Chapter THE TENTH: A Searching of Schoolmasters (7)

She would sit and think how indecent it was to be at the same time old and dissipated. Some of these women here, she perceived, were older than her aunts Phœbe and Phyllis, years older. Their faces were painted and done most amazingly—Joan knew all about facial massage and the rest of it—and still they were old faces. But their poor bodies were not nearly so old as their faces, that was the tragedy of them. Joan regarded the tremendous V decolletage of a lively grandmother before her, and the skin of the back shone as young as her own. The good lady was slapping the young gentleman next to her with a quite smooth and shapely arm. Joan speculated whether the old fashion of the masked ball and the Venetian custom of masks which she had been reading about that day in Voltaire’s _Princesse de Babylone_, might not have something to do with that. But—she reverted—only young people ought to make love at all. Her aunts didn’t; Oswald didn’t. And Oswald was years younger than some of the men here, and in Joan’s eyes at least far more presentable. He had a scarred face indeed but a clean skin; some of the old men here had skins one would shiver to touch, and the expressions of evil gargoyles. She let her thoughts dwell—not for the first time—on Oswald and a queer charm he had for her. Never in all her life had she known him do or say a mean, dishonest, unjust, or unkind thing. In some ways he was oddly like Peter, but wise and gentle—and not exasperating....

But all this playing with love in London was detestable, all of it. This was really a shameful place. It was shameful to be here. Love—mixed up with evening dress and costly clothes and jewellery and nasty laughter and cigars, strong cigars and drink that slopped about. It was disgusting. These people made love after their luncheons and dinners and suppers. Pigs! They were all pigs. They looked like pigs. If ever she made love it should be in the open air, in some lovely place with blue mountains in the distance, where there were endless wild flowers, where one could swim. No man she had ever talked with of love had really understood anything of the beauty of love and the cleanness of love—except Mir Jelaluddin. And he had a high-pitched voice and a staccato accent—and somehow.... One ought not to be prejudiced against a dark race, but somehow it was unthinkable....

Joan sat in the night club dreaming of a lover, and the men about her glanced furtively at her face, asking themselves, “Can it be I?” men with red ears, men with greasy hair, men with unpleasing necks and clumsy gestures; bald men, fat men, watery-eyed men, cheats, profiteers, usurers, snobs, toadies, successful old men of every sort and young men who had done nothing and for the most part never would. “Can it be I?” they surmised dimly, seeing her pensive eyes. And she was dreaming of a lithe, white, slender figure, strong and clean. He would hunt among the mountains, he would swim swift rivers; he would never drink strong drink nor reek of smoke....

At this moment young Winterbaum became urgent with his beautiful gold cigarette case. Joan took a cigarette and lighted it, and sat smoking with her elbows side by side on the table.

“You’re not bored?” said young Winterbaum.

“Oh, no. I’m watching people. I don’t want to talk.”

“Oh! not at all?” said young Winterbaum.

“So long as one has to talk,” he said after reflection and with an air of cleverness, “one isn’t really friends.”

“Exactly,” said Joan, and blew smoke through her nose.

What was it she had been thinking about? She could not remember, the thread was broken. She was sorry. She had a vague memory of something pleasant.... She fell into a fresh meditation upon Jews. All Jews, she thought, ought to grow beards. At least after they were thirty. They are too dark to shave, and besides there is a sort of indignity about their beaked shaven faces. A bearded old Jew can look noble, a moustached old Jew always looked like an imitation of a Norman gentleman done in cheaper material. But that of course was exactly what he was....

Why did men of forty or fifty always want to dance with and make love to flappers? Some of these girls here must be two or three years younger than herself. What was the interest? They couldn’t talk; they weren’t beautiful; one could see they weren’t beautiful. And they laughed, good God! how they laughed! Girls ought to be taught to laugh, or at any rate taught not to laugh offensively. Laughter ought to be a joyful, contagious thing, jolly and kind, but these shrieks! How few of these people looked capable of real laughter! They just made this loud chittering sound. Only human beings laugh....

In this manner the mind of Joan was running on the evening when she saw Peter and Hetty come into the club which tried to live up to the name of “The Nest of the Burning Phœnix.” Some tango experts had just relinquished the floor and there was a space amidst the throng when Hetty made her entry. Hetty had made a great effort, she was in full London plumage, and her effect was tremendous.

About her little bold face was a radiant scheme of peacock’s feathers, her slender neck carried a disc a yard and a quarter wide; her slender, tall body was sheathed in black and peacock satin; she wore enormous earrings and a great barbaric chain. Her arms were bare except for a score of bangles, and she had bare sandalled feet. She carried her arrow point of a chin triumphantly. Peter was not her only attendant. There was also another man in her train whom every one seemed to recognize, a big, square-faced, handsome man of thirty-five or so who made Peter look very young and flimsy. “She’s got Fred Beevor!” said Winterbaum with respect, and dropped the word “Million.” Peter’s expression was stony, but Joan judged he was not enjoying himself.

There were very few unoccupied chairs and tables, but opposite Joan were two gilt seats and another disengaged at a table near at hand. Hetty was too busy with her triumph to note Joan until Beevor had already chosen this place. With a slight awkwardness the two parties mingled. Young Winterbaum at least was elated. Beevor after a few civilities to Joan let it appear that Hetty preoccupied him. Peter was evidently not enjoying himself at all. Joan found him seated beside her and silent.

Joan knew that it is the feminine rôle to lead conversation, but it seemed to her rather fun to have to encourage a tongue-tied Peter. A malicious idea came into her head.

“Well, Petah,” she said; “why don’t you say I oughtn’t to be here?”

Peter regarded her ambiguously. He had an impulse.

“No decent people ought to be here,” he said quietly. “Let’s go home, Joan.”

Her heart jumped at the suggestion. All her being said yes. And then she remembered that she had as much right to have a good time as Peter. If she went back with him it would be like giving in to him; it would be like admitting his right to order her about. And besides there was Hetty. He wasn’t really disgusted. All he wanted to do really was to show off because he was jealous of Hetty. He didn’t want to go home with Joan. She wasn’t going to be a foil for Hetty anyhow. And finally, once somewhere he had refused her almost exactly the same request. She checked herself and considered gravely. A little touch of spite crept into her expression.

“No,” she said slowly. “No.... I’ve only just come, Petah.”

“Very well,” said Peter. “_I_ don’t mind. If you like this sort of thing——”

He said no more, sulking visibly.

Joan resolved to dance at the first opportunity, and to dance in a bold and reckless way—so as thoroughly to exasperate Peter. She looked about the room through the smoke-laden atmosphere in the hope of seeing Huntley....

She and Peter sat side by side, feeling very old and experienced and worldly and up-to-date. But indeed they were still only two children who ought to have been packed off to bed hours before.

§ 7

The disorder in the world of women, the dissolution of manners and restraints, was but the more intimate aspect of a universal drift towards lawlessness. The world of labour was seething also with the same spirit of almost aimless insurrection. In a world of quickened apprehensions and increasing stimulus women were losing faith in the rules of conduct that had sufficed in a less exacting age. Far profounder and more dangerous to the established order were the scepticisms of the workers. The pretensions of the old social system that trade unionism had scarcely challenged were now being subjected throughout all western Europe to a pitiless scrutiny by a new and more educated type of employé.

The old British trade unionism had never sought much more than increased wages and a slightly higher standard of life; its acceptance of established institutions had been artlessly complete; it had never challenged the authority nor the profits of the proprietor. It had never proposed more than a more reasonable treaty with the masters, a fairer sharing of the good gifts of industry. But infatuated by the evil teachings of an extreme individualism, a system of thought which was indeed never more than a system of base excuses dressed up as a philosophy, the directing and possessing classes had failed altogether to agree with their possible labour adversary quickly while they were yet in the way with him. They had lacked the intelligence to create a sympathetic industrial mentality, and the conscience to establish a standard of justice. They left things alone until the grit of a formless discontent had got into every cog of the industrial machinery. Too late, the employers were now conceding the modest demands that labour had made in the ’eighties and ’nineties, they were trying to accept the offers of dead men; they found themselves face to face with an entirely less accommodating generation. This new labour movement was talking no longer of shorter hours and higher pay but of the social revolution. It did not demand better treatment from the capitalist; it called him a profiteer and asked him to vanish from the body politic. It organized strikes now not to alter the details of its working conditions as its predecessor had done, but in order to end the system by making it impossible. In Great Britain as on the Continent, the younger generation of labour was no longer asking to have the harness that bound it to the old order made easier and lighter; it was asking for a new world.

The new movement seemed to men of Oswald’s generation to come as thunderstorms will sometimes come, as the militant suffragette had seemed to come, suddenly out of a clear sky. But it was far more ominous than the suffragette movement, for while that made one simple explicit demand, this demanded nothing short of a new economic order. It asked for everything and would be content with nothing. It was demanding from an old habitual system the supreme feat of reconstruction. Short of that vague general reconstruction it promised no peace. Higher wages would not pacify it; shorter hours would not pacify it. It threatened sabotage of every sort, and a steady, incessant broadening antagonism of master and man. Peter, half sympathetic and half critical, talked about it to Oswald one day.

“They all say, ’I’m a Rebel!’” said Peter. “’Rebel’ is their cant word.”

“Yes, but rebel against what?”

“Oh! the whole system.”

“They have votes.”

“They get humbugged, they say. They do, you know. The party system is a swindle, and everybody understands that. Why don’t we clean it up? P.R.’s the only honest method. They don’t understand how it is rigged, but they know it is rigged. When you talk about Parliament they laugh.”

“But they have their Unions.”

“They don’t trust their leaders. They say they are got at. They say they are old-fashioned and bluffed by the politicians.... They are....”

“Then what do they want?”

“Just to be out of all this. They are bored to tears by their work, by the world they have to live in, by the pinched mean lives they have to lead—in the midst of plenty and luxury—bored by the everlasting dulness and humbug of it all.”

“But how are they going to alter it?”

“That’s all vague. Altogether vague. Cole and Mellor and those Cambridge chaps preach Guild Socialism to them, but I don’t know how far they take it in—except that they agree that profit is unnecessary. But the fundamental fact is just blind boredom and the desire to smash up things. Just on the off chance of their coming better. The employer has been free to make the world for them, and this is the world he has made. Damn him! That’s how they look at it. They are bored by his face, bored by his automobile, bored by his knighthood, bored by his country house and his snob of a wife——”

“But what can they do?”

“Make things impossible.”

“They can’t run things themselves.”

“They aren’t convinced of that. Anyhow if they smash up things the employer goes first, and he’s the chap they seem to be principally after——”

Peter reflected. Then he gave a modern young Englishman’s view of the labour conflict. “The employers have been pretty tidy asses not to see that their workpeople get a better, more amusing life than they do. It was their business and their interest to do so. It could have been managed easily. But they’re so beastly disloyal. And so mean. They not only sweat labour themselves but they won’t stir a finger to save it from jerry-built housing, bad provisioning, tally-men, general ugliness, bad investments, rotten insurance companies—every kind of rotten old thing. Any one may help kill _their_ sheep. They’ve got no gratitude to their workers. They won’t even amuse them. Why couldn’t they set up decent theatres for them, and things like that? It’s so stupid of them. These employers are the most dangerous class in the community. There’s enough for every one nowadays and over. It’s the first business of employers to see workpeople get their whack. What good are they if they don’t do that? But they never have. Labour is convinced now that they never will. They run about pretending to be landed gentry. They’ve got their people angry and bitter now, they’ve destroyed public confidence in their ways, and it serves them jolly well right if the workmen make things impossible for them. I think they will. I hope they will.”

“But this means breaking up the national industries,” said Oswald. “Where is this sort of thing going to end?”

“Oh! things want shaking up,” said Peter.

“Perhaps,” he added, “one _must_ break up old things before one can hope for new. I suppose the masters won’t let go while they think there’s a chance of holding on....”

He had not a trace left of the Victorian delusion that this might after all be the best of all possible worlds. He thought that our politicians and our captains of industry were very poor muddlers indeed. They drifted. Each one sat in his own works, he said, and ran them for profit without caring a rap whither the whole system was going. Compared with Labour even their poverty of general ideas was amazing. Peter, warming with his subject, walked to and fro across the Pelham Ford lawn beside Oswald, proposing to rearrange industrialism as one might propose to reshuffle a pack of cards.

“But suppose things smash up,” said Oswald.

“Smash up,” did not seem to alarm Peter.

“Nowadays,” said Peter, “so many people read and write, so much has been thought out, there is so big a literature of ideas in existence, that I think we could recover from a very considerable amount of smashing. I’m pro-smash. We have to smash. What holds us back are fixed ideas. Take Profit. We’re used to Profit. Most business is done for profit still. But why should the world tolerate profit at all? It doesn’t stimulate enterprise; it only stimulates knavery. And Capital, Financial Capital is just blackmail by gold—gold rent. We think the state itself even can’t start a business going or employ people without first borrowing money. Why should it borrow money? Why not, for state purposes, create it? Yes. No money would be any good if it hadn’t the state guarantee. Gold standard, fixed money fund, legitimate profits and so on; that’s the sort of fixed idea that gets in the way nowadays. It won’t get out of the way just for reason’s sake. The employers keep on with these old fixed ideas, naturally, because so it is they have been made, but the workpeople believe in them less and less. There must be a smash of some sort—just to shake ideas loose....”

Oswald surveyed his ward. So this was the young man’s theory. Not a bad theory. Fixed Ideas!

“There’s something to be said for this notion of Fixed Ideas,” he said. “Yes. But isn’t this ’I’m a Rebel’ business, isn’t that itself a Fixed Idea?”

“Oh certainly!” said Peter cheerfully. “We poor human beings are always letting our ideas coagulate. That’s where the whole business seems to me so hopeless....”

§ 8

In the ’eighties and ’nineties every question had been positive and objective. “People,” you said, “think so and so. _Is it right?_” That seemed to cover the grounds for discussion in those days. One believed in a superior universal reason to which all decisions must ultimately bow. The new generation was beginning where its predecessors left off, with what had been open questions decided and carried beyond discussion. It was at home now on what had once been battlefields of opinion. The new generation was reading William James and Bergson and Freud and becoming more and more psychological. “People,” it said, “think so and so. Why do they do so?”

So when at last Oswald carried off Peter to Dublin—which he did not do at Easter as he had planned but at Whitsuntide for a mere long week-end—to see at close hand this perplexing Irish Question that seemed drifting steadily and uncontrollably towards bloodshed, he found that while he was asking “who is in the right and who is in the wrong here? Who is most to blame and who should have the upper hand?” Peter was asking with a terrible impartiality, “Why are _all_ these people talking nonsense?” and “Why have they got their minds and affairs into this dangerous mess?” Sir Horace Plunkett, Peter had a certain toleration for; but it was evident he suspected A.E. Peter did not talk very much, but he listened with a bright scepticism to brilliant displays of good talk—he had never heard such good anecdotal talk before—and betrayed rather than expressed his conviction that Nationalism, Larkinism, Sinn Feinism, Ulsterism and Unionism were all insults to the human intelligence, material for the alienist rather than serious propositions.

It wasn’t that he felt himself to be in possession of any conclusive solution, or that he obtruded his disbelief with any sense of superiority. In spite of his extreme youth he did not for a moment assume the attitude of a superior person. Life was evidently troubling him profoundly, and he was realizing that there was no apparent answer to many of his perplexities. But he was at least trying hard to get an answer. What shocked him in the world of Dublin was its manifest disinclination to get any answer to anything. They jeered at people who sought solutions. They liked the fun of disorder; it gave more scope for their irrepressible passion for character study. He began to recognize one particular phrase as the keynote of Dublin’s animation: “Hev ye hurrd the letest?”

On the Sunday afternoon of their stay in Dublin, Powys motored them through the city by way of Donnybrook and so on round the bay to Howth to see the view from Howth Head. Powys drove with a stray guest beside him. Behind, Peter imparted impressions to Oswald.

“I don’t like these high walls,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a lot of high walls.... It’s just as if they all shut themselves in from one another.”

“Fixed Ideas, Peter?”

“They _are_ rather like Fixed Ideas. I suppose high walls are fun to climb over and throw things over. But—it’s uncivilized.”

“Everybody,” grumbled Peter, “is given to fixed ideas, but the Irish have ’em for choice. All this rot about Ireland a Nation and about the Harp, which isn’t properly their symbol, and the dear old Green Flag which isn’t properly their colour!... They can’t believe in that stuff nowadays.... But _can_ they? In our big world? And about being a Black Protestant and pretending Catholics are poison, or the other way round. What are Protestants and Catholics now?... Old dead squabbles.... Dead as Druids.... Keeping up all that bickering stuff, when a child of eight ought to know nowadays that the Christian God started out to be a universal, charitable God.... If Christ came to Dublin the Catholics and Protestants would have a free fight to settle which was to crucify Him....”

“It’s the way with them,” said Oswald. “We’ve got to respect Irish opinion.”

“It doesn’t respect itself. Everywhere else in the world, wherever we have been, there’s been at least something like the germ of an idea of a new life. But here! When you get over here you realize for the first time that England is after all a living country trying to get on to something—compared with this merry-go-round.... It’s exactly like a merry-go-round churning away. It’s the atmosphere of a country fair. An Irishman hasn’t any idea of a future at all, so far as I can see—except that perhaps his grandchildren will tell stories of what a fine fellow he was....”

The automobile halted for a moment at cross roads, and the finger-post was in Erse characters.

“Look at _that!_” said Peter with genuine exasperation. “And hardly a Dubliner knows fifty words of the language! It’s foolery. If we were Irish I suppose we should smother London with black-letter. We should go on pretending that we, too, were still Catholics and Protestants. The pseudo-Protestants would hang Smithfield with black on account of the martyrs, and the pseudo-Catholics would come and throw the meat about on Fridays. Chesterton and Belloc would love it anyhow.”...

Oswald was not sure of the extent of Peter’s audience. “The susceptibilities of a proud people, Peter,” he whispered, with his eye on the back of their host.

“Bother their susceptibilities. Much they care for _our_ susceptibilities. The worst insult you can offer a grown-up man is to humour him,” said Peter. “What’s the good of pretending to be sympathetic with all this Wearing of the Green. It’s like our White Rose League. Let ’em do it by all means if they want to, but don’t let’s pretend we think it romantic and beautiful and all the rest of it. It’s just posing and dressing up, and it’s a nuisance, Nobby. All Dublin is posing and dressing up and playing at rebellion, and so is all Ulster. The Volunteers of the eighteenth century all over again. It’s like historical charades. And they’ve pointed loaded guns at each other. Only idiots point loaded guns. Why can’t we English get out of it all, and leave them to pose and dress up and then tell anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes about it until they are sick of it? If ever they are sick of it. Let them have their Civil War if they want it; let them keep on with Civil Wars for ever; what has it got to do with us?”

“You’re a Home Ruler then,” said Oswald.

“I don’t see that we English do any good here at all. What are we here for anyhow? The Castle’s just another Fixed Idea, something we haven’t the mental vigour to clear away. Nobody does any good here. We’re not giving them new ideas, we’re not unifying them, we’re not letting Ireland out into the world—which is what she wants—we’re not doing anything but just holding on.”

“What’s that?” said Powys suddenly over his shoulder.

“Peter’s declaring for Home Rule,” said Oswald.

“After his glimpse of the slums of Dublin?”

“It’s out of malice. He wants to leave Irishmen to Irishmen.”

“Ulster says _No_!” said Powys. “Tell him to talk to Ulster,” and resumed a conversation he had interrupted with the man beside him.

At the corner where Nassau Street runs into Grafton Street they were held up for some lengthy minutes by a long procession that was trailing past Trinity College and down Grafton Street. It had several bands, and in the forefront of it went National Volunteers in green uniforms, obviously for the most part old soldiers; they were followed by men with green badges, and then a straggle of Larkinites and various Friendly Societies with their bands and banners, and then by a long dribble of children and then some workgirls, and then a miscellany of people who had apparently fallen in as the procession passed because they had nothing else to do. As a procession it was tedious rather than impressive. The warm afternoon—it was the last day in May—had taken the good feeling out of the walkers. Few talked, still fewer smiled. The common expression was a long-visaged discontent, a gloomy hostile stare at the cars and police cordon, an aimless disagreeableness. They were all being very stern and resolute about they did not quite know what. They meant to show that Dublin could be as stern and resolute as Belfast. Between the parts of the procession were lengthy gaps. It was a sunshiny, dusty afternoon, and the legs of the processionists were dusty to the knees, their brows moist, and their lips dry. There was an unhurried air about them of going nowhere in particular. It was evident that many of their banners were heavy. “What’s it all about?” asked Oswald.

“Lord knows,” said Powys impatiently. “It’s just a demonstration.”

“Is that all? Why don’t we cut across now and get on?”

“There’s more coming. Don’t you hear another band?”

“But the police could hold it up for a minute and let all these tramcars and automobiles across.”

“There’d be a fight,” said Powys. “They daren’t.”...

“And I suppose this sort of thing is going on in the north too?” asked Oswald after a pause.

“Oh! everywhere,” said Powys. “Orange or Green. But they’ve got more guns up north.”

“These people don’t really want Ireland a Nation and all the rest of it,” said Peter.

“_Oh?_” said Powys, staring at him.

“Well, look at them,” said Peter. “You can see by their faces. They’re just bored to death. I suppose most people _are_ bored to death in Ireland. There’s nothing doing. England just holds them up, I suppose. And it’s an island—rather off the main line. There’s nothing to get people’s minds off these endless, dreary old quarrels. It’s all they have. But they’re bored by it....”

“And that’s why we talk nothing but anecdotes, Peter, eh?” Powys grinned.

“Well, you _do_ talk a lot of anecdote,” said Peter, who hadn’t realized the sharpness of his host’s hearing.

“Oh! we do. I don’t complain of your seeing it. It isn’t your discovery. Have you read or heard the truest words that were ever said of Ireland—by that man Shaw? In _John Bull’s Other Island_.... That laughing scene about the pig. ’Nowhere else could such a scene cause a burst of happiness among the people.’ That’s the very guts of things here; eh?”

“It’s his best play,” said Oswald, avoiding too complete an assent.

“It gets there,” Powys admitted, “anyhow. The way all them fools come into the shanty and snigger.”...

The last dregs of the procession passed reluctantly out of the way. It faded down Grafton Street into a dust cloud and a confusion of band noises. The policemen prepared to release the congested traffic. Peter leaned out to count the number of trams and automobiles that had been held up. He was still counting when the automobile turned the corner.

They shook Dublin off and spun cheerfully through the sunshine along the coast road to Howth. It was a sparkling bright afternoon, and the road was cheerful with the prim happiness of many couples of Irish lovers. But that afternoon peace was the mask worn by one particular day. If the near future could have cast a phantom they would have seen along this road a few weeks ahead of them the gun-runners of Howth marching to the first foolish bloodshed in Dublin streets....

They saw Howth Castle, made up now by Lutyens to look as it ought to have looked and never had looked in the past. The friend Powys had brought wanted to talk to some of the castle people, and while these two stayed behind Oswald and Peter went on, between high hedges of clipped beech and up a steep, winding path amidst great bushes of rhododendron in full flower to the grey rock and heather of the crest. They stood in the midst of one of the most beautiful views in the world. Northward they looked over Ireland’s Eye at Lambay and the blue Mourne mountains far away; eastward was the lush green of Meath, southward was the long beach of the bay sweeping round by Dublin to Dalkey, backed by more blue mountains that ran out eastward to the Sugar Loaf. Below their feet the pale castle clustered amidst its rich greenery, and to the east, the level blue sea sustained one single sunlit sail. It was rare that the sense of beauty flooded Peter, as so often it flooded Joan, but this time he was transported.

“But this is altogether beautiful,” he said, like one who is taken by surprise.

And then as if to himself: “How beautiful life might be! How splendid life might be!”

Oswald was standing on a ledge below Peter, and with his back to him. He waited through a little interval to see if Peter would say any more. Then he pricked him with “only it isn’t.”

“No,” said Peter, with the sunlight gone out of his voice. “It isn’t.”

He went on talking after a moment’s reflection.

“It’s as if we were hypnotized and couldn’t get away from mean things, beastly suspicions, and stale quarrels. I suppose we are still half apes. I suppose our brains set too easily and rapidly. I suppose it’s easy to quarrel yet and still hard to understand. We take to jealousy and bitterness as ducklings take to water. Think of that stale, dusty procession away there!”

Oswald’s old dream vision of the dark forest came back to his mind. “Is there no way out, Peter?” he said.

“If some great idea would take hold of the world!” said Peter....

“There have been some great ideas,” said Oswald....

“If it would take hold of one’s life,” Peter finished his thought....

“There has been Christianity,” said Oswald.

“Christianity!” Peter pointed at the distant mist that was Dublin. “Sour Protestants,” he said, “and dirty priests setting simple people by the ears.”

“But that isn’t true Christianity.”

“There isn’t true Christianity,” said Peter compactly....

“Well, there’s love of country then,” said Oswald.

“That Dublin corporation is the most patriotic and nationalist in the world. Fierce about it. And it’s got complete control there. It’s green in grain. No English need apply.... From the point of view of administration that town is a muck heap—for patriotic crowings. Look at their dirty, ill-paved streets. Look at their filthy slums! See how they let their blessed nation’s children fester and die!”

“There are bigger ideas than patriotism. There are ideas of empire, the Pax Britannica.”

“Carson smuggling guns.”

“Well, is there nothing? Do _you_ know of nothing?”

Oswald turned on his ward for the reply.

“There’s a sort of idea, I suppose.”

“But what idea?”

“There’s an idea in our minds.”

“But what is it, Peter?”

“Call it Civilization,” Peter tried.

“I believe,” he went on, weighing his words carefully, “as you believe really, in the Republic of Mankind, in universal work for a common end—for freedom, welfare, and beauty. Haven’t you taught me that?”

“_Have_ I taught you that?”

“It seems to me to be the commonsense aim for all humanity. You’re awake to it. You’ve awakened me to it and I believe in it. But most of this world is still deep in its old Fixed Ideas, walking in its sleep. And it won’t wake up. It won’t wake up.... What can we _do_? We’ve got to a sort of idea, it’s true. But here are these Irish, for example, naturally wittier and quicker than you or I, hypnotized by Orange and Green, by Protestant and Catholic, by all these stale things—drifting towards murder. It’s murder is coming here. You can smell the bloodshed coming on the air—and we can’t do a thing to prevent it. Not a thing. The silliest bloodshed it will be. The silliest bloodshed the world has ever seen. We can’t do a thing to wake them up....

“We’re _in_ it,” said Peter in conclusion. “We can’t even save ourselves.”

“I’ve been wanting to get at your political ideas for a long time,” said Oswald. “You really think, Peter, there might be a big world civilization, a world republic, did you call it?—without a single slum hidden in it anywhere, with the whole of mankind busy and happy, the races living in peace, each according to its aptitudes, a world going on—going on steady and swift to still better things.”

“How can one believe anything else? Don’t you?”

“But how do we get there, Peter?”

“Oh, how do we get there?” echoed Peter. “How do we get there?”

He danced a couple of steps with vexation.

“I don’t _know_, Nobby,” he cried. “I don’t know. I can’t find the way. I’m making a mess of my life. I’m not getting on with my work. You _know_ I’m not.... Either we’re mad or this world is. Here’s all these people in Ireland letting a solemn humbug of a second-rate lawyer with a heavy chin and a lumpish mind muddle them into a civil war—and _that’s_ reality! That’s life! The solemn League and Covenant—copied out of old history books! That’s being serious! And over there in England, across the sea, muddle and muck and nonsense indescribable. Oh! and we’re _in_ it!”

“But aren’t there big movements afoot, Peter, social reform, the labour movement, the emancipation of women, big changes like that?”

“Only big discontents.”

“But doesn’t discontent make the change?”

“It’s just boredom that’s got them. It isn’t any disposition to _make_. Labour is bored, women are bored, all Ireland is bored. I suppose Russia is bored and Germany is getting bored. She is boring all the world with her soldiering. How bored they must be in India too—by us! The day bores its way round the earth now—like a mole. Out of sight of the stars. But boring people doesn’t mean making a new world. It just means boring on to decay. It just means one sort of foolish old fixed idea rubbing and sawing against another, until something breaks down.... Oh! I want to get out of all this. I don’t _like_ this world of ours. I want to get into a world awake. I’m young and I’m greedy. I’ve only got one life to live, Nobby.... I want to spend it where something is being made. Made for good and all. Where clever men can do something more than sit overlong at meals and tell spiteful funny stories. Where there’s something better to do than play about with one’s brain and viscera!...”

§ 9

In the days when Peter was born the Anglican system held the Empire with apparently invincible feelings of security and self-approval; it possessed the land, the church, the army, the foreign office, the court. Such people as Arthur and Dolly were of no more account than a stray foreign gipsy by the wayside. When Peter came of age the Anglican system still held on to army, foreign office, court, land, and church, but now it was haunted by a sense of an impalpable yet gigantic antagonism that might at any time materialize against it. It had an instinctive perception of the near possibility of a new world in which its base prides could have no adequate satisfaction, in which its authority would be flouted, its poor learning despised, and its precedents disregarded. The curious student of the history of England in the decade before the Great War will find the clue to what must otherwise seem a hopeless tangle in the steady, disingenuous, mischievous antagonism of the old Anglican system to every kind of change that might bring nearer the dreaded processes of modernization. Education, and particularly university, reform was blocked, the most necessary social legislation fought against with incoherent passion, the lightest, most reasonable taxation of land or inheritance resisted.

Wherever the old system could find allies it snatched at them and sought to incorporate them with itself. It had long since taken over the New Imperialism with its tariff schemes and its spirit of financial adventure. It had sneered aloof when the new democracy of the elementary schools sought to read and think; it had let any casual adventurer to supply that reading; but now the creator of _Answers_ and _Comic Cuts_ ruled the _Times_ and sat in the House of Lords. It was a little doubtful still whether he was of the new order or the old, whether he was not himself an instalment of revolution, whether the Tories had bought him or whether he had bought them, but at any rate he did for a time seem to be serving the ends of reaction.

To two sources of strength the Anglicans clung with desperate resolution, India and Ulster. From India the mass of English people were shut and barred off as completely as any foreigners could have been. India was the preserve of the “ruling class.” To India the good Anglican, smitten by doubts, chilled by some disrespectful comment or distressed by some item of progress achieved, could turn, leaving all thoughts of new and unpleasant things behind him; there in what he loved to believe was the “unchanging East” he could recover that sense of walking freely and authoritatively upon an abundance of inferior people which was so necessary to his nature, and which was being so seriously impaired at home. The institution of caste realized his secret ideals. From India he and his womankind could return refreshed, to the struggle with Liberalism and all the powers of democratic irreverence in England. And Ulster was a still more precious stronghold for this narrow culture. From the fastness of Ulster they could provoke the restless temperament of the Irish to a thousand petty exasperations of the English, and for Ulster, “loyal Ulster,” they could appeal to the generous partisanship of the English against their native liberalism. More and more did it become evident that Ulster was the keystone of the whole Anglican ascendancy; to that they owed their grip upon British politics, upon army, navy, and education; they traded—nay! they existed—upon the open Irish sore. With Ireland healed and contented England would be lost to them. England would democratize, would Americanize. The Anglicans would vanish out of British life as completely as the kindred Tories vanished out of America at the close of the eighteenth century. And when at last, after years of confused bickering, a Home Rule Bill became law, and peace between the two nations in Ireland seemed possible, the Anglicans stepped at once from legal obstruction to open treason and revolt. The arming of Ulster to resist the decision of Parliament was incited from Great Britain, it was supported enthusiastically by the whole of the Unionist party in Great Britain, its headquarters were in the west end of London, and the refusal of General Gough to carry out the precautionary occupation of Ulster was hailed with wild joy in every Tory home. It was not a genuine popular movement, it was an artificial movement for which the landowning church people of Ireland and England were chiefly responsible. It was assisted by tremendous exertions on the part of the London yellow press. When Sir Edward Carson went about Ulster in that warm June of 1914, reviewing armed men, promising “more Mausers,” and pouring out inflammatory speeches, he was manifestly preparing bloodshed. The old Tory system had reached a point where it had to kill men or go.

And it did not mean to go; it meant to kill. It meant to murder men.

If youth and the new ideas were to go on with the world, the price was blood.

Ulster was a little country; altogether the dispute did not affect many thousands of men, but except for the difference in scale there was indeed hardly any difference at all between this scramble towards civil conflict in Ireland and the rush, swift and noiseless, that was now carrying central Europe towards immeasurable bloodshed. To kill and mutilate and waste five human beings in a petty riot is in its essence no less vile a crime than to kill and mutilate and waste twenty millions. While the British Tories counted their thousands, the Kaiser and his general staff reckoned in millions; while the British “loyalists” were smuggling a few disused machine-guns from Germany, Krupp’s factories were turning out great guns by the hundred. But the evil thing was the same evil thing; a system narrow and outworn, full of a vague fear of human reason and the common sense of mankind, full of pride and greed and the insolent desire to trample upon men, a great system of false assumptions and fixed ideas, oppressed by a thirsty necessity for reassurance, was seeking the refreshment of loud self-assertion and preparing to drink blood. The militarist system that centred upon Potsdam had clambered to a point where it had to kill men or go. The Balkans were the Ulster of Europe. If once this Balkan trouble settled down, an age of peace might dawn for Europe, and how would Junkerdom fare then, and where would Frau Bertha sell her goods? How would the War Lord justify his glories to the social democrat?...

But Oswald, like most Englishmen, was not attending very closely to affairs upon the Continent. He was preoccupied with the unreason of Ulster.

Recently he had had a curious interview with Lady Charlotte Sydenham, and her white excited face and blazing blue eyes insisted now upon playing the part of mask to the Ulster spirit in his thoughts. She had had to call him in because she had run short of ready money through over-subscription to various schemes for arming the northern patriots. She had sat at her writing-desk with her cap a little over one eye, as though it was a military cap, and the tuft of reddish hair upon her cheek more like bristles than ever, and he had walked about the room contriving disagreeable things to say to her after his wont. He was disinclined to let her have more money, he confessed; she ought to have had more sense, he said, than to write off big cheques, cheques beyond her means, in support of this seditious mischief. If she asked these people who had taken her money, probably they would let her have some back to go on with.

This enraged her nicely, as he had meant it to do. She scolded at him. A nice Sydenham he was, to see his King insulted and his country torn apart. He who had once worn the Queen’s uniform. Thank God! she herself was a Parminter and belonged to a sounder strain!

“It’s you who are insulting the King,” Oswald interpolated, “trying to defy his Acts in Parliament.”

“_Oh!_” cried Lady Charlotte, banging the desk with her freckled fist. “Oh! Parliament! I’d shoot ’em down! First that vile Budget, then the attack on the Lords.”

“They passed the Parliament Act,” said Oswald.

“To save themselves from being swamped in a horde of working-men peers—sitting there in their caps with their dirty boots on the cushions. Lord Keir Hardie! You’ll want Lord Chimneysweep and Viscount Cats-meatman next.... Then came that abominable Insurance Act—one thing worse than another! Setting class against class and giving them ideas! Then we gave up South Africa to the Boers again! What did we fight for? Didn’t we buy the country with our blood? Why, my poor cousin Rupert Parminter was a prisoner in Pretoria for a whole year—thirteen weary months! For nothing! And now Ireland is to be handed over to priests and rebels. To _Irishmen_! And I—I am not to lift a finger, not a finger, to save my King and my Country and my God—when they are all going straight to the Devil!”

“H’m,” said Oswald, rustling the counterfoils in his hand. “But you _have_ been lifting your finger, you know!”

“If I could give more——”

“You _have_ given more.”

“I’d give it.”

“Won’t Grimes make a friendly advance? But I suppose you’re up to the neck with Grimes.... I wonder what interest that little swindler charges you.”

The old lady could not meet the mild scrutiny of his eye. “You come here and grin and mock while your country is being handed over to a gang of God-knows-whos!” she said, staring at her inkpot.

“To whom probably it belongs as much as it does to me,” said Oswald.

“Thank God the army is sound,” said Aunt Charlotte. “Thank God this doesn’t end with your Parliaments! Mark my words, Oswald! On the day they raise their Home Rule flag in Ireland there will be men shot down—men shot down. A grim lesson.”

“Some perhaps killed by your own particular cheques,” said Oswald. “Who knows?”

“I hope so,” said Lady Charlotte, with a quiver of deep passion in her voice. “I hope so sincerely. If I could think I had caused the death of one of those traitors.... If it could be Lloyd George!”...

But that was too much apparently even for Lady Charlotte to hope for.

Oswald, when he had come to her, had fully intended to let her have money to go on with, but now he was changing his mind. He had thought of her hitherto just as a grotesque figure in his life, part of the joke of existence, but now with this worry of the Irish business in his mind he found himself regarding her as something more than an individual. She seemed now to be the accentuated voice of a whole class, the embodiment of a class tradition. He strolled back from the window and stood with his hands deep in his trouser pockets—which always annoyed her—and his head on one side, focusing the lady.

“My dear Aunt,” he said, “what right have you to any voice in politics at all? You know, you’re pretty—ungracious. The world lets you have this money—and you spend it in organizing murder.”

“_The world lets me have this money!_” cried Lady Charlotte, amazed and indignant. “Why!” she roared, “it’s MY money!”

In that instant the tenets of socialism, after a siege lasting a quarter of a century, took complete possession of Oswald’s mind. In that same instant she perceived it. “Any one can see you’re a Liberal and a Socialist yourself,” she cried. “You’d shake hands with Lloyd George tomorrow. Yes, you would. Why poor foolish Vincent made _you_ trustee——! He might have known! _You_ a sailor! A faddy invalid! Mad on blacks. I suppose you’d give your precious Baganda Home Rule next! And him always so sound on the treatment of the natives! Why! he kicked a real judge—a native judge—Inner Temple and all the rest of it—out of his railway compartment. Kicked him. Bustled him out neck and crop. Awayed with him! Oh, if he could see you now! Insulting me! Standing up for all these people, blacks, Irishmen, strikers, anything. Sneering at the dear old Union Jack they want to tear to pieces.”

“Well,” said Oswald as she paused to take breath. “You’ve got yourself into this mess and you must get along now till next quarter day as well as you can. I can’t help you and you don’t deserve to be helped.”

“You’ll not let me spend my own money?”

“You’ve fired off all the money you’re entitled to. You’ll probably kill a constable—or some decent little soldier boy from Devon or Kent.... Good God! Have you _no_ imagination?...”

It was the most rankling encounter he had ever had with her. Either he was losing tolerance for her or she was indeed becoming more noisy and ferocious. She haunted his thoughts for a long time, and his thoughts of her, so intricate is our human composition, were all mixed up with sympathy and remorse for the petty cash troubles in which he had left her....

But what a pampered, evil soul she had always been! Never in all her life had she made or grown or got one single good thing for mankind. She had lived in great expensive houses, used up the labour of innumerable people, bullied servants, insulted poor people, made mischief. She was like some gross pet idol that mankind out of whim kept for the sake of its sheer useless ugliness. He found himself estimating the weight of food and the tanks of drink she must have consumed, the carcases of oxen and sheep, the cartloads of potatoes, the pyramids of wine bottles and stout bottles she had emptied. And she had no inkling of gratitude to the careless acquiescent fellow-creatures who had suffered her so long and so abundantly. At the merest breath upon her clumsy intolerable dignity she clamoured for violence and cruelty and killing, and would not be appeased. An old idol! And she was only one of a whole class of truculent, illiterate harridans who were stirring up bad blood in half the great houses of London, and hurrying Britain on to an Irish civil war. No! She wasn’t as funny as she seemed. Not nearly so funny. She was too like too many people for that. Too like most people?

Did that go too far?

After all there was a will for good in men; even this weary Irish business had not been merely a conflict of fixed ideas, there had been, too, real efforts on the part of countless people to get the tangle straightened out. There were creative forces at work in men—even in Ireland. And also there was youth.

His thoughts came back to the figure of Peter, standing on the head of Howth and calling for a new world.

“I’ll pit my Peter,” he said, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in creation.... In the long run, that is.”

He was blind—was not all Europe blind?—to the vast disaster that hung over him and his and the whole world, to the accumulated instability of the outworn social and political façade that now tottered to a crash. Massacre, famine, social confusion, world-wide destruction, long years of death and torment were close at hand; the thinnest curtain of time, a mere month of blue days now, hung between him and the thunderous overture of the world disaster.

“I pit my Peter,” he repeated, “against all the Aunt Charlottes in creation.”

§ 10

All novels that run through the years of the great war must needs be political novels and fragments of history. In August, 1914, that detachment of human lives from history, that pretty picaresque disorder of experiences, that existence like a fair with ten thousand different booths, which had gone on for thousands of years, came to an end. We were all brought into a common drama. Something had happened so loud and insistent that all lives were focused upon it; it became a leading factor in every life, the plot of every story, the form of all our thoughts. It so thrust itself upon mankind that the very children in the schools about the world asked “why has this thing happened?” and could not live on without some answer. The Great War summoned all human beings to become political animals, time would brook no further evasion. August, 1914, was the end of adventure and mental fragmentation for the species; it was the polarization of mankind.