“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”
“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.
“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s heads?”
The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of “inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we must do now.
“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily discouraged than I was in 1909.”
Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in England.
“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one else.”
“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to follow your advice.”
As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.