BY STEPHEN McKENNA
_NOVELS_:
TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW
VINDICATION
THE COMMANDMENT OF MOSES
SOLILOQUY
THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL-MEANING WOMAN
THE SENSATIONALISTS:
I _Lady Lilith_
II _The Education of Eric Lane_
III _The Secret Victory_
SONIA MARRIED
MIDAS AND SON
NINETY-SIX HOURS’ LEAVE
SONIA
THE SIXTH SENSE
SHEILA INTERVENES
THE RELUCTANT LOVER
* * * * *
BY INTERVENTION OF PROVIDENCE
WHILE I REMEMBER
TEX: A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
TO-MORROW AND
TO-MORROW . . .
_A NOVEL_
BY
STEPHEN McKENNA
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1924
_Copyright, 1924_,
BY STEPHEN MCKENNA.
_All rights reserved_
Published, October, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MARION
Three years ago, _The Secret Victory_ brought to an end the trilogy
which I called _The Sensationalists_. This book and the antecedent
volumes—_Lady Lilith_ and _The Education of Eric Lane_—described the
fortunes of certain men and women who constituted part of the larger
groups which I had approached in _Sonia, Midas and Son_ and _Sonia
Married_.
By the accident of birth, fortune or talent, “these our actors” were
made to fill a position—before, during and after the war—which
attracted to them more attention than was warranted by their historical
importance. My defence—if I must defend myself—is that the butterfly
in every age has claimed more notice than the bee. The social scene, to
change my metaphor, presented by so single-minded a writer as Mr.
Greville has to find room for the D’Orsays, the Egremonts, the Sidney
Smiths and the Madame de Lievens, who throng his stage in act after act,
as well as for the Peels, Wellingtons and Melbournes.
Is a defence still necessary for continuing the life of a character from
one novel to another? Mr. Disraeli, in his splendid progress through a
part of Mr. Greville’s period, refused to cut the thread of an imaginary
existence at the moment when his last page was bound into its cover; and
the novel-sequence which aims to describe a social and political scene
must, no less than succeeding volumes of memoirs, call back to the stage
the same leaders and the same camp-followers. If this present series
have any artistic or historical value, I should like it to be found in
the completed picture.
I attempted, in _Sonia_, to trace the adolescence of the generation that
grew to manhood in time to meet the shock of the war. That war ends in
the first line of the present volume; and, before the last page, the
government that was charged to bring peace back to the sparse survivors
has itself passed away. One phase in history has been concluded; and
this series, which aimed at describing a single English scene in the
life of a single generation, ends with the end of that phase.
I ask no one to share any regret which I may feel in taking leave of
characters that have been my constant companions for more than eight
years. If they are no more likable than the men and women we meet in
daily life, I have at least never allowed parental affection to cover up
their shortcomings. I present them to you as a small mark of a deep
devotion.
STEPHEN MCKENNA.
“All our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.” . . .
SHAKESPEARE: _Macbeth_.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER
I TRUCE
II RETROSPECT
III THE DAWNING OF MORN
IV AFTER THE DELUGE
V THE RED ACCOUNT
PART TWO
I THE NAKEDNESS OF THE LAND
II THAT WHICH REMAINED
III AS YOU SOW
IV IN A GILDED CAGE
V “UN SACRIFICE INUTILE”
PART THREE
I TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW
II THE TEST
III TWO IN THE FIELD
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
TRUCE
“‘Rise up, rise up, thou Dives, and take again thy gold,
And thy women and thy housen as they were to thee of old.
It may be grace hath found thee
In the furnace where We bound thee,
And that thou shalt bring the peace My Son foretold.’”
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Peace of Dives_.
1
“_The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month_ . . .”
Though the departmental order was marked “secret”, I did not hesitate to
give my wife a hint of its contents. All the world—if the armistice
were accepted—could read the news next morning. And the armistice would
be accepted. Silence hung over town and country throughout the misty,
long hours of Sunday: it was, I felt, as though all England were at
prayer. Faint restlessness muttered throughout the lagging, cold hours
of Sunday night: it was as though all England were keeping vigil.
“You _can’t_ doubt,” I told Barbara, as we parted at the door of the
Admiralty. “With any luck, the news is waiting for me.”
“I can’t _believe_,” she answered. “Four years and three months. Nearly
a fifth of my whole life. I’m used to the war . . . almost. I don’t see
why it should ever stop.”
2
It was my turn for late duty; but, when I reached my room, I found a
message:
“Captain Hornbeck’s compliments; and it will not be necessary
for Commander Oakleigh to stay unless he wishes.”
Peace was not yet come, then, or Philip Hornbeck would have told me; it
would come that night, or he would not have granted me leave of absence.
The Admiralty, meanwhile, could not have been more silent if the old
world had died in giving birth to the new.
“You got my chit?,” Hornbeck asked in an undertone, when I went to
report. “Unless you _want_ to hang about here . . .”
“My taste for bureaucracy,” I answered, with a glance of loathing at his
“IN”, “OUT” and “PENDING” trays, “has been cured.” How long did Barbara
say the war had lasted? Since 1914? Yes, four years and three months had
passed since I began to masquerade unconvincingly as an officer of the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the actors, artists, barristers and
stockbrokers who combined to make up my section of the intelligence
department, I had talked a hundred times of the day when we should have
taken our last undeserved salute and laid aside the latest of our
comic-opera uniforms. Now it was come. “As I’m here, I may as well lend
a hand. I suppose they’re bound to sign?”
Hornbeck unlocked a row of japanned boxes and glanced perfunctorily at
his secret files before plunging them in the fire.
“It won’t come through in time for the morning papers, so I’m getting
rid of the evidence before I’m told not to,” he chuckled. “‘_The
eleventh hour . . . of the_ _eleventh day . . . of the eleventh month._’
Sounds as if a journalist had had something to do with that!” One file
slipped to the floor; and I read on the faded docket “_Goeben and
Breslau, 1914_”. It had been a very long war. “Lord! These papers are a
satire on the vanity of human wishes!,” he drawled. “You can give all
your people leave for the day. They won’t be in a fit state to work
. . . even if you had any work to give them. And I suppose you won’t
have. It . . . takes you some time to grasp that it’s all over,” he
added, checking half way to the fire and staring bemusedly at the papers
in his hands. Looking at him, I needed time to recall that he had been a
young man when war broke out. “What are you and Lady Barbara going to do
with yourselves?,” he asked after a pause.
“Get away to the sun,” I answered with the grim determination of a man
whose vitality was spent for lack of rest and good food.
“Wonder . . . what will happen . . . to _us_,” Hornbeck pondered,
punctuating his words with abrupt shrieks of rending paper. “No more
wars; . . . no more navies . . . or armies.”
“Well, you of all men are entitled to a holiday,” I said. Four years of
Whitehall had made him short-sighted and round-shouldered; his square,
wooden face was pallid; and his slow speech argued a tired brain.
“Everything will seem a bit flat now,” muttered one of the most powerful
men in England, who within the next few days or hours would be as
inconsequential as myself. Beyond a narrow circle described round the
Treasury Exchange, the name of Captain Hornbeck was unknown; the weight
and cunning of his hand, however, had been felt for more than four years
in Mexican revolutions, Greek _coups d’état_ and Russian
counter-revolutions. The papers which he was destroying ranged from
reports on South American credit-transfers to track-charts of North
Atlantic commerce-raiders. “This is what the N.O. has been training for,
ever since the old Britannia days,” he went on. “Now that we’ve finished
it . . .”
Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he threw open the window. From force
of habit, he switched off the lights before pulling up the blind; then,
as the last night of the war engulfed him in a grey eddy of fog, he
laughed at his own forgetfulness.
“There’s still a fair-sized mess to clean up,” I reminded him, as he
raked with irresolute fingers the memoranda that constituted the
Admiralty’s suggestions for the peace conference.
“Ah, I must leave that to you politicians,” he laughed. “And I don’t
envy you the job. A world without war . . . It’s a thing we’ve never
seen, George. And when you consider that we’re all of us demoralized and
most of us bankrupt . . . I suppose friend Woodrow knows what he wants,
but I don’t believe any one else does. . . . Doctor feller once told me
that, when a baby’s born, it comes into the world with its fists
clenched. I sometimes wonder if war isn’t a natural instinct.”
“Self-preservation is the first natural instinct,” I answered; “but it’s
not consistent with modern methods of fighting.”
“Oh, I know. This war will be a friendly scrap by comparison with the
next.”
“It’s stopping,” I said, “just when we were beginning to learn something
of mass-production, mass-enlistment, mass-mobilization of resources,
mass-destruction.”
Hornbeck strolled to a vast wall-map of the world and stared at it, with
his hands dug deep into his pockets.
“In the next war, we shan’t attempt to distinguish between combatants
and non-combatants,” he predicted. “The air-raids and the blockade have
caught the civilian.”
“And no country will be allowed to remain neutral,” I added, “any more
than Luxemburg and Greece in this war.”
“Until, at the end, when the human population of the earth has been
destroyed with typhoid-germs and poison-gas, you’ll be left with two
submersible flying-tanks chasing each other among the ice of the North
Pole.”
He stirred the fire to a blaze and began once more to feed it with the
papers from his private safe. I might have helped him; but this news of
approaching peace seemed to relax all my muscles. For the first time in
more than four years I could look beyond the work of the moment and see
myself as an individual. When I was less tired, I could go back to the
old life; and, for a man with a competence, life in England had been
more than tolerable until the fourth of August, 1914.
“Don’t let’s talk about the _next_ war,” I said. “Unless we can find a
substitute . . .”
“People talked like that after Waterloo,” Hornbeck murmured.
“I expect they talked like that after the siege of Troy; but they always
sowed their peace with the seeds of the next war.”
The night air was chilling the room; and Hornbeck interrupted his task
of destruction to shut the window.
“Well, what kind of peace do you want now?,” he asked, with a smile half
mocking, half wistful playing over his tired face. “This war followed
inevitably on the war of ’70, which followed inevitably on the
nationalist wars, which followed inevitably on Napoleon’s conquests.
Will you divide the world now according to nationalities? I’m afraid
you’ll have new wars in Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, Turkey; not to
mention Egypt and India. People talk about a United States of the World;
but, when you’ve been getting the last ounce out of national spirit for
all these years, you won’t persuade white men to take their orders from
an international committee of dagos.”
I turned from the wall-map to the official estimates of casualties in
all countries.
“When people remember what a bloody business war is . . .” I began.
“We had South Africa and Japan to warn _us_!” he interrupted. “The next
generation . . . George, I promise you that, unless you get your new
heaven and your new earth functioning at once, you’ll drift back to the
only kind of life a nation knows. Fear and arrogance; insane hatred and
colossal stupidity. Periodically the world will panic into war, which is
the only final solution known to history.” . . .
“The only one we’ve tried; and it’s a solution of nothing,” I answered.
“My God, if I didn’t believe this was really a war to end war . . .”
I paused as Hornbeck was called to the telephone. He listened for a
moment, nodded to me and took down his coat and cap. Even he could work
no longer; and, as I walked home alone, I tried to understand that the
“war to end war” had itself ended. In four years I had forgotten how
London looked before the lamps were shrouded and the hoardings placarded
with patriotic appeals. Their purpose was accomplished; a uniform would
soon be as rare as civilian clothes were now; the hospitals would empty;
the blue coats and red ties of the convalescents would disappear.
The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would
be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in
her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably
into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would
wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the
Great War.
At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on
the doors and shutters of the shops.
“I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the
armistice,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute.
A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver.
“They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they
_’ave_. . . . Well . . .”
I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace
came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the
hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a
flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David
O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had
failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were
all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools
in the last years of the nineteenth century.
A lifetime had passed since we all talked of what we would do “on the
day peace is signed”; and yet, when we spoke of “last summer”, we always
meant “the summer before the war”. It was, at the same time, an eternity
and an episode.
“So,” I reflected at the door of my house in Seymour Street, “one school
of political thought in France looked upon the Revolution and the
Empire.”
From force of habit, I headed for the hot milk in my dressing-room and
rang to have my bath prepared. Then I recollected that I need never
again work by night and sleep by day.
“I’ll breakfast first,” I told Barbara’s maid. “And I shan’t go to bed
this morning. The armistice has been signed.” The girl tried to speak,
but could only turn away with a sob that sounded like “dad”. “Has her
ladyship been called?,” I asked.
Still unable to speak, the girl shook her head and nodded in the
direction of a breakfast-tray.
3
Barbara was asleep, with a light burning by her side and an open book
face-downwards on the bed. At last, I told myself, I could see something
of my wife. I should be able to read the new poets and novelists who
overflowed her cases. At last we could entertain our friends again. At
last, after eight months, we could have our honeymoon. Barbara looked
dangerously fragile. As I watched her, one hand was drawn slowly up the
sheet; and the fingers were almost transparent. Her head turned
restlessly from side to side; and I knew that she was dreaming. There
was a whispered sigh; and I felt that her dreams were unhappy.
“George! Oh, it’s you!,” she exclaimed with a throb of relief; and, as
she brushed the cloudy hair back from her face, I saw that her big,
deep-set eyes were black and anguished.
“Who else should it be?,” I asked, as I draped a shawl over her thin
shoulders and kissed her flushed cheeks. “They’ve signed, Babs. It’s all
over.”
“It’s . . . all . . . over?,” she repeated dreamily.
“Yes. I telephoned to your mother from the Admiralty. They’re safe:
Neave and Charlie.”
Silence fell between us until Barbara covered her face and murmured:
“Thank God!” Then she sat up and stared round the shadowy room:
“What . . . what are we going to do now?”
Within an hour I felt that most people would be asking themselves that
question:
“I don’t know. For this morning Phil Hornbeck suggested that I should
invite a few friends to my room in case there’s anything to see.
Afterwards . . .”
“Afterwards you must take me away!,” she cried. “You’re quite sure
there’s been no mistake?”
“Quite sure!,” I answered, as I sat down by the telephone and tried to
remember which of our friends we should both care to have with us at the
moment when peace dawned.
A change had overtaken London by the time that I set out to collect my
party. As on August bank-holiday four years earlier, when I drove about
Gloucestershire, with Loring and O’Rane, waiting for news, the city had
an air of suspended animation. Of the twenty strangers who interrogated
me on my way across the park, not one had more doubt that the terms
would be accepted than that the sun would rise on the morrow. And yet,
so nicely balanced were hope and fear, I should have been surprised if
any one had laid me long odds on peace. Like Barbara, they were grown
used to the war. As I spread the news from house to house, every one
said: ‘What time is it now?’; and it seemed as if the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day would never come. There was a muddle-headed point of
honour, too, that no one should betray even impatience.
“Oh, yes, I’ll look in, if I have nothing better to do. You might have
called here instead of bringing me to this infernal contraption,”
growled my uncle Bertrand, who always visited his hatred of the
telephone on the heads of those who addressed him by it. “That all you
have to say? Filson! Filson!,” I heard him calling to his man. “They’ve
signed!”
Lady Dainton, whom I invited for the sake of old associations, murmured:
“Thank you so much. I know Roger will be interested,” as though I had
announced a minor change in the cabinet. Raymond Stornaway said: “I
trust this doesn’t mean a general holiday: I’ve the very devil of a
day’s work ahead of me.” My sister Beryl hoped that I had not gone to
the expense of buying that new uniform.
I had already warned old Lady Loring by telephone; and, when I reached
Curzon Street, I found my cousin Violet dressed to go out and playing in
the hall with her boy.
“I’m waiting to be told what to do next,” was her greeting.
Though she had worn her deep mourning for more than three years, her
little white face looked pathetically young and helpless. I wondered
what kind of life she could expect from the armistice.
“We’re all in the same boat,” I answered. “I called to suggest that you
should bring Sandy to the Admiralty. My father could just remember the
Famine; my mother remembers the crowds in the streets when Sebastopol
fell. Sandy may carry away something to fix this, eighty years hence, as
the day when the Great War ended.”
“I wonder if people will talk about it then as ‘the Great War’?,” Violet
mused.
As she buttoned her boy into his coat, I felt that she was thinking only
of the day when her husband of a month, with all that health, fortune,
rank and riches could give him, drifted whimsically to France, in the
meshes of a machine which he ridiculed, there to die in defence of one
country, which he faintly despised, against another, which he mildly
disliked. Violet had been left with a son to bring up and a vast estate
to administer. She would never, I knew, marry again; and, now that the
war was over, she saw herself fading into the twilight of life to dwell
with ghosts and memories and dreams.
“The Great Waste,” I suggested, as we set out. “If any one could have
foreseen, four years ago, how this would end, I wonder if there’d have
been a war? I tremble to think what the world will look like when we
have time to take stock.”
In our passage from Loring House to the Admiralty, I found that the news
had spread before us; and young Lucien de Grammont, speeding towards the
French Embassy, stopped long enough to vent on us his disappointment
that the allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender.
“Those accursed Americans!,” he cried. “But for them, peace would have
been signed in Berlin! Now in fifty years’ time . . . Well, let us hope
we shan’t be alive to see it.”
As he flung off in furious disappointment, I ventured the opinion that,
but for the Americans, a German peace might have been dictated in Paris.
Then we pressed through the crowd in the Processional Avenue and took up
our positions to see at least the greatest war in history ending. My
secretary had cleared the table of its trays; and we sat in a row,
looking through the mist of Horse Guards’ Parade and trying to guess
what was going to happen. The Crawleighs had arrived before us and were
talking to Raymond Stornaway; Sir Roger and Lady Dainton followed on our
heels; and our last inch of space was filled when my uncle Bertrand,
puffing and growling at the stairs, lumbered in with heavy tread and
demanded in the loud voice of incipient deafness why it was necessary to
collect this nest of magpies.
“Disreputable old wrecks we are!,” he muttered with a glance of sour and
comprehensive disfavour from Lord Crawleigh to Sir Roger Dainton and
from Sir Roger Dainton to Raymond Stornaway. The grey November light,
shining on a row of bent backs and haggard faces, made us older than our
years. “We’ve _had_ our chance,” he continued; “I believe the only way
of stopping war is to have conscription for all men and women over fifty
and to call up the oldest classes first.”
“So that you could hear men of thirty boasting that they’d ‘given’ two
grandfathers to the army?,” asked Raymond.
“They’d still be of an age to be kicked, if they tried that kind of
cant. . . . No, but I’m sufficiently sick of everything to feel it’s
indecent for me to be alive when mere children are wearing black for men
who might have been my grandsons. Eighty-four. . . . Most of my friends
will tell you I’ve lived twenty years too long; and, on my soul, I
believe they’re right.”
“You said something of the kind on the day war broke out,” I reminded
him. “Now that it’s all over . . .?”
Bertrand gathered himself for attack, towering over me with his hands on
his hips till the silence of the room daunted him. Then he shrugged his
shoulders and turned, with a savage tug at his black walrus-moustache,
to shake hands with his neighbours:
“I don’t detect any great reason for optimism. Um, Crawleigh. You
English have seen a million or two of your best men killed or
wounded. . . . Whose child is that? . . . You’ve seen new debt piled up
to the tune of thousands of millions. . . . How do, Lady Crawleigh?
. . . I’m an Irishman. . . . Violet, my dear! . . . And a liberal. I’ve
seen liberalism stamped out of existence and the Irish party
broken. . . . Lady Dainton, your humble servant. Find me a seat, George,
there’s a good boy.”
Most of us knew my uncle well enough to imagine his violent anger if any
one else had dared to be so despondent. My father-in-law, however, felt
obliged to pick up the gage.
“You mean that we should be no worse off,” he suggested, “if the Germans
had drawn up the terms and we had accepted them?”
“Not quite,” Bertrand conceded, “not quite. . . . I beg your pardon,
Barbara my dear, I didn’t see you! . . . If you know your Bible, my dear
Crawleigh, you’ll recollect that a Jew called Samson tried to get level
with the Philistines by pulling a heavy roof down on their heads. He got
level; but he paid for it with his life. Some one pulled away the
pillars that had been holding up our civilization for Heaven knows how
many centuries. Credit, commerce, law and order, faith and morals,
production, exchange, distribution: they’ve all toppled; and they’ve
toppled on the heads of _all_ of us. You’ll see as soon as peace really
sets in. No! No, Crawleigh! This war should have ended two years ago,
while there were still a few tiles left on the roof!”
I recalled my uncle’s warning, on the day war broke out, that freedom of
speech was dead; on the day it ended, he asserted his right to it with a
truculence that had been shouted down when he pleaded for “a patched-up
peace” at the end of 1916, before the United States came in, and again
in 1917 when the Lansdowne letter was published.
“Lucien de Grammont wants to go on to Berlin,” I said.
Bertrand clasped his hands over the crook of his stick and nodded
scornfully at a headstrong world that refused to take his advice. His
expression and attitude reminded me of Dr. Johnson, in the celebrated
picture, awaiting an audience with Lord Chesterfield.
“He forgets, perhaps, that we at least went into this war to uphold the
neutrality of Belgium. We stayed in to make the Germans pay for the
damage they’d done there. Later . . . Later, we were told that the
French must have Alsace-Lorraine, Russia must have Constantinople, Italy
must have an infernal place called the Trentino. And any stray islands
or continents where a German or the ally of a German has ever set foot
must be taken away and given to somebody else. It may be all very right
and proper; but that wasn’t our aim in 1914.”
More was coming; but his audience began to shew signs of hostility; and
Violet intervened by setting her boy on the old man’s knee and
whispering:
“You mustn’t quarrel on a day like this. Help me to shew him the
different nationalities, Uncle Bertrand. Sandy! Sandy! You see the
little man down there by the tree. D’you know what he is? He’s a Jap.
Japanese.”
“Jap-an-ese,” Sandy repeated slowly.
“Those are Americans,” she continued, with her finger pointing to three
grave, lean-faced young officers. “Amer-i-cans.”
“Call ’em ‘Yanks’, most noble marquess,” grunted Bertrand, who—with
much else that was Johnsonian—exhibited the doctor’s unreasoning
antipathy to the new world.
“Merry-cans,” Sandy repeated.
“There’s a Frenchman! There’s a Canadian! See, Sandy? Uncle Bertrand,
find me an Italian,” Violet pleaded. “I don’t know how much this mite
will remember, but it is rather marvellous to see them all together.
That’s a South African, isn’t it? Oh, and a poor soul with only one leg.
There’ll still be plenty of them for him to see when he’s grown up. I
_wish_ I could find an Italian!”
The open space under my window had filled so rapidly that it was hardly
possible for any one to move. Typists from the government offices, in
short skirts and transparent blouses, were standing on tiptoe,
bare-headed in the biting cold, staring bright-eyed over the shoulders
of those in front. There were soldiers, in uniform and in their hospital
undress; sailors; nurses; government messengers with battered red boxes;
a park-keeper; two clergymen; some errand-boys; and a thousand
nondescripts. At one moment they were very silent; at another, they
broke into feverish conversation with unknown neighbours, occasionally
shaking hands and cheering a foreign uniform.
“Five minutes to eleven,” muttered a voice which I could not identify.
4
The emotions of the crowd were reacting on us. Behind me, I could hear
murmurs like the soughing of wind, rising and falling with the murmurs
of the crowd. When hands were excitedly shaken below us, I felt
Barbara’s fingers gripping my wrist and saw Violet bending to kiss the
silken curls of her child’s head.
Out there, over the water, the ‘cease-fire’ must be travelling down the
unending shambles of the two opposing lines. The shadow that had
darkened the world for more than four years had at last been driven
away; and no one was going to be mutilated or killed any more. All—more
than all—that we set out to do in 1914 had been accomplished; and the
bound heads and empty sleeves of the survivors, the black dresses of
those with no survivors to welcome, testified to the cost. Of the
uniforms below us, some had first been donned in Tasmania, some in
Natal, others on the Alaskan border. Belgium and Servia, Russia and
France, Portugal and Japan, Italy and Rumania: all had joined hands with
our English-speaking peoples to hem in the wild beast. Throughout the
night, the news had crackled from Poldhu to the Azores, from Arlington
to Seattle, that the wild beast was subdued. It had flashed to lonely
patrols through the frost of the North Sea and the fire of the Persian
Gulf; two hundred million men were now standing silent, with their eyes
on their watches; and I fancied again the unearthly hush that must drop
on the world when the last war ended.
In spite of Bertrand, in spite of Lucien de Grammont, in spite of
Hornbeck I believed that it was the last war.
_Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp!_ The maroons were like the rending of
colossal drums. _Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp!_ Sandy turned wide eyes
of alarm upon us and buried his face in Violet’s bosom. _Burp! Burp!
Burp!_
“Eleven o’clock,” muttered Roger Dainton in a quavering voice.
My secretary collapsed into a chair, murmuring “Air-raid”; and, though I
knew that air-raids had now passed into history, I imagined for a moment
that the last ‘scrap of paper’ had followed the first and that London
and Paris were to be laid in ruins.
_Burp! . . . Burp! Burp!_
There was no concerted cheering from the crowd below; but I had a
curious feeling that the next man but one, down all that line from the
Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, had opened his lips and was waiting
for a neighbour to cheer with him. Heads were turning in every
direction; eyes were gazing upward, as though they expected to see
“Peace” written across the sky in letters of flame; bodies, for a
moment, were very still.
Then that vast sea of men and women gathered itself up and poured with a
hoarse roar towards the Palace. There was a check, and I fancy the
first-comers must have been pressed against the railings; I threw open
my window in time to hear a mutter rolling from lip to lip: “The king!
They’re calling for the king.” Later, though we could see and hear
nothing of it, the word was passed: “The king! He’s speaking”; later
still: “He’s finished! Give him a cheer! Hip, hip! _Come on._”
The human sea must have eddied at the Palace. Five minutes later, as the
crowd below my window surged forward, a returning stream poured down the
Processional Avenue into Trafalgar Square; and a new current set in
towards the Abbey. There was little cheering now, though every one made
individual noises of greeting and laughter. A War Office car hooted its
deliberate way across Horse Guards’ Parade and was promptly seized by
three wounded soldiers and four girl-clerks, who ranged themselves along
the running-boards and perched on the bonnet. As though all had been
awaiting a signal, the crowd broke into little groups and swept like
swarming bees upon every vehicle in sight. So long as all could move, it
did not matter whither they hurried: something, all seemed to feel, must
be happening somewhere else.
“The war’s over!,” some one cried; and mechanically, like hysterical
children, a dozen others repeated uncomprehendingly: “The war’s over!
The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over.” . . .
“And the funny thing,” said Raymond Stornaway, blowing his nose
vigorously, “is that they don’t know what to do next.”
“Do _we_?,” asked Bertrand; and, for once, he seemed less anxious to
instruct than to be instructed.
5
No one wanted to speak first. No one wanted to move. No one cared to
look any one else in the eyes. Lady Crawleigh, I think, was the first to
recover; and she was slipping out of the room, with a twisted smile,
when Raymond put his back to the door and took the position in hand with
a general invitation to lunch with him at the Carlton.
“No speeches or ‘celebrations’,” he promised. “If you’ll fight your way
there as best you can, I’ll telephone for a table.”
With the exception of Violet, we were glad to have our minds made up for
us. Bertrand was right: we none of us knew what to do next. The
movements of the crowd had become rhythmical by the time that we set
out. Every cab and bus was loaded with excited clusters of men and women
who seemed ready to do anything but remain still. Boys with paper caps
and empty tins marched aimlessly at the head of irregular battalions;
overwrought girls and grave grey-beards tramped with arms linked,
sublimely unselfconscious. The streets were carpeted with torn paper. An
indistinguishable hum of voices floated over and about us, still
seeming—as before—to come from our next neighbour but one; and on
every face was written vague relief, vague good-will, dawning
disappointment and vast perplexity.
“‘They order this matter, I said, better in France’,” quoted Raymond, as
we drifted slowly through the crowd to kill time before luncheon. “The
English don’t know how to express their emotions.”
“They haven’t had much time yet to think what their emotions are,” I
reminded him. “What’s the next stage? Babs and I are going off to the
Riviera as soon as we can. But after that?”
“_My_ work will go on,” Raymond murmured with a rueful glance down Pall
Mall. We were within sight of the unwieldy mansion from whose roof young
Deryk Lancing fell or flung himself on the eve of the war. The estate, I
believe, was valued at about twenty-five million pounds sterling; and a
freakish will had laid upon Raymond’s shoulders the task of distributing
a fortune which Deryk himself could not control nor keep from
increasing. “You can come and help me, if you like, George.”
“Thanks, I’ve done the last day’s work of my life,” I answered; “but
I’ve lived so long at other people’s orders that I’ve forgotten how to
take a holiday.”
The rest of our party was awaiting us by the door of the restaurant; and
throughout the meal we talked, for talking’s sake, of the fourteen
points and the probable terms of peace. Though we had all accepted
Raymond’s invitation with relief, we were more sincerely relieved when
luncheon came to an end. We wanted to think; and, when I had written a
formal request for immediate demobilization, I took Barbara home. The
streets were emptying as the silent crowds began to feel that they could
not for ever tramp to and fro or steal aimless rides. Hunger was driving
them in search of food; and the sunless November afternoon, already
touched with frost, was mottling their white faces and chapped hands.
“I feel . . . dazed,” Barbara signed, as we got into a taxi with her
parents.
“We all do,” answered Lady Crawleigh.
As we drove away, I watched our party scattering. From their silence I
judged the Crawleighs were trying to realize that their two elder boys
were safe at last; the Daintons, walking close together with bent heads,
were no doubt thinking of the son who would not return. As my uncle’s
big, lonely figure disappeared from sight, I fancied that he might
indeed be feeling he had lived too long. William the Fourth had
completed half his reign when Bertrand was born: a man who had survived
the nineteenth century, the Victorian era and the greatest war in
history might well shrink aghast from the unknown future.
6
At Barbara’s thoughts I could make no guess. Before the war, she had
been more mercilessly pursued by publicity than any one of her
generation. When our engagement was announced, I slunk like a criminal
past the contents-bills that proclaimed a “_Famous Society Beauty
Engaged_”; and, on the day of the wedding, when the traffic was held up
for three hours and the auxiliary police were numbered by hundreds, the
London crowd was certainly far more concerned to catch a glimpse of Lady
Barbara Neave than to hear that the Channel ports were safe. Since our
marriage, she had hardly appeared in public; but, as she crouched over
the fire without speaking, I wondered what picture she was composing for
her life in the unknown, new peace.
When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen
silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the
streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice
I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only
four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned
against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing
in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the
first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of
altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck,
confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial
reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be
expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should
think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions
and lay down that night with the same confused recollections.
There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital
of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was
more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not
know how to give it words.
“I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara,
as we went up to bed.
“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered.
We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too
exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the
first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the
wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed
by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess,
would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We
shall be useless for years,” I said.
“I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused.
“That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms.
And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who
voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were
degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has
been spared invasion.”
Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent
street.
“The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she
murmured. “We . . . Well, I suppose we go on from that?”
“If we want to.”
“Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call
our souls our own.”
“I wonder whether we ever shall again,” I said, as I filled my final
pipe. That last night of peace lingered more vividly in my memory than
any since. War was certain. We had read Grey’s speech; and I walked with
O’Rane up and down the valley-terrace, trying to decide what we were
fighting to preserve. “We want something more than the _status quo_,” I
told Barbara. “That night . . . There was no question, then, of a
general levy: the war must be over in a few months, and only the regular
army would fight. Well, we’d seen Jack Summertown and a car-load of
officers driving off the night before: they were a small minority who
were quite clearly going to risk their skins for the rest of us. Were we
worth it? I told Raney that I’d like to shew something that was better
worth fighting for.”
“And haven’t we? When you think how every one has worked and fought
. . .”
“But now that it’s all over?,” I persisted. “Raney said that people
couldn’t come back from the war to take up the old futility; you
couldn’t set up social barriers between men who had undertaken the same
charge. It was unthinkable to save a country from invasion in order to
perpetuate things like sweated labour. I wonder.” . . .
“What a long time ago it all seems!”
There was no cynicism in Barbara’s voice; but, if anybody spoke nowadays
of a new world, his words were dismissed as Fleet Street rhetoric or
Downing Street claptrap; and, though not one man of all the thousands
who would be returning in the next few days was likely to say that he
had risked his life to perpetuate sweated labour, I could not imagine
that many would exert themselves to abolish it.
Exertion! I was too tired to undress! The world might be bankrupt and
yet survive; the world might be decimated and yet make good its wastage;
first and foremost, the world was weary to the marrow of its bones.
CHAPTER TWO
RETROSPECT
“Now tell us what ’t was all about,”
Young Peterkin, he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
“Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for.”
“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,
“Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But every body said,” quoth he,
“That ’t was a famous victory. . . .
. . . . . . .
“With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory. . . .
. . . . . . .
“And every body praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,
“But ’t was a famous victory.”
ROBERT SOUTHEY: _The Battle of Blenheim_.
1
When we set out for Cannes three days after my demobilization, I
intended to remain out of England for at least a twelvemonth. Since the
night when Hornbeck and I waited for news of the armistice I had thought
many times of his blank and puzzled confession: ‘_This is what the N.O.
has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days._’ If I had not
also been preparing for the peace and for the war which preceded it, I
had at least toiled for the whole of my adult life to preserve the peace
which preceded the war. Now I could have adapted Hornbeck’s reasoning of
‘_no more wars, no more armies and navies_’ to my own case; and, when my
friends asked me what I was going to do now, I might have said: ‘No more
wars, no more politics or journalism on the old lines.’
And this, I take it, was the attitude of all who had even a smattering
of modern history. From the moment when I warned Barbara that we should
perhaps never again be able to call our souls our own, I realized that
the armistice had ended nothing but the long business of killing. The
victors would now contend for the fruits of their victory, as Russians,
Prussians and British had contended in the Congress of Vienna; the
vanquished would struggle to preserve in defeat all that compassion,
adroitness and obstinacy could secure them, as Talleyrand had struggled
for France after Waterloo. The alliance, if it was like any other of
modern times, would be strained and perhaps broken in the first weeks of
peace, as after our wars with Louis XIV and Napoleon. We should hear men
speaking, as de Grammont and Hornbeck already spoke, of “the next war”.
Any one who was concerned to avert that must be prepared for a continued
effort in which he might truly be unable to call his soul his own.
2
Such energy or ability as I possess were ready to be thrown into the
common stock. I had told Philip Hornbeck that the war would have been
fought to no purpose if we failed to discover a means of preventing
future wars. My difficulty was to know where my own very moderate
ability and energy were to be applied. The leading articles and public
speeches of these days, taking their time from President Wilson, were
familiarizing the idea of a league of nations. Neither speech nor
article, however, made clear how the league could be helped to birth by
the good-will of insignificant, isolated individuals. I debated with
Bertrand whether I should stand again for parliament; but my radicalism
from 1906 to 1910 was too strong for the taste of Frank Jellaby and the
other liberal whips; it would be repugnant now to every section of an
assembly that had sunk party divisions and was aiming at an agreed
peace. Very much as Bishop Blougram counselled Gigadibs to “overhaul
theology”, my uncle suggested sardonically that I should examine the
creeds which I had been professing for the last quarter of a century and
see how much of them the war had left. He did not, however, urge my
returning to the House; and, if the outbreak of war had justified him in
discontinuing our propaganda in _Peace_, the end of the war was hardly
the occasion for resurrecting it.
“I’m more completely out of a job than any of you,” I told Hornbeck when
my old colleagues at the Admiralty entertained me to a farewell dinner
on my last night in England. “An obsolete political editor . . .”
“Lucky man!,” he sighed enviously. “I’ve been warned for duty when the
peace conference opens. And, after that, I’m to convert the intelligence
department here to peace uses. Beating swords into plough-shares; and
what not.”
“If I thought I could be of any use to you . . .,” I began, with
temperate enthusiasm; but Hornbeck shook his head and nodded meaningly
towards the men at the far end of the table.
“I’ve already more than I know what to do with,” he murmured ruefully.
“_You_ don’t _need_ a job, but most of these fellows do; and it’ll be
harder for them to find one than for you. The war was the opportunity of
a lifetime for most of them; but when it’s a question of conventional,
peace-time billets . . .”
Hornbeck shrugged his shoulders and looked with mingled pride and
amusement at the flock which he had collected. There were men and women,
married and single, old and young; drawn from a dozen different
professions, they were alike in nothing but their admitted ignorance of
civil-service ways. And, in the hands of Hornbeck, this ignorance had
been converted into an asset. As the department is dead, I can praise
it—without offence—for loyalty, hard work and efficiency such as I
have never seen excelled; without offence, too, I hope, I can say that
we were the strangest collection of government officials that one man
ever assembled below one roof. The war, if it did nothing else, gave
scope to our versatility. At this dinner I recollect that Bellamy, the
actor, sat next to Clayton, the paper-manufacturer. On his other side
was Whitburn, the chancery silk; and, beyond him, old Norton, the
banker. Next to him sat my private slave and fact-finder, Spence-Atkins,
who had reached manhood as a traveller in Manchester goods and, on being
discharged for neglect of business, had drifted about the world,
collecting figures and languages. Next to him, again, was Jefferson
Wright, who began the war as a mathematical coach, lost a hand at Neuve
Chapelle, formed the statistical branch of the Purchase-and-Supply
Department, seconded himself to the Admiralty and ended mysteriously as
a brigadier on the pay-roll of the Ministry of Labour.
“It takes all kinds to make an intelligence department,” I said.
“I wish I could find something for them to do now,” answered Hornbeck;
and I remember his words as the first hint of the human dislocation that
would come as the country declared itself in a state of peace.
In the meantime, our conversation at this dinner strengthened my feeling
that I could do no good by remaining in England at present; and I had
excellent private reasons for wishing to go abroad and to keep my wife
abroad. Until conditions were normal, we did not even know where to
live. Most of my income was derived from Ireland: sentiment and duty
required that I should spend part of my time there as soon as the
country was habitable; and, now that my sister was married and my mother
had made her home in the south of France, Barbara might well grasp at
the chance of escaping from England.
“Quite deliberately, I feel as if I never wanted to go back,” she
announced next day, as we watched the white cliffs of Dover fading from
view.
“But London, without you, would simply not be London!,” said Lucien de
Grammont, who was taking us to stay with him at his father’s house by
the Etoile.
“It will perhaps be better for London, certainly better for me, if we
both make a fresh start,” she answered. “I’m rather tired of it all.”
“Of London in war? Naturally!,” Lucien persisted. “And for the first
months after the war, when we look for the familiar faces and have to
tell ourselves that they will not come back . . . Later on . . .”
“Later on, we must see how we feel,” I said; and the conversation swung
on to a less dangerous tack.