liked to explore this idea that civilization was bursting like an
overripe fruit. Everywhere, in my own lifetime, I had seen
fourth-dimensional energy collecting in a world of three dimensions. At
a far distance, I had watched the Harrimans and Carnegies and
Rockefellers bowing under wealth too great for a single man’s direction;
and, since we began to raise men a hundred thousand at a time and to
spend money at the rate of millions a day, I was convinced that we were
operating forces which we could not control. For twenty years I had
tried to “think imperially”, but I doubt if Mr. Chamberlain himself
would have recognized the British Empire as I saw it represented from my
window at the Admiralty on Armistice Day: in fifty years it had changed
to something that might become a federation of British states but had
certainly ceased to be an empire. America had ceased to be a nation
without becoming even a federation. When I heard of a gas that would
destroy whole cities, when I read of private fortunes that could buy
whole countries, I felt that the earth was hardly big enough for its
Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords; the Rockefellers and Hearsts and
Fords themselves seemed hardly big enough for the monsters they had
created.
“No one,” said O’Rane, “has spent twelve hundred thousand a year to
spread his own doctrines. We’ll buy up derelict palaces like Braye and
Eldridge; turn ’em into schools for the new poor who can’t afford Eton
and the new rich who can’t get in. We’ll stuff them with scholarships to
attract the brightest wits; we’ll have our subjects taught, as we want
them taught, by giving prizes at Oxford and Cambridge. And, when the
best men in every profession, every walk of life, are men who’ve been
through our mill, we can convert the world.”
What the text-books of a civic conscience were to be I did not enquire
at this stage. If O’Rane aspired to make each man love his neighbour as
himself, that was an aspiration towards which the Christian churches,
usually with relatively greater wealth, often with the power of the
sword and always with a grip on the fears and hopes of the faithful, had
been working for nearly two thousand years.
“The late war,” I propounded, “was not a good advertisement for
Christian teaching.”
“Because Christianity has never been brought to men’s doors and into
their lives.
‘_What ragamuffin-saint_
_Believes God watches him continually,_
_As he believes in fire that it will burn,_
_Or rain that it will drench him?_’
I often wonder what would have happened to Christianity if it had come
into the world with our modern means of communication.”
We were still arguing when the rest of the party returned; and, until
the brief winter twilight faded, we sat and spent Stornaway’s money for
him. To this day I can see the half-circle of light dresses and the
fire-fly movements of the men’s cigarettes; I can see faces white with
avarice and eyes dark with excitement.
“Over a million a year . . .,” Barbara gasped.
“I told you we were going to be the big new noise in London,” said Sonia
complacently. “George, of course, thinks he’s very superior.” . . .
“I only think it’s a tremendous responsibility,” I defended myself.
“If the job’s too big, we can turn it down,” said O’Rane.
“The others thought that, too,” I warned him.
It was a strange discussion, which ultimately became a monologue of
foreboding. As all the world knows, Aylmer Lancing made his first
fortune by chance and then found that he could not help adding to it;
after buying the site of a burnt city, he had to build a city on the
site; he constructed railroads to feed his city and manufactured
agricultural machinery to pay for the food. Daily, until his breakdown,
he grew richer; and, in the long years of his dying, he was to find
that, while the hospitals, the universities, the museums and galleries
could live on his bounty for a year, after that he must invent new
outlets.
“If your income’s too big, you can always reduce your capital,” Sam
Dainton contributed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”
“With a capital of five-and-twenty million?,” I asked. “It’s not a
simple question of dropping bags of gold into the sea.”
Early in his career, as I told them, Aylmer Lancing had tried to sell
the New-Mexico-Montana Railroad when it was threatened by the
South-Western Trunk. As he unloaded, the price fell; and, as the price
fell, others unloaded too. A panic set in at one moment, to be ended the
next by a rumour that Lancing was selling a bear. Up went the price; and
Aylmer sold his last share on a soaring market, to find himself the
richer by several million dollars.
In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors,
Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would
for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual
income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had
explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with
her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis
and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England.
Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the
stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt.
“I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing
wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his
problem, but none of them solved it.”
3
In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many
times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned
what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations
which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at
the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and
lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had
never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing.
As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the
Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace
conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin
and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected
to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination,
the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace,
like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen
points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business
to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit
these undiscoverable Baltic states.
“The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals.
“If you would look at politics from a _European_ point of view, George
. . .”
“It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted,
“that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our
contribution in money, men, ships . . .”
Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was
not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation,
had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of
Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely
by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by
intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in
money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted.
For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm
of bees.
“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in
making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll
be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is
your remedy against future wars?”
If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the
unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly
say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all
assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice
taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not
dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the
conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a
kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I
think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which
in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of
Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short
head behind him.
“Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I
asked Lucien.
“Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn.
“That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.”
“_And_ you don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German
navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!”
“With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck
whispered.
Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England.
I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new
development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs
and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild
words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop
very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him
or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled
since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common
effort for a common cause.
“Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile.
“I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as
the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning
session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the
same kind of criminal nonsense?”
“Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other
hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings,
you make on the roundabouts.”
“If you _want_ to go back . . .,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh,
when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand.
It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy
it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see
me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he
had lost his seat.
In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before
and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be
called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she
wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us
back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic
crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade
and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s.
“Bertrand _beaten_?,” I cried. “That’s been a safe radical seat for
fifty years!”
“Where are the English papers?,” O’Rane asked.
“It must have been an odd election if _he_ couldn’t get in,” said
Hornbeck.
Thanks to our isolation, I think we were all taken equally by surprise.
As I read out the strength of the new parties, our tranquil garden
became like a stricken field the day after battle. For a time we tried
to count the dead; then we found it simpler to hunt for the living.
“Runciman’s gone!,” I cried. “McKenna’s gone . . .” Then the tragedy
changed to farce. “_Asquith’s_ gone!”
Laurence caught the paper from my hand:
“Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-unionist.”
. . .
“The old liberal party’s dead!,” I exclaimed. “There’s a handful of
independents.” . . .
“Ireland, except in the north, has gone solid for Sinn Fein,” Hornbeck
read out over my shoulder.
“Labour will be the biggest single party in the House,” said Laurence.
“You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of
rot,” Hornbeck reminded me.
Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and
rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw
O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an
instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our
sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia,
two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five
years before, had flung bombs at another.
“It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered.
Hornbeck read remorselessly on.
“The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the
end.
“But _we_ can! We _must_!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name . . . We
went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free
existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free
existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in
the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now,
when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”
None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the
election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four
and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that
peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old
dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the
third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old
dispensation could not make peace?
We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance,
if we had been given the least warning how the election was being
conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an
exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section,
the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support,
though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time.
Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words.
The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and
I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of
December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we
were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in
our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of
Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less
magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh.
“If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference . . .” Hornbeck
muttered.
“These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up
to a civic conscience.”
“I must be getting back to London,” was all he would answer.
I was reminded irresistibly of a similar party, similarly dispersing in
the first days of August four and a half years earlier. We had all said
then that we must get back to London; we could none of us have said what
we expected to do there.
“You’ll wait till Bertrand comes,” I begged.
“Yes. I don’t suppose a day or two more or less will make much
difference,” said O’Rane. “After all these years, too . . . It’s a
curious thing, George; we’re both of us Irishmen, both of us men of
peace; and, most of all, we’re reformers. All our working life we’ve
seen the reforms nearest our hearts postponed and postponed by an
eruption in Ireland or by a threat of European war. God forgive me, I
had to stand as a tory and a militarist, because I saw this war coming!
Overboard went all my dreams of making life tolerable for the sons of
Ishmael! And now again!”
I might have added that it was this feeling of futility which kept me
from standing again for parliament when I lost my seat in 1910.
“Until these same sons of Ishmael strike against war,” I answered, “it’s
idle to think of improving their lot.”
“And yet it’s so little I’m asking!,” he sighed. “I only want every man
to have freedom to work . . . and save money . . . and marry . . . and
have children . . . without interfering with his neighbours . . . and
without interference from them. I want him to spend his old age in the
comfort and peace of mind which he has earned. His children must be born
healthy, to work, to save, to marry, to live and die as he has done. If
civilized society can’t give him that . . . And it can’t so long as a
country contains one single prison or workhouse or infirmary or brothel
. . .”
“I suspect there were brothels in the golden age,” I interposed.
O’Rane leant forward and gripped my wrist till I winced with the pain.
“In the golden age,” he answered between his teeth, “there were
hopeless, uncaring cynics, who said that prostitution was the oldest
profession in the world. Slavery was the oldest solution of all labour
problems. Torture was the oldest safeguard of civil authority. The moral
sense of the world must be roused till it sweeps away prostitution and
disease, as it swept away torture and slavery. It was not to keep them
flourishing that we went to war. And we _can’t_ sweep them away while
another war threatens.” . . .
He broke off, as my mother came into the garden with the day’s letters;
and, as I struggled against the impact of my uncle’s fury, I recognized
that I was being assailed by a stronger enthusiast even than O’Rane and
being asked to save by propaganda a world that I thought had already
been saved by war.
4
Bertrand’s descent upon Cannes may be likened to the unheralded arrival
of the headmaster in a form-room that has for some time been left to its
own devices.
“‘_The Theodosian code_’,” Laurence recited virtuously, “‘_was published
in Constantinople on the 15th of February, 438 . . ._’ If Bertrand tries
to find me a job, say I’m suited, thank you.”
The rest of us, for all our feeling that we were drowsing in a
back-water, looked regretfully at the blazing hibiscus-hedge and
guiltily at one another.
“We all ought to be going back,” said Barbara, who—six weeks
before—had never wished to see Dover Cliffs again.
I asked what good we could do; I nearly told her what harm we could not
avoid doing, for Eric Lane had crossed from New York on O’Rane’s boat
and was now in London. Bertrand’s outpouring, however, was beyond the
range of argument.
“_You will find_,” he predicted, “_that the world is entering on a new
glacial age of materialism. We must fight it._”
And his method of fighting it was to resurrect our old paper, to set me
in the old editorial chair, to sweep the country with new propaganda and
to create a new political party in the dining-room of Seymour Street.
Those who have never edited a paper are inclined to compare themselves
with Delane at his most legendary; and the comparison is seldom
favourable to Delane or to _The Times_. Those who have never tried to
influence opinion—as my uncle and I tried in six years’ devoted service
to the Disarmament League—become in their daydreams a rival to Parnell
or Gladstone and convert mass-meetings with a single speech. Hard-won
experience had taught me better, yet this is what Bertrand proposed; and
Barbara, I knew, was seeing herself already as the maker of cabinets and
the adviser of kings.
“_Read your Balzac_,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript.
“_London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like
Paris in the restoration-period . . ._”
It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and,
as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask
if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or
two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know,
had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman,
certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by
her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and
manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As
a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would
be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her
wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the
social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten
years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper
penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster
Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have
seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on
vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in
France.
I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice
Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life
was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her
empire.
When my uncle arrived, his mood was made apparent by the sombre opening
statement that nations got the governments they deserved. He added, with
fine public spirit, that the worst result of the election was the lack
of an effective opposition. Then less impersonal feelings broke through:
he charged ministers with treating the fourteen points as ‘a scrap of
paper’ and recommended a strait-waistcoat for all who escaped the
lamp-post. Sitting in a half-circle round his chair, with Lucien’s
international parliament huddled on our fringe, we were castigated with
a fury that would have been better deserved if we had in fact uttered
the vain things with which we were charged: _we_ had promised that there
should be no punitive damages and now _we_ were threatening to squeeze
Germany like an orange; _we_ were pledged to try the kaiser, if not to
execute him without trial; _we_ were to restore our trade by destroying
our best customer.
“If I’d asked for the kaiser’s head on a charger,” Bertrand thundered,
“you’d have promised me _two_ heads on _two_ chargers.”
When the first fury had abated, Lucien fanned it to life by a reference
to the peace of Brest-Litovsk, demanding why Germany should be treated
more tenderly in defeat than she had treated others in victory.
“If England had been _invaded_ . . .” he went on with a kindling eye.
“The mistake your prime minister made was that he didn’t say enough.”
“You should have thought of all that before you agreed to the
armistice,” Bertrand retorted.
“Well, say, the terms of the armistice . . .” began Clifford van Oss.
I have no doubt he was going to say that, if the French quoted one set
of undertakings against us, then America, which had drawn the terms,
would speedily quote another. My uncle, however, who detested what he
called “the American habit of making speeches instead of conversing”,
broke in with a speech of his own:
“Not that it matters whether he said too little or too much! The
speeches have served their turn. I tell you, Lloyd-George is a better
journalist than Northcliffe in knowing what the public will want the day
after to-morrow! _He_ knew that, when the troops came home to find no
job waiting for them, people would forget they’d ever called him ‘the
man who won the war’. Before they forgot him for high taxation, high
prices, falling wages and a creeping paralysis of unemployment, he had
to make himself snug. _And he has!_ Five years of autocratic power with
the certainty that something _must_ turn up; five years’ support from
the Curzons and Milners who’d never have seen the back-door of office
without him; five years’ support from the Monds and Greenwoods of the
liberal second-eleven; five years’ support from every man who’s lost a
son, every woman who can’t make both ends meet. You need only promise to
hang the kaiser and make Germany pay: England was worth a general
election.”
Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed
his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be
reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament
League in Princes Gardens and hatched _Peace_ out of a grimy office in
Bouverie Street.
“You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane.
“Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or
unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.”
As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition
before he had anything tangible to oppose.
“We must _shape_ the peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to
make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight
single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must
explain what’s expected of her.”