By the first week in September Peter had solved the Questioning; reduced it to a question. And the question, briefly, was this: “To join up meant the almost certain sacrifice of Nirvana. Not to join up, meant the definite loss of self-respect. Which should he do?” He had no fear of the soldiering part: on the contrary—being entirely and blessedly ignorant of warfare’s actualities—it seemed to him the obvious, glorious and easy solution of his problem. To abandon his business-responsibilities, on the other hand, implied—quite apart from the pang of giving up the thing he most loved—a lack of moral courage, a yielding to popular clamour.
Curiously enough, it was not Patricia but Hubert Rawlings who clinched Peter’s decision.
§ 5
It was a month and three days since the outbreak of war. Paris—thought Peter, as he sat alone in the back office at Lime Street—was practically safe. Still, it might easily be six months before the Cossacks got to Berlin. Meanwhile. . . .
The telephone-bell jangled; he took up the receiver, heard his brother-in-law’s voice.
“Peter Jameson speaking. . . . That you, Hubert? . . . Right, I’ll be in if you come along at once.”
Hubert Rawlings, Publicity Agent, had not been worried with any whispers of the “English-speaking spirit.” The contemptible cry of “business as usual” found him a ready convert. Government officials, eager to do anything except fight, had decided on a campaign of advertising, as wasteful to the country’s purse as it was degrading to its patriotism; and in Hubert Rawlings they discovered an invaluable henchman. Posters, leaflets, newspaper-stereos—one more revolting to decent folk than the other—spawned themselves in his lower-middle-class mind, spewed themselves over London and the provinces. Officially, he made no profits on these transactions, actually. . . . And in addition, there was always the advantage of being “in with the Government.” One might get . . . Heaven knows what one mightn’t get. . . . Also, one had “opportunities.”
Such an “opportunity” brought Hubert Rawlings to Peter’s office.
He came in, silk-hatted, morning-coated, flower in buttonhole, perfectly at ease. Already his voice had assumed a faint touch of the “Whitehall manner.”
“How do you do, Peter?” he said. “I hope you didn’t wait for me.”