It was obvious that if ever there was a time to be up and doing things, in a quite heroic sense, this was the time—this changing, transitional time! Here, now, was chance for fine endeavour. Whosoever was articulate could now be heard, ... which was very strange in the life politic, a quite new departure; for once on a time the Commons held only gentlemen, but now they let in quite clever fellows—if such could be persuaded to enter it; so that anything might happen, anything—in this transitional time! And it was the business of English youth to make things happen, in the finest way. But the basis of every endeavour must be work and knowledge; and it was the impulse to the one and the desire for the other that were now so plainly lacking in the “young men of opportunity”; which was a favourite phrase of Ivor’s in many talks with Magdalen and Rodney West.
All men who thought and wrote were at this time thinking and writing about the conflicting aims and principles of labour and capital. The calamity of Europe’s tumbling credit did not yet obsess people to the degree that it very soon did—indeed it had not yet crashed to anywhere near its lowest depth; but it was crashing. It seemed, then, that everything would come out smooth and straight if only a sensible accommodation could be found between the wage-earners and the employers in each country; but in each country angry men never tired of passionately crying in capital letters that there can be no accommodation between Principles of Living, that each must have its day—“or night!” dramatically thought sober men with their eyes on Russia. For sober men were as like the men in Mr. Beresford’s Revolution as a fish in the sea is like a fish in an aquarium, and in them was a growing fear of the spectre of anarchy.
“The best way to beat a real revolution is to lead it; the next best way is to talk to it; and the worst way of all is to fight it. Just because some ancient idiot—probably the same Roman idiot who wrote si vis pacem, para bellum, so that other idiots throughout history could take it for gospel truth simply because it was in Latin—just because some idiot once said that there’s no use talking to an angry man, no one has ever tried it until knocking the angry man down has failed. There’s no use doing anything else but talk to an angry man; and the idea that an angry man must temporarily be a fool is one of the misconceptions on which civilisation has been based ever since Saint Peter lost his temper with the ear of the law....
“You cannot fight and beat revolutions as you can fight and beat nations. You can kill a man, but you simply can’t kill a rebel. For a proper rebel has an Ideal of living, while your only ideal is to kill him so that you may preserve yourself. And the reason why no real revolution, or religion, has ever been beaten is that rebels die for something worth dying for, the future, but their enemies die only to preserve the past: and makers of history are always stronger than the makers of Empire. It is foolish to fight a revolutionary machine-gun with a loyalist machine-gun, gun for gun, or a Soviet machine-gun with a bourgeois machine-gun, gun for gun. You can only fight and beat them with an Idea, a clean and fearless Idea. And there is only one such Idea, the oldest in the world, the most blooded in the world, the aristocratic idea: which really means that you can only keep and strengthen your own freedom by acknowledging other peoples’. Mainly, it must mean that....”
Ivor Marlay made notes. He was trying to get somewhere: as, one day much later, he finally did. But a solitary man becomes very theoretical; which, maybe, is why all revolutions have been born of solitary men and all religions have come from the East.
CHAPTER II
1
He was interrupted.
One very cold and overcast afternoon towards the end of that January, he was walking up one of the lanes that skirted the parkland of the Kare estate. The lane led gently up the hill for a long and twisting way, and the hill led gently down to the Thames valley. Ivor was walking bareheaded, for his thick dark hair was covering enough on the bitterest day; and his remaining arm was deep in his trouser pocket. He looked a curiously still figure, walking thus: walking swiftly but nowhither, taking thought and air, taking very deep thought: a lonely and defiant man of affairs. How Aunt Percy would have chuckled to see him now!... And then a sudden crash to break his thoughts, a rustling crash of angry leaves and broken boughs, the wintry crash of a raped hedge! Three yards in front, almost on top of him, a horse pirouetted in the little lane; it pawed the air and ground, it made gestures towards equilibrium after its sudden dash through the barrier of Kare Park on to a strolling man. A sleek and quivering picture, drawn with a fine point against a dour background. The horse snorted, it quivered, it eyed the astonished Ivor, and then it pawed the ground with an arrogant air. And a woman laughed.
“Oh, Ivor Marlay!” the woman cried.