CHAPTER THREE
“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;For all that he hath plannedWe deliver to thy hand,As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’ ”Rudyard Kipling:The Peace of Dives.
“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;For all that he hath plannedWe deliver to thy hand,As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’ ”Rudyard Kipling:The Peace of Dives.
“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;For all that he hath plannedWe deliver to thy hand,As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’ ”Rudyard Kipling:The Peace of Dives.
“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;For all that he hath plannedWe deliver to thy hand,As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’ ”Rudyard Kipling:The Peace of Dives.
“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,
And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;
For all that he hath planned
We deliver to thy hand,
As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’ ”
Rudyard Kipling:The Peace of Dives.
Average, sensual man is no match for an enthusiast. When O’Rane wrote that he wanted to ask my advice, vague instinct warned me that he wanted the costlier, if no more valuable, privilege of my personal cooperation.
And it was my intention that he should cooperate with me. If I seemed a doctrinaire to Lucien, a fanatic to Hornbeck and a ‘bolshevist’—whatever that might mean—to Deganway, I seemed to myself the mildest revolutionary that had ever schemed to carry out a revolution by deputy. When, at this time, people talked of “winning the peace” and asked what we meant to do, I felt and said that no active man or woman who had survived the war was justified in sitting idle. I was ready to write, speak and subscribe money on behalf of any organization that would rouse the world to the danger which I saw threatening it. I would work for my “will to peace” as others worked, in the years that followed and along lines which I deplored, for the League of Nations. I lacked the fire and the endurance, however, to inspire a crusade. This, I felt, was O’Rane’s part.
Nevertheless, from our first conversation I divined that we were thinking on different planes. To “make the war worth while”, in my view, was to secure, first and foremost, that there should be no future wars. Perhaps because he had spent so many months in America, where by now the world seemed already to have been made “safe for democracy”, perhaps because he had seen too much of the late war to fancy that any one wanted more of it, O’Rane assumed the end at which I was aiming.
“If the war is to be made ‘worth while’,” he pronounced at the end of our first night together, “we have . . . in some way . . . to make England . . .”
“ ‘A land fit for heroes’ and what not,” Philip Hornbeck interrupted flippantly.
After that, though we conducted our debates in private, I felt that O’Rane’s enthusiasm was sapping my will to the point when I should be drawn from my own leisurely crusade and pressed into his. If, at the end of ten days, he returned to London without me, I can only explain his failure by saying that in the meantime I had fallen to the assault of a yet more formidable enthusiast.
“You heard what Sonia said about Stornaway’s proposal?,” O’Rane began on the second day.
The rest of the party had disappeared to Monte Carlo; and I was imprisoned in the shade of a palm-tree until I surrendered or bolted.
“He made the same proposal to me,” I said. “I turned it down because I thought there was more important work nearer to hand.”
“Our work won’t lack in importance.”
“Then you’ve accepted his offer?,” I asked. “You’re giving up the House?”
“I’m committed in principle,” he answered. “Yes, I shan’t stand again: this coupon business leaves no scope for the independent member. Why the prime minister wants an election at all, when his position is impregnable . . .”
“He wants to keep it impregnable,” I said. “Well, you’re going in with Raymond to succeed where Deryk Lancing and his father and every millionaire in history has so far failed? It’s easier to make money honestly than to spend it wisely, you’ll find. How much is there?”
“About twelve hundred thousand a year.”
“You can do a lot of harm with that,” I said. “How will you spend it?”
“For the first year or two it’s ear-marked for universities and hospitals.”
“And after that?”
“We might make the war worth while,” he laughed. “But you must help. The trouble with England at present is that we’ve so little sense of responsibility. Isn’t it about time we educated people up to a civic conscience? In the war, I admit . . .”
“You found a hundred men who would die for their country to one who would live for it.”
“Because, in peace, we call people ‘good citizens’ if they obey the laws and pay their taxes. That’s not enough for a civilized state, George! Good God, when a man commits murder, we hire another man to hang him! It’s you and I who ought to be hanged for not teaching him our own reverence for law. We hire people to persecute other people for beating their wives or neglecting their children or concealing their diseases! It’swewho ought to be persecuted. Illness, to me, is the wound inflicted on society by the indifference of the healthy. Poverty. Degradation.” . . .
“And your civic conscience . . .?,” I reminded him.
“Another word for imagination! You’d be ashamed of yourself if your tenants in Ireland died of want; if the men drank or the women turned prostitutes. Yet I’ve seen sights in different parts of the world that would make your blood run cold. Famines and pestilences and massacres. Things we don’t allow in England: we’ve gotthatfar. Now it’s time we went farther. If the war’s to be worth while, you must satisfy yourself that what has been saved was worth saving.”
“But how on earth are you to do it?”
In other days I had heard Aylmer Lancing, as he wheeled himself with slow impatience about his workroom, muttering of a dread project to corner the raw material of high explosives throughout the world. Some Central American republic was causing him trouble; and he had decided to make future wars impossible. Later, I had been present when Raymond Stornaway schemed to force up the standard of living for manual labour by paying uneconomic wages in one place and raising a storm of envious discontent in every other. Both men had been wonderfully convincing; but they had done nothing. Behind O’Rane’s shining eyes, in a stain of shadow between two white sheets of sunshine, I seemed now to see Raymond’s tired face at his luncheon-party on Armistice Day.
“So far,” said O’Rane thoughtfully, “no one’s gone about it in the right way.”
“It was not for want of intelligence. Can it be that the modern world has grown too fast for any one to control it?”
If I had not parted with my little monograph on the war, I should have liked to explore this idea that civilization was bursting like an overripe fruit. Everywhere, in my own lifetime, I had seen fourth-dimensional energy collecting in a world of three dimensions. At a far distance, I had watched the Harrimans and Carnegies and Rockefellers bowing under wealth too great for a single man’s direction; and, since we began to raise men a hundred thousand at a time and to spend money at the rate of millions a day, I was convinced that we were operating forces which we could not control. For twenty years I had tried to “think imperially”, but I doubt if Mr. Chamberlain himself would have recognized the British Empire as I saw it represented from my window at the Admiralty on Armistice Day: in fifty years it had changed to something that might become a federation of British states but had certainly ceased to be an empire. America had ceased to be a nation without becoming even a federation. When I heard of a gas that would destroy whole cities, when I read of private fortunes that could buy whole countries, I felt that the earth was hardly big enough for its Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords; the Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords themselves seemed hardly big enough for the monsters they had created.
“No one,” said O’Rane, “has spent twelve hundred thousand a year to spread his own doctrines. We’ll buy up derelict palaces like Braye and Eldridge; turn ’em into schools for the new poor who can’t afford Eton and the new rich who can’t get in. We’ll stuff them with scholarships to attract the brightest wits; we’ll have our subjects taught, as we want them taught, by giving prizes at Oxford and Cambridge. And, when the best men in every profession, every walk of life, are men who’ve been through our mill, we can convert the world.”
What the text-books of a civic conscience were to be I did not enquire at this stage. If O’Rane aspired to make each man love his neighbour as himself, that was an aspiration towards which the Christian churches, usually with relatively greater wealth, often with the power of the sword and always with a grip on the fears and hopes of the faithful, had been working for nearly two thousand years.
“The late war,” I propounded, “was not a good advertisement for Christian teaching.”
“Because Christianity has never been brought to men’s doors and into their lives.
‘What ragamuffin-saintBelieves God watches him continually,As he believes in fire that it will burn,Or rain that it will drench him?’
‘What ragamuffin-saintBelieves God watches him continually,As he believes in fire that it will burn,Or rain that it will drench him?’
‘What ragamuffin-saintBelieves God watches him continually,As he believes in fire that it will burn,Or rain that it will drench him?’
‘What ragamuffin-saint
Believes God watches him continually,
As he believes in fire that it will burn,
Or rain that it will drench him?’
I often wonder what would have happened to Christianity if it had come into the world with our modern means of communication.”
We were still arguing when the rest of the party returned; and, until the brief winter twilight faded, we sat and spent Stornaway’s money for him. To this day I can see the half-circle of light dresses and the fire-fly movements of the men’s cigarettes; I can see faces white with avarice and eyes dark with excitement.
“Over a million a year . . .,” Barbara gasped.
“I told you we were going to be the big new noise in London,” said Sonia complacently. “George, of course, thinks he’s very superior.” . . .
“I only think it’s a tremendous responsibility,” I defended myself.
“If the job’s too big, we can turn it down,” said O’Rane.
“The others thought that, too,” I warned him.
It was a strange discussion, which ultimately became a monologue of foreboding. As all the world knows, Aylmer Lancing made his first fortune by chance and then found that he could not help adding to it; after buying the site of a burnt city, he had to build a city on the site; he constructed railroads to feed his city and manufactured agricultural machinery to pay for the food. Daily, until his breakdown, he grew richer; and, in the long years of his dying, he was to find that, while the hospitals, the universities, the museums and galleries could live on his bounty for a year, after that he must invent new outlets.
“If your income’s too big, you can always reduce your capital,” Sam Dainton contributed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”
“With a capital of five-and-twenty million?,” I asked. “It’s not a simple question of dropping bags of gold into the sea.”
Early in his career, as I told them, Aylmer Lancing had tried to sell the New-Mexico-Montana Railroad when it was threatened by the South-Western Trunk. As he unloaded, the price fell; and, as the price fell, others unloaded too. A panic set in at one moment, to be ended the next by a rumour that Lancing was selling a bear. Up went the price; and Aylmer sold his last share on a soaring market, to find himself the richer by several million dollars.
In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors, Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England. Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt.
“I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his problem, but none of them solved it.”
In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing.
As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination, the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace, like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit these undiscoverable Baltic states.
“The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals. “If you would look at politics from aEuropeanpoint of view, George . . .”
“It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted, “that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our contribution in money, men, ships . . .”
Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation, had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted.
For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm of bees.
“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is your remedy against future wars?”
If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short head behind him.
“Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I asked Lucien.
“Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn.
“That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.”
“Andyou don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!”
“With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck whispered.
Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England. I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common effort for a common cause.
“Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile.
“I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the same kind of criminal nonsense?”
“Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings, you make on the roundabouts.”
“If youwantto go back . . .,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh, when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand.
It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he had lost his seat.
In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s.
“Bertrandbeaten?,” I cried. “That’s been a safe radical seat for fifty years!”
“Where are the English papers?,” O’Rane asked.
“It must have been an odd election ifhecouldn’t get in,” said Hornbeck.
Thanks to our isolation, I think we were all taken equally by surprise. As I read out the strength of the new parties, our tranquil garden became like a stricken field the day after battle. For a time we tried to count the dead; then we found it simpler to hunt for the living.
“Runciman’s gone!,” I cried. “McKenna’s gone . . .” Then the tragedy changed to farce. “Asquith’sgone!”
Laurence caught the paper from my hand:
“Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-unionist.” . . .
“The old liberal party’s dead!,” I exclaimed. “There’s a handful of independents.” . . .
“Ireland, except in the north, has gone solid for Sinn Fein,” Hornbeck read out over my shoulder.
“Labour will be the biggest single party in the House,” said Laurence.
“You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of rot,” Hornbeck reminded me.
Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia, two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five years before, had flung bombs at another.
“It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered.
Hornbeck read remorselessly on.
“The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the end.
“Butwecan! Wemust!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name . . . We went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now, when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”
None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old dispensation could not make peace?
We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance, if we had been given the least warning how the election was being conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section, the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support, though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time. Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words. The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh.
“If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference . . .” Hornbeck muttered.
“These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up to a civic conscience.”
“I must be getting back to London,” was all he would answer.
I was reminded irresistibly of a similar party, similarly dispersing in the first days of August four and a half years earlier. We had all said then that we must get back to London; we could none of us have said what we expected to do there.
“You’ll wait till Bertrand comes,” I begged.
“Yes. I don’t suppose a day or two more or less will make much difference,” said O’Rane. “After all these years, too . . . It’s a curious thing, George; we’re both of us Irishmen, both of us men of peace; and, most of all, we’re reformers. All our working life we’ve seen the reforms nearest our hearts postponed and postponed by an eruption in Ireland or by a threat of European war. God forgive me, I had to stand as a tory and a militarist, because I saw this war coming! Overboard went all my dreams of making life tolerable for the sons of Ishmael! And now again!”
I might have added that it was this feeling of futility which kept me from standing again for parliament when I lost my seat in 1910.
“Until these same sons of Ishmael strike against war,” I answered, “it’s idle to think of improving their lot.”
“And yet it’s so little I’m asking!,” he sighed. “I only want every man to have freedom to work . . . and save money . . . and marry . . . and have children . . . without interfering with his neighbours . . . and without interference from them. I want him to spend his old age in the comfort and peace of mind which he has earned. His children must be born healthy, to work, to save, to marry, to live and die as he has done. If civilized society can’t give him that . . . And it can’t so long as a country contains one single prison or workhouse or infirmary or brothel . . .”
“I suspect there were brothels in the golden age,” I interposed.
O’Rane leant forward and gripped my wrist till I winced with the pain.
“In the golden age,” he answered between his teeth, “there were hopeless, uncaring cynics, who said that prostitution was the oldest profession in the world. Slavery was the oldest solution of all labour problems. Torture was the oldest safeguard of civil authority. The moral sense of the world must be roused till it sweeps away prostitution and disease, as it swept away torture and slavery. It was not to keep them flourishing that we went to war. And wecan’tsweep them away while another war threatens.” . . .
He broke off, as my mother came into the garden with the day’s letters; and, as I struggled against the impact of my uncle’s fury, I recognized that I was being assailed by a stronger enthusiast even than O’Rane and being asked to save by propaganda a world that I thought had already been saved by war.
Bertrand’s descent upon Cannes may be likened to the unheralded arrival of the headmaster in a form-room that has for some time been left to its own devices.
“ ‘The Theodosian code’,” Laurence recited virtuously, “ ‘was published in Constantinople on the 15th of February, 438 . . .’ If Bertrand tries to find me a job, say I’m suited, thank you.”
The rest of us, for all our feeling that we were drowsing in a back-water, looked regretfully at the blazing hibiscus-hedge and guiltily at one another.
“We all ought to be going back,” said Barbara, who—six weeks before—had never wished to see Dover Cliffs again.
I asked what good we could do; I nearly told her what harm we could not avoid doing, for Eric Lane had crossed from New York on O’Rane’s boat and was now in London. Bertrand’s outpouring, however, was beyond the range of argument.
“You will find,” he predicted, “that the world is entering on a new glacial age of materialism. We must fight it.”
And his method of fighting it was to resurrect our old paper, to set me in the old editorial chair, to sweep the country with new propaganda and to create a new political party in the dining-room of Seymour Street.
Those who have never edited a paper are inclined to compare themselves with Delane at his most legendary; and the comparison is seldom favourable to Delane or toThe Times. Those who have never tried to influence opinion—as my uncle and I tried in six years’ devoted service to the Disarmament League—become in their daydreams a rival to Parnell or Gladstone and convert mass-meetings with a single speech. Hard-won experience had taught me better, yet this is what Bertrand proposed; and Barbara, I knew, was seeing herself already as the maker of cabinets and the adviser of kings.
“Read your Balzac,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript. “London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like Paris in the restoration-period . . .”
It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and, as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know, had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman, certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in France.
I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her empire.
When my uncle arrived, his mood was made apparent by the sombre opening statement that nations got the governments they deserved. He added, with fine public spirit, that the worst result of the election was the lack of an effective opposition. Then less impersonal feelings broke through: he charged ministers with treating the fourteen points as ‘a scrap of paper’ and recommended a strait-waistcoat for all who escaped the lamp-post. Sitting in a half-circle round his chair, with Lucien’s international parliament huddled on our fringe, we were castigated with a fury that would have been better deserved if we had in fact uttered the vain things with which we were charged:wehad promised that there should be no punitive damages and nowwewere threatening to squeeze Germany like an orange;wewere pledged to try the kaiser, if not to execute him without trial;wewere to restore our trade by destroying our best customer.
“If I’d asked for the kaiser’s head on a charger,” Bertrand thundered, “you’d have promised metwoheads ontwochargers.”
When the first fury had abated, Lucien fanned it to life by a reference to the peace of Brest-Litovsk, demanding why Germany should be treated more tenderly in defeat than she had treated others in victory.
“If England had beeninvaded. . .” he went on with a kindling eye. “The mistake your prime minister made was that he didn’t say enough.”
“You should have thought of all that before you agreed to the armistice,” Bertrand retorted.
“Well, say, the terms of the armistice . . .” began Clifford van Oss.
I have no doubt he was going to say that, if the French quoted one set of undertakings against us, then America, which had drawn the terms, would speedily quote another. My uncle, however, who detested what he called “the American habit of making speeches instead of conversing”, broke in with a speech of his own:
“Not that it matters whether he said too little or too much! The speeches have served their turn. I tell you, Lloyd-George is a better journalist than Northcliffe in knowing what the public will want the day after to-morrow!Heknew that, when the troops came home to find no job waiting for them, people would forget they’d ever called him ‘the man who won the war’. Before they forgot him for high taxation, high prices, falling wages and a creeping paralysis of unemployment, he had to make himself snug.And he has!Five years of autocratic power with the certainty that somethingmustturn up; five years’ support from the Curzons and Milners who’d never have seen the back-door of office without him; five years’ support from the Monds and Greenwoods of the liberal second-eleven; five years’ support from every man who’s lost a son, every woman who can’t make both ends meet. You need only promise to hang the kaiser and make Germany pay: England was worth a general election.”
Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament League in Princes Gardens and hatchedPeaceout of a grimy office in Bouverie Street.
“You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane.
“Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.”
As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition before he had anything tangible to oppose.
“We mustshapethe peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must explain what’s expected of her.”
I capitulated without even taking my hours of grace. When Bertrand stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals, but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation.
“Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is greater than the liberal party.”
“In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not be difficult. But you don’tbelieveyou’re going to make a new party of any kind.”
Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain, Gladstone and Asquith.
“If we can bring liberalism back to life,” he sighed, “a party will form without our help: all we need is a rallying-point. I mean something bigger than electoral reform and tariff squabbles, George: I mean a liberal spirit in politics. At the beginning, I should have called this a liberal war. When Wilson aimed at a peace that should leave nobody too strong, nobody too much broken, I called that a liberal spirit. I wrote to you about the glacial age of materialism, because a liberal spirit is the only thing that can melt it. Every individual, every country will fight for its own hand: it’s instinctive, like food-hoarding in 1914. Does Lucien care if Russia’s starving? Does van Oss care if England’s crippled with debt? Does any one care if the majority get less than the best out of life? Devil take the hindmost! That’s the spirit we have to fight.”
“But can it be done with a sixpenny review?,” I asked.
When our other guests had left us, Bertrand, Barbara and I set ourselves to collect our headquarters staff.
“Old men,” boomed my uncle oracularly, “make wars; and young men fight them. We must be surrounded by the young men.”
He then sat back, in the attitude which had become characteristic of him since his stroke, with his hairy, gnarled hands clasped over the ivory knob of his stick. I saw Barbara’s dark eyes shining as she hurried indoors and returned to the verandah with a pencil and paper. In her absence, Bertrand sought to seduce me by describing my room at the office and hinting at the furniture which he proposed to transfer from Princes Gardens. He resented my criticism that we were setting out to convert the world with six dubious Sheraton chairs and less than six more than dubious phrases; but, as we drafted our programme, I became ever more gloomily convinced that we were losing sight of the essentials in a wanton outburst of ornamentation. My excellent and unpractical colleagues agreed that we could have a delicious meal sent in from the Greyfriars Tavern for the editorial dinners; Barbara fought gamely for a weekly cartoon; Bertrand informed us, with an air of originality, that the youth of the nation were the trustees of posterity; and no one said a word about our gospel or our prophets.
“All the conditions are new,” my uncle reminded me at short intervals. “We need new men, new methods. A new spirit . . .”
And, while he coined phrases and Barbara designed our front page, I thought over the young men whom I had met when I was working at the Admiralty. Spence-Atkins and Jefferson Wright were still on Hornbeck’s “live register” of unemployed; and I invited them to take charge of our foreign policy and economics. That their names were unknown seemed a recommendation to Bertrand, who exclaimed in high glee:
“New men! To catch the other new men!”
On that, I presented him with a cynical jack-of-all-trades whom Hornbeck had engaged for his experience in the deeper waters of undetected roguery. I have no proof that Triskett’s hands were soiled, though a man whose friends included the scamps of every race and country must have lived under constant temptation to blackmail. I did not propose to give him free scope in what he wrote; but I thought that his curious information might sometimes illuminate an obscure motive.
“A new man to catch the other new men,” Bertrand repeated.
“A thief to catch a thief,” I answered; “but, if it’s youth you want, these men are all under thirty-five.”
The average was reduced further when, at Barbara’s suggestion, I invited a novelist of thirty, a poet of twenty-five and a composer of nineteen to take our artistic pages under their protection. They were all, she told me, touched with genius. I was also becoming reckless.
“And now,” said Bertrand, “can you set them to work in three months’ time? You’ll want that to get in touch with new conditions. You must study life in the marketplace, George. Mass-feeling. The great movement of men. . . . We’ll have our first editorial dinner somewhere about the end of March.”
“I should have it,” I suggested, “on the first of April.”
When my uncle returned a few weeks later, we returned with him; and, while Barbara made our house ready for party-meetings and drawing-room conclaves, I carried the dubious Sheraton chairs to Fetter Lane and passed from the Eclectic Club to my uncle’s study in Princes Gardens, in leisurely pursuit of the great movement of men.
I doubt if I have at any time felt more out of my element. I could understand O’Rane’s contention that, for all they won from civilization, the vast majority of mankind would be no worse off by taking to the hills and woods as bandits. I was prepared to work quite reasonably hard for my rooted faith that, if this vast majority was to be saved, it must be saved by its own efforts. I could sympathize with the proselytes to the League of Nations, though I placed no reliance in a league that did not make disarmament its first condition of membership. What I wholly failed to grasp was my uncle’s objective in taking an expensive office, exhuming our old manager from his retirement and entering the name of our paper once more at Stationer’s Hall.
London had never, in all my experience, been so little interested in politics.
“What’s been happening?,” Sam Dainton echoed when I took Barbara to dine with his parents. “Well, I’ve awarded myself the order of the bowler-hat; and I had the hell of a time in Paris after I left you; and now I’m thinking how I can make a bit of money.”
“Same here,” added John Gaymer. “If you come across anything, George . . .”
“Oh, the family first,” Laurence interrupted. “DearCousin George . . .”
The conversation at most dinner-parties in these weeks seemed to run on ways and means. Seizing on the jargon of the times at a moment when every one else was abandoning it, Lady Dainton described herself facetiously as “one of the new poor” and denounced every more fortunate neighbour as a “profiteer”, though I could not see that her novel poverty compelled her to retrenchment nor that her scorn for profiteers prevented Sir Roger’s trying to sell Crowley Court, at three times what he gave for it, to one of “the new rich”. In place of retrenchment I found a bewildering blend of ingenuity, industry and blackmail on the part of those who insisted on a life of pleasure and could find no one to finance it for them. Day after day, Barbara was dragged to new shops, where her friends sold her hats at exorbitant prices. Other friends offered to decorate our house. Others, again, begged me to open a “social” column inPeaceand to put them in charge of it.
“You can’t expect people to take much interest in public affairs,” Lady Dainton said to me at this first dinner. “There aresomany other things! These children”—she looked benevolently round the table at the girls she had collected for the approval of her necessitous son—“they don’t know what societywasbefore the war. They’ve none of them even been presented, so you can imagine the flutter they’re in. Their first season!”
“I shouldn’t have thought any one had the money to make much of a season,” I objected, with a cast back to her late confession of universal ruin.
“The war has only transferred it from one pocket to another,” she assured me.
This dark saying was made plain in these first unsettled days before the rebirth of our paper, when I drifted about London, analysing the atmosphere of the armistice. Less diplomatically, Lady Dainton might have said that, if the natives had too little money, the foreigners had too much; and, without a trace of diplomacy, a number of my acquaintances seemed to be coaxing it back from the new pockets to the old. With my own ears I heard the Duchess of Ross demanding a list of the Americans she could advantageously invite to her house. I listened with amusement as Clifford van Oss tried to explain politely that the people on whom she fawned were not received in New York. And I watched Sir Adolf Erckmann being made a test case for the date at which a wealthy man with a German name could be received by his less wealthy friends.
“The great movement of men isn’t carrying me anywhere in particular,” I confessed to Bertrand as the day of our first issue drew near. “I’ve met a number of spongers, lately, and a greater number of snobs. Which are the more to be pitied . . .”
“That’s only a phase,” my uncle answered. “London’s only a part of England; these people are only a part of London. While you were a boy, you must have seen the Rand Jews agonizing to fill their houses; and you saw the ‘new poor’ of the Harcourt death duties taking all they could get.”
“And we saw the result in the last years before the war,” I said, as Sir Adolf Erckmann shambled out of earshot. Could we give rein to our racial prejudices, I never knew whether I would sooner lynch him or the girls, like Sonia Dainton, who in those days had endured his odious familiarities for the sake of a string-quartet, a champagne supper and a free drive home in an Erckmann car. “A whole generation grew up in the belief that man had a natural right to be amused at some one else’s expense.”
“You’d have found the same thing in Rome and Nineveh,” said Bertrand. “Whenever a conspicuous social position is divorced from the means to keep it up . . .That’snot a thing to notice. I told you to study the movement of men because one class is being squeezed out of existence. It may last my time, but it won’t last yours. It was never a big class, but in some ways it was the best. Now the sons have been killed; and the parents are crippled with taxation. Who’s coming to take their place, George? That’s the riddle for boys like you; and it’s to the newcomers we must appeal. . . . Is everything ready for our first number?”
“As ready as it can be,” I answered, “without a principle, a policy or even a catchword.”
When I went to Fetter Lane for the ceremony of ordering the machinists to print off, I was glad to see that my colleagues shewed no lack of enthusiasm. Headed by Bertrand, we marched to the Clock Tower Press and stood in a half-circle till he should give the sign. Martin Luther, printing his own bibles, could hardly have been more impressive; and, as we marched back to toast Bertrand in tepid champagne, the day seemed pregnant with fate.
“All the same,” I said, as we dispersed, “you’ve none of you suggested a single reason why any one should want to buy this paper. People are simply not thinking of politics.”
“They will, when they come out of their fool’s paradise,” answered Bertrand.
With a prediction so vague I could not contend. Reconstruction, of which I had heard so much in the last years of the war, appeared to stop short when private lives and fortunes had been reconstructed. Employment was good; money was plentiful; trade was booming; and, after we had spent five million pounds a day without suffering for it, after we had found work for every one at his own price, it was not wonderful if the laws of political economy seemed to have been suspended. My brother-in-law Gervaise was but one of many whom I settled on the permanent wage-sheet of the country; during the next few days I was to help Sam Dainton into an engineering firm at Hartlepool and to be told that the directors could accommodate as many more of the same kind as I chose to send.
It was too good to be true; it was too good to last; but, while it lasted, I felt we could expect little support for gloomy vaticinations that were being falsified under our eyes.