collect its funds and build up its organization at short notice, I was
not surprised that the rich men surrounding the coalition were more
numerous and less savoury than the sufficiently dubious candidates for
honours whom I had seen haunting the whips’ office during my active
political career. If I was to believe Saltash, however, London had
suddenly become a hunting-ground for the desperadoes of the empire.
These “new men” were unknown names when the war began; soon I heard of
them whenever a political crisis was being engineered. Their ability was
undoubted; their experience had been gained in rough schools; and their
resourcefulness admitted no limit. Supplying the impecunious with money
and the affluent with advice, they acquired knowledge and influence
which they used to acquire more money; and this in turn purchased them a
further power of unseen interference in the direction of our government.
That night, as I sat down to our inaugural dinner, I told Bertrand of my
host at luncheon and of his conversation.
“It’s no new thing,” said my uncle, who in these nights of doubt and
sorrow unmasked an almost irritating resolution to be jolly at all
costs. “The great international financiers have influenced governments
and been influenced by them since banks and governments began.”
Historically, that may have been true. The new thing, as Bertrand
himself might have said, was the character of the new men and the new
methods which they employed.
3
This dinner was to be my last frolic as an irresponsible spectator.
When, as editor and managing-director, I proposed the toast of
“_Peace_”, a vibration from my colleagues’ eagerness troubled my rigid
negations and stirred doubt in my bland assurance. _Was_ Bertrand’s
project so hare-brained as I had thought? I questioned myself in honest
uncertainty as I settled my tie and looked down on the double row of
expectant faces. The old man’s predictions at Cannes were fulfilled as
soon as the conference met and a vague parliament of man reformed as a
quarrelsome committee of ten; the clash between President Wilson’s
fourteen points and Mr. Lloyd-George’s election speeches rang out when
the committee of ten shrank to a camarilla of four; and, if we had ever
doubted the apathy of the British public, our doubt must have evaporated
day by day as the first House of Commons in the new glacial age sat with
hands folded and eyes set jealously on the position each member had
wrested from the war. Twice or thrice in these months a
vigilance-committee of sterner and more unbending new members sent
hectoring telegrams to keep their representatives up to the mark;
President Wilson once ordered his ship to get up steam; and the Duchess
of Ross dined out intermittently on M. Clemenceau’s latest epigram; but
it is substantially true to say that no one in England thought of the
peace-treaty until it was submitted for the approval of parliament.
In my speech I confined myself to congratulating Bertrand on his staff.
At the end, he hoisted himself slowly to his feet and indicated his own
part in our endeavour:
“You young men will have to do the work; but perhaps, from a long
experience, I may be able to advise you. No lasting peace can be founded
on a sense of grievance; and, though the heathen are raging furiously
now, they’ll outgrow that phase. Maybe it’s because I had to keep my
mouth shut during the war, maybe old age is making me more radical. This
is not a party organ, it never was; it was an expression of liberal
spirit, and that’s what it has to be again. We were called hard names
when war broke out; but we had the right vision. Labour still thinks
parochially; toryism still thinks imperially, which is the same thing;
radicalism must think internationally. These fierce local patriotisms
are an unconscionable time a-dying; but England is a bigger conception
than the heptarchy, Europe is a bigger conception than England, the
world is a bigger conception than Europe. We depend too much on our
neighbours to blow them out of existence every few years. That truth has
been vouchsafed to those of us who are at this table; we have to get it
accepted.”
I rang a bell; and we were handed early copies of our first number.
Every man turned avidly to his own contribution. Then Barbara sent for
me to help her receive our guests.
This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a
review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head
in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep
fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder,
miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark
tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in
the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge
sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife;
and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand.
As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after
another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway
supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed:
“A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the
fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years
before you were born.”
As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only
an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually
disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty
colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet
younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their
lips; _débutantes_ of a generation after mine pressed under the elbows
of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed
trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an
actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I
uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I
remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to
innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I
remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to
charm back into their fold.
“I didn’t know there were so many people in the _world_!,” she exclaimed
in one of the few brief lulls.
Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed:
“It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.”
As the brief lull ended, my thoughts went back to the morning of
Armistice Day when I paused on my way home from the Admiralty to reckon
how many of my own generation had survived the war. As Robson bent,
straightened himself and turned at the stair-head, I expected at every
moment to hear him calling out “Captain Dainton” or “Lord Loring” or
“Mr. Arden”; had I shut my eyes to their absence, I could have fancied
that we were living in 1914. Now, as then, Crawleigh was so much
engrossed in a political altercation with Bertrand that he walked
stormily into the drawing-room without noticing us; Sam Dainton trotted
up grinning—as usual—and whispering scandal into Violet Loring’s
reluctant ear; Sir Roger, waiting uneasily for his wife, was
mistaken—as usual—for a hired waiter and urged to tell John Gaymer
where he could get his usual drink.
“The last time I did this sort of thing was at my coming-of-age ball,”
Barbara murmured.
“Which you gave for yourself because no one would give it for you?”
“Well, I hated father’s friends; and he hated mine,” she laughed.
“Besides, I’d been in so many scrapes that I _had_ to see whether people
would continue to know me.”
“They all came,” I said.
“Except one. That was the time when Jack Waring proposed to me one day
and quarrelled with me the next,” she explained lightly. “Why he wanted
to marry me when he disapproved of everything I did . . . I invited him
specially.” . . .
“And he wouldn’t come?”
“No. Apparently . . . Eric isn’t coming . . . to-night.”
The announcement fell so tranquilly, it was so long since we had
mentioned Eric Lane’s name that I doubted for a moment if I had heard
her aright.
“You . . . invited him?,” I asked.
“Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring
him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was
painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly
as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he
won’t be trampled on,” she whispered.
I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which
Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be
quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life
returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been
stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much
she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection?
I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful
jealousy.
“You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of
heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one
who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people
with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond
calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate,
among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct
heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t
know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.”
“The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance.
Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming
conscious of their strength.”
As I looked down the stairs, Crawleigh and Bertrand were finishing their
altercation. I heard Raymond telling them that it was time for old men
to be in bed; and the phrase reminded me of my meeting with Saltash. In
every sense of the term, they were old men, no longer able to hold their
own against the young vigour of Saltash’s recruits; in any struggle of
class with class, the material ammunition had passed from their hands.
Their prestige was weakening before the pressure of those who excelled
them in everything but length of tradition; and that tradition was now
being cut short.
“I suppose you can call yourself a radical and still believe in the
value of a good strain in breeding,” I said. “That hard-worked creature
‘the historian of the future’ will _have_ to say, I suppose, that the
people of this country carried a heavier burden than any other in the
war? I _think_ he’ll say that, of all our people, those who carried the
heaviest burden were the leaders. In fighting, in directing, in paying
. . . And in being killed: that’s why there are so few of them here
to-night. We shall be the poorer if we lose that strain.”
“We’ll hope there are still enough of them left to carry it on,” said
O’Rane.
“The next few years will be a race; there’ll be a fight against time, to
spread the tradition before the people who maintain it are swallowed
up.”
We talked at random until Sonia came to collect him for another party.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring Eric,” I heard him say to Barbara on
leaving. “Some friend of his had a first night; and he’d promised to
look in.”
“Did he say if he was coming on?,” asked Barbara.
“I should think it depends on the time. There was some talk about a
supper-party afterwards.”
“Then I don’t suppose he will,” she answered with the composure of
complete indifference. “Good-night, David. Good-night, Sonia.”
When we were by ourselves, I sent the servants to bed; and we sat for
half-an-hour discussing the party.
“Half-past one,” she sighed at last. “Nobody _can_ be coming now.”
“If any one does,” I said, “he’ll find an excellent doorstep to sit on.
Come to bed, Babs.”
“I must write one letter first. You go on and turn out the lights. If
you see my torch, you might put it on the hall-table.”
I chose a book and went to my room. Only when I was in bed did I
discover that I had brought the wrong book; and, on going downstairs
again, I saw the lights in the hall blazing. Then, as I reached the
drawing-room, I caught sight of Barbara, seated in a high-backed chair
at the stair-head. At first I thought she was asleep; then I saw that
she was staring through the hall to the front door.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked.
“He _can’t_ be coming now,” she answered.
“Who? Eric?”
My earlier whisperings of jealousy were silenced by her utter
forlornness. I did not care whether her thoughts and affection and heart
and soul were his, so long as I could take the look of pain out of her
eyes. I wanted to tell her that I understood and was sorry for her; but
the name had roused her, and she stood up with languid dignity:
“Yes.” . . . She was once again the alert and vigilant hostess of an
hour before. “I thought it would look so terribly rude if he came here
and found no one to receive him. After I’d specially asked him, too,”
she added on a higher note. Then her self-possession returned to her.
“It’s two o’clock. As he hasn’t come now, I suppose . . . he’s not
coming . . . at all.” . . .
4
If “the historian of the future”, whom I have already invoked, have the
microscopic vision and the titanic industry with which his predecessors
credit him, I believe he must find space for a footnote, in brilliant,
to describe our share in forming a critical opposition during the last
four months of the armistice. In the days immediately following the 1918
election, the government had hardly an enemy; in the months after the
peace-treaty was signed, it had hardly a friend. Even before the
_Economic Consequences of the Peace_, even before the mutual
vituperation of the allies, an independent mood of questioning and doubt
succeeded to the hysterical assertions and demands of the mad election.
How far we fostered that mood by means of open propaganda and private
suggestion, how far we made articulate a frame of mind that was already
struggling to express itself, I cannot say; but that the mood became
contagious cannot be challenged. In these first spring days, Barbara’s
circumspect cousin, Lord John Carstairs, avoided our house for fear of
finding himself described as a ‘defeatist’, a friend of the enemy, a
creature of Caillaux or a hireling of Stinnes. By the end of the summer,
an alert opportunist such as Sir Rupert Foreditch sought publicity in
the columns of _Peace_ or opened his campaign by an attack on Seymour
Street because our paper was frank and fearless and because “the
Oakleigh gang”, as we were unflatteringly called, was too important and,
in time, too numerous to be ignored.
On the morrow of the inaugural dinner, Bertrand hunted me out of doors
to study “the great movement of men”, while he plotted with Barbara new
days of keeping me on the run. No reference was made to our pitiful
encounter at the stair-head; but I left a note to say that she was not
to be called, and, when I carried in her breakfast, she looked up—with
the eloquent silence of a dog—to thank me for understanding and to shew
that she too understood. At once, after that, she began to discuss the
party of the night before.
I am not going to pretend that my work for the next three years, though
it left me without an hour, a house or a wife to call my own, was void
of interest: duty compelled me to meet every one, from labour-leaders to
cabinet ministers and from editors to bishops, who might be thought to
influence action or opinion by a hair’s breadth; I had to read the new
books and absorb a mass of papers; I explored different parts of the
country to find what different classes were saying or thinking; and a
New York reporter could not have been quicker to lay hands on the
foreign bankers and diplomats who passed through London. Two or three
dinner-parties were given in each week to these unofficial missionaries;
I met my uncle daily at the Eclectic Club to pool our discoveries in
collective psychology; and on Wednesday nights the staff of _Peace_
assembled on their spurious Sheraton chairs and helped to hammer out a
new message to mankind.
If from time to time I harboured unworthy projects for desertion, my
weakness of purpose must be attributed to natural indolence and perhaps
justifiable impatience. Our progress seemed so lamentably slow; our aims
were so exasperatingly vague! Much as I valued Bertrand’s long
experience, greatly as I admired his flashes of intuition, I dreaded his
descents on Fetter Lane in these first discouraging months. From Sir
Philip Saltash or from the spirit of the age he had caught an itch for
supermen; and I went about my work with a shame-faced consciousness of
inadequacy while my uncle clasped his hands over his stick and boomed
oracularly of novel tendencies and strange expedients.
“We’re becoming precious,” he grunted unamiably at our second number.
“Average opinion; the common touch: you mustn’t neglect that, George. If
you take your friend Dainton as a barometer . . .”
And I was incontinently pricked into the least comfortable of my clubs,
where I tested average feelings as they were represented in the changing
utterances of one well-meaning and uniquely stupid legislator. The first
experiment was made at a time when the successful candidates of the
December election were uneasily hoping to be saved by the firmness and
idealism of President Wilson from the consequences of their less
temperate speeches.
“‘Wilson _le bienvenu_’,” Dainton murmured approvingly, as he laid down
a welcoming number of _Punch_.
A few weeks later, I found the French press excitedly proclaiming that
Germany was being let off too easily. Sir John Woburn demanded with all
the polyphonic energy of the Press Combine why America should be allowed
to deprive the allies of their just reparations; and Dainton assured me
profoundly that the task of winning the war was child’s play compared
with that of winning the peace.
“Damned obstinate fellow, Wilson,” he grumbled. “If he thinks we’re
going to let him throw away all that our gallant boys fought for, he’ll
have a rude awakening.”
Later still, he ceased to speak of the president altogether. Remembering
Limehouse, he could not give implicit trust to the prime minister; but
the gossip that floated from Paris to London convinced him that M.
Clemenceau was the only statesman in Europe and he was content to leave
himself in the hands of a man whose rare, sardonic utterances embodied
the ferocity which Dainton had expressed so much less concisely in his
election speeches. Members of parliament, he told me, had duties nearer
home. Labour menaces were more important than quibbles about frontiers:
coal strikes and railway strikes, both leading through nationalization
and civil war to ruin and the disruption of the empire, were the proper
study of political mankind. Sir Roger no longer spoke of the British
working-man as one of “our gallant boys”; and I was invited to penetrate
the disguise that sheltered a Russian communist. Before I could do
justice to this conception, he had found new duties even nearer to the
hand of a patriot. “Bolshevism” was bad, but it soon ceased, in
Dainton’s eyes, to be quite so bad as “profiteering”; and neither, by
the middle of the summer, was so exasperating nor so tenacious of life
as Irish irreconcilability.
“If I could hold the wretched country under the sea for five minutes!,”
he exploded.
Fed on political catch-words and instructed by safe cartoons, Sir Roger
Dainton, coalition-unionist member for the Crowley Division of
Hampshire, would explain Ireland on alternate days by reference to the
incurable dourness of the north and the ineradicable savagery of the
south. He was the ‘pendulum voter’, the representative of all that is
unstable, ill-informed and irresponsible in public life. For that I was
prepared; for that Bertrand had sent me to study him. I was not
prepared, however, to be accepted as a disciple and an ally. Dining
weekly in Rutland Gate, I wondered whether the little man had ever
before found any one who would listen to him: obviously, pathetically,
he looked forward to our “good pow-wows”; and, when he saw me to the
door and gave me a fresh cigar, still more when he said, “Then, next
Tuesday as usual?”, I felt that I was being sent back to school with a
sovereign in my hand and being invited to Crowley for my next leave-out
day. My embarrassment was increased by a sense of black ingratitude. Sir
Roger always made these meetings “an occasion within the meaning of the
act”, as he called it, and opened his best champagne for me. When
Barbara deserted me on the plea that we wanted to talk business and she
would be in the way, Dainton redoubled his hospitality and became
increasingly confused in speech. As I watched the clock, I would ask
myself how such a man was admitted to the board of a company or
tolerated in parliament; then, in a flash of revelation, I saw him as
the type of all the class on which Sir Philip Saltash exercised the
wiles of his publicity. Saltash was a logical inference from Dainton.
“Now you see why I told you to study him,” Bertrand chuckled, when I
announced that I would resign my editorship before I submitted to
another spell of Dainton’s political conversation.
In despair, I asked how our little office in Fetter Lane was to overtake
and undo the work of Saltash and his forebears of the popular press. To
this, however, my uncle had no answer.
Though he continued to speak of us as a chosen people, our mission of
enlightenment was established on a paying basis by the success of our
literary editors, who made of _Peace_ the most feared and least loved
review in London. As Hancock confined his criticism to novels and
Mattrick to poetry, they could not be charged with rolling their own
logs or obstructing a rival, though I noticed that Mattrick’s sweeping
condemnations stopped short of “Mr. Hancock’s true lyrical genius” and
Hancock’s devastating onslaughts on modern fiction made an exception in
favour of Mr. Mattrick. My conscience became unquiet when books were
sent out for review and I heard Hancock choosing critics who could be
trusted to “sit on this sort of rot”; but, as the “rot” was usually
written by men who seemed to be making a substantial income, I hoped
that they could afford an occasional attack and console themselves with
the knowledge that, in the Penmen’s Club, fifty yards away, a league of
disgruntled novelists and poets was plotting the destruction of “the
Hancock-Mattrick gang”.
“All the same,” Bertrand expostulated after a month or two, “we’re not
running this paper so that one ill-tempered young gentleman can read
what another ill-tempered young gentleman has said about a book he
hasn’t troubled to finish. We’re not in touch yet with opinion. You
don’t mix with enough people, George: it’s all the office, or the club,
or Barbara’s parties.”
“But where am I to find your new men?,” I asked. “You say politics are
no longer manufactured over a week-end party at Woburn. The political
clubs only harbour your Tapers and Tadpoles. Where do men like Saltash
and Wister and Foreditch do their work?”
“They take their pleasure at the Turf and Stage,” Bertrand answered
sourly.
“I’m dining there with the O’Ranes to-night,” I said, as we began to
walk home.
“Then you’ll probably meet them. New men, new meeting-places.” My uncle
laughed mirthlessly. “If Pam or Johnnie Russell . . . It’s the rising
tide of democracy. Agricultural depression and death duties have slowly
strangled the landed classes; their social influence is tottering.
Before the war, Asquith was almost the only prime minister, bar Dizzy,
who wasn’t drawn from them; but the prime ministers of the future will
come from the middle class . . . till they come from labour. And the
stage changes with the actors,” he continued in a deep rumble that
carried from the one side of Fleet Street to the other. “_Circumspice!_
When the masses had been taught to read, Newnes gave them _Tit-Bits_;
Pearson and Harmsworth followed with the cheap daily press; headlines
took the place of news and arguments. The focus shifts to the newspaper
office.”
We were passing a flamboyant, white-and-gold building described as a
“Super Electric Palace de Luxe”; and I asked Bertrand if he thought
pictures were coming to take the place of headlines.