separated from Barbara. Two days after I landed at Kingston, she
telegraphed: “_Missing you dreadfully hope you arrived safely and are
coming back immediately all my love bless you_”; and, if her language
seemed still a trifle neurotic, she had almost recovered her
tranquillity by the time she wrote to describe the Whitsuntide party at
Croxton Hall. The week-end had been uneventful; and, though Eric Lane
was in the house, I could not read any embarrassment between the lines
that described their meeting. The nervous excitability, however, of
which I had seen too much evidence in London, betrayed itself once in a
comment on a rumour: “_You remember the Miss Maitland you met with the
O’Ranes? She’s here. A pretty little thing! Obviously in love with Eric.
I’d give anything to see him happily married, but I hope he’s not
serious about this child. She’s too hopelessly young, she’d send him mad
in a week. It’ll be too tragic if he lets another woman make a mess of
his life._” The next day Barbara telegraphed again, telling me once more
how much I was being missed and offering to join me at Lake House.
I returned to London as soon as I had finished my business and was met
at Euston by a shivering form in a scarlet tea-gown and an ermine cloak.
“You crazy child, you’ll give yourself pneumonia!,” I cried as I hurried
her into the car through a double line of smiling porters.
“That’s a pretty way to greet me when I’ve stayed up all night for
you!,” Barbara laughed. “I _am_ glad to see you again, George, though
that wasn’t why I came to meet you. It’s your little friend Ivy
Maitland: she’s gone down suddenly with appendicitis.”
“Well, I’m very sorry, of course . . .” I began.
“Yes, dear, but we must do something about it. You know she was acting
as Eric’s secretary while his own girl had a holiday? Yes! And this
child has collapsed in his flat. Dr. Gaisford’s attending her; and he
says she’s not to be moved on any consideration whatsoever. When I heard
about it last night, I felt we _must_ offer Eric a couple of rooms till
she can return home. Things being as they are, though . . .” Barbara
faltered and turned away. “It’s all such a muddle that I thought I
couldn’t ask him without your permission.”
From her consulting me, I surmised that she doubted the wisdom of her
impulse. From my knowledge of Eric, I imagined he would sleep on the
Embankment before he accepted a bed from us. If Barbara wished to make a
sign of friendship, however, I would not check her.
“You don’t need my permission,” I said. “If you think it will do any
good for us to invite him . . .”
5
We received our answer before the invitation could be sent. At the end
of breakfast, Lady John Carstairs telephoned to say that she had herself
placed her house at Eric’s disposal, but that he preferred to remain in
Ryder Street till the girl was out of danger. On my way to Fetter Lane,
I left some flowers and a card bidding Eric to let us know if we could
be of any service; but we heard nothing till a week later, when O’Rane
telephoned to catch me for five minutes before I went to bed.
“I couldn’t get round before,” he apologized, “and I thought you ought
to know. Poor old Eric! He’s getting all his troubles in a lump. Where’s
Babs? I’m afraid she ought to hear this, too.”
I was under the impression that she had gone to bed half an hour before;
but I heard sounds in the drawing-room, almost as though she had
expected news of Eric and was staying up because it was bad news.
“What’s happened to him now?,” I asked, as we went upstairs.
“He’s been ordered abroad immediately,” O’Rane answered. “California.
Lungs.”
I do not know whether Barbara heard more than the last word; but she
seemed to rise from her chair and cross the room in a single movement.
O’Rane’s expression changed to wonder and then softened to pity as she
caught and gripped his hand. No name had been mentioned in her hearing;
but I think we both realized that he and I and all the world—with one
exception—might be ordered to California for our lungs without striking
an equal terror into her heart. In that moment I knew how far I had
always been from winning her love.
O’Rane, I feel, atoned for want of sight by keenness of hearing. I
fancied that a little of the pity in his expression might be intended
for me.
“Is he . . . dying?,” Barbara whispered.
“Not yet awhile.” O’Rane withdrew his hand to feel for a chair. I
thought I saw his expression changing again, this time hardening
slightly as though to keep the flash-point of her emotions low or,
perhaps, to douse them with a single chilling jet. “He can get all right
if he wants to. You may imagine, he’s rather bowled over at present.” As
he turned to me, I felt that he wanted Barbara to hear his next
announcement without being watched. “It came quite suddenly,” he told
me; “and, but for this, you’d have seen him happily married to Ivy
Maitland.” If Barbara gave any sign of interest, I saw and heard
nothing. O’Rane took time to let his announcement sink in; and I fancied
again that he was tacitly advising her to close her side of an account
which Eric had already closed against her. If she chose to think that he
was still in love with her and that his engagement to Ivy was an act of
despair, no argument would cure her; at least there was now no reason
why this shadow should force its way between us any longer. “It’s rather
a facer,” O’Rane continued, “when you lose your wife and your health on
the same day. I’ve been telling him all evening that no woman in the
world is big enough to spoil a man’s life, but at the moment he’s in the
mood to creep into a corner and die. He’s too good for that. I want you
to see him before he starts, George; and write to him while he’s away.”
Naturally, I promised without hesitation. If Barbara sent a letter of
farewell, she said nothing to me about it; when I told her next day that
I was going to Ryder Street on my way to the office, she nodded
abstractedly but made no suggestion of accompanying me; and, on my
return, she sat like a spirit of tragedy, refusing to ask me the result
of my mission, till I volunteered to tell her.
“By the way, I missed Eric this morning,” I said.
“Oh? Had he gone already?,” she asked.
“The maid said he was not at home,” I answered; and, mercifully for me,
Barbara did not enquire further.
A less diplomatic version would have recounted that, as I hurried round
to Ryder Street, I saw Eric getting out of the taxi in front of me. His
front-door slammed as I was halfway up the stairs; and, when I said
something to the maid about being one of his older friends, I was
informed that Miss Maitland was still seriously ill. Divining that Miss
Maitland could not be occupying all the rooms in the flat, I scribbled a
note in which I begged Eric to see me for two minutes. A verbal message
apprised me that Mr. Lane was engaged; and I went away, more hurt, I
believe, than ever in my life before. Since his interrupted romance with
Ivy, the fellow could bear me no grudge for marrying the woman he had
tried so long to win; our friendship went back, sixteen years, to Oxford
and the dinners of the Phœnix. There were not too many survivors from
those days; and, coming to sympathize, I had seen my sympathy flung back
in my face. I made every allowance for his illness and misery; but I
could not write to him, at least for the present and, when a letter from
him, several months later, hurtled like a flask of vitriol from
California to England, I was too nearly blinded to attempt an answer.
“Will you call again?,” asked Barbara perfunctorily.
“I don’t suppose he wants to be bothered,” I said.
There was a long silence; and Barbara’s shoulders moved in a slight
shrug:
“I don’t suppose he wants to be friends. I tried, when we met at
Croxton; but, when there’s been love, I don’t think you can go back to
friendship.” She looked at me almost guiltily; and for an embarrassed
moment I feared that I was to be drawn into yet one more unwanted
confidence. Then, changing her mind, she walked slowly to the fire and
stood with the dancing flames reflected in her sombre eyes. “I’m . . .
_glad_ he’s going,” she murmured at last. “I’ve not really been myself
since I met him again, whatever I told you about feeling free. When you
wanted me to come with you to Ireland . . . I was mad. I’ll go with you
now, if you like . . . anywhere. We’ve talked so often about a fresh
start: I can make it now. I _do_ want our life to be a success. If
there’s anything I can do . . .”
“You can’t do more than you’re doing at present,” I said.
With a sudden turn, Barbara flung her arms about my neck and hid her
face against my chest.
“Is there nothing more that you want?,” she asked. “Don’t say ‘your
happiness’! I know you want that, darling. Don’t you want anything for
yourself? Don’t you want me to be like other women? Don’t you want me to
have children?”
“Most men want children,” I said, “but women have to bear them.”
“Yes . . . I’ve always wanted children and I’ve always been afraid of
them. I’m still afraid, . . . but I’m going to have one now, George,
. . . for your sake. You’re pleased? Hold me tight, darling, and promise
me one thing. If anything goes wrong . . .”
“But, good God . . .!,” I began.
“It _may_. If anything _does_ go wrong and one of us has to die, promise
you’ll let it be me!”
I was dispensed from answering by Barbara’s sudden surrender to
hysterics. When she was recovered, I put her to bed and sent for
Gaisford; as soon as he allowed her up, I took her to Crawleigh Abbey
and left her to recuperate from something which the doctor described
enigmatically as “a nervous breakdown that didn’t come off”.
“I’ve been expecting this for years,” he told me. “And for years I’ve
felt that she’d be a healthier, happier woman when she had some brats to
look after. This business about Eric Lane must have been a shock to
her.”
“Well, thank Heaven, that’s all over,” I said.
“At last,” Gaisford grunted. “If you’re going down to Crawleigh . . .”
“I shall stay here, except for week-ends, unless I’m sent for,” I
interrupted. “This is going to be a busy time. The peace terms are to be
signed within the next few days.”
“I wonder what kind of mess they’ve been making out there,” Gaisford
mused.
“You’re convinced it _will_ be a mess?”
“My dear George, when two human beings get together, they always make a
big mess,” he answered with more than his usual misanthropy; “and I’ve
known human beings who could make a fair-sized mess with their four
unaided paws.”
6
The peace of Versailles was celebrated in London with thanksgivings by
day and fireworks at night.
“I wonder why,” said Bertrand sadly.
“Lady Dainton wants me to bring you to her party at the Excelsior,” I
said, though, when he repeated: “I wonder why”, it was not easy to find
a convincing answer.
“Are _you_ going?” he asked suspiciously, as though I were revenging
myself on him for my dinners in Rutland Gate.
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder why myself; but I’m a bachelor at present
and I must dine somewhere.”
“All right,” sighed my uncle; and, on that, we drove to the office and
sat until seven o’clock considering the terms and discussing, with
Spence-Atkins and any one else who drifted in, what the future policy of
our paper was to be.
For several weeks the dearth of news in Fetter Lane and the claims of
outside interests had brought our fragile bantling to the verge of death
by starvation. Ministers, I thought, revealed a shrewd knowledge of
mass-psychology in denying us all news of the conference.
“Kid asks for a thing,” explained Sir Philip Saltash, when I loosed a
grumble in his hearing; “you refuse it; kid screams. Go on refusing it;
kid goes on screaming. Go on refusing still; kid thinks of something
else.”
By July, even the press had almost ceased to scream; parliament had long
been silent; and the country was probably thinking of a prize-fight. My
own record was representative of the vast majority: I went to my office
six days a week, I continued the farce of exploring London to find what
people were thinking, I supported a wall at the parties which my wife
gave to please my uncle; but such intellectual energy as I possessed had
been devoted at one moment to my private affairs in Ireland, at another
to O’Rane’s inheritance and again at another to the havoc which poor
Eric Lane’s return had wrought in my life with Barbara. At our editorial
dinners I was chiefly concerned to see that we had enough readable
matter of any kind to fill twenty-four pages. Like the child in
Saltash’s parable, I was now indifferent; and, when at last the great
secrets which we had screamed to know were flung to us in bulk, we were
mildly bored.
“I warned you at Cannes how it would be,” said Bertrand; then he lapsed
into unhelpful silence.
“You heard what they were saying in Paris?,” asked Spence-Atkins. “‘The
seeds of a great and durable war’.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “as our first article will be on the treaty . . .?”
We had reached no decision by the time my uncle and I adjourned for
dinner with the Daintons; if seventy men out of London’s seven millions
understood what kind of peace had been made, I do not believe that seven
men of the seventy cared by now whether it was a good peace or a bad.
“Indifference! Indifference!,” Bertrand sighed. “If you compare this
night with the day of the armistice . . . We said ‘never again!’; and we
meant it. Now, though half the world’s still in mourning, we’re racing
along a road that will put the other half in mourning.”
“I suppose you can never repeat your emotions,” I ventured, as I
followed his gaze over the packed restaurant. “The war ended at the
armistice; people say ‘All right! It’s _still_ ended.’”
“And they’re not interested to see whether the present world is built on
quicksand.”
“No one can say _we_ haven’t done our best to warn people,” I said
wearily, as the Daintons came into the lounge.
“No one but a fool would say that any one had paid the slightest
attention to our warnings,” Bertrand rejoined. “The harm’s done now.
That phase is over.”
As we went in to dinner, Lady Dainton told me that the scene was quite
like 1914. From a long and intimate acquaintance with her no less than
from the ring of pleasure in her voice, I realized that this was her
return from exile: for thirty years she had lived and laboured to enter
what she considered the “right” houses and to secure the “right” people
in her own. The war had thrown her out of work; but she could begin
again now. One of her sons had been killed, the other wounded; her
daughter had disappointed the family by marrying O’Rane and shocked it
by running away from him; for the Daintons, who had worked as hard as
any one, it had not been a pleasant or an easy war; and now Lady Dainton
was dismissing it as a regrettable incident, least said, soonest mended.
She was not wanting in affection for her dead son nor for the son who
would be among the first to die if another war came; but she was by now
too inelastic to remodel her daily life, still less to attempt
improvements on the scene of 1914 when there were no ‘profiteers’, no
‘temporary gentlemen’, no six-shilling income-tax, no bloated wages for
insatiable domestic servants.
“You think it will last?,” I enquired.
“I feel sure it will,” she answered. “It’s to _all_ our interests, don’t
you know?, to keep the big houses open, to have plenty of employment,
money circulating. . . . Of course, if the socialists had their way
. . . but I don’t think there’s much socialism in England, George. The
war has thrown people together so much. The agitators simply wouldn’t be
able to make a living if they weren’t paid from abroad. There’s a little
book I must send you on the Jewish peril.” . . .
A new taste for spreading scares was the only change that I could detect
in my hostess. Whereas she had occupied herself before the war by
sitting on endless committees, she reached a larger public now by
sitting at home and inundating her friends with pamphlets on bolshevism,
prohibition, the white-slave traffic, secular education and every other
danger that threatened, day by day, to sap the security of England. Sir
Roger, I fancy, had changed even less. Whereas he had formerly jobbed in
and out of wild-cat industrial securities, he now dabbled in the more
chaotic of the European exchanges. Sonia danced; Sam had left his firm
of contractors in Hartlepool for a vague “agency-business” of his own in
London; Tom Dainton’s widow had married again; and I believe this single
family could have been reproduced, in every detail of history and
circumstance, in almost every town and county throughout Great Britain
and Ireland.
“George not being pessimistic, is he?,” Sir Roger enquired genially, as
we settled into our places.
“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I
could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad
that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been
sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party,
realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile
supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a
general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a
smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be
followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.”
The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry.
“You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone
surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery
eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with
malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes
as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it
came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s
ended, he says it _must_ start again. Cheerful customer, George.”
I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an
inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I
might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the
fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his
promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and
the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the
interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political
barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political
controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he
represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to
secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime
minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back
impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of
“Wilson, _le bienvenu_”, he had discovered in the president an insidious
agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his
earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative
populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring
peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.
I had not, for several months, mentioned the inflammatory fourteen
points: had I done so, Dainton might have retorted that President Wilson
had himself departed from them by throwing his lot in with M. Clemenceau
and Mr. Lloyd-George. I did not discuss the equity of the peace terms. I
discussed very little with Dainton; but I tried, as I had been trying
all day, to envisage the new world which circumstances and the efforts
of the peace conference were labouring to bear. Russia was in the grip
of revolution, civil war and famine; Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy
might follow at any moment; the map of Europe was dotted with strangely
named, new, self-governing republics, alike only in their complete
ignorance of self-government; as we were soon to see, there was no
European police to restrain the Italian who might be inspired to seize
Fiume or the Rumanian who was tempted to march on Buda Pesht; the League
of Nations had been invested with no power; and the world outside
Europe, from India to Egypt and from Ireland to the Philippines, had
been taught the magic word “self-determination” and had realized its
possibilities more vividly than those who coined it.
In an unguarded moment I did ask Dainton whether he imagined that the
Germans could ever pay the indemnity which he had so sternly demanded.
He believed it confidently. How, I asked him; but Dainton told me that
he was not in the mood to split hairs: if they could pay it, they should
(and the allies would remain in occupation till the last penny had been
handed over); if the Hun ruined himself in the attempt, as I seemed to
think likely, it would be something to feel that he would never again
menace the world.
“And if he ruins us too?,” I asked. “Economically, the whole world is
knitted together. If the Russian revolution spreads to Germany?”
“It won’t spread here,” Dainton answered in happy forgetfulness of
earlier speeches against the corrupting influence of those Russian and
German agents who controlled British trades unions. “Our people are too
sensible. You’re very gloomy, George! This won’t do at all. Drink up
that cocktail and let’s begin our dinner.”
As I looked round on the scene of peace, now officially proclaimed, I
reflected that five years, all but a few days, had passed since I
strolled on to the valley-terrace at Chepstow, to smoke a cigarette
between dances; it seemed less than five weeks since Colonel Farwell
walked diffidently out of the darkness to say that, while war had not
yet been declared, it was prudent for all officers to be in touch with
their depots. They had gone, those first, in a spirit of routine
enlivened by adventure; they were followed by men who went in a spirit
of bewilderment clarified by sacrifice. The bewilderment passed; and the
sacrifice turned to resignation. Soon the resignation became fatalism:
every one went because every one else was going; none expected to come
back, and, of those who went first, few were cheated of their
expectation. Now we were celebrating the end of a war that dwarfed the
campaigns of Napoleon to so many intermittent brawls.
I must have spoken the name, for my uncle caught at it eagerly:
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” he murmured.
“Nineteen-fourteen, nineteen-nineteen. Napoleon ended the middle ages
and changed the map. Have we begun anything, ended anything, changed
anything? We spilt a paint-box over the atlas; but will the colours
stick? Germany and Russia cancel out; the rest of us have to play for
pennies instead of shillings; but have we ended war, have we ended the
nineteenth century, have we done anything but lose a few pawns in the
first moves?”
“We’d won _everything_ at the armistice!,” I exclaimed. “The world was
ready and willing to be disarmed, ready and willing to accept
arbitration in place of war . . .”
“What election-cry has a chance against ‘revenge’?,” Bertrand demanded,
with a glance of contempt towards the end of the table, when Dainton was
arguing heatedly with the wine-waiter. “‘The red account is cast’; and
Germany must pay. You and I know that we shall be the first to suffer.
You and I know that these dolts are laying the foundations of the next
war. You and I know that we have some misty world-vision and that we
must work for a united states of Europe and a brotherhood of man. People
won’t listen to us . . . yet. I shall be dead before you’ve cleared the
first unbelievers out of the temple. _Si monumentum requiris_ . . .
George, George, this is a blacker day in the world’s history than the
fourth of August.”
I have forgotten almost everything about that dinner except the sense of
depression that grew deeper with every advance to gaiety on the part of
my neighbours. We were spared speeches; but at the end our host called
us to our feet for some toast which I did not hear. As I sat down, a
kite’s-tail of coloured paper floated to us from the next table. A giant
bunch of air-balloons was divided among eager hands. Crackers exploded;
and a blare of tin trumpets punctuated the cheeping of wooden whistles.
Perhaps I had spent too many hours that day in discussion that led
nowhere: I suddenly felt that I was not in the mood for such artless
merry-making.
“_Si monumentum requiris_ . . .” Bertrand repeated.
At the table from which that tail of coloured paper had been thrown, I
observed my old ally, Sir Philip Saltash, entertaining a party of
friends. Dainton, in acknowledging a bow, informed us that Saltash had
“done as much as any one to win the war”; and, in examining Saltash’s
guests, I felt that the same tribute could be paid to each. Wilmot Dean,
representing a government of new men and new methods, was resting a
flushed face on the bare shoulder of a beautiful and, I should imagine,
wholly brainless mannequin. Lord Lingfield, whose inclusion in the
cabinet shewed that ministers were not indifferent to rank and lineage,
was deep in conversation with a Balkan millionaire who had been
naturalized in time to become private secretary to the needy holder of a
sinecure. And any one with attention to spare had it unpityingly claimed
by Mr. ‘Blob’ Wister, who had won the war by purchasing papers for the
government.