“Well, mind you tell me when it comes off,” said Lionel.
“Still no news of the war, Danford?” broke in Lord Mowbray, the amateur mimic.
“How can there be when we receive no letters. Perhaps the War Office has important wires from the seat of war, although it has not communicated them to the public. But it is strange how little the war has affected Society; the heavy blows that have fallen on nearly everyone in your circles have arrived very much softened by distance; and it seems really as if the whole tragedy were being acted in some other planet. Besides which, has not college and home life taught well-bred people to bear with fortitude all mishaps and sorrow? Civilisation is a thick ice which covers the current rushing beneath it; you must wait for a crack on the surface, to be able to notice which way runs the stream.”
“I suppose you would consider the London storm a crack on the surface, would you?” ironically inquired Sinclair, lighting a cigarette.
“By all means, Mr Sinclair, and those who have watched carefully through the crevice must have seen that, for a long time, we have been going the contrary way of the tide.”
“I do not know how it is to end—no regiments have been ordered out since our catastrophe.” This was Lord Mowbray again, who was not fond of ethics and preferred coming back to facts.
“The passing of regiments through the town would turn out a failure in our present condition,” retorted Danford. “No windows would be thrown open, no hearty cheers would rejoice the hearts of departing warriors; that excitement is over for ever—it was even on the wane before we stood as we are now. I often wonder why Society did not raise a regiment of Duchesses and Peeresses? That would have fetched the masses, and perhaps might have provoked a general surrendering of the enemy to an Amazon battalion; for certainly the novelty of the enterprise, and the incontestable beauty of the Peeresses’ physique, would do a great deal towards enlivening the old rotten game of warfare. But they missed the opportunity of putting new wine into old bottles, and now it is too late. After all, patriotism is only a question of coloured bunting: tear down the flags, and nationality will die a natural death.”
“What a sans patrie you are, Mr Danford,” contemptuously said Lord Mowbray, whose conception of Fatherland reduced itself to a season in London, a summer in Switzerland, and a winter on the Riviera.
“Danford is an unconscious prophet,” remarked Lionel, “for it is clear to whoever observes minutely the evolution of nationalities that we are all unwittingly working at the creation of a vast humanity. The more man will know of man—and it is impossible he should do otherwise, when you consider the map of the world and view the huge cobweb of railways which unite countries to one another—the more, I repeat, man will know of man, the fainter will become frontiers which have for so long separated human beings and turned them into enemies. The first time that men of different nationalities met and shook hands in a universal Exhibition, that day a muffled knell was heard in the far distance announcing the slow agony of nationalities. But it is again a question of the thick ice over the current. Progress in every branch is the name for which we labour and suffer; but conquest is the real aim of all our strenuous efforts. We have too long minimised the power of the current, and one day, whether we like it or not, we shall have to go where it leads us.”
“You are quite didactic, my dear Lionel,” said Lord Mowbray, who since the storm looked on his host with suspicion, and on all social guides in general, and Danford in particular, with contempt. He had absolutely declined to avail himself of the services of Music Hall artists, relying on his own powers of observation to guide him through life. He had even gone so far as to seek an engagement as a guide himself; but Society, however it may pat on the back every amateur or exponent of mediocrity, has the wisdom, in emergencies, to draw the line and to appeal to the professionals who, they well know, do not fail in technique. Lord Mowbray was therefore unemployed and generally uninformed. Left to his own conceit and ignorance, he constantly made the most terrible mistakes in drawing-rooms, and ignored the public guides stationed at different corners of crowded thoroughfares, who had taken the place of old-fashioned constables; to these guides Mowbray would never apply, passing them with haughty disdain. Each day he committed every conceivable faux pas; bowing to his friends’ butlers, passing by ignominiously his smart friends; in fact; he was the laughing-stock of Society, although he was blatantly happy and thoroughly unconscious of his folly.