My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one of his now periodical lapses into slumber.
“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G. would not now be prime minister,” he answered.
No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.
“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony, without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies and gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather vieux jeu: we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.
The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street. Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations, when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.
I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.
“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,” said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between the nisi and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”
“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”
We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home, I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.
“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she answered.