stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous
army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by
Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a
woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord
Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his
son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we
caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals,
but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom
they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was
likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation.
“Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is
greater than the liberal party.”
“In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not
be difficult. But you don’t _believe_ you’re going to make a new party
of any kind.”
Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression
of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of
Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain,
Gladstone and Asquith.
“If we can bring liberalism back to life,” he sighed, “a party will form
without our help: all we need is a rallying-point. I mean something
bigger than electoral reform and tariff squabbles, George: I mean a
liberal spirit in politics. At the beginning, I should have called this
a liberal war. When Wilson aimed at a peace that should leave nobody too
strong, nobody too much broken, I called that a liberal spirit. I wrote
to you about the glacial age of materialism, because a liberal spirit is
the only thing that can melt it. Every individual, every country will
fight for its own hand: it’s instinctive, like food-hoarding in 1914.
Does Lucien care if Russia’s starving? Does van Oss care if England’s
crippled with debt? Does any one care if the majority get less than the
best out of life? Devil take the hindmost! That’s the spirit we have to
fight.”
“But can it be done with a sixpenny review?,” I asked.
5
When our other guests had left us, Bertrand, Barbara and I set ourselves
to collect our headquarters staff.
“Old men,” boomed my uncle oracularly, “make wars; and young men fight
them. We must be surrounded by the young men.”
He then sat back, in the attitude which had become characteristic of him
since his stroke, with his hairy, gnarled hands clasped over the ivory
knob of his stick. I saw Barbara’s dark eyes shining as she hurried
indoors and returned to the verandah with a pencil and paper. In her
absence, Bertrand sought to seduce me by describing my room at the
office and hinting at the furniture which he proposed to transfer from
Princes Gardens. He resented my criticism that we were setting out to
convert the world with six dubious Sheraton chairs and less than six
more than dubious phrases; but, as we drafted our programme, I became
ever more gloomily convinced that we were losing sight of the essentials
in a wanton outburst of ornamentation. My excellent and unpractical
colleagues agreed that we could have a delicious meal sent in from the
Greyfriars Tavern for the editorial dinners; Barbara fought gamely for a
weekly cartoon; Bertrand informed us, with an air of originality, that
the youth of the nation were the trustees of posterity; and no one said
a word about our gospel or our prophets.
“All the conditions are new,” my uncle reminded me at short intervals.
“We need new men, new methods. A new spirit . . .”
And, while he coined phrases and Barbara designed our front page, I
thought over the young men whom I had met when I was working at the
Admiralty. Spence-Atkins and Jefferson Wright were still on Hornbeck’s
“live register” of unemployed; and I invited them to take charge of our
foreign policy and economics. That their names were unknown seemed a
recommendation to Bertrand, who exclaimed in high glee:
“New men! To catch the other new men!”
On that, I presented him with a cynical jack-of-all-trades whom Hornbeck
had engaged for his experience in the deeper waters of undetected
roguery. I have no proof that Triskett’s hands were soiled, though a man
whose friends included the scamps of every race and country must have
lived under constant temptation to blackmail. I did not propose to give
him free scope in what he wrote; but I thought that his curious
information might sometimes illuminate an obscure motive.
“A new man to catch the other new men,” Bertrand repeated.
“A thief to catch a thief,” I answered; “but, if it’s youth you want,
these men are all under thirty-five.”
The average was reduced further when, at Barbara’s suggestion, I invited
a novelist of thirty, a poet of twenty-five and a composer of nineteen
to take our artistic pages under their protection. They were all, she
told me, touched with genius. I was also becoming reckless.
“And now,” said Bertrand, “can you set them to work in three months’
time? You’ll want that to get in touch with new conditions. You must
study life in the marketplace, George. Mass-feeling. The great movement
of men. . . . We’ll have our first editorial dinner somewhere about the
end of March.”
“I should have it,” I suggested, “on the first of April.”
When my uncle returned a few weeks later, we returned with him; and,
while Barbara made our house ready for party-meetings and drawing-room
conclaves, I carried the dubious Sheraton chairs to Fetter Lane and
passed from the Eclectic Club to my uncle’s study in Princes Gardens, in
leisurely pursuit of the great movement of men.
I doubt if I have at any time felt more out of my element. I could
understand O’Rane’s contention that, for all they won from civilization,
the vast majority of mankind would be no worse off by taking to the
hills and woods as bandits. I was prepared to work quite reasonably hard
for my rooted faith that, if this vast majority was to be saved, it must
be saved by its own efforts. I could sympathize with the proselytes to
the League of Nations, though I placed no reliance in a league that did
not make disarmament its first condition of membership. What I wholly
failed to grasp was my uncle’s objective in taking an expensive office,
exhuming our old manager from his retirement and entering the name of
our paper once more at Stationer’s Hall.
London had never, in all my experience, been so little interested in
politics.
“What’s been happening?,” Sam Dainton echoed when I took Barbara to dine
with his parents. “Well, I’ve awarded myself the order of the
bowler-hat; and I had the hell of a time in Paris after I left you; and
now I’m thinking how I can make a bit of money.”
“Same here,” added John Gaymer. “If you come across anything, George
. . .”
“Oh, the family first,” Laurence interrupted. “_Dear_ Cousin George
. . .”
The conversation at most dinner-parties in these weeks seemed to run on
ways and means. Seizing on the jargon of the times at a moment when
every one else was abandoning it, Lady Dainton described herself
facetiously as “one of the new poor” and denounced every more fortunate
neighbour as a “profiteer”, though I could not see that her novel
poverty compelled her to retrenchment nor that her scorn for profiteers
prevented Sir Roger’s trying to sell Crowley Court, at three times what
he gave for it, to one of “the new rich”. In place of retrenchment I
found a bewildering blend of ingenuity, industry and blackmail on the
part of those who insisted on a life of pleasure and could find no one
to finance it for them. Day after day, Barbara was dragged to new shops,
where her friends sold her hats at exorbitant prices. Other friends
offered to decorate our house. Others, again, begged me to open a
“social” column in _Peace_ and to put them in charge of it.
“You can’t expect people to take much interest in public affairs,” Lady
Dainton said to me at this first dinner. “There are _so_ many other
things! These children”—she looked benevolently round the table at the
girls she had collected for the approval of her necessitous son—“they
don’t know what society _was_ before the war. They’ve none of them even
been presented, so you can imagine the flutter they’re in. Their first
season!”
“I shouldn’t have thought any one had the money to make much of a
season,” I objected, with a cast back to her late confession of
universal ruin.
“The war has only transferred it from one pocket to another,” she
assured me.
This dark saying was made plain in these first unsettled days before the
rebirth of our paper, when I drifted about London, analysing the
atmosphere of the armistice. Less diplomatically, Lady Dainton might
have said that, if the natives had too little money, the foreigners had
too much; and, without a trace of diplomacy, a number of my
acquaintances seemed to be coaxing it back from the new pockets to the
old. With my own ears I heard the Duchess of Ross demanding a list of
the Americans she could advantageously invite to her house. I listened
with amusement as Clifford van Oss tried to explain politely that the
people on whom she fawned were not received in New York. And I watched
Sir Adolf Erckmann being made a test case for the date at which a
wealthy man with a German name could be received by his less wealthy
friends.
“The great movement of men isn’t carrying me anywhere in particular,” I
confessed to Bertrand as the day of our first issue drew near. “I’ve met
a number of spongers, lately, and a greater number of snobs. Which are
the more to be pitied . . .”
“That’s only a phase,” my uncle answered. “London’s only a part of
England; these people are only a part of London. While you were a boy,
you must have seen the Rand Jews agonizing to fill their houses; and you
saw the ‘new poor’ of the Harcourt death duties taking all they could
get.”
“And we saw the result in the last years before the war,” I said, as Sir
Adolf Erckmann shambled out of earshot. Could we give rein to our racial
prejudices, I never knew whether I would sooner lynch him or the girls,
like Sonia Dainton, who in those days had endured his odious
familiarities for the sake of a string-quartet, a champagne supper and a
free drive home in an Erckmann car. “A whole generation grew up in the
belief that man had a natural right to be amused at some one else’s
expense.”
“You’d have found the same thing in Rome and Nineveh,” said Bertrand.
“Whenever a conspicuous social position is divorced from the means to
keep it up . . . _That’s_ not a thing to notice. I told you to study the
movement of men because one class is being squeezed out of existence. It
may last my time, but it won’t last yours. It was never a big class, but
in some ways it was the best. Now the sons have been killed; and the
parents are crippled with taxation. Who’s coming to take their place,
George? That’s the riddle for boys like you; and it’s to the newcomers
we must appeal. . . . Is everything ready for our first number?”
“As ready as it can be,” I answered, “without a principle, a policy or
even a catchword.”
When I went to Fetter Lane for the ceremony of ordering the machinists
to print off, I was glad to see that my colleagues shewed no lack of
enthusiasm. Headed by Bertrand, we marched to the Clock Tower Press and
stood in a half-circle till he should give the sign. Martin Luther,
printing his own bibles, could hardly have been more impressive; and, as
we marched back to toast Bertrand in tepid champagne, the day seemed
pregnant with fate.
“All the same,” I said, as we dispersed, “you’ve none of you suggested a
single reason why any one should want to buy this paper. People are
simply not thinking of politics.”
“They will, when they come out of their fool’s paradise,” answered
Bertrand.
With a prediction so vague I could not contend. Reconstruction, of which
I had heard so much in the last years of the war, appeared to stop short
when private lives and fortunes had been reconstructed. Employment was
good; money was plentiful; trade was booming; and, after we had spent
five million pounds a day without suffering for it, after we had found
work for every one at his own price, it was not wonderful if the laws of
political economy seemed to have been suspended. My brother-in-law
Gervaise was but one of many whom I settled on the permanent wage-sheet
of the country; during the next few days I was to help Sam Dainton into
an engineering firm at Hartlepool and to be told that the directors
could accommodate as many more of the same kind as I chose to send.
It was too good to be true; it was too good to last; but, while it
lasted, I felt we could expect little support for gloomy vaticinations
that were being falsified under our eyes.
CHAPTER FOUR
AFTER THE DELUGE
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
TENNYSON: _The Lotus-Eaters_.
1
At the end of March, as Bertrand had ordained, our first editorial
dinner took place. It was followed by a reception; and the two events
might have been read, by the optimistic, as an announcement that a new
force was at work in political and social London. Throughout the long
preparations, Barbara told us repeatedly that she had no personal
interest in our organization; but she could not have worked harder if
this had been a battle which she had to win or a lost battle which she
had to retrieve. For the first time since our marriage, she seemed fully
alive; the old love of ascendancy had returned; and I forgot the
futility of my uncle’s crusade in the happiness which it brought to my
wife.
“Well, I wasn’t going to spoil _your_ life, if I could help it,” she
laughed, when I complimented her on her new radiance. “Whatever kind of
mess I’ve made of my own . . .”
“It’s early days to be saying you’ve made a mess of your life,” I told
her.
These first weeks had been less formidable than I had expected. Every
one was too busy with his own concerns to recall the furious
tongue-wagging of the war; and the players in what Barbara counted her
tragedies had obligingly withdrawn from the stage. Jack Waring, the
first of her victims, crossed my path but once in three years: I met him
hurrying out of his tailor’s, and he stopped only long enough to say
that he was breeding blood-stock in the midlands and hardly ever came to
London. Eric Lane, a greater sufferer in a longer tragedy, had
disappeared; I was told that he was in London and I assumed that he must
be at work on a new play. Certainly we did not see him for several
months; and it was only in rare, startling moods of depression that
Barbara seemed to remember him.
“How much you feel depends on how much you put into life,” she
suggested, a little wistfully. “You can make a mess of your life when
you’re a child, if you go the right way about it. _You_ wouldn’t,
because you let other people live your life for you; but I always had to
make mine a great spiritual adventure, a thing to be squeezed dry, not
tasted! At the end I must feel that I’ve taken a wonderful journey and
that every moment of it has been marked by poignant emotions, vivid
experiences. The whole of myself must go into everything.”
“When you see a WET PAINT sign, you must make sure that the paint is
really wet?,” I asked.
“With both hands! Unlike my dear George, who avoids all paint because
some of it is sometimes not quite dry. We’re a strange and wonderful
combination, darling.”
“The actor and the audience.”
“You’re content just to look on?”
“Life is varied enough!,” I said. “And, though I don’t suppose any
period is dull when you know it, I believe our own period is the most
interesting in all history. I believe, too, that we’re in the most
interesting part of the most interesting period. Bertrand will tell you
that our day is over and that the future lies with the new men. I’m
watching.”
2
My uncle’s opinion was endorsed, perhaps naturally, by one who was a new
man himself and who introduced me at this time to some at least of the
other new men. Nearly four years have passed since I began to watch this
battle of old and new; I am watching still, and the battle is undecided.
It was on the day when our paper was reborn that our old
advertisement-manager called in Fetter Lane to prove that we were
working on wrong lines; and, as he knew enough of mob-psychology to make
a fortune out of it, I listened respectfully to the criticism and
studied the critic. Sir Philip Saltash had travelled far since the
August day when Bertrand paid off the staff—Mr. Saltash included—and
brought _Peace_ to an end by shivering the electros of the headings with
a mallet; he was to travel farther before he entered the House of Lords
as Lord Saltash of Bonde, publicity-expert and political wire-puller.
How much farther he will travel is another of the things I am watching.
“If _you_ think people will listen to the _stuff_ your old man’s put in
his _prospectus_,” he began with a force and directness that made me
feel the new men were bringing new manners with them, “you’re making the
mistake of your life. You may be right; every one else may be wrong
. . .”
As he paused with a shrug of contemptuous challenge, I reminded myself
that he was come to offer me publicity for _Peace_ and must therefore
prove that, without publicity, _Peace_ would wilt and die.
“My uncle feels,” I said, “that it’s bad policy to cure one
Alsace-Lorraine by setting up half-a-dozen others. It’s time _some_ one
made a protest against the last election.”
“Even if no one pays any attention to it? Mark you, I can _make_ people
listen,” he added, as he rolled an unlighted cigar from side to side of
his loose mouth; and I tried to recall how many million pounds Saltash
had advertised into war-loans and how many thousand men he had ordered,
from his ubiquitous hoardings, into the army. “That’s my job. _Has_
been, ever since I left you.”
“How would you make people listen to _us_?,” I asked.
Saltash caught up a copy of our first number and turned the pages with
loud slaps of an annihilating hand. I have forgotten his technical
proposals, though I remember that he kindled me with his cleverness the
while he was outraging me with his vulgarity. I have not, however,
forgotten his lyrical flights in describing the place of publicity in
public life. I had met “press-secretaries” and heard of “propaganda
sections” in government departments; I had suspected that certain
ministers were raised or disgraced at the bidding of certain
newspaper-proprietors; but I had not imagined that newspaper-proprietors
themselves struck or spared at the behest of men like Saltash, who in
their turn controlled the flow of information from Whitehall to Fleet
Street.
“It’s a question of spot-light,” Saltash explained; and I learned that,
when Dormer came to grief over food-rationing, it was Saltash’s artful
manipulation of the switches that saved him from public vengeance and
secured him his seat in the cabinet.
“I never _did_ think Dormer was to blame,” I happened to interpose.
“I never let you!,” cried Saltash. “Remember the Flying Corps scandal?
_I_ did that. And you soon forgot about Dormer. I told him from the
first he had only to lie quiet. . . . Later on . . .”
Later on, without prompting, I remembered Dormer’s reappearance.
Discovered by the caricaturists and taken to the heart of the public,
Dormer—with his vast chin and grotesque hat—became a music-hall hero.
“Our Willie” was acclaimed by the gallery with the loyal fervour
accorded in other days to “good old Joe”. The _Snap-Shot_ shewed him
pruning roses with his smiling wife in an “old-world garden” and playing
bumble-puppy with his apple-cheeked children. Finally, in the last days
of a united front against a common foe, his portrait was thrown on the
screen—after those of King Albert and General Joffre, Lord Kitchener
and Mr. Lloyd-George—as the man who had saved England from starvation.
The cost of Dormer’s apotheosis was one baronetcy and the promise of a
peerage when the more squeamish section of the government was better
used to the Saltash idea.
“Spot-light,” repeated the wizard. “People can’t look at more than one
thing at a time. Has it ever occurred to you why the old coalition went
and the new one came? The ginger-group were working that way from the
day Asquith carried conscription for them; they didn’t need him after
that, but the public wasn’t ready for a change. Well, it was my job to
_make_ the public ready. I concentrated opinion against certain men and
never left ’em alone; I concentrated in favour of others. The
Dardanelles. Mesopotamia. Shells. Food. You and I know that the new lot
were tarred with the same brush as the old; but we made the public think
they’d been on another planet when all these messes were made. The old
lot were too quiet; they never hit back.”
“There was a war on,” I reminded him.
“They would never have fallen if they’d shewn fight,” Saltash retorted.
“A man’s power in politics is what he makes others believe it to be.
‘This war is too big for ordinary folk,’ people were saying: ‘we want
supermen.’ Well, we said the new lot _were_ supermen. When there weren’t
enough to go round, we made so much din that office-sweepers seemed like
supermen. We restored confidence; and we frightened the Germans. Now,
you say you’re reviving the old rag and your slogan is to be ‘a
_lasting_ peace’. You’ll be called pro-Boche. You’ll be told you’re
letting the Hun off. I don’t despair, though. The first thing is to out
the present lot; and I can do that on departmental scandals alone. ’Got
all the papers. Then we must prepare a big peace-boost. . . . Lunch with
me and talk it over.”
Though I had nothing to discuss, I went with Saltash because Saltash
hypnotized me to come. All the vitality of young America radiated from
him, though he styled himself a Canadian; his features recalled semitic
South Russia, though he dissembled his love for the Jews; in the ten or
twelve years that I had known him I never detected a trace of breeding,
education or principle; and in the next two years I was never to see him
entirely sober. Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one
of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every
country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and
power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the
cheap press that came into existence when England was taught,
willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is
imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything
to gain and nothing to risk.
“_I_ trouble waters,” he explained thickly. “_Other_ fellers do fishing.
No personal axe t’ grind.”
After a champagne luncheon he talked to me of these others. If the war
unified the British Empire, it also brought to England a number of
adventurous spirits who had made existence unsafe for themselves in
their native dominions and whose claim to a hearing depended less on
their political wisdom than on the number of miles they had travelled to
reach Downing Street. The blatant harangues of Mr. Giles to indulgent
imperial conferences were received with so much respect that hysterical
women petitioned to have him included in the war-cabinet; a country with
population and wealth equal to the city of Glasgow ranked in our
councils as a great power.
“_I_ did that,” Saltash confided. “Overseas dominions. Young wolves
claiming place council-rock. People here _crawled_ to him. And the
government didn’t dare snub him.”
“So long,” I said, “as the prophet comes from another country, he has
full honour in ours.”
“He was a cut above some of them,” said Saltash defensively; and I was
told of one great public man who had dodged the dock in Australia to buy
papers in England, of another who operated in London because he was
threatened with a bullet in his brain if he ventured back to Winnipeg.
Though Saltash did not say so, I think they may have fished in the
waters which he troubled.
“The revenges of time!,” I said, as I stood up to go. “This is the
remittance-man come home to roost.”
“A party can’t exist without funds,” said Saltash, beckoning to our
waiter for a third liqueur. “Or without publicity.”