“They’ve had their hell; and they’re not through with it yet,” I said.
It was the first time that I had encountered the searing reproach of that device; and, as I described it to O’Rane, I recalled—as in a dream of some other life—that I was the editor of a political review and that I had been sent to study unemployment. There was an external world, then. At this moment my uncle was probably taking the chair at our weekly dinner.
As the tramp of feet grew fainter, O’Rane half rose in his seat and then subsided with a groan:
“No, I can’t! It’s not my business to pay other people’s debts. The state turned these men into soldiers, in a moment of blue funk; the state must turn them back into civilians. Sometimes I see so red that I want to hold this country to ransom. ‘You’ve no use for these fellows,’ I want to say. ‘Well, now I’m going to shew you what would have happened if they hadn’t come forward when they did.’ After a week of Belgian atrocities, there’d be a marked increase in popular gratitude! And I thought this war would produce a . . . spirit of fraternity!”
I had hoped for it, even if I had not expected it after the first months of 1915. Quick conversions are never permanent: and permanent conversions are never quick. Our drive that day, past great estates and big manufacturing towns, might have been chosen as an object-lesson in the aggressive competition that strangles fraternity at birth.
That night, when we lay at Gloucester, and next day, as we drove through the soul-searching loveliness of the Stroud valley, we talked of education and the gospel of humanity, as we had not talked since our Indian summer at Cannes; and once or twice, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, I forgot to think consciously of Barbara. H. G. Wells, after years of criticism, was turning teacher on his own account; and The Outline of History was conspicuous in every house and railway carriage I entered at this time. One man at least was pleading for the universal spirit; and his plea gave food for thought to the people who had shouted for blood and gold in the 1918 election. The havoc which Keynes had made in the economics of the peace-treaty was completed by the havoc which Wells made of its history and its spiritual trend.
“And yet,” I exclaimed in sudden reaction, “those books have left things where they were!” The treaty, which could not be enforced, had to be modified: the British representatives had to explain why their crazy election-pledges could not be fulfilled. At regular intervals Germany threatened to default; France retaliated with a threat of further occupation; a flustered knot of prime ministers collected at the first convenient watering-place; and a punctual press announced that the results of the conference were wholly satisfactory. “I sometimes despair of education. . . . And, damn it, Raney, you haven’t told me what to do when I get back to London!”
“You’ve not yet told me what you want to do. . . . It’s strange how people can hold mutually destructive opinions at the same moment! Lucien de Grammont talks piteously about German ‘revenge’ at a time when the French are pouring Senegalese troops into the occupied area!”
“Roger Dainton will tell you that a restored Germany means a new war and that an unrestored Germany is losing us our best customer.” . . .
At O’Rane’s skilled prompting, we argued our way farther west and farther until, at the end of a week, we stalled the car and strolled on foot, because we had reached Land’s End. Surrounded by water, in the spray and wind of the last rocky outposts of England, I felt my sanity and self-control returning to me; but a single day without the distraction of driving brought back the obsession. I flung myself into a voluminous report on Unemployment and Public Feeling, only to discover that my four folios might have been compressed into the single word “indifference”. There was no question of class or party: every one flabbily deplored the breakdown of industry, flabbily pitied the unemployed, flabbily felt that somebody should do something. Accent and idiom might change, but the stale thought and worn expression changed only by becoming more stale: the wayside tap echoed the slipshod reasoning of an Atlantic liner; a benighted book-maker in a forgotten Cornish village talked of trades unions in a way that I had thought only possible in my father-in-law; and there were Roger Daintons manipulating beer-engines in every bar.