When I began to listen to the speech again Gorman had reached his peroration.
The arts of war, he said, were the natural fruits of the human intellect in a society organised on an aristocratic basis. The development of the arts of peace and pleasure followed the birth of democracy. Tyrants and robber barons in old days loved to fight and lived to kill. The common, kindly men and women of our time, the now at length sovereign people, lived to love and desire peace above all things.
“The spirit of democracy,” said Gorman, “is moving through the world. Its coming is like the coming of the spring, gentle, kindly, gradual. We see it not, but in the fields and hedgerows of the world, past which it moves, we see the green buds bursting into leaf, the myriad-tinted flowers opening their petals to the sunlight. We see the lives of humble men made glad, and our hearts are established with strong faith; faith in the spirit whose beneficence we recognise, the spirit which at last is guiding the whole wide world into the way of peace.”
I gathered from these concluding remarks that all danger of war had passed from the horizon of humanity since the Liberal Government muzzled the House of Lords.
Gorman did not mention this great feat in plain words. He suggested it in such a way that the Cabinet Ministers in front of him understood what he meant, while Lady Kingscourt and her friends thought he was referring to a revolution in China or Portugal or the establishment of some kind of representative government in Thibet. Thus every one was pleased and Gorman climbed down from the platform amid a burst of applause.
Lady Kingscourt clapped her pretty hands as loudly as any one. Her husband is a territorial magnate. Her brothers are soldiers. But she is prepared to welcome democracy and universal peace as warmly as any of us. Perhaps what attracted her in Gorman’s programme was the prospect of a great increase in the pleasures of life.
We drank tea, ate sandwiches, cheered our hearts with champagne cup, chattered loudly, and, the men of the party, stretched our legs for half an hour. Then we settled down again to gape at Tim’s moving figures. The new mirrors were well worth the money I spent on them. The thing worked better, far better, than when I saw it in the barn. I think the audience was greatly pleased. Everybody said so to me when the time came for escape from the hall.
Mrs. Ascher and I drove back to Hampstead together. I told her how Ascher had left the hall and that it might be late before he got home. She sat silent beside me and I thought that she was wondering what had happened to her husband. Just before we reached the house she spoke, and I discovered that she had all the time been thinking of something else, not Ascher’s absence.
“I was wrong,” she said, “in condemning the cinematograph and this new invention. It is—at present it is vile beyond words, vile as I thought it; but I see now that there are possibilities.”
“May I tell Tim that?” I said. “It would cheer him greatly. The poor boy has never really got over what you said to him in New York, about blasphemy, you know.”