Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 14

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My triptych, displaying—in its centre—the war and—on either side—the peace that preceded and should follow the war, spared no space for dividing or linking frame-work: though I was working in the transition-period between full war and full peace, I made little attempt to describe the condition in which we all found ourselves at the moment when a truce was called.

To some extent—in these blissful, lazy days, when we had nothing to do but sleep and eat and smoke and gossip—we filled the blank by discussing the present and future states of our friends. My battle-piece was subjected to a more general scrutiny than I had intended; and for many rather embarrassing days I was challenged to defend myself against critics who opened wide fields of speculation with the words:

“If, as you think, the old political game is really played out ...”; or

“If you’re right about the redistribution of wealth ...”

In the morning, as we idled in long chairs on a glowing marble verandah; at night, as we sat in a half-circle while Barbara played to us; in leisurely afternoon walks and occasional peripatetic sessions from one bedroom to another, we discussed war-literature and war-religion, the new position of women, the fate of the demobilized soldier and the day-to-day life which we expected to lead when peace was proclaimed.

Most of our predictions were unbelievably wild, in their assumption either that everything or that nothing would be the same as before the war; and our discussions were so formless that they could never be summarized or recorded. When we abandoned conjecture for the concrete plans that each was making for himself, I felt that—in the words used at a dinner to Eric Lane in New York—‘the convulsion’s as great, when you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a soldier.’ Sam Dainton, after ten years’ service, was leaving the army, “to prey on society”, as he put it. Deganway was saying good-bye to the Foreign Office; Barbara’s cousin, John Carstairs, to the Diplomatic. Professionally, the climax in both their lives had been reached and passed; the first wanted to make money, the second to look after his estates.

At this time I began to detect the rise of that adventurer-class at which history points a punctual finger after every great war but which I somehow did not expect to see in my own time. When I was called back to London, I found new men in Fleet Street and the City, new names at Covent Garden and in the candidates’ books of the clubs; at Cannes I discerned, in the good-looking person of Violet’s brother Laurence, an adventurer in the making. As I became acquainted with his friends in the course of the next three years, I saw the natural, perhaps the necessary, evolution of a type which has not yet found its place in the social void. My cousin had been snatched from Melton on his eighteenth birthday and thrust into the Irish Guards, where his precocious development as a man-of-the-world had been won at the expense of his small aptitude for learning. The Hunter-Oakleighs could not afford to maintain him in idleness; and Laurence, recognizing this, quartered himself on Loring House and allowed Violet or any other of his relations to maintain him. In theory, he was reading for the bar; and a text-book on Roman law was always at hand to rebut the charge of idleness. In practice, he blandly awaited pecuniary compensation from a society which had taught him expensive tastes at a time when he might have been teaching himself the means of gratifying them. The army had paralysed his initiative; he believed—or affected to believe—that, at one-and-twenty, his life-work was done; and already he had learned that personal charm and rich friends were a fair substitute for industry.

“I wish you’d advise me about Laurie,” said Violet one day, with a troubled glance down the verandah to the bed of down cushions where her brother was devoting to La Vie Parisienne the hours demanded by the institutes of Justinian. “He’s rather a problem.”

“The whole of his generation is a problem,” I said. “He stands between Jim, who’s dead, and Sandy, who’s still a child. He and his like have already borne the burden of the war; now he’ll have to bear the burden of clearing up after the war.”

My proposal found less than no favour in the hearing to which it was directed.

“I’m not bearing any more burdens till I’ve made myself secure,” Laurence declared. “Nor’s any one else. Half the men I know have come back to see another fellow doing their job; the other half are like me and never had a job to come back to. And, while we were away, you let a pack of women into all the professions,” he grumbled.

“Laurie will marry a rich wife,” Sam Dainton prophesied. “I’d do the same myself, only I’m so precious ugly.”

“That doesn’t matter when men are scarce,” said Laurence reassuringly; “but I’d much prefer it if you married the rich wife and let me blow in as the tertium quid. That’s the way all the best marriages are arranged nowadays.”

“I wonder what the modern girl will turn into,” drawled Philip Hornbeck at a tangent.

“The modern girl is a contradiction in terms,” answered Lucien de Grammont. “To modernize yourself is to change; and woman never changes, she only adapts herself.”

“She adapted herself in the war, good and plenty,” said Sam Dainton with authority.

“She was brought up to know nothing,” rejoined Barbara; “she thought she knew everything. With luck she’ll learn enough to bring her daughters up better than she was brought up herself.”

“This from you!,” Violet laughed.

“It’s only now that I see what narrow squeaks I had,” said Barbara reflectively. “Whenever a girl makes a mess of her life, I believe it’s the parents who are to blame.”

While this theme was developed in the uneasy hearing of my mother, Violet took a last look at my manuscript before handing it back to me.

“You say nothing about religion,” she commented in an undertone. “It’s the biggest thing in life for many people.”

“For women more than for men,” I submitted. While we were still at school, Darwin, Huxley and Renan were made accessible to us in cheap reprints. I have felt, ever since, that, if my salvation depends on faith in something that ignores ordinary rules of evidence, I would prefer not to be saved. “And you couldn’t have had a bloodier war, if we’d all been followers of Anti-Christ. By a paradox, the only people who tried to live up to their religion were persecuted as conscientious objectors.”

“What will you put in its place?,” Violet asked.

I should only have hurt her feelings if I had suggested that Christianity might now be given a trial: to her, that faith is synonymous with the Holy Roman Catholic Church; to me, it is the service of man, and the Christian churches with their deadening forms and dead rules, their deferred punishments and rewards, their proscriptions and feuds and exclusive salvations have gone far to stifle Christianity.

“If people thought less about the next world,” I answered, “they might make a more tolerable place of this.”

And it was in some such words that I ended my criticism of the war. The folly and suspicion and malevolence of all the nations had made it possible; when it came, all the nations engaged in it exhibited much the same endurance, if simultaneously they exhibited much the same savagery.

“Well, is it ‘the Great War’ or ‘the Great Waste’?,” Violet asked. “Jim was over age when he gave up the staff. They didn’t want him to go. He felt that every one who got so much out of England in peace must go. I felt that, too. I shouldn’t like to think I’d helped to have him killed for no purpose.”

If we had taken a poll of the eager disputants at the other end of the verandah, I doubt if the verdict would have satisfied her. On their own admission, the mailed fist of Philip Hornbeck, the diplomacy of Lucien de Grammont and the first-hand experience of war which Laurence and Sam Dainton had won on four fronts provided no more security than the religion of Violet Loring that another war, equally or more cruel, unnecessary and futile, should not break out as soon as the memories of one generation were grown dim and the exhaustion of one generation had been repaired.

“Doesn’t that depend on the people who’ve survived?,” I asked. “Until the conscriptionists turned a crusade into a hunt for cannon-fodder, the war had a moral grandeur. Whether Jim’s death served a useful purpose for any one but himself depends on our power to recapture the spirit of 1914.”

For this elastic formula I can claim little credit. The cynic is now sure of his laugh if he mocks the idea of “a war to end war”; but I saw too much of my contemporaries in 1914 to join the later chorus of fashionable disparagement. Before their first idealism became jaded, the young men who had been reared in an atmosphere of war-preparations and war-scares, who aspired to a world orderly and a life beautiful and who saw their aspirations thwarted by men too old for hope or faith, resolved to create from the war a world of which they need not be ashamed. They enlisted in the service of man. From their deaths I learned the phrase. One of them, the last and best of my friends, who was literally and awfully crucified, came back blinded and broken to tell me that he was unrepentant.

“I was in New York,” O’Rane wrote at this time, “when the armistice was proclaimed. If you’d shouted ‘as you were’ from the Woolworth Tower, you couldn’t have scattered people more quickly. ‘As you were before the war’ is the general feeling. I expect it’s been the same in England. We must do better than that.” ...

“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Violet.

“And I’m not sure that I can put it into words,” I answered. “In general terms, no sacrifice was too great in the war; I want people to feel no sacrifice is too great in peace. It’s an empty victory if a high proportion of the victors are diseased, hungry, verminous, discontented. Any one of imagination must be ashamed of the slums in our big cities; but we won’t make the effort or the sacrifice to cure them. I want to fan the crusading spirit of 1914 back to life.... Before that, though, we must make sure that we aren’t going to drift into another war. That means a crusade covering the whole inhabited world.”

“I don’t know how you’ll begin.”

“Nor do I yet. I may be able to tell you more in a week’s time. Have you heard that the O’Ranes are coming here? He cabled to say that he was in urgent need of my advice. I cabled back that I was in much more urgent need of his.”

Glancing at my manuscript for the last time before sending it to be typed, I felt that, in a week’s time, I might know better how to paint my third panel. We had to see now whether those who had failed to avert war were capable of ending war.