CHAPTER FOUR
Death is the end of life; ah, whyShould life all labour be?Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone. What is it that will last?All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful Past.Let us alone. What pleasure can we haveTo war with evil? Is there any peaceIn ever climbing up the climbing wave?Tennyson:The Lotus-Eaters.
Death is the end of life; ah, whyShould life all labour be?Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone. What is it that will last?All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful Past.Let us alone. What pleasure can we haveTo war with evil? Is there any peaceIn ever climbing up the climbing wave?Tennyson:The Lotus-Eaters.
Death is the end of life; ah, whyShould life all labour be?Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone. What is it that will last?All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful Past.Let us alone. What pleasure can we haveTo war with evil? Is there any peaceIn ever climbing up the climbing wave?Tennyson:The Lotus-Eaters.
Death is the end of life; ah, whyShould life all labour be?Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone. What is it that will last?All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful Past.Let us alone. What pleasure can we haveTo war with evil? Is there any peaceIn ever climbing up the climbing wave?Tennyson:The Lotus-Eaters.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
Tennyson:The Lotus-Eaters.
At the end of March, as Bertrand had ordained, our first editorial dinner took place. It was followed by a reception; and the two events might have been read, by the optimistic, as an announcement that a new force was at work in political and social London. Throughout the long preparations, Barbara told us repeatedly that she had no personal interest in our organization; but she could not have worked harder if this had been a battle which she had to win or a lost battle which she had to retrieve. For the first time since our marriage, she seemed fully alive; the old love of ascendancy had returned; and I forgot the futility of my uncle’s crusade in the happiness which it brought to my wife.
“Well, I wasn’t going to spoilyourlife, if I could help it,” she laughed, when I complimented her on her new radiance. “Whatever kind of mess I’ve made of my own . . .”
“It’s early days to be saying you’ve made a mess of your life,” I told her.
These first weeks had been less formidable than I had expected. Every one was too busy with his own concerns to recall the furious tongue-wagging of the war; and the players in what Barbara counted her tragedies had obligingly withdrawn from the stage. Jack Waring, the first of her victims, crossed my path but once in three years: I met him hurrying out of his tailor’s, and he stopped only long enough to say that he was breeding blood-stock in the midlands and hardly ever came to London. Eric Lane, a greater sufferer in a longer tragedy, had disappeared; I was told that he was in London and I assumed that he must be at work on a new play. Certainly we did not see him for several months; and it was only in rare, startling moods of depression that Barbara seemed to remember him.
“How much you feel depends on how much you put into life,” she suggested, a little wistfully. “You can make a mess of your life when you’re a child, if you go the right way about it.Youwouldn’t, because you let other people live your life for you; but I always had to make mine a great spiritual adventure, a thing to be squeezed dry, not tasted! At the end I must feel that I’ve taken a wonderful journey and that every moment of it has been marked by poignant emotions, vivid experiences. The whole of myself must go into everything.”
“When you see awet paintsign, you must make sure that the paint is really wet?,” I asked.
“With both hands! Unlike my dear George, who avoids all paint because some of it is sometimes not quite dry. We’re a strange and wonderful combination, darling.”
“The actor and the audience.”
“You’re content just to look on?”
“Life is varied enough!,” I said. “And, though I don’t suppose any period is dull when you know it, I believe our own period is the most interesting in all history. I believe, too, that we’re in the most interesting part of the most interesting period. Bertrand will tell you that our day is over and that the future lies with the new men. I’m watching.”
My uncle’s opinion was endorsed, perhaps naturally, by one who was a new man himself and who introduced me at this time to some at least of the other new men. Nearly four years have passed since I began to watch this battle of old and new; I am watching still, and the battle is undecided. It was on the day when our paper was reborn that our old advertisement-manager called in Fetter Lane to prove that we were working on wrong lines; and, as he knew enough of mob-psychology to make a fortune out of it, I listened respectfully to the criticism and studied the critic. Sir Philip Saltash had travelled far since the August day when Bertrand paid off the staff—Mr. Saltash included—and broughtPeaceto an end by shivering the electros of the headings with a mallet; he was to travel farther before he entered the House of Lords as Lord Saltash of Bonde, publicity-expert and political wire-puller. How much farther he will travel is another of the things I am watching.
“Ifyouthink people will listen to thestuffyour old man’s put in hisprospectus,” he began with a force and directness that made me feel the new men were bringing new manners with them, “you’re making the mistake of your life. You may be right; every one else may be wrong . . .”
As he paused with a shrug of contemptuous challenge, I reminded myself that he was come to offer me publicity forPeaceand must therefore prove that, without publicity,Peacewould wilt and die.
“My uncle feels,” I said, “that it’s bad policy to cure one Alsace-Lorraine by setting up half-a-dozen others. It’s timesomeone made a protest against the last election.”
“Even if no one pays any attention to it? Mark you, I canmakepeople listen,” he added, as he rolled an unlighted cigar from side to side of his loose mouth; and I tried to recall how many million pounds Saltash had advertised into war-loans and how many thousand men he had ordered, from his ubiquitous hoardings, into the army. “That’s my job.Hasbeen, ever since I left you.”
“How would you make people listen tous?,” I asked.
Saltash caught up a copy of our first number and turned the pages with loud slaps of an annihilating hand. I have forgotten his technical proposals, though I remember that he kindled me with his cleverness the while he was outraging me with his vulgarity. I have not, however, forgotten his lyrical flights in describing the place of publicity in public life. I had met “press-secretaries” and heard of “propaganda sections” in government departments; I had suspected that certain ministers were raised or disgraced at the bidding of certain newspaper-proprietors; but I had not imagined that newspaper-proprietors themselves struck or spared at the behest of men like Saltash, who in their turn controlled the flow of information from Whitehall to Fleet Street.
“It’s a question of spot-light,” Saltash explained; and I learned that, when Dormer came to grief over food-rationing, it was Saltash’s artful manipulation of the switches that saved him from public vengeance and secured him his seat in the cabinet.
“I neverdidthink Dormer was to blame,” I happened to interpose.
“I never let you!,” cried Saltash. “Remember the Flying Corps scandal?Idid that. And you soon forgot about Dormer. I told him from the first he had only to lie quiet. . . . Later on . . .”
Later on, without prompting, I remembered Dormer’s reappearance. Discovered by the caricaturists and taken to the heart of the public, Dormer—with his vast chin and grotesque hat—became a music-hall hero. “Our Willie” was acclaimed by the gallery with the loyal fervour accorded in other days to “good old Joe”. TheSnap-Shotshewed him pruning roses with his smiling wife in an “old-world garden” and playing bumble-puppy with his apple-cheeked children. Finally, in the last days of a united front against a common foe, his portrait was thrown on the screen—after those of King Albert and General Joffre, Lord Kitchener and Mr. Lloyd-George—as the man who had saved England from starvation.
The cost of Dormer’s apotheosis was one baronetcy and the promise of a peerage when the more squeamish section of the government was better used to the Saltash idea.
“Spot-light,” repeated the wizard. “People can’t look at more than one thing at a time. Has it ever occurred to you why the old coalition went and the new one came? The ginger-group were working that way from the day Asquith carried conscription for them; they didn’t need him after that, but the public wasn’t ready for a change. Well, it was my job tomakethe public ready. I concentrated opinion against certain men and never left ’em alone; I concentrated in favour of others. The Dardanelles. Mesopotamia. Shells. Food. You and I know that the new lot were tarred with the same brush as the old; but we made the public think they’d been on another planet when all these messes were made. The old lot were too quiet; they never hit back.”
“There was a war on,” I reminded him.
“They would never have fallen if they’d shewn fight,” Saltash retorted. “A man’s power in politics is what he makes others believe it to be. ‘This war is too big for ordinary folk,’ people were saying: ‘we want supermen.’ Well, we said the new lotweresupermen. When there weren’t enough to go round, we made so much din that office-sweepers seemed like supermen. We restored confidence; and we frightened the Germans. Now, you say you’re reviving the old rag and your slogan is to be ‘alastingpeace’. You’ll be called pro-Boche. You’ll be told you’re letting the Hun off. I don’t despair, though. The first thing is to out the present lot; and I can do that on departmental scandals alone. ’Got all the papers. Then we must prepare a big peace-boost. . . . Lunch with me and talk it over.”
Though I had nothing to discuss, I went with Saltash because Saltash hypnotized me to come. All the vitality of young America radiated from him, though he styled himself a Canadian; his features recalled semitic South Russia, though he dissembled his love for the Jews; in the ten or twelve years that I had known him I never detected a trace of breeding, education or principle; and in the next two years I was never to see him entirely sober. Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the cheap press that came into existence when England was taught, willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything to gain and nothing to risk.
“Itrouble waters,” he explained thickly. “Otherfellers do fishing. No personal axe t’ grind.”
After a champagne luncheon he talked to me of these others. If the war unified the British Empire, it also brought to England a number of adventurous spirits who had made existence unsafe for themselves in their native dominions and whose claim to a hearing depended less on their political wisdom than on the number of miles they had travelled to reach Downing Street. The blatant harangues of Mr. Giles to indulgent imperial conferences were received with so much respect that hysterical women petitioned to have him included in the war-cabinet; a country with population and wealth equal to the city of Glasgow ranked in our councils as a great power.
“Idid that,” Saltash confided. “Overseas dominions. Young wolves claiming place council-rock. People herecrawledto him. And the government didn’t dare snub him.”
“So long,” I said, “as the prophet comes from another country, he has full honour in ours.”
“He was a cut above some of them,” said Saltash defensively; and I was told of one great public man who had dodged the dock in Australia to buy papers in England, of another who operated in London because he was threatened with a bullet in his brain if he ventured back to Winnipeg. Though Saltash did not say so, I think they may have fished in the waters which he troubled.
“The revenges of time!,” I said, as I stood up to go. “This is the remittance-man come home to roost.”
“A party can’t exist without funds,” said Saltash, beckoning to our waiter for a third liqueur. “Or without publicity.”
That I was not prepared to contest; and, as a new-born party had to collect its funds and build up its organization at short notice, I was not surprised that the rich men surrounding the coalition were more numerous and less savoury than the sufficiently dubious candidates for honours whom I had seen haunting the whips’ office during my active political career. If I was to believe Saltash, however, London had suddenly become a hunting-ground for the desperadoes of the empire. These “new men” were unknown names when the war began; soon I heard of them whenever a political crisis was being engineered. Their ability was undoubted; their experience had been gained in rough schools; and their resourcefulness admitted no limit. Supplying the impecunious with money and the affluent with advice, they acquired knowledge and influence which they used to acquire more money; and this in turn purchased them a further power of unseen interference in the direction of our government.
That night, as I sat down to our inaugural dinner, I told Bertrand of my host at luncheon and of his conversation.
“It’s no new thing,” said my uncle, who in these nights of doubt and sorrow unmasked an almost irritating resolution to be jolly at all costs. “The great international financiers have influenced governments and been influenced by them since banks and governments began.”
Historically, that may have been true. The new thing, as Bertrand himself might have said, was the character of the new men and the new methods which they employed.
This dinner was to be my last frolic as an irresponsible spectator.
When, as editor and managing-director, I proposed the toast of “Peace”, a vibration from my colleagues’ eagerness troubled my rigid negations and stirred doubt in my bland assurance.WasBertrand’s project so hare-brained as I had thought? I questioned myself in honest uncertainty as I settled my tie and looked down on the double row of expectant faces. The old man’s predictions at Cannes were fulfilled as soon as the conference met and a vague parliament of man reformed as a quarrelsome committee of ten; the clash between President Wilson’s fourteen points and Mr. Lloyd-George’s election speeches rang out when the committee of ten shrank to a camarilla of four; and, if we had ever doubted the apathy of the British public, our doubt must have evaporated day by day as the first House of Commons in the new glacial age sat with hands folded and eyes set jealously on the position each member had wrested from the war. Twice or thrice in these months a vigilance-committee of sterner and more unbending new members sent hectoring telegrams to keep their representatives up to the mark; President Wilson once ordered his ship to get up steam; and the Duchess of Ross dined out intermittently on M. Clemenceau’s latest epigram; but it is substantially true to say that no one in England thought of the peace-treaty until it was submitted for the approval of parliament.
In my speech I confined myself to congratulating Bertrand on his staff. At the end, he hoisted himself slowly to his feet and indicated his own part in our endeavour:
“You young men will have to do the work; but perhaps, from a long experience, I may be able to advise you. No lasting peace can be founded on a sense of grievance; and, though the heathen are raging furiously now, they’ll outgrow that phase. Maybe it’s because I had to keep my mouth shut during the war, maybe old age is making me more radical. This is not a party organ, it never was; it was an expression of liberal spirit, and that’s what it has to be again. We were called hard names when war broke out; but we had the right vision. Labour still thinks parochially; toryism still thinks imperially, which is the same thing; radicalism must think internationally. These fierce local patriotisms are an unconscionable time a-dying; but England is a bigger conception than the heptarchy, Europe is a bigger conception than England, the world is a bigger conception than Europe. We depend too much on our neighbours to blow them out of existence every few years. That truth has been vouchsafed to those of us who are at this table; we have to get it accepted.”
I rang a bell; and we were handed early copies of our first number. Every man turned avidly to his own contribution. Then Barbara sent for me to help her receive our guests.
This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder, miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife; and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand. As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed:
“A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years before you were born.”
As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their lips;débutantesof a generation after mine pressed under the elbows of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to charm back into their fold.
“I didn’t know there were so many people in theworld!,” she exclaimed in one of the few brief lulls.
Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed:
“It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.”
As the brief lull ended, my thoughts went back to the morning of Armistice Day when I paused on my way home from the Admiralty to reckon how many of my own generation had survived the war. As Robson bent, straightened himself and turned at the stair-head, I expected at every moment to hear him calling out “Captain Dainton” or “Lord Loring” or “Mr. Arden”; had I shut my eyes to their absence, I could have fancied that we were living in 1914. Now, as then, Crawleigh was so much engrossed in a political altercation with Bertrand that he walked stormily into the drawing-room without noticing us; Sam Dainton trotted up grinning—as usual—and whispering scandal into Violet Loring’s reluctant ear; Sir Roger, waiting uneasily for his wife, was mistaken—as usual—for a hired waiter and urged to tell John Gaymer where he could get his usual drink.
“The last time I did this sort of thing was at my coming-of-age ball,” Barbara murmured.
“Which you gave for yourself because no one would give it for you?”
“Well, I hated father’s friends; and he hated mine,” she laughed. “Besides, I’d been in so many scrapes that Ihadto see whether people would continue to know me.”
“They all came,” I said.
“Except one. That was the time when Jack Waring proposed to me one day and quarrelled with me the next,” she explained lightly. “Why he wanted to marry me when he disapproved of everything I did . . . I invited him specially.” . . .
“And he wouldn’t come?”
“No. Apparently . . . Eric isn’t coming . . . to-night.”
The announcement fell so tranquilly, it was so long since we had mentioned Eric Lane’s name that I doubted for a moment if I had heard her aright.
“You . . . invited him?,” I asked.
“Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he won’t be trampled on,” she whispered.
I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection? I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful jealousy.
“You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate, among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.”
“The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance. Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming conscious of their strength.”
As I looked down the stairs, Crawleigh and Bertrand were finishing their altercation. I heard Raymond telling them that it was time for old men to be in bed; and the phrase reminded me of my meeting with Saltash. In every sense of the term, they were old men, no longer able to hold their own against the young vigour of Saltash’s recruits; in any struggle of class with class, the material ammunition had passed from their hands. Their prestige was weakening before the pressure of those who excelled them in everything but length of tradition; and that tradition was now being cut short.
“I suppose you can call yourself a radical and still believe in the value of a good strain in breeding,” I said. “That hard-worked creature ‘the historian of the future’ willhaveto say, I suppose, that the people of this country carried a heavier burden than any other in the war? Ithinkhe’ll say that, of all our people, those who carried the heaviest burden were the leaders. In fighting, in directing, in paying . . . And in being killed: that’s why there are so few of them here to-night. We shall be the poorer if we lose that strain.”
“We’ll hope there are still enough of them left to carry it on,” said O’Rane.
“The next few years will be a race; there’ll be a fight against time, to spread the tradition before the people who maintain it are swallowed up.”
We talked at random until Sonia came to collect him for another party.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring Eric,” I heard him say to Barbara on leaving. “Some friend of his had a first night; and he’d promised to look in.”
“Did he say if he was coming on?,” asked Barbara.
“I should think it depends on the time. There was some talk about a supper-party afterwards.”
“Then I don’t suppose he will,” she answered with the composure of complete indifference. “Good-night, David. Good-night, Sonia.”
When we were by ourselves, I sent the servants to bed; and we sat for half-an-hour discussing the party.
“Half-past one,” she sighed at last. “Nobodycanbe coming now.”
“If any one does,” I said, “he’ll find an excellent doorstep to sit on. Come to bed, Babs.”
“I must write one letter first. You go on and turn out the lights. If you see my torch, you might put it on the hall-table.”
I chose a book and went to my room. Only when I was in bed did I discover that I had brought the wrong book; and, on going downstairs again, I saw the lights in the hall blazing. Then, as I reached the drawing-room, I caught sight of Barbara, seated in a high-backed chair at the stair-head. At first I thought she was asleep; then I saw that she was staring through the hall to the front door.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked.
“Hecan’tbe coming now,” she answered.
“Who? Eric?”
My earlier whisperings of jealousy were silenced by her utter forlornness. I did not care whether her thoughts and affection and heart and soul were his, so long as I could take the look of pain out of her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I understood and was sorry for her; but the name had roused her, and she stood up with languid dignity:
“Yes.” . . . She was once again the alert and vigilant hostess of an hour before. “I thought it would look so terribly rude if he came here and found no one to receive him. After I’d specially asked him, too,” she added on a higher note. Then her self-possession returned to her. “It’s two o’clock. As he hasn’t come now, I suppose . . . he’s not coming . . . at all.” . . .
If “the historian of the future”, whom I have already invoked, have the microscopic vision and the titanic industry with which his predecessors credit him, I believe he must find space for a footnote, in brilliant, to describe our share in forming a critical opposition during the last four months of the armistice. In the days immediately following the 1918 election, the government had hardly an enemy; in the months after the peace-treaty was signed, it had hardly a friend. Even before theEconomic Consequences of the Peace, even before the mutual vituperation of the allies, an independent mood of questioning and doubt succeeded to the hysterical assertions and demands of the mad election. How far we fostered that mood by means of open propaganda and private suggestion, how far we made articulate a frame of mind that was already struggling to express itself, I cannot say; but that the mood became contagious cannot be challenged. In these first spring days, Barbara’s circumspect cousin, Lord John Carstairs, avoided our house for fear of finding himself described as a ‘defeatist’, a friend of the enemy, a creature of Caillaux or a hireling of Stinnes. By the end of the summer, an alert opportunist such as Sir Rupert Foreditch sought publicity in the columns ofPeaceor opened his campaign by an attack on Seymour Street because our paper was frank and fearless and because “the Oakleigh gang”, as we were unflatteringly called, was too important and, in time, too numerous to be ignored.
On the morrow of the inaugural dinner, Bertrand hunted me out of doors to study “the great movement of men”, while he plotted with Barbara new days of keeping me on the run. No reference was made to our pitiful encounter at the stair-head; but I left a note to say that she was not to be called, and, when I carried in her breakfast, she looked up—with the eloquent silence of a dog—to thank me for understanding and to shew that she too understood. At once, after that, she began to discuss the party of the night before.
I am not going to pretend that my work for the next three years, though it left me without an hour, a house or a wife to call my own, was void of interest: duty compelled me to meet every one, from labour-leaders to cabinet ministers and from editors to bishops, who might be thought to influence action or opinion by a hair’s breadth; I had to read the new books and absorb a mass of papers; I explored different parts of the country to find what different classes were saying or thinking; and a New York reporter could not have been quicker to lay hands on the foreign bankers and diplomats who passed through London. Two or three dinner-parties were given in each week to these unofficial missionaries; I met my uncle daily at the Eclectic Club to pool our discoveries in collective psychology; and on Wednesday nights the staff ofPeaceassembled on their spurious Sheraton chairs and helped to hammer out a new message to mankind.
If from time to time I harboured unworthy projects for desertion, my weakness of purpose must be attributed to natural indolence and perhaps justifiable impatience. Our progress seemed so lamentably slow; our aims were so exasperatingly vague! Much as I valued Bertrand’s long experience, greatly as I admired his flashes of intuition, I dreaded his descents on Fetter Lane in these first discouraging months. From Sir Philip Saltash or from the spirit of the age he had caught an itch for supermen; and I went about my work with a shame-faced consciousness of inadequacy while my uncle clasped his hands over his stick and boomed oracularly of novel tendencies and strange expedients.
“We’re becoming precious,” he grunted unamiably at our second number. “Average opinion; the common touch: you mustn’t neglect that, George. If you take your friend Dainton as a barometer . . .”
And I was incontinently pricked into the least comfortable of my clubs, where I tested average feelings as they were represented in the changing utterances of one well-meaning and uniquely stupid legislator. The first experiment was made at a time when the successful candidates of the December election were uneasily hoping to be saved by the firmness and idealism of President Wilson from the consequences of their less temperate speeches.
“ ‘Wilsonle bienvenu’,” Dainton murmured approvingly, as he laid down a welcoming number ofPunch.
A few weeks later, I found the French press excitedly proclaiming that Germany was being let off too easily. Sir John Woburn demanded with all the polyphonic energy of the Press Combine why America should be allowed to deprive the allies of their just reparations; and Dainton assured me profoundly that the task of winning the war was child’s play compared with that of winning the peace.
“Damned obstinate fellow, Wilson,” he grumbled. “If he thinks we’re going to let him throw away all that our gallant boys fought for, he’ll have a rude awakening.”
Later still, he ceased to speak of the president altogether. Remembering Limehouse, he could not give implicit trust to the prime minister; but the gossip that floated from Paris to London convinced him that M. Clemenceau was the only statesman in Europe and he was content to leave himself in the hands of a man whose rare, sardonic utterances embodied the ferocity which Dainton had expressed so much less concisely in his election speeches. Members of parliament, he told me, had duties nearer home. Labour menaces were more important than quibbles about frontiers: coal strikes and railway strikes, both leading through nationalization and civil war to ruin and the disruption of the empire, were the proper study of political mankind. Sir Roger no longer spoke of the British working-man as one of “our gallant boys”; and I was invited to penetrate the disguise that sheltered a Russian communist. Before I could do justice to this conception, he had found new duties even nearer to the hand of a patriot. “Bolshevism” was bad, but it soon ceased, in Dainton’s eyes, to be quite so bad as “profiteering”; and neither, by the middle of the summer, was so exasperating nor so tenacious of life as Irish irreconcilability.
“If I could hold the wretched country under the sea for five minutes!,” he exploded.
Fed on political catch-words and instructed by safe cartoons, Sir Roger Dainton, coalition-unionist member for the Crowley Division of Hampshire, would explain Ireland on alternate days by reference to the incurable dourness of the north and the ineradicable savagery of the south. He was the ‘pendulum voter’, the representative of all that is unstable, ill-informed and irresponsible in public life. For that I was prepared; for that Bertrand had sent me to study him. I was not prepared, however, to be accepted as a disciple and an ally. Dining weekly in Rutland Gate, I wondered whether the little man had ever before found any one who would listen to him: obviously, pathetically, he looked forward to our “good pow-wows”; and, when he saw me to the door and gave me a fresh cigar, still more when he said, “Then, next Tuesday as usual?”, I felt that I was being sent back to school with a sovereign in my hand and being invited to Crowley for my next leave-out day. My embarrassment was increased by a sense of black ingratitude. Sir Roger always made these meetings “an occasion within the meaning of the act”, as he called it, and opened his best champagne for me. When Barbara deserted me on the plea that we wanted to talk business and she would be in the way, Dainton redoubled his hospitality and became increasingly confused in speech. As I watched the clock, I would ask myself how such a man was admitted to the board of a company or tolerated in parliament; then, in a flash of revelation, I saw him as the type of all the class on which Sir Philip Saltash exercised the wiles of his publicity. Saltash was a logical inference from Dainton.
“Now you see why I told you to study him,” Bertrand chuckled, when I announced that I would resign my editorship before I submitted to another spell of Dainton’s political conversation.
In despair, I asked how our little office in Fetter Lane was to overtake and undo the work of Saltash and his forebears of the popular press. To this, however, my uncle had no answer.
Though he continued to speak of us as a chosen people, our mission of enlightenment was established on a paying basis by the success of our literary editors, who made ofPeacethe most feared and least loved review in London. As Hancock confined his criticism to novels and Mattrick to poetry, they could not be charged with rolling their own logs or obstructing a rival, though I noticed that Mattrick’s sweeping condemnations stopped short of “Mr. Hancock’s true lyrical genius” and Hancock’s devastating onslaughts on modern fiction made an exception in favour of Mr. Mattrick. My conscience became unquiet when books were sent out for review and I heard Hancock choosing critics who could be trusted to “sit on this sort of rot”; but, as the “rot” was usually written by men who seemed to be making a substantial income, I hoped that they could afford an occasional attack and console themselves with the knowledge that, in the Penmen’s Club, fifty yards away, a league of disgruntled novelists and poets was plotting the destruction of “the Hancock-Mattrick gang”.
“All the same,” Bertrand expostulated after a month or two, “we’re not running this paper so that one ill-tempered young gentleman can read what another ill-tempered young gentleman has said about a book he hasn’t troubled to finish. We’re not in touch yet with opinion. You don’t mix with enough people, George: it’s all the office, or the club, or Barbara’s parties.”
“But where am I to find your new men?,” I asked. “You say politics are no longer manufactured over a week-end party at Woburn. The political clubs only harbour your Tapers and Tadpoles. Where do men like Saltash and Wister and Foreditch do their work?”
“They take their pleasure at the Turf and Stage,” Bertrand answered sourly.
“I’m dining there with the O’Ranes to-night,” I said, as we began to walk home.
“Then you’ll probably meet them. New men, new meeting-places.” My uncle laughed mirthlessly. “If Pam or Johnnie Russell . . . It’s the rising tide of democracy. Agricultural depression and death duties have slowly strangled the landed classes; their social influence is tottering. Before the war, Asquith was almost the only prime minister, bar Dizzy, who wasn’t drawn from them; but the prime ministers of the future will come from the middle class . . . till they come from labour. And the stage changes with the actors,” he continued in a deep rumble that carried from the one side of Fleet Street to the other. “Circumspice!When the masses had been taught to read, Newnes gave themTit-Bits; Pearson and Harmsworth followed with the cheap daily press; headlines took the place of news and arguments. The focus shifts to the newspaper office.”
We were passing a flamboyant, white-and-gold building described as a “Super Electric Palace de Luxe”; and I asked Bertrand if he thought pictures were coming to take the place of headlines.
“It’s not the instrument that matters, but the man who handles it,” he answered. “Does Saltash play on Ll-G. or does Ll-G. play on Saltash? You’ll know better to-night when you’ve seen the new stage with the new men on it. Your modern prime minister doesn’t waste his time with duchesses at Ross House or with dukes at the Carlton. He has suave young secretaries to feed the press; he has rich friends to provide him personally with the sinews of war. He has his publicity agent. And, if he’s wise, he has a chain of intermediaries running through the country, somebody always knowing somebody who knows somebody else, so that he can draw any one into his net at a moment’s notice.” As we crossed Waterloo Place, Bertrand glanced contemptuously at Mr. Gladstone’s old house in Carlton House Terrace. “There’d be no end to the buzzing if Ll-G. spent a week-end with Sir John Woburn: hemustbe trying to collar the Press combine! But if my Lord Lingfield entertains a few actresses and a jockey or two and a prize-fighter and if Woburn happens to come along . . .? That’s how politics are manufactured nowadays; and the Turf and Stage is the sort of place to see them manufacturing.”
Such a preparation was almost inevitably a preparation for disappointment; but the unexpected end of my first evening at the Turf and Stage left me no time to define my expectations nor judge whether they had been fulfilled. As Barbara had a headache, I entered the resplendent club-room off Hanover Square under Sonia’s protection; and, for all the scars that the last five years had left, I could have fancied for a moment that we were back in 1914 when the “Cottage Cabaret” and “Blue Moon” were tentatively opening their doors. I observed the same mirrored walls and plush sofas, the same small tables surrounding the same polished floor, the same high gallery and beaming, southern band. From the atmosphere I inhaled the same desolating quality, only to be rendered by the desolating name of “smartness”.
I found no hint, however, that my rigidly standardized neighbours were powers behind thrones. Apart from a passion for dancing that grew ever more feverish as youth receded, they were severely domesticated. Men brought their wives to supper, I was told, their sisters to dinner and their mothers to luncheon; I should not have been surprised to hear of a nursery upstairs or to see Gaspard, the incomparable manager, devising quiet games with the children in their parents’ absence. Most of the men that night were young and exceedingly prosperous financiers; the rest, exemplified by Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh and Johnnie Gaymer, had at least the appearance of prosperity. Born to rule, they had all done well in the war; they were doing well in the peace; and their women dominated the situation as shrewdly, as calmly and as confidently as the men. Some trick of memory sent my thoughts back to the “Duchess of Richmond” ball at Loring Castle on the eve of the war. I remembered standing in the hall with Puggy Mayhew, watching the lithe girls and hard-trained men mounting the stairs with their magnificently English self-possession; and, though Mayhew filled a grave in Mesopotamia, I could hear again his tone of startled discovery as he murmured: “There’s nothing to touch them in any countryIknow.” . . .
I had been invited to meet a girl who aspired to that career of mendicancy and private blackmail which is known to women with a friend in Fleet Street as “freelance journalism”; and, while O’Rane waited in the hall for the rest of his party, Sonia led me downstairs for a cocktail.
“I have a standing invitation from Gaspard to come here at his expense,” she confided. “He considers me rather a draw. And, as Lorrimer is always good for a dress if I’ll wear it in public, I can usually kill two guests with one free dinner. If Johnnie Gaymer would only give me one of his firm’s cars to be seen driving about in, David would get a perfectly good wife below cost.”
As we descended to a more intimate room, with smaller tables half hidden by plates of oysters, I suggested that the assistant-almoner of the Lancing millions could afford to buy his wife a car.
“Then you don’t know David,” she rejoined with a touch of petulance. “He’s working himself to death; but, if any one tries to pay him for what he does, he thinks it’s charity. Let’s talk of something else. You’ve not met this Maitland child? She’s very pretty and very silly, I should think. Just what I was at her age . . . or at my own, I suppose you’d say if I gave you a chance. Finished? Then let’s go up,” she continued with the restlessness that characterized the age or at least the women of it whom I met that night.
One and all, they sat down and jumped up again like marionettes that would collapse if their wires slackened; they looked at one page of a paper and then tossed it away; they clamoured for cigarettes and laid them aside. Finding that her other guests were not yet arrived, Sonia hurried into the dining-room, snatched a youth unknown to me from his protesting party and danced with him till a voice, peevish with hunger, cried: “Bertie, you little beast, come back and order dinner.” She then attached herself precariously to another party, stole some one else’s portion of caviare and rejoined us in the hall with her booty.
O’Rane, I thought, was looking ill and overworked.
“Stornaway’s gone down with pneumonia,” he explained; “so I’ve had all his work to do. It’s a bigger thing than I contemplated. I wonder . . . I wonder very much . . .”
“Whether you can carry out the schemes we discussed at Cannes?,” I asked.
“No! Whether we’ve any place in our present civilization for these colossal fortunes . . . Ah, that’s Ivy’s voice. Come and be introduced.”
I have never known for certain who constituted our party that night. Four of us met in the hall; but we mislaid Sonia as we went to our table; and John Gaymer invited himself to join us until his own friends arrived. Between the dances, some twenty to forty people surged into our corner; during them, I was usually left with one compassionate neighbour. As in a dream, I talked to O’Rane with grave absorption about shell-shock treatment; then I listened as Sam Dainton was convinced against his will that he had spent the previous night in the hall of his hotel, because he could not remember his bedroom number nor his name; then Sonia plunged me in a morass of domestic finance, demanding how any one could keep herself, her husband and child on the pittance which David allowed her.
“And now I’m going to have another,” she added, as the saxophone uttered a warning bleat.
“Dance?,” I asked.
“No, baby, of course. . . . Do knock some sense into David’s head. . . . Good-bye-ee.”
As she slipped away, I found myself alone with a pretty little dark-eyed girl, precocious and unbalanced, whom I remembered with difficulty as Ivy Maitland; and for another five minutes we talked gravely of work and life and careers for women. Ivy must have been younger by several years than any other woman in the club; and in that setting she seemed a human note of interrogation, scored by the present on the threshold of the future. She also seemed sadly out of place. Her friends were too old for her, most of them were married, some were living apart from their wives and others were not living far enough apart from the wives of other men.
At the end of five minutes, forgetting her concern for a career, she darted off to dance with John Gaymer; and her place was taken by Sam Dainton, lately returned from Paris and full of gossip about the conference. The unruffled Gaspard conjured one more chair to our ever-lengthening table; and a basket of plover’s eggs for Sam appeared simultaneously with O’Rane’s chicken and my savoury, while heated revellers lolled over chair-backs with coffee and cigarettes. A warning of indigestion assailed me as I changed my place for the fourth time; intellectual dyspepsia had prostrated me from the moment when these five-minute conversational turns began.
“You look a bit out of the picture, old son,” Sam told me candidly.
“I’m a spectator,” I said. “My uncle feels that I should study the great movement of men.” . . .
“Paris is the spot for that,” he chuckled, with his mouth full. “They call it a peace conference, but I should say it was a full-dress parade for the next war.” . . .
He broke off as Sonia danced up with shining eyes to whisper her discovery that one of our neighbours had married a second husband in the premature belief that the first had been killed. By the time she had done, Sam had finished his plover’s eggs and was in the thick of a discussion with my cousin Laurie, which was to enrich them both if they could only find an out-of-work capitalist to launch them. Ivy concluded an audible disagreement with Gaymer, who I thought was more sodden than his wont, and dragged me headlong into a conversation that seemed to begin as startling indecency and cooled to the temperate obscurity of psychoanalysis.
“You should read Freud,” she told me. “Psychoanalysis explains everything. Youarebehind the times.”
From the little knowledge which I had been compelled to acquire in the hope of understanding the novels and plays of the period, I should have said that psychoanalysis defiled more than it explained; but I was chiefly interested to distinguish this night as the first on which the old reticences between men and women were torn away.
“Not bored, I hope?,” murmured a voice at my elbow, as Ivy flitted away for the second time.
I turned to see O’Rane sitting huddled with fatigue.
“Bewildered, rather. This . . . this is the generation you’re undertaking to educate,” I said.
“You must expect some kind of reaction.”
“It’s been going on for six months now. . . . However, I’m more concerned with the shepherds than with the sheep.”
It was only as the theatres emptied that I appreciated my uncle’s sardonic wisdom in sending me to study “the great movement of men” in the Turf and Stage. The government was then represented by Lord Lingfield, who danced—for exercise rather than pleasure—with Miss Maud Valance, of the Pall Mall Theatre, and by the Right Honourable Wilmot Dean, who refrained from dancing on the principle that a man must learn to walk before he can run and must be in a condition to stand before he can dance. What weight Mr. Dean and Lord Lingfield contributed to cabinet councils I am too ignorant to guess; at the Turf and Stage they demonstrated that ministers, in spite of a nonconformist head, were not killjoys; and those who did not get many chances of hailing convivial privy councillors by their Christian names took the opportunity when it came.
“It’s about twenty-one years since Gladstone died,” I murmured to O’Rane. “It’s ‘new men, new manners’, with a vengeance.”
In strident conversation with Wilmot Dean, I could hear ‘Blob’ Wister roaring the latest of his political creeds. For three months he had won consequence by purchasing in succession thePeople’s Tribune, theSt. Stephen’s Timesand theDaily Echo. No one knew whence the money had been collected; no one that I ever met could tell me whence Wister himself sprang. He burst upon London like Sir Philip Saltash, like Wilmot Dean, like a third of the new men inside the government and on its outskirts, in response to the prime minister’s known desire for business talent. I was still watching the unsteady antics of Lingfield, when Sir Philip Saltash himself rose with a well-remembered lurch and bore down on us with the customary unlighted cigar swinging like a semaphore from the one side of his mouth to the other.
“Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer: “You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury and Pitt and all that lot.”
“I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.
“They wouldn’t be in a state to come here! Old Pitt was a rare one for the booze. People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh attorney: ‘Oh, howvulgar!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield. “The war opened up a place in the sun for people who hadn’t been brought up to your kid-glove ideas of public life.”
The whispering group was joined by Sir Rupert Foreditch, whose chief claim on his country’s gratitude is that he sacrificed the dilatory chance of promotion on the staff in order to race home after Neuve Chapelle and offer himself for a place in the first coalition. It was by an accident of geography rather than through any lack of zeal that others were before him; but he and the group that broke the first war-administration have the comfort of knowing that all decisions at the Dardanelles were postponed till an embarrassed government could decide which of their willing swords must be declined.
“Would you say,” I asked, “that there was a touch of the adventurer about some of them?”
“A man,” enunciated Saltash, “is only an adventurer till he arrives; then he’s a pioneer. Nobody minds new men when they’re like Asquith. Nobody minds rich men when they’re like Derby.” . . .
“For one reason, because the Stanleys don’t drift from one country to another, seeing which they can turn to their own greatest profit.”
Saltash shook his head incredulously:
“Don’t try to pull any stake-in-the-country stuff on me. That’s well enough for your father-in-law. I sat next to old Crawleigh at a city dinner last week; and he didn’t know what to make of things. I did. And I told him. ‘The aristocracy,’ I said, ‘has been swamped by the middle-classes. Well, if the aristocracy couldn’t keep its end up against men like Chamberlain and Asquith and Lloyd-George, it was best out of the way.’ D’you mind if I bring Foreditch over here? He’s just back from Germany; and I want to know how the land lies there.”
I could not repel such a man at a time when my sole function in the Turf and Stage was to study the new leaders in our political life. When I first met Sir Rupert at Oxford, he was an unbending radical; but the 1906 election brought into the world more radical mouths than there was bread to feed, and, when I took my seat, Foreditch was spaciously enthroned in the wastes of opposition. As a hired assassin, his tale of Budget Leaguers’ scalps won him the deputy-leadership of the Die-Hards when the Parliament Bill came to be fought; and, in the Home Rule controversy, he preached rebellion in Ulster with a gusto not exceeded by Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith. An incautious declaration that the kaiser could be trusted to save Ulster from a false Hanoverian, as William of Orange had saved her from a perfidious Stuart, kept Foreditch from reaping the reward of his shell-intrigue in 1916; but, if he missed cabinet rank, he achieved a greater position as the unofficial plenipotentiary who was always being sent, with the easy informality introduced by a ‘business’ government, to make overtures and arrange deals. His ambition, I think, was to play the part of Colonel House to Mr. Lloyd-George’s President Wilson: in the last years of the war he was always vanishing mysteriously to Stockholm or Berne; and, two years after this date, I heard that he was visiting, in disguise, the leaders of all the parties in Ireland.
“The present condition of Germany . . .,” he began; but, before I could hear what it was, an unknown woman bustled up to our table and began to make notes for an article which informed the world two days later (1) that anybody who was anybody would be found dining at the Turf and Stage, (2) that “Lucile”—as she confided to her “darling Betty”—had seen good-looking Bobbie Pentyre dancing with Lady Clackmannan’s girl, (3) that Lady Barbara Oakleigh—“Babs Neave, as we must still think of her”—had been at the table next to “Lucile’s” and (4) that her husband would certainly stand again for parliament when opportunity offered. In its slangy pertness and familiarity, the style was the woman; and, as accuracy was less important to theDaily Picturethan snappy diction or a knowing air of intimacy, it would have been idle to correct her statements or to reprove her manners. No doubt she had a livelihood to earn; and those who create a demand have to bear as heavy a responsibility as those who furnish the supply. When I had recovered from my first exasperation, I felt that the loud-voiced lady was less to blame than “Blob” Wister, who owned the paper for which she wrote, and the two million readers (the circulation of theDaily Picturewas certified by an impeccable firm of chartered accountants) who liked to think of Miss Murchison as “Lady Clackmannan’s girl” and of Lord Pentyre as “Bobbie”. Those who had no chance of seeing for themselves whether he was good-looking must have been grateful to “Lucile” for lifting a corner of the curtain from the world of beauty, rank and fashion.
“Another section of the public you propose to educate,” I told O’Rane.
“And you,” he retorted. “You heard what Sam Dainton said about the state of Paris. Everybody hating everybody else.” . . .
I looked round to make sure that we were not being overheard. Lucien de Grammont, I knew, was somewhere in the room; but I fancied that he was avoiding me.
“That’s only these damned French,” I said. “Instead of thanking us for pulling them out of the mire, they thinktheywon the war single-handed and our job is just to foot the bill. Hang it all, Raney, we spent more money and provided more ammunition than any one else; we raised about five million men; we stayed on to clear the Germans out of France when it was all we could do to keep the French in the war at all; and, when our papers were gushing about the splendid unity, the French government was making us pay rent for the trenches our men occupied to defend their miserable country. They’re the meanest hounds on earth. During the war, one couldn’t say these things . . .”
“Does one do much good by saying them now? The Americans bring pretty much the same charge against us. You’ve an organization, George, and you should make it your business to fight the hatred-epidemic.” . . .
He broke off, as the bland Gaspard presented himself at our table with the announcement that a lady was waiting outside. When I read Yolande Manisty’s name, I guessed that Raymond Stornaway was worse; when I met her, I knew—without being told—that he was dead. As I came back to the blaze and blare of the dining-room, I felt that this was my first contact with reality that night. The financiers and wire-pullers and propagandists, the glitteringcorps de ballet, the punctual scribe who chronicled their movements, all belonged to a world of masquerade. I cannot say what lesson Bertrand had sent me there to learn; the lesson which I carried away was a doubt—the first since 1914—of victory.
I drove O’Rane to his house in Westminster and left him to think over Yolande Manisty’s message. By the terms of her uncle’s will, he had—for better or for worse—inherited unconditionally an estate of more than twenty million pounds.