troubled glance down the verandah to the bed of down cushions where her
brother was devoting to _La Vie Parisienne_ the hours demanded by the
institutes of Justinian. “He’s rather a problem.”
“The whole of his generation is a problem,” I said. “He stands between
Jim, who’s dead, and Sandy, who’s still a child. He and his like have
already borne the burden of the war; now he’ll have to bear the burden
of clearing up after the war.”
My proposal found less than no favour in the hearing to which it was
directed.
“I’m not bearing any more burdens till I’ve made myself secure,”
Laurence declared. “Nor’s any one else. Half the men I know have come
back to see another fellow doing their job; the other half are like me
and never had a job to come back to. And, while we were away, you let a
pack of women into all the professions,” he grumbled.
“Laurie will marry a rich wife,” Sam Dainton prophesied. “I’d do the
same myself, only I’m so precious ugly.”
“That doesn’t matter when men are scarce,” said Laurence reassuringly;
“but I’d much prefer it if _you_ married the rich wife and let me blow
in as the _tertium quid_. That’s the way all the best marriages are
arranged nowadays.”
“I wonder what the modern girl will turn into,” drawled Philip Hornbeck
at a tangent.
“The modern girl is a contradiction in terms,” answered Lucien de
Grammont. “To modernize yourself is to change; and woman never changes,
she only adapts herself.”
“She adapted herself in the war, good and plenty,” said Sam Dainton with
authority.
“She was brought up to know nothing,” rejoined Barbara; “she thought she
knew everything. With luck she’ll learn enough to bring her daughters up
better than she was brought up herself.”
“This from you!,” Violet laughed.
“It’s only now that I see what narrow squeaks I had,” said Barbara
reflectively. “Whenever a girl makes a mess of her life, I believe it’s
the parents who are to blame.”
While this theme was developed in the uneasy hearing of my mother,
Violet took a last look at my manuscript before handing it back to me.
“You say nothing about religion,” she commented in an undertone. “It’s
the biggest thing in life for many people.”
“For women more than for men,” I submitted. While we were still at
school, Darwin, Huxley and Renan were made accessible to us in cheap
reprints. I have felt, ever since, that, if my salvation depends on
faith in something that ignores ordinary rules of evidence, I would
prefer not to be saved. “And you couldn’t have had a bloodier war, if
we’d all been followers of Anti-Christ. By a paradox, the only people
who tried to live up to their religion were persecuted as conscientious
objectors.”
“What will you put in its place?,” Violet asked.
I should only have hurt her feelings if I had suggested that
Christianity might now be given a trial: to her, that faith is
synonymous with the Holy Roman Catholic Church; to me, it is the service
of man, and the Christian churches with their deadening forms and dead
rules, their deferred punishments and rewards, their proscriptions and
feuds and exclusive salvations have gone far to stifle Christianity.
“If people thought less about the next world,” I answered, “they might
make a more tolerable place of this.”
And it was in some such words that I ended my criticism of the war. The
folly and suspicion and malevolence of all the nations had made it
possible; when it came, all the nations engaged in it exhibited much the
same endurance, if simultaneously they exhibited much the same savagery.
“Well, is it ‘the Great War’ or ‘the Great Waste’?,” Violet asked. “Jim
was over age when he gave up the staff. They didn’t want him to go. He
felt that every one who got so much out of England in peace _must_ go.
_I_ felt that, too. I shouldn’t like to think I’d helped to have him
killed for no purpose.”
If we had taken a poll of the eager disputants at the other end of the
verandah, I doubt if the verdict would have satisfied her. On their own
admission, the mailed fist of Philip Hornbeck, the diplomacy of Lucien
de Grammont and the first-hand experience of war which Laurence and Sam
Dainton had won on four fronts provided no more security than the
religion of Violet Loring that another war, equally or more cruel,
unnecessary and futile, should not break out as soon as the memories of
one generation were grown dim and the exhaustion of one generation had
been repaired.
“Doesn’t that depend on the people who’ve survived?,” I asked. “Until
the conscriptionists turned a crusade into a hunt for cannon-fodder, the
war had a moral grandeur. Whether Jim’s death served a useful purpose
for any one but himself depends on our power to recapture the spirit of
1914.”
For this elastic formula I can claim little credit. The cynic is now
sure of his laugh if he mocks the idea of “a war to end war”; but I saw
too much of my contemporaries in 1914 to join the later chorus of
fashionable disparagement. Before their first idealism became jaded, the
young men who had been reared in an atmosphere of war-preparations and
war-scares, who aspired to a world orderly and a life beautiful and who
saw their aspirations thwarted by men too old for hope or faith,
resolved to create from the war a world of which they need not be
ashamed. They enlisted in the service of man. From their deaths I
learned the phrase. One of them, the last and best of my friends, who
was literally and awfully crucified, came back blinded and broken to
tell me that he was unrepentant.
“_I was in New York_,” O’Rane wrote at this time, “_when the armistice
was proclaimed. If you’d shouted ‘as you were’ from the Woolworth Tower,
you couldn’t have scattered people more quickly. ‘As you were before the
war’ is the general feeling. I expect it’s been the same in England. We
must do better than that._” . . .
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Violet.
“And I’m not sure that I can put it into words,” I answered. “In general
terms, no sacrifice was too great in the war; I want people to feel no
sacrifice is too great in peace. It’s an empty victory if a high
proportion of the victors are diseased, hungry, verminous, discontented.
Any one of imagination must be ashamed of the slums in our big cities;
but we _won’t_ make the effort or the sacrifice to cure them. I want to
fan the crusading spirit of 1914 back to life. . . . Before that,
though, we must make sure that we aren’t going to drift into another
war. That means a crusade covering the whole inhabited world.”
“I don’t know how you’ll begin.”
“Nor do I yet. I may be able to tell you more in a week’s time. Have you
heard that the O’Ranes are coming here? He cabled to say that he was in
urgent need of my advice. I cabled back that I was in much more urgent
need of his.”
Glancing at my manuscript for the last time before sending it to be
typed, I felt that, in a week’s time, I might know better how to paint
my third panel. We had to see now whether those who had failed to avert
war were capable of ending war.
5
Though I charged O’Rane at the time with disturbing the repose of our
retreat, I can see now that, even before I invited him to Cannes, I was
resigned to moving at least one stage nearer to the heart of politics.
It is true that my uncle Bertrand’s appeal for help in his election was
answered with a lame reference to Barbara’s health; simultaneously I
told Frank Jellaby, without a trace of lameness or indecision, that I
was too little in sympathy with the liberal party to fight a seat on my
own account; all the time, however, I was conscious of a chilling
remoteness. I did not want to go back; I was thankful that Barbara
seemed content to vegetate; but, if I was right in thinking that the
fruits of the war remained to be gathered, I was right in thinking that
they could not be gathered in Cannes.
I hoped that O’Rane, with his knowledge of other countries, would tell
me whether my derided ‘will to peace’ was practicable or even necessary.
If he shared my misgivings, I wanted his help in planning a campaign
that would be bounded only by the confines of the inhabited earth and
would engage our energies for the rest of our lives. A train of
reasoning is sometimes so persuasive in its premises and overwhelming in
its conclusion that human intelligence rejects it without argument; and
a train of this kind was presented to me on the eve of the armistice,
when Hornbeck declared in succeeding breaths that another war would be
synonymous with the end of the world and that nothing could prevent
another war. His first premise was substantiated by all the evidence of
the late war; his second was at least supported by every soldier and
statesman whose memoirs I had been reading for the last month. The
syllogism could only be refuted by a general strike against war. This
was my revelation and mission; and I had suffered too long from the
revelations and missions of others to trust my own until I had been put
to the question.
The O’Ranes arrived, with my sister and her husband, a week before
Christmas. It was characteristic of the times that I should first set
eyes on my brother-in-law two years after his marriage. Beryl wrote in
1916 to say that she was engaged to a certain Gervaise Maxwell, whom she
had nursed at the Lorings’ hospital in Scotland. They parted after a
week’s honeymoon: Beryl went back to House of Steynes, Gervaise rejoined
his battalion in Mesopotamia; and they met for the second time four days
after the armistice.
Now they were coming to exploit my influence in finding work for
Gervaise; and I, knowing the slender proportions of that influence and
recollecting the claims already advanced by Sam Dainton and my cousin
Laurence, wondered helplessly whether the government did wisely in
releasing men from the army before they had found civil employment. For
a week before leaving London my telephone had been agitated by the
voices of anxious friends who assured me that they could be demobilized
at once if I would invent some urgent private business for them. “Good
pay, light work and decent holidays,” they all said. I suppose the army
let them go because the army could not retain them. At Wilminster and
Yareham the troops demobilized themselves and walked home; at Enstaple
and Durncliffe they threatened to mutiny if they were ordered back to
France. It was one thing, however, to kick a uniform into a cupboard;
and something quite different to find civilian clothes that would fit.
Gervaise, I decided, must wait until I had discussed with O’Rane my own
plans. It might be that, within a few months, I should want all the men
I could get; or it might be that I should be cultivating my garden in
Ireland. I must wait, too, until I had heard O’Rane’s proposals.
Eighteen months had passed since I hunted him out to America, nominally
to lecture on the war and really to make a fresh start with Sonia after
her disaster with Vincent Grayle. In that time I had purposely not
enquired how they were getting on, as a fresh start might well be the
fresh start only to more trouble. The woman who jilts two men, marries a
third, runs away with a fourth and returns with his child, all before
the age of thirty-three, has either too much emotion in her nature or
else too little.
I must confess to a feeling of embarrassment as the train drew in. The
feeling passed as Sonia waved ecstatically from her window and announced
breathlessly that no one would believe what a success she had had in
Paris, that she was insolvent, that this no longer mattered, that she
had the most wonderful news for me, that she was going to have an
unprecedented success in London, that it was heavenly to see me again
and that she was really going to enjoy herself in Cannes.
A woman who lived only for the moment was not likely to be disturbed by
regrets or fears; and, as Sonia swung down from the train into my arms,
her eyes were as limpid and innocent, her lips were as moistly red and
provocative, as when I took her to supper at her first parties fifteen
years before. Then and now, she was of those who make the world take
them at their own valuation. Then she had babbled of her earliest
ball-room triumphs; now she described the men who had thrown themselves
at her feet from San Francisco to Paris.
“Then you enjoyed yourself?,” I asked, when she paused for breath.
“_They_ enjoyed _me_,” she answered complacently. “I don’t think they’d
ever seen anything quite like me before. Oh, George! Has David told you
our news? We met Mr. Stornaway in London; and he wants us to come and
work with him! Say, kid, can you beat it? I asked him what the work was;
and he said it was just helping him to spend money. If there’s one thing
I _do_ know about . . . We’re going to be the new big noise in London.
Collect David; and we’ll tell you all about it!”
If my embarrassment returned as I went forward to give her husband a
hand, it vanished as he took up the interrupted tale. In voice and
manner there was nothing to hint that he had ever been estranged from
his radiant wife; and I decided that, in a sense, he too lived only for
the moment. When we first met, a small boy without a friend in the world
had decided that he must put himself to school. His father had been
killed, fighting for Greece against Turkey; and David made his way to
England, with enough money for one term, by working his passage round
the world. When he had sucked in all that Melton and Oxford could give
him, he banished them into the past, as he had already banished his
wanderings, and concentrated all his energies on making money; when the
money was made, he turned his back for ever on the oil-fields of Mexico
and devoted himself to English politics until the war imposed on him a
more urgent duty. On the day that he was discharged from hospital,
blinded and maimed, he called to tell me that he had already secured new
work. When Sonia left him, he set himself to get her back; and, when she
returned, I am sure that he set himself with equal singleness of purpose
to forget that they had ever been parted.
Now he could think of nothing but Raymond Stornaway’s proposal.
“That’s where I want your advice,” he explained gravely, as though in
all his thirty-five tempestuous years of life he had ever taken advice
from anybody.
“And I want yours,” I told him. “I’m sorry to find Raymond butting in: I
expect to need your help much more.”
That evening after dinner, when the others had gone away to gamble, we
talked of the war and of that other evening, when we stood on the
dividing ridge between two worlds. Of the men who dined at Loring Castle
on the last night of peace, he and I alone had survived. We talked of
the war that was over as then we had talked of the war that was coming.
I quoted him the words in which he had described his vision of what the
world might be after the war; and I challenged him to say whether he
still believed in the perfectibility of man.
“I’ve acquired a lot of patience in the last four years,” he answered.
Then I tested him with Hornbeck’s prediction that wars would be fought
so long as the human race survived to fight them.
“I want you to help me organize a general strike against war,” I said,
as I began to blow out the candles. Then I paused to frame a question
which I had kept unasked since our last evening of peace: “D’you
remember blowing out the candles that night?” He nodded. “You left two.
Why?”
As he hesitated, I saw that he was frowning. I saw also that, like the
rest of us, he had aged in the last five years, though the thin face had
its old passionate vitality and the fine black hair its old gay
disorder. Slight as ever, boyish as ever, he was none the less lined
with the mental and physical tortures of the war. His very hesitation
was a subtle mark of decline, as though for the first time in his life
he doubted himself.
“I knew in my bones that only two of us would come through,” he
muttered. “I should be one; I couldn’t make a guess at the other.”
“There aren’t more than half-a-dozen left out of all our generation,” I
told him. “The old club-groups at Oxford. . . . I can’t look at them.”
“And I couldn’t see ’em if I _did_ look. Not that I need to be reminded
of them.” . . . The unseeing eyes flashed in sudden exaltation. “What
death takes away, George, is very little by comparison with what he
leaves! The men I’ve loved best in the world have been my father and
your uncle and old Burgess and you and Jim. Three of you, thank God!,
are alive: I stayed with Burgess for his last night before he retired
from Melton; but you’re no more alive than my father and Jim. Nothing
can take away the time I spent with them. . . . I shan’t see again in
this world, but nothing can take away all that I’ve seen in the past. I
still see the men I recruited, the men who trained with me, though I
helped to bury more than a few.”
“Some of them were here to-night,” I said.
“Yes! And what death has done is just to put their bodies out of action
. . . . That means there are fewer hands and more work.” . . .
As I led him to the door, O’Rane’s fingers ran lightly down my arm.
“It’s about twenty years since you first came to stay with us,” I
reminded him.
“I suppose it must be. Good, full years.”
“I was feeling middle-aged till you came. Middle-aged and depressed.”
He laughed and gripped my hand:
“We’ve no time to grow middle-aged. It’s the next twenty years that will
count. We must pull together. In a sense we _are_ the last two.”
As I blew out the remaining candles, the room once more seemed to fill
with our friends of other days. We were indeed almost the only
survivors; and I could not tell these ghosts that they had given their
lives, I could not tell O’Rane that he had given his sight, to no
purpose.
“Think over what we’ve been saying,” I suggested. “Tell me if you can
see any reason why just such another war shouldn’t break out with just
as little reason.”
“If it does, then this war wasn’t worth while. . . . And it’s our
business to make it worth while,” he answered.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DAWNING OF MORN
“‘Rise up, rise up, thou Satan, upon the Earth to go,
And prove the peace of Dives if it be good or no;
For all that he hath planned
We deliver to thy hand,
As thy skill shall serve to break it or bring low.’”
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The Peace of Dives_.
1
Average, sensual man is no match for an enthusiast. When O’Rane wrote
that he wanted to ask my advice, vague instinct warned me that he wanted
the costlier, if no more valuable, privilege of my personal cooperation.
And it was my intention that he should cooperate with me. If I seemed a
doctrinaire to Lucien, a fanatic to Hornbeck and a
‘bolshevist’—whatever that might mean—to Deganway, I seemed to myself
the mildest revolutionary that had ever schemed to carry out a
revolution by deputy. When, at this time, people talked of “winning the
peace” and asked what we meant to do, I felt and said that no active man
or woman who had survived the war was justified in sitting idle. I was
ready to write, speak and subscribe money on behalf of any organization
that would rouse the world to the danger which I saw threatening it. I
would work for my “will to peace” as others worked, in the years that
followed and along lines which I deplored, for the League of Nations. I
lacked the fire and the endurance, however, to inspire a crusade. This,
I felt, was O’Rane’s part.
Nevertheless, from our first conversation I divined that we were
thinking on different planes. To “make the war worth while”, in my view,
was to secure, first and foremost, that there should be no future wars.
Perhaps because he had spent so many months in America, where by now the
world seemed already to have been made “safe for democracy”, perhaps
because he had seen too much of the late war to fancy that any one
wanted more of it, O’Rane assumed the end at which I was aiming.
“If the war is to be made ‘worth while’,” he pronounced at the end of
our first night together, “we have . . . in some way . . . to make
England . . .”
“‘A land fit for heroes’ and what not,” Philip Hornbeck interrupted
flippantly.
After that, though we conducted our debates in private, I felt that
O’Rane’s enthusiasm was sapping my will to the point when I should be
drawn from my own leisurely crusade and pressed into his. If, at the end
of ten days, he returned to London without me, I can only explain his
failure by saying that in the meantime I had fallen to the assault of a
yet more formidable enthusiast.
2
“You heard what Sonia said about Stornaway’s proposal?,” O’Rane began on
the second day.
The rest of the party had disappeared to Monte Carlo; and I was
imprisoned in the shade of a palm-tree until I surrendered or bolted.
“He made the same proposal to me,” I said. “I turned it down because I
thought there was more important work nearer to hand.”
“Our work won’t lack in importance.”
“Then you’ve accepted his offer?,” I asked. “You’re giving up the
House?”
“I’m committed in principle,” he answered. “Yes, I shan’t stand again:
this coupon business leaves no scope for the independent member. Why the
prime minister wants an election at all, when his position is
impregnable . . .”
“He wants to keep it impregnable,” I said. “Well, you’re going in with
Raymond to succeed where Deryk Lancing and his father and every
millionaire in history has so far failed? It’s easier to make money
honestly than to spend it wisely, you’ll find. How much is there?”
“About twelve hundred thousand a year.”
“You can do a lot of harm with that,” I said. “How will you spend it?”
“For the first year or two it’s ear-marked for universities and
hospitals.”
“And after that?”
“We might make the war worth while,” he laughed. “But you must help. The
trouble with England at present is that we’ve so little sense of
responsibility. Isn’t it about time we educated people up to a civic
conscience? In the war, I admit . . .”
“You found a hundred men who would die for their country to one who
would live for it.”
“Because, in peace, we call people ‘good citizens’ if they obey the laws
and pay their taxes. That’s not enough for a civilized state, George!
Good God, when a man commits murder, we hire another man to hang him!
It’s you and I who ought to be hanged for not teaching him our own
reverence for law. We hire people to persecute other people for beating
their wives or neglecting their children or concealing their diseases!
It’s _we_ who ought to be persecuted. Illness, to me, is the wound
inflicted on society by the indifference of the healthy. Poverty.
Degradation.” . . .
“And your civic conscience . . .?,” I reminded him.
“Another word for imagination! You’d be ashamed of yourself if your
tenants in Ireland died of want; if the men drank or the women turned
prostitutes. Yet I’ve seen sights in different parts of the world that
would make your blood run cold. Famines and pestilences and massacres.
Things we don’t allow in England: we’ve got _that_ far. Now it’s time we
went farther. If the war’s to be worth while, you must satisfy yourself
that what has been saved was worth saving.”
“But how on earth are you to do it?”
In other days I had heard Aylmer Lancing, as he wheeled himself with
slow impatience about his workroom, muttering of a dread project to
corner the raw material of high explosives throughout the world. Some
Central American republic was causing him trouble; and he had decided to
make future wars impossible. Later, I had been present when Raymond
Stornaway schemed to force up the standard of living for manual labour
by paying uneconomic wages in one place and raising a storm of envious
discontent in every other. Both men had been wonderfully convincing; but
they had done nothing. Behind O’Rane’s shining eyes, in a stain of
shadow between two white sheets of sunshine, I seemed now to see
Raymond’s tired face at his luncheon-party on Armistice Day.
“So far,” said O’Rane thoughtfully, “no one’s gone about it in the right
way.”
“It was not for want of intelligence. Can it be that the modern world
has grown too fast for any one to control it?”