When, as editor and managing-director, I proposed the toast of “Peace”, a vibration from my colleagues’ eagerness troubled my rigid negations and stirred doubt in my bland assurance. Was Bertrand’s project so hare-brained as I had thought? I questioned myself in honest uncertainty as I settled my tie and looked down on the double row of expectant faces. The old man’s predictions at Cannes were fulfilled as soon as the conference met and a vague parliament of man reformed as a quarrelsome committee of ten; the clash between President Wilson’s fourteen points and Mr. Lloyd-George’s election speeches rang out when the committee of ten shrank to a camarilla of four; and, if we had ever doubted the apathy of the British public, our doubt must have evaporated day by day as the first House of Commons in the new glacial age sat with hands folded and eyes set jealously on the position each member had wrested from the war. Twice or thrice in these months a vigilance-committee of sterner and more unbending new members sent hectoring telegrams to keep their representatives up to the mark; President Wilson once ordered his ship to get up steam; and the Duchess of Ross dined out intermittently on M. Clemenceau’s latest epigram; but it is substantially true to say that no one in England thought of the peace-treaty until it was submitted for the approval of parliament.
In my speech I confined myself to congratulating Bertrand on his staff. At the end, he hoisted himself slowly to his feet and indicated his own part in our endeavour:
“You young men will have to do the work; but perhaps, from a long experience, I may be able to advise you. No lasting peace can be founded on a sense of grievance; and, though the heathen are raging furiously now, they’ll outgrow that phase. Maybe it’s because I had to keep my mouth shut during the war, maybe old age is making me more radical. This is not a party organ, it never was; it was an expression of liberal spirit, and that’s what it has to be again. We were called hard names when war broke out; but we had the right vision. Labour still thinks parochially; toryism still thinks imperially, which is the same thing; radicalism must think internationally. These fierce local patriotisms are an unconscionable time a-dying; but England is a bigger conception than the heptarchy, Europe is a bigger conception than England, the world is a bigger conception than Europe. We depend too much on our neighbours to blow them out of existence every few years. That truth has been vouchsafed to those of us who are at this table; we have to get it accepted.”
I rang a bell; and we were handed early copies of our first number. Every man turned avidly to his own contribution. Then Barbara sent for me to help her receive our guests.
This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder, miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife; and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand. As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed:
“A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years before you were born.”
As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their lips; débutantes of a generation after mine pressed under the elbows of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to charm back into their fold.
“I didn’t know there were so many people in the world!,” she exclaimed in one of the few brief lulls.
Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed:
“It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.”