2
I believe Bertrand’s death saved my life or at least my reason. I remember feeling almost bitterly that I could not support his illness in addition to my work for our paper, the hourly exasperation of my life at home and the storm of calamities that were bursting on us from the four corners of heaven at the same moment. The shock of losing him gave me the break I needed. When I awoke in an unfamiliar bed, I recalled that we were overshadowed by a new war, that a general election was imminent and that unemployment was a problem which we could not solve “by pulling long faces”. Then I recollected the venomous, red-eyed author of that phrase; and the scene in O’Rane’s library was flashed on my brain like a scene in a film. I remembered Sonia’s jejune sympathy. I remembered finding Barbara in the car. I wondered dully how we stood after that bitter, mad outpouring; and, despite her note, I was thankful that we should not meet for a few days. Then I realized that for a few days I should have a respite enforced: from the paper, from war and unemployment, from everything that seemed at the moment more than I could bear.
My first duty was to arrange for the memorial service at St. Margaret’s; and, as I watched the congregation arriving, I felt that the respite was extending, for an hour, to all of us. The obituary notices, the memoir which I was writing for one of the quarterly reviews, most of all this solemn tribute to a man, perhaps great, of an undeniably great past turned our thoughts backward to a time when France lived under a citizen-king and disunited Germany declaimed ineffectually at Frankfurt. Of the two former prime ministers who attended the service, both were hardly more than boys when my uncle first entered the House; the oldest head of a foreign mission had found “old Bertrand Oakleigh” an established institution when he was first accredited to the Court of St. James; and the journalists, the lawyers, the men of business, the bees and butterflies of society who moved sombrely to their places could not remember a time when the truculent Johnsonian figure had not been one of the familiar sights of London.
“A great landmark gone,” whispered Dainton, as I waited for Barbara to arrive with the Crawleighs. “I didn’t always agree with him. Indeed, if you took a poll of the people here he hadn’t quarrelled with . . .”
I turned to watch the cars emptying and the new arrivals dodging or seeking out the reporters. My mother had come over from Cannes; my sister and her husband, Violet Loring and Laurence represented the family; and, if we had all tingled from the old man’s lash, that was long ago and inextricably in the part he chose to play. The older generation in the House of Commons and the younger generation in Fleet Street—men who won his respect by standing squarely up to him—came unurged to prove their regard for his fighting qualities and his generosity.
“I deplore his politics,” said Crawleigh, “but he was a great public servant.”
At such a time I refrained from suggesting that Crawleigh’s father had deplored the politics of Bright and Cobden. It is one curse of the party-system that an opponent must be dead before we admit that he may possibly not be damned. I was brought up to regard Lord Salisbury as a monster wherewith to frighten naughty children; my father, if he had been required to expose the Antichrist, would have pointed his finger unhesitatingly at Lord Beacons field.
I thought over Crawleigh’s belated tribute as I took Barbara to our places. This imminent election might purge the House of those to whom the war—as Saltash told me frankly—had come as a god-send; but, if the adventurers into public life were not sent back to their counting-houses and newspaper-offices and bucket-shops, I feared that, with Bertrand, there would die an unparalleled tradition of integrity and devotion. My uncle had prepared himself for politics by half a lifetime of study, as Gladstone and Salisbury, Morley and Rosebery prepared themselves; of the men under thirty who entered the House with me in 1906, hardly one had not tried to equip himself by travel, by settlement-work, by experience in business or by the management of an estate. There seemed to be fewer servants of the public in 1918.
“If he had scoffed less,” said Lady Dainton, “he would have done more.”
I agreed privately, though I think his cynicism covered a disappointment of soul: he had come to England, as a brilliant, ambitious and sanguine boy, to reform the world; and the sluggish-witted, slow-speaking English had worn him down. To begin as an O’Connell and to end as “a great public servant” would have roused him to savage merriment.
“How he would have despised all this!,” I whispered to Barbara, as the people whom he would not admit to his house hurried importantly into the more prominent seats.
Ministers of the present and past, divines and pressmen, authors and diplomats poured in till every place seemed to be taken. A crowd began to collect at the doors; there was rather more noise than I thought seemly; and I was glad when the organ began to play.
Sixty years of public life. I was trying to remember whether Bertrand had known Westminster before the new Houses of Parliament were built, when Spence-Atkins, who was acting as an usher, touched my arm and asked if we had room in our pew for two more. I made way for Sonia, who crushed past me with scarlet cheeks, and for O’Rane, who allowed himself to be guided by a verger. His face, I thought, was white and set, with a suppressed anger which I had seen more often at school than in later years. I asked if anything was amiss; but he would only reply “Afterwards.” Then I relapsed into the past and forgot my surroundings until the last notes of the Dead March throbbed into silence.
Outside I was surrounded by sympathetic friends; but, in the complete detachment of my anæsthesia, I was thinking only that I had time to see my solicitors before luncheon, when I found Sonia the centre of an agitated little group which O’Rane was trying alternately to soothe and to disperse.
“No, I insist on telling George,” she proclaimed. “Did you hear what happened when we arrived? I don’t like being called a murderer!”
The word—and, still more, the tone in which it was uttered—disturbed my dream of past days.
“Who . . .?” I began.
Then O’Rane, with mounting irritation as some queer sense warned him that a crowd was collecting, felt for my arm and led me away.
“We don’t want a scene,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, George: I wouldn’t have come if I’d thought for a moment. . . . Our excellent friendship the Bishop of Poplar is unintentionally at the bottom of this. You remember his saying something about my condemning innocent people to death if I stopped the money I’ve been giving him the last few years? Well, that’s been taken up by Griffiths’ gang. We’ve had sandwichmen patrolling The Sanctuary all this week: O’RANE’S SENTENCE OF DEATH or something of the kind. I didn’t care; I wasn’t going to be blackmailed. Then, to-day, one of the reporters at the door asked my name; and somebody in the crowd overheard it. A few idiots thought it would be amusing to shout ‘murderer’. . . . Where’s Sonia? It’s time we got back.”
As I led him to his wife, I observed that her cheeks were no longer flushed; she looked, indeed, unpleasantly scared, and her eyes were fixed on the avenue of loiterers between whom she must pass on her way home.
“We’ll drop you,” Barbara suggested, with a quick movement towards the car.
Sonia hurried gratefully to her side.
“Thanks, Babs, I’ll walk,” said O’Rane obstinately.
“Then I’ll walk with you,” I said. “This business is frightening your wife,” I added when we were alone. “Why don’t you tell the police to clear these sandwichmen away?”
“I really haven’t had time. This is going to be the worst winter of all, George; we must raise every penny we can.” His lip curled contemptuously at the booing which greeted us in Palace Yard. “I’m free to beg now; if people want to know what I’m doing myself, I can say I’m giving every last shilling I can spare and they must do the same. We’re all responsible for relieving this distress; it’s part of the war, and we must volunteer as freely as we volunteered in ’14. And, if that doesn’t bring the money, we must try other means. The smug, secure people were glad enough to have conscription of men. Their money’s less than a man’s life; we must have conscription of wealth if they won’t volunteer. If it amuses the people I’m working for to call me murderer . . . Will you come in?” he asked, as we reached The Sanctuary.
“I’m already overdue at my solicitors’,” I answered, though I made time to call at the Admiralty on my way to the City.
I thought that Philip Hornbeck, who amassed “intelligence” of all kinds, should have a first-hand account of this ugly little scene; and I wanted to hear his opinion of Griffiths. Though he promised to keep on eye open for the O’Ranes, he clearly considered the temper of the country less dangerous than in the big strikes after the war. The unemployed were numerous enough, but they were kept scattered; Griffiths had the ability and the will to make mischief, but he was disowned by the official labour-leaders.
“The people of this country have no experience in revolutions,” said Hornbeck. “When you have a riot, it’s always the rioters who need police-protection.”