“No,” she said slowly. “No.... I’ve only just come, Petah.”
“Very well,” said Peter. “I don’t mind. If you like this sort of thing——”
He said no more, sulking visibly.
Joan resolved to dance at the first opportunity, and to dance in a bold and reckless way—so as thoroughly to exasperate Peter. She looked about the room through the smoke-laden atmosphere in the hope of seeing Huntley....
She and Peter sat side by side, feeling very old and experienced and worldly and up-to-date. But indeed they were still only two children who ought to have been packed off to bed hours before.
§ 7
The disorder in the world of women, the dissolution of manners and restraints, was but the more intimate aspect of a universal drift towards lawlessness. The world of labour was seething also with the same spirit of almost aimless insurrection. In a world of quickened apprehensions and increasing stimulus women were losing faith in the rules of conduct that had sufficed in a less exacting age. Far profounder and more dangerous to the established order were the scepticisms of the workers. The pretensions of the old social system that trade unionism had scarcely challenged were now being subjected throughout all western Europe to a pitiless scrutiny by a new and more educated type of employé.
The old British trade unionism had never sought much more than increased wages and a slightly higher standard of life; its acceptance of established institutions had been artlessly complete; it had never challenged the authority nor the profits of the proprietor. It had never proposed more than a more reasonable treaty with the masters, a fairer sharing of the good gifts of industry. But infatuated by the evil teachings of an extreme individualism, a system of thought which was indeed never more than a system of base excuses dressed up as a philosophy, the directing and possessing classes had failed altogether to agree with their possible labour adversary quickly while they were yet in the way with him. They had lacked the intelligence to create a sympathetic industrial mentality, and the conscience to establish a standard of justice. They left things alone until the grit of a formless discontent had got into every cog of the industrial machinery. Too late, the employers were now conceding the modest demands that labour had made in the ’eighties and ’nineties, they were trying to accept the offers of dead men; they found themselves face to face with an entirely less accommodating generation. This new labour movement was talking no longer of shorter hours and higher pay but of the social revolution. It did not demand better treatment from the capitalist; it called him a profiteer and asked him to vanish from the body politic. It organized strikes now not to alter the details of its working conditions as its predecessor had done, but in order to end the system by making it impossible. In Great Britain as on the Continent, the younger generation of labour was no longer asking to have the harness that bound it to the old order made easier and lighter; it was asking for a new world.
The new movement seemed to men of Oswald’s generation to come as thunderstorms will sometimes come, as the militant suffragette had seemed to come, suddenly out of a clear sky. But it was far more ominous than the suffragette movement, for while that made one simple explicit demand, this demanded nothing short of a new economic order. It asked for everything and would be content with nothing. It was demanding from an old habitual system the supreme feat of reconstruction. Short of that vague general reconstruction it promised no peace. Higher wages would not pacify it; shorter hours would not pacify it. It threatened sabotage of every sort, and a steady, incessant broadening antagonism of master and man. Peter, half sympathetic and half critical, talked about it to Oswald one day.
“They all say, ’I’m a Rebel!’” said Peter. “’Rebel’ is their cant word.”