forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the
suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped
out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being
left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a
restored and rejuvenated Turkey.
“This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge
for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.”
“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand
thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested
calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams.
There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when
I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this
night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I
looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through
dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its
orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell
him.
“Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own
courage up. “If he _can_ avoid a conflict . . .”
I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our
courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war
if war could be prevented.
“I _still_ don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were
conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.
“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the
same conclusion in less few words.
War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want
it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most
completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the
war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had
urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the
hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the
red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile
India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India
was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the
victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself
quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops
went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their
old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and
restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.
“But . . . but _why_ . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with
pathetic helplessness.
Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by
his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all
that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant
waterways.
“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable
exasperation.
And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for
news.
“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the
Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money.
Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in
another.” . . .
For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a
somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite
formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.
“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition
ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”
I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he
looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I
went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George
government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October
to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.
3
Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf
and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as
before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold
his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into
confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and
down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its
big guns.
“_It is hard_,” the Lingfield press stated, “_to imagine a conservative
administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr.
Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their
allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George_.”. . .
“_Recent events in the near east_,” retorted the Wister papers, “_have
signed the death-warrant of the coalition_.”. . .
The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal
ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides
were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or
the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split.
As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to
ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest
approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby,
who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the
election.
“What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn.
“And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil
himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”
“_Our_ line . . .” he began eagerly; and, as I turned from the things he
had forgotten to the things he had never learned, I classed him
unhesitatingly with those who—in O’Rane’s phrase—would not admit that
a war had taken place.
“I suppose a political whip can’t live without an abnormal endowment of
optimism,” I said, more to myself than to him.
Jellaby forged ahead with growing enthusiasm. The local associations
were solidly in support of the Asquith wing, solidly opposed to the
Lloyd-George renegades. Much capital could be made out of the
Safeguarding of Industries Bill (“which is pure protection; you’d have
thought the tories had had enough protection in 1906”); more from the
Black-and-Tan reprisals in Ireland; most of all from the unpopularity of
the coalition.
“But have you considered why it’s unpopular?,” I broke in at last. “Not
because its policy is faintly protectionist—the electors to-day don’t
care tuppence about free trade—; not because it tried to put down
murder with more murder. What people care about is taxation and the cost
of living and unemployment and, above all else, my dear Frank, security.
We’re in sight of another and a bloodier war.”
“With a man like Lloyd-George . . .,” he began with a kindling eye.
I did not wait, however, for the end of the tirade. No one beyond
Jellaby’s immediate circle of colleagues cared about the internecine
feuds of exasperated factionaries; and I look back on this night as the
time when so temperamental, congenital and impenitent a liberal as
myself had to realize that there was at present no hope for liberalism
in the liberal party. So far as the roar of his indignant rhetoric
allowed me, I tried to formulate the demands of all who shared my own
feeling of insecurity. The country was demoralized by the war and by the
paralysis of government that followed it; instinctively the country
wanted to be put into training, to have its muscles hardened and—still
more—its nerves steadied. Though the heat of civil war had died down in
Ireland, it had been replaced by the fitful blaze of individual
assassination; the chief of the imperial general staff was done to death
this summer on the steps of his house in London; the commander-in-chief
of the Free State army was ambushed in Ireland. It was idle to bandy
figures of murders and reprisals, when the country demanded a cure for
its own demoralization.
“People feel it’s time to pull up, take stock, overhaul,” I said. “It’s
the spirit of 1914, when the war did for us what we could not do for
ourselves.”
“And that security is just what the liberal party offers,” said Jellaby.
“Standing midway between a tory reaction and socialism . . .”
“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go
all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy
now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to
settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the
country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before
the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as
near war as we are to-night.”
We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still
no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be
troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when
Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his
cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space
calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that
she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week.
“These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced
away with Sam.
Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought
from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by
a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder
moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers
and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it.
“A mad world,” I said, as I parted from Jellaby. “A mad world,” I
repeated, two days later, when I went north to bring Barbara home. “A
mad world face to face with its madness,” I thought to myself, on
reading an announcement, sandwiched between news of now greater moment,
that Mr. David O’Rane was withdrawing the funds of the Lancing Trust
from England.
On reaching Seymour Street I found a telephone-message from Sonia,
begging me to see her at once. I replied that I would come; but, as I
walked to Westminster that afternoon, I felt—as in the similar
atmosphere of eight years before—that the individual had shrunk in
importance. Barbara, shaken out of her usual aloofness, now only cared
to know what chance of life I would give her brother; and, though I felt
for Sonia as I should feel for a popular actress who married a country
curate, I was mildly aggrieved that she should absorb my time when I
wanted to explore the last frantic hopes of peace.
The case which I prepared for O’Rane was, I fancy, not unpersuasive; but
I had no chance of putting it forward. If the inheritance three years
before had been a nine-days’-wonder, the news of the renunciation seemed
likely to cause, in some quarters at least, a nine weeks’ consternation.
I blundered into the wake of a deputation and entered the library in
time to hear the venerable Bishop of Poplar pleading for men and women
whom O’Rane had kept alive for more than two years. Thousands, the
bishop asserted, were on the verge of starvation; before the winter,
they would be reckoned by tens of thousands. While Mr. O’Rane’s
arguments might be unassailable in normal times, the aftermath of an
unprecedented war demanded abnormal remedies.
“From half-a-dozen abnormally long purses?,” O’Rane enquired wearily. “I
want _every one_ to give and _every one_ to feel it. If your few rich
men go on strike, what will happen?”
The bishop was too old a controversialist to be trapped:
“You would like me to say that some one will come forward in their
place. I wish I could believe it. When the pinch becomes unbearable, the
government will provide relief out of the taxpayer’s pocket. But, before
that relief comes, many people will be dead; there will be rioting
. . .”
“It’s a nice question already how long we can keep ’em sweet,”
interposed an anxious voice on behalf of the National Unemployment
Committee.
“It’s a nice question whether you’ll get anything done till they turn
nasty,” retorted a small man with a Cardiff accent.
The bishop smiled and explained that, to make his deputation
representative, he had included his friend Mr. Griffiths, with whose
well-known bolshevist views we were no doubt already acquainted.
“What would you think, Mr. O’Rane,” he continued, “if I threw the bread
of London into the Thames on the plea that it would be better for the
people to eat cake? You are pronouncing sentence of death on the weakest
section of the community.”
In the silence that followed I turned from O’Rane’s tortured eyes to the
apostle of “bolshevism”. This was certainly my first, though not my
last, meeting with the organizer and leader of “Griffiths’ Heroes”. I
had expected a figure cast in the heroic mould, for there was a touch of
the genius in the originality of his ideas and a hint of the commander
in the obedience which he secured in carrying them out. Most strongly
marked, however, was the fanatic; and his blended passion and cruelty
made him something less than human. In thinking of him after all these
months I am always reminded of an angry ferret. He was very small, very
hirsute, very quick; though his eyes were brown, they seemed to shine
red; and, as he looked scornfully round O’Rane’s warm library, I felt
that his little teeth were seeking a hand to bite.
“There’d be less talk of bolshevism, if people knew what they were
talking about,” he announced with a bluntness that was in painful
contrast to the bishop’s courtly patience. “The government says it
doesn’t know what to do; let’s see if any one else does. When folk are
starving, they know what to do.”
There was a threat in his tone; but he did not explain it, as Sonia came
in at this moment and motioned me into the corner by the tea-table.
Griffiths, to the credit of his consistency, refused tea: the men whom
he represented had been out of work for eleven months; he lived as they
lived and, if need be, would starve as they starved.
“We’re first on the list for looting, when the revolution comes,” she
whispered cheerfully, while he examined her clothes as though he would
have liked to strip her. Then, for a moment, she forgot to think of
herself. “Oh, George! Babs has just telephoned for you. I’m so sorry,
I’m afraid there’s bad news. Your uncle . . .” I stood up; but she
pulled me back, as the deputation filed out. “She’s sending the car
here; she thinks you ought to go to him at once. If there’s anything we
can do . . .”
I shook my head. At Bertrand’s age, there was little that any one could
do.
“Have you told Raney?,” I asked.
“I hadn’t a chance. This deputation . . . Oh, David, what did you tell
them?”
O’Rane dropped into a chair and pressed his fists against his temples:
“I said . . . I’d think the thing over. It was really out of politeness
to the poor old bishop. Nothing can make any difference.”. . .
“Even when everybody tells you you’re wrong? People simply won’t believe
it. I had four reporters within half-an-hour.”
“I don’t know what they want to worry us for,” he broke out. “What did
you tell them?”
Sonia weighed each word of her answer before launching it:
“I said you hadn’t made up your mind. If you want to shew that you care
for me . . .”
O’Rane walked to her with his hands outstretched in an attitude of
entreaty:
“If this accursed money had never come to me, you couldn’t have said
that.”
The attitude of entreaty won no hint of yielding.
“Of course, if you _won’t_ be warned . . .” Sonia muttered, as she
walked with me to the door.
4
As I got into the car, I was first frightened and then touched to find
Barbara sitting half-hidden in her corner.
“I’m afraid he’s very bad,” she whispered. “It’s not a stroke this time;
but something’s broken inside him and he’s had terrible hæmorrhages. If
he has another . . . I’m so sorry, George.”
“It was good of you to come.”
In the darkness I heard a sigh; and Barbara laid her hand on mine:
“We’ve always been good friends, even if we _have_ made rather a mess of
our lives.” . . .
I could not hear what she said after that, for I had been caught
unprepared by Sonia and was realizing now for the first time that it was
a toss-up whether I saw Bertrand alive. My uncle was a man of almost
fifty when I was born. For ten years I was frightened out of my wits by
his huge stature and bellowing voice; for another ten I was humiliated
by his brutal jests and blasting disparagement; then, as a young man, I
rose in exasperation and trounced him till he roared with delight at my
beating. From that unlikely beginning sprang a friendship in which
Bertrand played the part of father, elder brother, political mentor and
fellow-conspirator in my most impressionable years.
“I . . simply can’t imagine life without Bertrand,” I told Barbara.
“If you want me . . .”, she whispered.
Did even she know how the sentence would have ended? I was stunned by
the thought of losing Bertrand; I clutched at any one who would take his
place, clutching literally with both my hands about Barbara’s wrists.
And she, for the first time in my acquaintance, was frightened.
“Does this mean . . .?,” I began.
“I won’t come into his room, of course,” she continued, in a superb
recovery. “If you want me to fetch some one for a second opinion . . .”
“Does this mean that we’re going to make a new start?,” I persisted.
“I’ll do all I _can_ . . .”
Though it was Bertrand’s imminent death that broke my self-control, I
forgot him and forgot that we were driving to his death-bed:
“The only good you can do is to tell me this ghastly farce is played
out! Two years!”
“We all make mistakes,” she answered with composure, though she had
winced at that word “farce”. “I can’t help you _much_. In these two
years I’ve grown used to doing without love. I’ve lost everything,
thrown everything away.” The silence that followed seemed to daunt her;
and I felt my hand being pressed. “You know as well as I do all you’ve
done for me. I’ll be your wife, I’ll bear you children if I can; but I
can’t give you a love I don’t feel.”
As though I had stepped aside, I saw myself lurching forward to demand
satisfaction for the unuttered reproaches and contemptuous suspicions
that had masqueraded so long as patience.
“Did you ever feel it?,” I heard myself asking. “Have you _ever_ loved
_any one_? You’ve been curious about many people; but it’s always been
in your head and not in your heart.”
“I don’t let _myself_ off!,” she moaned.
“I wonder! You have tragic scenes; but, when other people are broken,
you survive. If your heart had been brought into the play . . .”
I broke off in stark horror. Never before had we held such language; and
we were almost within earshot of Bertrand. Barbara was dumbfoundered at
first; then she rallied and threw herself into the duel as though I were
at last giving her an opportunity of which she had been unfairly
deprived ever since our marriage.
“I never pretended to be in love with you,” she taunted me.
“You’ve never been in love with any one. If you’d ever known the meaning
of the word, you wouldn’t have married me on those terms.”
Barbara turned away and covered her face with her hands.
“That’s the way Eric said good-bye to me!,” she gasped. “George, I asked
you to divorce me two years ago.”
“And I wanted to make sure, for your sake. Well, let’s face reality for
once! Imagine me to be dead.” . . .
With another unexpected turn, Barbara clung to me convulsively and laid
her hand over my mouth:
“Don’t talk of death!,” she whispered. “I’m so frightened of it! And
it’s very near at hand now. I’ve been ill so often, I’ve had to fight it
so often. My dear, my dear, if I ever heard you were ill, it would bring
back all my love: I’d nurse you; I’d shew you I _could_ sacrifice
myself. Never say that again!,” she cried hysterically.
My fit of bitterness passed as quickly as it had come; and I tried to
apologize. Then it returned; and I asked myself whether this talk of
“sacrifice” meant more than that Barbara was living, as ever, in a world
of emotional romance. Then the car stopped; and I stumbled up the steps
of my uncle’s house.
In the hall Violet Loring told me there had been no further hæmorrhages.
Only a few more hours of life could be expected, however; and this
Bertrand realized.
“I didn’t bother you before,” he began in his normal voice, “because I
didn’t know whether I was going to live or die. I’m going to die, it
seems; and I can tell you, George, it’s the most interesting experience
I’ve ever had.”
His grim chuckles rumbled till the vast Victorian brass-bed creaked.
Involuntarily Violet shivered; but I felt that the last and least
service I could do was to make my mood chime with my uncle’s.
“I’m glad I’m in time to thank you, Bertrand,” I said. “You’ve been my
best friend ever since we first set up house here together, nearly
twenty years ago.”
Though I knew the room of old, I was struck for the first time by the
uncouth masculinity of a vanished era.
“Odd business,” he grunted. “I always dropped a generation. I’m your
_great_-uncle; but I always put you in your father’s place. You’ve kept
me young. . . . And now this is the end, the moment we wait for all our
lives. The heart’s weak, thank goodness, so I shan’t make a fight; but I
swear to you I expect to wake up again to-morrow morning! I’m not afraid
of going out, but I can’t believe it. That’s why people persist in
fabricating a future life. I’ll tell you one thing, George, that’ll
comfort you: death’s only a terrible thing if it comes before you’re
ready, and you’re only ready when you’re worn out. That was the terrible
part of the war.” The leonine head turned with an effort that left him
breathless. “Violet my dear, I bow humbly at the thought of boys like
Jim who were killed before they had time to find the grasshopper a
burden. I can’t believe I shan’t wake up to-morrow, but I don’t want to
. . . here or anywhere. A silly old woman of a parson came here
yesterday. . . . It cost me a hæmorrhage to get rid of him. Good God,
I’ve outgrown _that_ phase! Life eternal. . . . I’m much more interested
in the brief life that is our portion here. I’ve had nigh on a century
of it; and I know less about it than I did when I was born.”
He paused as the nurse came in to say that O’Rane was waiting
downstairs.
“Good of the boy,” he murmured. “Ask him to come up.” Then his eyes
shone with their last gleam of mischief:
“‘_Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to
learn!_’”
5
The fit of coughing that followed caused my uncle to examine himself for
injuries. The nurse made signs to Violet, who slipped noiselessly from
the room; O’Rane came in, and I guided him to the bedside. Bertrand
shook hands with difficulty; and his heavy eyes lightened.
“You’re another of them,” he panted. “Always think of your father when I
see you. I wonder what he’d have made of it all if he’d lived. . . .
George there?”
“I’m here,” I answered, as I pulled a chair to the bedside.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said the other day about our
prototypes in history. Triskett’s great-grandfather firing on the
Versailles mob just to see what would happen. . . . I’ve known a good
few historic figures: O’Connell; Mazzini; Lassalle. The great
unspeakables. I believe I went to them for fear of being told by boys
like you that I and my spiritual forefathers had been on the wrong side.
Dam’ conceit! I hope I’ve outgrown that phase now; but, when that ass
Crawleigh spluttered about rounding up conscientious objectors in the
war, I felt that his ancestors had burnt heretics. Your friend Maitland
sentenced a man to the cat the other day: he said it was the only remedy
for crimes of violence. I asked him why he didn’t break the fellow on a
wheel, as his forebears had done. Damn it, I gave up shooting for fear
of finding myself in the same dock as the old cock-fighters. Conceit, if
you like. I’ve been a radical because I couldn’t let posterity charge me
with the savagery and intolerance which we throw up against our
conservative predecessors. Time was on my side. I recorded my protest.
What _good_ it’s done . . .? That’s why you’d better keep the paper on,
George. It’ll shew the next generation how superior you were to this.”
The advice was rounded with a cynical, deep chuckle; and he lay long
without speaking.
“The world’s a gentler place than when you were a boy, sir,” O’Rane put
in.
Bertrand looked at him in silence for a moment and then shook his head
slowly:
“You say that, with your experience of the late war? _Does_ human nature
change? . . . We shan’t have that dinner, George, but I wasn’t far out
in my date. The present government is falling to pieces.”
“And what’s going to take its place?,” I asked.
Bertrand ruminated in silence for some time; then his face lighted for
the last time in a reflective smile: