“Joyce’s crowd!” To some extent his own crowd. He saw it, not for the
first time, but peculiarly defined in his imagination, and in all its
glory, on the afternoon of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He drove in a “taxi”
with Joyce from their little home in Holland Street to the Wigmore Hall,
and by the time they’d reached Cumberland Place, at the top of the Park,
fell into line with a steady stream of automobiles of highly expensive
kinds.
“The New Poor aren’t so beastly poor yet,” said Bertram, thinking of
Huggett in his squalid rooms with the four squalling brats.
Joyce tapped his hand sharply.
“They’ve saved a little out of the wreckage. Precious little, and we’re
all going ‘broke.’”
Joyce had two reserved seats towards the front of the hall. Bertram saw
that she wore a new hat for the occasion, a little blue thing, with an
osprey plume (Bernard Hall would hate her for that!), and the short
ermine cloak which Lady Ottery had given her for “going away,” when they
were married. She looked splendid in health again, and exquisite to his
eyes as she stood up looking round the hall and smiling to many friends
who waved hands to her, or programmes. The two Russian girls—the
Countess Lydia and her sister—were a few seats behind, and called out
over the heads of other ladies:
“So glad you could come, _chérie_! Your husband too! _Merveilleux!_”
That last sentence was a dig of spite from the Countess Lydia.
“How d’you do, Lady Joyce?” This very gallantly and formally from
General Bellasis, who nodded affably to Joyce’s husband, and said,
“Going strong, Pollard?”
Kenneth Murless sauntered in (his arduous duties at the Foreign Office
didn’t prevent afternoon outings of this kind) looking elegant, as
usual, in morning dress with a white slip beneath his waistcoat, and
immaculate spats. Bertram hated him unendurably.
“Well, Joyce! Is Lady Ottery in good form? Not nervous, I hope?”
“Mother is never nervous,” said Joyce. “It’s not a family failing.”
She held a kind of reception, standing there by her seat, and Bertram
was aware of some extremely pretty girls, and many ugly old ladies. The
old ladies interested him most. God, how ugly they were! Many of them
wore black silk with beads. He thought such costumes had departed with
Queen Victoria. Others were youthfully dressed in the latest style, with
odd little hats and short capes like Joyce’s, and low-necked bodices.
They were fat and old and hard and wrinkled. He did not blame them for
that—poor old darlings!—but only observed them. He knew some of them
by sight. He’d had the honour of shaking hands with some of them—little
old hands with many rings—at various receptions to which Joyce had
dragged him. There were two Dowager Duchesses, like caricatures of
themselves by Bolshevik artists. The Lord alone knew how many
Countesses. The old Régime had rallied up.
The men were in a minority, but those present were full of quality—old
gentlemen whom one sees in profile deep sunk in club chairs,
white-haired, bald, with bags under their eyes, with side-whiskers, with
hawk noses; and middle-aged men who, one day, would be the exact
replicas of the old gentlemen, but now straight-backed, with close-cut
hair, firm mouths, alert eyes.
Bertram recognised Lord Banthorp, Viscount Risborough, the Duke of
Berkshire, old Brookwood of Banstead, Morton of Greystoke, and the new
Earl of Winthorp. He also observed the entry of several Major-Generals
and Brigadiers in “civvies,” as Bill Huggett called his old pre-war
clothes, and not so terrifying as when his machine-gun company had been
reviewed by them before and after battle.
His mother-in-law had certainly drawn “a good house.” It represented the
aristocracy of England in its oldest and crustiest tradition, with only
a thin sprinkling, he guessed, of the newer vintages. The old, ugly
ladies had come out of their hiding-places in Mayfair to support England
in “the hour of danger.” There was something fine about them, in spite
of ugliness, even because of it. He admitted that. He knew their spirit,
indomitable, hard to themselves as to others, resolute in what they
believed to be their duty. They were the grandmothers of modern girlhood
in Joyce’s crowd, those pretty, laughing, dashing-looking girls, and on
the whole, perhaps, of stronger stuff. Well, perhaps not! Joyce and her
crowd had come out well in the war, with some scandalous exceptions. His
eyes wandered about, studying the faces in the hall with something like
a new vision—Christy’s angle of vision, Janet Welford’s.
There were beautiful faces there, neither old nor young, of middle-aged
women, rather sad, rather anxious, rather worn. They were the women who
had suffered the strain of war most in their souls, with long patient
agony. The mothers of fighting men, the wives of others. He could see in
their eyes that they remembered things which he remembered, which others
forget. Among them was the beautiful Lady Martock, in her widow’s weeds.
The Duke of Bramshaw led Lady Ottery to her chair on the platform, and
there was a clapping of hands, and a scuttling to places.
Joyce took her seat, and her face was eager and proud because of this
public tribute to her mother. Her father, who had come in late, with
Alban, sat next to her on her left hand. His face wore his usual vacant
look, with slightly opened mouth.
“Your mother’s marvellous!” he said to Joyce in a loud voice, which she
“hushed” immediately, and after that rebuke, he settled himself
deliberately to sleep. He had heard a good deal at home about the
Religion of Revolution. It was not new to him, and he had acquired the
habit of sleep in the House of Lords and during all speeches.
Alban, on his father’s left, wonderfully good-looking, dressed almost as
well as Kenneth Murless, kept awake, but appeared painfully bored. He
too, was aware of his mother’s theory. He avoided it as much as
possible, while agreeing with its general thesis. Out of filial respect
and devotion he had come to-day, at some personal sacrifice in the way
of a game of real tennis at the Bath Club, which was a passion of his.
The Duke of Bramshaw opened with some general observations on the
subject of Lady Ottery’s lecture. He was a thin man, with a long,
mournful face, a sharply curved nose, and a bald head. Caricaturists
made him look like a diseased bird of prey. In the clubs he was
generally known as “the greyhound,” because he made a little hair go a
long way.
In melancholy tones he referred to the honour he had in introducing the
Countess of Ottery, who, indeed, needed no introduction to such an
audience as he saw before him, well aware of her devoted work during the
War, of her great virtue as a wife and mother, of her noble patriotism,
and of her profound scholarship. They were to receive the benefit of her
historical knowledge that afternoon.
He himself had been a student of history, as far as his duties in the
House of Lords would permit, and other services which he had been called
to do for his King and Country, but he confessed that he had been amazed
by the revelations which Lady Ottery had discovered in relation to a
continuous tradition of revolutionary doctrine, of a most subversive,
destructive, and damnable kind—if they would permit him to use so
strong a word—from the time of the Fourteenth Century to the present
day.
Lady Ottery had made it quite clear to him, he felt sure that she would
make it quite clear to the audience—that the revolutionary spirit which
they found in the world around them, not only in Russia, but nearer
home, in their very midst, he regretted to say, was due to the dreadful
propaganda of a secret cult, mainly of German-Jewish origin, which had
for its object the overthrow of civilisation, the downfall of Christian
morality, no less than the destruction of all law and order. The members
of that cult, the Initiated, as they called themselves, were but few,
but they were powerful.
As Lady Ottery would tell them, they belonged to the tradition of Satan
worship, that dark and evil blasphemy of the Middle Ages. It was an
awful thought that men in England belonged to that secret brotherhood.
They were working among the labouring classes of England. They were, he
said so with a frankness which the gravity of the time demanded,
endeavouring to promote at that very hour, a Strike which threatened to
paralyse the life and industry of Great Britain. The Countess of Ottery
was not, therefore, lecturing on an academic theory of history,
unrelated to their present situation.
“In short, my Lords, ladies, and gentlemen, the lecture we are about to
hear is a warning of the menace at our very doors. . . . Lady Ottery—”
With enormous melancholy he bowed to the applause of the ugly old ladies
and the pretty young ones, and resigned his place on the platform to
Bertram’s Mother-in-law.
“For Heaven’s sake!” said Bertram, aloud. Sheer rage was rising in his
brain. What did all this mean? Did these people seriously believe all
that dark and monstrous nonsense suggested by the Duke of Bramshaw? A
sentence of Bill Huggett’s came into his brain. He repeated it to
himself, over and over again, as Lady Ottery began her lecture, and went
on with it.
“There’s no more sense in some of these so-called Toffs than in the long
ears of a coster’s moke.”
And yet the Duke of Bramshaw was not a fool. He had been educated at
Eton and Oxford. He had made many speeches in the House of Lords. He had
held high office during the War. These people were not fools. They were
highly educated. They helped to govern England. Good Heavens! They were,
in their way, among the best types of English aristocracy. It was
impossible for him to believe that such an audience could listen
patiently to such a wild falsification of history and commonsense as
that outlined by the Duke of Bramshaw, and elaborated by his
mother-in-law.
Joyce had said, “Do behave, Bertram!” and he “behaved” while Lady Ottery
read page after page of manuscript in a clear, hard, penetrating voice,
perfectly self-possessed, strikingly handsome, utterly convinced of her
own argument.
Bertram tried not to listen to her, but her words penetrated his brain.
With a kind of insane and dreadful logic she ranged through centuries of
history, connecting the origin of all revolts, uprisings, passionate
outbreaks of peasants—and peoples—from the Black Death to the French
Revolution, from that to the Chartist Riots, from 1848 to the Liberation
of Italy, from the Veto of the House of Lords to the Russian Revolution,
and from Bolshevism in Russia to Trade Union strikes in England—to
small groups of fanatical men and women, belonging, as the Duke had
said, to a secret cult pledged to the overthrow of civilisation and
religion.
She quoted old documents, newly discovered letters, ancient memoirs,
journals, revolutionary pamphlets, political allegories and squibs,
enormous tomes of German philosophers, French atheists, Italian
free-thinkers, Russian anarchists. Her range of research, her immense
industry, was wonderful, and she had hewn her pathway of argument with
remarkable skill and clarity through a jungle of false evidence.
But she had entirely ignored the ordinary impulses of human nature—the
savage instincts of men when they and their women folk are starving
while others are fully fed, the passion of downtrodden peoples for the
liberty of life, the long patience, breaking at last into impatience, of
simple folk oppressed by corrupt and cruel tyrannies, the vision of a
better human life in the minds of those who starve in garrets and
languish over sweated labour, the righteous wrath of those who see their
rulers growing rotten with luxury and vice, the divine rage at the heart
of a people under the scourge of the knout, and the brutality of a
secret police, the silent, ever-growing pressure of the Nobodies of the
world for more joy in life, a wider margin of ease, a greater share of
luck and opportunity, the claims of men who have done good service and
expect a fair reward.
Bertram thought of all the men who had gone marching with him, and
before him, and behind him, up the roads of war in France and Flanders,
the men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales. They had seen the bodies
of their “pals” blown to bits, but had not turned back. They had sat
down with Death, smelt it, heard it scream above their heads, known the
fear of it, seen the close horror of it, day after day, month after
month, year after year, but had not surrendered some faith in them, some
love of their soil, some heritage of the spirit. Were they now likely to
be the victims of a “secret cult,” urging them to overthrow
civilisation? Were they in dark conspiracy, as the dupes of German Jews,
to play Hell and Satan-worship in the country they had saved by the
valour of their souls? They were restless, discontented, bitter. What
wonder, when prices were rising high against them, and wages were going
down, and unemployment was creeping up like a dark tide of misery into
millions of little homes? This lecture of Lady Ottery’s was an outrage
to the men who had fought for England, though she had no idea of that.
It was a perversion of all truth in history. It was putting morbid fears
into the minds of an audience already obsessed by fantastic bogeys. It
would lead to conflict and cruelty.
“Joyce, I can’t bear it. This is mad and monstrous!”
So he whispered to Joyce, and she turned to him angrily, and said, “Be
quiet, Bertram!”
Their movement, and Joyce’s answer, awakened the Earl of Ottery. He
smiled sleepily at Joyce, and said her mother was remarkable.
Presently Bertram rose in his seat, bent again to find his stick on the
floor under some ladies’ muffs, and whispered again to Joyce:
“Sorry, darling! I’m going. I can’t breathe.”
“You’re abominable!” said Joyce, in a low voice, and turned her head
away from him with an angry shake of her bobbed hair.
He strode through an audience that was hostile to his going. Old
Brookwood of Banstead growled audibly as he passed, “Be quiet, sir!”
Outside, groups of chauffeurs were chatting beside their motor cars, and
across Oxford Circus, as he passed through, came a procession of
unemployed with their banners.
“We want work!”