London—sullenly protesting that we only bored the converted and
exasperated the inconvertible—till the end of the year. Looking back, I
suppose the autumn brought with it the first signs of returning reason,
though Sir Roger Dainton—more in sorrow than anger—burnt the _Economic
Consequences_ and left me—with anger and sorrow nicely balanced—to buy
myself another copy. It was one thing, however, to concede that the
peace terms were unworkable; it was something quite different to
precipitate a general election in the hope of mending them. The
coalition survived the Paisley election, when Mr. Asquith was drawn to
Westminster through an avenue of cheering crowds; it survived the
awkward questions which the average voter was beginning to frame. And,
so long as it steered clear of another war, it could disregard the
academic questions of sentimental leader-writers who asked if any one
was a penny the better for war and victory.
“You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,”
said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the
anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve
entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?”
“A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my
thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months.
D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and
defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the
old _régime_ in Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in
England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that
had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If
the allies had an agreed policy . . .”
“You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with
a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your
friend Lucien de Grammont . . .”
“He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know
that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.”
It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to
her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and
Vancouver to die in a common cause.
“I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three
high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient
with the rank-and-file.”
It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected
could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected,
quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the
covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a
chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue
of _Peace_.
“I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively,
with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the
war?”
“We haven’t lost it yet,” I said, “but some of us are doing our best. I
wish you’d explain to me, Lucien, how you expect to make Germany pay for
the war when you’re standing with your foot on her throat.”
“I am sorry if we are keeping you from trading with her,” he answered
with icy politeness, “but security is as necessary to France as trade is
to England. You made _yourselves_ secure when you took the German fleet.
Now, when France is left alone . . .”
He glanced malevolently at Clifford van Oss and turned again to the
window.
“But, hell, Wilson had no power to commit us!” Clifford protested. “If
you’d any of you gotten down to the constitution of the United States
. . .”
“I fancy America signed the treaty?,” said Lucian coldly.
“We’d best quit talking about bad faith,” Clifford recommended, without,
however, following his own advice. “Clemenceau and Lloyd-George let up
on Wilson over the fourteen points; they let up on the Germans . . .”
I turned to Hornbeck, whose square face was alight with malicious
enjoyment.
“What are you supposed to be doing nowadays?,” I asked, as we strolled
up and down the room where we had worked so long together.
“I’m adviser to the secretariat,” he answered. “What does that mean?
Well, you may say, if you like, that I’m preparing for the next war.”
“It’s a pity there’s no one to bang all our heads together,” I murmured,
as a new wrangle broke out between Clifford and Lucien. “The German
menace has gone, but there’s a French menace coming. Nine or ten months
ago I told Lucien in Paris that his people were at the top of their
prestige; now they’re the most hated, feared and despised people in
Europe. A mad war, a mad peace . . .”
“And nothing to prevent another war as mad,” Hornbeck began. Then we
stood without speaking, in a silence that spread over London, freezing
sound and movement. The customary rumble of traffic receded to a
distance and faded away; the blare of horns, the ringing of bells, the
click of typewriters, all the shouting, speaking and whispering that
made up the unceasing drone of a great city now, for two minutes,
ceased. Then, very far away, the rumble of traffic began again. I felt
as if I were recovering consciousness after an anæsthetic. Nearer at
hand I heard voices, then the scuffle of feet; a typewriter clicked
interrogatively, as though wondering if the two minutes were over; then
a telephone-bell rang; and the city heaved and roared its way back to
life. “We’re no better off,” Hornbeck resumed. “Only you sentimentalists
ever thought we should be.”
I had been indescribably awed by that sudden silence and by the
spectacle of those many thousands all stricken motionless at the same
time. The street was a solid block of devout, bare-headed humanity; from
the Victoria Tower to the National Gallery a single mood of gratitude
and reverence bowed those myriad heads. Far from Westminster, far from
London, the same silence had fallen, the same devotion had risen from a
myriad other hearts.
“Spiritually?,” I asked.
“Not in the very least! A great many people were very brave in an
emergency; a great many people always are very brave in an emergency. A
great many people have suffered . . . shall I say, on behalf of
civilization? A great many people always suffer on behalf of
civilization, which is a wasteful and cruel business, George, only one
degree less wasteful and cruel than barbarism. This wasn’t the first war
in history; people like you have always looked for a spiritual
regeneration; you’ve never found it.”
“I should be content,” I said, “if one man in ten out of all that crowd
would join me in making future wars impossible.”
“I should be content if one man in all the world would tell me how
that’s to be done.”
5
I reached Fetter Lane in a chastened mood; and for the rest of the
morning we talked of the year that had passed since Armistice Day.
There was to be no United States of Europe, still less a United States
of the World. The peace-treaty, to the view of us all, indicated the
swiftest and surest way to another war; and there was no influence,
outside parliament or within, to modify it. Trade depression was
attracting attention to unemployment and taxation; but, of a hundred men
who said “We must cut down expenditure,” ninety-nine added “You can’t
touch pensions, of course; or the army and navy; or the air force.”
. . . And, after nine months, the one political organ that looked beyond
the cheap scores and cheaper promises of the 1918 election was read by a
growing literary public for the sake of its musical notes and dramatic
criticism.
“Are we addressing the right people?,” asked Jefferson Wright.
“Any person who’ll listen is the right person for me,” said Bertrand
sententiously.
“Then why not speak to labour?”
“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted
Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German
workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”
“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.
“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French
turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist
a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological
accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s
heads?”
The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with
the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to
the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we
should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than
our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its
drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period
of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only
people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best
intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of
“inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it
impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the
privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we
must do now.
“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily
discouraged than I was in 1909.”
Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of
Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with
O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in
England.
“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the
number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one
else.”
“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The
civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness?”
“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to
follow your advice.”
As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with
the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on
wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy
flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the
criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.
“Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me.
And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil.
When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he
enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I
talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of
universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of
travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and
national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he
applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect.
“I do my modest share,” I said.
“And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have
more money to . . . _waste_ on yourself.”
I cannot recall that the tone or choice of language was more vigorous
than I had long been accustomed to hearing from O’Rane. Certainly I
should have taken up the challenge without concern, if Sonia had not
rushed superfluously to my assistance. Her indignation, however, in
demanding why personal expenditure should be called waste, warned me
against taking sides in a family quarrel.
“David’s _impossible_ about money!,” she cried. “So long as I have _one_
crust of bread, _one_ dress that would disgrace a scarecrow . . .”
“If this is how the poor live, let’s join them!,” interposed Barbara
pacifically.
In spite of herself, Sonia laughed as she saw us admiring her frock. The
house was unpretentious, but it was enviably comfortable. I never wish
to be given better food or wine. And, on a lower plane of morality,
whatever she lacked from her husband was made up by the munificence of
her friends.
“It’s so difficult, when every one thinks you’re rich . . .” she began.
“But it isn’t our money,” O’Rane objected.
Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged
myself beside Sonia.
“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and
managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five
millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”
“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he
sighed. “Is that _all_ the advice you can give me, George?”
“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money
with a pole.”
“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow
your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that,
though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France
again?”
By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way
home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if
some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia
and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was
bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life
of wasted opportunities.
“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I
sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.
It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might
have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have
guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I
comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she
would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed
them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be
passed.
The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were
to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to
have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended
to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding
when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five
thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes
wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession.
Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I
took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought
about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even
chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened,
for drawing us together.
As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the
early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down
for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of
the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any
one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the
abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am
not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence
in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants,
nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending.
I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a
hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and
murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.
“Everything all right?,” I asked as carelessly as I could.
“Yes, sir. Lady Barbara is in her room. I believe her ladyship is with
her.”
When I went upstairs, Barbara was in bed. The blinds were down, and a
closing door hinted that my mother-in-law was for some reason hurrying
away to avoid me. As I crossed the room, Barbara told me to stop; and,
as I tried to ask how she was, I was waved into silence. Then she
covered her eyes and turned away:
“You’ve not been told? It’ll be a shock, but I wanted to tell you
myself. I’m sorry, George . . . I . . . I did my best. You mustn’t be
_too_ dreadfully disappointed. Dead . . . He was born dead. If only it
could have been the other way round!”
Mercifully, as though she had been listening at the door, Lady Crawleigh
came back to say that my father-in-law wished to see me. Together we
drafted the announcement for the press; and I asked whether it would be
prudent for me to go upstairs again. He said “yes” and “no” alternately,
concluding on a “yes” in the frantic hope of getting rid of me. As I
tapped on Barbara’s door, I heard Lady Crawleigh scuttling through
another; and it was Barbara, undaunted and indomitable, who hid her own
agony under a gentle concern for me.
“I suppose people will want to sympathize,” she began. “May I have all
my letters sent to you, George? Open them, answer them. I shall have to
be here for some weeks, I’m afraid, but I’ll make up for deserting you
when I come back to London. I’ll give some lovely parties for you. We
shall be so busy we shan’t have time to think. I _want_ to keep busy.”
. . .
And, on that word, her dead child, her suffering and her disappointment
were banished from Barbara’s life. Three years have passed since that
April evening of 1920 when we made our compact of silence; and, with a
single exception, we observed it with equal scruple on both sides.
CHAPTER TWO
THAT WHICH REMAINED
No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover—the three first without a wife
While I have mine! So—still they overcome
Because there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.
Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.
ROBERT BROWNING: _Andrea del Sarto_.
1
Before we settled in London for the summer of 1920, I asked Bertrand
whether he was prepared to run our paper without me if I could persuade
Barbara to dull the edge of her grief by coming round the world with me.
“You’ll be leaving us,” answered my uncle rather blankly, “just at the
moment when life is becoming normal after the war. We’ve hideous
labour-troubles in store; unemployment . . . From all I hear, there’s
going to be an explosion in Ireland.”
“And this,” I interrupted, “is what you describe as normal conditions
after the war?”
Bertrand nodded slowly over his clasped hands:
“I do. A peace-treaty you may regard as another aspect of war: the last
chapter, if you like. Then you come to that which remains: the bill
that’s still unpaid when you’ve counted your dead and disbanded your
armies and dismembered your empires. All the complications of our
spiritual convalescence are before us. Still . . .”
I might have spared him my importunity until I had approached Barbara.
With the choice of six months in London and twelve on a steamer, she had
no difficulty in making up her mind; and I soon found myself studying,
in her company and from a somewhat different angle, “that which
remained” in London after eighteen months of armistice and peace. If the
life was a little bewildering and sometimes more than a little
uncongenial, that—as Bertrand would have said—was part of the unpaid
bill.
2
“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his
long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly
inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make
a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the
metropolis of England.”
“For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing
for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play
round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San
Remo, Hythe . . .”
In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so
swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on,
meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season,
of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of
those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent
tragedy.
“Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence
with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I
suppose _you_ don’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more
money and a bit less work than the bar?”
If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over
with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last
regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I
hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped
into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say
without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position
that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who
sent me testimonials beginning: “_Public school and university
ex-service officer_, 1914-1918, _wounded_.” . . . If others received
half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them;
and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was
the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a
colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty
houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he
accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have
landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of
business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more
experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and
the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced,
with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below
cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks.
“Nobody could want _less_ work than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck
pointed out.
“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with
dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said
nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a
glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need
the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle
. . .”
“My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered.
“Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained
Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him.
In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of
hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses,
land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed
along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be
blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful
a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly
as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a
retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their
wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by
creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for
economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first
practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’
candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk
of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the
whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the
pleadings of _Peace_ would never do.
At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by
placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who
despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals;
and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and
treatment of international prostration.
“The _whole_ of Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany.
Take Austria. _Take Russia._”
And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to
join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann
was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal
unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics,
had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for
her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I
seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European
dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended
the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting
for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the
crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which
England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger
received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations
than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and,
if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow
was so far from London.