“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world, is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example, British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”
“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in fair play.”
“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland. It had been dragged into the mud since the War.
These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly, as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles, and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.
These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member, W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor of The New World,—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words, quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of character and quality.
What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed, for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste, for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and education.
Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.
Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague, ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.
Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the London School of Economics.
W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford, his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.