CHAPTER TWO
King Henry:The sum of all our answer is but this:We would not seek a battle, as we are;Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .Shakespeare:King Henry V.
King Henry:The sum of all our answer is but this:We would not seek a battle, as we are;Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .Shakespeare:King Henry V.
King Henry:
King Henry:
The sum of all our answer is but this:We would not seek a battle, as we are;Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .Shakespeare:King Henry V.
The sum of all our answer is but this:We would not seek a battle, as we are;Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .Shakespeare:King Henry V.
The sum of all our answer is but this:
We would not seek a battle, as we are;
Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it . . .
Shakespeare:King Henry V.
Since the first tragedy cast its shadow on the first man, philosophers have taught, in the jargon of their choice, that the past is unalterable, that it is no use crying over spilt milk and that it is a waste of time to job backwards. Unphilosophic man has then returned to the twilit dreamland of might-have-beens.
Daily, since the tragedy that darkened my life in the last weeks of 1922, I have asked myself whether I could have done anything to prevent it. I am sane enough to realize that I contributed nothing by what I did; the philosopher blandly assures me that questioning comes too late; and, in spite of all, I continue to wonder what would have happened if I had made a firm stand here or a graceful surrender there. If only, as I walked with O’Rane to The Sanctuary after the opening of parliament, I had thrown my weight into one scale or the other . . . If only, at any time subsequently, I had shewn myself to be what nature failed to make me, a man of action, strong and silent, rapping out decisions like Napoleon disposing an army . . .
I had not intended to come into The Sanctuary, but O’Rane insisted that Sonia would be disappointed if I turned back at the door. We found her in the nursery, playing with her elder boy, while the baby was packed protesting to bed in the next room. I had not often been privileged to catch Sonia in a domestic attitude and was ill-prepared for her efficiency. This child in her lap was a beautiful creature, in radiant health and exuberant spirits, with his mother’s brown hair and eyes. There was a lusty crow of delight when O’Rane came into the room; and, as I shook hands with Sonia, the child demanded shrilly that the interrupted tale of the day before should be resumed.
“Will you say good-night to David junior?,” she asked me, as Daniel surrendered to the spell of O’Rane’s story.
“If he’s not asleep,” I said; and she conducted me into the presence of a wide-awake and fierce Japanese doll, who gripped two of my fingers and demanded truculently what I was doing in his nursery.
At three years old, the child had his father’s flashing black eyes and imperious manner. Sonia added that he had also more than his father’s indomitable obstinacy.
“Is he equally fearless?,” I asked.
For answer she pointed from a green bruise on the child’s forehead to a padlocked grille over the window:
“David had a fire-escape fitted the other day. He went down it himself just to learn the way; and this infant must needs follow. He’d never been on a ladder in his life, but he climbed cheerfully out of the window . . .”
“Trusting to the special providence that looks after all O’Ranes,” I put in.
“By the mercy of heaven a policeman caught him; but if he behaves like that now . . .”
“He looks like keeping you fully occupied.”
“I can do what I like with him at present,” she answered, “because he realizes I’m only a woman, and I can get on the soft side of him. When he’s old enough to see that women can be more easily bullied than men, more easily hurt . . . I don’t envy his wife. I don’t envy any wife.”
“Yet if all marriages were dissolved by act of parliament . . .,” I began, as she led me downstairs.
“Should I take David on again? I wonder! He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. . . . What fools we women are! And what fools men are! They don’t want a woman to have a will of her own; and, when she echoes their will, they find her insipid. And what a fool I’ve always been! Once I thought it would be wonderful to run away . . . as I did. But that was only a wonderful fit of bad temper,” she added with the candour that she always employed in discussing herself.
“And one that you’ll never repeat.”
“No. In those days I was so hungry for children that I thought myself quite immodest: if I’d had my first one earlier, we should never have had our great tragedy. Now that I’ve got two, you need never be afraid I shall run away again even if David ties me to the bed and beats me. I honestly, honestly don’t think of myself any longer except through them. I want them to have the best chance in life: all that you and Jim and my brothers had. They must go to the best schools, the best universities; they must never be driven down the wrong road like so many boys because they haven’t the money to go by the right one. They must besecure.” . . . Her face darkened; and she turned to the fire. “David won’t promise me that. My father can’t afford it.” . . .
I believe that, if her husband could have seen Sonia at that moment as I saw her, he would have compromised with his insurgent conscience. Once before, when he came back from France, I had seen her, as now, on her knees; pleading, as now, for the privilege of serving him and, as now, wholly forgetful of her too insistent self.
“He’s not easy to move when he’s made up his mind,” I said, with memories of our conversation earlier in the afternoon.
Sonia shook her head ruefully:
“Don’t I know that? You remember when that unemployment deputation came to see him? We’ve had about three a day ever since. Does that influence him? The press camps on our doorstep. He’s besieged in his office. This afternoon that man Griffiths came here again.”
“What did you do with him?”
Her patience suddenly deserted her:
“I sent him to Hampstead. Thisisa private house, when all’s said and done. I don’t suppose he got any satisfaction there, but I thought the walk would be good for him. Odious little creature!”
It was now that I feel I might have done some good by speaking strongly. Neither Griffiths nor any other grown man deserved to be sent on a fool’s errand; in cooler moments Sonia would have been ashamed to play such a trick. Her answer, I suppose, would have been that Griffiths and her husband were too much for any one’s coolness; and I feared—no doubt, weakly—that I should lose my slight influence over her if I sided with her husband. When he came down from the nursery, she was still indignant enough to retail Griffiths’ visit and to ask O’Rane whether the deputation had reached Hampstead in time to find him.
“I had to say I could do nothing for them,” he answered a little wearily. “I’ve given all I can spare of my own money; and I’ve collected as much as I can from other people. If they come again, you might tell them that.”
“You must tell them yourself,” Sonia replied stiffly. “I’mnot going to make myself responsible.”
“I only wanted you to save them a useless journey. When you sent them to me, you gave them some sort of hope; and that makes it so much harder when I have to turn them down.”
“Perhaps in time you’ll find it so hard . . .” she muttered.
“I can’t go back on what I’ve said. It’s only unkind to give them a long walk for nothing. Promise me you won’t do it again, Sonia.”
“Let’s hope they won’t come again. If they do, I shallagainsend them to you.” Then, without disguise, her temper broke. “I’m not consulted about what you do with this money, so I wash my hands of it. This is not your office; and you can’t blame me if you refuse to give them anything for their trouble.”
“I can only repeat that you make my task more difficult,” O’Rane answered patiently.
“Before I’ve done, I hope to make it impossible,” Sonia retorted defiantly, as she hurried out of the library and up the stairs.
I had a second opportunity of speaking strongly, this time to O’Rane; and I failed to press it. The papers that night gave long accounts of the opening of parliament and longer, less hackneyed descriptions of the demonstration by the unemployed. I detected for the first time a note of uneasiness as, for the first time, unemployment passed out of the realm of abstract statistics and incarnated itself in ragged armies of hungry men. I remembered Philip Hornbeck’s blithe assurance that Griffiths could do little harm so long as the armies were scattered; well, their banners shewed that they were scattered no longer. One nervous leader-writer compared this march with the advance of the Marseillais on Paris and asked angrily how the police had allowed it; another, more valiant, rehearsed the history of the Fascismo movement in Italy and warned the proletariat at large—without considering whether the proletariat was likely to read such a paper—that England would never yield to mob-violence. A third, mentioning O’Rane by name, exhumed the controversy of the summer and enquired whether those who had voluntarily undertaken a national responsibility could abandon it at such a time in satisfaction of a “doctrinaire whim”. In less blunt terms than the sandwichman had displayed, O’Rane’s ‘sentence of death’ was brought up against him; and it was with some muddled, premonitory feeling of an isolated conflict between Griffiths and the O’Ranes that I uttered my warning.
“Suspend your sentence,” I said, “until the new government has declared its unemployment policy.”
O’Rane replied with the entirely logical and utterly irrelevant thesis that unemployment was a consequence of the war, that the community had called the tune and must pay the piper, that one government had imposed conscription of men’s lives and that another could impose conscription of their wealth. The state had turned prosperous civilians into soldiers; the state must turn these soldiers back into prosperous civilians.
His cold reasoning and neat phrasing reminded me of a speech at some undergraduate debating-society.
“I can only hope,” I said, “that you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.”
Hungry men had no time for debating-society arguments. I hoped, too, that Sonia would not be forced to say ‘no’ again. Hungry men had no taste for being ordered to walk from Westminster to Hampstead as a move in the game with her husband. I said no more. And, amid my self-reproaches, I find a barren comfort in the knowledge that neither Sonia nor her husband would have listened, though one rose from the dead to warn them.
Thereafter, like every one else, I waited to see the policy of the government proclaimed. The debate on the address gave rise to some acrimonious passages between the two front benches; a programme of rather remote public-relief work was fluttered in the face of the labour party; and the prime minister ostentatiously reestablished departmental responsibility and dissociated himself from the improvisations of his predecessor by refusing to receive a deputation of the unemployed.
Then the interest of the public sought a new stimulus.
I am inclined to think that modern journalism, with its craving for daily excitement and its acquiescence in the superficial, has incapacitated us for patient study. Few subjects unconnected with sex or bloodshed can hold the attention of a newspaper-reader for more than three days; and, when the men with schemes for employment had been photographed as they walked to Downing Street and when a popular novelist had protested passionately that the unemployed were not really bolshevists, the eyes of the nation were allured by pictures of Lord Curzon entering his train for the Lausanne conference, and controversialists with uncertain memories enquired rhetorically the name of the last woman to be hanged in England for complicity in murder. Like the peace negotiations, like the war, like the domestic and international unrest before the war, like the Irish problem, this unemployment business became a bore: the public was accustomed to the variety of a “continuous performance” in its cinematograph theatres, it expected a “new programme weekly” for its political stage.
I myself was compelled for professional reasons to study problems of public policy even after they had ceased to be fashionable. The only excuse for continuing our paper was to be found in my uncle’s warning that, after four years of peace, we were in at least no better position than at the outbreak of war; at his death, we had cut our last party-ties and were standing behind the government as friendly critic. If the new administration shewed no improvement on the old, we should have to consider—as I told my colleagues—whether we were to throw in our lot with labour, whether we should lay our paper in its overdue grave or whether we must extend to our own country the verdict of revolutionary Russia that the old machine of national and international government had broken down.
That verdict was pronounced in my private hearing by Griffiths himself, with a warning that he would repeat it publicly if the government failed to give him instant satisfaction. Our second interview was no more of my seeking than the first. When the House rose without curing unemployment then and there, he made it known—first of all at a mass-meeting in Trafalgar Square and then in handbills which were distributed about the streets—that he would instruct ministers in the meaning of unemployment by confronting them with the unemployed. This, in the vague phrase which he favoured, would “put things to the test”. The demonstrations at the opening of parliament had been hardly more than a parade. “Hunger marches” were now to be organized in every part of the country, converging on London at the same moment. After that . . .? I noticed that Griffiths carefully refrained from saying what would happen when fifty, or a hundred, thousand disappointed men found themselves empty-handed, empty-bellied, foot-sore and resentful at the closed door of an impotent office. And I pointed out this sinister omission in the next number ofPeace.
There was nothing, Hornbeck told me at this time, in the speech or the manifesto to justify police interference; but any one who remembered Griffiths’ share in organizing the land-grabbing campaign could imagine how this new demonstration would be conducted and how it was likely to end. I went farther than most of myconfrèresand denounced the manifesto as deliberately provocative. Griffiths called to inform me that, if I chose to print lies, he could not stop me, but that, if I was interested in the truth, I might perhaps be not too proud to hear it from him.
I professed a prompt eagerness for truth in any form, though I was more interested to know what amusement or instruction he derived from so painfully academic a journal asPeace. I wondered how he came to associate me with its direction and why he visited me in Seymour Street rather than in Fetter Lane. My curiosity on this last point was satisfied when he ran a practised eye over the dimensions of the house and asked me how many the establishment comprised.
“You? And your wife? And six servants?,” he recapitulated. “No kids? A car and a man to drive it? Four meals a day? You don’t callthatprovocative?”
“If we had fewer servants, you’d have more unemployed,” I pointed out.
“It takes three men and four women to keep the two of you alive. The house is half empty. You waste more food in a day than my people eat in a week. You drive about in your jewels and fine clothes among people who’ve been cold and hungry for months. And then you tell me not to be . . . ‘provocative’!”
I reminded him that we were supposed to be discussing unemployment.
“I shan’t remedy that by going about in rags,” I said, “or by shutting up half the house.”
“If you were in Germany, you wouldn’t be allowed to have empty rooms. And, if you were in Russia, you wouldn’t be allowed twenty coats when the next man has nothing but a shirt between him and the rain.”
I reminded him that we were in England and that he had called to demonstrate how little provocation his manifesto contained.
“If the government orders me to find accommodation for people without homes,” I said, “if I have to clothe them and feed them, I’ll do it to the best of my ability. I put obedience to the law above all things.” The little red eyes glowed in anticipation of an attack. “My criticism of you is the criticism I’ve brought before now against the people who preach a general strike for political objects. That’s not the way to proceed in a constitutional country. There’s no end to it short of revolution. You object to the word ‘provocative’. . .”
“Did youreadwhat I said?,” he interrupted.
“Every word. It was admirably phrased. A single letter more would have had you prosecuted. You’re careful not to provoke anybody in words; but I tell you that you’re inciting people to violence by your actions. You know their temper far better than I do. You know what you’ve taught them to regard as the minimum standard of housing, feeding, wages and out-of-work pay. Do you believe you’ll get it by bringing a hundred thousand men to London?”
Griffiths hesitated perceptibly. If he said “no”, he condemned himself for inflating his followers with false hopes; if he said “yes”, he was confessing himself the prophet of intimidation in its crudest form.
“In time,” he answered at length.
“Do your men realize that they’ll have to wait?” He hesitated again for fear of admitting that he had taught them too well or not well enough. “No government in the world can submit to the dictation of a mass-meeting. You know that. If it surrendered to-morrow, you’d have another mass-meeting the day after. I think you know that too.”
“And still they wouldn’t have all they’re entitled to,” he murmured.
“That’s another question. My charge is that you’re bringing thousands of men to London on false pretences. They’re probably not in the sweetest of moods; and small blame to them. They won’t get what you’re promising them; and they’ll turn on you.”
The red eyes flashed defiantly:
“I can look after myself.”
So far, we had kept fairly free from personal attacks, but something in Griffiths’ manner or voice exasperated me. I had not admitted him in order to be lectured about the number of servants who were needed to keep me alive; the angry, ferret’s eyes gave me a curious feeling that I must bite before I was bitten; and, seeing him—perhaps quite unjustifiably as a vindictive, treacherous little animal, I fixed a quality of untrustworthiness on the man.
“You will look after yourself,” I prophesied, “by putting the blame on the government and rousing your people against law and order instead of telling them there was never a hope of their getting any of the things you promised.”
Though my antagonist betrayed his feelings in an angry flush, he affected to dismiss my prediction as something unworthy of his notice:
“They said that at Woolhampton,” he answered, “when we seized the Town Hall. I’m always stirring people up, it seems . . . Provocative . . . because I put the blame where the blame should go! You haven’t called me a paid agitator yet.”
“I’ve no intention of doing so. I say to your face, as I said in print, that you’re provoking something which may end in a revolution. I take the purity of your motives for granted. You’ve volunteered to tell me the truth and to shew that you’re not organizing constructive revolution.” . . .
Despite the dislike which I could not help feeling, there was no doubting the man’s passionate sincerity. He felt for the people he championed the same frenzied protectiveness and lust for revenge that I should have felt if my sister had been hacked to pieces before my eyes. Argument was out of the question; warnings were idle. I reconsidered the phrase I had used in likening him to a spiteful ferret, for he was touched with the greatness that is inseparable from fanaticism. Self-advancement and self-advertising had no place in his thoughts, though he was arrogantly confident of his authority as a popular leader and of his power to cut knots that had baffled every other hand. In a conversation that extended over two hours I learned nothing of his private history; at the end I realized no better than at the beginning why he had singled me out for his aggressive apologia. The resonant blows of our blunt swords echoed emptily on our impenetrable harness; and, when I saw him to the door, I was saying for the fiftieth time: “You’re trying to stir up a revolution”; and for the fiftieth time he was retorting: “If your precious government can’t do anything, some one else had better have a try.”
As we crossed swords for the last time, Barbara drove up to the door. She had been giving another sitting to Wace; and her appearance, in an ermine coat and a diamond star, was not wasted on Griffiths, who bowed ironically and looked her up and down as though he were assessing her in terms of daily meat-meals.
“Well, I must be off,” he said; and I know he was recapitulating again: “You. And your wife. And six servants . . .”
“I’m glad to have had this talk,” I said, “even though we’ve not convinced each other. If you think I’ve misrepresented you, I can only offer you equal space in our columns to put yourself right with our readers.”
“I shan’t have time,” he answered.
“You can do it in two lines. If you’ll answer my charge that you’re working, consciously or unconsciously, for a revolution . . .”
“I’m answering it now,” he interrupted. “From here I go to King’s Cross and from King’s Cross to the north. Putting things to the test. I shall be back again in just the time that it takes us to walk here.”
As he disappeared from sight, Barbara commented admiringly on his exit:
“For a third curtain, it was unsurpassed. Idowant to know what’s going to happen in the last act.”
If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after that, there might well be rioting.
I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee in my bonnet.
This notwithstanding, I did ask Barbara to arrange a dinner; and I am only sorry that I did not make the invitation more urgent.
“Is anything the matter?,” she asked in some surprise, for Hornbeck had dined with us only two or three nights before.
“Not at the moment; but there may be trouble if some one doesn’t spike that fellow Griffiths’ guns. In his way, the man’s right: as the governmenthasno remedy, you can’t find an answer to people who say they’ll take the remedy into their own hands. But the common sense of the world won’t allow that. Griffiths will be refused a hearing; the mob may break a few windows; and then the police will clear the streets. It’s not worth marching an army three hundred miles to learn that old lesson.”
“Until they’ve learnt it, they’ll go on believing in men like Griffiths,” said Barbara.
“But it will be a more costly lesson than they realize. With the best intentions in the world, he’s marching them into a trap. I want Hornbeck to stop the march and break up the units before they can collect in force.”
We telephoned to the Admiralty; but Hornbeck had left. When I got in touch with him next day, he was engaged for several nights ahead. Rather shamefacedly, I told him my fears; and he promised to enquire what steps were being taken, though I felt I had wholly failed to communicate my dread of the wasted little fanatic Griffiths. In the middle of the following week I read that the great “hunger-march” had begun; and, when Hornbeck dined with us, he explained that Griffiths was being given enough rope to hang himself, but no more. One army had reached Nottingham, a second was on the outskirts of Coventry and a third was halting on the east side of Newbury; but they would not be allowed to reach London. Since my interview with him, the leader and spokesman had abandoned his former caution; and Hornbeck told me that the police were waiting to prosecute him for inciting to crime.
“It’s a pity to wait,” I said.
“What else can one do?,” asked Hornbeck.
Perhaps my memory is biased by the events of the following week, perhaps my instinct was right in warning me that Griffiths was one of the most dangerous firebrands that I had ever met. He haunted me, as the shadow of Marat must have haunted the well-to-do citizens of Paris; and I felt an equal, unreasoning impatience with the departments that ignored him and with the papers that advertised him. For two or three days the great march was reported mile by mile, with a list of the victories won by “Griffiths’ armies” over the powerless custodians of such county halls, municipal libraries and public baths as they occupied on their way. For the same period the government maintained a calm and dignified silence. Then new interests demanded attention and space.
By the time that the various units joined forces in the open country beyond Neasden, hunger-marching commanded no price in the ever-changing tariff of news-items. London was shopping for Christmas; the Lausanne conference was becoming every day more firm and ineffectual; Signor Mussolini was in England; Germany had defaulted again; and the prime ministers of the late allies were discussing with their financial experts new and final methods of settling the problem of reparations.
I only learned that the army was at hand when I read that the government policy for combating unemployment had been fully explained and that, in the opinion of one private secretary, “no useful purpose would be served by a meeting between the Minister and the leaders of the unemployed now collected in Wembley Park.”
“This is the moment I’ve been dreading,” I told Barbara. “Griffiths has made fools of these people; and he can only recover his authority by fighting the government.”
I read next day that the leaders of the unemployed insisted upon sending a deputation to the minister of labour. A public demonstration was announced later; and from an evening paper I learned that, while the police would not interfere with an orderly march through the streets, it must not be conducted in the neighbourhood of Westminster. As I walked home that night, I was given a handbill in which I read, over the signature of Griffiths, that the hunger-march would be resumed next morning and would be directed first to Buckingham Palace, then—as a concession to constitutionalism—to the Home Office and finally—for a reason I could not guess, since parliament was no longer sitting—to the House of Commons. It was not for Scotland Yard to say who might or might not have access to the king or his responsible ministers; and the problem that chiefly vexed the spirit of Griffiths was to discover who in fact was responsible.
“Now,” I told my colleagues when I reached Fetter Lane through a double line of police, “there’s going to be trouble. The only thing that can stop it will be a downpour of rain.”
“And there is in fact a hard frost,” yawned Triskett.
“This fog may do as well,” said Jefferson Wright.
“It’s pretty serious,” we all agreed.
Did any of us believe in the warnings and predictions which we uttered? I cannot say. Everything that happened in these days is coloured by the memory of what happened afterwards. I may conceivably take credit for explaining before other people that these demonstrations were on a different plane from the coal strikes and railway strikes that aroused our uneasiness after the war; on the other hand, I may only have been suffering from disordered nerves. It was the end of the year; I wanted a holiday; and the self-control which I had to exercise at home sometimes deserted me when I was at my office. Accordingly I claim no praise and feel no shame in saying that I was nervous. The long lines of police-pickets had not been stationed about the streets without some purpose; and the news that trickled in throughout the morning was not of a kind to allay anxiety.
Philip Hornbeck did indeed repeat by telephone his customary assurance that Griffiths could be discounted. When the marchers entered Regent’s Park, they were warned that they would not be allowed to approach Downing Street; and, as Hornbeck walked to the Admiralty, he passed half-a-dozen columns of dejected, leaderless men who were standing easy or trudging slowly under banners of ineffectual protest. Even the bands, he said, were dispirited. After one glance, the passers-by paid no heed to a sight that was now wearisomely familiar; and, in Hornbeck’s eyes, the gaunt, ragged army found its best friends among the constables who tramped in a protective and restraining cordon.
“Did these fellows seem disappointed?,” I asked.
“I think they were too tired, poor devils, to feel anything. If it hadn’t been for the bobbies, you might have thought it was another retreat from Moscow. I believe therewassome plain speaking when they found their Napoleon had left them, but I hear he’s only gone to see about billets. The police are helping him all they can. That’s the way we stop revolutions in England,” he chuckled.
I was reminded again of the day now long distant when O’Rane and I had stood in a crowd of many thousands to watch the body of Terence McSwiney drawing through the respectfully silent streets of London. The English, I felt, behaved sometimes like characters in a comic opera: consistent only in their inconsistency, they could not rise to a revolution. With a longer leap into the past, my memory fastened on a moment in O’Rane’s first year at Melton, when he watched a half-hearted attempt at a May Day demonstration and, in disgust at the apathy of the demonstrators, instructed them in the Marseillaise. I wondered if he recalled that day, which was also nearly his last as a scholar of Melton. I wondered if he and Hornbeck were right in discounting this threat of revolution.
Then I thought of the weary crowds that were pouring into London.
“If you’d put a spoke in his wheel at the beginning . . .,” I began.
“You can’t stop peaceful pedestrians from walking along the king’s highway,” Hornbeck rejoined, “and Griffiths arranged that the armies should onlybecomearmies when they were too big to turn back.”
I had intended to lunch at the Eclectic in the hopes of hearing what steps the government was taking to house and feed the hunger-marchers, but, when I was halfway to St. James’ Street, I turned north and walked home with a vague feeling that I must see how Barbara was getting on.
When Spence-Atkins asked me point-blank if I thought there would be any outbreak, I had replied with conviction that I did not. That, however, was in the office; and, as I walked west, I was disquieted by the sight of these silent columns, marching aimlessly, halting and dissolving into little knots of stragglers too weary to march longer. In Waterloo Place and Regent Street, the police imposed an order which the men themselves had been unable to maintain; but from Hanover Square to Park Lane the army split into its elements. Through the settling fog I saw men sitting on the kerbs and clustering on the island-refuges; they dropped in a shapeless heap on the first convenient doorstep; and the good-humoured constables who said “Now then, you must move along” found themselves addressing ears that were already deaf with sleep.
“Half of them are no more than boys, sir,” one policeman pointed out to me. “Tired out, that’s what they are. They don’t mean no harm.”
By a damnable irony, the men had chosen for their collapse a moment when Brook Street offered a tantalizing blend of warm, savoury smells. I, who had never known the meaning of hunger, found my appetite quickening.
“They’re tired out andhungry,” I said. So far as I am a judge of accents, some of these boys had come from the Black Country, others from Lancashire, others again from Northumberland. “I live near here. Is it any good trying to raise some soup . . .?”
The constable shrugged his shoulders and waited while an old man, who had fainted, was lifted on to an ambulance.
“If once you begin, sir, you’ll have the whole lot of them at your door. It’s more than one man can tackle.”
I walked on to Seymour Street with a growing sense of despair. All this had been prophesied to Griffiths in forcible language ten days before; but my meagre powers of imagination and description never came within miles of actuality. I had not realized the dishonour to humanity which a man commits when he no longer hides a broken spirit; I had forgotten the disfigurements of starvation and the sickly stench of neglect. The policeman was entirely right: half these fellows were only boys; and I felt the blood mounting to my head when I thought of the way they were victimized and their ignorance exploited. During the war I had seen them and their elder brothers trotting obediently to the slaughter-house and bemusedly offering their lives for a cause that was never explained and for objects that they never understood. Now, no less obediently, they trotted in answer to a voice that promised them a quick millennium.
I should have caught some hope, for all my denunciation of violence, if they had torn Griffiths limb from limb; but the patient credulity that collected them under his leadership accepted uncomplainingly the fate to which he led them. Griffiths, as he had boasted to me, could look after himself; providence, the police or the devil might look after his followers, who sprawled about the misty streets like slumbering cattle.
If I had expected to find Barbara sharing my own anxiety, I might have known better than to expect any sign of it. She greeted me with faint surprise because I had not warned her that I should be lunching at home; then the surprise turned to relief as she recollected that she was a man short.
“It’s a family party,” she explained. “Father and mother and Charles. I asked the O’Ranes; but David can’t get away, so you must take his place. . . . You’re not ill or anything are you, George?”
“Oh, no, thanks.Depressed, if you like. London’s a horrible sight with all these hunger-marchers dropping down on every side from sheer exhaustion. I don’t know what’s to be done about them. I only hope there won’t be a scrap.”
Barbara looked out of window; but the fog was now so thick that she could not see across the street.
“Was that why you came back?,” she asked with her head averted.
“I wanted to see that you were all right.”
“Thank you.” . . . As though afraid that I might take advantage of her curt gratitude, she broke into a laugh. “Some one—I think it was Jim—once said that, when the revolution came, there’d be keen competition between Sonia and me for a place in the first tumbril. If it begins to-day, we shall be able to drive down together. I suppose wearetwo of the most useless human beings in creation. . . . I hope the mob doesn’t break in while father’s here: I know he’d struggle with the executioner, and I think it’s unfair to hinder a man who’s simply trying to do his duty.”
“I feel Robson would probably save us,” I answered. “He’d tell the mob, very patiently, that it was out of the question for them to have a revolution in Seymour Street.” . . .
“You don’t really expect any trouble, do you?”
As I believed Barbara to be entirely fearless, I did not mind speaking frankly:
“It all turns on what’s likely to happen in the next few hours. The men are too tired at present even to feel hungry. When they wake up, they’ll be like ravening wolves.”
On Crawleigh’s arrival, I was distantly comforted to find that he shared my own view and had indeed spent an hour trying to get it accepted in Downing Street. During his viceroyalty he had been ultimately responsible for the relief-works in two famines; and, for once, I found him pregnant with constructive proposals. Three or four of the biggest catering-firms, he urged, should set up kitchens in the London parks; every public hall should be turned into a dormitory; and, if supplies ran short in the shops, there must be a house-to-house visitation to collect bread and blankets.
“I’d punish the ring-leaders without mercy,” he added, “but we must do one thing at a time. This is December, these men are starving; and for the next forty-eight hours we must simply suspend our ordinary laws. Why the government everallowedsuch madness . . .”
We were still discussing emergency measures when Sonia came in very late and apologetic. Every approach to Westminster, she reported, was barred with lines of mounted police; St. James’ Park was closed, Whitehall and Victoria Street were barricaded. She herself had crossed the river at Lambeth and come by tube from Waterloo.
“Are things still quiet?,” Lady Crawleigh enquired nervously.
“I should think so; but the fog’s so thick that you can’t tell. . . . Did David find you?,” Sonia asked me. “He wanted to talk to you about soup-kitchens or something.”
“He hadn’t come when I left the office,” I answered.
As we went in to luncheon, Charles Neave, who had come up from the country the day before, contributed some first-hand observations on the march from Cumberland. It had been peaceful and orderly from the moment when the marchers convinced their potential antagonists that they meant to have what they wanted. Private property was scrupulously respected; but, on the principle that churches and public buildings belonged to the community, Griffiths’ ‘armies’ took possession of them as lodgings for a night. I was given to understand that there had been one or two sharp conflicts; but Crawleigh was expressing more than his own opinion when he reminded us that this was December and that the men were starving. Barns and warehouses were offered voluntarily as soon as their owners were satisfied that they would not be damaged.
“How did they manage for food?,” I asked.
“The workhouse people did what they could. I think the rest was voted by the different town-councils. There wasn’t enough to go round anywhere, but a whole lot was given privately.”
“Were there any speeches or demonstrations?,” asked Crawleigh.
“I didn’t hear any. Everybody seemed to be on the side of the marchers. They felt it was jolly hard lines and something ought to be done. Any ass who calls it bolshevism doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If we can only get them back as quietly as they’ve come . . .” Crawleigh began and left his sentence unfinished.
I wondered whether he too was reflecting that the most dangerous revolution is the one in which popular sympathy goes out to the revolutionaries. In the last years of the eighteenth century the history of the world would have been changed if Louis had not forbidden the Swiss Guard to fire from the windows of the Tuileries; it was in fact changed—and revolution died in giving birth to Bonapartism—when Napoleon cleared the streets of Paris with a whiff of grapeshot. I would more readily have turned a machine-gun on my own dining-room than have harassed the spent men whom I saw collapsing on the doorsteps of Brook Street; but I wondered how far the sympathy of the onlookers and the kindliness of the police would paralyse vigorous action if the spent men rose and had to be coerced.
“Is anybody infacttaking any steps?,” I asked Crawleigh. “We’ve food in the house, we can buy more.” . . .
“They’re collecting food and money as it is,” added Sonia. “Just before I came here, that little red-eyed Welshman called to see David . . .”
“D’you mean Griffiths?,” I asked in surprise.
“Yes. That’s another reason why I was so late. He wouldn’t go. I told him I’d nothing to give him.”
“Did he come alone?”
“Oh, no! There was a queue stretching farther than I could see. He told me he was sure Mr. O’Rane wouldn’t refuse to help when he realized what these men had been through to bring their grievances before the government.” Sonia’s expression grew suddenly hard. “I told him we weren’t the government; and I should be very glad if he’d take his army to Hampstead and let me get to my taxi.”
Before I had time to warn her against such trifling, I was called to the telephone and informed that O’Rane himself was in Fetter Lane and wished to see me at once.
“Hullo? This is a private wire, isn’t it?,” he began. “Good! I came to see you on quite other business. Then one of your people came in with the latest news, and I felt I should have to borrow your eyes for the afternoon. I’m afraid Griffiths’ people are getting out of hand. There’s a certain amount of damage being done . . .”
“Whereabouts?,” I interrupted.
“In Hampstead. I’ve warned the police; and, of course, Hampstead is a big place; but I couldn’t help wondering if they’d taken it into their heads to loot my office. I’m afraid they won’t find more than about five pounds in the till; but there are a lot of young clerks there, and I don’t want them to have a scare. If you could pick me up here and come to inspect the field of battle . . .”
“I’ll be with you as soon as I can get across London,” I answered.
As I hung up the receiver, I saw Barbara standing in the doorway. One hand gripped the moulding of the frame; the other was pressed to her side. I jumped up in sudden alarm and helped her to a chair, for her lips were moving without giving forth any sound.
“Babs! Darling heart, what’s the matter?,” I asked.
“That’s what I came to find out,” she answered with an effort that almost choked her. “George, you’re not going!”
“Not till you’re all right,” I promised. “Are you feeling faint? I shall have to go out for a bit: a man who’s waiting to see me at the office . . .”
“But you’re not going!,” she repeated frantically.
“It’ll only be for an hour or so . . .”
“It’ll be for all eternity! George, if you go, you won’t come back! Can’t youfeelit? I know when death’s at hand! Have I ever been wrong? Uncle Bertrand. Eric . . . Oh, before the war! Jack Summertown and the other boys in Jim’s last party! I know, Iknow! You think I’m mad . . .”
“But, my dear, who’s going to kill me?,” I asked. “I’ve been in too many London fogs to fear them much; and, if you’re thinking of the hunger-marchers, I’m afraid the poor devils couldn’t do any mischief even if they wanted to. I made an appointment with a man . . .”
“With David. You put him before me?”
I was at a loss to think of anything that would calm her.
“He is my best and oldest friend,” I said.
“You alwayshaveput him before me,” she cried.
“My dear, you speak as if you were jealous! It’s absurd . . .”
“I heard what you said to him.”
“Then you couldn’t have heard more than about six words. I said I’d be with him . . .”
“And wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t it enough when I knew he wanted you? I’m not jealous; I’m terrified! Don’t I know what he said to you? He’s in trouble and he wants to drag you into it. But he shan’t, he shan’t!”
I sat down by Barbara’s side and told her, so far as I could remember, word for word all that O’Rane had said to me.
“You know what Fleet Street rumours are,” I ended, though I felt it was unfortunate that this rumour of rioting in Hampstead had followed so disquieting soon on Sonia’s jaunty account of her meeting with Griffiths.
“If there weren’t danger, you wouldn’t think it necessary to go. It’s no good lying to me, George. I’ve lived with you too long not to know something about you. I ask you to stay.”
“If Raney could see for himself . . .,” I began.
“Let some oneelsego!”
Though I could not tell Barbara, I remembered vividly the night when I had sat alone in that room, begging O’Rane to come and keep me company. I remembered, too, his characteristic promise that he would see me through to the grave and beyond.
“He’s never asked me to do anything for him before. I’ve promised; and I’m afraid I can’t go back on it.”
Barbara stood up as though she were going to rejoin her guests. Physically she was in control of herself and could walk without difficulty or apparent pain; mentally she seemed to be on the verge of a collapse.
“Four and a half,” she muttered at the door.
“Four and a half what?,” I asked.
“Four and a half years sinceyoumade certain promises tome. Four and a half years since we were married. David has only to raise his little finger . . .”
“This is hardly the time to hold apost mortemon our marriage,” I said.
“And I’m hardly the person?,” she taunted.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You wouldn’t! You made up your mind to be patient with me at all costs. You justwouldn’tlose your temper! Dear God, why didn’t you, George? I deserved it. We could have been friends if you’d dropped your hateful superiority for a moment, if you’d ever become human! Youcanbe! You were marvellously sympathetic when all was going well; but, after the crash, you behaved like a stone god. I was wrong. Itoldyou I was wrong. You didn’t blame me. You know I’m jealous through and through, but you wouldn’t punish me by falling in love with some one else. You didn’t even complain of this ghastly two years’ imprisonment. Won’t you ever meet me half way? I told you my love for Eric was dead; you know I never loved any one else. What more do you want? Must I apologize? I will! I’m sorry. I love you, I need you! I wouldn’t say it the other night, because I was trying to hold together the rags of my pride. Isn’t that enough? If you’ll stay, I’ll make up for all my wickedness and cruelty. You’re all I have in the world. I didn’t know it before; but now I can feel death hovering over you like some great black bird. If you go . . . If you go . . .”
Suddenly turning, she clung to me, laughing and crying. I stood without speaking because her intensity of feeling overwhelmed me. I remember stroking her hands. I believe I told her that I should be back before she had time to miss me.
“But you’re not goingnow?,” she cried.
“Darling, I must. I shan’t be in any more danger than I am now; but, if it were a question of bombs and machine-guns, you wouldn’t ask me to let Raney down. He wouldn’t have asked me if he didn’t need me.”
Barbara’s hands disengaged themselves from mine and rose to draw me into her embrace. As our lips met, I felt that she belonged to me, at last, heart and soul; but, when I looked into her eyes, I read her frantic certainty that we should never kiss again.
“I’m coming back, sweetheart,” I promised her.
“Good-bye,” she whispered. Then, still gripping my shoulders, she looked wildly about the room as though to face and drive away this black presence of death that was haunting her. “It’s . . . come too late. Good-bye . . . and forgive me.”
“I’m coming back,” I told her again; but Barbara was now kneeling with eyes closed and folded hands.
If she heard me, she made no sign; I fancy she heard nothing but her own passionate prayers. As I stumbled into the choking fog, the door slammed behind me; and for the first time in these bewildering five minutes I realized that I was awake.