3
The tumult, which had seemed to be so mysteriously suspended, broke out anew on the day when I sent my memoir of Bertrand to the printers and walked out of Princes Gardens into the traffic of Knightsbridge. Clamorous contents-bills at the street-corners reminded me that I was come back to a world where new wars were imminent; the Guards had sailed for Chanak; a general election could no longer be averted.
My ultimate duty to Bertrand was fulfilled when I persuaded my staff to carry out his last wishes for Peace. Though he mocked the empty conceits of recording protests and demonstrating moral superiority, he was not scheming to stand well with enlightened posterity when he lay murmuring: “Un sacrifice inutile? Un sacrifice inutile?” O’Rane’s question was an affront to him; he was wishing himself fifty years younger, to make an answer that would satisfy him; and we must take up the burden which his hands could no longer hold.
As soon as I had their promise of support, I left my colleagues and set out for Berkeley Square to learn the secret history of the long-threatened conservative revolt.
This menace of war had done what the grotesque treaty of Versailles, the organized anarchy in Ireland, the paralysis of government in every limb had so far failed to do. Others, besides my butler, were saying that the long record of misrule was beyond a joke; and the party-managers, in concert with the independent wire-pullers who were now an established part of our public life, had decided to wreck the coalition. ‘Blob’ Wister had already spoken; and Saltash told me that Woburn and the Press Combine would speak next day.
I found my father-in-law engaged on a letter to The Times, protesting against the exclusion of peers from the Carlton Club meeting; and for a long spell he reiterated like a sulky child that he could tell me nothing because he was allowed to know nothing. Then he relaxed and informed me that the fight was taking place over foreign policy in general and, in particular, over the prime minister’s dictatorial habit of conducting his foreign relationships through his own secretariat over the head of the Foreign Office.
“If I’d been Curzon, I’d have thrown the whole thing up years ago,” said Crawleigh with that eagerness for resignation so often exhibited by men who have not been invited to hold cabinet office.
“He may feel he’s more useful as a brake on the prime minister,” I suggested.
“If the prime minister goes, the foreign secretary must follow . . . unless he precedes him, when he sees how the cat’s jumping,” said Crawleigh with ill-concealed malice. “Well, it’s quite simple; Chamberlain has pledged himself to support the coalition; Birkenhead and Horne are with him; and the rump is meeting to see if it can overthrow Chamberlain.”
“Who’s to be put in Chamberlain’s place?,” I asked.
“No one knows yet. No one has the least idea how the meeting will turn out. If I were in the confidence of my party . . . Nowadays the unhappy accident of being a peer . . .”
Feeling that I should hear no more, I drifted to the Turf and Stage, where Frank Jellaby thickened the mist in which Crawleigh had enveloped the Carlton Club. After a denunciation of the coalition-liberals which reminded me of Cato’s punctual fulminations against Carthage, he explained that the new crisis had been engineered by ‘Blob’ Wister and that its outcome depended on Wister’s success in finding a leader:
“He had no difficulty in persuading people like Dean and Lingfield to come out for an all-tory government when his papers were marching ahead to cover their advance. If he can get Bonar Law to stampede the meeting . . .”
“I hear Lingfield and the rest of George’s tory ministers are swearing allegiance to him with one hand,” I said, “and writing him letters of resignation with the other.”
“They don’t know anything . . . except that some of them will be badly left.”
“But no one,” I encouraged him, “will be left quite so completely as your coalition-liberal friends.”
Jellaby’s face darkened:
“They sold the pass in ’16, they’ve had their reward; if there were another pass to sell, they’d sell it; and they mustn’t complain if they can’t find one.”
“You won’t join forces,” I asked, “to keep the tories out?”
“After 1916 I could never trust a coaly-lib again,” he answered. “Now, if your paper would help us into a position where we could hold the balance . . .”
“That,” I said, “is simply overturning one coalition to make way for another. And you’ve no more programme to-day than you had in 1918, when you let Ll-G.’s mad promises pass without a protest. We’re paying for your silence to-day, at Chanak and wherever the French can hit us.”
Before Jellaby had time to answer, we were hurried one stage farther along the ever unfinished road of contemporary politics. Lord Saltash, whom I had observed moving from table to table with the manner of a conspirator rather far gone in wine, raised his eyebrows suddenly as ‘Blob’ Wister hacked his way across the dancing-floor. There was a quick nod; and Saltash lurched towards the telephone-boxes, only pausing to whisper thickly in my ear:
“He’s going! Bonar, I mean. Meeting to-morrow.”
“Are you betting on the result?” I asked.
“He’s not coming back politics sake being losing side,” Saltash answered telegraphically, laying a squat index-finger against one side of his nose. “Last kick dying lion. Wash-out George. Number up.”
Jellaby was silent for a few minutes; then he smiled as one who had waited patiently by the mills of the gods.
“Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?,” he demanded at large.
“This is the end of the liberal party for a generation,” I said; which was not the answer expected of me.
And then I stood up to say good-by. There is little difference of age between Jellaby and myself; but he has been nurtured more strictly on the official hatreds of a whips’ office. I was born and bred a liberal, whereas Jellaby embraced that faith as he embraced agnosticism, the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, the painting of Manet, the æsthetics of Pater and, for a time, total abstinence. They were all fashionable among the members of one coterie at Balliol in his day.
“For some years . . .” he conceded with regretful solemnity.
“And,” I pursued, “what happens to liberalism, which is more important to me than the liberal party?”
Jellaby had no answer ready; and, if he had not been my host, I should have asked him whether a liberal whips’ office cared for these things.
Next day the conservative wing of the coalition seceded, after a brief debate, on the strength of a single, brief speech. The prime minister resigned; and the king invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a government. As soon as the conservative party had accepted its new leader, the date of the election was announced. Those of my friends who were nursing constituencies became, of a sudden, very important and excited; I received invitations to speak from people who must have forgotten, if they ever knew, how bad a speaker I am; wagers were offered freely; and all parties predicted confidently that they would return with increased numbers.
I spent much time at the Eclectic Club in these days, wondering what line my paper should follow in the election. No new policy was being put forward; and, if the old policy stood condemned, I did not understand why ministers who were responsible for it were kept in office. Nor, at a season when everybody speculated how long the patience of the unemployed would endure, did I understand why the order of the county was entrusted to a man who had preached the sacred right of rebellion so few years before in Ulster. I wondered, too, what would happen to the floating wreckage of the coalition; and, more bitterly than ever before, I missed old Bertrand’s caustic humour in the hours when he sat with me here in a window of the smoking-room, defaming the passers-by and pretending that we were studying trends of opinion and “the great movement of men”.
He it was who said that politics were desocialized when Mr. Asquith left Downing Street. For six years the political stage had been occupied by statesmen, demagogues, shy scholars, blatant adventurers, advertising-agents, unemployed millionaires, newspaper-proprietors, dukes, international Jews and merchant-princes. Cabinet control had been replaced by the personal domination of one man who miraculously held this heterogeneous company together; considered policy had yielded to a succession of brilliant and incongruous improvisations. On no day could an outsider foretell who next would pull a wire; and, as I looked round the crowded rooms of the Eclectic, I wondered what all these long-faced, out-of-work pressmen and financiers, these confidential secretaries and hangers-on would now do for a living or a career.
Then, as the ministry was completed and the first election-addresses appeared, I recalled Bertrand’s last verdict.
“Without break of thought or mend of heart . . .”
Were we going on from 1914? Had the war, in which most of my generation perished, really achieved nothing?