fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia.
“Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and
then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me.
Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the
thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which
he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek
tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of
a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were
discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these
birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his
plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his
gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place
to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few
years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his
securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances!
“Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with
shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’.
“The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same
perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of
religion should be regarded as paid agitators.
Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang
would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but,
without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the
commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the
material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive
commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold.
“Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved
upstairs.
“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal;
politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it
absolutely to yourself.”
I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment
of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and
monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel,
however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier.
After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house
in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying
belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that
night for their retirement.
“I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are
leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves,
don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizing _this_ party, of course; but
the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.”
If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with
her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned
or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still
bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord
Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us
furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus
and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties
had the ceremony and pomp of a _levée_. In 1920 we had no time for the
ceremony, no money for the pomp.
“I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I
contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation.
The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us
feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The
Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions
according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the
Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to
see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner
and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of
recognition.
“Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely,
“for one who can find time to be hospitable.”
As we drifted uncomfortably about the house, I found it expedient to
leave at least this charge unanswered. The smoking-room was given up to
bridge, the dining-room to an endless supper; musicians, whom in time I
came to suspect our butler of keeping on a chain in one of the cellars,
were imprisoned on a landing: and both drawing-rooms were cleared for
dancing. “_Solitudinem faciunt: pacem appellant._ I’m off,” said
Bertrand in bewilderment. “Promise you won’t invite me again!” And I
shared his bewilderment. The success of the party, as of the late war,
lay in unity of command. Our butler was _generalissimo_; and Barbara
asked only that I would leave him alone. If the men could not find
cigars, they appealed to Robson; when an uninvited guest strayed into
the hall, demanding who the guy was who was giving this show, Robson
introduced him promptly to his hostess; I saw him supplying powder and
carrying out repairs to torn dresses; and, when our musicians knocked
off work for the night, Robson obliged at the piano, apologizing for the
slow, melodious waltzes of my undergraduate days and regretting that he
had no temperament for jazz-music.
“I _wish_ I knew his history,” Barbara murmured plaintively. “I daren’t
ask for fear of finding he has a wife. That would break my heart,
because I’m determined to marry him if anything happens to you, George.”
Lady Dainton, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength of
disapproval.
“I would sooner give up society altogether,” she announced, “than
countenance its present form. This, of course, is different,” she added
vaguely and without conviction.
Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while
to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they
amused Barbara.
3
“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding a
_post mortem_.
“These people don’t _amuse_ you?,” he cried.
“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”
Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the
three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights
of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of
Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they
had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me
that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I
was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of
young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the
landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found
myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having
beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help,
they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of
fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by
the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of
self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and
critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were
unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet
another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.
“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary
opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who
praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their
notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred.
If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re
suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”
And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more
reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six
months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too
discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea
was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of
Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of
Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always
unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they
damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan
splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we
should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek
of shells had been forgotten.
“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara,
when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the
war on art . . .?”
“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no
such thing as absolute good.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“And I’m thrilled by it!,” she cried in unaffected rapture. “All the
violence and horror and madness of the war are reflected in the art of
to-day. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. This party, which dear Lady
Dainton hated so much . . . The restlessness, the hysteria . . . Jazz,
in itself . . .”
“That which remains,” I murmured, in Bertrand’s phrase.
I was reminded of the days before the war when revues and ragtime first
established their empire in London. Then, as the curtain prepared to
fall, principals and supers, the latest beauty and the last comedian, a
scene-shifter or two and the prompter all jigged and shuffled to the
haunting syncopation of the _Honeymoon Rag_ or _That Ol’ Mason-Dixon
Line_. The audience jigged and shuffled up the gangways; the men were
still humming, the women still working their shoulders when they drove
away. ‘_Oh, honey, I feel funny when dat coon begin to play_ . . .’ Now
they jigged and shuffled through the streets and into the houses; they
could not stop; life was become an endless syncopation.
I wondered when our friends would settle down. If the art of the day
seemed, in my philistine eyes, epileptic, it was at least faithful to
the epileptic contortions and fitful mood of the times. Reviewing these
stupefying parties, I see men and women in a high fever. The girls all
wear the same short skirts and exhibit the same bare backs; they have
achieved the same flat figure; and, granted an upturned nose, they bob
their hair in the same way. Very young, very pretty and very full of
high spirits, they think the same thoughts and express them in the same
jargon with the same loud assurance. Their sameness makes every party
the same. I see myself talking feverishly of films with some star from
Los Angeles and being told, by little Ivy Gaymer, of the latest divorce;
I see young poets discussing a recent lampoon and young actresses
describing their last triumph. There are financial groups and political
caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd
manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving
a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam
Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish
pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women;
the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at
any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the
sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant.
Sir Rupert Foreditch spreads the fever among the young politicians.
I can understand that Lady Dainton is too inelastic for the universal
syncopation of these days. I could wish, in this season of comprehensive
toleration, that I were far more tolerant or far less, for many of these
women would not be received by Violet Loring or my mother, many of the
men would be roughly handled if their business records were examined by
unsympathetic counsel. And no one can for long live comfortably in a
state of delirium. The clatter from the dining-room and the din from the
musicians’ corner are unceasing. Every one is moving, talking, smoking
at top speed. And Robson holds all the threads in his capable hands; he
is, to my house in Seymour Street, what Gaspard is to the Turf and
Stage. My house is indeed a small and noisy club.
It is to be hoped that our guests enjoyed themselves; I believe that
they, like Barbara, were only concerned to be so busy that they could
not think. I should not be surprised to hear that, like Barbara, some of
them broke down before the end. We had intended to stay in London until
I went to shoot with the Knightriders; but early in July Barbara
collapsed suddenly and was ordered to the country. Though there was
nothing organically amiss with her, Gaisford threatened to throw up the
case if she remained in London.
“When I die, you can tell people I was the only honest leech you ever
met,” he muttered with a frown. “I’m never afraid to say I don’t know;
and I don’t know now what’s wrong with that child. She’s very ill
indeed; and there’s nothing the matter with her. I have my suspicions.
You’ll go with her?”
“If I can arrange things at the office,” I answered.
“Office be damned! If she wants you, go!”
More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and
for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an
indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which
Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when
the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical
Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called
to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different
if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand
had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.
“If you _must_ go, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my
letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are
always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”
“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.
4
London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole
condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares
were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.
“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our
dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the
peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh
triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to
define our attitude.”
“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman
who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for
Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”
“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.
Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal
suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the
assembly framed.
“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with
us, “means coercing Ulster.”
As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I
urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was
represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of
the table.
“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner
coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster
in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never
know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and
‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”
Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others
propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy
reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and
precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two
years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a
settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as
one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of
governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing
them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat;
my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of
parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot
irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I
reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County
Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years
that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I
always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round
our echoing table.
It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell,
though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell
could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the
sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years
Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage
by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the
balance, it must employ the same means.
“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore
thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present
position is an evenly matched civil war.”
As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an
even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had
been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded,
after perusal, with an endorsement “_Passed by the Censor I. R. A._”; my
agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If
attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due
to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one,
however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the
shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the
avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain
neutral.
“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick
. . .”
“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.
“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in
an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.
“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the
House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican
troops.”
“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.
“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.
The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most
of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an
opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should
avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men
though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab
before he laid down his arms.
“You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully
avoiding my uncle’s eye.
“The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the
Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old
enough to remember O’Connell: it always _has_ been somebody else! Will
you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his _own_
country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d
call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his
‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.”
“As your people _do_ say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you
in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of
course, when you’ve got your republic?”
My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this
laudable restraint won no favour from the rest.
“I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were
ordering a well-considered dinner.
“Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said
Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly
from hatred of liberalism.
“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as
Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of
the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.”
“If you’re going to hang for treason, you must hang for constructive
treason, for constructive mutiny and for acquiescence in constructive
treason and mutiny,” I pointed out: “that brings in the covenanters, the
Curragh people and the Asquith cabinet.” Dainton, I knew, was a
covenanter; and I wanted him to see the implication of his wholesale
executions. “Personally, I don’t think hanging or shooting ever does
much good . . .”
“It would have been a good thing,” Bertrand interrupted, “if you’d shot
the entire 1914 House of Commons.”
“But as a policy for the government in 1920?,” I asked.
I have thought over this dinner a dozen times since; and, when ministers
were attacked for permitting the slaughter and reprisals that followed,
I would sometimes ask their critics if they could do better than the
reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-informed and reasonably sane men
who shewed themselves so crass, ignorant and mad at this meeting.
“For all the good we’ve done,” I told Bertrand, as we walked home, “I
might as well have been in the country.”
“Don’t leave me yet,” he begged.
And throughout the late summer and early autumn I was torn between
Barbara’s entreaties that I should come back to Crawleigh and Bertrand’s
reproach that I was deserting him when he most needed me.
As a study in “that which remained” I suppose these barren passions
claim their place: in our politics, as in our work and play, our
gettings and spendings, our crimes and insanities, we lived more
rapidly, more violently. The growing disorders of Ireland were ascribed
to a “murder-gang”; in the spirit of the age, they were met by irregular
troops, with general instructions to give at least as good as they
received. Under the reign of reprisals, there was inaugurated an
organized terror for which there had been no parallel since the first
French revolution. Burning, looting, killing and torturing were paid
back, with interest, in the same currency. Mysterious and fatal lists of
names were passed up and down the country; the mails were now
intercepted at will; and, when far-scattered, unsuspecting men and women
were done to death by simultaneous blows, a whisper of “spy” and
“counter-spy”—words that had lost their meaning—explained this
opposing secret carnage which no man had power to stop.
Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my
shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the
world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at
our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed
and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now
branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor
who had broken faith with the South.
“If our own statesmanship is bankrupt, we must look elsewhere,” my uncle
pronounced.
For a week he laid siege to the League of Nations, then to the Foreign
Office. Simultaneously I went as a suppliant to Crawleigh in the hope
that he would forward my petition to the Vatican. On the same day, in
almost the same words, we were told that there was no precedent to guide
a sovereign power in summoning an arbitrator to settle differences
between a government and its subjects.
“You can’t run an empire on those lines,” said my father-in-law.
“You’re not running an empire on your present lines!” I retorted.
He was impregnable. Until the republican leaders came, like the burghers
of Calais, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, he
would not parley with them; and, unhappily for him, no one was strong
enough to compass an unconditional surrender.
As I walked empty-handed away from Berkeley Square, I met Hornbeck
returning home from the Admiralty.
“Making a nice, tidy world for heroes to live in?,” he enquired with a
grin.
Though his tone was bantering, it was free from malice. Philip Hornbeck
had no political predilections and less than no belief in the
perfectibility of man. Government, for him, always came back to a whiff
of grapeshot, which he was always ready to discharge, always without
passion and always without error.