5
I reached Fetter Lane in a chastened mood; and for the rest of the morning we talked of the year that had passed since Armistice Day.
There was to be no United States of Europe, still less a United States of the World. The peace-treaty, to the view of us all, indicated the swiftest and surest way to another war; and there was no influence, outside parliament or within, to modify it. Trade depression was attracting attention to unemployment and taxation; but, of a hundred men who said “We must cut down expenditure,” ninety-nine added “You can’t touch pensions, of course; or the army and navy; or the air force.” . . . And, after nine months, the one political organ that looked beyond the cheap scores and cheaper promises of the 1918 election was read by a growing literary public for the sake of its musical notes and dramatic criticism.
“Are we addressing the right people?,” asked Jefferson Wright.
“Any person who’ll listen is the right person for me,” said Bertrand sententiously.
“Then why not speak to labour?”
“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”
“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.
“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s heads?”
The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of “inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we must do now.
“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily discouraged than I was in 1909.”
Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in England.
“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one else.”
“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to follow your advice.”
As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.
“Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me.
And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil. When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect.
“I do my modest share,” I said.
“And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have more money to . . . waste on yourself.”
I cannot recall that the tone or choice of language was more vigorous than I had long been accustomed to hearing from O’Rane. Certainly I should have taken up the challenge without concern, if Sonia had not rushed superfluously to my assistance. Her indignation, however, in demanding why personal expenditure should be called waste, warned me against taking sides in a family quarrel.
“David’s impossible about money!,” she cried. “So long as I have one crust of bread, one dress that would disgrace a scarecrow . . .”
“If this is how the poor live, let’s join them!,” interposed Barbara pacifically.
In spite of herself, Sonia laughed as she saw us admiring her frock. The house was unpretentious, but it was enviably comfortable. I never wish to be given better food or wine. And, on a lower plane of morality, whatever she lacked from her husband was made up by the munificence of her friends.
“It’s so difficult, when every one thinks you’re rich . . .” she began.
“But it isn’t our money,” O’Rane objected.
Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged myself beside Sonia.
“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”
“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he sighed. “Is that all the advice you can give me, George?”
“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money with a pole.”
“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that, though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France again?”
By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life of wasted opportunities.
“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.
It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be passed.
The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession. Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened, for drawing us together.
As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants, nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending. I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.
“Everything all right?,” I asked as carelessly as I could.
“Yes, sir. Lady Barbara is in her room. I believe her ladyship is with her.”
When I went upstairs, Barbara was in bed. The blinds were down, and a closing door hinted that my mother-in-law was for some reason hurrying away to avoid me. As I crossed the room, Barbara told me to stop; and, as I tried to ask how she was, I was waved into silence. Then she covered her eyes and turned away:
“You’ve not been told? It’ll be a shock, but I wanted to tell you myself. I’m sorry, George . . . I . . . I did my best. You mustn’t be too dreadfully disappointed. Dead . . . He was born dead. If only it could have been the other way round!”
Mercifully, as though she had been listening at the door, Lady Crawleigh came back to say that my father-in-law wished to see me. Together we drafted the announcement for the press; and I asked whether it would be prudent for me to go upstairs again. He said “yes” and “no” alternately, concluding on a “yes” in the frantic hope of getting rid of me. As I tapped on Barbara’s door, I heard Lady Crawleigh scuttling through another; and it was Barbara, undaunted and indomitable, who hid her own agony under a gentle concern for me.
“I suppose people will want to sympathize,” she began. “May I have all my letters sent to you, George? Open them, answer them. I shall have to be here for some weeks, I’m afraid, but I’ll make up for deserting you when I come back to London. I’ll give some lovely parties for you. We shall be so busy we shan’t have time to think. I want to keep busy.” . . .
And, on that word, her dead child, her suffering and her disappointment were banished from Barbara’s life. Three years have passed since that April evening of 1920 when we made our compact of silence; and, with a single exception, we observed it with equal scruple on both sides.