"If you were back in August, '14?" George asked, looking him in the eyes and then quickly turning away.
"I'd go through it again," was the quiet reply.
George got up and began to pace restlessly up and down the room.
"The big thing about this war is quite independent of results," O'Rane explained. "It's the effect on the individual, the effort, the risk, the readiness to make sacrifice. I always hold that there's no room in life for compromise. You know that, don't you, George?" He held out his hand and pulled George on to the arm of his chair. "From the days when we were at Melton together. You and dear old Jim Loring and Tom Dainton—dear God! how this war has killed them off!—you used to thrash me, you brutes, to make me see that I must compromise, but you never won. And always before the war I thought that compromise—what I call moral cowardice and spiritual slovenliness—was the only thing that people minded about. They didn't care. It wasn't their business! If the world was cruel and licentious or base-minded, they always asked me to remember that human nature was human nature." He sprang up with a sudden wriggle as though he were jerking an incubus from his shoulders. "As a nation we were contented with the second-rate—compromise, toleration, ease; we were second-rate in life, art, politics, second-rate in humanity, in soul.... And then there came the war—and it was the big moment when we had to decide whether to fight our way through the flames or to stand in distant security and explain to the reporters that there was a child, sure enough, in the top storey, but that it would be suicide to attempt a rescue and what was the fire brigade for, anyway?... We had to decide, we had to make up our minds that there was something big enough to suffer and sacrifice ourselves for.... All of us who went out there thought, rightly or wrongly, that we'd found something that admitted of no compromise.... Even if you went out of bravado, like poor Val Arden, so as not to be thought a funk.... What it was—I don't quite know ..." he went on slowly. "I doubt if any of us know, and we certainly didn't at the time. Perhaps it was for the security of the people at home.... I know I was seeing red, I'd have slit the throats of German women and children at that time—in revenge for what they did in Belgium.... But before that started, before war was declared.... You remember that last week-end of the Saturnia regna, George? When we walked up and down, up and down at Loring Castle, wondering whether there was anything worth saving.... Well, whenever I catch myself feeling as you do now, I recall that about four million men voluntarily decided that there was something in life better than their own lives, something that had to be preserved, something that ruled out all compromise. That's the moral value of war. After all, what is it you do when you run into the flames and rescue the kiddie from the top storey? You save its life, I admit, and that's something, if you value human life, but the child may die a week later of whooping-cough, it may grow into a drunkard, an imbecile, a criminal. What matters it that you've taken yourself, your own soul, and given it a value?... When this is all over, if we lose, if we're bankrupt and broken, if Germany enchains us like so many tribes of African blacks, it still doesn't matter to the men who refused to compromise, they've made themselves.... Yes, quite deliberately, I'd—go through it—all—again.... And, when the war's over, we can't afford to tolerate anything but the best, we haven't been fighting for the second-rate. And we've got to prepare our own minds for that now, so that the material changes follow automatically. You must start with the individual, your own relationship to the world in all its aspects. Hanging for sheep-stealing ceased automatically when the public mind had prepared itself, stirred itself up to say 'This has got to stop!' and the compromisers, the obscurantists, the vested interests daren't raise their heads. You think, perhaps, that I'm not the best person to decry the usefulness of compromise——"
He stopped abruptly, and all the light and colour died out of his big eyes.
Bertrand, whom I thought to be dozing, raised his head for a moment and lowered it again.
"Didn't Saint Paul say something about being all things to all men?" he asked gently. "Saint Paul was a great diplomatist, a great man of the world. You'd say he was a great compromiser, David, but at least he knew how to suit himself to his audiences, to make allowances for poor, despised human nature. And perhaps you'll even admit that he was not altogether unsuccessful and that Christianity would never have spread a hundred miles from Jerusalem but for him. I sometimes think he has been unduly neglected," he continued with a yawn. "Christianity would have been a poor thing without him."
"It would have been a poorer thing without Christ," O'Rane answered. "And there would have been no Christianity at all, if Christ had said that the Scribes and Pharisees were doing their best according to their lights ... or that we must make allowances for Dives because he had a great many calls on his charity and really couldn't investigate each one personally. Of course, there'd have been no Crucifixion...."
3
The Christmas holidays passed rapidly, and I remember that O'Rane told me one Sunday night that he would be going back to Melton in another ten days' time. None of us cared to ask him how much longer he proposed to continue this make-shift life, teaching seventeen-year-olds for nine months in the year and learning procedure in the House of Commons during the remainder; it was his means of trying to forget that his wife was in the same city, living within a mile or two of him, driving perhaps within a hundred yards of their house or passing him in the street, elusive and unattainable.