passion, the great love which she still demanded as of right; even with
Eric Lane out of the way, I could not deck out my humdrum self as a
fairy prince. If I failed in the “understanding” for which alone she had
married me, how was her indifference ever to be overcome? The whole of
our life must be such an evening as this, when she donned a brilliant
mask of gaiety for dinner and discarded it when she locked her door
against me.
A sudden thought urged me from my chair and sent me pacing up and down
my room. How many other masks did Barbara employ? She dramatized her
life so richly that, though her grief for Eric was unfeigned, I doubted
if she could resist the temptation to make a romance out of his death.
Had she been still unmarried, she would have cast herself for a part of
inconsolable bereavement; as I obtruded awkwardly into her scene, she
chose a blend of remorse for the injury she had done him and of heroic
endeavour to forget him in her devotion to me. Unconsciously, in that
queer childish brain that could never separate sincerity from pretence,
the phrases had formed themselves; the emotion that fed the phrases had
been fed by them. Instinctively she had changed her attitude and
improvised a new part when she heard of Eric’s letter; and this trick of
dramatizing her life was now so much ingrained in her nature that within
half an hour she was perfect in her lines, her expression and her whole
reading of the part. Henceforward she would continue to regard herself
as “a damned soul”, with the added damnation of being tied to a crass,
unsympathetic husband and of conspiring with him to deceive her
neighbours as she had deceived O’Rane and Neave at dinner.
I readily believed that Barbara had forgotten half the agony of Eric’s
death in the joy of playing her new part.
“But how long is it to go on?,” I asked myself in despair.
The new part had in some sort been forced upon her; she could not
relinquish it without abandoning her attitude of moral superiority to
one who already believed her to be morally in the wrong and would
believe her to be yet more deeply in the wrong if she admitted that even
her grand romance had been a piece of play-acting. And play-acting it
had been for half the time! She could have married Eric if she had dared
to admit that Jack Waring was tired of her, instead of pretending that
she was pledged to him. . . .
Next day the Crawleighs arrived in time for luncheon; and we returned to
London in the afternoon. Our departure was on the border-line between
farce and tragedy. Muffled in furs and bathed in the warm fragrance of
her beloved carnations, Barbara took her place by my side; her eyes were
shining as when I came back to her the day before; and her
undemonstrative mother was stirred to exclaim: “My dear, you really _do_
look very lovely.” Crawleigh, who had recently met my uncle at dinner
and was overcharged with repartees that had not occurred to him in time,
stood with one foot on the running-board and emphasized his endless
rejoinders with excited cutting movements of a tremulous forefinger. In
the background stretched the low grey walls of the Abbey, unchanged
since the days when the first marquis criticized the treaty of Vienna,
unchanged since Lord Chancellor Neave cavilled at the peace of Utrecht,
unchanged since some nameless political abbot pointed the significance
of Crécy and attacked the staff-work at Poictiers. I can no more
reproduce my father-in-law’s arguments than I can reconstruct those of
his predecessors; but I remember being told that now, two years after
the armistice, we were in a more parlous state than when the war was
still raging.
“That’s what my uncle always tells me,” I answered, though it was not
worth while to remind Crawleigh that this was what I had been preaching
in despised _Peace_ for fifteen months. “If you sow the wind, you must
expect to reap the whirlwind.”
The reply probably bore no relation to the argument, but I wanted to get
away; and I had not listened to the argument.
As the car turned out of sight, Barbara flung aside one mask and pulled
another into place. Her eyes lost their colour; her whole body seemed to
grow limp. Appearances no longer needed to be maintained.
So we returned home, to reap a whirlwind. My trite phrase haunted me. I
wondered who had sown the wind.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN A GILDED CAGE
For remember (this our children shall know: we are too near for that
knowledge)
Not our mere astonied camps, but Council and Creed and College—
All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us—
Have felt the effects of the lesson we got—an advantage no money could
buy us!
. . . . . . .
It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to
use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!
So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall
get—
We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!
RUDYARD KIPLING: _The
Lesson_.
1
My return home from Crawleigh Abbey brought to my mind the reappearance
of the small boy in _Punch_, who, finding his running-away unremarked at
the end of one whole day, drew attention to it by observing that his
parents had the same old cat. For a single moment, as O’Rane and I
reached Salisbury Plain, I had remembered that the world was revolving
in sublime unconcern at my private tragedy; then a starless night of
misery enveloped me once more. In London, a fortnight later, I was
amazed to find letters and messages, proofs and manuscripts from people
who seemed still interested in unemployment or reparations, in the fate
of Ireland or the coalition.
Now and for many weeks I thought only of new means to win back a woman
who had become a stranger to me. After her first declaration of
“indifference, utter indifference”, Barbara never weakened the effect of
her action by talking about it; when I had influenza, she nursed me as
she would have nursed any man who had the misfortune to fall sick in her
house; when she caught my influenza and aggravated it with pleurisy, she
allowed me to take her abroad to recuperate. No two acquaintances,
sharing the same house, could have lived in greater harmony; and no
woman could have devised a keener torment than by treating lover,
husband or friend as an acquaintance.
Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .
“_I want to see you about these articles of yours_ . . .”, wrote
Bertrand.
“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash
predicted.
“_I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head_,” Sonia
lamented.
“‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in
astonishment.
2
It is a tribute, I think, to our loyalty in public that my marriage to
Barbara was commonly quoted at this time as one of the very few
successful unions in an age of confessed failures and desperate escapes.
Had I imagined at the beginning that our unreal separation could drag on
for two years, the myth of our blissful harmony would soon have been
exploded. As it was, we drifted. I thought by day, I dreamed by night,
of a romantic reconciliation that never came. There were moments when I
fancied that Barbara, with her passion for dramatizing life, forgot her
boredom in the excitement of martyrdom. On some plea, which I do not
remember, she gave up entertaining; and, while the young “London of the
restoration”—in Bertrand’s phrase—went leaderless, she had the barren
pleasure of feeling herself wasted.
By degrees which I cannot recall I was driven to spend more and more
time at my office and to dine more and more often at a club. Her
indifference spread beyond me to all the men and women who in other days
had interested her; it culminated in her dispassionate efforts to
interest her husband in some other woman. I returned home one evening to
be told that Ivy Gaymer had fled to us for sanctuary and that Barbara
was waiting for me to say whether we should send her back to her husband
or communicate with Mr. Justice Maitland or wait helplessly for
something to turn up. As Ivy was already in bed, we could hardly prick
her into the street at midnight; and next morning she ruled out our
first two courses by declaring that she would never again enter the
house of a man who intrigued with other women under her nose and that
her father’s advice and sympathy were limited to the triumphant
question: what else could any one expect?
We decided to wait for something to turn up. I did not want to be
inhospitable, but I wanted still less to hear Barbara talking about my
“little _protégée_”. After a week or two I suggested that there were
hotels in plenty and that Ivy was not without money. Barbara confined
herself to saying that, as I had insisted on the creature’s staying on
in the first instance, it was now my delicate task to evict her.
Following the cowardly expedient of writing what I was afraid to utter
by word of mouth, I sent a note to Ivy’s room one night, asking what her
plans were; we should, I said, be going down to Crawleigh for Easter. By
ill luck, she was still up; and her reply was delivered from the foot of
my bed, where she sat, smoking cigarettes, in scantier clothes than
women usually wear in public. If we kept the house open, she would not
in the least mind staying on by herself; her solicitors were advising a
divorce; it was saintly of us to take her in; and she would not have
troubled us if she had not been in fear of her life. The interview was
ended damagingly by Barbara, who came in to insist maternally that, if
Ivy and I wanted to talk, she must put on a warm dressing-gown.
Though my door was locked against similar conferences in the future, my
next attempt was no more fortunate. Ivy agreed that she must go and then
broke into piteous weeping. I comforted her as well as Barbara’s
expression of scornful amusement permitted; and, when the weeping broke
out afresh as Ivy began to pack, I recollected an overdue appointment at
my office. On my return, our guest was still in possession.
“She’s cried herself sick,” Barbara told me. “You can say she must go,
George, or you can say she may stop on; but it’s cruel to keep making
her cry.”
“I want her to go,” I said, without enlarging the field of debate.
“It was a pity you asked her in the first place, if you were going to
turn her out.”
“I fancy she asked herself.”
“I thought she was a passion of yours,” said Barbara in faint surprise.
“You made me go to her wedding, when I hardly knew her.”
“At O’Rane’s request: because her father was being so difficult.”
There was a pause; then Barbara shrugged her shoulders.
“I think she’s rather in love with you,” she murmured.
“That’s very flattering,” I said, “but it doesn’t make things any
easier. Her affections are quickly aroused. First it was Eric, then
Gaymer; now . . .”
“You don’t believe it? George, you’re sometimes rather unobservant. Why
d’you think she came _here_ of all places?”
“I should think she was banking on the softness of your heart or of my
head,” I answered.
I hardly knew whether to be surprised or not when I found Ivy still with
us next day, but I made no further attempt to dislodge her. At the end
of the week Barbara went to Crawleigh and I telephoned for a room at the
Eclectic Club. New developments in Ireland kept me tied to the office at
the last moment; and I did not choose that my wife or Ivy’s husband
should be able to say that the two of us had been alone together. After
four-and-twenty hours’ solitude Ivy discovered that it was possible to
live in an hotel without being tracked by her drunken and homicidal
lord; and the incident closed when Barbara came into my room, on the
night of her return from the Abbey, with a brief letter of thanks.
“You’d get tired of her very soon,” she said judicially, as though I
still needed to be saved from myself. “So would any man. That’s why I
begged Eric not to marry her. I believe you’d be happier, though, if you
found some woman who really interested you.”
“That advice is more suitable for a bachelor than for a married man,” I
pointed out.
Barbara walked to the door in silence, then paused with her fingers on
the handle.
“And how long is this going on?,” she asked with a sigh of utter
exhaustion.
“You alone can say that,” I replied.
The tragic farce had been running for six months and was to run for
another eighteen before the farce was eliminated and only the tragedy
remained. Without regular employment, I should have gone out of my mind;
and I am thankful that my uncle’s increasing infirmities threw ever more
and more of our work on my shoulders.
It was in the spring of 1921 that he despaired openly and finally of the
existing government; it was in the summer that he called for a change.
“Though, mark you, there’s not another man who could have done what
George has!,” cried Bertrand with the generous appreciation that Jack
Sheppard might have exhibited towards Dick Turpin. “After two years of
power he’s made a tumbledown peace that satisfies no one. He _hasn’t_
hanged the kaiser; he _hasn’t_ made Germany pay for the war. The League
of Nations, which we were promised, _isn’t_ functioning; he calls a new
conference every few weeks to settle finally the problems which were
finally settled at Versailles. If that isn’t an achievement . . .”
“Oh, admitted!,” I said. “I’m thinking about the day of reckoning.”
We were walking slowly along Knightsbridge on our way to one of the
weekly editorial dinners; and, as we approached the French Embassy, I
crossed the road for fear of encountering Lucien de Grammont. My
shoulders were not broad enough to support the load of obloquy which he
kept in reserve for our few, uneasy meetings; and, though I stated
candidly that the French were now the chief obstacles to peace, I could
not persuade Lucien that it was the prime minister and not the humble
editor of an obscure review who had coaxed the French to open their
mouths and shut their eyes at Versailles. Now that no sweetmeats were to
be had, the French were threatening to undertake the search themselves.
This was the first bill to be met on the day of reckoning; but I was not
prepared to say that it would be the last or the heaviest. In Ireland,
the practice of wholesale murder and destruction was being met with
reprisals in kind. Of India and Egypt it is enough to say that we knew
very little, that all we knew was bad and that we were not allowed to
print all we knew.
“That’s my point,” said Bertrand with cynical complacency. “Any one of
these things would have brought down a government in old days. Take
taxation! Take unemployment!”
“My one consolation,” I broke in, “is that _no_ man, even if damned
fools call him a ‘little wizard’, can cope with all that at the same
moment.”
“I’ll write you an article on _The First Duty of Government_,” Bertrand
promised. “And that, some of these gentry may be surprised to hear, is
. . . to _govern_.”
3
My most vivid memory of my uncle’s subsequent diatribe was that I
declined to publish it. In Ireland or France, where irony is understood,
it would have gone with a swing; but we were unpopular enough already
without assailing the cherished conviction of the English that they have
a natural talent for self-government. And this is what Bertrand
attempted with artful citations from any convenient speech in which an
English publicist had asserted that Dervishes, Hottentots, Andaman
Islanders or even Irishmen were unfit to govern themselves. Could
darkest Africa shew such a record of misrule as we had at our doors? Had
Egypt plunged to bankruptcy with greater recklessness than we displayed?
By the standard of our Indian crimes and blunders, was not Abdul the
Damned unjustly damned? The English were mistaken, but it was not too
late to repair the mistake; and my uncle proposed in conclusion that the
United States should lend Mr. Herbert Hoover for six months to organize
and run the British Empire Protectorate.
“It won’t do, Bertrand,” I said.
“But isn’t it true?”
“It’s too true.”
That, however, was not to say that the English had enough detachment to
relish the truth underlying the irony. Roger Dainton, on the eve of
signing the Ulster covenant, told me—as an Englishman—that the Irish
would never be fit for independence till they had acquired respect for
law; I had seen Violet Loring whiten to the lips at the report of a
lynching in some southern state and then regain her colour in a spasm of
indignation that a Quaker had not been shot for refusing to enter the
army. Collectively, I had watched the people of London—and, for all I
know, the people of England outdid them—exhibiting, at the time of the
Pemberton-Billing case, a ferocious credulity that was not exceeded by
the French in the Dreyfus trial.
“Well, write your own damned article,” said Bertrand. “If you think you
know these people . . .”
I believe that in one respect I understand the English, among whom I was
brought up, better than Bertrand, to whom they were always a race of
despised aliens. What they lack in imagination they make up in a queer
political instinct. Every one at the Eclectic Club was sublimely
indifferent, in these days, to the case of Egyptian autonomy; the
Amritsar sentences only provoked a desultory discussion whether “damned
black men”, as I heard them described by Sir Roger Dainton, would not be
all the better for “an occasional dressing-down”. When, however,
national bankruptcy was threatened, I encountered an instinctive
preference for solvency; and, when refugees from all parts of Ireland
flooded England with tales of assassination and counter-assassination,
the British liking for order at home grew clamant. I remember carrying
back to Seymour Street an official poster in which recruits were invited
to “_Join the Royal Air Force and_ _See the World_”; an unofficial hand
had appended the grim warning: “_Join the Royal Irish Constabulary and
See the Next World_.”
“It’s beyond a joke: that’s what it is,” said Robson, on whom I tried
the last of my experiments.
For soul-deadening years, my butler’s sentiment had been expressed, from
different angles, by Crawleigh and Bertrand, by O’Rane and Dainton, by
_Peace_ and the _Morning Post_. I believe, however, that no change of
heart can be effected by one man or one paper. England accepted the
reformation and acquiesced in the decapitation of Charles the First when
the Robsons of those days—inarticulate and irrational, for the most
part, but numerous and determined—decided that the unreformed Catholic
Church or the divine right of kings was “beyond a joke”.
“I’ve written my own damned article,” I telephoned to Bertrand. “I think
it’s an improvement on yours.”
“You _would_,” he replied.
“I don’t think this government has very long to live,” I added.
The oldest trick in the bag of a political journalist is to find out
what policy is going to be followed, to insist vehemently that this
policy must be followed and to take credit for having forced his own
policy on a vacillating and apathetic government. During the war, Sir
John Woburn preached conscription from the moment when his chief spy in
the cabinet had revealed that ministers were agreed to bring
conscription in: the Press Combine advertised itself for months as the
mouthpiece of that opinion which demanded conscription; and, when the
first military service act was passed, Woburn stood forth as the giant
who had forced the government, in his own phrase, “to give Haig the
men”. I have to guard against the temptation to employ this trick in
writing of our campaign in 1921. Independently of our prompting, every
one was saying that ministers must govern or go; and I only realized how
far opinion had swung, when I met the lately ennobled Lord Saltash at a
public dinner.
“Well, things are moving,” he began darkly, as he led me to the Turf and
Stage and pointed from an unobserved corner of the gallery to Lord
Lingfield’s customary table.
I needed a few minutes to penetrate the familiar externals. My cousin
Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh was entertaining a party of American revue
actresses; Sam Dainton was dancing with Ivy Gaymer; and the inscrutable
Gaspard was watching and ministering with his wonted resourcefulness and
address. It was like going back to a play at the end of a long run. I
felt that they must all of them have been frozen in the same attitude
since last I looked down on the top of their heads a year before. The
band, which played unceasingly from the moment we arrived to the moment
we left, might well have been playing for twelve months on end. It was
impossible to think of these sleek heads and slim figures without their
Turf and Stage frame, unless you thought of them as the brilliant,
glossy chorus of mannequins and salesmen in a musical comedy at the
Hilarity in old days. Had they homes? Had they private lives?
“I see Wister is withdrawing the support of his papers from the
coalition,” I said.
“Yes, he’s out for an all-conservative ministry,” answered Saltash.
“Foreditch put him up to it; and you can see they’re trying to nobble
Wilmot Dean for their new ginger-group. The rank-and-file tories don’t
want to drive Ll-G. out, though, till they’re sure of keeping him out.
And Lingfield, who’s leading the rank-and-file, doesn’t believe they can
do it yet, unless Bonar comes back. That’s why he wants a centre party,
to include Birkenhead, Winston and that lot. It’s interesting, devilish
interesting! The dying lion ain’t dead yet.”
“What line are you taking yourself?,” I asked.
“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer
his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If
Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t
get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative
ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition,
his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s
too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most
evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me.
“I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political
crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I
made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a
member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard;
and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi
that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome.
4
She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the
signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I
arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to
use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance
and property.
“We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old
world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People
won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . .
“I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured.
“If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise
now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual
opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven
years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them
withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea
we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that
Pompeii shall not be buried again?”
I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the
manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new
age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his
neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other
envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be
unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this
inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to
revolution and civil war.
“You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you
told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic
fortunes.”
“I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he
answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m
seeing that every day in my own work.”