It had been a regret to Bertram—almost a distress—that Luke Christy
had not been in London lately, and he was glad to see his signature
under some article in “The New World,” showing that he was back again.
There was something in Christy’s exalted pessimism, in his bitter and
almost savage irony, in a queer humour darkly shaded by a sense of
tragedy, which acted in an inexplicable way in Bertram as both an
irritant and an opiate.
His own moodiness, his private doubts and difficulties, even his bigger
apprehensions of political troubles at home and abroad, were made
trivial by the intense world-ranging analysis of social disease
threatening civilisation which Christy brought back from his journeys
abroad.
He was seldom in London, and after a few days, or at most, a few weeks,
in his rooms overlooking the river from Adelphi Terrace, would set out
again for Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Rome, with an insatiable
desire to “see how things were getting on” in the spirit of peoples and
in their social conditions. The results of his inquiries could be read
in Radical weeklies under the heading of “Our Special Correspondent,” in
articles written with a cold scientific touch, over-crammed with facts
and statistics, and unemotional. They revealed nothing of the flame at
the heart of this man, none of his whimsicality of expression in private
conversation, not a gleam of his philosophy, but Bertram believed that
they were valued as important contributions to knowledge by
international groups of men and women outside his own set, and unknown
to him except by references in newspapers and in satirical comment by
men like Kenneth Murless.
Kenneth called them “long-haired idealists,” “Crawling Pacifists,” and
“home-bred Bolshevists.” He had even referred to Christy once or twice
by name, and had denounced an article of his as “a challenge to all
established authority. The fellow ought to be shot.”
“He’s a friend of mine,” said Bertram.
Kenneth Murless raised his eyebrows in languid surprise.
“That so? Then you’re entertaining an enemy unawares. A viper in your
bosom, old man. Christy and his crowd have declared war against our set
and our ideals.”
“What ideals?” asked Bertram.
“Preserving the good old order of things,” said Kenneth. “The Stately
Homes of England, our Prerogatives, our Very Pleasant Way of Life, which
is already seriously threatened by tax-collectors and the greedy clamour
of an insensate mob.”
Bertram objected violently.
“The mob did most of the dying in the Great War, and now ask for a
decent living wage!”
“For high wages and no work!” answered Kenneth in his best
unimpassioned, smiling, and supercilious manner, which had made him
successful as President of the Union, during his third year at Oxford.
He begged Bertram not to be led astray by the snobbish witticisms of his
friends in a pampered democracy, not to be spellbound by their facile
and foolish catchwords. He disliked the suggestion that the mob did most
of the dying in the great war. The gently of England, the old
aristocracy, poured out their blood like water in a prodigal way at the
outset as at the end, while crowds of lazy young hooligans had to be
coaxed and bribed to do their duty, and then conscripted.
Even then they took refuge behind “special trades,” “essential
occupations.” There were no essential occupations as an excuse for
staying at home by boys from public schools and universities and county
families. They just went out and died, if need be, without a whine.
“That’s true,” said Bertram; “they played up all right. None better.”
“I’m glad you admit that, Bertram!” said Joyce in her satirical voice,
which Bertram knew was a challenge.
She was in the drawing-room of their house in Holland Street, lying back
on the sofa among a heap of flaming cushions, with her legs tucked up,
revealing her long silk stockings. A charming, slim, golden-crowned
figure in a close-fitting jumper, so young and fresh that it was
difficult even for Bertram to believe that she had been the mother of a
child. How beautiful she was! How good to see her well again!
“Why shouldn’t I admit it? Why should I even ‘admit’ it? It’s an
historical fact!”
“You’re always taking sides with the common people. Backing up Labour
with a big L. It’s disloyalty to Us.”
Bertram shifted moodily in his seat—a low window seat looking out to
the street where a Punch and Judy show was being performed to a small
crowd of children and nursemaids.
“For God’s sake don’t talk about the common people as though they were
dirt, Joyce! They saved England. England owes them something. Those
fellows in my company—”
Joyce flicked some cigarette ash into the fireplace and put her hands
round her knees.
“Those fellows in your company! I can’t think how you kept your
authority, hob-nobbing with them so much!”
Bertram said in a low voice that they had saved his life more than once.
“That’s ancient history,” said Joyce. “You’re always harking back to the
old war! Let’s forget it. We’re talking about the present situation. The
working people are thoroughly lazy, utterly demoralised, and infected
with Bolshevism. They ought to be kept in their places with a strong
hand.”
“I agree!” said Kenneth Murless. “They’ve become tyrannical and
snobbish.”
“Snobbish!” said Bertram, laughing, and making an effort to keep the
temper that was rising in him.
“Yes,” said Kenneth, observing a paradoxical argument from afar; “the
snobbishness of the working classes is disgusting. Because they don’t
wear collars and ties, they won’t associate with men who are afflicted
with stiff linen round their necks. Because they’re illiterate, they
make a caste of illiteracy and condemn the Intellectual as a parasite
and a pariah. Their Trade Unions are more exclusive than West-end clubs,
more intolerant than mediæval Star Chambers. Their Labour leaders are
enemies of the liberty so hardly won for England by English
gentry—freedom of speech, equality before the law, justice for rich and
poor alike, religious toleration, taxation according to wealth. Why
these fellows are all for the suppression of liberty. Anybody who
ventures to disagree with them is called a damned reactionary. If they
had their way, as in Russia, they would prevent the free exercise of
religion, and stifle all intellectual opposition with the hangman’s
rope. Even now in England the working class is the only one exempt from
taxation, getting their education for nothing, and blackmailing those
who have accumulated a little money by hard toil.”
“Like you,” said Bertram.
“Like me,” answered Kenneth, calmly. “I confess my little job at the
F.O. is not exacting, but don’t I toil over my sonnets—on official
stationery—? Don’t I agonise in labour to produce a gem of thought for
‘The London Mercury’?”
“You ought to go into the House, Kenneth!” said Joyce. “Your eloquence
would overwhelm Lloyd George himself. And I will say there’s a lot of
sense in your head, in spite of your devastating beauty, and
supercilious conceit.”
She spoke in the usual vein of irony with which she set her wit against
Kenneth’s, yet with an underlying admiration which he perceived and
liked.
His face crimsoned a little, and he laughed affectedly.
“For that tribute, dear lady, my heart’s thanks! But don’t tempt me to
sully my bright soul with the dirt of politics. Diplomacy, yes, the
higher Machiavellism, but, please, not politics! It’s impossible to keep
clean within the precincts of Westminster.”
Two of Joyce’s girl friends called, followed by the Reverend Peter Fynde
and an Italian countess who spoke detestable English and made enormous
eyes to Kenneth Murless—enormous black eyes in a dead white face.
Bertram noticed that her hands were dirty, though they glistened with
wonderful rings. She called Joyce “_Carissima_.”—It was an opportunity
for him to slip away and see old Christy again.
X
Luke Christy answered the rap of a little brass knocker on a door up
three flights of stairs.
“Hullo, Major! I had an idea you’d come. You can’t keep away from my
sinister influence.”
He saluted in an ungainly fashion, like a drunken Tommy, and then
gripped Bertram’s hand in his long, bony fingers. He was a tall, thin,
loosely-built man, with a clean-shaven face singularly ugly because of
its long, lean jaw and bulging forehead. “An ugly mug,” as Bertram had
often insulted it, but with a bright light within, shining out of dark,
humorous, brooding eyes.
He was in his shirt sleeves, unpacking some hand-bags amidst a litter of
dirty shirts, collars, socks, pyjamas, newspapers, and paper-backed
books, and other salvage from a long journey.
“Just come back from Poland,” he said, “by way of Berlin. Put on a pipe
and tell me all about life and London, while I stow this wreckage away.
How’s Lady Joyce and the British aristocracy?”
He looked up at Bertram with the whimsical smile which always twisted
his face when he chaffed Bertram about his close relationship with
“bloated aristocrats.” His own family kept a little shop in a
Warwickshire village.
“Joyce is pretty well,” said Bertram. “She had a baby . . . but it
died.”
Luke Christy’s twisted smile left his face, and his eyes shone with
sympathy.
“Oh, Lord! That’s tragic. I’m sorry.”
Bertram sat watching him “tidy up,” a process which seemed to consist in
heaving his dirty linen into a cupboard, and flinging the paper-backed
books on to a shelf already crowded with papers.
The whole room was framed in books, badly assorted in size, and mostly
of tattered bindings. Above them were some rather good etchings and
caricatures torn out of foreign newspapers, fastened to the walls with
drawing pins. On the mantelpiece were photographs of several young
soldiers, one of Bertram himself, and a “homely” elderly woman with grey
hair, exactly like Luke Christy—who, as Bertram knew—was Christy’s
mother.
A door opened into an inner room into which Christy plunged now and then
with pairs of trousers, boots, and other bits of clothing. It was from
this inner room that he began a monologue to which Bertram listened
through the open door.
“Hard for a girl to bring a life into the world, and then see it flicker
out. I’m sorry to hear that, Pollard. It’s the saddest thing for you and
that exquisite little lady of yours. Good God, yes! But for myself, I
couldn’t risk it, anyhow. I haven’t the pluck. I should be filled with
dreadful forebodings.”
“About what?” asked Bertram.
He could not see Christy, but heard him moving about the inner room.
“Why, to bring a new life into the world. Was it a boy?”
“Yes,” said Bertram, “it was going to have my name.”
“A boy, eh? Oh, Lord, no! I couldn’t bring a boy into a world like this.
It wouldn’t be fair. Not yet awhile, until we see how things are going
to shape out. Major”—he still kept to Bertram’s old rank—“I’m afraid
I’m becoming a coward.”
He came to the half open door, and leant against the frame of it,
looking in at Bertram, who sat in a low leather chair with his back to a
long casement window through which the dusk of a grey day crept from the
darkening Thames below. So Christy had often stood in the entrance of a
dug-out when he and Bertram lived in the earth not far from an enemy’s
line.
“What are you afraid about?” asked Bertram, with a curious thrill, like
the sensation he had had as a boy when his nurse told him ghost stories.
“I’m afraid of this civilisation of ours, and of all sorts of forces
creeping up to destroy it.”
For an hour or more he talked of the things he had seen.
He had been to Eastern Europe, from which civilisation was passing.
Poland was poverty-stricken, disease-stricken, and utterly demoralised.
Austria was no more than the corpse of a nation which had once been a
mighty Empire, and now was a bulbous-headed thing without a body.
Vienna was its bulbous head, a great capital of over two million people
without the means of life. He described the dance of death there, the
starvation of women and children, the misery of the mean streets, the
ruin of the intellectuals and the professional classes. In the hotels
and restaurants and café concerts, foreigners were gathering like
vampires to feed on the mortality of that old centre of civilisation.
Austrian Jews and international gamblers, making paper fortunes out of
the fluctuations of paper money, guzzled and gorged in an orgy of vice
with girls who sold their smiles for the sake of a meal or an evening’s
warmth.
The old palaces of Vienna still stood, the great mansions and cathedrals
and churches and art galleries and museums remained as the heritage of a
splendid past, but the life that made them had gone. When they began to
crumble there would be no money to repair them. No man or woman could
follow the pursuit of beauty and truth, painting or music or science, as
in the old days. They must either get back to the land, and grub a
sparse life out of the soil, or starve to death. So it was with other
countries, the little new nations of the Baltic, the great Empire of
Russia.
He’d not been into Russia—it pulled him tremendously, he must get there
somehow—yet out on the frontier he’d met the refugees, and heard their
tale of misery. In Russia civilisation was passing, had almost passed.
He would have to go to Russia before long to see the truth of things.
There was a famine coming which would destroy millions of people.
Disease was already rife, amounting to pestilence. Again, there, the
only people who could live at all were those who stayed close to the
soil, and were desperate in defence of their own produce.
Was Europe, a large part of it, going to return to the Peasant State?
That might happen. That would be something to cling to, though not
civilisation as it had been built up through centuries of struggle. But
worse than that might happen.
He’d been to Berlin and other German towns. What was happening there? An
immense industry of a people over-strained by war, crushingly defeated,
beaten to the earth in pride, but desperate to regain their place in the
world and defend their national existence. They were working with an
astounding energy, adapting their immense genius to the necessities of
this peace and its penalties. Krupps’ which had made great guns, were
now turning out sewing-machines, reapers and binders, cash registers,
razors, anything of metal for the markets of the world. But the
indemnities put upon them by the victors made all their energy
fruitless. The mark was dropping in value week by week. Every time they
paid their indemnities it dropped lower with a rush. The printing
presses poured out new marks. That enabled them to undercut their rivals
in every market of the world, but at the same time they were bleeding
themselves to death.
Meanwhile France was putting on the screw, goading the Germans to hatred
again, making them vow vengeance, some time, some day, in the future,
however far ahead. France was ready to ruin the whole world rather than
let Germany get up again, and the whole world, and England first, would
be ruined, if Germany were to go the way of Austria and plunge over the
precipice into national bankruptcy.
There were evil forces at work everywhere, forces of cruelty, and greed,
and stupidity, and hatred. The men of the Old Order were keeping a grip
on the machinery of Government, arranging new balances of power, making
new alliances for an “inevitable” war. Hostile to them, were those out
to destroy all civilisation, at any cost, the revolutionaries for
revolution’s sake, the fanatics allied with the murderers and the
cave-men of life.
In between those two extremes, poor patient people, desiring peace, were
bewildered by the non-fulfilment of all their hopes after so much
sacrifice, and in their ignorance turning this way and that, to false
gods, to those who appealed to their lower passions, to those who doped
them with the greatest falsehoods. There was no truth-teller to whom the
masses would listen. No high and noble leadership, but only corrupt and
unclean men, holding on to power, or little men, honest in a little way,
clinging to their jobs.
Other forces were at work, biological, evolutionary, and mysterious
forces, which no man could understand or govern. There was a new
restlessness in the soul of humanity. Some great change was happening,
or about to happen. The old checks and balances had become unhinged, in
the minds of men, in the spirit of peoples, in great races. The coloured
peoples of the world were stirring. Some yeast in them was rising. Some
passion of desire. India, Egypt, Africa, Mesopotamia, were seething with
the spirit of revolt. He had been in the East. He had seen something of
it. The white races would have to take care. There were other races
waiting for their place. Japan and China were changing in “the
unchanging East.”
What of the British Empire? Little old England, dependent on overseas
trade, on world markets which had failed, on a mercantile marine which
could not get its cargoes, would be hardest pressed of all. . . . And
the spirit of revolution among men embittered by war, disillusioned by
false promises, beaten back to a low standard of life, had touched even
England, at last.
“Major,” said Luke Christy, “I wouldn’t care to bring a son into the
world.”
Bertram rose, and did not answer for a while. He went to the window and
stared out into the darkness creeping over the Thames. From Christy’s
windows he could see the curve of the river, and the lights of the great
old city gleaming through the purple dusk, and the red fire from the
engine of a train passing over Charing Cross bridge, and the head-lights
of motors and taxi-cabs streaming along the Embankment—all the
glamorous life of London in the hour between dusk and darkness of an
evening in May. A scene in modern civilisation as he knew and loved it.
He turned round to Christy and said: “You old ghoul! You make me shiver.
It’s not as bad as all that!”
Christy laughed, and switched on the electric light, breaking the spell
of darkness.
“It’s my morbid temperament! P’raps I’m all wrong. But I’m just
watching, and trying to find out the drift of things.”
He’d found one curious thing wherever he went, in whatever country; he
found men and women talking anxiously, analysing civilisation, uncertain
of its endurance. Was that a good or a bad sign? The intellectuals of
Greece and Rome used to talk like that before the “decline and fall.”
“Let’s drop the international situation and get down to home politics.
What are you doing with yourself, Major?”
“Looking for a job,” said Bertram.
Luke Christy advised him to get a soft job, in one of the Government
offices, with good pay out of the rate-payers’ pockets and no more work
than an office boy could do without knowing it.
“I want to be an honest man,” said Bertram.
Christy seemed to find that uncommonly amusing.
“My dear Major! The only honest men in the world are those who are dying
of starvation. All who have more than that are rogues. I’m one of the
worst of hypocrites, for while I bleed at the heart for suffering
humanity, I get a good price for the articles in which I describe its
torture and disease.”
Bertram suddenly flushed a little, and spoke in a nervous way.
“Christy, I believe I could write, if I tried. In the old days at St.
Paul’s, I had a notion—anyhow, I feel I might do something if I had a
shot at it. What do you think?”
“You?” said Christy.
That word and its emphasis of surprise were not encouraging, and Bertram
found it hard to confess to his friend that he had been writing a book,
and believed that at last he had found his object in life, and the
impulse he’d been seeking.
“What kind of book?” asked Christy.
“A book on the War.”
Christy groaned, and cried “Kamerad!” with raised hands.