“I’ve been thinking over what you said the other day about our prototypes in history. Triskett’s great-grandfather firing on the Versailles mob just to see what would happen. . . . I’ve known a good few historic figures: O’Connell; Mazzini; Lassalle. The great unspeakables. I believe I went to them for fear of being told by boys like you that I and my spiritual forefathers had been on the wrong side. Dam’ conceit! I hope I’ve outgrown that phase now; but, when that ass Crawleigh spluttered about rounding up conscientious objectors in the war, I felt that his ancestors had burnt heretics. Your friend Maitland sentenced a man to the cat the other day: he said it was the only remedy for crimes of violence. I asked him why he didn’t break the fellow on a wheel, as his forebears had done. Damn it, I gave up shooting for fear of finding myself in the same dock as the old cock-fighters. Conceit, if you like. I’ve been a radical because I couldn’t let posterity charge me with the savagery and intolerance which we throw up against our conservative predecessors. Time was on my side. I recorded my protest. What good it’s done . . .? That’s why you’d better keep the paper on, George. It’ll shew the next generation how superior you were to this.”
The advice was rounded with a cynical, deep chuckle; and he lay long without speaking.
“The world’s a gentler place than when you were a boy, sir,” O’Rane put in.
Bertrand looked at him in silence for a moment and then shook his head slowly:
“You say that, with your experience of the late war? Does human nature change? . . . We shan’t have that dinner, George, but I wasn’t far out in my date. The present government is falling to pieces.”
“And what’s going to take its place?,” I asked.
Bertrand ruminated in silence for some time; then his face lighted for the last time in a reflective smile:
“A restoration government! We’ve given a million men and heaven knows how many thousand million pounds to keep things . . . just as they were. Nurse says we’re shipping troops again to the Straits: to defend the graves we’ve already filled there, I suppose. In ten years the great powers will be balanced as they were ten years ago; there’ll be the same competition in armaments, the same scares, ultimately the same universal war . . . on a vastly different scale. At home we’ve fallen back into our old social and financial grooves.” Bertrand’s eyes turned fixedly to the ceiling in a strained effort of concentration. He was speaking very slowly now and studying his articulation. “We’re . . . going on . . . from 1914 . . . without break of thought . . . or mend of heart.”
As he paused, O’Rane stood up and walked cautiously to the bed.
“I’ll leave you now, sir, unless you want me,” he said. “I expect you’d like to talk to George. I . . . want to thank you.” . . .