4
As we slid noiselessly into the least passionate general election of my experience, I wondered whether we were going on from anything so good even as 1914. If the German peril was at an end, no man could say what new trouble might come out of the east, when demoralized Russia and Austria joined hands with resentful Turkey and Prussia. The mark had collapsed; and, unless it could be rehabilitated, the trade of central Europe must come to a standstill.
After that, it was a toss-up whether famine or revolution came first. Against this tidal wave of hunger, disease and the reckless savagery of hopeless millions, the only powers with strength and means to build a rampart were France, America and Great Britain.
If Lucien de Grammont and Clifford van Oss fairly represented the first two, the simple faith of the French—embodied in M. Clemenceau—was being betrayed by every one else at the very moment when M. Clemenceau was betraying the simple faith of President Wilson. Recalling that the world was to have been made safe for democracy, I wondered if another war must be fought before democracy was made safe for the world. According to one or other of us, it was the greed and bad faith of Great Britain, America and France which was wholly and solely responsible for our present perils.
In these days of misgiving the most persistent optimist of my acquaintance was my father-in-law. To him—in common with most of my conservative friends—public life had been a bad dream from the moment when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his sansculottes usurped power. Crawleigh was genuinely convinced that all electors, at all times and in all places, were conservative born and bred; and, to him, a liberal victory could only come by low cunning. Now that the spell had been broken, he looked forward to “going on from 1906”; and, in listening to him, I understood, as Saltash had never made me understand, the all-conservative movement in the late coalition, the Carlton Club meeting and the loathing of the party for those who still tried to keep it in bondage to its old associates. So a Bourbon might have felt towards a legitimist who took office under Napoleon.
Sir Roger Dainton, when I dined with him on the night after the polling, was even more outspoken. Some one had taught him the word “impeachment”; and he was for impeaching the fallen members of the old cabinet as light-heartedly as his wife, in other days, had consigned “agitators” to the nearest firing-party.
“You think there are further depths they can still reach?,” I asked. The brush of a professional moralist would be needed to paint the difference between this election and the last, between the power of a prime minister in being and that of the member for Carnarvon Boroughs. “Come and see the results.”
By its rules the Eclectic Club is constituted a “place of social intercourse for officers and gentlemen, irrespective of politics”. Any demonstration, other than occasional groans when a labour victory was announced, would have been ill-received; but I was struck chiefly by the absence of all desire to demonstrate except when objects of personal venom appeared at the bottom of the poll. Dainton thumped my back with furtive violence when two rich and rather questionable private secretaries, from his own party, were at last “put out of harm’s way”, as he expressed it; and Jellaby became almost hysterical as one coalition-liberal after another was edged into the cold; but it was left to my father-in-law to express the rapture of his associates in a series of satisfied grunts. Without looking at the board, I could recognize a conservative gain by Crawleigh’s long “A-a-ah!”
“The entry of the first French troops into their recovered provinces,” I murmured to Jellaby.
“And yet . . . they don’t seem as much pleased about it as I should have expected.”
“Perhaps these fellows feel that it’s the same board, the same problem, and that it becomes no easier by a shuffle of the pieces. Perhaps they’re wondering what more they can do than the coalition to prevent a world-revolution or a new world-war.”
Jellaby looked contemptuously at the lengthening tale of ministerial successes:
“Perhaps they realize that these results don’t represent the true strength of parties.”
“You mean it’s a moral victory for you?,” I asked. “I said the same thing to you when I was beaten at Cranborne in 1910. With respect I think the feeling of the country is admirably represented in this club to-night: nobody cares.”
With that I left him. Seven men, I think, said good-night to me as I crossed the hall; six of them added: “Well, thank God that’s over.”
There was a further spasm of excitement as the new parliament met; and for me, though I was preoccupied with Barbara’s return, a stab of regret when the liberal party had to surrender its historic claim to lead the opposition. Then one of the shortest sessions on record opened and closed; the foreign secretary set out for Lausanne to find an escape from the threatened war in the near east; and the country gave its undivided attention to the most popular murder-trial of the year.
Save for a moment after Bertrand’s memorial service, I had not been alone with Barbara since our scene in the car. I fancied that she was hardly less embarrassed than I was, though she talked easily enough of her plans for being painted by Edmund Wace and of my work on Bertrand’s papers. We both felt that nothing could be quite the same after that explosion; but I at least had no idea what she wanted.
“There was a touch of brutality about your uncle,” she said after dinner the first night, in criticism of my sketch. “I’m not sure that you bring it out. Any one who disagreed with him was treated with such obvious contempt.”
“Unless he happened to like the person,” I said. “I can’t imagine a single point on which he agreed with you or Violet or Amy, but he was devoted to you all. On the other hand, I’ve heard him trouncing poor Sonia for holding exactly the same views, simply because he thought her second-rate.”
“He thought all women second-rate. So do you, George,” she rejoined without malice.
So sweeping a misstatement I could not allow to pass unchallenged.
“I’ll leave you out for fear of embarrassing you . . .,” I began.
Barbara laughed sadly and turned, with a shrug, to the fire:
“No, my dear, you’re leaving me out because you despise me. Not cruelly, but just in the Oakleigh way: as a tolerant Turk would despise me. In your eyes, we’ve never grown up; and sometimes you shew us the tenderness you’d shew to a child. You think we’re creatures who’ve failed to be men; you don’t imagine that we’ve never tried to be men. . . . You smile benignly on our little foibles and follies and frailties just as I smile at a kitten chasing its own tail. ‘Kittens will be kittens,’ I say; ‘women will be women,’ you murmur to yourself.”
“The trouble is that you speak the same language . . .”
“But we don’t think the same thoughts. D’you remember my telling you I’d forgotten certain things you’d said?”
As her eyes turned slowly to meet mine, I thought I could see a gentle new light of friendship.
“I wished at the time you’d said you had forgiven them,” I answered.
“There was nothing to forgive. You were right, from your point of view. May I speak of it?”
“If it will help us.”
Barbara turned once more to the fire and sat with her cheek resting against her hand:
“It’s just two years since Eric died. You think I’m not in love with him and never was. Well, I’m not now, but I was once; and the whole of my heart went into it, George. Do men ever realize that women can be in love with them and yet know all the time that it’s a mistake? When he left me, Eric thought I’d been taking all his love for my own selfish, greedy enjoyment. I hadn’t. I took it because I couldn’t help myself; but I always knew it would be a mistake for us to marry. We were too much alike, too highly-strung. If you can imagine two great musicians marrying . . . If only I’d been strong enough to refuse his love! I couldn’t help myself . . . It was wrong of me, by any standard, to do what I did at Croxton. If I’d told you at the time . . .”
“I should have thought nothing of it, I hope.”
Barbara laughed mirthlessly and crossed to my chair, where she seated herself on the arm.
“That’s what I feared,” she whispered. “I knew I was wrong, I knew it would have been hell for us all if Eric had agreed, I’d had the worst rebuff that can come to a woman, I was still in love with him. All that, you’d have said, was nothing. A perfect Oakleighism! . . . Yet I wish now I had told you. Eric’s letter must have been a cruel shock.”
Her hand stole timidly to mine; and I raised it to my lips:
“That’s all over now; but, Babs, I did not spend twelve days wondering whether you would run away with any one else. What hurt was that you’d pretended to love me when you didn’t.”
“And that’s what you’ve been urging me to do for the last two years.”
Silence fell between us. Then I said:
“I’ve been hoping that you could love me without pretending. I forgot those twelve days the moment I set eyes on you.”
“Yes. You were as much in love with me as I was with Eric. But love didn’t give you much understanding, dear. For two years you’ve been waiting for me to confess that I did something very wrong: you’d then be able to commit another Oakleighism by forgiving me. You’ve been waiting for me to say I’ve outgrown my love for Eric, so that you could tell me—Oakleigh-fashion—that you’d always known time would cure all things. Well, I was wrong; and I have outgrown my love. Does it help you to know that? The difficulty is, George, that I don’t want to be forgiven. I’m not a child, I’m not an unsuccessful attempt to be a man; I’m a woman.”
“And being a woman . . .”
Barbara laid her hand over my lips:
“Shall I say it for you? ‘Being a woman, you don’t know what you do want.’ It’s quite true, even though all the Oakleighs in history have said it. I know you so much better than you know me.”
“And better than you know yourself?”
“I know myself better than I can explain myself. Women feel so much more and express so much less than men. Words are clumsy. When a man frames a sentence, he imagines he is shewing a thought to the world; a woman feels that the thought is being imprisoned, perhaps mutilated.” . . .
“Do you know why you married me?,” I asked.
Before she could answer, Barbara stared long at the fire.
“Yes. But I’ve never put it in words. I couldn’t now. I wasn’t in love with you, but you gave me something that I needed. . . . Women marry sometimes because they’re frightened of themselves. Sonia did. And I remember how my beloved aunts gloated over Jack Waring, as the one man who could keep me in order. Strange to say, I didn’t want to be kept in order; and I wasn’t frightened of myself. I’m only frightened of death and of waste: a wasted life, with all the love and the beauty left out of it. You gave me the feeling that you had something I needed to keep my life from being wasted.”
“And do you feel that no longer?”
“Have I needed you these last two years? I’ve ceased to look for happiness.”
“And you’re not yet thirty!,” I groaned.
Barbara glanced at her watch and stood up:
“It’s time for me to go to bed. I’m afraid I’ve talked a great deal about myself. It was thinking about Bertrand that started it. The world is divided into men, women and Oakleighs.”
“I believe you’ll find, as you go on, that every husband begins as a man and ends as an Oakleigh. That is one of the major tragedies of life.”
For the first time in eighteen months, Barbara bent to kiss my cheek.
“To marry an Oakleigh and find him a man would be the greatest romance life could offer,” she laughed.
“Then I’m afraid you must look elsewhere for your romance,” I sighed. “You can only give out what’s in you. I’m sorry our marriage has been a failure. I’ve honestly done my best.” . . .
Turning at the door, Barbara came slowly back and kissed me again:
“I know you have. And I’ll do mine. I told you the day poor old Bertrand died that I’d be your wife, I’d bear you children if I could . . .”
In spite of her kisses, in spite of the strange new light in her eyes, I had to be told in words that our two years’ tragedy was over:
“My dear one, you said we should be dishonoured if we put anything in the place of love . . .”
I waited to hear that terrible verdict reversed. Barbara looked at me in amazement and then gave a single tearless sob. She regained her composure immediately and walked again to the door.
“You have a good memory, George,” she threw back. “Have you saved that up for two years? Do you want me to say that I’ve suddenly found you irresistible? The Oakleighs are very true to their own type.”