5
As the door closed, I saw my last chance being shut from me. The house was in darkness when I went into the hall; there was no answer when I called to Barbara, though I could see a light in her room. I came downstairs again to brood of men, women and Oakleighs.
I tried next day to explain, but Barbara refused with cold courtesy to understand what I was trying to explain. I had been patient, too patient; in her turn she was trying to meet me. She was ready to give anything I asked, if she had it to give; and the false sweetness of her complaisance was a deadlier bar than any refusal.
“I feel I was ungracious,” I said.
“Ungracious? You?,” she mocked. “I must go now, or I shall be late for Mr. Wace.”
“Shall I see you after the opening of parliament?”
“But of course! For another eternity! Good-bye.”
The rest of that morning I spent in Fetter Lane, reviewing the achievements of the peace-administration. The only visible traces of the war, when I walked down to Westminster, were the cenotaph in Whitehall and the long army of unemployed that was trying to get past it to the precincts of parliament. While I waited for the crowd to disperse, I heard a familiar voice asking my neighbour what was happening.
“Raney! Here, you’d better let me see you home,” I said. “There’s an appalling mob everywhere.”
“Thanks, I’ve had to acquire a sixth sense,” he answered. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking on and thinking of that week-end in August when the Anti-Intervention people pursued me down to Loring Castle. I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have done better to keep out of the war at all costs.”
“We should have been dishonoured if we’d let Belgium down,” he answered.
“If we’d told the Germans we would stop the moment Belgium was evacuated, the war would have been over in ’14. And we shouldn’t have an unemployed army marching through London to-day,” I added savagely.
We squeezed our way forward till a sudden thinning of the crowd enabled us to escape into the park.
“I think we’re individually the better for the sacrifices we all of us made,” he answered slowly. “For one moment there was a real spirit of fraternity; and, when the reaction has run its course, I hope to see that again. I’m recruiting people now, with quite fair success: reminding them what they did once and asking them to give up everything for one month or six or a year for the service of their country. I’m only asking them to do what I’ve done myself. I tell them, as I tell you, that’s the new idea that we must capture from the war. Fraternity . . .”
“Your new idea is at least as old as Christ and Buddha,” I objected. “Will you succeed where they failed?”
“Had they ever such a chance as we have? We’ve seen the quality of modern war. We know that, if there’s another, it will bury civilization under a sea of lava. Men, women, sheep, cattle, the very blades of grass. Another war is synonymous with the end of the world.”
“But how does one set about being fraternal?,” I asked.
O’Rane walked for some distance without answering; and I thought he had not heard my question. Then he laughed and gave my arm a squeeze:
“By realizing the alternative, as every one’s had every chance of doing in this war. By seeing that, if we trample on people weaker than ourselves, there’ll be people stronger than ourselves to trample on us. When I first saw ‘fraternity’ shining in front of me like Constantine’s Cross, I was a very small, very young, very miserable boy. I went through hell till I learnt how to defend myself. And then . . . many years afterwards . . . I began to think . . . about the poor devils who couldn’t defend themselves. I saw that we must make a world in which man wasn’t always measuring his strength. Yes, I admit Christ had made the discovery before me,” he ended with another laugh.
I forebore to ask whether the second discovery was likely to change the hearts of men more than the first. The rule of force, I pointed out, had to be repudiated by every one at the same time:
“If we’d been fraternal when the Germans were marching on Calais . . .”
“If we’d been fraternal rather earlier, perhaps they’d never have marched there. Some one has to make a beginning. That’s one reason I had to give up this money. Fraternity can’t exist side by side with vast differences of wealth, among nations or individuals. It’s our sense of possession, George, that stands between us and our souls.”
“Unfortunately, ever since man appeared on this planet, it’s been the instinct that keeps soul and body together. Will you be the first to strip for the plunge?”
“I’m ready.”
“If you take that dive, Raney, your wife and children won’t follow. They also are a part of humanity, which I think you sometimes forget.”
“ ‘Who is my mother?’,” he murmured. . . .