how many thousand million pounds to keep things . . . _just as they
were_. Nurse says we’re shipping troops again to the Straits: to defend
the graves we’ve already filled there, I suppose. In ten years the great
powers will be balanced as they were ten years ago; there’ll be the same
competition in armaments, the same scares, ultimately the same universal
war . . . on a vastly different scale. At home we’ve fallen back into
our old social and financial grooves.” Bertrand’s eyes turned fixedly to
the ceiling in a strained effort of concentration. He was speaking very
slowly now and studying his articulation. “We’re . . . going on . . .
from 1914 . . . without break of thought . . . or mend of heart.”
As he paused, O’Rane stood up and walked cautiously to the bed.
“I’ll leave you now, sir, unless you want me,” he said. “I expect you’d
like to talk to George. I . . . want to thank you.” . . .
“You’ve nothing to thank me for. Don’t go unless I’m depressing you.”
“It’s not encouraging,” O’Rane laughed. “You remember Anatole France’s
story of the woman who tried to save her lover in the Terror? She gave
herself to one of the judges and was told afterwards that she had . . .
rather misunderstood his assurances. _On fera le nécessaire_, yes; but
what then? ‘_Je t’ai dit, citoyenne, qu’on ferait le nécessaire,
c’est-à-dire qu’on appliquerait la loi, rien de plus, rien de moins_.’
Most unfortunate misunderstanding! ‘_Elle sentit aussitôt_’,” he quoted
slowly, “‘_qu’elle avait fait_ . . . _un sacrifice inutile_’.”
As Bertrand looked from O’Rane’s scarred hands to his sightless eyes, I
saw that he had no answer ready. I do not know what answer either of us
could have given such a man at such a moment.
Until the nurse came in with the doctor, my uncle lay silent and, I
think, half-asleep. Towards midnight he roused with a start and seemed
at a loss to explain why we were there. Then he remembered that he was
dying; and, with the slow effort of failing strength, one hand was
dragged painfully from under the bed-clothes. I led O’Rane to him and
then shook hands myself.
“That place of yours . . .” he muttered.
“Yes?”
“Lake House. I heard you were selling it. Don’t . . . unless you must. I
was brought up there. Your grandfather and I . . . You’re too young to
remember the orangery . . . When I was twenty, our nearest neighbour was
a girl called Cathleen Nolan . . .” He paused for breath, and I tried to
find out if he wanted to send her a message. “She’s been dead for more
than sixty years,” said Bertrand with a twisted smile.
If that was his romance, he could tell me no more of it; and the smile
gave place to a quick contortion of pain. I sent O’Rane for the nurse;
but, before he reached the door, my uncle gave one long sigh and the
slight movement of his breathing ended.
O’Rane carried the news to Barbara and with it a note to say that I
should stay at Princes Gardens until the funeral. On the heels of the
first letter I sent a second to beg her forgiveness for my mad words in
the car. She replied that she had forgotten everything.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
TO-MORROW AND TO-MORROW . . .
. . . In the dark there careers—
As if Death astride came
To numb all with his knock—
A horse at mad rate
Over rut and stone.
No figure appears,
No call of my name,
No sound but “Tic-toc”
Without check. Past the gate
It clatters—is gone. . . .
Maybe that “More Tears!—
More Famine and Flame—
More Severance and Shock!”
Is the order from Fate
That the Rider speeds on
To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.
THOMAS HARDY: _A New Year’s Eve in War Time._
1
The days that followed my uncle’s death stand out in my memory as a
vivid and wholly disconnected dream between two normal periods of
waking-life. At one moment I was living in the midst of vast,
conflicting noises; there followed complete calm, during which I was
indeed as busy as ever—as busy as one seems to be in a dream—; then
the tumult broke out afresh. Though nothing had in fact been suspended,
though nothing had greatly progressed in my short spell of
unconsciousness, I felt at the time that I had two personalities, one on
either bank of the dividing stream.
2
I believe Bertrand’s death saved my life or at least my reason. I
remember feeling almost bitterly that I could not support his illness in
addition to my work for our paper, the hourly exasperation of my life at
home and the storm of calamities that were bursting on us from the four
corners of heaven at the same moment. The shock of losing him gave me
the break I needed. When I awoke in an unfamiliar bed, I recalled that
we were overshadowed by a new war, that a general election was imminent
and that unemployment was a problem which we could not solve “by pulling
long faces”. Then I recollected the venomous, red-eyed author of that
phrase; and the scene in O’Rane’s library was flashed on my brain like a
scene in a film. I remembered Sonia’s jejune sympathy. I remembered
finding Barbara in the car. I wondered dully how we stood after that
bitter, mad outpouring; and, despite her note, I was thankful that we
should not meet for a few days. Then I realized that for a few days I
should have a respite enforced: from the paper, from war and
unemployment, from everything that seemed at the moment more than I
could bear.
My first duty was to arrange for the memorial service at St. Margaret’s;
and, as I watched the congregation arriving, I felt that the respite was
extending, for an hour, to all of us. The obituary notices, the memoir
which I was writing for one of the quarterly reviews, most of all this
solemn tribute to a man, perhaps great, of an undeniably great past
turned our thoughts backward to a time when France lived under a
citizen-king and disunited Germany declaimed ineffectually at Frankfurt.
Of the two former prime ministers who attended the service, both were
hardly more than boys when my uncle first entered the House; the oldest
head of a foreign mission had found “old Bertrand Oakleigh” an
established institution when he was first accredited to the Court of St.
James; and the journalists, the lawyers, the men of business, the bees
and butterflies of society who moved sombrely to their places could not
remember a time when the truculent Johnsonian figure had not been one of
the familiar sights of London.
“A great landmark gone,” whispered Dainton, as I waited for Barbara to
arrive with the Crawleighs. “I didn’t always agree with him. Indeed, if
you took a poll of the people here he _hadn’t_ quarrelled with . . .”
I turned to watch the cars emptying and the new arrivals dodging or
seeking out the reporters. My mother had come over from Cannes; my
sister and her husband, Violet Loring and Laurence represented the
family; and, if we had all tingled from the old man’s lash, that was
long ago and inextricably in the part he chose to play. The older
generation in the House of Commons and the younger generation in Fleet
Street—men who won his respect by standing squarely up to him—came
unurged to prove their regard for his fighting qualities and his
generosity.
“I deplore his politics,” said Crawleigh, “but he was a great public
servant.”
At such a time I refrained from suggesting that Crawleigh’s father had
deplored the politics of Bright and Cobden. It is one curse of the
party-system that an opponent must be dead before we admit that he may
possibly not be damned. I was brought up to regard Lord Salisbury as a
monster wherewith to frighten naughty children; my father, if he had
been required to expose the Antichrist, would have pointed his finger
unhesitatingly at Lord Beacons field.
I thought over Crawleigh’s belated tribute as I took Barbara to our
places. This imminent election might purge the House of those to whom
the war—as Saltash told me frankly—had come as a god-send; but, if the
adventurers into public life were not sent back to their counting-houses
and newspaper-offices and bucket-shops, I feared that, with Bertrand,
there would die an unparalleled tradition of integrity and devotion. My
uncle had prepared himself for politics by half a lifetime of study, as
Gladstone and Salisbury, Morley and Rosebery prepared themselves; of the
men under thirty who entered the House with me in 1906, hardly one had
not tried to equip himself by travel, by settlement-work, by experience
in business or by the management of an estate. There seemed to be fewer
servants of the public in 1918.
“If he had scoffed less,” said Lady Dainton, “he would have done more.”
I agreed privately, though I think his cynicism covered a disappointment
of soul: he had come to England, as a brilliant, ambitious and sanguine
boy, to reform the world; and the sluggish-witted, slow-speaking English
had worn him down. To begin as an O’Connell and to end as “a great
public servant” would have roused him to savage merriment.
“How he would have despised all this!,” I whispered to Barbara, as the
people whom he would not admit to his house hurried importantly into the
more prominent seats.
Ministers of the present and past, divines and pressmen, authors and
diplomats poured in till every place seemed to be taken. A crowd began
to collect at the doors; there was rather more noise than I thought
seemly; and I was glad when the organ began to play.
Sixty years of public life. I was trying to remember whether Bertrand
had known Westminster before the new Houses of Parliament were built,
when Spence-Atkins, who was acting as an usher, touched my arm and asked
if we had room in our pew for two more. I made way for Sonia, who
crushed past me with scarlet cheeks, and for O’Rane, who allowed himself
to be guided by a verger. His face, I thought, was white and set, with a
suppressed anger which I had seen more often at school than in later
years. I asked if anything was amiss; but he would only reply
“Afterwards.” Then I relapsed into the past and forgot my surroundings
until the last notes of the Dead March throbbed into silence.
Outside I was surrounded by sympathetic friends; but, in the complete
detachment of my anæsthesia, I was thinking only that I had time to see
my solicitors before luncheon, when I found Sonia the centre of an
agitated little group which O’Rane was trying alternately to soothe and
to disperse.
“No, I insist on telling George,” she proclaimed. “Did you hear what
happened when we arrived? I don’t like being called a murderer!”
The word—and, still more, the tone in which it was uttered—disturbed
my dream of past days.
“Who . . .?” I began.
Then O’Rane, with mounting irritation as some queer sense warned him
that a crowd was collecting, felt for my arm and led me away.
“We don’t want a scene,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, George: I wouldn’t
have come if I’d thought for a moment. . . . Our excellent friendship
the Bishop of Poplar is unintentionally at the bottom of this. You
remember his saying something about my condemning innocent people to
death if I stopped the money I’ve been giving him the last few years?
Well, that’s been taken up by Griffiths’ gang. We’ve had sandwichmen
patrolling The Sanctuary all this week: O’RANE’S SENTENCE OF DEATH or
something of the kind. I didn’t care; I wasn’t going to be blackmailed.
Then, to-day, one of the reporters at the door asked my name; and
somebody in the crowd overheard it. A few idiots thought it would be
amusing to shout ‘murderer’. . . . Where’s Sonia? It’s time we got
back.”
As I led him to his wife, I observed that her cheeks were no longer
flushed; she looked, indeed, unpleasantly scared, and her eyes were
fixed on the avenue of loiterers between whom she must pass on her way
home.
“We’ll drop you,” Barbara suggested, with a quick movement towards the
car.
Sonia hurried gratefully to her side.
“Thanks, Babs, I’ll walk,” said O’Rane obstinately.
“Then I’ll walk with you,” I said. “This business is frightening your
wife,” I added when we were alone. “Why don’t you tell the police to
clear these sandwichmen away?”
“I really haven’t had time. This is going to be the worst winter of all,
George; we must raise every penny we can.” His lip curled contemptuously
at the booing which greeted us in Palace Yard. “I’m free to beg now; if
people want to know what I’m doing myself, I can say I’m giving every
last shilling I can spare and they must do the same. We’re _all_
responsible for relieving this distress; it’s part of the war, and we
must volunteer as freely as we volunteered in ’14. And, if that doesn’t
bring the money, we must try other means. The smug, secure people were
glad enough to have conscription of men. Their money’s less than a man’s
life; we must have conscription of wealth if they won’t volunteer. If it
amuses the people I’m working for to call me murderer . . . Will you
come in?” he asked, as we reached The Sanctuary.
“I’m already overdue at my solicitors’,” I answered, though I made time
to call at the Admiralty on my way to the City.
I thought that Philip Hornbeck, who amassed “intelligence” of all kinds,
should have a first-hand account of this ugly little scene; and I wanted
to hear his opinion of Griffiths. Though he promised to keep on eye open
for the O’Ranes, he clearly considered the temper of the country less
dangerous than in the big strikes after the war. The unemployed were
numerous enough, but they were kept scattered; Griffiths had the ability
and the will to make mischief, but he was disowned by the official
labour-leaders.
“The people of this country have no experience in revolutions,” said
Hornbeck. “When you have a riot, it’s always the rioters who need
police-protection.”
3
The tumult, which had seemed to be so mysteriously suspended, broke out
anew on the day when I sent my memoir of Bertrand to the printers and
walked out of Princes Gardens into the traffic of Knightsbridge.
Clamorous contents-bills at the street-corners reminded me that I was
come back to a world where new wars were imminent; the Guards had sailed
for Chanak; a general election could no longer be averted.
My ultimate duty to Bertrand was fulfilled when I persuaded my staff to
carry out his last wishes for _Peace_. Though he mocked the empty
conceits of recording protests and demonstrating moral superiority, he
was not scheming to stand well with enlightened posterity when he lay
murmuring: “_Un sacrifice inutile? Un sacrifice inutile?_” O’Rane’s
question was an affront to him; he was wishing himself fifty years
younger, to make an answer that would satisfy him; and we must take up
the burden which his hands could no longer hold.
As soon as I had their promise of support, I left my colleagues and set
out for Berkeley Square to learn the secret history of the
long-threatened conservative revolt.
This menace of war had done what the grotesque treaty of Versailles, the
organized anarchy in Ireland, the paralysis of government in every limb
had so far failed to do. Others, besides my butler, were saying that the
long record of misrule was beyond a joke; and the party-managers, in
concert with the independent wire-pullers who were now an established
part of our public life, had decided to wreck the coalition. ‘Blob’
Wister had already spoken; and Saltash told me that Woburn and the Press
Combine would speak next day.
I found my father-in-law engaged on a letter to _The Times_, protesting
against the exclusion of peers from the Carlton Club meeting; and for a
long spell he reiterated like a sulky child that he could tell me
nothing because he was allowed to know nothing. Then he relaxed and
informed me that the fight was taking place over foreign policy in
general and, in particular, over the prime minister’s dictatorial habit
of conducting his foreign relationships through his own secretariat over
the head of the Foreign Office.
“If I’d been Curzon, I’d have thrown the whole thing up years ago,” said
Crawleigh with that eagerness for resignation so often exhibited by men
who have not been invited to hold cabinet office.
“He may feel he’s more useful as a brake on the prime minister,” I
suggested.
“If the prime minister goes, the foreign secretary must follow . . .
unless he precedes him, when he sees how the cat’s jumping,” said
Crawleigh with ill-concealed malice. “Well, it’s quite simple;
Chamberlain has pledged himself to support the coalition; Birkenhead and
Horne are with him; and the rump is meeting to see if it can overthrow
Chamberlain.”
“Who’s to be put in Chamberlain’s place?,” I asked.
“No one knows yet. No one has the least idea how the meeting will turn
out. If I were in the confidence of my party . . . Nowadays the unhappy
accident of being a peer . . .”
Feeling that I should hear no more, I drifted to the Turf and Stage,
where Frank Jellaby thickened the mist in which Crawleigh had enveloped
the Carlton Club. After a denunciation of the coalition-liberals which
reminded me of Cato’s punctual fulminations against Carthage, he
explained that the new crisis had been engineered by ‘Blob’ Wister and
that its outcome depended on Wister’s success in finding a leader:
“He had no difficulty in persuading people like Dean and Lingfield to
come out for an all-tory government when his papers were marching ahead
to cover their advance. If he can get Bonar Law to stampede the meeting
. . .”
“I hear Lingfield and the rest of George’s tory ministers are swearing
allegiance to him with one hand,” I said, “and writing him letters of
resignation with the other.”
“_They_ don’t know anything . . . except that some of them will be badly
left.”
“But no one,” I encouraged him, “will be left quite so completely as
your coalition-liberal friends.”
Jellaby’s face darkened:
“They sold the pass in ’16, they’ve had their reward; if there were
another pass to sell, they’d sell it; and they mustn’t complain if they
can’t find one.”
“You won’t join forces,” I asked, “to keep the tories out?”
“After 1916 I could never trust a coaly-lib again,” he answered. “Now,
if your paper would help us into a position where we could hold the
balance . . .”
“That,” I said, “is simply overturning one coalition to make way for
another. And you’ve no more programme to-day than you had in 1918, when
you let Ll-G.’s mad promises pass without a protest. We’re paying for
your silence to-day, at Chanak and wherever the French can hit us.”
Before Jellaby had time to answer, we were hurried one stage farther
along the ever unfinished road of contemporary politics. Lord Saltash,
whom I had observed moving from table to table with the manner of a
conspirator rather far gone in wine, raised his eyebrows suddenly as
‘Blob’ Wister hacked his way across the dancing-floor. There was a quick
nod; and Saltash lurched towards the telephone-boxes, only pausing to
whisper thickly in my ear:
“He’s going! Bonar, I mean. Meeting to-morrow.”
“Are you betting on the result?” I asked.
“He’s not coming back politics sake being losing side,” Saltash answered
telegraphically, laying a squat index-finger against one side of his
nose. “Last kick dying lion. Wash-out George. Number up.”
Jellaby was silent for a few minutes; then he smiled as one who had
waited patiently by the mills of the gods.
“Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?,” he demanded at large.
“This is the end of the liberal party for a generation,” I said; which
was not the answer expected of me.
And then I stood up to say good-by. There is little difference of age
between Jellaby and myself; but he has been nurtured more strictly on
the official hatreds of a whips’ office. I was born and bred a liberal,
whereas Jellaby embraced that faith as he embraced agnosticism, the
poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, the painting of Manet, the æsthetics of
Pater and, for a time, total abstinence. They were all fashionable among
the members of one coterie at Balliol in his day.
“For some years . . .” he conceded with regretful solemnity.
“And,” I pursued, “what happens to liberalism, which is more important
to me than the liberal party?”
Jellaby had no answer ready; and, if he had not been my host, I should
have asked him whether a liberal whips’ office cared for these things.
Next day the conservative wing of the coalition seceded, after a brief
debate, on the strength of a single, brief speech. The prime minister
resigned; and the king invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a government. As
soon as the conservative party had accepted its new leader, the date of
the election was announced. Those of my friends who were nursing
constituencies became, of a sudden, very important and excited; I
received invitations to speak from people who must have forgotten, if
they ever knew, how bad a speaker I am; wagers were offered freely; and
all parties predicted confidently that they would return with increased
numbers.
I spent much time at the Eclectic Club in these days, wondering what
line my paper should follow in the election. No new policy was being put
forward; and, if the old policy stood condemned, I did not understand
why ministers who were responsible for it were kept in office. Nor, at a
season when everybody speculated how long the patience of the unemployed
would endure, did I understand why the order of the county was entrusted
to a man who had preached the sacred right of rebellion so few years
before in Ulster. I wondered, too, what would happen to the floating
wreckage of the coalition; and, more bitterly than ever before, I missed
old Bertrand’s caustic humour in the hours when he sat with me here in a
window of the smoking-room, defaming the passers-by and pretending that
we were studying trends of opinion and “the great movement of men”.
He it was who said that politics were desocialized when Mr. Asquith left
Downing Street. For six years the political stage had been occupied by
statesmen, demagogues, shy scholars, blatant adventurers,
advertising-agents, unemployed millionaires, newspaper-proprietors,
dukes, international Jews and merchant-princes. Cabinet control had been
replaced by the personal domination of one man who miraculously held
this heterogeneous company together; considered policy had yielded to a
succession of brilliant and incongruous improvisations. On no day could
an outsider foretell who next would pull a wire; and, as I looked round
the crowded rooms of the Eclectic, I wondered what all these long-faced,
out-of-work pressmen and financiers, these confidential secretaries and
hangers-on would now do for a living or a career.
Then, as the ministry was completed and the first election-addresses
appeared, I recalled Bertrand’s last verdict.
“_Without break of thought or mend of heart . . ._”
_Were_ we going on from 1914? Had the war, in which most of my
generation perished, really achieved nothing?
4
As we slid noiselessly into the least passionate general election of my
experience, I wondered whether we were going on from anything so good
even as 1914. If the German peril was at an end, no man could say what
new trouble might come out of the east, when demoralized Russia and
Austria joined hands with resentful Turkey and Prussia. The mark had
collapsed; and, unless it could be rehabilitated, the trade of central
Europe must come to a standstill.
After that, it was a toss-up whether famine or revolution came first.
Against this tidal wave of hunger, disease and the reckless savagery of
hopeless millions, the only powers with strength and means to build a
rampart were France, America and Great Britain.
If Lucien de Grammont and Clifford van Oss fairly represented the first
two, the simple faith of the French—embodied in M. Clemenceau—was
being betrayed by every one else at the very moment when M. Clemenceau
was betraying the simple faith of President Wilson. Recalling that the
world was to have been made safe for democracy, I wondered if another
war must be fought before democracy was made safe for the world.
According to one or other of us, it was the greed and bad faith of Great
Britain, America and France which was wholly and solely responsible for
our present perils.