Bernard Hall, whose editorship of The New World had founded something like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.
A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then, brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and purpose?
Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word “Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—
“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful democracy in Europe.
There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy, guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that, and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to their hatred of cruelty.
No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them, for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called “reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men, to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds. They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in discipline.
“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but not imposed by external authority.
“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard Hall, of The New World, and the flame in him leapt through his cold mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff, about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”
This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour, even the question of Divorce.
It was all very difficult. . . . It would be more difficult with Joyce, if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over wholly to their side.