§ 4
Nowadays quite little things would suddenly assume a tremendous and devastating importance to Oswald. In his pocket, not folded but crumpled up, was an insulting letter from Lady Charlotte Sydenham, and the thought of it was rankling bitterly in his mind.
The days were long past when he could think of the old lady as of something antediluvian in quality, a queer ungainly megatherium floundering about in a new age from which her kind would presently vanish altogether. He was beginning to doubt more and more about her imminent disappearance. She had greater powers of survival than he had supposed; he was beginning to think that she might outlive him; there was much more of her in England than he had ever suspected. All through the war she, or a voice indistinguishable from hers, had bawled unchastened in the Morning Post; on many occasions he had seemed to see her hard blue eye and bristling whisker glaring at him through a kind of translucency in the sheets of The Times; once or twice in France he had recognized her, or something very like her, in red tabs and gilt lace, at G.H.Q. These were sick fancies no doubt; mere fantastic intimations of the stout resistances the Anglican culture could still offer before it loosened its cramping grip upon the future of England and the world, evidence rather of his own hypersensitized condition than of any perennial quality in her.
The old lady had played a valiant part in the early stages of the war. She had interested herself in the persecution of all Germans not related to royalty, who chanced to be in the country; and had even employed private detectives in one or two cases that had come under her notice. She had been forced most unjustly to defend a libel case brought by a butcher named Sterne, whom she had denounced as of German origin and a probable poisoner of the community, in the very laudable belief that his name was spelt Stern. She felt that his indubitable British ancestry and honesty only enhanced the deception and made the whole thing more alarming, but the jury, being no doubt tainted with pacifism, thought, or pretended to think, otherwise. She had had a reconciliation with her old antagonists the Pankhurst section of the suffragettes, and she had paid twenty annual subscriptions to their loyal and outspoken publication Britannia, directing twelve copies to be sent to suitable recipients—Oswald was one of the favoured ones—and herself receiving and blue-pencilling the remaining eight before despatching them to such public characters as she believed would be most beneficially cowed or instructed by the articles she had marked. She also subscribed liberally to the British Empire Union, an organization so patriotic that it extended its hostility to Russians, Americans, Irishmen, neutrals, President Wilson, the League of Nations, and similar infringements of the importance and dignity of Lady Charlotte and her kind. She remained at Chastlands, where she had laid in an ample store of provisions quite early in the war—two sacks of mouldy flour and a side of bacon in an advanced state of decomposition had been buried at night by Cashel—all through the Zeppelin raids; and she played a prominent rather than a pacifying part in the Red Cross politics of that part of Surrey. She induced several rich Jewesses of Swiss, Dutch, German or Austrian origin to relieve the movement of their names and, what was still better, of the frequently quite offensively large subscriptions with which they overshadowed those who had the right to lead in such matters. She lectured also in the National Economy campaign on several occasions—for like most thoughtful women of her class and type, she was deeply shocked by the stories she had heard of extravagance among our over-paid munition workers. After a time the extraordinary meanness of the authorities in restricting her petrol obliged her in self-respect to throw up this branch of her public work. She was in London during one of the early Gotha raids, but she conceived such a disgust at the cowardice of the lower classes on this occasion that she left town the next day and would not return thither.
The increasing scarcity of petrol and the onset of food rationing, which threatened to spread all over England, drove her to Ulster—in spite of the submarine danger that might have deterred a less stout-hearted woman. She took a small furnished house in a congenial district, and found herself one of a little circle of ultra-patriotic refugees, driven like herself from England by un-English restrictions upon the nourishment of the upper classes and the spread of the pacifist tendencies of Lord Lansdowne. “If the cowards must make peace,” said Lady Charlotte, “at least give me leave to be out of it.”
Considering everything, Ulster was at that time as comfortably and honourably out of the war as any part of the world, and all that seemed needed to keep it safely out to the end was a little tactful firmness in the Dublin Convention. There was plenty of everything in the loyal province at that time—men, meat, butter, Dublin stout, and self-righteousness; and Lady Charlotte expanded again like a flower in the sun. She reverted to driving in a carriage; it was nice to sit once more behind a stout able-bodied coachman with a cockade, with a perfect excuse for neutrality, and she still did her best for old England from eleven to one and often from five to six by writing letters and dabbling in organization. Oswald she kept in mind continually. Almost daily he would get newspaper cuttings from her detailing Sinn Fein outrages, or blue-marked leading articles agitating for a larger share of the munition industries for Belfast, or good hot stuff, deeply underlined, from the speeches of Sir Edward Carson. One dastardly Sinn Feiner, Oswald learnt, had even starved himself to death in gaol, a most unnatural offence to Lady Charlotte. She warmed up tremendously over the insidious attempts of the Prime Minister and a section of the press to get all the armies in France and Italy under one supreme generalissimo and end the dislocated muddling that had so long prolonged the war. It was a change that might have involved the replacement of regular generals by competent ones, and it imperilled everything that was most dear to the old lady’s heart. It was “an insult to the King’s uniform,” she wrote. “A revolution. I knew that this sort of thing would begin if we let those Americans come in. We ought not to have let them come in. What good are they to us? What can they know of war? A crowd of ignorant republican renegades! British generals to be criticized and their prospects injured by French Roman Catholics and Atheists and chewing, expectorating Yankees and every sort of low foreigner. What is the world coming to? Sir Douglas Haig has been exactly where he is for two years. Surely he knows the ground better than any one else can possibly do.”
Once the theme of Lady Charlotte got loose in Oswald’s poor old brain, it began a special worry of its own. He found his mind struggling with assertions and arguments. As this involved trying to remember exactly what she had said in this letter of hers, and as it was in his pocket, he presently chose the lesser of two evils and took it out to read over:—
“I suppose you have read in the papers what is happening in Clare. The people are ploughing up grass-land. It is as bad as that man Prothero. They raid gentlemen’s houses to seize arms; they resist the police. That man Devil-era—so I must call him—speaks openly of a republic. Devil-era and Devil-in; is it a coincidence merely? All this comes of our ill-timed leniency after the Dublin rebellion. When will England learn the lesson Cromwell taught her? He was a wicked man, he made one great mistake for which he is no doubt answering to his Maker throughout all eternity, but he certainly did know how to manage these Irish. If he could come back now he would be on our side. He would have had his lesson. Your Bolshevik friends go on murdering and cutting throats, I see, like true Republicans. Happily the White Guards seem getting the upper hand in Finland. In the end I suppose we shall be driven to a peace with the Huns as the worst of two evils. If we do, it will only be your Bolsheviks and pacifists and strikers and Bolos who will be to blame.
“The whining and cowardice of the East Enders disgusts me more and more. You read, I suppose, the account of the disgraceful panic during the air raid the other day in the East End, due entirely to foreigners of military age, mostly, no doubt, your Russian Bolsheviks. I am well away from such a rabble. I suffer from rheumatism here. I know it is rheumatism; what you say about gout is nonsense. In spite of its loyalty Ulster is damp. I pine more and more for the sun and warmth of Italy. Unwin must needs make herself very tiresome and peevish nowadays. These are not cheerful times for me. But one must do one’s bit for one’s country, I suppose, unworthy though it be.
“So Mr. Peter is back in England again wounded after his flying about in the air. I suppose he is tasting the delights of matrimony, such as they are! What an affair! Something told me long ago that it would happen. I tried to separate them. My instincts warned me, and my instincts were right. Breed is breed, and the servant strain came out in her. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Why you let them marry I cannot imagine!!! I am sure the young lady could have dispensed with that ceremony!!!! I still think at times of that queer scene I passed on the road when I came to Pelham Ford that Christmas. A second string,—no doubt of it. But Peter was her great chance, of course, thanks to your folly. Well, let us hope that in the modern way they won’t have any children, for nothing is more certain than that these inter-breeding marriages are most harmful, and whether we like it or not you have to remember they are first cousins, if not in the sight of the law at any rate in the sight of God, which is what matters in this respect. Mr. Grimes, who has studied these things in his leisure time, tells me that there is a very great probability indeed that any child will be blind or malformed or consumptive, let us hope the latter, if not actually still-born, which, of course, would be the best thing that could possibly happen....”