III
"I'm afraid you've all had a sickening time," said Loring apologetically after dinner that night, when he had suggested the break-up of the party next day. Lady Loring had not left her room, and Amy's parting instructions to us were not to hurry over our cigars as she and Violet were going to bed.
"Let's hope it'll all be over when next we meet here," said Arden conventionally.
"If we ever do," Loring murmured, half to himself, as he lit a cigar.
"Hang it all, we aren't at war yet," I said.
Loring shrugged his shoulders.
"Does it affect my point?" he asked. "If we fight, there'll be a bill of hundreds, thousands of millions; and if we keep out of it, we shall spend not much less preparing for our turn. I seem to see a quadrupled Navy and universal service and a general arming to the teeth; and that means an end of your big houses and cars and men-servants. A good thing too, eh, Raney?"
"A very good thing." It was Val Arden who spoke. "You can afford it, Jim, but I can't; and, honestly, if war comes and we're brought face to face with reality, if we can give up pretending.... God knows, there's nothing beautiful in war, and in my way I've tried to find beauty; the destructiveness of war to a man who tries to create, even on the smallest scale.... I don't say I haven't had a good time; up to a point I've succeeded.... That's to say, for a man who was never at a public school or university, and lived on four hundred and fifty a year paid him by Arden, Lawrence & Younger, Wholesale Bootmakers, Northampton, I've been taken pretty well at my own valuation—by being rather more precious than the most precious people I met anywhere in society——"
"You're in a chastened mood to-night, Val," commented Loring. There was something rather embarrassing in this sudden, uninvited avowal from the enigmatic Arden.
"Aren't we all?" he asked.
"It comes a bit unexpectedly from you."
Arden drew meditatively at his cigar.
"I'm tired of it all, Jim," he said, with a weary sigh. "The whole damned hothouse existence. On my honour, I almost wish I were a soldier so that I could feel I had done man's work for one day of my life.... It takes a time like this to show you how useless and untrained our class is." He broke off to laugh at himself. "Our class, indeed! Raney, you know everything; is it possible for a man like me to get into the Army nowadays?"
"Before a year's out, there'll be hardly a hale man not in the Army," O'Rane answered.
"A year?" I echoed.
He turned to me quietly.
"Don't imagine this is going to be another seven weeks' war," he said. "It's two empires, two civilizations, two ideals in conflict. There'll be no truce till one or other has been annihilated. I've lived in Germany and I know something of the German ideal; I've lived here and watched the life that we all love—and revile; and I see the form of future civilization balancing midway between the two as it balanced before between Greek and Persian or Roman and Goth. Whatever any one of us values most in life he'll have to risk—and it's long odds, very long odds, he will lose it."
Loring studied his face attentively and then strolled to the window, where he pulled aside the curtains and gazed out into the night. He looked tired and worried, and, when he turned again to the room, it was with the suggestion that we should go to bed.
"If the worst comes to the worst, I suppose we can only die once, Raney," he said, putting his hand on the other's shoulder.
"I shan't be killed," answered O'Rane. "I've got too much to do first."
He bent forward and began blowing out the candles on the table until only two remained alight, while the rest of us watched him as though he were performing a rite. "If I'd been meant to be killed it would have happened long ago. The fact that I'm still alive.... You fellows think it's superstition, but it serves my purpose, and we needn't quarrel over terms.... Good night, Jim; good night, Val.... George, I shall take you for a breath of fresh air in the garden before we turn in."
It was eleven o'clock when we stepped on to the terrace, one before we came in to bed, and for the first hour and three-quarters we walked arm in arm without exchanging a dozen sentences. His phrase, 'the life we all love and revile,' and the sudden sobering of Arden, had set me thinking of my own life, and as a thing for which a man might die, it seemed a mean and paltry ideal. At Melton and Oxford there had been at least generous illusions, but my dreams had left me in London. The pettiness and personal ambitions of the House, the artificiality and extravagance of society, the lifelessness, the want of purpose, the absence of enthusiasm, seemed to argue a dying civilization.
I thought of Loring and his dozen wasted years, but he at least was marrying and in the upbringing of a family could look to find an object and an interest. If the war-cloud passed, I should presumably drift on as I had done before, dancing a little less, shooting a little more as the years went by, and gossiping in Fleet Street to give me an excuse for gossiping at the Club. Had I died that night, my record for a man of education would not have been a proud one. My social groove, as I hinted to O'Rane years before at Lake House, held me fast.
"I'm depressed, Raney," I said. "Our civilization as I see it would never be missed. In place of religion we have controversies over ritual or endowments or the Kikuyu decision; for art we have cubism, for music a revue, for literature a sex novel. Sport and spending money and being invited to the right houses are the only things we care about."
We walked on in silence for a few moments; then he said:
"Think again, old man."
"I've thought, Raney. Politics, society, journalism——" The thought of Erckmann and the 'Ruban Bleu,' the memory of Sir John Woburn and the Press Combine, choked me.
"There's a world outside London, old man," he said. "It's a large thing you're condemning—the order of an empire where there's more personal liberty, freedom of speech and thought and even-handed justice than anywhere in creation. A race of degenerates seldom rules for long, and, if it's the virtues of individuality that make our rule possible, you must expect the vices of individuality to appear and drop their pebbles into the wheels of the machine."
Again we walked on until the stable clock struck one. O'Rane looked at his watch in surprise.
"I'd had no idea it was so late," he said. "I've been thinking—like you."
"Or Jim, or Val Arden," I put in.
"Yes, and—like you—I'm depressed. Things move so slowly, George. I've been so busy with my own affairs that I've hardly been near the House since I was elected, and now there's likely to be war, and when that's over I shall have to start again at the bottom. And there was a lot I was in a hurry to do," he added regretfully.
"What can you do with our social and political machine?" I demanded.
"It's made up of human parts," he answered, with a smile, "and every human being has ears and a heart. In time I can make people listen to me and, when they listen, I can do what I like with them."
"I thought that before I made my first speech. You've not been broken by the House of Commons yet, Raney."
"And I doubt if I shall ever have the chance. I didn't go up there to-day because I doubted if I should ever be able to sit there again. After all, that's only one platform, and Wesley, Newman, Tolstoi got on without it. If the fire's inside you——"
"And how do you start?" I interrupted.
"On the simplest things. I've got a commonplace mind, George, with no subtlety or cleverness, but it's frightfully hard to shake. From experience I know that hunger and physical pain and disease and indignity are terrible things—the whole world knows it—and we must put an end to them. I've only learned two lessons in life, and they came to me on the same day—I've told you about it before—when I fainted from want of food, and a prostitute, dying of consumption, fed me. I don't aim higher than that, old man—to put an end to human suffering. There's little a man can't do by example and teaching, if he knows how to touch primitive imagination.... I'm quite commonplace; I've got the temperament of a Salvation Army man—and like him I can make people shout, or laugh, or tremble, or cry."
Once again I put a question that I had asked him years before in Ireland.
"What can you do with me, Raney, or a hundred thousand other low-flying, unimaginative, class-conscious souls, steeped in materialism and taught from childhood to repress emotion? To get rid of selfishness and muddle, to make us alert and sympathetic, you must change human nature—set the world in the path of one of Wells' comets——"
"And can't you see the comet approaching?" He stood still, with hands outstretched, appealing, and in his eye shone the light of a visionary. "We shall fight to preserve an ideal, side by side, with disregard of class-consciousness. We shall fight to maintain our toleration and justice, and so that no man may ever have to fight again. Do you think we can come back with the scream of a shell in our ears to take up the old narrowness and futility? Shall we re-establish a social barrier between men who've undertaken the same charge? Shall we save this country from invasion so that sweated labour may be perpetuated?" His voice had grown quicker and quicker until he stopped suddenly, panting for breath. "George, you don't know the soul of a people."
"I knew it before the comet."
"You don't know its capabilities."
"I hope you will prove me wrong, Raney."
On the following morning Arden, O'Rane, Loring and I returned to town. That Tuesday was the last of the Five Days since Germany declared herself in a state of war, the twelfth—only the twelfth—since the Austrian ultimatum. We all of us felt that we should at least get our news some hours earlier than at Chepstow, and for my own part I had to see what policy Bertrand proposed to adopt with "Peace." Also, I had wired at length to the Whips' Office, telling young Jellaby to take a note of my name in case any overworked Minister came in search of volunteers for his department.
On our way up we read the full text of the previous day's speeches. They added little to our knowledge, but the sensationalism of all Fleet Street could hardly smear the bold outline of the Commons' scene. As well as if I had been there, I could visualize the haggard faces on the Treasury Bench as the Foreign Secretary expounded a situation that momentarily changed and acquired new complexity. I could almost see him phrasing his speech as he hurried to the House and discarding sentence after sentence as an eleventh-hour dispatch was handed him to read on the way. The speech itself breathed an air of fever, like the news of the Indian floods in 1903, when at one end of the line I read scraps of a message transmitted from a station that was swept away before the end. I knew something, too, of my House of Commons and its glorious uncertainty; to some extent I could guess at the feelings of a man who called for its decision in an unexpected war.
On reaching Paddington I sent my luggage to Princes Gardens and drove to the Club for luncheon. The extended Bank Holiday gave the streets an unfamiliar aspect, like an industrial town at the beginning of a lock-out. My driver took me round through Cockspur Street, and I found the White Star offices thronged with Americans newly mindful of the Monroe Doctrine. They pressed forward in a vociferous queue and, as the first arrivals fought their way back into the street, they could have sold their passage tickets ten times over at their own price.
In a block by the Crimean Monument I heard my name called, and Summertown passed with a hurried wave of the hand. I had seen him in mess uniform a dozen times when dining with the King's Guard; this was the first occasion on which I had met him dressed for active service. It was also the last time I saw him alive. All the way down Pall Mall I saw unfamiliar khaki on men I had never regarded as soldiers, and, as I mounted the steps of the Club, Tom Dainton ran down and engaged my vacant taxi, only pausing to murmur in his deep voice:
"Bore about this war, isn't it? I'd arranged to take my wife to Scotland."
The Club itself was reconciled to the inevitable, and the members forestalled the Government by some hours in issuing their ultimatum. I heard such names as 'Wilhelmshaven,' 'The Sound' and 'Kiel' being flung about with age-long familiarity by some, while others turned furtively to an atlas or inquired angrily why no geography was taught in the public schools. A group of barristers, flannel-suited for the Long Vacation, stood in one corner prophesying a shortage of food; and before long Crabtree, whom I had not seen half a dozen times in as many years, detached himself and cashed a cheque in the dining-room to the limit set by the Club rules. More than one father of a family, following his example, wrote unpractical grocery orders or dispatched tinned tongues to helpless dependents in the country. From food shortage to bread riots was a short step, and I overheard a circle of Civil Servants discussing the early enrolment of special constables.
The long 'Parliamentary' table in the dining-room was in a condition of crowded excitement, and each new-comer brought a fresh list of the Ministers who had resigned and the reasons for which they had wobbled back into the fold. Nowhere did I hear it suggested that war was avoidable, hardly anywhere that it should be avoided, though two Radical members who had consistently voted against the increased naval estimates in 1909 declaimed against the dispatch of land forces and asserted that all must be left to a happily invincible Fleet.
In the first year of the war I often marvelled at the uncritical credulity of educated men who believed and handed on every rumour or theory of the moment—from the execution of Admirals in the Tower to the certain arrival of Cossacks in Berlin by Christmas. I lay no claim to superior wisdom, as for six months I myself believed all such stories as simply as I afterwards rejected true with false. From the day of the ultimatum there was a ready disposition to canvass opinions without considering their worth, and before the end of luncheon I was ladling out second-hand judgements on the French cavalry or on reputed defects of meeting recoil as observed in the practice of German field artillery. Had I not been absent from the Club for nearly a week? Must I not be presumed to have new information or fresh points of view?
As I paid my bill, Jellaby hurried up with the suggestion that I should report next day at the Admiralty.
"Is war quite certain?" I asked.
"As certain as anything in an uncertain world," he answered.
In the smoking-room I retired to a corner to read the latest telegrams and drink my coffee in solitude. One was as impossible as the other, and lest I be thought to exaggerate I will not say how many men pursued me to find out what I had been discussing with Jellaby. I should be sorry even to guess at the number of unknown men who entered into conversation, but I cannot forget the omnipresence of Sir Adolf Erckmann. In less worthy moments I suspect him of deliberately displaying what he conceived to be sufficiently flamboyant patriotism to obscure the unhappy circumstance of his name. Certainly he edged from one end of the room to the other, unsparingly subjecting man after man to an unvarying monologue.
"These Chermans wand a lezzon," he grunted into his beard. "And we'll give id 'em, hein? They thought Bridain wouldn't gom in. We gan dell a differend story, hein?"
His scarlet face and head, bronzed with the wind and sun of his recent tour on the Continent, was moist with exertion by the time he penned me in my corner.
"How long is it going to last, Erckmann?" I asked—with some idea of testing the resources of his English.
"How long?" he repeated, pulling truculently at his tangled beard. "A month, hein? Doo months ad the oudside. I'm a bangker, my boy. I know, hein? If they doan'd ged to Baris in a vordnide, they're done, zmashed, pancrupd. You ead your Grizmas dinner in Berlin, hein?"
I resisted the obvious retort and made an excuse to get home to my uncle.