There was something in Christy’s exalted pessimism, in his bitter and almost savage irony, in a queer humour darkly shaded by a sense of tragedy, which acted in an inexplicable way in Bertram as both an irritant and an opiate.
His own moodiness, his private doubts and difficulties, even his bigger apprehensions of political troubles at home and abroad, were made trivial by the intense world-ranging analysis of social disease threatening civilisation which Christy brought back from his journeys abroad.
He was seldom in London, and after a few days, or at most, a few weeks, in his rooms overlooking the river from Adelphi Terrace, would set out again for Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Rome, with an insatiable desire to “see how things were getting on” in the spirit of peoples and in their social conditions. The results of his inquiries could be read in Radical weeklies under the heading of “Our Special Correspondent,” in articles written with a cold scientific touch, over-crammed with facts and statistics, and unemotional. They revealed nothing of the flame at the heart of this man, none of his whimsicality of expression in private conversation, not a gleam of his philosophy, but Bertram believed that they were valued as important contributions to knowledge by international groups of men and women outside his own set, and unknown to him except by references in newspapers and in satirical comment by men like Kenneth Murless.
Kenneth called them “long-haired idealists,” “Crawling Pacifists,” and “home-bred Bolshevists.” He had even referred to Christy once or twice by name, and had denounced an article of his as “a challenge to all established authority. The fellow ought to be shot.”
“He’s a friend of mine,” said Bertram.
Kenneth Murless raised his eyebrows in languid surprise.
“That so? Then you’re entertaining an enemy unawares. A viper in your bosom, old man. Christy and his crowd have declared war against our set and our ideals.”
“What ideals?” asked Bertram.
“Preserving the good old order of things,” said Kenneth. “The Stately Homes of England, our Prerogatives, our Very Pleasant Way of Life, which is already seriously threatened by tax-collectors and the greedy clamour of an insensate mob.”
Bertram objected violently.