peace-treaty which was to make an end of war; and, but for that, I
should have handed Bertrand my resignation and taken Barbara abroad.
Until we saw the terms, however, we could not tell how far his gloomy
predictions at Cannes would be fulfilled nor how far any one could undo
the mischief that was reported from Paris. If we could believe a quarter
of all we heard, the butchery for which Sanguszko and Boscarelli
clamoured in Lucien’s verandah-parliament was taking place in one
country after another; as I warned Saltash, three discontented
Alsace-Lorraines were being created for one that was pacified; and the
mood of the December election seemed to return as the public realized
the helplessness of the defeated enemy. Outside the now notorious
“Oakleigh gang” I found few to admit that any country but Germany had
been responsible for the war; and on that foundation each man erected
his own standard of retribution. My father-in-law went the length of
collecting a party at the Eclectic Club to reason with me and to check
the wrong-headed doctrines that poured forth, week after week, from
Fetter Lane.
“You really seem to live in a world of your own,” he explained wearily.
“_I_ don’t hope to convince you; but, if you take a poll of your
friends, on a question like indemnities . . .”
Before he had time to finish or I to answer, John Carstairs put his own
case with alluring brevity:
“The Boche made the war. The Boche must pay for it.”
“What would have happened to our colonies if we’d lost?,” pursued
Crawleigh, who seemed to regard the empire as a dumping-ground for the
viceregally-inclined members of his family. German West Africa was below
his dignity, but he had three sons. “These people mustn’t complain if
they’re served in the same way.”
I recalled and quoted Bertrand’s dictum that no lasting peace could be
established on a sense of grievance.
“I feel no tenderness towards Germany,” I said, “but aren’t we making
another war inevitable?”
“You will make it inevitable,” said Mr. Justice Maitland, “if you let
the last war go unpunished. No one will deny that the Germans broke a
treaty, that they robbed, tortured, violated and murdered, not in the
heat of fighting but as part of a terrorizing campaign ordered from
headquarters. If acts like these go unpunished, every nation will know
that it can take ‘frightfulness’ as its starting-point. Rape and
mutilation will become sanctified usages of war. There will be a
precedent.”
“That’s unanswerable,” I told the judge. “But, if this war proves
anything, it proves that war doesn’t pay. I want to make that the great
contribution of this war to history. If we impose a peace so unendurable
that even war is no worse . . .”
Maitland interrupted me with a smiling head-shake:
“I have to try murderers in the course of my duties. Their state would
be no better than that of their victims, if vendettas were permitted.
You might say truly enough that murder doesn’t pay. I should be sorry to
see the death-penalty abolished on that reasoning.”
“If you could hang every German,” I said, as I left to dress for the
opera, “I might accept your argument. As it is, a punitive peace will
set them thinking of revenge; and, the moment they’re strong enough,
they’ll take it.”
“A good reason for keeping them weak,” said Carstairs, “which—quite
rightly—is all Clemenceau cares about.”
I might have multiplied, almost to infinity, the number of similar
opinions, held by the most dissimilar people. I heard them at the club,
I was inundated by them at my office and I wrestled with them at
Barbara’s parties.
“I wonder whether Bertrand thinks we’re making any headway?,” I asked
that night at dinner, after venting my despondency on my wife.
I am not sure whether she heard me; her only answer was to look at her
watch and to ask which opera was being played.
“_Louise?_” she repeated. “Then we can miss the first two acts. I
suppose you wouldn’t care to go alone?”
“Aren’t you feeling up to it?,” I asked.
Barbara turned her back on me and busied herself with the wad of her
cigarette-holder:
“Oh, I don’t know! Yes, I’m all right! And, anyway, I shan’t do any good
. . . I don’t know what I’m talking about!,” she cried with sudden loss
of control. “I’m going to lie down till we start.”
“I’ll take you up,” I said.
“No!,” she answered, with what I can only call a suppressed scream.
Her look and tone took me aback as though she had struck me in the face.
For some weeks I had fancied that her nerves were disordered; but, as I
finished my cigar in solitude, I felt that this night marked a subtle
change in my relations with her. To this day I cannot tell when it
began. We had been married little more than a year; before that, for ten
years, we had been excellent friends. At first I believe she told me
every thought in her heart; and there were times when I wished for both
our sakes that she would think less and say less about what could not be
mended. As though I had put my wish into words, her manner changed at
the armistice: we were to make a new start, she was to forget her love
for Eric Lane; and, after that, an onlooker would have said that she
belonged to me, soul and body. She and I alone knew that, in some way,
we were becoming strangers. Though she was bored with Cannes after the
first week, she never told me; she might be bored with the life of a
political hostess, but loyalty or lack of confidence kept her silent.
She would not admit that she was ill or unhappy; but something now
tortured her beyond bearing.
And I was afraid to ask her. In all that touched her soul, I was a
stranger, an amateur and a bungler. Something of this must have revealed
itself in my expression, for on her return to the dining-room she put
her arms round my neck and told me not to look so worried.
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“But I swear to you I’ve never felt better in my life! Come on; or we
shall miss the only act worth hearing!”
I followed her, more worried than ever. If I said nothing, I should seem
callous; if I said anything, I might inflame her misery. I knew her too
little for any idea what she wanted of me; and she trusted me too little
to help by a hint. At this rate, she would become every day more
uncommunicative; and each unanswered appeal for understanding would
separate her farther from me.
“If _ever_ there’s anything the matter,” I said, as we got into the car,
“I hope you’ll tell me, Babs.”
“Everything’s _perfect_,” she answered. “A darling house, a darling
husband.” . . . Her voice suddenly lost its false ring of assurance.
“No, the fault’s in _me_ somewhere. There’s something missing. Don’t
let’s talk about it.”
At the unexpected quaver, I caught her fingers in mine; and she brushed
away a tear with the back of my hand. Though no more was said, I felt
that something more ought to have been said and that I was a moral
coward for not saying it. In the silence and darkness of the car, I
wondered whether Barbara was unhappy because she had been given no sign
that she was to bear children. For all I knew, she did not want them or
was afraid; for all I knew, she wanted them and could not bear them and
was afraid to tell me. And we were both afraid to confess our fear.
3
When we reached the opera-house, the second act was over; and, on the
way to our box, we ran the gauntlet of a dozen friends, who invited us
to meals, and of a hundred staring strangers, who turned to their
neighbours and whispered: “There’s Lady Barbara!” with the mingled
triumph and awe which the English display when they recognize any idol
of the illustrated papers.
“One gets used to anything, even the manners of the well-bred,” I
murmured, as we struggled towards the stairs.
“If any one else asks us to lunch, I shall say we’ve given up
eating. . . . Oh, I _must_ speak to Marion! You go on.”
I ploughed slowly into an open space by the entrance to the pit-tier
boxes, then came to an involuntary standstill. Face to face, too near
for either of us to escape, I found Eric Lane smoking a cigarette and
looking over my shoulder to the place where Barbara was talking to Mrs.
Shelley. Unless she had already seen him and was lingering behind till I
had made myself a screen, they must meet in another moment. Eric never
had much colour to lose, but even his lips now seemed bloodless. When
our eyes met, I could not have said which was the more uncomfortable. I
enquired after his father, I believe; and he asked me, as he had been in
Japan at the time of our wedding, to accept his belated good wishes now.
“When are we to have another play?,” I asked.
“This autumn, I hope,” he answered.
“Good for that. Well, Eric, I little thought in the old Phoenix Club
days that we were entertaining a genius unawares.”
“They were g-good days,” he sighed.
Then there was a pause; and the cordiality which old habit had brought
to life wilted. As he glanced in Barbara’s direction, I fancy he was
charging her with making our friendship impossible; this second sight of
her seemed to incapacitate him; and we stood stockishly silent. When she
joined us, there was, indeed, a smile on either side, a high and rather
breathless “Oh, how do you do?” Then we hurried to our box; and Eric
strolled across the hall. His hand was shaking as he tried to relight
his cigarette; and the hollow eyes and cadaverous cheeks seemed ten
years older for the ten seconds’ encounter.
Was it a presentiment of this meeting that had unnerved Barbara? I had
no time to speak before we were surrounded by a new throng. It was her
first appearance at Covent Garden; and from the boxes and stalls we had
opera-glasses trained upon us until I seemed to be looking at a tank of
lobsters; a queue formed outside our door and we were flattened against
the side of the box. The acclamation was not confined within a ring of
our friends: I felt the atmosphere of the whole house warming in the
greatest tribute to personality that I have ever seen.
“I watched you coming in to-night,” Dr. Gaisford told her at the end.
“It was like the sun breaking through. . . . How are you, my dear child?
As you don’t come to see me professionally, I hope that means you’re
well and happy?”
“Everything’s _perfect_,” Barbara cried, with a conviction that had been
lacking when she used the same words earlier. As we settled ourselves in
the car, she added joyously: “How sweet every one is! Marion wants us to
choose a night for dining with her next week. And I’ve committed you to
the Pinto de Vasconcellos the week after. And Bobbie Pentyre wants us to
go to Croxton one week-end. Can you remember all that? And will you
come?”
“Anywhere you like,” I promised. “You seem to have had rather a success
to-night, Babs.”
“It’s a good world! I’ve got back my grip on life. . . . I feel _free_,”
she went on with a note of wonder; and her hand stole shyly into mine as
though we were composing a quarrel: “George dear, I’m sorry to have been
unsatisfactory, sorry to have worried you. I promised on Armistice Day
that I wouldn’t speak of certain people. You can’t help thinking of
them, but since to-night I’m not . . . haunted. _Seeing_ Eric has broken
the spell. . . . I can meet him now. I’m going to. Madame Pinto said he
was coming to her party.”
Remembering Eric’s look of anguish when he caught sight of Barbara, I
felt that the greatest kindness she could shew him would be to prevent
further meetings. It was folly, I thought, for her to invite him to our
first reception, it was madness to expect that he would come; and, if I
said nothing at the time, it was for fear she would imagine that I was
jealous.
“Make things as easy as you can for him,” I recommended.
“We can give him the opportunity of being friends again.”
“And don’t be hurt if he doesn’t take it. Men of that kind, imaginative
and highly-strung . . . In his way, he is a bit of a genius.” . . .
“I gave him that,” she murmured with a pride which I thought ill-timed.
“He had only talent before.”
To judge by appearances, Eric had paid dearly for his goddess’ kiss.
“They feel things more intensely,” I continued, “than dull,
matter-of-fact people like me.”
Barbara made no answer for several minutes; then she looked straight
ahead and asked:
“Wouldn’t you feel it as much if you lost me?”
“I should feel it more than anything in the world.”
“It’s broken Eric. He’ll never be mended. But it wouldn’t break you?”
Faint though the challenge was, I fancied, for the first time in my
life, that Barbara was trying to drag me into a ‘scene’.
“We won’t talk about it,” I said.
“I don’t think anything would break you. And you may take that how you
like.”
The words may have been her tribute to flint-like resolution or her
criticism of wooden insensibility. The way that I decided to take them
was in silence. Barbara hid her face in the great nosegay of carnations
which she always carried, then held them out, like an impulsive child,
for me to smell. As she walked, slender, tall and radiant, into the
house, I felt that this was the day which I had waited fourteen months
to see dawning.
“Yes, I had quite a success,” she murmured to her reflection, when we
paused in front of a mirror halfway up the stairs. “You seem surprised,
George.”
“I don’t know how any one could hope to resist you,” I said. “_I_ never
can.”
The South American dinner to which Barbara had committed me marked our
grudging surrender to a lady whose hospitality was rapidly breaking the
_morale_ of London. Madame Pinto de Vasconcellos, if her ambitions had
been examined before the judgement-seat, must have confessed a
resolution to force free wine, food and tobacco on a larger number of
victims than had fallen to any other Brazilian. Setting out with an
introduction to the Duchess of Ross and a system of snowball
terrorization for every one else, she secured B for her parties by
playing on his fear of hurting A’s feelings.
“She is a stranger to London,” the duchess explained to Lady Crawleigh
in a tone that hid natural exultation under less natural pity. “I should
like to shew her a little hospitality.”
Lady Crawleigh had been caught too often in similar traps to forget
that, while Herrig Castle and Ross House remained unlet, no one was
secure; but, like every one else, she tried to shelter herself behind a
substitute. Madame Pinto, she told Barbara, had heard so much of her
“beautiful daughter”; it would be only a kindness to accept one of her
many invitations.
When I pointed out that the whole English-speaking world had heard so
much of Barbara, my mother-in-law rejoined wistfully that it was a small
thing to ask, that she did not ask much and that she would not have
asked now if she had imagined we should make difficulties. Remembering
the unsteady concordat which was the best that a heretic and a radical
could ever hope to establish with the Crawleighs, I urged Barbara to
capitulate before I knew that Eric Lane was to be our fellow-guest. Had
I now urged her to refuse, Lady Crawleigh would have had a grievance;
and Barbara might have thought that I had a personal interest in
preventing another encounter.
Though the dinner passed off pleasantly enough, it had one wholly
unexpected result which changed the course of history for two or three
of Madame Pinto’s guests. Had we refused this invitation, I might not
have seen John Carstairs for another month; had I not seen him, I should
not have asked him to tell me about his recent tour of the Ross estates
in Connemara; had he not told me, I might have contentedly played my
part of absentee landlord for years to come. Carstairs, however,
succeeded in frightening me with his stories of impending Irish trouble.
The precarious peace, he said, might break down at any moment. As
trustee for his half-witted brother, he was anxious to sell at any
sacrifice and advised me to do the same. Whether I sold or not, I should
be a fool if I did not at least visit an estate which I had neglected
since the Easter rising of 1916.
Our chance conversation was the cause of my first serious disagreement
with Barbara. Before parting with a property that had been in the family
for three hundred years, I told her that we must explore the conditions
of the County Kerry for ourselves. In my suggestion that we should go to
Lake House for Whitsuntide she acquiesced at once, only stipulating that
she should be allowed to stay behind at the last moment if the crossing
threatened to be very rough. Next morning I reserved our sleepers and
arranged with Spence-Atkins to postpone his own holiday and to take
charge of our paper till my return; in the evening she warned me, rather
fretfully, that she might not feel well enough to come. I asked if she
would care for me to send for Gaisford; but, after a night’s rest, she
assured me buoyantly that she was all right. I telegraphed to warn my
agent of our coming; and, when I read out his reply, Barbara exclaimed
with almost hysterical passion that, well or ill, in fine weather or
foul, nothing would induce her to come with me to Ireland.
“Well, do you mind my leaving you alone here?,” I asked, when I had
recovered my breath.
“No. Bobbie Pentyre has arranged his Croxton party for Whitsuntide.”
“But why didn’t you tell me that before? I could have gone another week.
Now I’ve made Spence-Atkins cancel his own plans . . .”
“Oh, you’d better stick to your present arrangement,” she answered.
Then, for some reason that I could not guess, she broke into wild
weeping. “I’m so miserable! I’m mad! I don’t know what I’m saying!
George, I’m sorry I was rude.”
“You weren’t rude,” I assured her.
“I’ve not slept for nights and nights,” she gasped. “You’ve been very
patient with me. Go on being patient, go on loving me! I’m so
miserable.” . . .
This time I determined to be a moral coward no longer:
“But why?”
“Oh, I’ve told you! Because I’m a damned soul. I told you that when you
asked me to marry you.”
“And I told you that I’d make you happy or die in the attempt. There’s
nothing I won’t do . . .”
In her first convulsion of grief, Barbara had allowed me to take her
into my arms; but, as she became more composed, I felt her struggling
gently to be free.
“You really mean that?,” she asked, with her head averted. “If it meant
your honour, your life, your happiness, you’d give all that to see me
happy?” I fancied again that she was challenging me and that, if I made
unguarded reservations, I should be told that I did not love her as Jack
Waring and Eric Lane had loved her. The second, as she believed, was
paying with his life; the first had already paid with his soul. “I don’t
know what I’m saying!” she cried, with her hands pressed to her temples.
“I’m worried . . . No, I won’t see a doctor. You go off as you arranged.
I’ll go to Croxton if I feel in the mood. When you come back, I may be
all right; if not . . .”
She stared distractedly round the room in a way that reminded me of the
sad, mad time when Eric first went out of her life.
“But you _will_ be all right,” I assured her.
“If I’m not, remember you married a lost soul, George; I warned you. I
kill whatever I touch.” . . .
4
It is hardly to be imagined that I carried a light heart to Ireland. And
the state of the country at this time was not of a kind to cure any
private depression. In 1916 I entered Dublin as an academic nationalist,
who had voted year after year with the staunch, self-effacing
Redmondites; I left as a perfervid Sinn Feiner, when the men who had
played with me as boys five-and-twenty years before were shot off their
crazy barricades or done to death by a mockery of legal forms. Then for
the first time, face to face with a people cheated of its promised
independence, I too said that no trust was to be reposed in English
honour and no sane leadership expected from men who believed in English
pledges. Through weary years we liberals had fought constitutionally for
our Home Rule Bill; it was inscribed on the Statute Book in spite of
intrigues and intimidation; but treason triumphed over constitutionalism
on the day when Germany made war in the belief that an Irish guerilla
would keep Great Britain from taking part.
Melancholy memories and uneasy forebodings were my companions on the
familiar road to Holyhead. I was dining with my uncle Bertrand on the
night when the Home Rule Act was suspended; he at least had protested
and perhaps he was a little self-righteous, but in 1916 I was to
remember his grim prediction that from the breach of that undertaking,
which every party in parliament helped to repudiate, would follow
inevitably the discredit of the simpleton nationalists and the rise of
Sinn Fein. The rebellion, which he foretold so accurately, was succeeded
by a repression, which he and every one else knew would continue until
the next rebellion. Sinn Fein, in these first months of the armistice,
was penetrating the country peacefully; but even John Carstairs, who
usually advocated the use of machine-guns and aeroplanes against
political opponents, recognized that there would be war if the present
army of occupation interfered. As yet there were only sporadic outrages
on both sides, followed by reprisals, followed by counter-reprisals. As
always happens, the non-combatants, squeezed by both sides, suffered
most.
On this score, when at last I reached Lake House, I had no personal
complaint to make. My agent told me that certain Sinn Feiners had been
billeted on me and certain stores of food commandeered; my gun-room had
been emptied; but both my cars, after a short period of detention, were
returned with a permit from republican headquarters. This, I believe,
made them liable to seizure by the forces of the crown; but my agent
warned me that any license which recognized the authority of Dublin
Castle would cause the cars to be taken and not restored. And nothing in
Kerry tempted the Castle to send its emissaries so far into hostile
territory. If I abstained from provocative acts or speeches, I should be
left in peace.
“They like you,” my agent was good enough to tell me; “and it’s what
they’re all saying, that you should be living here.”
“Are the tenants paying me any rent?,” I asked.
“They are.”
I drifted away by myself to see how well the house would suit Barbara.
The lake was like a sheet of glass, in a frame of dense green wood,
hanging from the gardens by the red ribands of the fuchsia hedges. Here
and there I saw thin spirals of smoke: it was turf smoke, though I could
not smell it. From Castlemaine, in the west, the air blew soft and salt
from the Atlantic. I cursed the malevolence of man that disturbed such
peace and desecrated such beauty. I cursed, too, the fate that had sent
me to an English school, because there was none good enough in Ireland,
so robbing me of one home without giving me another.
“I’m a married man,” I told my agent, “since last I was here. I don’t
care to bring my wife over till things are more settled.”
That, he assured me regretfully, was what every one said; but I should
be comfortable enough if I did not make trouble. He was himself an
avowed republican, not from any hostility to the king, whom he admired,
nor from devotion to the forms and spirit of republicanism: he wanted
peace; and, whether Sinn Fein would achieve it or not, no other party
had succeeded. Sinn Fein was feared, if not respected; and the English
only remembered Ireland when they were frightened. If Redmond and his
lot had put the fear of God into the English one half as well as the
others, they would be lords and ministers and the rest now, like Mr. Law
and the man who prosecuted Roger Casement. My agent disapproved of Sir
Edward Carson’s politics but admired him as the Irishman who had put
more fear of God into the English than any one since Parnell.
The one sentimental relaxation that this hard-headed, soft-spoken man
allowed himself was that Parnell was still alive and would come back to
lead Ireland.
“If I could find a purchaser . . .” I began.
“An Englishman? The house would be burnt over your honour’s head if the
whisper of it ran round!”
“Then,” I said, “I may as well be getting back to London.”