1
The winter months of 1917 passed sadly for anyone who was condemned to live in the depression of London. I was well enough to go back to work in February, but I stayed on at "The Sanctuary," because, with all its nerve-racking discomfort, I had not the heart to go away when both Bertrand and George pressed me so warmly to remain. Three, they said, were less depressing than two, though I came to doubt it. For the tenth time, we seemed to be entering upon the last decisive phase of the war; Germany had begun her unrestricted submarine campaign, it was inevitable that America should abandon her neutrality. (Since the Presidential election and with every day that brought intervention nearer, our press became less scornful of the President; it ceased to misquote and misinterpret phrases about a nation that was too proud to fight or a peace without victory.) But the race would be hotly contested. The submarine campaign at sea, a win-through-at-all-costs offensive on land had to put Germany in a position to dictate terms before the incalculable weight of American arms was thrown into the scale against her.
Men wore grave faces in those days. Though few could give accurate figures of the tonnage which was being sunk daily or of the stocks of food on which we could depend, everyone knew that prices had soared until they had to be arbitrarily fixed by the Government; everyone knew that already certain foods were unprocurable and that the privations were unlikely to grow less. Meatless days and three-course dinners were but the beginning, and Bertrand, who was by now almost reconciled to the continuation of war in the hope that it would discredit the new Government, shook his head gloomily at me and wondered morosely how long the proud-stomached people of England would consent to go on short commons.
And it was not only in food that the shortage was being felt. Omniscient critics, who had a figure and a date ready for every question, whispered that, since the Somme campaign, we were short of recruits to the extent of a hundred thousand men, and the whisper, growing in volume, was the signal for a campaign, half malicious, half patriotic, and wholly mischievous. The unessential industries must yield up their young men, the civil service must be purged of its indispensables, and, that not even one fish should slip through the meshes of the net, those who had been exempted, rejected or discharged from the army, were required to present themselves for re-examination. The campaign evoked one flash of opposition, not serious in itself, but of interest as a symptom of turbulent discontent; mass meetings of discharged soldiers, each with his silver badge, assembled to declare their intention of not being sent out again until others had done their share.
"The wheel has swung the full circle now," said George one night. "I was up before a board to-day. The doctors seemed to feel that it was a personal score for them that my eyes weren't bad enough for me to be rejected; but, when they came to my heart, they were quite indignant. They couldn't pass me on that, but it was a personal grievance and I shouldn't have been a bit surprised if they'd tested me to see if I'd been chewing cordite.... I suppose it's not to be wondered at; I'm not as keen to go out as I was two and a half years ago; I shouldn't be keen at all, if it wasn't for the feeling that I'm left, that all my friends have been killed.... And they must get men from somewhere. This Russian revolution is a very fine and hopeful thing in itself, but the Russians are so much absorbed in it that they can't spare time to bother about the war, and the Germans are withdrawing the best part of their troops from the East. I don't know where you're going to get men from. The papers keep yapping about Ireland, but I wonder how many of their inspired leader-writers know anything about the country."
It was one of many discussions, when George would come home late and tired from his office, Bertrand later and more tired from the House.
"If Germany threw up the sponge to-morrow!" George began one night, "what should we have gained? The flower of our manhood's been destroyed, we're smashed financially, the money market of the world has shifted to New York, and we shall spend the rest of our days paying the interest on our debt, trying to repair the damage.... I don't care to think of the labour troubles we're going to have when we try to get back to peace-time rates of wages or when the men find that their jobs have been done as well or better in their absence by women. And what's it all for? I get most infernally sceptical at times. As poor Beresford used to prove with chapter and verse, in every war of this kind there's always been a school of optimists to say that such a scourge will never be seen again. And it always is.... As for social or moral elevation, with the spirit of lynch-law and the methods of the press-gang.... It'll all be the same!"
"It can't be quite the same after so universal a shake-up," I objected.
George shook his head wisely.
"In the early days, when men of our class were enlisting as privates, even lately, when rankers were getting commissions, I used to think that some of our social angles would be rubbed off, but just you have five minutes' talk with an Old Army officer about the 'temporary gentlemen' in his battalion, who've been fighting side by side with him, mark you! While you're on the desert island, your Admirable Crichton may come to the top, but once get him back in London with a drawing-room and a servants' hall!... I agree in theory with people like Raney, who say we must get value for the lives we're spending, but I can't do it! Nobody can do it. The men out there who are paying the price want to forget about the whole thing, they'll come home at the end as they come home now on leave, to attend to their own affairs, to enjoy themselves, to make up for lost time and recapture the years they've wasted in the trenches. And the people who've never been out have forgotten all the old good resolutions; they're as tired of the war as the soldiers, tired of drudgery, discomfort, economising; they want to forget it and enjoy themselves and get back to the old life. Frankly, Stornaway, it still makes you sick to hear of the way our prisoners are treated and that sort of thing, but you don't any longer regard this war as a crusade, do you? There's too much eighteenth-century diplomacy about it, too many compensations, too much balance of power. It was one thing to send a forlorn hope to Belgium, one thing to say that the German military machine must be broken, but when it comes to conscribing men to coerce Greece or win Constantinople for Russia ... I wonder when the accursed things will end."
Bertrand roused himself to light a fresh cigar. From the angle at which he held it in his mouth, no less than from the way that he screwed up his eyes and peered into the shadows of the rafters, I prepared myself for a paradoxical and probably pretentious generalisation.
"I sometimes feel that war is the new expression of our national activity," he began. "Don't the Rolls-Royce people build only for the Government? Well, that's typical of a gigantic state-socialism which has grown up in a night; you can't build a house or buy a suit of clothes until war-needs have been satisfied. Production, transport, distribution have all been taken over; you've an army of controllers directing the machine; and in time we shall dress as we're told, eat the quantity of food we're allowed, move here and there, do this and that, as we're ordered. At one age we shall be drafted into the army, at another we shall be knocked on the head to save feeding; there'll be birth-rate bonuses amounting to state-subsidised polygamy.... Everything that a man did in the old days for his own benefit or amusement,—his daily task, his career, his material output, his accumulation of wealth, his pioneer-work in developing and improving the world, his family-life, even—will now be directed to feeding the war. I don't complain; we're united in a labour gang of forty million souls, and our job is to turn out a better war than Germany. I don't see where it's going to stop and I don't see who's going to stop it. Not the soldiers, because they're shot if they disobey an order; not the Government, because they're the Board of Directors."
"You'll only stop it by a general strike at home," George answered reflectively.
Bertrand spread out his hands with a gesture of sweet reasonableness.
"And who's going to carry through a general strike? The people with small fixed incomes can't make themselves heard, and, for all the rise in prices, your industrial wage-earner has never been so prosperous; besides, whenever prices become too high, the Government steps in and controls them, subsidises producers. Again, it's not pleasant to be told that your sons and brothers are being killed because you won't turn out shells."
George wriggled his shoulder-blades impatiently.
"But, if you make it plain that you're not going to turn out shells, the killing stops automatically. If anyone would only come off the high horse and discuss concrete terms!"
Bertrand shrugged his shoulders and blew a scornful cloud of smoke.
"But people are getting used to the killing," he objected. "Three years ago—take anyone you like, Jim Loring; he could only die as the result of illness or an accident; even if there were a war, he wasn't a soldier. And it came like a sort of icy grip at the heart.... Nowadays a man becomes a soldier, whether he likes it or not, at eighteen. They get mown down at twenty instead of dying in their beds at seventy. And, as we grow accustomed to it, on my soul! George, we cease caring. People who come back from Paris tell me that there's a sort of hedonistic fatalism there—the restaurants never so full, money never so prodigally squandered. And anyone who knows anything knows that French credit in America is gone! So it isn't the calm, undismayed spirit of the Spartans at Thermopylæ; it's hysteria, carelessness. I've little doubt that with certain obvious differences you'd find the same thing in Berlin, assuredly you'd find it in Vienna. And we're getting it as badly."
It was due to the house in which I lived, but I suddenly realised that for a twelvemonth my emotions and interests had strayed from battlefields where thousands of men were daily laying down their lives for conflicting ideals; they were engrossed in the contemplation of a middle-aged bachelor, taking advantage of a blind man to carry off his wife. And Mrs. Tom Dainton, one of the earliest widows in the war, had married again. And Lady Maitland and her friends were wondering whether the risk of sudden death would nerve young Pentyre to marry Lady Sally Farwell.
"You're not very encouraging, Bertrand," I said.
"And yet, if you take a long view, you can see light," he rejoined unexpectedly. "The same scientific development which gives you chloroform gives you also poison gas; and, until you can disarm the world and make one nation of it under a single police, each war becomes more horrible than the last. At the same time international divisions and values may be becoming obsolete; the stronghold of Gibraltar may be the target for long-range Spanish guns; we may all of us thankfully throw down our weapons before we have to fight under changing conditions. You remember when war broke out, George? You were going to stay with Jim Loring, and I went to Paddington with you; we all shook our heads gravely and said, 'Thank God! We're an island!' Well, insularity would have been a source of greater weakness than strength, if the perfection of submarine warfare had gone pari passu with the development of trench warfare; and we may want to cry 'quits' before the submarine makes any further progress. Or take aerial transit. With any luck, George, you'll live to see mail and passenger services through the air all over the world. Germany can't get to the Far East without the leave of Russia, she can hardly get to America without sending her air-ships over someone else's territory. All these international barriers have changed their values."
George looked at his watch and dragged himself to his feet.
"I think I shall turn in. A discussion of this kind is very purifying for the soul, no doubt, but it doesn't get you any forrarder. Dear old Raney could usually be counted on to produce some Mark Tapley consolation at the end of the evening, but I doubt if even he's got any superabundance at the present time."
Bertrand emptied his tumbler, and we moved slowly towards the door.
"Have you heard anything of him since he went back?" I asked.
"He's written once or twice on business. I send him a line two or three times a week to say how Sonia's getting on, and I'm going down there for the week-end pretty soon. You can't tell much from a dictated letter—or from him, if it comes to that," he added with a sigh.
It must have been two or three days after this night that Lady Loring came to me with a worried expression and the announcement that Sonia would have to keep her bed until after her confinement; against this sentence the doctor allowed no appeal. Thereafter I found myself spending a considerable portion of the day in the sick-room. Sonia had overcome her earlier antagonism and after her first unburdening of spirit was prepared to discuss herself and her history with a frankness that amazed me until George told me that it was one of her most unchanging characteristics and one that was not solely stamped upon her by a desire to talk about herself. At the end of a week I had received a full and most unflattering account of her girlhood.
"I was frightfully attractive, of course, but I must have been odious," she began engagingly. "Every other woman hated me, and I used to take it as a great compliment, but I don't think I should now. I want to be liked, I always did; but I never took any trouble, I went out of my way to exasperate men. I don't know why people stood me—people like George, I mean, who didn't pretend to be in love with me. I must either have been a first-class flirt, or I must have been a genius, or else I must really have had qualities that I didn't recognise."
I had a full history of her engagement to Loring, over whom her facile triumph had exasperated her, so that she picked quarrels day by day until the engagement was broken off and she made, if not the match, at least the most widely discussed scandal, of the year.
There was another man called Claypole or Crabtree (as she always alluded to him as Tony I never entirely discovered his surname) to whom she had been engaged before Loring came on the scene. I had his history, too, sandwiched between accounts of the men whom she had not married for one reason or another, and the rich Jews like Sir Adolphus Erskine, whom she had fascinated and bled; throughout she talked like an artless child describing her first ball. On some subjects she was inexorably reticent; I never heard why she had fallen in love with O'Rane and married him, and in all the hours that I sat with her she never alluded a second time to the stages of her estrangement from her husband. An hour daily for a fortnight told me little, perhaps, about Sonia, but it shed a searching light on girls of the class to which she belonged.