CHAPTER FOUR

For remember (this our children shall know: we are too near for that knowledge)Not our mere astonied camps, but Council and Creed and College—All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us—Have felt the effects of the lesson we got—an advantage no money could buy us!. . . . . . .It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use;We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get—We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!Rudyard Kipling:The Lesson.

For remember (this our children shall know: we are too near for that knowledge)

Not our mere astonied camps, but Council and Creed and College—

All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us—

Have felt the effects of the lesson we got—an advantage no money could buy us!

. . . . . . .

It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use;We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get—We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!Rudyard Kipling:The Lesson.

It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use;

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!

So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get—

We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!

Rudyard Kipling:The Lesson.

My return home from Crawleigh Abbey brought to my mind the reappearance of the small boy inPunch, who, finding his running-away unremarked at the end of one whole day, drew attention to it by observing that his parents had the same old cat. For a single moment, as O’Rane and I reached Salisbury Plain, I had remembered that the world was revolving in sublime unconcern at my private tragedy; then a starless night of misery enveloped me once more. In London, a fortnight later, I was amazed to find letters and messages, proofs and manuscripts from people who seemed still interested in unemployment or reparations, in the fate of Ireland or the coalition.

Now and for many weeks I thought only of new means to win back a woman who had become a stranger to me. After her first declaration of “indifference, utter indifference”, Barbara never weakened the effect of her action by talking about it; when I had influenza, she nursed me as she would have nursed any man who had the misfortune to fall sick in her house; when she caught my influenza and aggravated it with pleurisy, she allowed me to take her abroad to recuperate. No two acquaintances, sharing the same house, could have lived in greater harmony; and no woman could have devised a keener torment than by treating lover, husband or friend as an acquaintance.

Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .

“I want to see you about these articles of yours. . .”, wrote Bertrand.

“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash predicted.

“I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head,” Sonia lamented.

“ ‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in astonishment.

It is a tribute, I think, to our loyalty in public that my marriage to Barbara was commonly quoted at this time as one of the very few successful unions in an age of confessed failures and desperate escapes. Had I imagined at the beginning that our unreal separation could drag on for two years, the myth of our blissful harmony would soon have been exploded. As it was, we drifted. I thought by day, I dreamed by night, of a romantic reconciliation that never came. There were moments when I fancied that Barbara, with her passion for dramatizing life, forgot her boredom in the excitement of martyrdom. On some plea, which I do not remember, she gave up entertaining; and, while the young “London of the restoration”—in Bertrand’s phrase—went leaderless, she had the barren pleasure of feeling herself wasted.

By degrees which I cannot recall I was driven to spend more and more time at my office and to dine more and more often at a club. Her indifference spread beyond me to all the men and women who in other days had interested her; it culminated in her dispassionate efforts to interest her husband in some other woman. I returned home one evening to be told that Ivy Gaymer had fled to us for sanctuary and that Barbara was waiting for me to say whether we should send her back to her husband or communicate with Mr. Justice Maitland or wait helplessly for something to turn up. As Ivy was already in bed, we could hardly prick her into the street at midnight; and next morning she ruled out our first two courses by declaring that she would never again enter the house of a man who intrigued with other women under her nose and that her father’s advice and sympathy were limited to the triumphant question: what else could any one expect?

We decided to wait for something to turn up. I did not want to be inhospitable, but I wanted still less to hear Barbara talking about my “littleprotégée”. After a week or two I suggested that there were hotels in plenty and that Ivy was not without money. Barbara confined herself to saying that, as I had insisted on the creature’s staying on in the first instance, it was now my delicate task to evict her. Following the cowardly expedient of writing what I was afraid to utter by word of mouth, I sent a note to Ivy’s room one night, asking what her plans were; we should, I said, be going down to Crawleigh for Easter. By ill luck, she was still up; and her reply was delivered from the foot of my bed, where she sat, smoking cigarettes, in scantier clothes than women usually wear in public. If we kept the house open, she would not in the least mind staying on by herself; her solicitors were advising a divorce; it was saintly of us to take her in; and she would not have troubled us if she had not been in fear of her life. The interview was ended damagingly by Barbara, who came in to insist maternally that, if Ivy and I wanted to talk, she must put on a warm dressing-gown.

Though my door was locked against similar conferences in the future, my next attempt was no more fortunate. Ivy agreed that she must go and then broke into piteous weeping. I comforted her as well as Barbara’s expression of scornful amusement permitted; and, when the weeping broke out afresh as Ivy began to pack, I recollected an overdue appointment at my office. On my return, our guest was still in possession.

“She’s cried herself sick,” Barbara told me. “You can say she must go, George, or you can say she may stop on; but it’s cruel to keep making her cry.”

“I want her to go,” I said, without enlarging the field of debate.

“It was a pity you asked her in the first place, if you were going to turn her out.”

“I fancy she asked herself.”

“I thought she was a passion of yours,” said Barbara in faint surprise. “You made me go to her wedding, when I hardly knew her.”

“At O’Rane’s request: because her father was being so difficult.”

There was a pause; then Barbara shrugged her shoulders.

“I think she’s rather in love with you,” she murmured.

“That’s very flattering,” I said, “but it doesn’t make things any easier. Her affections are quickly aroused. First it was Eric, then Gaymer; now . . .”

“You don’t believe it? George, you’re sometimes rather unobservant. Why d’you think she camehereof all places?”

“I should think she was banking on the softness of your heart or of my head,” I answered.

I hardly knew whether to be surprised or not when I found Ivy still with us next day, but I made no further attempt to dislodge her. At the end of the week Barbara went to Crawleigh and I telephoned for a room at the Eclectic Club. New developments in Ireland kept me tied to the office at the last moment; and I did not choose that my wife or Ivy’s husband should be able to say that the two of us had been alone together. After four-and-twenty hours’ solitude Ivy discovered that it was possible to live in an hotel without being tracked by her drunken and homicidal lord; and the incident closed when Barbara came into my room, on the night of her return from the Abbey, with a brief letter of thanks.

“You’d get tired of her very soon,” she said judicially, as though I still needed to be saved from myself. “So would any man. That’s why I begged Eric not to marry her. I believe you’d be happier, though, if you found some woman who really interested you.”

“That advice is more suitable for a bachelor than for a married man,” I pointed out.

Barbara walked to the door in silence, then paused with her fingers on the handle.

“And how long is this going on?,” she asked with a sigh of utter exhaustion.

“You alone can say that,” I replied.

The tragic farce had been running for six months and was to run for another eighteen before the farce was eliminated and only the tragedy remained. Without regular employment, I should have gone out of my mind; and I am thankful that my uncle’s increasing infirmities threw ever more and more of our work on my shoulders.

It was in the spring of 1921 that he despaired openly and finally of the existing government; it was in the summer that he called for a change.

“Though, mark you, there’s not another man who could have done what George has!,” cried Bertrand with the generous appreciation that Jack Sheppard might have exhibited towards Dick Turpin. “After two years of power he’s made a tumbledown peace that satisfies no one. Hehasn’thanged the kaiser; hehasn’tmade Germany pay for the war. The League of Nations, which we were promised,isn’tfunctioning; he calls a new conference every few weeks to settle finally the problems which were finally settled at Versailles. If that isn’t an achievement . . .”

“Oh, admitted!,” I said. “I’m thinking about the day of reckoning.”

We were walking slowly along Knightsbridge on our way to one of the weekly editorial dinners; and, as we approached the French Embassy, I crossed the road for fear of encountering Lucien de Grammont. My shoulders were not broad enough to support the load of obloquy which he kept in reserve for our few, uneasy meetings; and, though I stated candidly that the French were now the chief obstacles to peace, I could not persuade Lucien that it was the prime minister and not the humble editor of an obscure review who had coaxed the French to open their mouths and shut their eyes at Versailles. Now that no sweetmeats were to be had, the French were threatening to undertake the search themselves.

This was the first bill to be met on the day of reckoning; but I was not prepared to say that it would be the last or the heaviest. In Ireland, the practice of wholesale murder and destruction was being met with reprisals in kind. Of India and Egypt it is enough to say that we knew very little, that all we knew was bad and that we were not allowed to print all we knew.

“That’s my point,” said Bertrand with cynical complacency. “Any one of these things would have brought down a government in old days. Take taxation! Take unemployment!”

“My one consolation,” I broke in, “is thatnoman, even if damned fools call him a ‘little wizard’, can cope with all that at the same moment.”

“I’ll write you an article onThe First Duty of Government,” Bertrand promised. “And that, some of these gentry may be surprised to hear, is . . . togovern.”

My most vivid memory of my uncle’s subsequent diatribe was that I declined to publish it. In Ireland or France, where irony is understood, it would have gone with a swing; but we were unpopular enough already without assailing the cherished conviction of the English that they have a natural talent for self-government. And this is what Bertrand attempted with artful citations from any convenient speech in which an English publicist had asserted that Dervishes, Hottentots, Andaman Islanders or even Irishmen were unfit to govern themselves. Could darkest Africa shew such a record of misrule as we had at our doors? Had Egypt plunged to bankruptcy with greater recklessness than we displayed? By the standard of our Indian crimes and blunders, was not Abdul the Damned unjustly damned? The English were mistaken, but it was not too late to repair the mistake; and my uncle proposed in conclusion that the United States should lend Mr. Herbert Hoover for six months to organize and run the British Empire Protectorate.

“It won’t do, Bertrand,” I said.

“But isn’t it true?”

“It’s too true.”

That, however, was not to say that the English had enough detachment to relish the truth underlying the irony. Roger Dainton, on the eve of signing the Ulster covenant, told me—as an Englishman—that the Irish would never be fit for independence till they had acquired respect for law; I had seen Violet Loring whiten to the lips at the report of a lynching in some southern state and then regain her colour in a spasm of indignation that a Quaker had not been shot for refusing to enter the army. Collectively, I had watched the people of London—and, for all I know, the people of England outdid them—exhibiting, at the time of the Pemberton-Billing case, a ferocious credulity that was not exceeded by the French in the Dreyfus trial.

“Well, write your own damned article,” said Bertrand. “If you think you know these people . . .”

I believe that in one respect I understand the English, among whom I was brought up, better than Bertrand, to whom they were always a race of despised aliens. What they lack in imagination they make up in a queer political instinct. Every one at the Eclectic Club was sublimely indifferent, in these days, to the case of Egyptian autonomy; the Amritsar sentences only provoked a desultory discussion whether “damned black men”, as I heard them described by Sir Roger Dainton, would not be all the better for “an occasional dressing-down”. When, however, national bankruptcy was threatened, I encountered an instinctive preference for solvency; and, when refugees from all parts of Ireland flooded England with tales of assassination and counter-assassination, the British liking for order at home grew clamant. I remember carrying back to Seymour Street an official poster in which recruits were invited to “Join the Royal Air Force andSee the World”; an unofficial hand had appended the grim warning: “Join the Royal Irish Constabulary and See the Next World.”

“It’s beyond a joke: that’s what it is,” said Robson, on whom I tried the last of my experiments.

For soul-deadening years, my butler’s sentiment had been expressed, from different angles, by Crawleigh and Bertrand, by O’Rane and Dainton, byPeaceand theMorning Post. I believe, however, that no change of heart can be effected by one man or one paper. England accepted the reformation and acquiesced in the decapitation of Charles the First when the Robsons of those days—inarticulate and irrational, for the most part, but numerous and determined—decided that the unreformed Catholic Church or the divine right of kings was “beyond a joke”.

“I’ve written my own damned article,” I telephoned to Bertrand. “I think it’s an improvement on yours.”

“Youwould,” he replied.

“I don’t think this government has very long to live,” I added.

The oldest trick in the bag of a political journalist is to find out what policy is going to be followed, to insist vehemently that this policy must be followed and to take credit for having forced his own policy on a vacillating and apathetic government. During the war, Sir John Woburn preached conscription from the moment when his chief spy in the cabinet had revealed that ministers were agreed to bring conscription in: the Press Combine advertised itself for months as the mouthpiece of that opinion which demanded conscription; and, when the first military service act was passed, Woburn stood forth as the giant who had forced the government, in his own phrase, “to give Haig the men”. I have to guard against the temptation to employ this trick in writing of our campaign in 1921. Independently of our prompting, every one was saying that ministers must govern or go; and I only realized how far opinion had swung, when I met the lately ennobled Lord Saltash at a public dinner.

“Well, things are moving,” he began darkly, as he led me to the Turf and Stage and pointed from an unobserved corner of the gallery to Lord Lingfield’s customary table.

I needed a few minutes to penetrate the familiar externals. My cousin Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh was entertaining a party of American revue actresses; Sam Dainton was dancing with Ivy Gaymer; and the inscrutable Gaspard was watching and ministering with his wonted resourcefulness and address. It was like going back to a play at the end of a long run. I felt that they must all of them have been frozen in the same attitude since last I looked down on the top of their heads a year before. The band, which played unceasingly from the moment we arrived to the moment we left, might well have been playing for twelve months on end. It was impossible to think of these sleek heads and slim figures without their Turf and Stage frame, unless you thought of them as the brilliant, glossy chorus of mannequins and salesmen in a musical comedy at the Hilarity in old days. Had they homes? Had they private lives?

“I see Wister is withdrawing the support of his papers from the coalition,” I said.

“Yes, he’s out for an all-conservative ministry,” answered Saltash. “Foreditch put him up to it; and you can see they’re trying to nobble Wilmot Dean for their new ginger-group. The rank-and-file tories don’t want to drive Ll-G. out, though, till they’re sure of keeping him out. And Lingfield, who’s leading the rank-and-file, doesn’t believe they can do it yet, unless Bonar comes back. That’s why he wants a centre party, to include Birkenhead, Winston and that lot. It’s interesting, devilish interesting! The dying lion ain’t dead yet.”

“What line are you taking yourself?,” I asked.

“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition, his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me.

“I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard; and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome.

She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance and property.

“We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . .

“I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured.

“If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that Pompeii shall not be buried again?”

I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to revolution and civil war.

“You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic fortunes.”

“I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m seeing that every day in my own work.”

The subject was too big to discuss at midnight; but, as his article was avowedly the preamble to a declaration that he was bent at all costs on saving humanity from the poison of the Lancing inheritance, I warned him that the unemployed might break his windows if they heard that a million a year was going to feed distant Russians when they themselves had not eaten a square meal for twelve months. I asked whether his wife approved of the article, but received no answer. Finally, I returned him his manuscript with a reminder that I could not stultify my weekly predictions of insolvency by proclaiming of a sudden that we were all suffering from too much money.

“I’ll try elsewhere,” said O’Rane without resentment. “I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised. You’re hypnotized by 1914, too, and you think you can avert another eruption by treaties and boards of arbitration. They didn’t stop the war in ’14, George; they neverhavestopped wars, they never will. If you’d change the course of history, you must change the heart of man.”

“The more I study the heart of man . . .” I was beginning.

“It changes daily,” O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution of wealth.”

“Write me an article on that theme,” I said, “and I’ll publish it gladly.”

My invitation and promise were forgotten by O’Rane, I imagine, as quickly as I forgot his demand that I should find a new spirit moving on the face of the waters. When I reached Fetter Lane next morning, I was greeted by Spence-Atkins with news which made Saltash’s predictions obsolete and O’Rane’s researches premature. With or without our reminder that the business of a government was to govern, ministers were hatching a new Irish policy. Like most Irish policies, it could be guaranteed to divide England even if it failed to unite Ireland; and I felt then and later that the decay of the coalition set in on this day. Like all new moves in the Irish game at this time, it was certain to keep me in London when I wanted to take Barbara to Scotland.

The result of the new negotiations has passed into history; and from first to last I was narrowly preoccupied with their effect on my own fortunes. If the south-west of Ireland became habitable again, I was resolved to make it my home; and, at the end of many months’ parleying, I was wakened by a telephone-message from my uncle to say that a settlement had been reached. After threatening reconquest, the government had ascertained that to “reconquer” Ireland would cost as much and take as long as the last South African war; those who had preached coercion changed their text to conciliation; and, as I passed through Inverness, the king’s ministers were meeting the ministers of President de Valera on equal terms.

“The treaty,” Bertrand’s message ran, “was signed in the small hours. Outside a portion of Ulster, Ireland is to be a Free State.”

“And now,” I answered, “and now . . . now perhaps we may see home-rule for England.” In 1906 I had brought a young man’s ideals to Westminster; thirty years before me, my father had done the same; and ten years before him, though he might now call his ideals illusions, Bertrand had entered parliament with hope and vision. One after another, each in our generation, we had seen our vision clouded and our hope deferred by the shadow of Ireland. “May I go home now?,” I asked.

“I can’t spare you yet,” Bertrand sighed. “The trouble’s not over. There are thousands of Irishmen who’ve taken a solemn oath of allegiance to the republic for which their fathers and brothers laid down their lives. There are thousands of English who will say in every passing difficulty: ‘Itoldyou so! Ireland is unfit for self-government.’ We must preach patience, George. We must try to sweeten the bitter taste that all this blood has left on our lips. Lake House can get along without you for the present.”

“I was only thinking Barbara and I should be the better for a change,” I answered with deliberate vagueness.

If I kept my disappointment to myself, I could not help being disappointed. This talk of peace had suddenly opened an unexpected vista of escape from the “gilded cage”; and my single glimpse of freedom convinced me that I could not continue the armed neutrality which Barbara had been imposing on me for a twelvemonth. We must be reconciled or divorced. If we could separate even for a short time, we might be able to decide what we wanted. I therefore told Bertrand that he must not count on me indefinitely; and the old man shewed the wisdom to give me my change by sending me to America for the Washington Conference.

“One of us ought to be there; and I’m too old,” he explained. “I don’t know what stuffing the new president has inside him; but this is the first serious effort to undo the harm of the Versailles treaty, and Harding is the first responsible statesman to say frankly that we’re all committing financial suicide. You’ll go?”

“I will,” I promised.

“And you’ll take Barbara?”

“I’ll talk to her about it.”

And that night I told her of my decision.

“Are you expecting me to come with you?,” she asked.

“It will be better for us both if I go alone. When I come back, you’ll have had time to think quietly . . .”

“I can picture you talking to your clerks like this,” Barbara mocked. “ ‘Your last chance, remember!’ . . .”

“To think quietly,” I repeated, “whether you would prefer me to live in Ireland. Conditions are becoming normal there . . .”

“You mustreallydecide for yourself where you want to live,” she answered, without hinting whether she wished me to live alone.

A week later I sailed from Southampton.

If I had expected to find any striking change on my return, I should have been disappointed; but I fancy that I had by now ceased to look for the romantic reconciliations of the film-world. There was little enough change anywhere. My father-in-law had given me a farewell dinner on the night before I sailed; he gave me a dinner of welcome on the night that I returned. Tempers, I thought, were a little shorter; nerves a little thinner. The vague feeling that something decisive must soon happen reminded me of 1914, when the world expected a cataclysm and almost hoped for it.

“And certainly the conference has done nothing to avert it,” I told Bertrand at the end of dinner.

“Not the French show-down?,” he asked. “After this, we can talk frankly instead of gushing about our gallant allies. We all made grievous mistakes at the peace conference, George, but it’s the French who are keeping us from repairing them.”

“Which will coerce which?,” I asked.

The question, I could see, was not palatable.

“They’ve the best air-force in the world and could lay London in ruins within a week,” Bertrand growled. “It’s immeasurably superior to anything we saw in the war. They can hold Germany down with aeroplanes and niggers; and, when you ask them why they won’t reduce their submarines, you don’t get a satisfactory answer. I can give it to you. They’re going to make themselves masters of Europe before any one has time to stop them. They worked against us in Poland, they’re working against us in the near east.”

“How do you propose to make use of this knowledge?”

“It may lead to clear thinking. Whyweshould pay six shillings in the pound to relieve them of an income-tax, when they’re amassing armaments . . .”

There was very little change anywhere. Lady John Carstairs hoped vaguely that we were not going to desert our late allies; Violet Loring whispered that it was all very well for dear Phyllis to preach at us, but America had deserted every one. I provoked a passing storm by asserting that all international debts would have ultimately to be forgiven; and, had any one asked wherein the world was safer or happier than in 1914, he must have waited long for an answer.

An hour later, as we drove home, Barbara enquired expressionlessly whether I had enjoyed my holiday from her.

“I wantedyouto have a holiday from me,” I answered. “No, I missed you horribly. I should like to think you missed me.”

“Oh, why say that?,” she exclaimed with sudden petulance. “If I could have a holiday from myself so that I didn’t see how my life has been wasted, if I could lose my memory . . . Dear God, if I could only die!”

There was no change in her; and I was driven to issue my ultimatum:

“If you’d like me to go away again, I will. And this time I shouldn’t upset you by coming back. I’ve done my best; and I’ve failed. We can part friends. If you want a divorce, you can have it now.”. . .

“Somehow, I don’t see you in the divorce-court,” Barbara murmured half to herself. “I feel you’d bungle it. When I wrote and begged you to come back, youwould. . . by special train.”

“Well, the matter is now in your hands,” I said.

“I think you’ve a finer collection of worn-out phrases than any man I know,” she cried, again without answering my question.

“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her a fortnight after my return to England.

Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others; Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity,vers libre, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”, explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was playing counsellor and friend of all parties.

“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did, it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”

“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”

From Barbara’s thoughtful look I fancied she was wondering whether I wanted a divorce in order to marry some one else.

“The trouble is,” she continued, “you never know who is the right man till you’ve married him. I always thought you had more perfect understanding than any man I knew . . . Funny!,” she added, as I made no answer.

No answer seemed possible. There was now no change in our rare private passages, though I thought the reference to my want of understanding was dragged in to close the subject of divorce. There was no change in the atmosphere of this party. Nearly seven years had passed since Violet and I last dined together at Loring House. The noble line of portraits had been reinforced by a black-and-white sketch of Jim in uniform; Sandy was old enough for his mother to consult me about schools; but we were arguing now in the very mood and terms that we had used in 1914.

“I wish people wouldn’t talk so much about ‘the next war’,” Violet muttered with a frown in the direction of Philip Hornbeck. “I’ve lost my husband; I’m not going to lose my son if I can help it.”

The big, softly-lighted room reminded me of my interminable discussions with Jim and of his own admission on the outbreak of war that the old governing classes were played out. I was reminded, too, of the question that had haunted me in the first weeks of the armistice: if the order that was represented at this table could not keep peace or make peace, would it have to give way?

“We talk about the next war,” I said, “because the combined wisdom of the world has done nothing in the last three years to prevent it.”

“I suppose the prime ministeristhe only man . . .?” she hazarded.

“Every prime minister is indispensable,” I answered, “till he finds himself on an opposition bench, watching his successor taking command. Five minutes after George goes, every one will ask why he didn’t go before. Every one will discover then the vice of all coalitions: which is that there’s no one to oppose them. You don’t expect Curzon to admit that Lloyd-George’s foreign policy is dangerous?”

“Can nobody do anything from outside?”

“The press does its best, but this government is stronger than the press. Otherwise, Woburn and his combine would have had George out in the street a year ago. Your best hope is an intrigue from inside. Ll-G. was at least equally responsible for the shortage of high explosives in ’15; yet he put the blame on the others and broke the Asquith government. It may be done again.”

My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one of his now periodical lapses into slumber.

“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G. would not now be prime minister,” he answered.

No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.

“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony, without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladiesandgentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rathervieux jeu: we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.

The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street. Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations, when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.

I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.

“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,” said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between thenisiand the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”

“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”

We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home, I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.

“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she answered.

“And if he repudiates her repudiation?”

“She’ll repudiate him.”

“Um. I rather hoped, when I saw them together . . .”

“Husbands and wives who get on well in public always arouse my worst suspicions,” said Barbara. “No, there’s no change.”

I was still pondering our hard-worked phrase when we re-entered our “gilded cage”; and Barbara had slipped away to bed before I could ask her whether a man erred more grievously by doing everything that his wife demanded or nothing.

CHAPTER FIVE

“. . . They say, the tongues of dying menEnforce attention, like deep harmony;Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain;For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.” . . .Shakespeare:King Richard II.

“. . . They say, the tongues of dying men

Enforce attention, like deep harmony;

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain;

For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.” . . .

Shakespeare:King Richard II.

“On the turf,” expounded my uncle Bertrand, “races are won by the intelligence of the individual backer. It is only when you lose that you divide the responsibility between the breeder, the trainer, the jockey and the horse. That is why the sporting tipster is the happiest of men. Why shouldn’t we call ourselves ‘the Brigadier’ and run a sporting column inPeace? You and I, George, get neither pleasure nor profit from seeing our political forecasts being fulfilled.” . . .

“Perhaps, if we’d backed our fancy . . .” I began.

“I’ve backedPeace,” said my uncle grimly, “to a tune that would make an unsuccessful racing-stable seem like a safe investment. I pay tens of thousands a year for the privilege of casting myself for the part of Cassandra. Wecan’tbe so much cleverer than other people . . .”

“If we were,” I interrupted, “we might make them believe what we tell them.”

“The world believes what it wants to believe,” said Bertrand.

“And is quite unabashed when it’s proved wrong,” I added, as I pocketed the article which I had brought to Princes Gardens for my uncle’simprimatur.

Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs. By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last?

Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles conference could only be changed by another war?

I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions, above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the 1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de Liancourt substituted.

According to my uncle, the first responsible attack on the peace-treaty was delivered by President Harding; a counter-attack was opened by the French, when they stultified the Washington Conference; and an attack, in reply to the counter-attack, was launched by the Balfour Note on inter-allied indebtedness.

On the day after it was published, Clifford van Oss called in Fetter Lane to enquire whether the note was an overture to repudiation.

“I should rather call it our reply to the Frenchnon possumusat Washington,” said Bertrand. “If we pay our debts to you, the French must pay their debts to us instead of building submarines against us.”

“From what I know of the French,” said Clifford, with the detachment that some of us found irritating in a country which had so disconcertingly washed its hands of European problems, “they won’t take it lying down.”

The assertion was so intrinsically probable that I did not contest it; but, if I spent little time wondering what the French reply would be, that was chiefly because I was watching the fulfilment of another prophecy. The controversy that raged for six months over O’Rane’s articles in theDemocratic Reviewis now public, if not ancient, history; and my chief memory is of his victory by silence. If one of his million critics had troubled to study his argument, he would have seen that the flamboyant gifts of embarrassed millionaires were attacked for their demoralizing effect on the recipients. Those who wrote to the papers or passed unanimous resolutions of protest laid emphasis on the crying needs of hospitals and the like; they assumed an almost impertinent right to tell other people how they should spend their money; but they did not meet O’Rane’s contention that every university could be endowed, every laboratory subsidized and every great work of art purchased for the nation from the money that was spent on luxuries.

I paid less attention to those who lectured O’Rane from expensive addresses than to those who heard, on the authority of a millionaire, that a great many people had a great deal too much money.

“Any windows broken?,” I asked him on one of the rare occasions when we met in these months.

“Not yet,” he laughed.

I did not dare to enquire whether any wives had been running away lately. Sonia’s threatened repudiation had not yet been published; but this, Barbara told me, was only because he had not yet stated in public that he would renounce his inheritance. The controversy imparted a transient heat to the chilly summer of 1922; and no doubt I should still be printing letters of protest if O’Rane’s theories of property had not been drowned in the thunder of a more urgent conflict. In August I took Barbara to stay with the Knightriders; and I had only reached Northumberland when my uncle recalled me to London with a telegram that revived for many days the agonizing fears and uncertainties of 1914.

I returned alone to find Bertrand breakfasting in bed.

“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,” he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.”

In the last week I had seen but a few provincial papers; I had almost forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a restored and rejuvenated Turkey.

“This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.”

“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams.

There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell him.

“Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own courage up. “If hecanavoid a conflict . . .”

I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war if war could be prevented.

“Istilldon’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.

“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the same conclusion in less few words.

War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.

“But . . . butwhy. . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with pathetic helplessness.

Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant waterways.

“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable exasperation.

And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for news.

“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money. Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in another.” . . .

For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.

“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”

I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.

Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its big guns.

“It is hard,” the Lingfield press stated, “to imagine a conservative administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr. Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George.”. . .

“Recent events in the near east,” retorted the Wister papers, “have signed the death-warrant of the coalition.”. . .

The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split.

As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby, who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the election.

“What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn. “And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”

“Ourline . . .” he began eagerly; and, as I turned from the things he had forgotten to the things he had never learned, I classed him unhesitatingly with those who—in O’Rane’s phrase—would not admit that a war had taken place.

“I suppose a political whip can’t live without an abnormal endowment of optimism,” I said, more to myself than to him.

Jellaby forged ahead with growing enthusiasm. The local associations were solidly in support of the Asquith wing, solidly opposed to the Lloyd-George renegades. Much capital could be made out of the Safeguarding of Industries Bill (“which is pure protection; you’d have thought the tories had had enough protection in 1906”); more from the Black-and-Tan reprisals in Ireland; most of all from the unpopularity of the coalition.

“But have you considered why it’s unpopular?,” I broke in at last. “Not because its policy is faintly protectionist—the electors to-day don’t care tuppence about free trade—; not because it tried to put down murder with more murder. What people care about is taxation and the cost of living and unemployment and, above all else, my dear Frank, security. We’re in sight of another and a bloodier war.”

“With a man like Lloyd-George . . .,” he began with a kindling eye.

I did not wait, however, for the end of the tirade. No one beyond Jellaby’s immediate circle of colleagues cared about the internecine feuds of exasperated factionaries; and I look back on this night as the time when so temperamental, congenital and impenitent a liberal as myself had to realize that there was at present no hope for liberalism in the liberal party. So far as the roar of his indignant rhetoric allowed me, I tried to formulate the demands of all who shared my own feeling of insecurity. The country was demoralized by the war and by the paralysis of government that followed it; instinctively the country wanted to be put into training, to have its muscles hardened and—still more—its nerves steadied. Though the heat of civil war had died down in Ireland, it had been replaced by the fitful blaze of individual assassination; the chief of the imperial general staff was done to death this summer on the steps of his house in London; the commander-in-chief of the Free State army was ambushed in Ireland. It was idle to bandy figures of murders and reprisals, when the country demanded a cure for its own demoralization.

“People feel it’s time to pull up, take stock, overhaul,” I said. “It’s the spirit of 1914, when the war did for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

“And that security is just what the liberal party offers,” said Jellaby. “Standing midway between a tory reaction and socialism . . .”

“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as near war as we are to-night.”

We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week.

“These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced away with Sam.

Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it.

“A mad world,” I said, as I parted from Jellaby. “A mad world,” I repeated, two days later, when I went north to bring Barbara home. “A mad world face to face with its madness,” I thought to myself, on reading an announcement, sandwiched between news of now greater moment, that Mr. David O’Rane was withdrawing the funds of the Lancing Trust from England.

On reaching Seymour Street I found a telephone-message from Sonia, begging me to see her at once. I replied that I would come; but, as I walked to Westminster that afternoon, I felt—as in the similar atmosphere of eight years before—that the individual had shrunk in importance. Barbara, shaken out of her usual aloofness, now only cared to know what chance of life I would give her brother; and, though I felt for Sonia as I should feel for a popular actress who married a country curate, I was mildly aggrieved that she should absorb my time when I wanted to explore the last frantic hopes of peace.

The case which I prepared for O’Rane was, I fancy, not unpersuasive; but I had no chance of putting it forward. If the inheritance three years before had been a nine-days’-wonder, the news of the renunciation seemed likely to cause, in some quarters at least, a nine weeks’ consternation. I blundered into the wake of a deputation and entered the library in time to hear the venerable Bishop of Poplar pleading for men and women whom O’Rane had kept alive for more than two years. Thousands, the bishop asserted, were on the verge of starvation; before the winter, they would be reckoned by tens of thousands. While Mr. O’Rane’s arguments might be unassailable in normal times, the aftermath of an unprecedented war demanded abnormal remedies.

“From half-a-dozen abnormally long purses?,” O’Rane enquired wearily. “I wantevery oneto give andevery oneto feel it. If your few rich men go on strike, what will happen?”

The bishop was too old a controversialist to be trapped:

“You would like me to say that some one will come forward in their place. I wish I could believe it. When the pinch becomes unbearable, the government will provide relief out of the taxpayer’s pocket. But, before that relief comes, many people will be dead; there will be rioting . . .”

“It’s a nice question already how long we can keep ’em sweet,” interposed an anxious voice on behalf of the National Unemployment Committee.

“It’s a nice question whether you’ll get anything done till they turn nasty,” retorted a small man with a Cardiff accent.

The bishop smiled and explained that, to make his deputation representative, he had included his friend Mr. Griffiths, with whose well-known bolshevist views we were no doubt already acquainted.

“What would you think, Mr. O’Rane,” he continued, “if I threw the bread of London into the Thames on the plea that it would be better for the people to eat cake? You are pronouncing sentence of death on the weakest section of the community.”

In the silence that followed I turned from O’Rane’s tortured eyes to the apostle of “bolshevism”. This was certainly my first, though not my last, meeting with the organizer and leader of “Griffiths’ Heroes”. I had expected a figure cast in the heroic mould, for there was a touch of the genius in the originality of his ideas and a hint of the commander in the obedience which he secured in carrying them out. Most strongly marked, however, was the fanatic; and his blended passion and cruelty made him something less than human. In thinking of him after all these months I am always reminded of an angry ferret. He was very small, very hirsute, very quick; though his eyes were brown, they seemed to shine red; and, as he looked scornfully round O’Rane’s warm library, I felt that his little teeth were seeking a hand to bite.

“There’d be less talk of bolshevism, if people knew what they were talking about,” he announced with a bluntness that was in painful contrast to the bishop’s courtly patience. “The government says it doesn’t know what to do; let’s see if any one else does. When folk are starving, they know what to do.”

There was a threat in his tone; but he did not explain it, as Sonia came in at this moment and motioned me into the corner by the tea-table. Griffiths, to the credit of his consistency, refused tea: the men whom he represented had been out of work for eleven months; he lived as they lived and, if need be, would starve as they starved.

“We’re first on the list for looting, when the revolution comes,” she whispered cheerfully, while he examined her clothes as though he would have liked to strip her. Then, for a moment, she forgot to think of herself. “Oh, George! Babs has just telephoned for you. I’m so sorry, I’m afraid there’s bad news. Your uncle . . .” I stood up; but she pulled me back, as the deputation filed out. “She’s sending the car here; she thinks you ought to go to him at once. If there’s anything we can do . . .”

I shook my head. At Bertrand’s age, there was little that any one could do.

“Have you told Raney?,” I asked.

“I hadn’t a chance. This deputation . . . Oh, David, what did you tell them?”

O’Rane dropped into a chair and pressed his fists against his temples:

“I said . . . I’d think the thing over. It was really out of politeness to the poor old bishop. Nothing can make any difference.”. . .

“Even when everybody tells you you’re wrong? People simply won’t believe it. I had four reporters within half-an-hour.”

“I don’t know what they want to worry us for,” he broke out. “What did you tell them?”

Sonia weighed each word of her answer before launching it:

“I said you hadn’t made up your mind. If you want to shew that you care for me . . .”

O’Rane walked to her with his hands outstretched in an attitude of entreaty:

“If this accursed money had never come to me, you couldn’t have said that.”

The attitude of entreaty won no hint of yielding.

“Of course, if youwon’tbe warned . . .” Sonia muttered, as she walked with me to the door.

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