avowedly the preamble to a declaration that he was bent at all costs on
saving humanity from the poison of the Lancing inheritance, I warned him
that the unemployed might break his windows if they heard that a million
a year was going to feed distant Russians when they themselves had not
eaten a square meal for twelve months. I asked whether his wife approved
of the article, but received no answer. Finally, I returned him his
manuscript with a reminder that I could not stultify my weekly
predictions of insolvency by proclaiming of a sudden that we were all
suffering from too much money.
“I’ll try elsewhere,” said O’Rane without resentment. “I’m sorry, but
I’m not surprised. You’re hypnotized by 1914, too, and you think you can
avert another eruption by treaties and boards of arbitration. They
didn’t stop the war in ’14, George; they never _have_ stopped wars, they
never will. If you’d change the course of history, you must change the
heart of man.”
“The more I study the heart of man . . .” I was beginning.
“It changes daily,” O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at
gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when
men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But
you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the
poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every
revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution
of wealth.”
“Write me an article on that theme,” I said, “and I’ll publish it
gladly.”
My invitation and promise were forgotten by O’Rane, I imagine, as
quickly as I forgot his demand that I should find a new spirit moving on
the face of the waters. When I reached Fetter Lane next morning, I was
greeted by Spence-Atkins with news which made Saltash’s predictions
obsolete and O’Rane’s researches premature. With or without our reminder
that the business of a government was to govern, ministers were hatching
a new Irish policy. Like most Irish policies, it could be guaranteed to
divide England even if it failed to unite Ireland; and I felt then and
later that the decay of the coalition set in on this day. Like all new
moves in the Irish game at this time, it was certain to keep me in
London when I wanted to take Barbara to Scotland.
The result of the new negotiations has passed into history; and from
first to last I was narrowly preoccupied with their effect on my own
fortunes. If the south-west of Ireland became habitable again, I was
resolved to make it my home; and, at the end of many months’ parleying,
I was wakened by a telephone-message from my uncle to say that a
settlement had been reached. After threatening reconquest, the
government had ascertained that to “reconquer” Ireland would cost as
much and take as long as the last South African war; those who had
preached coercion changed their text to conciliation; and, as I passed
through Inverness, the king’s ministers were meeting the ministers of
President de Valera on equal terms.
“The treaty,” Bertrand’s message ran, “was signed in the small hours.
Outside a portion of Ulster, Ireland is to be a Free State.”
“And now,” I answered, “and now . . . now perhaps we may see home-rule
for England.” In 1906 I had brought a young man’s ideals to Westminster;
thirty years before me, my father had done the same; and ten years
before him, though he might now call his ideals illusions, Bertrand had
entered parliament with hope and vision. One after another, each in our
generation, we had seen our vision clouded and our hope deferred by the
shadow of Ireland. “May I go home now?,” I asked.
“I can’t spare you yet,” Bertrand sighed. “The trouble’s not over. There
are thousands of Irishmen who’ve taken a solemn oath of allegiance to
the republic for which their fathers and brothers laid down their lives.
There are thousands of English who will say in every passing difficulty:
‘I _told_ you so! Ireland is unfit for self-government.’ We must preach
patience, George. We must try to sweeten the bitter taste that all this
blood has left on our lips. Lake House can get along without you for the
present.”
“I was only thinking Barbara and I should be the better for a change,” I
answered with deliberate vagueness.
If I kept my disappointment to myself, I could not help being
disappointed. This talk of peace had suddenly opened an unexpected vista
of escape from the “gilded cage”; and my single glimpse of freedom
convinced me that I could not continue the armed neutrality which
Barbara had been imposing on me for a twelvemonth. We must be reconciled
or divorced. If we could separate even for a short time, we might be
able to decide what we wanted. I therefore told Bertrand that he must
not count on me indefinitely; and the old man shewed the wisdom to give
me my change by sending me to America for the Washington Conference.
“One of us ought to be there; and I’m too old,” he explained. “I don’t
know what stuffing the new president has inside him; but this is the
first serious effort to undo the harm of the Versailles treaty, and
Harding is the first responsible statesman to say frankly that we’re all
committing financial suicide. You’ll go?”
“I will,” I promised.
“And you’ll take Barbara?”
“I’ll talk to her about it.”
And that night I told her of my decision.
“Are you expecting me to come with you?,” she asked.
“It will be better for us both if I go alone. When I come back, you’ll
have had time to think quietly . . .”
“I can picture you talking to your clerks like this,” Barbara mocked.
“‘Your last chance, remember!’ . . .”
“To think quietly,” I repeated, “whether you would prefer me to live in
Ireland. Conditions are becoming normal there . . .”
“You must _really_ decide for yourself where you want to live,” she
answered, without hinting whether she wished me to live alone.
A week later I sailed from Southampton.
If I had expected to find any striking change on my return, I should
have been disappointed; but I fancy that I had by now ceased to look for
the romantic reconciliations of the film-world. There was little enough
change anywhere. My father-in-law had given me a farewell dinner on the
night before I sailed; he gave me a dinner of welcome on the night that
I returned. Tempers, I thought, were a little shorter; nerves a little
thinner. The vague feeling that something decisive must soon happen
reminded me of 1914, when the world expected a cataclysm and almost
hoped for it.
“And certainly the conference has done nothing to avert it,” I told
Bertrand at the end of dinner.
“Not the French show-down?,” he asked. “After this, we can talk frankly
instead of gushing about our gallant allies. We all made grievous
mistakes at the peace conference, George, but it’s the French who are
keeping us from repairing them.”
“Which will coerce which?,” I asked.
The question, I could see, was not palatable.
“They’ve the best air-force in the world and could lay London in ruins
within a week,” Bertrand growled. “It’s immeasurably superior to
anything we saw in the war. They can hold Germany down with aeroplanes
and niggers; and, when you ask them why they won’t reduce their
submarines, you don’t get a satisfactory answer. I can give it to you.
They’re going to make themselves masters of Europe before any one has
time to stop them. They worked against us in Poland, they’re working
against us in the near east.”
“How do you propose to make use of this knowledge?”
“It may lead to clear thinking. Why _we_ should pay six shillings in the
pound to relieve them of an income-tax, when they’re amassing armaments
. . .”
There was very little change anywhere. Lady John Carstairs hoped vaguely
that we were not going to desert our late allies; Violet Loring
whispered that it was all very well for dear Phyllis to preach at us,
but America had deserted every one. I provoked a passing storm by
asserting that all international debts would have ultimately to be
forgiven; and, had any one asked wherein the world was safer or happier
than in 1914, he must have waited long for an answer.
An hour later, as we drove home, Barbara enquired expressionlessly
whether I had enjoyed my holiday from her.
“I wanted _you_ to have a holiday from me,” I answered. “No, I missed
you horribly. I should like to think you missed me.”
“Oh, why say that?,” she exclaimed with sudden petulance. “If I could
have a holiday from myself so that I didn’t see how my life has been
wasted, if I could lose my memory . . . Dear God, if I could only die!”
There was no change in her; and I was driven to issue my ultimatum:
“If you’d like me to go away again, I will. And this time I shouldn’t
upset you by coming back. I’ve done my best; and I’ve failed. We can
part friends. If you want a divorce, you can have it now.”. . .
“Somehow, I don’t see you in the divorce-court,” Barbara murmured half
to herself. “I feel you’d bungle it. When I wrote and begged you to come
back, you _would_ . . . by special train.”
“Well, the matter is now in your hands,” I said.
“I think you’ve a finer collection of worn-out phrases than any man I
know,” she cried, again without answering my question.
5
“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her
a fortnight after my return to England.
Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned
to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia
and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the
article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others;
Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of
the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula
which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity,
_vers libre_, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”,
explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would
outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was
playing counsellor and friend of all parties.
“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic
felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did,
it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”
“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t
mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”
From Barbara’s thoughtful look I fancied she was wondering whether I
wanted a divorce in order to marry some one else.
“The trouble is,” she continued, “you never know who is the right man
till you’ve married him. I always thought you had more perfect
understanding than any man I knew . . . Funny!,” she added, as I made no
answer.
No answer seemed possible. There was now no change in our rare private
passages, though I thought the reference to my want of understanding was
dragged in to close the subject of divorce. There was no change in the
atmosphere of this party. Nearly seven years had passed since Violet and
I last dined together at Loring House. The noble line of portraits had
been reinforced by a black-and-white sketch of Jim in uniform; Sandy was
old enough for his mother to consult me about schools; but we were
arguing now in the very mood and terms that we had used in 1914.
“I wish people wouldn’t talk so much about ‘the next war’,” Violet
muttered with a frown in the direction of Philip Hornbeck. “I’ve lost my
husband; I’m not going to lose my son if I can help it.”
The big, softly-lighted room reminded me of my interminable discussions
with Jim and of his own admission on the outbreak of war that the old
governing classes were played out. I was reminded, too, of the question
that had haunted me in the first weeks of the armistice: if the order
that was represented at this table could not keep peace or make peace,
would it have to give way?
“We talk about the next war,” I said, “because the combined wisdom of
the world has done nothing in the last three years to prevent it.”
“I suppose the prime minister _is_ the only man . . .?” she hazarded.
“Every prime minister is indispensable,” I answered, “till he finds
himself on an opposition bench, watching his successor taking command.
Five minutes after George goes, every one will ask why he didn’t go
before. Every one will discover then the vice of all coalitions: which
is that there’s no one to oppose them. You don’t expect Curzon to admit
that Lloyd-George’s foreign policy is dangerous?”
“Can nobody do anything from outside?”
“The press does its best, but this government is stronger than the
press. Otherwise, Woburn and his combine would have had George out in
the street a year ago. Your best hope is an intrigue from inside. Ll-G.
was at least equally responsible for the shortage of high explosives in
’15; yet he put the blame on the others and broke the Asquith
government. It may be done again.”
My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one
of his now periodical lapses into slumber.
“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G.
would not now be prime minister,” he answered.
No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by
another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than
any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my
first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of
the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me
disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.
“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp
of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony,
without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies _and_
gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new
policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so
felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight
against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the
labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for
invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather _vieux jeu_:
we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the
Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an
invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the
Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a
new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of
everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.
The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years
earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street.
Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that
they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a
bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at
short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it
was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be
at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations,
when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and
Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And
Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel
and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The
Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a
bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette
to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.
I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.
“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,”
said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the
last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between
the _nisi_ and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by
opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating
a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”
“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You
can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to
drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”
We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing
silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife
had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the
room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home,
I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.
“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she
answered.
“And if he repudiates her repudiation?”
“She’ll repudiate him.”
“Um. I rather hoped, when I saw them together . . .”
“Husbands and wives who get on well in public always arouse my worst
suspicions,” said Barbara. “No, there’s no change.”
I was still pondering our hard-worked phrase when we re-entered our
“gilded cage”; and Barbara had slipped away to bed before I could ask
her whether a man erred more grievously by doing everything that his
wife demanded or nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
“UN SACRIFICE INUTILE”
“. . . They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.” . . .
SHAKESPEARE: _King Richard II_.
1
“On the turf,” expounded my uncle Bertrand, “races are won by the
intelligence of the individual backer. It is only when you lose that you
divide the responsibility between the breeder, the trainer, the jockey
and the horse. That is why the sporting tipster is the happiest of men.
Why shouldn’t we call ourselves ‘the Brigadier’ and run a sporting
column in _Peace_? You and I, George, get neither pleasure nor profit
from seeing our political forecasts being fulfilled.” . . .
“Perhaps, if we’d backed our fancy . . .” I began.
“I’ve backed _Peace_,” said my uncle grimly, “to a tune that would make
an unsuccessful racing-stable seem like a safe investment. I pay tens of
thousands a year for the privilege of casting myself for the part of
Cassandra. We _can’t_ be so much cleverer than other people . . .”
“If we were,” I interrupted, “we might make them believe what we tell
them.”
“The world believes what it wants to believe,” said Bertrand.
“And is quite unabashed when it’s proved wrong,” I added, as I pocketed
the article which I had brought to Princes Gardens for my uncle’s
_imprimatur_.
Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning
that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In
the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm
that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs.
By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at
loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social
revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist
riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now
in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the
public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and
what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told
him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as
likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I
listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with
Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last?
Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles
conference could only be changed by another war?
2
I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I
must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that
my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions,
above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be
that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to
maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the
armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I
believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the
peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the
country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another
war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the
chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did
not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make
peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that
they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel
that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division
and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and
press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement
or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If
history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the
1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I
wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de
Liancourt substituted.
According to my uncle, the first responsible attack on the peace-treaty
was delivered by President Harding; a counter-attack was opened by the
French, when they stultified the Washington Conference; and an attack,
in reply to the counter-attack, was launched by the Balfour Note on
inter-allied indebtedness.
On the day after it was published, Clifford van Oss called in Fetter
Lane to enquire whether the note was an overture to repudiation.
“I should rather call it our reply to the French _non possumus_ at
Washington,” said Bertrand. “If we pay our debts to you, the French must
pay their debts to us instead of building submarines against us.”
“From what I know of the French,” said Clifford, with the detachment
that some of us found irritating in a country which had so
disconcertingly washed its hands of European problems, “they won’t take
it lying down.”
The assertion was so intrinsically probable that I did not contest it;
but, if I spent little time wondering what the French reply would be,
that was chiefly because I was watching the fulfilment of another
prophecy. The controversy that raged for six months over O’Rane’s
articles in the _Democratic Review_ is now public, if not ancient,
history; and my chief memory is of his victory by silence. If one of his
million critics had troubled to study his argument, he would have seen
that the flamboyant gifts of embarrassed millionaires were attacked for
their demoralizing effect on the recipients. Those who wrote to the
papers or passed unanimous resolutions of protest laid emphasis on the
crying needs of hospitals and the like; they assumed an almost
impertinent right to tell other people how they should spend their
money; but they did not meet O’Rane’s contention that every university
could be endowed, every laboratory subsidized and every great work of
art purchased for the nation from the money that was spent on luxuries.
I paid less attention to those who lectured O’Rane from expensive
addresses than to those who heard, on the authority of a millionaire,
that a great many people had a great deal too much money.
“Any windows broken?,” I asked him on one of the rare occasions when we
met in these months.
“Not yet,” he laughed.
I did not dare to enquire whether any wives had been running away
lately. Sonia’s threatened repudiation had not yet been published; but
this, Barbara told me, was only because he had not yet stated in public
that he would renounce his inheritance. The controversy imparted a
transient heat to the chilly summer of 1922; and no doubt I should still
be printing letters of protest if O’Rane’s theories of property had not
been drowned in the thunder of a more urgent conflict. In August I took
Barbara to stay with the Knightriders; and I had only reached
Northumberland when my uncle recalled me to London with a telegram that
revived for many days the agonizing fears and uncertainties of 1914.
I returned alone to find Bertrand breakfasting in bed.
“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,”
he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.”