Chapter ONE: The Nakedness of the Land

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so
melancholy as a battle won.”

DUKE OF WELLINGTON: _Despatches_.

1

On the day after the peace-treaty had been signed, my uncle sent me to make a political survey of England. If it brought no benefit to England or to our paper, it provided me with a pleasant holiday and a welcome break.

Looking back on my two years’ labours in Fetter Lane, I feel that the first six months were given to creating an atmosphere. As Bertrand proclaimed at our inaugural dinner, no lasting peace could be established on a sense of grievance; and, until the terms of peace were published, we tried to deflect public attention from crude thoughts of triumph and cruder hankerings after revenge to a frank desire for mutual forgiveness and good-will. For twelve months after the treaty was placed in our hands, we laboured to demonstrate that it was unworkable. And in the six months during which the peace coalition was tottering to the fall I received my answer to the old question whether those who could neither keep peace nor make war were competent to make peace.

“It won’t do,” Bertrand declared summarily, when we met to discuss our public attitude to the treaty of Versailles. “‘Revision’ must be our battle-cry. Revision of the treaty.”

I fancy I was expressing what Spence-Atkins and Triskett and all of us had long felt, when I said:

“Thank God we have a battle-cry at last.”

“It will not be popular,” predicted my uncle, with his usual love for being in a minority. “The fools who shouted that we were ‘letting the Hun off’ will shout more than ever that we’re making the treaty ‘a scrap of paper’. . . . And yet, if we try to enforce it, all central Europe will go the way of Russia.”

“I’m afraid it will be another unpopular cry,” added Jefferson Wright, “but it’s time we drew attention to the economic position at home. We’re pouring out money as though the war were still going on.”

“Our battle-cry, then,” said Bertrand, “must be ‘Produce more and consume less’.”

“We shall be told we’re trying to enslave labour. And there’ll be no end to unemployment when the ‘consuming less’ begins.”

“We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,” Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry.

Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed me out of the office to collect material for six articles on _England in Reconstruction_.

“The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s a hot-house: abnormal.”

2

My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy Maitland’s wedding.

She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been headed: _Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals_.

“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”

“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”

The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:

“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of them.”

“It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered. “The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.”

If my explanation was heard, it was not answered.

“One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he could do that. It’s terrible!”

I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of peace.

I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids, which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal truth of the Old Testament.

“Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel through.

He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these critics, had been found out.

I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets.

“Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked.

“Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered.

How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me to solve.

“So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir, what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?”

I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when living was so expensive.

“A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.

Then he muttered something about “middlemen” and “profiteers”.

At the other end of the scale, Violet Loring deferred making any improvements on the Chepstow estate until her tenants paid a rent commensurate with the high cost of labour and material. She was a rich woman, by the standard of gross income; but she had three houses in England, a palace in Scotland and a derelict barrack in Ireland. The greater part of her income was derived from coal; and the latest strike-cloud was being illuminated terrifyingly with lightning-forks that spelt ‘nationalization’. In one paper I read that some Angevin king, with more generosity than geography, had granted to Sir Humfrey de Loringe certain lands that were his by right of seizure alone; the paper—and I with it—knew of no service by Sir Humfrey to the community at large that justified this grant in perpetuity; and, if right of seizure was the basis of the Loring estates in one century, right of seizure—it was suggested—might be the means of expropriating the Lorings in another.

“I don’t think there’ll be any confiscation in my time,” said Violet, “but I have to think of Sandy.”

And her surplus income was therefore being invested in various securities of various foreign countries, in the hope that all would not default at the same moment.

As I moved to houses less well endowed than my cousin’s, I found the uneasiness more marked. The Knightriders, taking early advantage of the boom in real estate, had sold their house in Raglan to a rich colliery-proprietor; John Carstairs, when we went to stay with him at Herrig, said that, after this experimental year, he would have to let the shooting; and our visit to Philip Hornbeck in Yorkshire had to be cancelled because his wife had suggested a general reduction of wages and his servants had left her in a body without notice.

“_Insecurity is the first, universal quality of the times_,” I wrote to my uncle.

3

At the beginning of the autumn, a railway-strike assailed the country with partial paralysis.

“_It may help_,” wrote Bertrand from the security of London, “_to bring people to their senses. They think they’re rich because the printing-presses keep ’em well supplied with depreciated notes. As usual, Spence-Atkins prophesies a tremendous slump; and that will be just as unreal as the boom. If people would think in terms of commodities and services instead of chattering about money!_

“_But this is not the worst of the trouble. The triple alliance is a political engine. Direct action is a political method; the reply of organized labour to a government that represents no one in particular and organized labour least of all. This is the first protest against the 1918 election and I’ve been torn in pieces by the tory press for asking what else any sane man could have expected, when the present House never tries to control ministers._ ‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’”

Barbara and I turned south on the first day of the strike; and, by the time we reached Crawleigh Abbey, it was over. In the tone of my father-in-law, however, I detected a new rancour such as I had not met since the almost daily strikes and lock-outs before the war. Neave had been warned for duty; and, as he changed out of uniform, I fancied that father and son were like a pair of reluctant game-cocks, as difficult to drag out of a fight as to urge in.

“I regret nothing,” said Crawleigh on the first night, “that shews labour it can’t hold the country to ransom. If I’d been the prime minister, though, I’d have recalled every man jack of them to the colours . . .”

“And if they refused to come?,” I ventured to interrupt.

“After being ordered to mobilize?,” asked Neave with the aloof patience of a Guards officer in teaching a civilian his A.B.C.

“Yes,” I answered. “In 1914 the regular officer threatened to resign if he were ordered to put down rebellion in Ulster. That’s never been quoted, but you may be sure it’s not been forgotten. And if you ever try to use troops against an industrial strike . . .”

“I should use troops to protect life and property,” Crawleigh interposed. “A very few days without trains, and the babies in every city would die for want of milk. One hopes that these drastic steps will never be necessary. One hopes the lesson’s been taken to heart.”

“I hope so too,” I said; but I knew Crawleigh to be only one of many who regretted that the strike had not been fought to a finish.

As I began my articles, I noticed sadly that neither he nor Neave, neither the capitalist press which called our paper “bolshevistic” nor the labour sheets which damned us with faint, patronizing praise suggested that strikes and lock-outs ought to be as impossible in a civilized state as a wheat-corner or that, whoever was to blame and whoever was punished, the noncombatant majority suffered most.

“Human nature being what it is . . .” began Sir Roger Dainton, with a fine affectation of political wisdom, when I put this view before him.

I had driven Barbara to luncheon at Crowley Court; and throughout the meal our host droned of high taxation without considering the capital loss of a strike.

“Every one’s the poorer for a struggle that has changed nothing and proved nothing,” I said.

“In time, perhaps, the agitators will see that,” answered Lady Dainton, who had been expatiating, from the other end of the table, on class-hatred and proving in alternate sentences that the man Thomas was responsible for all this unrest and that Mr. Thomas really seemed the only person who would stand up to these bolshevists.

It was at this time that the secret funds on which labour disturbances throve were discovered—by her—to come from Irish organizations in America and Jewish societies in Russia; perhaps her brain was tired, but in the course of one brief conversation the Indian home-ruler, the modernist in religion, the eccentric in music and the individualist in dress were all found to be tainted with “bolshevism”. Their predecessors, I recalled, had all been anarchists.

“I must send you a little book on _The Soviet Peril_,” promised Lady Dainton, who at other times and in her untiring search for whipping-boys had sent me pamphlets on _A Short Way with Profiteers_.

I refrained from commenting on her husband’s incautious boast that he had increased his capital twenty _per cent._ since 1914.

“Are these agitators actually to be found in England?,” I asked.

Lady Dainton assured me that they were, though neither she nor any one she knew had actually met one. Not content with fomenting revolution on earth, they were unseating religion from on high. Communist schools were springing up to poison youthful minds with secularist literature. So far as I could make out, she accounted it for enlightenment when her own friends paraded their scepticism; but, if there had been no god, she would have invented one for the poorer classes. It was no defence that the secular propagandist might be a sincere secularist; so long as he was paid, he stood condemned.

“By the same test,” I asked, “would you call the clergy of the Established Church or the officers of the Employers’ Defence League ‘paid agitators’?”

“Certainly not! Good gracious, why . . .?” she asked in a voice that faded into the silence of stupefaction.

The pulse of the Dainton family was the last that I felt before returning to London and presenting Bertrand with my report on the first phase of reconstruction. Looking over this review later, I noticed a _diminuendo_ in the rather robust optimism with which I began. England was still enjoying superficial plenty; and yet I heard a mutter of misgiving. Some of the factories were over-producing; finished articles, of material bought at war prices, had to be sold at post-war prices; credit became harder to obtain from the banks; and, as the first year of peace hastened to its close, other people than the Daintons woke to the unpleasant discovery that income-tax would have to be paid as though the war were still being waged and that they had for a year, in disregard of Bertrand’s battle-cries, been producing less and consuming more than they could afford.

It was a time to draw in horns. Barbara and I had ordered a new car; and in a spirit of prudence we decided to cancel the order. Sam Dainton—I hope, without his mother’s knowledge—gave me £300 for my place in the waiting-list and made another £300 within two days by selling it to one of the Jews against whom I was so indefatigably warned. After this one experience of practical finance and of an “agency-business” as conducted by Sam, I went back to the unassailable heights of theory; and for the next six months, until other cares claimed my attention, I watched the unreal boom of 1919 changing to the unreal slump of 1920.

The one was no better justified than the other. While the country clamoured for houses, the building trade clamoured for work; domestic servants were not to be procured, and the figures of unemployment rose steeply. Every other country, I read, was working overtime; and our own exports threatened to dry up.

“Ever heard of a man called Keynes, George?,” my uncle asked on my return, tossing me _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_.

“Yes. I sent my copy to your friend Dainton. It was the least I could do after the literature that his good lady has been pouring in on me.”

“What Keynes preaches from inside knowledge is what I’ve been preaching to you since the armistice.”

“It’s what our worthy Wright and every other economist would have preached, if he’d had the figures before him,” I answered. “But have you seen Keynes’ reception in the press? This country’s still drunk from armistice night. _People won’t listen._”

And then I told Bertrand of the psychological discovery that impressed me most in the whole course of my tour. On the minds of men who had taken part in the war the printed word had ceased to exert its old spell. In the first recruiting of 1914 the boys in my old Wiltshire constituency were forbidden to pluck the blackberries by the roadside, because a mysterious red car had been abroad, before daylight, sprinkling the hedges with what was believed to be a strong solution of typhoid germs. The story was printed in the papers and believed because it was in print. Five years later the same story—with a Russian or a Sinn Feiner in charge of the car—might have been believed until it was published; then it would have been relegated to the teeming limbo of “newspaper lies”. The captain of the Loring yacht, who had served for most of the war on an auxiliary cruiser, told me of his amazement on reading that the _Pelion_, which was at that time his home, had been sunk by a mine in the North Sea; he was less surprised, though more aggrieved, to read a year later that his ship, which had lately been sunk by a torpedo in the Irish Channel, was still convoying troopers in the Mediterranean. He accepted my explanation that the Admiralty was of malice aforethought misleading the newspaper-readers of England in the hope of misleading the German intelligence department; but his faith was shattered beyond repair. If the press lied to him on matters which he could check from his own experience, how much more easily it would lie about defeats and casualties, wages and prices!

“And in future,” I told Bertrand, “we have to reckon with this incredulity in addition to all the apathy that’s been breaking our hearts.”

“_And_ the misrepresentation,” he sighed with a sensitiveness surprising in so scarred a fighter to the charge of the Woburn press that he was selling the French for thirty pieces of German silver.

“There are times,” I said, “when I feel that only the logic of events will convince people. Aren’t we wasting our energy, Bertrand? I’ve given the experiment more than six months’ trial; now I want to get away. Barbara’s going to have a baby.” . . .

I could have piled argument on argument if my uncle had resisted me; but he sat without speaking, his hands crossing and uncrossing themselves tremulously over the ivory knob of his stick and his eyes set gloomily on the fire.

“The logic of events?,” he repeated at length.

“I don’t believe we shall do any good here till we have a revolution,” I said, with bitter memories of my battle-piece in its three panels. “A revolution; or another war.”

“Our intention was to avert it,” he reminded me.

4

Because Bertrand made no effort to detain me, I stayed in London—sullenly protesting that we only bored the converted and exasperated the inconvertible—till the end of the year. Looking back, I suppose the autumn brought with it the first signs of returning reason, though Sir Roger Dainton—more in sorrow than anger—burnt the _Economic Consequences_ and left me—with anger and sorrow nicely balanced—to buy myself another copy. It was one thing, however, to concede that the peace terms were unworkable; it was something quite different to precipitate a general election in the hope of mending them. The coalition survived the Paisley election, when Mr. Asquith was drawn to Westminster through an avenue of cheering crowds; it survived the awkward questions which the average voter was beginning to frame. And, so long as it steered clear of another war, it could disregard the academic questions of sentimental leader-writers who asked if any one was a penny the better for war and victory.

“You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,” said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?”

“A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months. D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the old _régime_ in Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If the allies had an agreed policy . . .”

“You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your friend Lucien de Grammont . . .”

“He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.”

It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and Vancouver to die in a common cause.

“I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient with the rank-and-file.”

It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected, quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue of _Peace_.

“I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively, with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the war?”

“We haven’t lost it yet,” I said, “but some of us are doing our best. I wish you’d explain to me, Lucien, how you expect to make Germany pay for the war when you’re standing with your foot on her throat.”

“I am sorry if we are keeping you from trading with her,” he answered with icy politeness, “but security is as necessary to France as trade is to England. You made _yourselves_ secure when you took the German fleet. Now, when France is left alone . . .”

He glanced malevolently at Clifford van Oss and turned again to the window.

“But, hell, Wilson had no power to commit us!” Clifford protested. “If you’d any of you gotten down to the constitution of the United States . . .”

“I fancy America signed the treaty?,” said Lucian coldly.

“We’d best quit talking about bad faith,” Clifford recommended, without, however, following his own advice. “Clemenceau and Lloyd-George let up on Wilson over the fourteen points; they let up on the Germans . . .”

I turned to Hornbeck, whose square face was alight with malicious enjoyment.

“What are you supposed to be doing nowadays?,” I asked, as we strolled up and down the room where we had worked so long together.

“I’m adviser to the secretariat,” he answered. “What does that mean? Well, you may say, if you like, that I’m preparing for the next war.”

“It’s a pity there’s no one to bang all our heads together,” I murmured, as a new wrangle broke out between Clifford and Lucien. “The German menace has gone, but there’s a French menace coming. Nine or ten months ago I told Lucien in Paris that his people were at the top of their prestige; now they’re the most hated, feared and despised people in Europe. A mad war, a mad peace . . .”

“And nothing to prevent another war as mad,” Hornbeck began. Then we stood without speaking, in a silence that spread over London, freezing sound and movement. The customary rumble of traffic receded to a distance and faded away; the blare of horns, the ringing of bells, the click of typewriters, all the shouting, speaking and whispering that made up the unceasing drone of a great city now, for two minutes, ceased. Then, very far away, the rumble of traffic began again. I felt as if I were recovering consciousness after an anæsthetic. Nearer at hand I heard voices, then the scuffle of feet; a typewriter clicked interrogatively, as though wondering if the two minutes were over; then a telephone-bell rang; and the city heaved and roared its way back to life. “We’re no better off,” Hornbeck resumed. “Only you sentimentalists ever thought we should be.”

I had been indescribably awed by that sudden silence and by the spectacle of those many thousands all stricken motionless at the same time. The street was a solid block of devout, bare-headed humanity; from the Victoria Tower to the National Gallery a single mood of gratitude and reverence bowed those myriad heads. Far from Westminster, far from London, the same silence had fallen, the same devotion had risen from a myriad other hearts.

“Spiritually?,” I asked.

“Not in the very least! A great many people were very brave in an emergency; a great many people always are very brave in an emergency. A great many people have suffered . . . shall I say, on behalf of civilization? A great many people always suffer on behalf of civilization, which is a wasteful and cruel business, George, only one degree less wasteful and cruel than barbarism. This wasn’t the first war in history; people like you have always looked for a spiritual regeneration; you’ve never found it.”

“I should be content,” I said, “if one man in ten out of all that crowd would join me in making future wars impossible.”

“I should be content if one man in all the world would tell me how that’s to be done.”

5

I reached Fetter Lane in a chastened mood; and for the rest of the morning we talked of the year that had passed since Armistice Day.

There was to be no United States of Europe, still less a United States of the World. The peace-treaty, to the view of us all, indicated the swiftest and surest way to another war; and there was no influence, outside parliament or within, to modify it. Trade depression was attracting attention to unemployment and taxation; but, of a hundred men who said “We must cut down expenditure,” ninety-nine added “You can’t touch pensions, of course; or the army and navy; or the air force.” . . . And, after nine months, the one political organ that looked beyond the cheap scores and cheaper promises of the 1918 election was read by a growing literary public for the sake of its musical notes and dramatic criticism.

“Are we addressing the right people?,” asked Jefferson Wright.

“Any person who’ll listen is the right person for me,” said Bertrand sententiously.

“Then why not speak to labour?”

“Because it’s no more opposed to war than any other class,” grunted Bertrand. “If it were, there’d have been no war in ’14. When your German workman mobilized, the British workman had to mobilize against him.”

“The labour party kept us out of a war with Russia,” Wright interposed.

“Would the labour party keep us out of a war with France if the French turned nasty? If you’ve the guts of a louse, it’s human nature to resist a threat,” said Bertrand with more rhetorical force than biological accuracy. “How can we stop people putting pistols to other people’s heads?”

The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of “inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we must do now.

“But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily discouraged than I was in 1909.”

Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in England.

“I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one else.”

“And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”

“What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to follow your advice.”

As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”.

“Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me.

And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil. When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect.

“I do my modest share,” I said.

“And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have more money to . . . _waste_ on yourself.”

I cannot recall that the tone or choice of language was more vigorous than I had long been accustomed to hearing from O’Rane. Certainly I should have taken up the challenge without concern, if Sonia had not rushed superfluously to my assistance. Her indignation, however, in demanding why personal expenditure should be called waste, warned me against taking sides in a family quarrel.

“David’s _impossible_ about money!,” she cried. “So long as I have _one_ crust of bread, _one_ dress that would disgrace a scarecrow . . .”

“If this is how the poor live, let’s join them!,” interposed Barbara pacifically.

In spite of herself, Sonia laughed as she saw us admiring her frock. The house was unpretentious, but it was enviably comfortable. I never wish to be given better food or wine. And, on a lower plane of morality, whatever she lacked from her husband was made up by the munificence of her friends.

“It’s so difficult, when every one thinks you’re rich . . .” she began.

“But it isn’t our money,” O’Rane objected.

Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged myself beside Sonia.

“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”

“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he sighed. “Is that _all_ the advice you can give me, George?”

“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money with a pole.”

“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that, though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France again?”

By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life of wasted opportunities.

“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.

It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be passed.

The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession. Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened, for drawing us together.

As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants, nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending. I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.

“Everything all right?,” I asked as carelessly as I could.

“Yes, sir. Lady Barbara is in her room. I believe her ladyship is with her.”

When I went upstairs, Barbara was in bed. The blinds were down, and a closing door hinted that my mother-in-law was for some reason hurrying away to avoid me. As I crossed the room, Barbara told me to stop; and, as I tried to ask how she was, I was waved into silence. Then she covered her eyes and turned away:

“You’ve not been told? It’ll be a shock, but I wanted to tell you myself. I’m sorry, George . . . I . . . I did my best. You mustn’t be _too_ dreadfully disappointed. Dead . . . He was born dead. If only it could have been the other way round!”

Mercifully, as though she had been listening at the door, Lady Crawleigh came back to say that my father-in-law wished to see me. Together we drafted the announcement for the press; and I asked whether it would be prudent for me to go upstairs again. He said “yes” and “no” alternately, concluding on a “yes” in the frantic hope of getting rid of me. As I tapped on Barbara’s door, I heard Lady Crawleigh scuttling through another; and it was Barbara, undaunted and indomitable, who hid her own agony under a gentle concern for me.

“I suppose people will want to sympathize,” she began. “May I have all my letters sent to you, George? Open them, answer them. I shall have to be here for some weeks, I’m afraid, but I’ll make up for deserting you when I come back to London. I’ll give some lovely parties for you. We shall be so busy we shan’t have time to think. I _want_ to keep busy.” . . .

And, on that word, her dead child, her suffering and her disappointment were banished from Barbara’s life. Three years have passed since that April evening of 1920 when we made our compact of silence; and, with a single exception, we observed it with equal scruple on both sides.