“How long does it take to chain up your primitive beast?,” Violet asked. “I mean, . . . these are the people that the war has left us to live with and work with.” . . .
To that I had no answer ready. It was easier to say that Sonia O’Rane would not have run away from her husband before the war than to be certain she would not run away again. And it seemed idle to talk of international conferences and a reconstructed world, of a new spirit and a ‘will to peace’ while the passions of the war were still unfettered.
4
My triptych, displaying—in its centre—the war and—on either side—the peace that preceded and should follow the war, spared no space for dividing or linking frame-work: though I was working in the transition-period between full war and full peace, I made little attempt to describe the condition in which we all found ourselves at the moment when a truce was called.
To some extent—in these blissful, lazy days, when we had nothing to do but sleep and eat and smoke and gossip—we filled the blank by discussing the present and future states of our friends. My battle-piece was subjected to a more general scrutiny than I had intended; and for many rather embarrassing days I was challenged to defend myself against critics who opened wide fields of speculation with the words:
“If, as you think, the old political game is really played out . . .”; or
“If you’re right about the redistribution of wealth . . .”
In the morning, as we idled in long chairs on a glowing marble verandah; at night, as we sat in a half-circle while Barbara played to us; in leisurely afternoon walks and occasional peripatetic sessions from one bedroom to another, we discussed war-literature and war-religion, the new position of women, the fate of the demobilized soldier and the day-to-day life which we expected to lead when peace was proclaimed.
Most of our predictions were unbelievably wild, in their assumption either that everything or that nothing would be the same as before the war; and our discussions were so formless that they could never be summarized or recorded. When we abandoned conjecture for the concrete plans that each was making for himself, I felt that—in the words used at a dinner to Eric Lane in New York—‘the convulsion’s as great, when you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a soldier.’ Sam Dainton, after ten years’ service, was leaving the army, “to prey on society”, as he put it. Deganway was saying good-bye to the Foreign Office; Barbara’s cousin, John Carstairs, to the Diplomatic. Professionally, the climax in both their lives had been reached and passed; the first wanted to make money, the second to look after his estates.
At this time I began to detect the rise of that adventurer-class at which history points a punctual finger after every great war but which I somehow did not expect to see in my own time. When I was called back to London, I found new men in Fleet Street and the City, new names at Covent Garden and in the candidates’ books of the clubs; at Cannes I discerned, in the good-looking person of Violet’s brother Laurence, an adventurer in the making. As I became acquainted with his friends in the course of the next three years, I saw the natural, perhaps the necessary, evolution of a type which has not yet found its place in the social void. My cousin had been snatched from Melton on his eighteenth birthday and thrust into the Irish Guards, where his precocious development as a man-of-the-world had been won at the expense of his small aptitude for learning. The Hunter-Oakleighs could not afford to maintain him in idleness; and Laurence, recognizing this, quartered himself on Loring House and allowed Violet or any other of his relations to maintain him. In theory, he was reading for the bar; and a text-book on Roman law was always at hand to rebut the charge of idleness. In practice, he blandly awaited pecuniary compensation from a society which had taught him expensive tastes at a time when he might have been teaching himself the means of gratifying them. The army had paralysed his initiative; he believed—or affected to believe—that, at one-and-twenty, his life-work was done; and already he had learned that personal charm and rich friends were a fair substitute for industry.