The fog had lifted; and only a faint haze remained. For the first time in many hours I looked at my watch to explain what seemed to be stars. It was nine o’clock; and I became suddenly conscious of great hunger, great fatigue and almost unbearable pain in my head and hand. At the same moment I began to see the events of the afternoon in their perspective.
Nothing quite of this kind had happened for a hundred years. Barbara had confirmed what the policeman told me: this outbreak was isolated and unique. Within the next day or two I was to meet men who had driven unsuspectingly across the battlefield from luncheon-parties an hour before the battle; I was to meet others who drove across the same ground an hour after the surrender and only imagined that the road was under repair. It was local, it was brief; but it was new. Had I seen the beginning or the end? Sardou, I remember, makes one of his characters say: “An émeute is when the mob is conquered; then they are all canaille; a revolution is when they are victorious; then they are all heroes.” The émeute of to-day, however, becomes not infrequently the revolution of to-morrow. I felt that, in history, this outbreak might mark a turning-point: it would be the first active step towards a social revolution, or it would be the last demonstration of turbulence before a great and orderly people, with a genius for self-government, adjusted itself slowly, pragmatically and irrationally to the new conditions.
I know now, I knew next day, that the collision which loomed so large to me would escape the notice of the most vigilant historian. The average headline in the average paper said no more than: Disorderly scenes in westminster. Feared loss of life. Then and now I felt and feel that what I witnessed was more than a “disorderly scene”. Little more than eight years had passed since the threat of a European war shook us to the foundations of our being. The ardent among us had vowed that, if we won, we would have an order of civilization for which any man would be proud to die. After eight years, the danger of a new war lowered more menacingly than in the summer months of 1914. And the civilization which we had set up to commemorate the war was to be judged on that afternoon’s encounter. Had the association of one human being with another, in his national and international grouping, grown so complex that no one could control it? Had the world become like the Roman Empire in its last days, when—for no reason that a statesman of the day or an historian of later days could enunciate—the mighty machine ceased to revolve? If the aim of government was to secure the life and liberty of the governed and to lead them towards prosperity and happiness, government had palpably failed in victorious England and France, in defeated Germany, in revolutionary Russia. My uncle warned me on his death-bed that we were back in 1914; had he been with me now, I must have told him that we were sunk to something incredibly lower than 1914. After the events of this afternoon I did not believe that even O’Rane would dispute that.
Of all the ironies that had chequered his life, I knew of none greater than that his should be the house to be attacked by the most downtrodden and hopeless section of the community. If their salvation could have been helped by his death, he would have given his life for them as lightly as another man might toss a coin to a beggar. Now, if any one had indeed been killed, he would be held indirectly responsible.
I had come to a halt till the pain which every step sent shooting through my head should abate. Looking again at my watch, I saw that I must hasten. By Great College Street, O’Rane had told me, and then into Dean’s Yard. As I turned the corner, I had to step aside to avoid an obstacle. Glancing back, I saw that it was a man. He lay stretched on his back, with his arms flung out, midway between two lamp-posts; and I could not be sure whether he was wounded or drunk. I called out to find if he wanted help; but there was no answer. Then I struck a match.
As it flared, I saw what—in some way that I shall never understand—I had been expecting to see. It was this that had sent me back to his side again and again; this, maybe, that had brought Barbara with her car; this, for all I know, that appeared to her in the semblance of black wings beating a prophetic message over the house. O’Rane’s hands were cold as ice; the back of his head was brutally smashed. His black eyes stared up to heaven in mild perplexity at the insoluble enigma of death and the eternal paradox of life.
He looked a boy of twenty.
I covered his face and mounted guard over my last and best friend. . . .
Waltham St. Lawrence,
Berkshire, 1923.