II
I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.
Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane, he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar; later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.
In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British entente. Secret treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness, and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a fainéant Duma hardly availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to be drawn into the entente, well and good; there could be no need for so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were dividing Europe into two groups,—at best for a competition in armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,—then the men and women whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble their rulers were meditating.
In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a pro rata reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not materialize to-day or to-morrow, but—as O'Rane was fond of saying—slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between individuals did not come in a night.
Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall; perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be—and there is little doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manœuvres; certainly a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for the Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers provided a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and drudgery, there was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign; l'appétit vient en mangeant, and to some extent we succumbed to the enthusiasm we tried to inspire in others.
Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League," floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the lands of sympathizers and suspects.
The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details, and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.
I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper. We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide—but never thwart—our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful, and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing was too great or too small for our attention....
Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the "Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with excited suggestions.
"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay—I don't mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a paper...."
And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title, suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the Watchman about it."
Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus. Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the Sensations they had effected—the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the "Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo" carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as épatant a sensation of universal disarmament—or, for the matter of that, bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform—but a narrow Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or worse we had to get on without them.
Sir John Woburn himself I never met—and am the first to regret the loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.
The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled—Penelope fashion—the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader, Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war, which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the voluntary system by day.
"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."
"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily commercial.
After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the provinces—which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles—and seemed pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared manuscripts.
M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long, I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And, when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some new édition de luxe, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man, don't you think you could give me some reviewing to do?" Publishers at one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head knowingly and reassured me.
"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy. He kens well—if you don't—that good reviews never yet sold a bad book, nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."
The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.
No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909 Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly, there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.
The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle, international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to lose by war.
Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues, what—if anything—the Disarmament League had achieved for all its pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts' national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries. Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.
Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand years of Christian teaching.
But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910. When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of strenuous goodwill.
The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.
It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera, only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations. We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in very truth be dead.
And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.
"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."