3
At the beginning of the autumn, a railway-strike assailed the country with partial paralysis.
“It may help,” wrote Bertrand from the security of London, “to bring people to their senses. They think they’re rich because the printing-presses keep ’em well supplied with depreciated notes. As usual, Spence-Atkins prophesies a tremendous slump; and that will be just as unreal as the boom. If people would think in terms of commodities and services instead of chattering about money!
“But this is not the worst of the trouble. The triple alliance is a political engine. Direct action is a political method; the reply of organized labour to a government that represents no one in particular and organized labour least of all. This is the first protest against the 1918 election and I’ve been torn in pieces by the tory press for asking what else any sane man could have expected, when the present House never tries to control ministers. ‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’ ”
Barbara and I turned south on the first day of the strike; and, by the time we reached Crawleigh Abbey, it was over. In the tone of my father-in-law, however, I detected a new rancour such as I had not met since the almost daily strikes and lock-outs before the war. Neave had been warned for duty; and, as he changed out of uniform, I fancied that father and son were like a pair of reluctant game-cocks, as difficult to drag out of a fight as to urge in.
“I regret nothing,” said Crawleigh on the first night, “that shews labour it can’t hold the country to ransom. If I’d been the prime minister, though, I’d have recalled every man jack of them to the colours . . .”
“And if they refused to come?,” I ventured to interrupt.
“After being ordered to mobilize?,” asked Neave with the aloof patience of a Guards officer in teaching a civilian his A.B.C.
“Yes,” I answered. “In 1914 the regular officer threatened to resign if he were ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster. That’s never been quoted, but you may be sure it’s not been forgotten. And if you ever try to use troops against an industrial strike . . .”
“I should use troops to protect life and property,” Crawleigh interposed. “A very few days without trains, and the babies in every city would die for want of milk. One hopes that these drastic steps will never be necessary. One hopes the lesson’s been taken to heart.”
“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.
As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave, neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.
“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.
I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital loss of a strike.
“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and proved nothing,” I said.
“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton, who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.
It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.
“I must send you a little book on The Soviet Peril,” promised Lady Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys had sent me pamphlets on A Short Way with Profiteers.
I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he had increased his capital twenty per cent. since 1914.
“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.
Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he was paid, he stood condemned.
“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League ‘paid agitators’?”
“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that faded into the silence of stupefaction.
The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a diminuendo in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles, of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices; credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than they could afford.
It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.
The one was no better justified than the other. While the country clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own exports threatened to dry up.
“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my return, tossing me The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”
“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching to you since the armistice.”
“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from armistice night. People won’t listen.”
And then I told Bertrand of the psychological discovery that impressed me most in the whole course of my tour. On the minds of men who had taken part in the war the printed word had ceased to exert its old spell. In the first recruiting of 1914 the boys in my old Wiltshire constituency were forbidden to pluck the blackberries by the roadside, because a mysterious red car had been abroad, before daylight, sprinkling the hedges with what was believed to be a strong solution of typhoid germs. The story was printed in the papers and believed because it was in print. Five years later the same story—with a Russian or a Sinn Feiner in charge of the car—might have been believed until it was published; then it would have been relegated to the teeming limbo of “newspaper lies”. The captain of the Loring yacht, who had served for most of the war on an auxiliary cruiser, told me of his amazement on reading that the Pelion, which was at that time his home, had been sunk by a mine in the North Sea; he was less surprised, though more aggrieved, to read a year later that his ship, which had lately been sunk by a torpedo in the Irish Channel, was still convoying troopers in the Mediterranean. He accepted my explanation that the Admiralty was of malice aforethought misleading the newspaper-readers of England in the hope of misleading the German intelligence department; but his faith was shattered beyond repair. If the press lied to him on matters which he could check from his own experience, how much more easily it would lie about defeats and casualties, wages and prices!
“And in future,” I told Bertrand, “we have to reckon with this incredulity in addition to all the apathy that’s been breaking our hearts.”
“And the misrepresentation,” he sighed with a sensitiveness surprising in so scarred a fighter to the charge of the Woburn press that he was selling the French for thirty pieces of German silver.
“There are times,” I said, “when I feel that only the logic of events will convince people. Aren’t we wasting our energy, Bertrand? I’ve given the experiment more than six months’ trial; now I want to get away. Barbara’s going to have a baby.” . . .
I could have piled argument on argument if my uncle had resisted me; but he sat without speaking, his hands crossing and uncrossing themselves tremulously over the ivory knob of his stick and his eyes set gloomily on the fire.
“The logic of events?,” he repeated at length.
“I don’t believe we shall do any good here till we have a revolution,” I said, with bitter memories of my battle-piece in its three panels. “A revolution; or another war.”
“Our intention was to avert it,” he reminded me.