More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.
“If you must go, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”
“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.
4
London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.
“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to define our attitude.”
“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”
“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.
Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the assembly framed.
“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with us, “means coercing Ulster.”