been asked who won the war, I should have named David O’Rane rather than
Wilmot Dean, Lord Loring rather than Lord Lingfield. Saltash’s guests
may have given body and soul to victory; but their material position was
founded on the war. After fine winnowing, we had arrived—in these ‘new
men’—at the governing class of the immediate future: borrowing the name
from ‘Blob’ Wister, they called themselves “realists”, and the
coalitions of 1915 and 1916 had certainly intrigued the “sentimentalist”
in politics to his extinction. Peace was too welcome for me to complain
if it had been ushered in by ministers with more ambition than scruple.
An obsolescent administration may have needed business brains to fit it
for war; a democratic country cannot ignore its press-man and
publicity-agent; and the rich hangers-on of a government only prove that
bricks cannot be made without straw. Of the men who had won the war I
only felt what Bertrand expressed bluntly:
“They look as if they’d made a damned good thing out of it.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” I replied.
“Nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-nineteen. We have changed our rulers.”
“It’s about all we _have_ changed,” Bertrand rejoined.
Then we stood up as a waiter begged leave to push our table away from
the dancing-floor. Sir Roger, unexpectedly on his feet, exhibited
symptoms of impending oratory, which was checked, at the instigation of
Wilmot Dean, by a well-directed crust of bread from the hand of the
mannequin. The band, for the first time in several years, played the
national anthems of all the allies. Our host ordered more champagne and
then called for his bill. Sonia led off the dancing with Lord Lingfield;
and I invented an excuse to go home to bed.
The streets round the hotel were too crowded for driving. I told my
chauffeur to get home as best he could and walked with Bertrand into the
quiet backwaters north of Piccadilly. At the door of Loring House we met
my cousin Violet, who insisted on our going the rest of the way in her
car.
“I’ve missed all the celebrations,” she told us. “I’ve been unveiling
the memorial to Jim at Chepstow.”
“You’ve not missed very much,” I answered. “Are you satisfied with the
memorial?”
“Yes. It’s only a medallion in the chapel; and you can only see it from
the corner where I sit. I have . . . rather a horror of the
war-memorials that are being put up everywhere.”
“They’re the easiest means of forgetting the dead with a good
conscience,” Bertrand suggested.
“But not the only means,” I said, as a dishevelled vagrant steadied
himself against the bonnet of the car and invited us to a confession of
political faith.
Its form consisted of question and answer: “_What’s the matter with
Lloyd-George? ’E’s orl right! And what’s the matter with Winston? ’E’s
orl right. What’s the matter with Beatty?_” . . .
“That fellow is surprisingly like our friend Dainton,” said my uncle.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
THE NAKEDNESS OF THE LAND
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so
melancholy as a battle won.”
DUKE OF WELLINGTON: _Despatches_.
1
On the day after the peace-treaty had been signed, my uncle sent me to
make a political survey of England. If it brought no benefit to England
or to our paper, it provided me with a pleasant holiday and a welcome
break.
Looking back on my two years’ labours in Fetter Lane, I feel that the
first six months were given to creating an atmosphere. As Bertrand
proclaimed at our inaugural dinner, no lasting peace could be
established on a sense of grievance; and, until the terms of peace were
published, we tried to deflect public attention from crude thoughts of
triumph and cruder hankerings after revenge to a frank desire for mutual
forgiveness and good-will. For twelve months after the treaty was placed
in our hands, we laboured to demonstrate that it was unworkable. And in
the six months during which the peace coalition was tottering to the
fall I received my answer to the old question whether those who could
neither keep peace nor make war were competent to make peace.
“It won’t do,” Bertrand declared summarily, when we met to discuss our
public attitude to the treaty of Versailles. “‘Revision’ must be our
battle-cry. Revision of the treaty.”
I fancy I was expressing what Spence-Atkins and Triskett and all of us
had long felt, when I said:
“Thank God we have a battle-cry at last.”
“It will not be popular,” predicted my uncle, with his usual love for
being in a minority. “The fools who shouted that we were ‘letting the
Hun off’ will shout more than ever that we’re making the treaty ‘a scrap
of paper’. . . . And yet, if we try to enforce it, all central Europe
will go the way of Russia.”
“I’m afraid it will be another unpopular cry,” added Jefferson Wright,
“but it’s time we drew attention to the economic position at home. We’re
pouring out money as though the war were still going on.”
“Our battle-cry, then,” said Bertrand, “must be ‘Produce more and
consume less’.”
“We shall be told we’re trying to enslave labour. And there’ll be no end
to unemployment when the ‘consuming less’ begins.”
“We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,”
Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up
encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry.
Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed
me out of the office to collect material for six articles on _England in
Reconstruction_.
“The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s
a hot-house: abnormal.”
2
My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy
Maitland’s wedding.
She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of
Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period
were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found
devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the
ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour
with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of
comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction
from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up
for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly
bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been
headed: _Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals_.
“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the
stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought
less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost
their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”
“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”
The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:
“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their
deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from
failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of
them.”
“It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered.
“The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their
revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that
had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.”
If my explanation was heard, it was not answered.
“One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and
unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually
asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her
in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he
could do that. It’s terrible!”
I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored
Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse
of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been
closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened
their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed
on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at
Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for
the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a
four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty
hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of
those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the
valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of
peace.
I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this
child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was
marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The
house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was
setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The
stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids,
which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought
that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that
the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal
truth of the Old Testament.
“Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking
dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the
Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel
through.
He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the
family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would
have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the
Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless
fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh
pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and
hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the
war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as
well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have
been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these
critics, had been found out.
I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and
the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made
blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the
converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if
anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his
scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets.
“Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked.
“Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered.
How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me
to solve.
“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s
tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship
raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid
nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done
before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir,
what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”
I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few
purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of
labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when
living was so expensive.
“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing
the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.
Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.
At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any
improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent
commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich
woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in
England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The
greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest
strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks
that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin
king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de
Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the
paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community
at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of
seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of
seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the
Lorings in another.
“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet,
“but I have to think of Sandy.”
And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various
securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not
default at the same moment.
As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the
uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the
boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich
colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at
Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let
the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be
cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages
and his servants had left her in a body without notice.
“_Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times_,” I wrote to
my uncle.
3
At the beginning of the autumn, a railway-strike assailed the country
with partial paralysis.
“_It may help_,” wrote Bertrand from the security of London, “_to bring
people to their senses. They think they’re rich because the
printing-presses keep ’em well supplied with depreciated notes. As
usual, Spence-Atkins prophesies a tremendous slump; and that will be
just as unreal as the boom. If people would think in terms of
commodities and services instead of chattering about money!_
“_But this is not the worst of the trouble. The triple alliance is a
political engine. Direct action is a political method; the reply of
organized labour to a government that represents no one in particular
and organized labour least of all. This is the first protest against the
1918 election and I’ve been torn in pieces by the tory press for asking
what else any sane man could have expected, when the present House never
tries to control ministers._ ‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’”
Barbara and I turned south on the first day of the strike; and, by the
time we reached Crawleigh Abbey, it was over. In the tone of my
father-in-law, however, I detected a new rancour such as I had not met
since the almost daily strikes and lock-outs before the war. Neave had
been warned for duty; and, as he changed out of uniform, I fancied that
father and son were like a pair of reluctant game-cocks, as difficult to
drag out of a fight as to urge in.
“I regret nothing,” said Crawleigh on the first night, “that shews
labour it can’t hold the country to ransom. If I’d been the prime
minister, though, I’d have recalled every man jack of them to the
colours . . .”
“And if they refused to come?,” I ventured to interrupt.
“After being ordered to mobilize?,” asked Neave with the aloof patience
of a Guards officer in teaching a civilian his A.B.C.
“Yes,” I answered. “In 1914 the regular officer threatened to resign if
he were ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster. That’s never been
quoted, but you may be sure it’s not been forgotten. And if you ever try
to use troops against an industrial strike . . .”
“I should use troops to protect life and property,” Crawleigh
interposed. “A very few days without trains, and the babies in every
city would die for want of milk. One hopes that these drastic steps will
never be necessary. One hopes the lesson’s been taken to heart.”
“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who
regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.
As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave,
neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor
the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise
suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a
civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and
whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.
“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a
fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.
I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the
meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital
loss of a strike.
“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and
proved nothing,” I said.
“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton,
who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on
class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was
responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the
only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.
It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances
throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in
America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but
in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the
modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in
dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their
predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.
“I must send you a little book on _The Soviet Peril_,” promised Lady
Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys
had sent me pamphlets on _A Short Way with Profiteers_.
I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he
had increased his capital twenty _per cent._ since 1914.
“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.
Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one
she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on
earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were
springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far
as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own
friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she
would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that
the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he
was paid, he stood condemned.
“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the
Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League
‘paid agitators’?”
“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that
faded into the silence of stupefaction.
The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before
returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first
phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a
_diminuendo_ in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England
was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of
misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles,
of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices;
credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of
peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the
unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the
war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of
Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than
they could afford.
It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and
in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I
hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the
waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one
of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one
experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted
by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the
next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the
unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.
The one was no better justified than the other. While the country
clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic
servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose
steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own
exports threatened to dry up.
“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my
return, tossing me _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_.
“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do
after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”
“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching
to you since the armistice.”
“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have
preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you
seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from
armistice night. _People won’t listen._”
And then I told Bertrand of the psychological discovery that impressed
me most in the whole course of my tour. On the minds of men who had
taken part in the war the printed word had ceased to exert its old
spell. In the first recruiting of 1914 the boys in my old Wiltshire
constituency were forbidden to pluck the blackberries by the roadside,
because a mysterious red car had been abroad, before daylight,
sprinkling the hedges with what was believed to be a strong solution of
typhoid germs. The story was printed in the papers and believed because
it was in print. Five years later the same story—with a Russian or a
Sinn Feiner in charge of the car—might have been believed until it was
published; then it would have been relegated to the teeming limbo of
“newspaper lies”. The captain of the Loring yacht, who had served for
most of the war on an auxiliary cruiser, told me of his amazement on
reading that the _Pelion_, which was at that time his home, had been
sunk by a mine in the North Sea; he was less surprised, though more
aggrieved, to read a year later that his ship, which had lately been
sunk by a torpedo in the Irish Channel, was still convoying troopers in
the Mediterranean. He accepted my explanation that the Admiralty was of
malice aforethought misleading the newspaper-readers of England in the
hope of misleading the German intelligence department; but his faith was
shattered beyond repair. If the press lied to him on matters which he
could check from his own experience, how much more easily it would lie
about defeats and casualties, wages and prices!
“And in future,” I told Bertrand, “we have to reckon with this
incredulity in addition to all the apathy that’s been breaking our
hearts.”
“_And_ the misrepresentation,” he sighed with a sensitiveness surprising
in so scarred a fighter to the charge of the Woburn press that he was
selling the French for thirty pieces of German silver.
“There are times,” I said, “when I feel that only the logic of events
will convince people. Aren’t we wasting our energy, Bertrand? I’ve given
the experiment more than six months’ trial; now I want to get away.
Barbara’s going to have a baby.” . . .
I could have piled argument on argument if my uncle had resisted me; but
he sat without speaking, his hands crossing and uncrossing themselves
tremulously over the ivory knob of his stick and his eyes set gloomily
on the fire.
“The logic of events?,” he repeated at length.
“I don’t believe we shall do any good here till we have a revolution,” I
said, with bitter memories of my battle-piece in its three panels. “A
revolution; or another war.”
“Our intention was to avert it,” he reminded me.
4