“For some years . . .” he conceded with regretful solemnity.
“And,” I pursued, “what happens to liberalism, which is more important to me than the liberal party?”
Jellaby had no answer ready; and, if he had not been my host, I should have asked him whether a liberal whips’ office cared for these things.
Next day the conservative wing of the coalition seceded, after a brief debate, on the strength of a single, brief speech. The prime minister resigned; and the king invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a government. As soon as the conservative party had accepted its new leader, the date of the election was announced. Those of my friends who were nursing constituencies became, of a sudden, very important and excited; I received invitations to speak from people who must have forgotten, if they ever knew, how bad a speaker I am; wagers were offered freely; and all parties predicted confidently that they would return with increased numbers.
I spent much time at the Eclectic Club in these days, wondering what line my paper should follow in the election. No new policy was being put forward; and, if the old policy stood condemned, I did not understand why ministers who were responsible for it were kept in office. Nor, at a season when everybody speculated how long the patience of the unemployed would endure, did I understand why the order of the county was entrusted to a man who had preached the sacred right of rebellion so few years before in Ulster. I wondered, too, what would happen to the floating wreckage of the coalition; and, more bitterly than ever before, I missed old Bertrand’s caustic humour in the hours when he sat with me here in a window of the smoking-room, defaming the passers-by and pretending that we were studying trends of opinion and “the great movement of men”.
He it was who said that politics were desocialized when Mr. Asquith left Downing Street. For six years the political stage had been occupied by statesmen, demagogues, shy scholars, blatant adventurers, advertising-agents, unemployed millionaires, newspaper-proprietors, dukes, international Jews and merchant-princes. Cabinet control had been replaced by the personal domination of one man who miraculously held this heterogeneous company together; considered policy had yielded to a succession of brilliant and incongruous improvisations. On no day could an outsider foretell who next would pull a wire; and, as I looked round the crowded rooms of the Eclectic, I wondered what all these long-faced, out-of-work pressmen and financiers, these confidential secretaries and hangers-on would now do for a living or a career.
Then, as the ministry was completed and the first election-addresses appeared, I recalled Bertrand’s last verdict.
“Without break of thought or mend of heart . . .”
Were we going on from 1914? Had the war, in which most of my generation perished, really achieved nothing?