6
The peace of Versailles was celebrated in London with thanksgivings by day and fireworks at night.
“I wonder why,” said Bertrand sadly.
“Lady Dainton wants me to bring you to her party at the Excelsior,” I said, though, when he repeated: “I wonder why”, it was not easy to find a convincing answer.
“Are you going?” he asked suspiciously, as though I were revenging myself on him for my dinners in Rutland Gate.
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder why myself; but I’m a bachelor at present and I must dine somewhere.”
“All right,” sighed my uncle; and, on that, we drove to the office and sat until seven o’clock considering the terms and discussing, with Spence-Atkins and any one else who drifted in, what the future policy of our paper was to be.
For several weeks the dearth of news in Fetter Lane and the claims of outside interests had brought our fragile bantling to the verge of death by starvation. Ministers, I thought, revealed a shrewd knowledge of mass-psychology in denying us all news of the conference.
“Kid asks for a thing,” explained Sir Philip Saltash, when I loosed a grumble in his hearing; “you refuse it; kid screams. Go on refusing it; kid goes on screaming. Go on refusing still; kid thinks of something else.”
By July, even the press had almost ceased to scream; parliament had long been silent; and the country was probably thinking of a prize-fight. My own record was representative of the vast majority: I went to my office six days a week, I continued the farce of exploring London to find what people were thinking, I supported a wall at the parties which my wife gave to please my uncle; but such intellectual energy as I possessed had been devoted at one moment to my private affairs in Ireland, at another to O’Rane’s inheritance and again at another to the havoc which poor Eric Lane’s return had wrought in my life with Barbara. At our editorial dinners I was chiefly concerned to see that we had enough readable matter of any kind to fill twenty-four pages. Like the child in Saltash’s parable, I was now indifferent; and, when at last the great secrets which we had screamed to know were flung to us in bulk, we were mildly bored.
“I warned you at Cannes how it would be,” said Bertrand; then he lapsed into unhelpful silence.
“You heard what they were saying in Paris?,” asked Spence-Atkins. “ ‘The seeds of a great and durable war’.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “as our first article will be on the treaty . . .?”
We had reached no decision by the time my uncle and I adjourned for dinner with the Daintons; if seventy men out of London’s seven millions understood what kind of peace had been made, I do not believe that seven men of the seventy cared by now whether it was a good peace or a bad.
“Indifference! Indifference!,” Bertrand sighed. “If you compare this night with the day of the armistice . . . We said ‘never again!’; and we meant it. Now, though half the world’s still in mourning, we’re racing along a road that will put the other half in mourning.”
“I suppose you can never repeat your emotions,” I ventured, as I followed his gaze over the packed restaurant. “The war ended at the armistice; people say ‘All right! It’s still ended.’ ”
“And they’re not interested to see whether the present world is built on quicksand.”
“No one can say we haven’t done our best to warn people,” I said wearily, as the Daintons came into the lounge.
“No one but a fool would say that any one had paid the slightest attention to our warnings,” Bertrand rejoined. “The harm’s done now. That phase is over.”
As we went in to dinner, Lady Dainton told me that the scene was quite like 1914. From a long and intimate acquaintance with her no less than from the ring of pleasure in her voice, I realized that this was her return from exile: for thirty years she had lived and laboured to enter what she considered the “right” houses and to secure the “right” people in her own. The war had thrown her out of work; but she could begin again now. One of her sons had been killed, the other wounded; her daughter had disappointed the family by marrying O’Rane and shocked it by running away from him; for the Daintons, who had worked as hard as any one, it had not been a pleasant or an easy war; and now Lady Dainton was dismissing it as a regrettable incident, least said, soonest mended. She was not wanting in affection for her dead son nor for the son who would be among the first to die if another war came; but she was by now too inelastic to remodel her daily life, still less to attempt improvements on the scene of 1914 when there were no ‘profiteers’, no ‘temporary gentlemen’, no six-shilling income-tax, no bloated wages for insatiable domestic servants.
“You think it will last?,” I enquired.
“I feel sure it will,” she answered. “It’s to all our interests, don’t you know?, to keep the big houses open, to have plenty of employment, money circulating. . . . Of course, if the socialists had their way . . . but I don’t think there’s much socialism in England, George. The war has thrown people together so much. The agitators simply wouldn’t be able to make a living if they weren’t paid from abroad. There’s a little book I must send you on the Jewish peril.” . . .
A new taste for spreading scares was the only change that I could detect in my hostess. Whereas she had occupied herself before the war by sitting on endless committees, she reached a larger public now by sitting at home and inundating her friends with pamphlets on bolshevism, prohibition, the white-slave traffic, secular education and every other danger that threatened, day by day, to sap the security of England. Sir Roger, I fancy, had changed even less. Whereas he had formerly jobbed in and out of wild-cat industrial securities, he now dabbled in the more chaotic of the European exchanges. Sonia danced; Sam had left his firm of contractors in Hartlepool for a vague “agency-business” of his own in London; Tom Dainton’s widow had married again; and I believe this single family could have been reproduced, in every detail of history and circumstance, in almost every town and county throughout Great Britain and Ireland.
“George not being pessimistic, is he?,” Sir Roger enquired genially, as we settled into our places.
“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party, realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.”
The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry.
“You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s ended, he says it must start again. Cheerful customer, George.”
I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of “Wilson, le bienvenu”, he had discovered in the president an insidious agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.
I had not, for several months, mentioned the inflammatory fourteen points: had I done so, Dainton might have retorted that President Wilson had himself departed from them by throwing his lot in with M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd-George. I did not discuss the equity of the peace terms. I discussed very little with Dainton; but I tried, as I had been trying all day, to envisage the new world which circumstances and the efforts of the peace conference were labouring to bear. Russia was in the grip of revolution, civil war and famine; Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy might follow at any moment; the map of Europe was dotted with strangely named, new, self-governing republics, alike only in their complete ignorance of self-government; as we were soon to see, there was no European police to restrain the Italian who might be inspired to seize Fiume or the Rumanian who was tempted to march on Buda Pesht; the League of Nations had been invested with no power; and the world outside Europe, from India to Egypt and from Ireland to the Philippines, had been taught the magic word “self-determination” and had realized its possibilities more vividly than those who coined it.
In an unguarded moment I did ask Dainton whether he imagined that the Germans could ever pay the indemnity which he had so sternly demanded. He believed it confidently. How, I asked him; but Dainton told me that he was not in the mood to split hairs: if they could pay it, they should (and the allies would remain in occupation till the last penny had been handed over); if the Hun ruined himself in the attempt, as I seemed to think likely, it would be something to feel that he would never again menace the world.
“And if he ruins us too?,” I asked. “Economically, the whole world is knitted together. If the Russian revolution spreads to Germany?”
“It won’t spread here,” Dainton answered in happy forgetfulness of earlier speeches against the corrupting influence of those Russian and German agents who controlled British trades unions. “Our people are too sensible. You’re very gloomy, George! This won’t do at all. Drink up that cocktail and let’s begin our dinner.”
As I looked round on the scene of peace, now officially proclaimed, I reflected that five years, all but a few days, had passed since I strolled on to the valley-terrace at Chepstow, to smoke a cigarette between dances; it seemed less than five weeks since Colonel Farwell walked diffidently out of the darkness to say that, while war had not yet been declared, it was prudent for all officers to be in touch with their depots. They had gone, those first, in a spirit of routine enlivened by adventure; they were followed by men who went in a spirit of bewilderment clarified by sacrifice. The bewilderment passed; and the sacrifice turned to resignation. Soon the resignation became fatalism: every one went because every one else was going; none expected to come back, and, of those who went first, few were cheated of their expectation. Now we were celebrating the end of a war that dwarfed the campaigns of Napoleon to so many intermittent brawls.
I must have spoken the name, for my uncle caught at it eagerly:
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” he murmured. “Nineteen-fourteen, nineteen-nineteen. Napoleon ended the middle ages and changed the map. Have we begun anything, ended anything, changed anything? We spilt a paint-box over the atlas; but will the colours stick? Germany and Russia cancel out; the rest of us have to play for pennies instead of shillings; but have we ended war, have we ended the nineteenth century, have we done anything but lose a few pawns in the first moves?”
“We’d won everything at the armistice!,” I exclaimed. “The world was ready and willing to be disarmed, ready and willing to accept arbitration in place of war . . .”
“What election-cry has a chance against ‘revenge’?,” Bertrand demanded, with a glance of contempt towards the end of the table, when Dainton was arguing heatedly with the wine-waiter. “ ‘The red account is cast’; and Germany must pay. You and I know that we shall be the first to suffer. You and I know that these dolts are laying the foundations of the next war. You and I know that we have some misty world-vision and that we must work for a united states of Europe and a brotherhood of man. People won’t listen to us . . . yet. I shall be dead before you’ve cleared the first unbelievers out of the temple. Si monumentum requiris . . . George, George, this is a blacker day in the world’s history than the fourth of August.”
I have forgotten almost everything about that dinner except the sense of depression that grew deeper with every advance to gaiety on the part of my neighbours. We were spared speeches; but at the end our host called us to our feet for some toast which I did not hear. As I sat down, a kite’s-tail of coloured paper floated to us from the next table. A giant bunch of air-balloons was divided among eager hands. Crackers exploded; and a blare of tin trumpets punctuated the cheeping of wooden whistles. Perhaps I had spent too many hours that day in discussion that led nowhere: I suddenly felt that I was not in the mood for such artless merry-making.
“Si monumentum requiris . . .” Bertrand repeated.
At the table from which that tail of coloured paper had been thrown, I observed my old ally, Sir Philip Saltash, entertaining a party of friends. Dainton, in acknowledging a bow, informed us that Saltash had “done as much as any one to win the war”; and, in examining Saltash’s guests, I felt that the same tribute could be paid to each. Wilmot Dean, representing a government of new men and new methods, was resting a flushed face on the bare shoulder of a beautiful and, I should imagine, wholly brainless mannequin. Lord Lingfield, whose inclusion in the cabinet shewed that ministers were not indifferent to rank and lineage, was deep in conversation with a Balkan millionaire who had been naturalized in time to become private secretary to the needy holder of a sinecure. And any one with attention to spare had it unpityingly claimed by Mr. ‘Blob’ Wister, who had won the war by purchasing papers for the government.
I did not know the rest. I did not greatly want to know them. If I had been asked who won the war, I should have named David O’Rane rather than Wilmot Dean, Lord Loring rather than Lord Lingfield. Saltash’s guests may have given body and soul to victory; but their material position was founded on the war. After fine winnowing, we had arrived—in these ‘new men’—at the governing class of the immediate future: borrowing the name from ‘Blob’ Wister, they called themselves “realists”, and the coalitions of 1915 and 1916 had certainly intrigued the “sentimentalist” in politics to his extinction. Peace was too welcome for me to complain if it had been ushered in by ministers with more ambition than scruple. An obsolescent administration may have needed business brains to fit it for war; a democratic country cannot ignore its press-man and publicity-agent; and the rich hangers-on of a government only prove that bricks cannot be made without straw. Of the men who had won the war I only felt what Bertrand expressed bluntly:
“They look as if they’d made a damned good thing out of it.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” I replied. “Nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-nineteen. We have changed our rulers.”
“It’s about all we have changed,” Bertrand rejoined.
Then we stood up as a waiter begged leave to push our table away from the dancing-floor. Sir Roger, unexpectedly on his feet, exhibited symptoms of impending oratory, which was checked, at the instigation of Wilmot Dean, by a well-directed crust of bread from the hand of the mannequin. The band, for the first time in several years, played the national anthems of all the allies. Our host ordered more champagne and then called for his bill. Sonia led off the dancing with Lord Lingfield; and I invented an excuse to go home to bed.
The streets round the hotel were too crowded for driving. I told my chauffeur to get home as best he could and walked with Bertrand into the quiet backwaters north of Piccadilly. At the door of Loring House we met my cousin Violet, who insisted on our going the rest of the way in her car.
“I’ve missed all the celebrations,” she told us. “I’ve been unveiling the memorial to Jim at Chepstow.”
“You’ve not missed very much,” I answered. “Are you satisfied with the memorial?”
“Yes. It’s only a medallion in the chapel; and you can only see it from the corner where I sit. I have . . . rather a horror of the war-memorials that are being put up everywhere.”
“They’re the easiest means of forgetting the dead with a good conscience,” Bertrand suggested.
“But not the only means,” I said, as a dishevelled vagrant steadied himself against the bonnet of the car and invited us to a confession of political faith.
Its form consisted of question and answer: “What’s the matter with Lloyd-George? ’E’s orl right! And what’s the matter with Winston? ’E’s orl right. What’s the matter with Beatty?” . . .
“That fellow is surprisingly like our friend Dainton,” said my uncle.