“Read your Balzac,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript. “London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like Paris in the restoration-period . . .”
It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and, as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know, had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman, certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in France.
I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her empire.
When my uncle arrived, his mood was made apparent by the sombre opening statement that nations got the governments they deserved. He added, with fine public spirit, that the worst result of the election was the lack of an effective opposition. Then less impersonal feelings broke through: he charged ministers with treating the fourteen points as ‘a scrap of paper’ and recommended a strait-waistcoat for all who escaped the lamp-post. Sitting in a half-circle round his chair, with Lucien’s international parliament huddled on our fringe, we were castigated with a fury that would have been better deserved if we had in fact uttered the vain things with which we were charged: we had promised that there should be no punitive damages and now we were threatening to squeeze Germany like an orange; we were pledged to try the kaiser, if not to execute him without trial; we were to restore our trade by destroying our best customer.
“If I’d asked for the kaiser’s head on a charger,” Bertrand thundered, “you’d have promised me two heads on two chargers.”
When the first fury had abated, Lucien fanned it to life by a reference to the peace of Brest-Litovsk, demanding why Germany should be treated more tenderly in defeat than she had treated others in victory.
“If England had been invaded . . .” he went on with a kindling eye. “The mistake your prime minister made was that he didn’t say enough.”
“You should have thought of all that before you agreed to the armistice,” Bertrand retorted.
“Well, say, the terms of the armistice . . .” began Clifford van Oss.
I have no doubt he was going to say that, if the French quoted one set of undertakings against us, then America, which had drawn the terms, would speedily quote another. My uncle, however, who detested what he called “the American habit of making speeches instead of conversing”, broke in with a speech of his own: