Chapter FOUR: In a Gilded Cage

For remember (this our children shall know: we are too near for that
knowledge)
Not our mere astonied camps, but Council and Creed and College—
All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us—
Have felt the effects of the lesson we got—an advantage no money could
buy us!

. . . . . . .

It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to
use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!
So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall
get—
We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!

RUDYARD KIPLING: _The
Lesson_.

1

My return home from Crawleigh Abbey brought to my mind the reappearance of the small boy in _Punch_, who, finding his running-away unremarked at the end of one whole day, drew attention to it by observing that his parents had the same old cat. For a single moment, as O’Rane and I reached Salisbury Plain, I had remembered that the world was revolving in sublime unconcern at my private tragedy; then a starless night of misery enveloped me once more. In London, a fortnight later, I was amazed to find letters and messages, proofs and manuscripts from people who seemed still interested in unemployment or reparations, in the fate of Ireland or the coalition.

Now and for many weeks I thought only of new means to win back a woman who had become a stranger to me. After her first declaration of “indifference, utter indifference”, Barbara never weakened the effect of her action by talking about it; when I had influenza, she nursed me as she would have nursed any man who had the misfortune to fall sick in her house; when she caught my influenza and aggravated it with pleurisy, she allowed me to take her abroad to recuperate. No two acquaintances, sharing the same house, could have lived in greater harmony; and no woman could have devised a keener torment than by treating lover, husband or friend as an acquaintance.

Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .

“_I want to see you about these articles of yours_ . . .”, wrote Bertrand.

“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash predicted.

“_I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head_,” Sonia lamented.

“‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in astonishment.

2

It is a tribute, I think, to our loyalty in public that my marriage to Barbara was commonly quoted at this time as one of the very few successful unions in an age of confessed failures and desperate escapes. Had I imagined at the beginning that our unreal separation could drag on for two years, the myth of our blissful harmony would soon have been exploded. As it was, we drifted. I thought by day, I dreamed by night, of a romantic reconciliation that never came. There were moments when I fancied that Barbara, with her passion for dramatizing life, forgot her boredom in the excitement of martyrdom. On some plea, which I do not remember, she gave up entertaining; and, while the young “London of the restoration”—in Bertrand’s phrase—went leaderless, she had the barren pleasure of feeling herself wasted.

By degrees which I cannot recall I was driven to spend more and more time at my office and to dine more and more often at a club. Her indifference spread beyond me to all the men and women who in other days had interested her; it culminated in her dispassionate efforts to interest her husband in some other woman. I returned home one evening to be told that Ivy Gaymer had fled to us for sanctuary and that Barbara was waiting for me to say whether we should send her back to her husband or communicate with Mr. Justice Maitland or wait helplessly for something to turn up. As Ivy was already in bed, we could hardly prick her into the street at midnight; and next morning she ruled out our first two courses by declaring that she would never again enter the house of a man who intrigued with other women under her nose and that her father’s advice and sympathy were limited to the triumphant question: what else could any one expect?

We decided to wait for something to turn up. I did not want to be inhospitable, but I wanted still less to hear Barbara talking about my “little _protégée_”. After a week or two I suggested that there were hotels in plenty and that Ivy was not without money. Barbara confined herself to saying that, as I had insisted on the creature’s staying on in the first instance, it was now my delicate task to evict her. Following the cowardly expedient of writing what I was afraid to utter by word of mouth, I sent a note to Ivy’s room one night, asking what her plans were; we should, I said, be going down to Crawleigh for Easter. By ill luck, she was still up; and her reply was delivered from the foot of my bed, where she sat, smoking cigarettes, in scantier clothes than women usually wear in public. If we kept the house open, she would not in the least mind staying on by herself; her solicitors were advising a divorce; it was saintly of us to take her in; and she would not have troubled us if she had not been in fear of her life. The interview was ended damagingly by Barbara, who came in to insist maternally that, if Ivy and I wanted to talk, she must put on a warm dressing-gown.

Though my door was locked against similar conferences in the future, my next attempt was no more fortunate. Ivy agreed that she must go and then broke into piteous weeping. I comforted her as well as Barbara’s expression of scornful amusement permitted; and, when the weeping broke out afresh as Ivy began to pack, I recollected an overdue appointment at my office. On my return, our guest was still in possession.

“She’s cried herself sick,” Barbara told me. “You can say she must go, George, or you can say she may stop on; but it’s cruel to keep making her cry.”

“I want her to go,” I said, without enlarging the field of debate.

“It was a pity you asked her in the first place, if you were going to turn her out.”

“I fancy she asked herself.”

“I thought she was a passion of yours,” said Barbara in faint surprise. “You made me go to her wedding, when I hardly knew her.”

“At O’Rane’s request: because her father was being so difficult.”

There was a pause; then Barbara shrugged her shoulders.

“I think she’s rather in love with you,” she murmured.

“That’s very flattering,” I said, “but it doesn’t make things any easier. Her affections are quickly aroused. First it was Eric, then Gaymer; now . . .”

“You don’t believe it? George, you’re sometimes rather unobservant. Why d’you think she came _here_ of all places?”

“I should think she was banking on the softness of your heart or of my head,” I answered.

I hardly knew whether to be surprised or not when I found Ivy still with us next day, but I made no further attempt to dislodge her. At the end of the week Barbara went to Crawleigh and I telephoned for a room at the Eclectic Club. New developments in Ireland kept me tied to the office at the last moment; and I did not choose that my wife or Ivy’s husband should be able to say that the two of us had been alone together. After four-and-twenty hours’ solitude Ivy discovered that it was possible to live in an hotel without being tracked by her drunken and homicidal lord; and the incident closed when Barbara came into my room, on the night of her return from the Abbey, with a brief letter of thanks.

“You’d get tired of her very soon,” she said judicially, as though I still needed to be saved from myself. “So would any man. That’s why I begged Eric not to marry her. I believe you’d be happier, though, if you found some woman who really interested you.”

“That advice is more suitable for a bachelor than for a married man,” I pointed out.

Barbara walked to the door in silence, then paused with her fingers on the handle.

“And how long is this going on?,” she asked with a sigh of utter exhaustion.

“You alone can say that,” I replied.

The tragic farce had been running for six months and was to run for another eighteen before the farce was eliminated and only the tragedy remained. Without regular employment, I should have gone out of my mind; and I am thankful that my uncle’s increasing infirmities threw ever more and more of our work on my shoulders.

It was in the spring of 1921 that he despaired openly and finally of the existing government; it was in the summer that he called for a change.

“Though, mark you, there’s not another man who could have done what George has!,” cried Bertrand with the generous appreciation that Jack Sheppard might have exhibited towards Dick Turpin. “After two years of power he’s made a tumbledown peace that satisfies no one. He _hasn’t_ hanged the kaiser; he _hasn’t_ made Germany pay for the war. The League of Nations, which we were promised, _isn’t_ functioning; he calls a new conference every few weeks to settle finally the problems which were finally settled at Versailles. If that isn’t an achievement . . .”

“Oh, admitted!,” I said. “I’m thinking about the day of reckoning.”

We were walking slowly along Knightsbridge on our way to one of the weekly editorial dinners; and, as we approached the French Embassy, I crossed the road for fear of encountering Lucien de Grammont. My shoulders were not broad enough to support the load of obloquy which he kept in reserve for our few, uneasy meetings; and, though I stated candidly that the French were now the chief obstacles to peace, I could not persuade Lucien that it was the prime minister and not the humble editor of an obscure review who had coaxed the French to open their mouths and shut their eyes at Versailles. Now that no sweetmeats were to be had, the French were threatening to undertake the search themselves.

This was the first bill to be met on the day of reckoning; but I was not prepared to say that it would be the last or the heaviest. In Ireland, the practice of wholesale murder and destruction was being met with reprisals in kind. Of India and Egypt it is enough to say that we knew very little, that all we knew was bad and that we were not allowed to print all we knew.

“That’s my point,” said Bertrand with cynical complacency. “Any one of these things would have brought down a government in old days. Take taxation! Take unemployment!”

“My one consolation,” I broke in, “is that _no_ man, even if damned fools call him a ‘little wizard’, can cope with all that at the same moment.”

“I’ll write you an article on _The First Duty of Government_,” Bertrand promised. “And that, some of these gentry may be surprised to hear, is . . . to _govern_.”

3

My most vivid memory of my uncle’s subsequent diatribe was that I declined to publish it. In Ireland or France, where irony is understood, it would have gone with a swing; but we were unpopular enough already without assailing the cherished conviction of the English that they have a natural talent for self-government. And this is what Bertrand attempted with artful citations from any convenient speech in which an English publicist had asserted that Dervishes, Hottentots, Andaman Islanders or even Irishmen were unfit to govern themselves. Could darkest Africa shew such a record of misrule as we had at our doors? Had Egypt plunged to bankruptcy with greater recklessness than we displayed? By the standard of our Indian crimes and blunders, was not Abdul the Damned unjustly damned? The English were mistaken, but it was not too late to repair the mistake; and my uncle proposed in conclusion that the United States should lend Mr. Herbert Hoover for six months to organize and run the British Empire Protectorate.

“It won’t do, Bertrand,” I said.

“But isn’t it true?”

“It’s too true.”

That, however, was not to say that the English had enough detachment to relish the truth underlying the irony. Roger Dainton, on the eve of signing the Ulster covenant, told me—as an Englishman—that the Irish would never be fit for independence till they had acquired respect for law; I had seen Violet Loring whiten to the lips at the report of a lynching in some southern state and then regain her colour in a spasm of indignation that a Quaker had not been shot for refusing to enter the army. Collectively, I had watched the people of London—and, for all I know, the people of England outdid them—exhibiting, at the time of the Pemberton-Billing case, a ferocious credulity that was not exceeded by the French in the Dreyfus trial.

“Well, write your own damned article,” said Bertrand. “If you think you know these people . . .”

I believe that in one respect I understand the English, among whom I was brought up, better than Bertrand, to whom they were always a race of despised aliens. What they lack in imagination they make up in a queer political instinct. Every one at the Eclectic Club was sublimely indifferent, in these days, to the case of Egyptian autonomy; the Amritsar sentences only provoked a desultory discussion whether “damned black men”, as I heard them described by Sir Roger Dainton, would not be all the better for “an occasional dressing-down”. When, however, national bankruptcy was threatened, I encountered an instinctive preference for solvency; and, when refugees from all parts of Ireland flooded England with tales of assassination and counter-assassination, the British liking for order at home grew clamant. I remember carrying back to Seymour Street an official poster in which recruits were invited to “_Join the Royal Air Force and_ _See the World_”; an unofficial hand had appended the grim warning: “_Join the Royal Irish Constabulary and See the Next World_.”

“It’s beyond a joke: that’s what it is,” said Robson, on whom I tried the last of my experiments.

For soul-deadening years, my butler’s sentiment had been expressed, from different angles, by Crawleigh and Bertrand, by O’Rane and Dainton, by _Peace_ and the _Morning Post_. I believe, however, that no change of heart can be effected by one man or one paper. England accepted the reformation and acquiesced in the decapitation of Charles the First when the Robsons of those days—inarticulate and irrational, for the most part, but numerous and determined—decided that the unreformed Catholic Church or the divine right of kings was “beyond a joke”.

“I’ve written my own damned article,” I telephoned to Bertrand. “I think it’s an improvement on yours.”

“You _would_,” he replied.

“I don’t think this government has very long to live,” I added.

The oldest trick in the bag of a political journalist is to find out what policy is going to be followed, to insist vehemently that this policy must be followed and to take credit for having forced his own policy on a vacillating and apathetic government. During the war, Sir John Woburn preached conscription from the moment when his chief spy in the cabinet had revealed that ministers were agreed to bring conscription in: the Press Combine advertised itself for months as the mouthpiece of that opinion which demanded conscription; and, when the first military service act was passed, Woburn stood forth as the giant who had forced the government, in his own phrase, “to give Haig the men”. I have to guard against the temptation to employ this trick in writing of our campaign in 1921. Independently of our prompting, every one was saying that ministers must govern or go; and I only realized how far opinion had swung, when I met the lately ennobled Lord Saltash at a public dinner.

“Well, things are moving,” he began darkly, as he led me to the Turf and Stage and pointed from an unobserved corner of the gallery to Lord Lingfield’s customary table.

I needed a few minutes to penetrate the familiar externals. My cousin Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh was entertaining a party of American revue actresses; Sam Dainton was dancing with Ivy Gaymer; and the inscrutable Gaspard was watching and ministering with his wonted resourcefulness and address. It was like going back to a play at the end of a long run. I felt that they must all of them have been frozen in the same attitude since last I looked down on the top of their heads a year before. The band, which played unceasingly from the moment we arrived to the moment we left, might well have been playing for twelve months on end. It was impossible to think of these sleek heads and slim figures without their Turf and Stage frame, unless you thought of them as the brilliant, glossy chorus of mannequins and salesmen in a musical comedy at the Hilarity in old days. Had they homes? Had they private lives?

“I see Wister is withdrawing the support of his papers from the coalition,” I said.

“Yes, he’s out for an all-conservative ministry,” answered Saltash. “Foreditch put him up to it; and you can see they’re trying to nobble Wilmot Dean for their new ginger-group. The rank-and-file tories don’t want to drive Ll-G. out, though, till they’re sure of keeping him out. And Lingfield, who’s leading the rank-and-file, doesn’t believe they can do it yet, unless Bonar comes back. That’s why he wants a centre party, to include Birkenhead, Winston and that lot. It’s interesting, devilish interesting! The dying lion ain’t dead yet.”

“What line are you taking yourself?,” I asked.

“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition, his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me.

“I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard; and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome.

4

She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance and property.

“We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . .

“I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured.

“If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that Pompeii shall not be buried again?”

I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to revolution and civil war.

“You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic fortunes.”

“I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m seeing that every day in my own work.”

The subject was too big to discuss at midnight; but, as his article was avowedly the preamble to a declaration that he was bent at all costs on saving humanity from the poison of the Lancing inheritance, I warned him that the unemployed might break his windows if they heard that a million a year was going to feed distant Russians when they themselves had not eaten a square meal for twelve months. I asked whether his wife approved of the article, but received no answer. Finally, I returned him his manuscript with a reminder that I could not stultify my weekly predictions of insolvency by proclaiming of a sudden that we were all suffering from too much money.

“I’ll try elsewhere,” said O’Rane without resentment. “I’m sorry, but I’m not surprised. You’re hypnotized by 1914, too, and you think you can avert another eruption by treaties and boards of arbitration. They didn’t stop the war in ’14, George; they never _have_ stopped wars, they never will. If you’d change the course of history, you must change the heart of man.”

“The more I study the heart of man . . .” I was beginning.

“It changes daily,” O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution of wealth.”

“Write me an article on that theme,” I said, “and I’ll publish it gladly.”

My invitation and promise were forgotten by O’Rane, I imagine, as quickly as I forgot his demand that I should find a new spirit moving on the face of the waters. When I reached Fetter Lane next morning, I was greeted by Spence-Atkins with news which made Saltash’s predictions obsolete and O’Rane’s researches premature. With or without our reminder that the business of a government was to govern, ministers were hatching a new Irish policy. Like most Irish policies, it could be guaranteed to divide England even if it failed to unite Ireland; and I felt then and later that the decay of the coalition set in on this day. Like all new moves in the Irish game at this time, it was certain to keep me in London when I wanted to take Barbara to Scotland.

The result of the new negotiations has passed into history; and from first to last I was narrowly preoccupied with their effect on my own fortunes. If the south-west of Ireland became habitable again, I was resolved to make it my home; and, at the end of many months’ parleying, I was wakened by a telephone-message from my uncle to say that a settlement had been reached. After threatening reconquest, the government had ascertained that to “reconquer” Ireland would cost as much and take as long as the last South African war; those who had preached coercion changed their text to conciliation; and, as I passed through Inverness, the king’s ministers were meeting the ministers of President de Valera on equal terms.

“The treaty,” Bertrand’s message ran, “was signed in the small hours. Outside a portion of Ulster, Ireland is to be a Free State.”

“And now,” I answered, “and now . . . now perhaps we may see home-rule for England.” In 1906 I had brought a young man’s ideals to Westminster; thirty years before me, my father had done the same; and ten years before him, though he might now call his ideals illusions, Bertrand had entered parliament with hope and vision. One after another, each in our generation, we had seen our vision clouded and our hope deferred by the shadow of Ireland. “May I go home now?,” I asked.

“I can’t spare you yet,” Bertrand sighed. “The trouble’s not over. There are thousands of Irishmen who’ve taken a solemn oath of allegiance to the republic for which their fathers and brothers laid down their lives. There are thousands of English who will say in every passing difficulty: ‘I _told_ you so! Ireland is unfit for self-government.’ We must preach patience, George. We must try to sweeten the bitter taste that all this blood has left on our lips. Lake House can get along without you for the present.”

“I was only thinking Barbara and I should be the better for a change,” I answered with deliberate vagueness.

If I kept my disappointment to myself, I could not help being disappointed. This talk of peace had suddenly opened an unexpected vista of escape from the “gilded cage”; and my single glimpse of freedom convinced me that I could not continue the armed neutrality which Barbara had been imposing on me for a twelvemonth. We must be reconciled or divorced. If we could separate even for a short time, we might be able to decide what we wanted. I therefore told Bertrand that he must not count on me indefinitely; and the old man shewed the wisdom to give me my change by sending me to America for the Washington Conference.

“One of us ought to be there; and I’m too old,” he explained. “I don’t know what stuffing the new president has inside him; but this is the first serious effort to undo the harm of the Versailles treaty, and Harding is the first responsible statesman to say frankly that we’re all committing financial suicide. You’ll go?”

“I will,” I promised.

“And you’ll take Barbara?”

“I’ll talk to her about it.”

And that night I told her of my decision.

“Are you expecting me to come with you?,” she asked.

“It will be better for us both if I go alone. When I come back, you’ll have had time to think quietly . . .”

“I can picture you talking to your clerks like this,” Barbara mocked. “‘Your last chance, remember!’ . . .”

“To think quietly,” I repeated, “whether you would prefer me to live in Ireland. Conditions are becoming normal there . . .”

“You must _really_ decide for yourself where you want to live,” she answered, without hinting whether she wished me to live alone.

A week later I sailed from Southampton.

If I had expected to find any striking change on my return, I should have been disappointed; but I fancy that I had by now ceased to look for the romantic reconciliations of the film-world. There was little enough change anywhere. My father-in-law had given me a farewell dinner on the night before I sailed; he gave me a dinner of welcome on the night that I returned. Tempers, I thought, were a little shorter; nerves a little thinner. The vague feeling that something decisive must soon happen reminded me of 1914, when the world expected a cataclysm and almost hoped for it.

“And certainly the conference has done nothing to avert it,” I told Bertrand at the end of dinner.

“Not the French show-down?,” he asked. “After this, we can talk frankly instead of gushing about our gallant allies. We all made grievous mistakes at the peace conference, George, but it’s the French who are keeping us from repairing them.”

“Which will coerce which?,” I asked.

The question, I could see, was not palatable.

“They’ve the best air-force in the world and could lay London in ruins within a week,” Bertrand growled. “It’s immeasurably superior to anything we saw in the war. They can hold Germany down with aeroplanes and niggers; and, when you ask them why they won’t reduce their submarines, you don’t get a satisfactory answer. I can give it to you. They’re going to make themselves masters of Europe before any one has time to stop them. They worked against us in Poland, they’re working against us in the near east.”

“How do you propose to make use of this knowledge?”

“It may lead to clear thinking. Why _we_ should pay six shillings in the pound to relieve them of an income-tax, when they’re amassing armaments . . .”

There was very little change anywhere. Lady John Carstairs hoped vaguely that we were not going to desert our late allies; Violet Loring whispered that it was all very well for dear Phyllis to preach at us, but America had deserted every one. I provoked a passing storm by asserting that all international debts would have ultimately to be forgiven; and, had any one asked wherein the world was safer or happier than in 1914, he must have waited long for an answer.

An hour later, as we drove home, Barbara enquired expressionlessly whether I had enjoyed my holiday from her.

“I wanted _you_ to have a holiday from me,” I answered. “No, I missed you horribly. I should like to think you missed me.”

“Oh, why say that?,” she exclaimed with sudden petulance. “If I could have a holiday from myself so that I didn’t see how my life has been wasted, if I could lose my memory . . . Dear God, if I could only die!”

There was no change in her; and I was driven to issue my ultimatum:

“If you’d like me to go away again, I will. And this time I shouldn’t upset you by coming back. I’ve done my best; and I’ve failed. We can part friends. If you want a divorce, you can have it now.”. . .

“Somehow, I don’t see you in the divorce-court,” Barbara murmured half to herself. “I feel you’d bungle it. When I wrote and begged you to come back, you _would_ . . . by special train.”

“Well, the matter is now in your hands,” I said.

“I think you’ve a finer collection of worn-out phrases than any man I know,” she cried, again without answering my question.

5

“No change of any kind!,” I told my cousin Violet when we dined with her a fortnight after my return to England.

Barbara had not mentioned divorce again; and I believe we were summoned to Loring House with a view to mending the latest breach between Sonia and her husband. He, unchanging in stubbornness, had published the article which I rejected and was threatening to follow it with others; Sonia, unchanging in tactics, had announced that she would walk out of the house unless he yielded. Bertrand, unchanging in the beloved formula which he applied indiscriminately to cigarette-smoking, Christianity, _vers libre_, welfare-work, side-whiskers and “self-determination”, explained that this was only a phase, which one or other or both would outgrow. And Violet, whose kindness of heart nothing could change, was playing counsellor and friend of all parties.

“We, I suppose,” said Barbara, “are to be the object-lesson in domestic felicity. When women have married the wrong men, as Sonia and I did, it’s rather a waste of time for any one to patch it up.”

“If there’s been a fair trial,” I said, “you should end what you can’t mend. Armed neutrality is intolerable.”

From Barbara’s thoughtful look I fancied she was wondering whether I wanted a divorce in order to marry some one else.

“The trouble is,” she continued, “you never know who is the right man till you’ve married him. I always thought you had more perfect understanding than any man I knew . . . Funny!,” she added, as I made no answer.

No answer seemed possible. There was now no change in our rare private passages, though I thought the reference to my want of understanding was dragged in to close the subject of divorce. There was no change in the atmosphere of this party. Nearly seven years had passed since Violet and I last dined together at Loring House. The noble line of portraits had been reinforced by a black-and-white sketch of Jim in uniform; Sandy was old enough for his mother to consult me about schools; but we were arguing now in the very mood and terms that we had used in 1914.

“I wish people wouldn’t talk so much about ‘the next war’,” Violet muttered with a frown in the direction of Philip Hornbeck. “I’ve lost my husband; I’m not going to lose my son if I can help it.”

The big, softly-lighted room reminded me of my interminable discussions with Jim and of his own admission on the outbreak of war that the old governing classes were played out. I was reminded, too, of the question that had haunted me in the first weeks of the armistice: if the order that was represented at this table could not keep peace or make peace, would it have to give way?

“We talk about the next war,” I said, “because the combined wisdom of the world has done nothing in the last three years to prevent it.”

“I suppose the prime minister _is_ the only man . . .?” she hazarded.

“Every prime minister is indispensable,” I answered, “till he finds himself on an opposition bench, watching his successor taking command. Five minutes after George goes, every one will ask why he didn’t go before. Every one will discover then the vice of all coalitions: which is that there’s no one to oppose them. You don’t expect Curzon to admit that Lloyd-George’s foreign policy is dangerous?”

“Can nobody do anything from outside?”

“The press does its best, but this government is stronger than the press. Otherwise, Woburn and his combine would have had George out in the street a year ago. Your best hope is an intrigue from inside. Ll-G. was at least equally responsible for the shortage of high explosives in ’15; yet he put the blame on the others and broke the Asquith government. It may be done again.”

My voice carried to Bertrand’s side of the table and roused him from one of his now periodical lapses into slumber.

“If the House of Commons contained anybody one half as clever, Ll-G. would not now be prime minister,” he answered.

No change; and no prospect of a change until it was forced upon us by another cataclysm. It was the public temper that alarmed me more than any concrete problem of unemployment or proved blunders of policy. On my first appearance in Fetter Lane I asked young Triskett for a sketch of the political position; and the tone of his reply reminded me disquietingly of the recklessness and exasperation of 1914.

“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony, without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies _and_ gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather _vieux jeu_: we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity.

The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street. Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations, when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”.

I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner.

“It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,” said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between the _nisi_ and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .”

“We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”

We were not encouraged by O’Rane’s tone to break the rather embarrassing silence that followed. I had noticed before dinner that he and his wife had not merely—in the language of stage directions—“come into the room”; they had “entered, conversing with animation”. As we drove home, I asked Barbara whether Violet had effected a reconciliation.

“If he publishes any more articles, Sonia will repudiate them,” she answered.

“And if he repudiates her repudiation?”

“She’ll repudiate him.”

“Um. I rather hoped, when I saw them together . . .”

“Husbands and wives who get on well in public always arouse my worst suspicions,” said Barbara. “No, there’s no change.”

I was still pondering our hard-worked phrase when we re-entered our “gilded cage”; and Barbara had slipped away to bed before I could ask her whether a man erred more grievously by doing everything that his wife demanded or nothing.