XVIII
“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!”