5
“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her a fortnight after my return to England.
Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others; Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity, vers libre, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”, explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was playing counsellor and friend of all parties.
“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did, it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”
“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”
From Barbara’s thoughtful look I fancied she was wondering whether I wanted a divorce in order to marry some one else.
“The trouble is,” she continued, “you never know who is the right man till you’ve married him. I always thought you had more perfect understanding than any man I knew . . . Funny!,” she added, as I made no answer.
No answer seemed possible. There was now no change in our rare private passages, though I thought the reference to my want of understanding was dragged in to close the subject of divorce. There was no change in the atmosphere of this party. Nearly seven years had passed since Violet and I last dined together at Loring House. The noble line of portraits had been reinforced by a black-and-white sketch of Jim in uniform; Sandy was old enough for his mother to consult me about schools; but we were arguing now in the very mood and terms that we had used in 1914.
“I wish people wouldn’t talk so much about ‘the next war’,” Violet muttered with a frown in the direction of Philip Hornbeck. “I’ve lost my husband; I’m not going to lose my son if I can help it.”
The big, softly-lighted room reminded me of my interminable discussions with Jim and of his own admission on the outbreak of war that the old governing classes were played out. I was reminded, too, of the question that had haunted me in the first weeks of the armistice: if the order that was represented at this table could not keep peace or make peace, would it have to give way?
“We talk about the next war,” I said, “because the combined wisdom of the world has done nothing in the last three years to prevent it.”
“I suppose the prime minister is the only man . . .?” she hazarded.
“Every prime minister is indispensable,” I answered, “till he finds himself on an opposition bench, watching his successor taking command. Five minutes after George goes, every one will ask why he didn’t go before. Every one will discover then the vice of all coalitions: which is that there’s no one to oppose them. You don’t expect Curzon to admit that Lloyd-George’s foreign policy is dangerous?”
“Can nobody do anything from outside?”
“The press does its best, but this government is stronger than the press. Otherwise, Woburn and his combine would have had George out in the street a year ago. Your best hope is an intrigue from inside. Ll-G. was at least equally responsible for the shortage of high explosives in ’15; yet he put the blame on the others and broke the Asquith government. It may be done again.”
My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one of his now periodical lapses into slumber.
“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G. would not now be prime minister,” he answered.
No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.
“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony, without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies and gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather vieux jeu: we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.
The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street. Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations, when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.
I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.
“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,” said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between the nisi and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”
“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”
We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home, I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.
“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she answered.
“And if he repudiates her repudiation?”
“She’ll repudiate him.”
“Um. I rather hoped, when I saw them together . . .”
“Husbands and wives who get on well in public always arouse my worst suspicions,” said Barbara. “No, there’s no change.”
I was still pondering our hard-worked phrase when we re-entered our “gilded cage”; and Barbara had slipped away to bed before I could ask her whether a man erred more grievously by doing everything that his wife demanded or nothing.