Mrs. Ascher looked at Gorman while he spoke. Her face expressed a quiet dignity.
“That is not the difficulty,” she said. “What people say or think of us or do to us does not matter. We live our own lives. We can always live them, apart from, above the bitter voices of the crowd.”
“All the same,” said Gorman, “it will be unpleasant. It will be a great deal worse than merely unpleasant. If I were Ascher I should get on the safe side at once. I should give a thumping big subscription—£50,000 or something that will attract attention—to some popular fund. I should offer to present the War Office with half a dozen aeroplanes to be called ‘The Ascher Flying Fleet’; or a first-rate cannon of the largest size. A good deal can be done to shut people’s mouths in that sort of way.”
“You do not understand,” said Mrs. Ascher.
She turned to me, evidently hoping that I would explain Ascher’s real difficulty to Gorman. I hesitated for a moment. It was plain to me that though Gorman did not appreciate the reality of the spiritual crisis, he did understand something which had escaped me and, so far as I knew, had escaped Ascher also. I had a vivid recollection of the unenviable position of men suspected of lukewarm patriotism during the Boer War. In the struggle we were then entering upon popular passion would be far more highly excited. The position of the Aschers in England might become impossible.
Gorman with his highly developed faculty for gauging the force and direction of popular opinion understood at once and thoroughly the difficulties that lay before Ascher. What he did not understand was the peculiar difficulty which Ascher felt. I responded to Mrs. Ascher’s glance of appeal and tried to explain things to Gorman.
“Ascher,” I said, “is pulled two ways. His country is pulling him. That’s the call of patriotism. You ought to understand that, Gorman. You’re a tremendous patriot yourself. But if he goes back to his country now he absolutely ruins his business. That means a lot more than merely losing his money. It means more even than losing other people’s money, the money of the men who trusted him. It means that he must be false to his commercial honour. You see that, don’t you, Gorman? And there doesn’t seem any way out of the dilemma. He has got to go back on his patriotism or on his honour. There is no other course.”
I looked at Mrs. Ascher for approval. I had stated her husband’s dilemma clearly, I believed fairly. Gorman could hardly fail to understand. I thought Mrs. Ascher would have been pleased with me. To my amazement she acknowledged my efforts with a burst of indignation.
“Oh,” she cried, “you do not understand, either of you. You do not even begin to understand. I suppose you cannot, because you are men and not women. You men! All of you, my husband, too, though he is far above the rest of you—but even he! You concern yourselves about things which are nothing. You argue about phantoms and discuss them as if they were realities. And all the time you miss the things which are. You think”—she spoke directly to Gorman and her voice expressed the utmost scorn—“you think about reputation, the way men babble about each other and will babble about us. Why should we care? Even if we were afraid of what men say there are places in the world to which the voices of Europe cannot reach. There are islands in the sea where the sun shines and palm trees grow, to which the talk of men who dwell in cities never comes.”
I recollected the desire which Mrs. Ascher had once expressed to me of getting “far, far away from everywhere.” She evidently hoped to be able to try that experiment.