CHAPTER ONE

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half somelancholy as a battle won.”Duke of Wellington:Despatches.

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so

melancholy as a battle won.”

Duke of Wellington:Despatches.

On the day after the peace-treaty had been signed, my uncle sent me to make a political survey of England. If it brought no benefit to England or to our paper, it provided me with a pleasant holiday and a welcome break.

Looking back on my two years’ labours in Fetter Lane, I feel that the first six months were given to creating an atmosphere. As Bertrand proclaimed at our inaugural dinner, no lasting peace could be established on a sense of grievance; and, until the terms of peace were published, we tried to deflect public attention from crude thoughts of triumph and cruder hankerings after revenge to a frank desire for mutual forgiveness and good-will. For twelve months after the treaty was placed in our hands, we laboured to demonstrate that it was unworkable. And in the six months during which the peace coalition was tottering to the fall I received my answer to the old question whether those who could neither keep peace nor make war were competent to make peace.

“It won’t do,” Bertrand declared summarily, when we met to discuss our public attitude to the treaty of Versailles. “ ‘Revision’ must be our battle-cry. Revision of the treaty.”

I fancy I was expressing what Spence-Atkins and Triskett and all of us had long felt, when I said:

“Thank God we have a battle-cry at last.”

“It will not be popular,” predicted my uncle, with his usual love for being in a minority. “The fools who shouted that we were ‘letting the Hun off’ will shout more than ever that we’re making the treaty ‘a scrap of paper’. . . . And yet, if we try to enforce it, all central Europe will go the way of Russia.”

“I’m afraid it will be another unpopular cry,” added Jefferson Wright, “but it’s time we drew attention to the economic position at home. We’re pouring out money as though the war were still going on.”

“Our battle-cry, then,” said Bertrand, “must be ‘Produce more and consume less’.”

“We shall be told we’re trying to enslave labour. And there’ll be no end to unemployment when the ‘consuming less’ begins.”

“We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,” Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry.

Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed me out of the office to collect material for six articles onEngland in Reconstruction.

“The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s a hot-house: abnormal.”

My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy Maitland’s wedding.

She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been headed:Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals.

“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”

“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”

The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:

“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of them.”

“It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered. “The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.”

If my explanation was heard, it was not answered.

“One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he could do that. It’s terrible!”

I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of peace.

I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids, which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal truth of the Old Testament.

“Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel through.

He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these critics, had been found out.

I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets.

“Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked.

“Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered.

How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me to solve.

“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir, what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”

I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when living was so expensive.

“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.

Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.

At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the Lorings in another.

“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet, “but I have to think of Sandy.”

And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not default at the same moment.

As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages and his servants had left her in a body without notice.

“Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times,” I wrote to my uncle.

At the beginning of the autumn, a railway-strike assailed the country with partial paralysis.

“It may help,” wrote Bertrand from the security of London, “to bring people to their senses. They think they’re rich because the printing-presses keep ’em well supplied with depreciated notes. As usual, Spence-Atkins prophesies a tremendous slump; and that will be just as unreal as the boom. If people would think in terms of commodities and services instead of chattering about money!

“But this is not the worst of the trouble. The triple alliance is a political engine. Direct action is a political method; the reply of organized labour to a government that represents no one in particular and organized labour least of all. This is the first protest against the 1918 election and I’ve been torn in pieces by the tory press for asking what else any sane man could have expected, when the present House never tries to control ministers.‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’ ”

Barbara and I turned south on the first day of the strike; and, by the time we reached Crawleigh Abbey, it was over. In the tone of my father-in-law, however, I detected a new rancour such as I had not met since the almost daily strikes and lock-outs before the war. Neave had been warned for duty; and, as he changed out of uniform, I fancied that father and son were like a pair of reluctant game-cocks, as difficult to drag out of a fight as to urge in.

“I regret nothing,” said Crawleigh on the first night, “that shews labour it can’t hold the country to ransom. If I’d been the prime minister, though, I’d have recalled every man jack of them to the colours . . .”

“And if they refused to come?,” I ventured to interrupt.

“After being ordered to mobilize?,” asked Neave with the aloof patience of a Guards officer in teaching a civilian his A.B.C.

“Yes,” I answered. “In 1914 the regular officer threatened to resign if he were ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster. That’s never been quoted, but you may be sure it’s not been forgotten. And if you ever try to use troops against an industrial strike . . .”

“I should use troops to protect life and property,” Crawleigh interposed. “A very few days without trains, and the babies in every city would die for want of milk. One hopes that these drastic steps will never be necessary. One hopes the lesson’s been taken to heart.”

“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.

As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave, neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.

“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.

I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital loss of a strike.

“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and proved nothing,” I said.

“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton, who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.

It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.

“I must send you a little book onThe Soviet Peril,” promised Lady Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys had sent me pamphlets onA Short Way with Profiteers.

I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he had increased his capital twentyper cent.since 1914.

“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.

Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he was paid, he stood condemned.

“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League ‘paid agitators’?”

“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that faded into the silence of stupefaction.

The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed adiminuendoin the rather robust optimism with which I began. England was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles, of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices; credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than they could afford.

It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.

The one was no better justified than the other. While the country clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own exports threatened to dry up.

“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my return, tossing meThe Economic Consequences of the Peace.

“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”

“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching to you since the armistice.”

“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from armistice night.People won’t listen.”

And then I told Bertrand of the psychological discovery that impressed me most in the whole course of my tour. On the minds of men who had taken part in the war the printed word had ceased to exert its old spell. In the first recruiting of 1914 the boys in my old Wiltshire constituency were forbidden to pluck the blackberries by the roadside, because a mysterious red car had been abroad, before daylight, sprinkling the hedges with what was believed to be a strong solution of typhoid germs. The story was printed in the papers and believed because it was in print. Five years later the same story—with a Russian or a Sinn Feiner in charge of the car—might have been believed until it was published; then it would have been relegated to the teeming limbo of “newspaper lies”. The captain of the Loring yacht, who had served for most of the war on an auxiliary cruiser, told me of his amazement on reading that thePelion, which was at that time his home, had been sunk by a mine in the North Sea; he was less surprised, though more aggrieved, to read a year later that his ship, which had lately been sunk by a torpedo in the Irish Channel, was still convoying troopers in the Mediterranean. He accepted my explanation that the Admiralty was of malice aforethought misleading the newspaper-readers of England in the hope of misleading the German intelligence department; but his faith was shattered beyond repair. If the press lied to him on matters which he could check from his own experience, how much more easily it would lie about defeats and casualties, wages and prices!

“And in future,” I told Bertrand, “we have to reckon with this incredulity in addition to all the apathy that’s been breaking our hearts.”

“Andthe misrepresentation,” he sighed with a sensitiveness surprising in so scarred a fighter to the charge of the Woburn press that he was selling the French for thirty pieces of German silver.

“There are times,” I said, “when I feel that only the logic of events will convince people. Aren’t we wasting our energy, Bertrand? I’ve given the experiment more than six months’ trial; now I want to get away. Barbara’s going to have a baby.” . . .

I could have piled argument on argument if my uncle had resisted me; but he sat without speaking, his hands crossing and uncrossing themselves tremulously over the ivory knob of his stick and his eyes set gloomily on the fire.

“The logic of events?,” he repeated at length.

“I don’t believe we shall do any good here till we have a revolution,” I said, with bitter memories of my battle-piece in its three panels. “A revolution; or another war.”

“Our intention was to avert it,” he reminded me.

Because Bertrand made no effort to detain me, I stayed in London—sullenly protesting that we only bored the converted and exasperated the inconvertible—till the end of the year. Looking back, I suppose the autumn brought with it the first signs of returning reason, though Sir Roger Dainton—more in sorrow than anger—burnt theEconomic Consequencesand left me—with anger and sorrow nicely balanced—to buy myself another copy. It was one thing, however, to concede that the peace terms were unworkable; it was something quite different to precipitate a general election in the hope of mending them. The coalition survived the Paisley election, when Mr. Asquith was drawn to Westminster through an avenue of cheering crowds; it survived the awkward questions which the average voter was beginning to frame. And, so long as it steered clear of another war, it could disregard the academic questions of sentimental leader-writers who asked if any one was a penny the better for war and victory.

“You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,” said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?”

“A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months. D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the oldrégimein Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If the allies had an agreed policy . . .”

“You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your friend Lucien de Grammont . . .”

“He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.”

It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and Vancouver to die in a common cause.

“I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient with the rank-and-file.”

It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected, quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue ofPeace.

“I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively, with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the war?”

“We haven’t lost it yet,” I said, “but some of us are doing our best. I wish you’d explain to me, Lucien, how you expect to make Germany pay for the war when you’re standing with your foot on her throat.”

“I am sorry if we are keeping you from trading with her,” he answered with icy politeness, “but security is as necessary to France as trade is to England. You madeyourselvessecure when you took the German fleet. Now, when France is left alone . . .”

He glanced malevolently at Clifford van Oss and turned again to the window.

“But, hell, Wilson had no power to commit us!” Clifford protested. “If you’d any of you gotten down to the constitution of the United States . . .”

“I fancy America signed the treaty?,” said Lucian coldly.

“We’d best quit talking about bad faith,” Clifford recommended, without, however, following his own advice. “Clemenceau and Lloyd-George let up on Wilson over the fourteen points; they let up on the Germans . . .”

I turned to Hornbeck, whose square face was alight with malicious enjoyment.

“What are you supposed to be doing nowadays?,” I asked, as we strolled up and down the room where we had worked so long together.

“I’m adviser to the secretariat,” he answered. “What does that mean? Well, you may say, if you like, that I’m preparing for the next war.”

“It’s a pity there’s no one to bang all our heads together,” I murmured, as a new wrangle broke out between Clifford and Lucien. “The German menace has gone, but there’s a French menace coming. Nine or ten months ago I told Lucien in Paris that his people were at the top of their prestige; now they’re the most hated, feared and despised people in Europe. A mad war, a mad peace . . .”

“And nothing to prevent another war as mad,” Hornbeck began. Then we stood without speaking, in a silence that spread over London, freezing sound and movement. The customary rumble of traffic receded to a distance and faded away; the blare of horns, the ringing of bells, the click of typewriters, all the shouting, speaking and whispering that made up the unceasing drone of a great city now, for two minutes, ceased. Then, very far away, the rumble of traffic began again. I felt as if I were recovering consciousness after an anæsthetic. Nearer at hand I heard voices, then the scuffle of feet; a typewriter clicked interrogatively, as though wondering if the two minutes were over; then a telephone-bell rang; and the city heaved and roared its way back to life. “We’re no better off,” Hornbeck resumed. “Only you sentimentalists ever thought we should be.”

I had been indescribably awed by that sudden silence and by the spectacle of those many thousands all stricken motionless at the same time. The street was a solid block of devout, bare-headed humanity; from the Victoria Tower to the National Gallery a single mood of gratitude and reverence bowed those myriad heads. Far from Westminster, far from London, the same silence had fallen, the same devotion had risen from a myriad other hearts.

“Spiritually?,” I asked.

“Not in the very least! A great many people were very brave in an emergency; a great many people always are very brave in an emergency. A great many people have suffered . . . shall I say, on behalf of civilization? A great many people always suffer on behalf of civilization, which is a wasteful and cruel business, George, only one degree less wasteful and cruel than barbarism. This wasn’t the first war in history; people like you have always looked for a spiritual regeneration; you’ve never found it.”

“I should be content,” I said, “if one man in ten out of all that crowd would join me in making future wars impossible.”

“I should be content if one man in all the world would tell me how that’s to be done.”

I reached Fetter Lane in a chastened mood; and for the rest of the morning we talked of the year that had passed since Armistice Day.

There was to be no United States of Europe, still less a United States of the World. The peace-treaty, to the view of us all, indicated the swiftest and surest way to another war; and there was no influence, outside parliament or within, to modify it. Trade depression was attracting attention to unemployment and taxation; but, of a hundred men who said “We must cut down expenditure,” ninety-nine added “You can’t touch pensions, of course; or the army and navy; or the air force.” . . . And, after nine months, the one political organ that looked beyond the cheap scores and cheaper promises of the 1918 election was read by a growing literary public for the sake of its musical notes and dramatic criticism.

“Are we addressing the right people?,” asked Jefferson Wright.

“Any person who’ll listen is the right person for me,” said Bertrand sententiously.

“Then why not speak to labour?”

“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”

“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.

“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s heads?”

The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of “inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we must do now.

“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily discouraged than I was in 1909.”

Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in England.

“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one else.”

“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to follow your advice.”

As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.

“Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me.

And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil. When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect.

“I do my modest share,” I said.

“And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have more money to . . .wasteon yourself.”

I cannot recall that the tone or choice of language was more vigorous than I had long been accustomed to hearing from O’Rane. Certainly I should have taken up the challenge without concern, if Sonia had not rushed superfluously to my assistance. Her indignation, however, in demanding why personal expenditure should be called waste, warned me against taking sides in a family quarrel.

“David’simpossibleabout money!,” she cried. “So long as I haveonecrust of bread,onedress that would disgrace a scarecrow . . .”

“If this is how the poor live, let’s join them!,” interposed Barbara pacifically.

In spite of herself, Sonia laughed as she saw us admiring her frock. The house was unpretentious, but it was enviably comfortable. I never wish to be given better food or wine. And, on a lower plane of morality, whatever she lacked from her husband was made up by the munificence of her friends.

“It’s so difficult, when every one thinks you’re rich . . .” she began.

“But it isn’t our money,” O’Rane objected.

Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged myself beside Sonia.

“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”

“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he sighed. “Is thatallthe advice you can give me, George?”

“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money with a pole.”

“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that, though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France again?”

By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life of wasted opportunities.

“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.

It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be passed.

The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession. Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened, for drawing us together.

As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants, nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending. I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.

“Everything all right?,” I asked as carelessly as I could.

“Yes, sir. Lady Barbara is in her room. I believe her ladyship is with her.”

When I went upstairs, Barbara was in bed. The blinds were down, and a closing door hinted that my mother-in-law was for some reason hurrying away to avoid me. As I crossed the room, Barbara told me to stop; and, as I tried to ask how she was, I was waved into silence. Then she covered her eyes and turned away:

“You’ve not been told? It’ll be a shock, but I wanted to tell you myself. I’m sorry, George . . . I . . . I did my best. You mustn’t betoodreadfully disappointed. Dead . . . He was born dead. If only it could have been the other way round!”

Mercifully, as though she had been listening at the door, Lady Crawleigh came back to say that my father-in-law wished to see me. Together we drafted the announcement for the press; and I asked whether it would be prudent for me to go upstairs again. He said “yes” and “no” alternately, concluding on a “yes” in the frantic hope of getting rid of me. As I tapped on Barbara’s door, I heard Lady Crawleigh scuttling through another; and it was Barbara, undaunted and indomitable, who hid her own agony under a gentle concern for me.

“I suppose people will want to sympathize,” she began. “May I have all my letters sent to you, George? Open them, answer them. I shall have to be here for some weeks, I’m afraid, but I’ll make up for deserting you when I come back to London. I’ll give some lovely parties for you. We shall be so busy we shan’t have time to think. Iwantto keep busy.” . . .

And, on that word, her dead child, her suffering and her disappointment were banished from Barbara’s life. Three years have passed since that April evening of 1920 when we made our compact of silence; and, with a single exception, we observed it with equal scruple on both sides.

CHAPTER TWO

No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.This must suffice me here. What would one have?In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and meTo cover—the three first without a wifeWhile I have mine! So—still they overcomeBecause there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.Robert Browning:Andrea del Sarto.

No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,

You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.

This must suffice me here. What would one have?

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me

To cover—the three first without a wife

While I have mine! So—still they overcome

Because there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.Robert Browning:Andrea del Sarto.

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.

Robert Browning:Andrea del Sarto.

Before we settled in London for the summer of 1920, I asked Bertrand whether he was prepared to run our paper without me if I could persuade Barbara to dull the edge of her grief by coming round the world with me.

“You’ll be leaving us,” answered my uncle rather blankly, “just at the moment when life is becoming normal after the war. We’ve hideous labour-troubles in store; unemployment . . . From all I hear, there’s going to be an explosion in Ireland.”

“And this,” I interrupted, “is what you describe as normal conditions after the war?”

Bertrand nodded slowly over his clasped hands:

“I do. A peace-treaty you may regard as another aspect of war: the last chapter, if you like. Then you come to that which remains: the bill that’s still unpaid when you’ve counted your dead and disbanded your armies and dismembered your empires. All the complications of our spiritual convalescence are before us. Still . . .”

I might have spared him my importunity until I had approached Barbara. With the choice of six months in London and twelve on a steamer, she had no difficulty in making up her mind; and I soon found myself studying, in her company and from a somewhat different angle, “that which remained” in London after eighteen months of armistice and peace. If the life was a little bewildering and sometimes more than a little uncongenial, that—as Bertrand would have said—was part of the unpaid bill.

“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the metropolis of England.”

“For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San Remo, Hythe . . .”

In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on, meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season, of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent tragedy.

“Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I supposeyoudon’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more money and a bit less work than the bar?”

If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who sent me testimonials beginning: “Public school and university ex-service officer, 1914-1918,wounded.” . . . If others received half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them; and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced, with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks.

“Nobody could wantlesswork than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck pointed out.

“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle . . .”

“My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered.

“Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him.

In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses, land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’ candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the pleadings ofPeacewould never do.

At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals; and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and treatment of international prostration.

“Thewholeof Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany. Take Austria.Take Russia.”

And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics, had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and, if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow was so far from London.

I had heard so much of the coming royalist counterrevolution that I fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia.

“Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me.

Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances!

“Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’.

“The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of religion should be regarded as paid agitators.

Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but, without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold.

“Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved upstairs.

“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal; politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it absolutely to yourself.”

I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel, however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier. After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that night for their retirement.

“I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves, don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizingthisparty, of course; but the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.”

If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties had the ceremony and pomp of alevée. In 1920 we had no time for the ceremony, no money for the pomp.

“I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation.

The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of recognition.

“Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely, “for one who can find time to be hospitable.”

As we drifted uncomfortably about the house, I found it expedient to leave at least this charge unanswered. The smoking-room was given up to bridge, the dining-room to an endless supper; musicians, whom in time I came to suspect our butler of keeping on a chain in one of the cellars, were imprisoned on a landing: and both drawing-rooms were cleared for dancing. “Solitudinem faciunt: pacem appellant.I’m off,” said Bertrand in bewilderment. “Promise you won’t invite me again!” And I shared his bewilderment. The success of the party, as of the late war, lay in unity of command. Our butler wasgeneralissimo; and Barbara asked only that I would leave him alone. If the men could not find cigars, they appealed to Robson; when an uninvited guest strayed into the hall, demanding who the guy was who was giving this show, Robson introduced him promptly to his hostess; I saw him supplying powder and carrying out repairs to torn dresses; and, when our musicians knocked off work for the night, Robson obliged at the piano, apologizing for the slow, melodious waltzes of my undergraduate days and regretting that he had no temperament for jazz-music.

“IwishI knew his history,” Barbara murmured plaintively. “I daren’t ask for fear of finding he has a wife. That would break my heart, because I’m determined to marry him if anything happens to you, George.”

Lady Dainton, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength of disapproval.

“I would sooner give up society altogether,” she announced, “than countenance its present form. This, of course, is different,” she added vaguely and without conviction.

Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they amused Barbara.

“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding apost mortem.

“These people don’tamuseyou?,” he cried.

“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”

Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help, they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.

“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred. If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”

And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek of shells had been forgotten.

“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara, when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the war on art . . .?”

“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no such thing as absolute good.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“And I’m thrilled by it!,” she cried in unaffected rapture. “All the violence and horror and madness of the war are reflected in the art of to-day. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. This party, which dear Lady Dainton hated so much . . . The restlessness, the hysteria . . . Jazz, in itself . . .”

“That which remains,” I murmured, in Bertrand’s phrase.

I was reminded of the days before the war when revues and ragtime first established their empire in London. Then, as the curtain prepared to fall, principals and supers, the latest beauty and the last comedian, a scene-shifter or two and the prompter all jigged and shuffled to the haunting syncopation of theHoneymoon RagorThat Ol’ Mason-Dixon Line. The audience jigged and shuffled up the gangways; the men were still humming, the women still working their shoulders when they drove away. ‘Oh, honey, I feel funny when dat coon begin to play. . .’ Now they jigged and shuffled through the streets and into the houses; they could not stop; life was become an endless syncopation.

I wondered when our friends would settle down. If the art of the day seemed, in my philistine eyes, epileptic, it was at least faithful to the epileptic contortions and fitful mood of the times. Reviewing these stupefying parties, I see men and women in a high fever. The girls all wear the same short skirts and exhibit the same bare backs; they have achieved the same flat figure; and, granted an upturned nose, they bob their hair in the same way. Very young, very pretty and very full of high spirits, they think the same thoughts and express them in the same jargon with the same loud assurance. Their sameness makes every party the same. I see myself talking feverishly of films with some star from Los Angeles and being told, by little Ivy Gaymer, of the latest divorce; I see young poets discussing a recent lampoon and young actresses describing their last triumph. There are financial groups and political caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women; the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant. Sir Rupert Foreditch spreads the fever among the young politicians.

I can understand that Lady Dainton is too inelastic for the universal syncopation of these days. I could wish, in this season of comprehensive toleration, that I were far more tolerant or far less, for many of these women would not be received by Violet Loring or my mother, many of the men would be roughly handled if their business records were examined by unsympathetic counsel. And no one can for long live comfortably in a state of delirium. The clatter from the dining-room and the din from the musicians’ corner are unceasing. Every one is moving, talking, smoking at top speed. And Robson holds all the threads in his capable hands; he is, to my house in Seymour Street, what Gaspard is to the Turf and Stage. My house is indeed a small and noisy club.

It is to be hoped that our guests enjoyed themselves; I believe that they, like Barbara, were only concerned to be so busy that they could not think. I should not be surprised to hear that, like Barbara, some of them broke down before the end. We had intended to stay in London until I went to shoot with the Knightriders; but early in July Barbara collapsed suddenly and was ordered to the country. Though there was nothing organically amiss with her, Gaisford threatened to throw up the case if she remained in London.

“When I die, you can tell people I was the only honest leech you ever met,” he muttered with a frown. “I’m never afraid to say I don’t know; and I don’t know now what’s wrong with that child. She’s very ill indeed; and there’s nothing the matter with her. I have my suspicions. You’ll go with her?”

“If I can arrange things at the office,” I answered.

“Office be damned! If she wants you, go!”

More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.

“If youmustgo, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”

“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.

London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.

“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to define our attitude.”

“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”

“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.

Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the assembly framed.

“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with us, “means coercing Ulster.”

As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of the table.

“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and ‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”

Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat; my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round our echoing table.

It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell, though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the balance, it must employ the same means.

“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present position is an evenly matched civil war.”

As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded, after perusal, with an endorsement “Passed by the Censor I. R. A.”; my agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one, however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain neutral.

“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick . . .”

“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.

“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.

“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican troops.”

“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.

“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.

The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab before he laid down his arms.

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