Chapter FIVE: “un Sacrifice Inutile”

“. . . They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain.” . . .

SHAKESPEARE: _King Richard II_.

1

“On the turf,” expounded my uncle Bertrand, “races are won by the intelligence of the individual backer. It is only when you lose that you divide the responsibility between the breeder, the trainer, the jockey and the horse. That is why the sporting tipster is the happiest of men. Why shouldn’t we call ourselves ‘the Brigadier’ and run a sporting column in _Peace_? You and I, George, get neither pleasure nor profit from seeing our political forecasts being fulfilled.” . . .

“Perhaps, if we’d backed our fancy . . .” I began.

“I’ve backed _Peace_,” said my uncle grimly, “to a tune that would make an unsuccessful racing-stable seem like a safe investment. I pay tens of thousands a year for the privilege of casting myself for the part of Cassandra. We _can’t_ be so much cleverer than other people . . .”

“If we were,” I interrupted, “we might make them believe what we tell them.”

“The world believes what it wants to believe,” said Bertrand.

“And is quite unabashed when it’s proved wrong,” I added, as I pocketed the article which I had brought to Princes Gardens for my uncle’s _imprimatur_.

Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs. By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last?

Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles conference could only be changed by another war?

2

I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions, above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the 1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de Liancourt substituted.

According to my uncle, the first responsible attack on the peace-treaty was delivered by President Harding; a counter-attack was opened by the French, when they stultified the Washington Conference; and an attack, in reply to the counter-attack, was launched by the Balfour Note on inter-allied indebtedness.

On the day after it was published, Clifford van Oss called in Fetter Lane to enquire whether the note was an overture to repudiation.

“I should rather call it our reply to the French _non possumus_ at Washington,” said Bertrand. “If we pay our debts to you, the French must pay their debts to us instead of building submarines against us.”

“From what I know of the French,” said Clifford, with the detachment that some of us found irritating in a country which had so disconcertingly washed its hands of European problems, “they won’t take it lying down.”

The assertion was so intrinsically probable that I did not contest it; but, if I spent little time wondering what the French reply would be, that was chiefly because I was watching the fulfilment of another prophecy. The controversy that raged for six months over O’Rane’s articles in the _Democratic Review_ is now public, if not ancient, history; and my chief memory is of his victory by silence. If one of his million critics had troubled to study his argument, he would have seen that the flamboyant gifts of embarrassed millionaires were attacked for their demoralizing effect on the recipients. Those who wrote to the papers or passed unanimous resolutions of protest laid emphasis on the crying needs of hospitals and the like; they assumed an almost impertinent right to tell other people how they should spend their money; but they did not meet O’Rane’s contention that every university could be endowed, every laboratory subsidized and every great work of art purchased for the nation from the money that was spent on luxuries.

I paid less attention to those who lectured O’Rane from expensive addresses than to those who heard, on the authority of a millionaire, that a great many people had a great deal too much money.

“Any windows broken?,” I asked him on one of the rare occasions when we met in these months.

“Not yet,” he laughed.

I did not dare to enquire whether any wives had been running away lately. Sonia’s threatened repudiation had not yet been published; but this, Barbara told me, was only because he had not yet stated in public that he would renounce his inheritance. The controversy imparted a transient heat to the chilly summer of 1922; and no doubt I should still be printing letters of protest if O’Rane’s theories of property had not been drowned in the thunder of a more urgent conflict. In August I took Barbara to stay with the Knightriders; and I had only reached Northumberland when my uncle recalled me to London with a telegram that revived for many days the agonizing fears and uncertainties of 1914.

I returned alone to find Bertrand breakfasting in bed.

“You’ve asked me more than once what we’ve done to prevent another war,” he began. “Here’s your answer: nothing.”

In the last week I had seen but a few provincial papers; I had almost forgotten the diplomatic moves that led to this check. With all the suddenness of those August days eight years before, however, I stepped out of the train at King’s Cross to learn that Great Britain was being left to fight, single-handed, for the freedom of the Straits, against a restored and rejuvenated Turkey.

“This is the French reply to the Balfour note,” I said; “their revenge for our refusing to accompany them into the Ruhr.”

“If you’ll be good enough to tell me what it’s all about . . .” Bertrand thundered; then he lay back, spent and very old, until I suggested calling in Fetter Lane to see the latest telegrams.

There was nothing to be learned there; almost nothing to be learned when I invited myself to dine with the Crawleighs, though I remember this night with pleasure as the only one on which my father-in-law and I looked on any political problem with the same eyes. Halfway through dinner, Neave entered in service-uniform. His battalion had received its orders for Chanak; he did not know why he was going; we could not tell him.

“Harington’s a cool-headed fellow,” said Crawleigh to keep his own courage up. “If he _can_ avoid a conflict . . .”

I remembered the days eight years before when Jim Loring and I kept our courage up by telling each other that Sir Edward Grey would prevent war if war could be prevented.

“I _still_ don’t understand,” muttered Lady Crawleigh, as though we were conspiring to keep some discreditable secret for her.

“No one does, ma,” Neave snapped and then left his father to reach the same conclusion in less few words.

War was again at our gates; and we had not willed it, we did not want it. Stalking across Europe from that country which had been most completely vanquished, it hammered at our gates within four years of the war that was to have ended war. Whenever in the last three years I had urged that the incorrigible and blighting Turk should be forced into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Crawleigh had annotated my articles with the red-ink comment that we should pay for a peaceful Europe with a hostile India. Now, though he knew better than most men that Mohammedan India was not bound to us by ties of love, we awoke to find that, while the victorious allies were quarrelling at a distance, Turkey had set herself quietly to recover all that she had lost in the war. When British troops went unsupported to uphold the Treaty of Sèvres, they were to find their old enemies equipped with the arms which we had shipped to Russia and restored to fighting form by officers of the French army.

“But . . . but _why_ . . .?,” Lady Crawleigh kept repeating with pathetic helplessness.

Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant waterways.

“Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable exasperation.

And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for news.

“The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money. Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in another.” . . .

For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite formula that another European war would be beyond a joke.

“If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.”

I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner.

3

Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its big guns.

“_It is hard_,” the Lingfield press stated, “_to imagine a conservative administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr. Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George_.”. . .

“_Recent events in the near east_,” retorted the Wister papers, “_have signed the death-warrant of the coalition_.”. . .

The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split.

As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby, who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the election.

“What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn. “And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”

“_Our_ line . . .” he began eagerly; and, as I turned from the things he had forgotten to the things he had never learned, I classed him unhesitatingly with those who—in O’Rane’s phrase—would not admit that a war had taken place.

“I suppose a political whip can’t live without an abnormal endowment of optimism,” I said, more to myself than to him.

Jellaby forged ahead with growing enthusiasm. The local associations were solidly in support of the Asquith wing, solidly opposed to the Lloyd-George renegades. Much capital could be made out of the Safeguarding of Industries Bill (“which is pure protection; you’d have thought the tories had had enough protection in 1906”); more from the Black-and-Tan reprisals in Ireland; most of all from the unpopularity of the coalition.

“But have you considered why it’s unpopular?,” I broke in at last. “Not because its policy is faintly protectionist—the electors to-day don’t care tuppence about free trade—; not because it tried to put down murder with more murder. What people care about is taxation and the cost of living and unemployment and, above all else, my dear Frank, security. We’re in sight of another and a bloodier war.”

“With a man like Lloyd-George . . .,” he began with a kindling eye.

I did not wait, however, for the end of the tirade. No one beyond Jellaby’s immediate circle of colleagues cared about the internecine feuds of exasperated factionaries; and I look back on this night as the time when so temperamental, congenital and impenitent a liberal as myself had to realize that there was at present no hope for liberalism in the liberal party. So far as the roar of his indignant rhetoric allowed me, I tried to formulate the demands of all who shared my own feeling of insecurity. The country was demoralized by the war and by the paralysis of government that followed it; instinctively the country wanted to be put into training, to have its muscles hardened and—still more—its nerves steadied. Though the heat of civil war had died down in Ireland, it had been replaced by the fitful blaze of individual assassination; the chief of the imperial general staff was done to death this summer on the steps of his house in London; the commander-in-chief of the Free State army was ambushed in Ireland. It was idle to bandy figures of murders and reprisals, when the country demanded a cure for its own demoralization.

“People feel it’s time to pull up, take stock, overhaul,” I said. “It’s the spirit of 1914, when the war did for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

“And that security is just what the liberal party offers,” said Jellaby. “Standing midway between a tory reaction and socialism . . .”

“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as near war as we are to-night.”

We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week.

“These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced away with Sam.

Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it.

“A mad world,” I said, as I parted from Jellaby. “A mad world,” I repeated, two days later, when I went north to bring Barbara home. “A mad world face to face with its madness,” I thought to myself, on reading an announcement, sandwiched between news of now greater moment, that Mr. David O’Rane was withdrawing the funds of the Lancing Trust from England.

On reaching Seymour Street I found a telephone-message from Sonia, begging me to see her at once. I replied that I would come; but, as I walked to Westminster that afternoon, I felt—as in the similar atmosphere of eight years before—that the individual had shrunk in importance. Barbara, shaken out of her usual aloofness, now only cared to know what chance of life I would give her brother; and, though I felt for Sonia as I should feel for a popular actress who married a country curate, I was mildly aggrieved that she should absorb my time when I wanted to explore the last frantic hopes of peace.

The case which I prepared for O’Rane was, I fancy, not unpersuasive; but I had no chance of putting it forward. If the inheritance three years before had been a nine-days’-wonder, the news of the renunciation seemed likely to cause, in some quarters at least, a nine weeks’ consternation. I blundered into the wake of a deputation and entered the library in time to hear the venerable Bishop of Poplar pleading for men and women whom O’Rane had kept alive for more than two years. Thousands, the bishop asserted, were on the verge of starvation; before the winter, they would be reckoned by tens of thousands. While Mr. O’Rane’s arguments might be unassailable in normal times, the aftermath of an unprecedented war demanded abnormal remedies.

“From half-a-dozen abnormally long purses?,” O’Rane enquired wearily. “I want _every one_ to give and _every one_ to feel it. If your few rich men go on strike, what will happen?”

The bishop was too old a controversialist to be trapped:

“You would like me to say that some one will come forward in their place. I wish I could believe it. When the pinch becomes unbearable, the government will provide relief out of the taxpayer’s pocket. But, before that relief comes, many people will be dead; there will be rioting . . .”

“It’s a nice question already how long we can keep ’em sweet,” interposed an anxious voice on behalf of the National Unemployment Committee.

“It’s a nice question whether you’ll get anything done till they turn nasty,” retorted a small man with a Cardiff accent.

The bishop smiled and explained that, to make his deputation representative, he had included his friend Mr. Griffiths, with whose well-known bolshevist views we were no doubt already acquainted.

“What would you think, Mr. O’Rane,” he continued, “if I threw the bread of London into the Thames on the plea that it would be better for the people to eat cake? You are pronouncing sentence of death on the weakest section of the community.”

In the silence that followed I turned from O’Rane’s tortured eyes to the apostle of “bolshevism”. This was certainly my first, though not my last, meeting with the organizer and leader of “Griffiths’ Heroes”. I had expected a figure cast in the heroic mould, for there was a touch of the genius in the originality of his ideas and a hint of the commander in the obedience which he secured in carrying them out. Most strongly marked, however, was the fanatic; and his blended passion and cruelty made him something less than human. In thinking of him after all these months I am always reminded of an angry ferret. He was very small, very hirsute, very quick; though his eyes were brown, they seemed to shine red; and, as he looked scornfully round O’Rane’s warm library, I felt that his little teeth were seeking a hand to bite.

“There’d be less talk of bolshevism, if people knew what they were talking about,” he announced with a bluntness that was in painful contrast to the bishop’s courtly patience. “The government says it doesn’t know what to do; let’s see if any one else does. When folk are starving, they know what to do.”

There was a threat in his tone; but he did not explain it, as Sonia came in at this moment and motioned me into the corner by the tea-table. Griffiths, to the credit of his consistency, refused tea: the men whom he represented had been out of work for eleven months; he lived as they lived and, if need be, would starve as they starved.

“We’re first on the list for looting, when the revolution comes,” she whispered cheerfully, while he examined her clothes as though he would have liked to strip her. Then, for a moment, she forgot to think of herself. “Oh, George! Babs has just telephoned for you. I’m so sorry, I’m afraid there’s bad news. Your uncle . . .” I stood up; but she pulled me back, as the deputation filed out. “She’s sending the car here; she thinks you ought to go to him at once. If there’s anything we can do . . .”

I shook my head. At Bertrand’s age, there was little that any one could do.

“Have you told Raney?,” I asked.

“I hadn’t a chance. This deputation . . . Oh, David, what did you tell them?”

O’Rane dropped into a chair and pressed his fists against his temples:

“I said . . . I’d think the thing over. It was really out of politeness to the poor old bishop. Nothing can make any difference.”. . .

“Even when everybody tells you you’re wrong? People simply won’t believe it. I had four reporters within half-an-hour.”

“I don’t know what they want to worry us for,” he broke out. “What did you tell them?”

Sonia weighed each word of her answer before launching it:

“I said you hadn’t made up your mind. If you want to shew that you care for me . . .”

O’Rane walked to her with his hands outstretched in an attitude of entreaty:

“If this accursed money had never come to me, you couldn’t have said that.”

The attitude of entreaty won no hint of yielding.

“Of course, if you _won’t_ be warned . . .” Sonia muttered, as she walked with me to the door.

4

As I got into the car, I was first frightened and then touched to find Barbara sitting half-hidden in her corner.

“I’m afraid he’s very bad,” she whispered. “It’s not a stroke this time; but something’s broken inside him and he’s had terrible hæmorrhages. If he has another . . . I’m so sorry, George.”

“It was good of you to come.”

In the darkness I heard a sigh; and Barbara laid her hand on mine:

“We’ve always been good friends, even if we _have_ made rather a mess of our lives.” . . .

I could not hear what she said after that, for I had been caught unprepared by Sonia and was realizing now for the first time that it was a toss-up whether I saw Bertrand alive. My uncle was a man of almost fifty when I was born. For ten years I was frightened out of my wits by his huge stature and bellowing voice; for another ten I was humiliated by his brutal jests and blasting disparagement; then, as a young man, I rose in exasperation and trounced him till he roared with delight at my beating. From that unlikely beginning sprang a friendship in which Bertrand played the part of father, elder brother, political mentor and fellow-conspirator in my most impressionable years.

“I . . simply can’t imagine life without Bertrand,” I told Barbara.

“If you want me . . .”, she whispered.

Did even she know how the sentence would have ended? I was stunned by the thought of losing Bertrand; I clutched at any one who would take his place, clutching literally with both my hands about Barbara’s wrists. And she, for the first time in my acquaintance, was frightened.

“Does this mean . . .?,” I began.

“I won’t come into his room, of course,” she continued, in a superb recovery. “If you want me to fetch some one for a second opinion . . .”

“Does this mean that we’re going to make a new start?,” I persisted.

“I’ll do all I _can_ . . .”

Though it was Bertrand’s imminent death that broke my self-control, I forgot him and forgot that we were driving to his death-bed:

“The only good you can do is to tell me this ghastly farce is played out! Two years!”

“We all make mistakes,” she answered with composure, though she had winced at that word “farce”. “I can’t help you _much_. In these two years I’ve grown used to doing without love. I’ve lost everything, thrown everything away.” The silence that followed seemed to daunt her; and I felt my hand being pressed. “You know as well as I do all you’ve done for me. I’ll be your wife, I’ll bear you children if I can; but I can’t give you a love I don’t feel.”

As though I had stepped aside, I saw myself lurching forward to demand satisfaction for the unuttered reproaches and contemptuous suspicions that had masqueraded so long as patience.

“Did you ever feel it?,” I heard myself asking. “Have you _ever_ loved _any one_? You’ve been curious about many people; but it’s always been in your head and not in your heart.”

“I don’t let _myself_ off!,” she moaned.

“I wonder! You have tragic scenes; but, when other people are broken, you survive. If your heart had been brought into the play . . .”

I broke off in stark horror. Never before had we held such language; and we were almost within earshot of Bertrand. Barbara was dumbfoundered at first; then she rallied and threw herself into the duel as though I were at last giving her an opportunity of which she had been unfairly deprived ever since our marriage.

“I never pretended to be in love with you,” she taunted me.

“You’ve never been in love with any one. If you’d ever known the meaning of the word, you wouldn’t have married me on those terms.”

Barbara turned away and covered her face with her hands.

“That’s the way Eric said good-bye to me!,” she gasped. “George, I asked you to divorce me two years ago.”

“And I wanted to make sure, for your sake. Well, let’s face reality for once! Imagine me to be dead.” . . .

With another unexpected turn, Barbara clung to me convulsively and laid her hand over my mouth:

“Don’t talk of death!,” she whispered. “I’m so frightened of it! And it’s very near at hand now. I’ve been ill so often, I’ve had to fight it so often. My dear, my dear, if I ever heard you were ill, it would bring back all my love: I’d nurse you; I’d shew you I _could_ sacrifice myself. Never say that again!,” she cried hysterically.

My fit of bitterness passed as quickly as it had come; and I tried to apologize. Then it returned; and I asked myself whether this talk of “sacrifice” meant more than that Barbara was living, as ever, in a world of emotional romance. Then the car stopped; and I stumbled up the steps of my uncle’s house.

In the hall Violet Loring told me there had been no further hæmorrhages. Only a few more hours of life could be expected, however; and this Bertrand realized.

“I didn’t bother you before,” he began in his normal voice, “because I didn’t know whether I was going to live or die. I’m going to die, it seems; and I can tell you, George, it’s the most interesting experience I’ve ever had.”

His grim chuckles rumbled till the vast Victorian brass-bed creaked. Involuntarily Violet shivered; but I felt that the last and least service I could do was to make my mood chime with my uncle’s.

“I’m glad I’m in time to thank you, Bertrand,” I said. “You’ve been my best friend ever since we first set up house here together, nearly twenty years ago.”

Though I knew the room of old, I was struck for the first time by the uncouth masculinity of a vanished era.

“Odd business,” he grunted. “I always dropped a generation. I’m your _great_-uncle; but I always put you in your father’s place. You’ve kept me young. . . . And now this is the end, the moment we wait for all our lives. The heart’s weak, thank goodness, so I shan’t make a fight; but I swear to you I expect to wake up again to-morrow morning! I’m not afraid of going out, but I can’t believe it. That’s why people persist in fabricating a future life. I’ll tell you one thing, George, that’ll comfort you: death’s only a terrible thing if it comes before you’re ready, and you’re only ready when you’re worn out. That was the terrible part of the war.” The leonine head turned with an effort that left him breathless. “Violet my dear, I bow humbly at the thought of boys like Jim who were killed before they had time to find the grasshopper a burden. I can’t believe I shan’t wake up to-morrow, but I don’t want to . . . here or anywhere. A silly old woman of a parson came here yesterday. . . . It cost me a hæmorrhage to get rid of him. Good God, I’ve outgrown _that_ phase! Life eternal. . . . I’m much more interested in the brief life that is our portion here. I’ve had nigh on a century of it; and I know less about it than I did when I was born.”

He paused as the nurse came in to say that O’Rane was waiting downstairs.

“Good of the boy,” he murmured. “Ask him to come up.” Then his eyes shone with their last gleam of mischief:

“‘_Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . . Well, now is your time to learn!_’”

5

The fit of coughing that followed caused my uncle to examine himself for injuries. The nurse made signs to Violet, who slipped noiselessly from the room; O’Rane came in, and I guided him to the bedside. Bertrand shook hands with difficulty; and his heavy eyes lightened.

“You’re another of them,” he panted. “Always think of your father when I see you. I wonder what he’d have made of it all if he’d lived. . . . George there?”

“I’m here,” I answered, as I pulled a chair to the bedside.

“I’ve been thinking over what you said the other day about our prototypes in history. Triskett’s great-grandfather firing on the Versailles mob just to see what would happen. . . . I’ve known a good few historic figures: O’Connell; Mazzini; Lassalle. The great unspeakables. I believe I went to them for fear of being told by boys like you that I and my spiritual forefathers had been on the wrong side. Dam’ conceit! I hope I’ve outgrown that phase now; but, when that ass Crawleigh spluttered about rounding up conscientious objectors in the war, I felt that his ancestors had burnt heretics. Your friend Maitland sentenced a man to the cat the other day: he said it was the only remedy for crimes of violence. I asked him why he didn’t break the fellow on a wheel, as his forebears had done. Damn it, I gave up shooting for fear of finding myself in the same dock as the old cock-fighters. Conceit, if you like. I’ve been a radical because I couldn’t let posterity charge me with the savagery and intolerance which we throw up against our conservative predecessors. Time was on my side. I recorded my protest. What _good_ it’s done . . .? That’s why you’d better keep the paper on, George. It’ll shew the next generation how superior you were to this.”

The advice was rounded with a cynical, deep chuckle; and he lay long without speaking.

“The world’s a gentler place than when you were a boy, sir,” O’Rane put in.

Bertrand looked at him in silence for a moment and then shook his head slowly:

“You say that, with your experience of the late war? _Does_ human nature change? . . . We shan’t have that dinner, George, but I wasn’t far out in my date. The present government is falling to pieces.”

“And what’s going to take its place?,” I asked.

Bertrand ruminated in silence for some time; then his face lighted for the last time in a reflective smile:

“A restoration government! We’ve given a million men and heaven knows how many thousand million pounds to keep things . . . _just as they were_. Nurse says we’re shipping troops again to the Straits: to defend the graves we’ve already filled there, I suppose. In ten years the great powers will be balanced as they were ten years ago; there’ll be the same competition in armaments, the same scares, ultimately the same universal war . . . on a vastly different scale. At home we’ve fallen back into our old social and financial grooves.” Bertrand’s eyes turned fixedly to the ceiling in a strained effort of concentration. He was speaking very slowly now and studying his articulation. “We’re . . . going on . . . from 1914 . . . without break of thought . . . or mend of heart.”

As he paused, O’Rane stood up and walked cautiously to the bed.

“I’ll leave you now, sir, unless you want me,” he said. “I expect you’d like to talk to George. I . . . want to thank you.” . . .

“You’ve nothing to thank me for. Don’t go unless I’m depressing you.”

“It’s not encouraging,” O’Rane laughed. “You remember Anatole France’s story of the woman who tried to save her lover in the Terror? She gave herself to one of the judges and was told afterwards that she had . . . rather misunderstood his assurances. _On fera le nécessaire_, yes; but what then? ‘_Je t’ai dit, citoyenne, qu’on ferait le nécessaire, c’est-à-dire qu’on appliquerait la loi, rien de plus, rien de moins_.’ Most unfortunate misunderstanding! ‘_Elle sentit aussitôt_’,” he quoted slowly, “‘_qu’elle avait fait_ . . . _un sacrifice inutile_’.”

As Bertrand looked from O’Rane’s scarred hands to his sightless eyes, I saw that he had no answer ready. I do not know what answer either of us could have given such a man at such a moment.

Until the nurse came in with the doctor, my uncle lay silent and, I think, half-asleep. Towards midnight he roused with a start and seemed at a loss to explain why we were there. Then he remembered that he was dying; and, with the slow effort of failing strength, one hand was dragged painfully from under the bed-clothes. I led O’Rane to him and then shook hands myself.

“That place of yours . . .” he muttered.

“Yes?”

“Lake House. I heard you were selling it. Don’t . . . unless you must. I was brought up there. Your grandfather and I . . . You’re too young to remember the orangery . . . When I was twenty, our nearest neighbour was a girl called Cathleen Nolan . . .” He paused for breath, and I tried to find out if he wanted to send her a message. “She’s been dead for more than sixty years,” said Bertrand with a twisted smile.

If that was his romance, he could tell me no more of it; and the smile gave place to a quick contortion of pain. I sent O’Rane for the nurse; but, before he reached the door, my uncle gave one long sigh and the slight movement of his breathing ended.

O’Rane carried the news to Barbara and with it a note to say that I should stay at Princes Gardens until the funeral. On the heels of the first letter I sent a second to beg her forgiveness for my mad words in the car. She replied that she had forgotten everything.