“I feel sure it will,” she answered. “It’s to all our interests, don’t you know?, to keep the big houses open, to have plenty of employment, money circulating. . . . Of course, if the socialists had their way . . . but I don’t think there’s much socialism in England, George. The war has thrown people together so much. The agitators simply wouldn’t be able to make a living if they weren’t paid from abroad. There’s a little book I must send you on the Jewish peril.” . . .
A new taste for spreading scares was the only change that I could detect in my hostess. Whereas she had occupied herself before the war by sitting on endless committees, she reached a larger public now by sitting at home and inundating her friends with pamphlets on bolshevism, prohibition, the white-slave traffic, secular education and every other danger that threatened, day by day, to sap the security of England. Sir Roger, I fancy, had changed even less. Whereas he had formerly jobbed in and out of wild-cat industrial securities, he now dabbled in the more chaotic of the European exchanges. Sonia danced; Sam had left his firm of contractors in Hartlepool for a vague “agency-business” of his own in London; Tom Dainton’s widow had married again; and I believe this single family could have been reproduced, in every detail of history and circumstance, in almost every town and county throughout Great Britain and Ireland.
“George not being pessimistic, is he?,” Sir Roger enquired genially, as we settled into our places.
“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party, realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.”
The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry.
“You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s ended, he says it must start again. Cheerful customer, George.”
I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of “Wilson, le bienvenu”, he had discovered in the president an insidious agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.
I had not, for several months, mentioned the inflammatory fourteen points: had I done so, Dainton might have retorted that President Wilson had himself departed from them by throwing his lot in with M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd-George. I did not discuss the equity of the peace terms. I discussed very little with Dainton; but I tried, as I had been trying all day, to envisage the new world which circumstances and the efforts of the peace conference were labouring to bear. Russia was in the grip of revolution, civil war and famine; Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy might follow at any moment; the map of Europe was dotted with strangely named, new, self-governing republics, alike only in their complete ignorance of self-government; as we were soon to see, there was no European police to restrain the Italian who might be inspired to seize Fiume or the Rumanian who was tempted to march on Buda Pesht; the League of Nations had been invested with no power; and the world outside Europe, from India to Egypt and from Ireland to the Philippines, had been taught the magic word “self-determination” and had realized its possibilities more vividly than those who coined it.
In an unguarded moment I did ask Dainton whether he imagined that the Germans could ever pay the indemnity which he had so sternly demanded. He believed it confidently. How, I asked him; but Dainton told me that he was not in the mood to split hairs: if they could pay it, they should (and the allies would remain in occupation till the last penny had been handed over); if the Hun ruined himself in the attempt, as I seemed to think likely, it would be something to feel that he would never again menace the world.
“And if he ruins us too?,” I asked. “Economically, the whole world is knitted together. If the Russian revolution spreads to Germany?”