Luke Christy was still in town. It was when the sense of loneliness was
in Bertram that he found himself drifting towards the Adelphi to
Christy’s rooms. The time of day or night didn’t matter. Christy was
always glad of a “yarn,” and an excuse to drop his work awhile, when
Bertram called, if he happened to be in. And he was mostly in, not going
out much to meet his friends but expecting his friends to come to him.
“That’s the test I put ’em to,” he said. “If they come, I know they love
me. And I’ve never learnt how to behave outside my own rooms. I break
their china, or eat with the wrong fork, or scandalise the servants. I’m
a plebeian, a coarse-mannered loon, hopelessly ill-educated.”
Christy’s friends accepted the condition he imposed. There were often
several in his room when Bertram called, smoking innumerable cigarettes,
talking, talking. Remarkable men and women, most of them, new in type to
Bertram, and wonderfully interesting. They were literary people,
journalists, social workers of one kind and another, professional
idealists. There was also Janet Welford, at times, more interesting than
any of them, and more alarming. Now and then came a foreigner—a
Russian, an Indian student, a Belgian poet, a young Czecho-Slovak, an
Austrian musician, an American professor, even a full-blooded Red
Indian, once an officer in the Canadian flying corps, and a brilliant
young man, speaking perfectly good English, and liberal in ideas.
They were all liberal in ideas. Rather too liberal, some of them,
according to Bertram’s way of thinking. He was startled by the boldness
with which they accepted the necessity of change in the whole structure
of social life and international relations. While he was worrying out of
old inherited instincts and traditions, with some travail of doubt, they
had jumped clean beyond to more advanced ideals than he could accept.
They put no limit to their conceptions of liberty. If Ireland wanted a
Republic, then it was her right to have it. They only questioned the
wisdom of wanting a Republic, and the political possibility of obtaining
it, with England hostile to that idea. They believed that national
independence was less desirable, less “advanced” than federations of
free peoples, linking up into ever widening groups, until the United
States of Europe and the United States of America, and other
associations of peoples would become the United States of the World. A
distant vision!
Bertram’s mind refused to follow them as far as that. He balked at the
first obstacle, and insisted that Ireland had no right to greater
freedom than that of Dominion Home Rule. He believed in the link between
the two countries. England had rights as well as Ireland, her own need
of security and freedom. He did not see how England could be safe or
free, with an Irish Republic on her flank, able to cut her
communications at sea. An Irish Republic would be a mortal blow to the
old historical pride and sentiment of England.
Christy laughed at that argument of his.
“England’s old historical pride and sentiment are going to be rudely
shocked before long, my child! She can’t afford those antique treasures.
She’s got to keep pace with the new needs of a world ruined by those
dangerous possessions of old castes. It was historical pride and
sentiment which caused the German ultimatum in 1914, and led to the
massacre of the world’s best youth. All that’s in the Old Curiosity Shop
now. Such stuff and nonsense must be replaced, lest we perish, by a
spirit of comradeship and commonsense between peoples. Not “My country,
right or wrong,” nor “Kaiser and Fatherland,” but “Service to the Human
Family.”
“I believe in patriotism,” Bertram had said, stubbornly, and that
confession of faith, which he would never have stated in Joyce’s “set,”
because it was taken for granted as the very air they breathed, seemed
to astonish and amuse some of Christy’s friends, as though he had
uttered some ancient heresy in an outworn creed.
“Patriotism has been the curse of the human race,” said Henry Carvell,
the war correspondent, who had seen more of wars, big and little, than
any man in England, and had been a knight-errant of the pen in most
countries of the world. A heavily-built, square-shouldered man, with
white hair and a ruddy face, he spoke with a kind of smiling contempt
for Bertram’s simplicity of ignorance.
“It’s a survival of the old tribal rivalry which replaced the cave-man
law when every old ourang-outang defended his lair and his females from
all others of his species. ‘This is my patch of earth. I’ve drawn a line
with my club. It marks my territory. Cross it if you dare. I’m stronger
than you. Yah!’ That’s patriotism. I’ve seen it working out in bloodshed
and brutality from the Zambesi to the Rhine.”
Bertram made a violent protest against that line of reasoning.
“I utterly disagree. If you deny patriotism, you rule out human nature
and one of its strongest instincts.”
“I don’t deny it,” said Henry Carvell, with a touch of impatience. “I
denounce it. What virtue do you see in it?”
“Love of familiar things in life. Loyalty to the ideas of one’s own
people, their code of honour and all that. Men will die in defence of
those things, in the last ditch.”
“Why die?” asked Christy, grinning at Bertram in a friendly way. “Why
get into ditches? Why not talk it out with the other fellow whose ideas,
most likely, are exactly the same?”
Hubert Melvin, the novelist, took up the argument. He was a chubby
little man with a bald head, a great expanse of brow, and a plump,
good-natured face, like Shakespeare without his beard and dignity.
“Our friend, Pollard, is enlarging the definition of patriotism. He
seems to be talking about sacrifice for the ideals of life. They reach
beyond frontiers. They’re not limited to a particular patch of earth
hedged round by jealousy and governed by a small group of rascals
calling themselves patriots! Of course men will die for what they
believe to be the true faith.”
“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national
education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive
suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world,
is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only
code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and
murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example,
British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”
“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in
fair play.”
“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for
five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland.
It had been dragged into the mud since the War.
These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on
life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and
her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly,
as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he
found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles,
and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.
These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the
novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member,
W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor of
_The New World_,—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s
rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never
agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words,
quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a
younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of
character and quality.
What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed,
for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others
Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste,
for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and
education.
Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he
disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.
Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at
all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague,
ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean
streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks
northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer
wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.
Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of
Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the
London School of Economics.
W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford,
his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful
Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.
Bernard Hall, whose editorship of _The New World_ had founded something
like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to
international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political
insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his
swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament
which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother
and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.
A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and
heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then,
brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and
purpose?
Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word
“Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide
other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been
brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all
religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a
time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to
keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony
in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as
an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged
against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to
accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—
“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and
children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could
be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful
democracy in Europe.
There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy,
guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They
seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people
than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that,
and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding
to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to
their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to
their hatred of cruelty.
No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them,
for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called
“reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly
intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to
bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men,
to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds.
They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of
the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than
in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in
discipline.
“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against
that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the
necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but
not imposed by external authority.
“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard
Hall, of _The New World_, and the flame in him leapt through his cold
mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff,
about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public
shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”
This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the
Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the
exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the
unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour,
even the question of Divorce.
It was all very difficult. . . . It would be more difficult with Joyce,
if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their
philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over
wholly to their side.
“You ought to join us,” said Nat Verney, the Labour member. “Labour has
need of lads like you. The younger Intellectuals.”
He spoke with a North country burr in his speech, in spite of the London
School of Economics. He was a sturdy, youngish man—thirty-five or
so—with a shock of brown hair and a Lancashire face, hard as teak,
square-jawed, with deep-set eyes in which there was a glint of humour,
in spite of the light of fanaticism now and then, when he was bitter
against “the classes” and his great enemy “Capital.”
“Why don’t you write occasionally for _The New World_—?” asked Bernard
Hall. “You have the gift of words, if I may say so.”
Bertram’s heart gave a thump at that compliment from Hall, distinguished
editor, fastidious critic. Was he serious or only sarcastic?
“A realistic novel on the War,” said Hubert Melvin, raising his
Shakespeare brow, and a little plump hand. “Nobody in England has come
up to Barbusse. You could do it, Pollard! It’s burnt into you. Give it
’em hot and strong—‘The Old Gang!’ Put the heart of England into it.”
Bertram had glanced at Christy. He had pledged him to secrecy about his
book, and Christy kept the pledge.
“Pollard may surprise us all!” So Christy said, and then spoilt his
speech for Bertram by a grin and a jibe. “But we mustn’t forget his
aristocratic connections! It’s hard to break with one’s caste.”
“That belongs to the wreckage of war,” said Henry Carvell. “I’m glad of
the smash. Think of the entrenched snobbishness of England in 1913!
Thank Heaven that heritage of stupidity has been blown to bits.”
Christy was not so sure that it had been blown to bits. In time of war
there had been a little mixing up. Patrician girls had been dairy-maids,
hospital nurses, canteen women. Public school men had gone into the
ranks, now and then. Now they were all dividing again, getting back to
different sides.
Bertram agreed with Christy, thinking of Kenneth Murless, General
Bellasis, and others. He agreed more with Christy than any of the
others. He was glad when they went away, leaving him to “jaw” with this
old comrade of his. Christy was of simpler stuff, dead true in his
estimate of facts. What was it in Christy that caught hold of him so?
Perhaps his intense sincerity and his harsh realism. He did not deceive
himself by illusion, however pleasant and idealistic. He told the truth
as he saw it, unsparingly, to himself as well as to others. He had
revealed Bertram to himself.
“You’re pulled two ways, old man,” he had said one night, as they had
sat each side of his fireplace, here. “There’s a tug of war between two
opposing ideals in your brain. You’re a traditional Conservative, trying
to make a truce, or Coalition Government, with Liberal ideals. A foot in
both camps.”
“A Jekyll and Hyde!”
Bertram laughed, but he had been touched by this sword point which had
pierced his armour.
“A Hamlet in Holland Street,” said Christy. “You want to murder your old
uncle, Tory Tradition, but you can’t bear to ‘kill him at his prayers.’
You’re still under the spell of Caste.”
“It’s my caste by proxy. It’s my wife’s.”
“True,” said Christy; “and out of chivalry to her, you will deny the
light that sometimes gleams in you—the fierce, white flame of truth.”
He quoted Scripture. It was a habit of his, though no Churchman.
“‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and
he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he
that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.’”
“A harsh doctrine, if harshly interpreted,” said Bertram. “It sometimes
leads to the cruelty which your friends hate so much.”
“One must be hard for honesty’s sake.”
Christy spoke of the secret in his own life which only once before he
had revealed to Bertram—on a night before a morning of battle.
“When I found that my wife was dragging me down into the dirt of lies,
into the squalour of self-pity and spiritual impotence, I left her—with
my blessing. It was hard—because I had loved her.”
“Hard on her,” said Bertram.
“For a time,” Christy agreed. “Afterwards she was glad. We had nagged at
each other for five years, before the war. That gave her relief. She was
sorry I didn’t get killed. Of course I ought to have been, for her
sake—perhaps for mine. After the Armistice life became intolerable. She
had changed and I had changed—or rather, developed on separate lines.
We were worlds apart. She hated my Socialistic tendencies. I hated her
damned little suburban philosophy. You see, she’d married beneath her. A
clergyman’s daughter. Think of that—with me!”
Bertram remained silent for a while. Was Christy’s story to be repeated
in another sphere of life; in another quarter of London? Joyce had
married “beneath her”—a peer’s daughter to a lawyer’s son.
“Christy, old man,” he said at last, “I believe in Loyalty. It’s my
central faith. Loyalty to one’s country, one’s wife, one’s code of
honour. Without that life, to me, is unlivable.”
Christy puffed at his old burnt pipe for several minutes before
replying.
“Loyalty’s good,” he admitted presently; “but to the highest and not to
the lowest. Loyalty to lies is disloyalty to truth. That’s one of life’s
little ironies. A damned nuisance, sometimes!”
The conversation was broken by Janet Welford, who came in to see
Christy, whom she loved.