“You heard what they were saying in Paris?,” asked Spence-Atkins. “ ‘The seeds of a great and durable war’.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “as our first article will be on the treaty . . .?”
We had reached no decision by the time my uncle and I adjourned for dinner with the Daintons; if seventy men out of London’s seven millions understood what kind of peace had been made, I do not believe that seven men of the seventy cared by now whether it was a good peace or a bad.
“Indifference! Indifference!,” Bertrand sighed. “If you compare this night with the day of the armistice . . . We said ‘never again!’; and we meant it. Now, though half the world’s still in mourning, we’re racing along a road that will put the other half in mourning.”
“I suppose you can never repeat your emotions,” I ventured, as I followed his gaze over the packed restaurant. “The war ended at the armistice; people say ‘All right! It’s still ended.’ ”
“And they’re not interested to see whether the present world is built on quicksand.”
“No one can say we haven’t done our best to warn people,” I said wearily, as the Daintons came into the lounge.
“No one but a fool would say that any one had paid the slightest attention to our warnings,” Bertrand rejoined. “The harm’s done now. That phase is over.”
As we went in to dinner, Lady Dainton told me that the scene was quite like 1914. From a long and intimate acquaintance with her no less than from the ring of pleasure in her voice, I realized that this was her return from exile: for thirty years she had lived and laboured to enter what she considered the “right” houses and to secure the “right” people in her own. The war had thrown her out of work; but she could begin again now. One of her sons had been killed, the other wounded; her daughter had disappointed the family by marrying O’Rane and shocked it by running away from him; for the Daintons, who had worked as hard as any one, it had not been a pleasant or an easy war; and now Lady Dainton was dismissing it as a regrettable incident, least said, soonest mended. She was not wanting in affection for her dead son nor for the son who would be among the first to die if another war came; but she was by now too inelastic to remodel her daily life, still less to attempt improvements on the scene of 1914 when there were no ‘profiteers’, no ‘temporary gentlemen’, no six-shilling income-tax, no bloated wages for insatiable domestic servants.
“You think it will last?,” I enquired.