Chapter TWO: That Which Remained

No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,
You loved me quite enough, it seems to-night.
This must suffice me here. What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance—
Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,
Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,
For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me
To cover—the three first without a wife
While I have mine! So—still they overcome
Because there’s still Lucrezia,—as I choose.

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my love.

ROBERT BROWNING: _Andrea del Sarto_.

1

Before we settled in London for the summer of 1920, I asked Bertrand whether he was prepared to run our paper without me if I could persuade Barbara to dull the edge of her grief by coming round the world with me.

“You’ll be leaving us,” answered my uncle rather blankly, “just at the moment when life is becoming normal after the war. We’ve hideous labour-troubles in store; unemployment . . . From all I hear, there’s going to be an explosion in Ireland.”

“And this,” I interrupted, “is what you describe as normal conditions after the war?”

Bertrand nodded slowly over his clasped hands:

“I do. A peace-treaty you may regard as another aspect of war: the last chapter, if you like. Then you come to that which remains: the bill that’s still unpaid when you’ve counted your dead and disbanded your armies and dismembered your empires. All the complications of our spiritual convalescence are before us. Still . . .”

I might have spared him my importunity until I had approached Barbara. With the choice of six months in London and twelve on a steamer, she had no difficulty in making up her mind; and I soon found myself studying, in her company and from a somewhat different angle, “that which remained” in London after eighteen months of armistice and peace. If the life was a little bewildering and sometimes more than a little uncongenial, that—as Bertrand would have said—was part of the unpaid bill.

2

“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the metropolis of England.”

“For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San Remo, Hythe . . .”

In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on, meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season, of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent tragedy.

“Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I suppose _you_ don’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more money and a bit less work than the bar?”

If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who sent me testimonials beginning: “_Public school and university ex-service officer_, 1914-1918, _wounded_.” . . . If others received half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them; and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced, with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks.

“Nobody could want _less_ work than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck pointed out.

“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle . . .”

“My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered.

“Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him.

In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses, land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’ candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the pleadings of _Peace_ would never do.

At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals; and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and treatment of international prostration.

“The _whole_ of Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany. Take Austria. _Take Russia._”

And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics, had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and, if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow was so far from London.

I had heard so much of the coming royalist counterrevolution that I fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia.

“Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me.

Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances!

“Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’.

“The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of religion should be regarded as paid agitators.

Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but, without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold.

“Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved upstairs.

“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal; politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it absolutely to yourself.”

I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel, however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier. After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that night for their retirement.

“I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves, don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizing _this_ party, of course; but the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.”

If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties had the ceremony and pomp of a _levée_. In 1920 we had no time for the ceremony, no money for the pomp.

“I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation.

The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of recognition.

“Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely, “for one who can find time to be hospitable.”

As we drifted uncomfortably about the house, I found it expedient to leave at least this charge unanswered. The smoking-room was given up to bridge, the dining-room to an endless supper; musicians, whom in time I came to suspect our butler of keeping on a chain in one of the cellars, were imprisoned on a landing: and both drawing-rooms were cleared for dancing. “_Solitudinem faciunt: pacem appellant._ I’m off,” said Bertrand in bewilderment. “Promise you won’t invite me again!” And I shared his bewilderment. The success of the party, as of the late war, lay in unity of command. Our butler was _generalissimo_; and Barbara asked only that I would leave him alone. If the men could not find cigars, they appealed to Robson; when an uninvited guest strayed into the hall, demanding who the guy was who was giving this show, Robson introduced him promptly to his hostess; I saw him supplying powder and carrying out repairs to torn dresses; and, when our musicians knocked off work for the night, Robson obliged at the piano, apologizing for the slow, melodious waltzes of my undergraduate days and regretting that he had no temperament for jazz-music.

“I _wish_ I knew his history,” Barbara murmured plaintively. “I daren’t ask for fear of finding he has a wife. That would break my heart, because I’m determined to marry him if anything happens to you, George.”

Lady Dainton, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength of disapproval.

“I would sooner give up society altogether,” she announced, “than countenance its present form. This, of course, is different,” she added vaguely and without conviction.

Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they amused Barbara.

3

“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding a _post mortem_.

“These people don’t _amuse_ you?,” he cried.

“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”

Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help, they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.

“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred. If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”

And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek of shells had been forgotten.

“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara, when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the war on art . . .?”

“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no such thing as absolute good.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“And I’m thrilled by it!,” she cried in unaffected rapture. “All the violence and horror and madness of the war are reflected in the art of to-day. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. This party, which dear Lady Dainton hated so much . . . The restlessness, the hysteria . . . Jazz, in itself . . .”

“That which remains,” I murmured, in Bertrand’s phrase.

I was reminded of the days before the war when revues and ragtime first established their empire in London. Then, as the curtain prepared to fall, principals and supers, the latest beauty and the last comedian, a scene-shifter or two and the prompter all jigged and shuffled to the haunting syncopation of the _Honeymoon Rag_ or _That Ol’ Mason-Dixon Line_. The audience jigged and shuffled up the gangways; the men were still humming, the women still working their shoulders when they drove away. ‘_Oh, honey, I feel funny when dat coon begin to play_ . . .’ Now they jigged and shuffled through the streets and into the houses; they could not stop; life was become an endless syncopation.

I wondered when our friends would settle down. If the art of the day seemed, in my philistine eyes, epileptic, it was at least faithful to the epileptic contortions and fitful mood of the times. Reviewing these stupefying parties, I see men and women in a high fever. The girls all wear the same short skirts and exhibit the same bare backs; they have achieved the same flat figure; and, granted an upturned nose, they bob their hair in the same way. Very young, very pretty and very full of high spirits, they think the same thoughts and express them in the same jargon with the same loud assurance. Their sameness makes every party the same. I see myself talking feverishly of films with some star from Los Angeles and being told, by little Ivy Gaymer, of the latest divorce; I see young poets discussing a recent lampoon and young actresses describing their last triumph. There are financial groups and political caves; my cousin Laurence, who has cultivated a knowing and shrewd manner, runs feverishly from one to another, nodding, whispering, waving a vast cigar and, I fancy, rather modelling himself on Saltash. Sam Dainton, who is beginning to look dissipated, engages in feverish pursuit of one woman after another. This fever has infected the women; the divorce-court does a flourishing trade; no one can remember who at any moment is allied with whom; and Sam makes overtures to all in the sure belief that some—and, perhaps, most—will prove to be complaisant. Sir Rupert Foreditch spreads the fever among the young politicians.

I can understand that Lady Dainton is too inelastic for the universal syncopation of these days. I could wish, in this season of comprehensive toleration, that I were far more tolerant or far less, for many of these women would not be received by Violet Loring or my mother, many of the men would be roughly handled if their business records were examined by unsympathetic counsel. And no one can for long live comfortably in a state of delirium. The clatter from the dining-room and the din from the musicians’ corner are unceasing. Every one is moving, talking, smoking at top speed. And Robson holds all the threads in his capable hands; he is, to my house in Seymour Street, what Gaspard is to the Turf and Stage. My house is indeed a small and noisy club.

It is to be hoped that our guests enjoyed themselves; I believe that they, like Barbara, were only concerned to be so busy that they could not think. I should not be surprised to hear that, like Barbara, some of them broke down before the end. We had intended to stay in London until I went to shoot with the Knightriders; but early in July Barbara collapsed suddenly and was ordered to the country. Though there was nothing organically amiss with her, Gaisford threatened to throw up the case if she remained in London.

“When I die, you can tell people I was the only honest leech you ever met,” he muttered with a frown. “I’m never afraid to say I don’t know; and I don’t know now what’s wrong with that child. She’s very ill indeed; and there’s nothing the matter with her. I have my suspicions. You’ll go with her?”

“If I can arrange things at the office,” I answered.

“Office be damned! If she wants you, go!”

More than a little frightened, I took Barbara to Crawleigh next day and for a week tried to run our paper by means of special messengers and an indistinct telephone. Then I returned to London. The explosion which Bertrand had predicted four months earlier took place at a moment when the office was entrusted to the learned and wholly unpractical Spence-Atkins; and I judged—God knows how rashly!—that Ireland called to me the more urgently. I suppose our lives would have been different if Barbara’s rest-cure had been postponed till September; if Bertrand had taken his holiday in August, I a month earlier.

“If you _must_ go, you must,” sighed Barbara. “Will you open all my letters, as you did before? I’m not to be worried; and my letters are always so uninteresting that they send my temperature up two points.”

“I’ll do anything if you’ll only promise to get well,” I answered.

4

London, on my return, was in what Bertrand called “its tadpole condition: all head and no body”. The residential streets and squares were deserted; the clubs and newspaper-offices were thronged.

“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to define our attitude.”

“Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.”

“How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked.

Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the assembly framed.

“But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with us, “means coercing Ulster.”

As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of the table.

“I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and ‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.”

Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat; my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round our echoing table.

It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell, though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the balance, it must employ the same means.

“Can’t we cut out ancient history?,” I suggested, as my patience wore thin. “We need a policy to meet the present position; and the present position is an evenly matched civil war.”

As the phrase left my lips, I wondered whether the war was any longer an even match. Two days before, I heard from Hornbeck that a mail-train had been held up and the contents of the lord lieutenant’s bag forwarded, after perusal, with an endorsement “_Passed by the Censor I. R. A._”; my agent reported that stores were being looted and ammunition seized. If attacks on private persons and on property were still rare, this was due to prudence on the one side and to intimidation on the other. Some one, however, would soon be shot because he refused to be intimidated; the shooting would be avenged; there would be reprisals against the avengers; and, worst fate of all, no one would be allowed to remain neutral.

“It’s begun already,” said Dainton. “That man they murdered in Limerick . . .”

“That spy they shot?,” Jellaby substituted.

“You call a man a spy for saving British troops from being butchered in an ambush?,” Crawleigh enquired acidly.

“You called Flaherty a spy,” boomed my uncle, “from your place in the House of Lords. He gave exactly similar information to the republican troops.”

“Who were in armed rebellion against the king,” said John Carstairs.

“Whose king?,” asked Jellaby.

The dialogue tripped on with the ease that comes of practice; and most of us were tried players in the farce or tragedy of mistranslating an opponent’s terms. In the interests of peace I begged that we should avoid the more flagrantly question-begging labels; but by now, grown men though we were, each owed himself the satisfaction of just one more stab before he laid down his arms.

“You know who’s at the back of all this?,” enquired Dainton, carefully avoiding my uncle’s eye.

“The bolshevists?,” Bertrand asked indulgently. “You said it was the Germans in ’16. It was the Americans before that. Good God! I’m old enough to remember O’Connell: it always _has_ been somebody else! Will you English never learn that an Irishman’s feeling is for his _own_ country? The more you’re pleased to call a man ‘loyalist’, the more I’d call him ‘traitor’, as I’d say ‘traitor’ to a Pole who boasted of his ‘loyalty’ to Russia or Germany.”

“As your people _do_ say ‘traitor’ to the loyalists who fought for you in this war,” muttered Carstairs. “You’ll hang them all as traitors, of course, when you’ve got your republic?”

My uncle was understood to say that he wished to hang no one; but this laudable restraint won no favour from the rest.

“I should hang Carson and Bonar Law,” said Jellaby, as though he were ordering a well-considered dinner.

“Then you must hang Asquith and Birrell for not hanging them,” said Crawleigh, partly from proconsular devotion to firmness, but chiefly from hatred of liberalism.

“I,” said Dainton, “should be quite content to shoot de Valera as Casement was shot. Like a dog. Hanging’s too good for him. President of the Irish Republic, indeed! It’s treason to the king.”

“If you’re going to hang for treason, you must hang for constructive treason, for constructive mutiny and for acquiescence in constructive treason and mutiny,” I pointed out: “that brings in the covenanters, the Curragh people and the Asquith cabinet.” Dainton, I knew, was a covenanter; and I wanted him to see the implication of his wholesale executions. “Personally, I don’t think hanging or shooting ever does much good . . .”

“It would have been a good thing,” Bertrand interrupted, “if you’d shot the entire 1914 House of Commons.”

“But as a policy for the government in 1920?,” I asked.

I have thought over this dinner a dozen times since; and, when ministers were attacked for permitting the slaughter and reprisals that followed, I would sometimes ask their critics if they could do better than the reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-informed and reasonably sane men who shewed themselves so crass, ignorant and mad at this meeting.

“For all the good we’ve done,” I told Bertrand, as we walked home, “I might as well have been in the country.”

“Don’t leave me yet,” he begged.

And throughout the late summer and early autumn I was torn between Barbara’s entreaties that I should come back to Crawleigh and Bertrand’s reproach that I was deserting him when he most needed me.

As a study in “that which remained” I suppose these barren passions claim their place: in our politics, as in our work and play, our gettings and spendings, our crimes and insanities, we lived more rapidly, more violently. The growing disorders of Ireland were ascribed to a “murder-gang”; in the spirit of the age, they were met by irregular troops, with general instructions to give at least as good as they received. Under the reign of reprisals, there was inaugurated an organized terror for which there had been no parallel since the first French revolution. Burning, looting, killing and torturing were paid back, with interest, in the same currency. Mysterious and fatal lists of names were passed up and down the country; the mails were now intercepted at will; and, when far-scattered, unsuspecting men and women were done to death by simultaneous blows, a whisper of “spy” and “counter-spy”—words that had lost their meaning—explained this opposing secret carnage which no man had power to stop.

Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor who had broken faith with the South.

“If our own statesmanship is bankrupt, we must look elsewhere,” my uncle pronounced.

For a week he laid siege to the League of Nations, then to the Foreign Office. Simultaneously I went as a suppliant to Crawleigh in the hope that he would forward my petition to the Vatican. On the same day, in almost the same words, we were told that there was no precedent to guide a sovereign power in summoning an arbitrator to settle differences between a government and its subjects.

“You can’t run an empire on those lines,” said my father-in-law.

“You’re not running an empire on your present lines!” I retorted.

He was impregnable. Until the republican leaders came, like the burghers of Calais, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, he would not parley with them; and, unhappily for him, no one was strong enough to compass an unconditional surrender.

As I walked empty-handed away from Berkeley Square, I met Hornbeck returning home from the Admiralty.

“Making a nice, tidy world for heroes to live in?,” he enquired with a grin.

Though his tone was bantering, it was free from malice. Philip Hornbeck had no political predilections and less than no belief in the perfectibility of man. Government, for him, always came back to a whiff of grapeshot, which he was always ready to discharge, always without passion and always without error.

“The problem’s _not_ insoluble,” I maintained. “We settled Quebec; we settled South Africa. We could settle Ireland, if we wanted to; but, of a hundred men who talk of settlements, ninety-nine will only settle on their own terms.”

On reaching Fetter Lane, I found my uncle at work on an appeal to the nation.

“The Foreign Office,” he told me with frozen rage, “wanted to know what business this was of mine. Perhaps we can shew them.”

While he wrote, I hardened my heart to the unpleasantest duty that had befallen me since my marriage. After the usual enquiries when I was coming down to Crawleigh, Barbara let fly such a cloud of reproaches that I was ashamed to finish her letter. A delicate wife was no doubt a nuisance; but ought I not to have thought of that before marrying her? Engrossing as my work was, did I—as a matter of academic interest—rate it higher than her reiterated request that I should come to her when she was more ill and miserable than ever in her life before?

I was halfway to the station when my secretary overtook me with an hysterical telegram: _If you love me destroy letter unread_; and I should be hard put to say whether telegram or letter was the more disturbing. Crawleigh and the local doctor assured me that she was progressing famously; Bertrand urged me to go with a vehemence more inhibitive than the strongest veto; and, in the end, I lamely begged Barbara to be patient and promised to come at an hour’s notice if she really needed me.

“Peace,” I reminded my uncle, “is only another aspect of war. ‘The last chapter, if you like’ . . .”

“Please God it may be!,” he answered with emotion.

5

And, as we spoke, the last chapter was opening. Though neither of us had paid much attention to the report that certain political prisoners were being removed to England, we awoke next day to find that public interest had been deflected to another part of the battle. As a football match is suddenly suspended at sound of the referee’s whistle and the players stand apart to watch one of their number who has been injured, so the armies in Ireland, the factions in England, the spectators all over the world now stood apart to watch one man slowly dying. The lord mayor of Cork, arrested and imprisoned, refused to take food. For a week or two, while life still ticked loudly, we debated over our dinners whether he had been rightly condemned, whether the government would let him die of starvation, whether he and his cause would not be made ridiculous if he were fed forcibly. Then the contest became more determined: the government would not yield to a hunger-strike; and Terence McSwiney, with life ticking now less clearly, would not yield to the government. It was a question of endurance.

“_Do come here next week-end if you can possibly manage it_,” wrote Barbara. “_This business about the lord mayor must be decided one way or the other by then._” . . .

I could give no promise. The papers were at this time recording the days of the fast and hunting for stories of men who had lived for three, four, five weeks without food. The ticking became feebler; and, one press-night, when I sat shuffling an obituary, an appeal and a face-saving leader on McSwiney’s surrender, we heard that the strike was over. The report was contradicted before I reached the composing-room. A week later, as the unwound spring stopped, jerked and stopped again, we were told that the lord mayor was dead. He was still alive next day, next week. Sympathy flowed and ebbed. The government was entreated to spare a game fighter; the public grew angrily unhappy at being made an accomplice in this slow torture. Then a gust of impatience blew against such crazy stubbornness; there followed a flash of illumination, and Dainton, who would have shot McSwiney out of hand two months before, asked dubiously whether an Ireland of McSwineys would be easy to “reconquer”.

At length the dying prisoner became an institution. His name was tucked into inconspicuous corners of the daily papers. There were other claims on the public attention. At last he died; and we realized that, as the injured player no longer obstructed the field, the match must go on.

On the day of the funeral procession I received an unexpected call from O’Rane, white-faced and enigmatic. In all the years I had known him I doubt if we had talked of Ireland a dozen times; but this day stirred passions older than any he could remember, and I felt that the taut, bare-headed figure who gripped my arm was saluting McSwiney’s coffin in the name of his father, “O’Rane the liberator”. The Irish of London were present in thousands; but the English watched or followed in tens of thousands. Some, I well believe, came to salve a restless conscience; some in homage to a brave man; most to gratify an idle curiosity. The republican colours fluttered unfamiliarly in English faces; the way was lined with English police.

“In any other country there would have been a riot,” murmured O’Rane, when I described the scene.

“There will be all the riots you can use when this is over. . . . You’ve been lying very low the last few months, Raney.”

“I’ve been thinking. All Lancing’s money . . .”

“And ‘the good of humanity’?”

“Yes. I believe . . . I’ve decided . . . to save humanity . . . from ever touching it,” he answered slowly.

At the time he would say no more; and we spent the afternoon strolling along one embankment and back by the other. In the course of our walk, we had a good view of St. Thomas’ Hospital, if he wished to heal the sick, and of the Tate Gallery, if he cared to foster the fine arts; south of the river we walked through streets that were more sordidly grimed with poverty than any I wish to see again. There were, I pointed out, inequalities of wealth for a millionaire to adjust.

“But is all this for the good of humanity?,” O’Rane asked, breaking silence for the first time as we pressed into his house. The side-door of The Sanctuary was like the out-patients’ entrance to a hospital; his writing-table was submerged in appeals to his charity. “You can begin by adjusting the difference between yourself and those people outside.”

There was a sneer in his tone that roused my natural perversity. I distributed a handful of small change and returned to find him smiling.

“What did you give them?,” he asked.

“About a sovereign. Whether they’re deserving cases . . .”

“They’re more deserving than you, George. And, if I’d given Lancing money, I should have been handing _you_ a sovereign. That’s my difficulty. Every time I give to a hospital or a gallery, I’m relieving prosperous people like you of your responsibilities. If the material good is outweighed by the spiritual harm . . .” He broke off to stalk up and down the darkening library with shoulders hunched and head thrust forward. “There’s still plenty of wealth in the world. Places like the Turf and Stage stink of it. And, if people want things badly enough, they’ll pay for them. If London had a smallpox epidemic, we should press money on our neighbours to get them vaccinated.”

“But, while you’re saving humanity from itself,” I pointed out, “the money’s increasing automatically.”

“I can find outlets farther afield. You wouldn’t let those people starve under your eyes; but you’ll let people starve to their hearts’ content if you can’t see ’em.”

“With a million or two of unemployed here,” I began, “you won’t be popular.”

“If I could afford to consider my popularity!,” he broke out with a joyless laugh.

As Sonia was in the country, I brought him to dine with me in Seymour Street. We gossiped until nearly midnight; and, when I had sent him home, I settled to my daily duty of opening Barbara’s letters for her. She had been right, three months before, in calling her correspondence uninteresting; and, until this night, I had not been troubled with any doubts which letters to send on and which to destroy.

Now I encountered a problem for which I was unprepared. The first letter referred to an occasion eighteen months before, when my wife—according to the writer—had invited him to run away with her.