“That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.”
“And you don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!”
“With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck whispered.
Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England. I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common effort for a common cause.
“Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile.
“I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the same kind of criminal nonsense?”
“Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings, you make on the roundabouts.”
“If you want to go back . . .,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh, when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand.
It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he had lost his seat.
In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s.