If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

CHAPTER I

I

But life goes on without the smallest regard for individual preoccupations. You may take up what attitude you like towards it or, with the majority, you may take up no attitude towards it but immerse yourself in the stupendous importance of your own affairs and disclaim any connection with life. It doesn't matter tuppence to life. The ostrich, on much the same principle, buries its head in the sand; and just as forces outside the sand ultimately get the ostrich, so life, all the time, is massively getting you.

You have to go along with it.

And in October of the following year, October, 1913, life was going along at a most delirious and thrilling and entirely fascinating speed. There never was such a delicious and exciting and progressive year as between October, 1912, and October, 1913.

And it certainly took not the remotest notice of Sabre.

In February, Lord Roberts, at Bristol, opened a provincial campaign for National Service. The best people—that is to say those who did not openly laugh at it or, being scaremongers, rabidly approve it—considered it a great shame and a great pity that the poor old man should thus victimise those closing years of his life which should have been spent in that honourable retirement which is the right place for fussy old people of both sexes and all walks of life.

Sabre, reading the reports of the campaign—two or three lines—could not but reflect how events were falsifying, and continued to falsify the predictions of the intense Otway in this regard. Deliciously pleasant relations with Germany were variously evidenced throughout 1913. The King and Queen attended in Berlin the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, and the popular Press, in picture and paragraph, told the genial British public what a thoroughly delightful girl the Kaiser's daughter was. The Kaiser let off loud "Hochs!" of friendly pride, and the Press of the world responded with warm "Hochs" of admiration and tribute; and the Kaiser, glowing with generous warmth, celebrated the occasion by releasing and handsomely pardoning three of those very British "spies" to whose incarceration in German fortresses (Sabre recalled) the intense Otway had attached such deep significance. This was a signal for more mutual "Hochs." Later the Prince of Wales visited Germany and made there an extended stay of nine weeks; and in June the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emperor William's accession was "Hoch'd" throughout the German Empire and admiringly "Hoch'd" back again from all quarters of the civilised globe.

It was all splendid and gratifying and deeply comforting. So many "Hochs!" and such fervent and sincere "Hochs!" never boomed across the seas of the world, and particularly the North Sea or (nice and friendly to think) German Ocean, in any year as in the year 1913.

II

Not that relations with Germany counted for anything in the whirl of intensely agreeable sensations of these excellent days. Their entirely pleasing trend prevented the scaremongers from interfering with full enjoyment of the intensely agreeable sensations; otherwise they were, by comparison with more serious excitements, completely negligible. The excitements were endless and of every nature. At one moment the British Public was stirred to its depths in depths not often touched (in 1913) by reading of Scott's glorious death in the Antarctic; at another it was unspeakably moved by the disqualification of the Derby winner for bumping and boring. In one week it was being thrilled with sympathy by the superb heroism and the appalling death-roll, four hundred twenty-nine, in the Welsh colliery disaster at Senghenydd; in another thrilled with horror and indignation at the baseness of a sympathetic strike. In one month was immense excitement because the strike of eleven thousand insufferable London taxi-drivers drove everybody into the splendid busses; and in another month immense excitement because the strike of all the insufferable London bus-drivers drove everybody into the splendid taxis. M. Pegond accomplished the astounding feat of flying upside down at Juvisy without being killed and then came and flew upside down without being killed at Brooklands. One man flew over the Simplon Pass and another over the Alps. Colonel Cody flew to his death in one waterplane, and Mr. Hawker made a superb failure to fly around Great Britain in another waterplane. The suffragists threw noisome and inflammable matter into the letter boxes, bombs into Mr. Lloyd George's house at Walton and into other almost equally sacred shrines of the great, stones into windows, axes into pictures, chained their misguided bodies to railings and gates, jammed their miserable bodies into prisons, hunger-struck their abominable bodies out again, and hurled their outrageous bodies in front of the sacred race for the Derby at Epsom, and the only less sacred race for the Gold Cup at Ascot.

It was terrific!

At one moment the loyal public were thrilled by the magnificent enrolment of the Ulster Volunteers, and at another moment outraged by the seditious and mutinous enrolment of the Nationalist Volunteers; in one month the devoted Commons read a third time the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill, and in the very same month the stiff-necked and abominable Lords for the third time threw out the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill. It was terrific. The newspapers could scarcely print it—or anything—terrifically enough. Adjectives and epithets became exhausted with overwork and burst. The word crisis lost all meaning. There was such a welter of crises that the explosions of those that came to a head were unnoticed and pushed away into the obscurest corners of the newspapers, before the alarming swelling of those freshly rushing to a head. It was magnificent. It was a deliciously thrilling and emotional year. A terrific and stupendous year. Many well-known people died.

III

It was naturally a year of strong partisanship. A year of violent feelings violently expressed; and amidst them, and because of them, Sabre found with new certainty that he had no violent feelings. Increasingly he came to know that he had well expressed his constitutional habit, the outstanding trait in his character, when, on the day of that talk in the office with Nona, he had spoken of his disastrous inability—disastrous from the point of view of being satisfactory to single-minded persons, or of pulling out that big booming stuff called success—to see a thing, whatever it might be, from a single point of view and go all out for it from that point of view. "Convictions," he had said, and often in the welter of antagonistic convictions of 1913 thought again, "Convictions. If you're going to pull out this big booming stuff they call success, if you're going to be satisfactory to anybody or to anything, you must shut down on everybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. And narrower than that—not only convictions but conviction. Conviction that your side is the right side and that the other side is wrong, wrong to hell."

And he had no such convictions. Above all, and most emphatically, he had never the conviction that his side, whichever side it might be in any of the issues daily tabled for men's discussion, was the right side and the other side the wrong and wicked and disastrous side.

He used to think, "I can't stand shouting and I can't stand smashing. And that's all there is. These newspapers and these arguments you hear—it's all shouting and smashing. It's never thinking and building. It's all destructive; never constructive. All blind hatred of the other views, never fair examination of them. You get some of these Unionists together, my class, my friends. They say absolutely nothing else but damning and blasting and foaming at Lloyd George and Asquith and the trade-unionists. Absolutely nothing else at all. And you get some of these other chaps together, or their newspapers, and it's exactly the same thing the other way about. And yet we're all in the same boat. There's only one life—only one living—and we're all in it. Come into it the same way and go out of it the same way; and all up against the same real facts as we are against the same weather. That fire the other night in High Street. All sorts of people, every sort of person, lent a hand in putting it out. And that frightful railway disaster at Aisgill; all sorts of people worked together in rescuing. No one stopped to ask whether the passengers were first class or third. Well, that's the sort of thing that gets me. Fire and disaster—those are facts and everybody gets to and deals with them. And if there was a big war everybody would get to and fight it. And yet all these political and social things are just as much facts that affect everybody, and all anybody can do is to shout and smash up the other man's rights in them. They all do it—in everything. Religion's as bad as any—worse. Here's one of these bishops saying he can't countenance Churchmen preaching in chapels or dissenters being invited to preach in churches because the Church must stand by the rock principles of its creed, and to preach in a chapel would mean politely not touching on those principles. You'd think heaven didn't come into the business at all. And you'd think that life doesn't come into the business of living at all. All smashing.... Well, I can't stick shouting and I can't stick smashing."

IV

Something of these views he one day expressed to Pike, the Editor of the Tidborough County Times. He was taken into the County Times office by business connected with an error in the firm's standing account for advertisement notices and, encountering Pike outside his room, entered with him and talked.

Pike was a man of nearly sixty with furiously black and luxuriant hair. He had been every sort of journalist in America and in London, and some years previously had been brought into the editorship of the County Times. The Press, broad-based on the liberty of the English people and superbly impervious to whatever temptation to jump in the direction the cat jumps, is, on the other hand, singularly sensitive to apparently inconsequent trifles in the lives of its proprietary. Pike, with his reputation, was brought into the editorship of the County Times solely because the proprietor late in life suddenly married. The wife of the proprietor desiring to share a knighthood with her husband, the proprietor, anxious to please but unwilling to pay, incontinently sacked the tame editor who was beguiling an amiable dotage with the County Times and looked about for a wild editor, whom unquestionably he found in Mr. Pike.

The breath of the County Times became as the breath of life to the Tory tradition and burst from its columns as the breath of a fiery furnace upon all that was opposed to the Tory tradition. The proprietor felt that his knighthood was assured as soon as the tide of liberalism turned; and the County Times, which could not notice even a Baptist harvest festival without snorting fire and brimstone upon it, said that the tide of radicalism—it did not print the words Liberal or Liberalism—was turning every day. About once a week the County Times said that the tide of radicalism "definitely turned last night."

Pike was a man of extraordinarily violent language. Consequent, no doubt, on the restraint of having to write always in printable language, his vocal discussion of the subjects on which he wrote was mainly in unprintable. He spoke of trade-unionists always as "those swine and dogs" and of the members of the Government as "those dogs and swine",—swine and dogs being refined and temperate euphuisms for the epithets Mr. Pike actually employed.

However he heard Sabre's stumbling periods tolerantly out and tolerantly dealt with him.

"Excuse me, Sabre, but that sort of stuff's absolutely fatal—fatal. It's simply compromise. Compromise. The most fatal defect in the English character."

Sabre happened to be stout enough on this particular point. "That's just what it isn't. Precisely what it isn't. I loathe compromise. More than anything. Compromise is accepting a little of what you know to be wrong in order to get a little of what you imagine to be right."

Pike made a swift note in shorthand on his blotting pad. "Exactly. Well?"

"Well, that's just the opposite to what I mean. I mean accepting, admitting, what you know to be right."

Pike smote his hand upon the blotting pad. "But, damn it, those dogs and swine never are right."

"There you are!" said Sabre.

And there they were, shouting, smashing; and Sabre could not do either and retired dismayed from the arenas of both.