Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 18

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Average, sensual man is no match for an enthusiast. When O’Rane wrote that he wanted to ask my advice, vague instinct warned me that he wanted the costlier, if no more valuable, privilege of my personal cooperation.

And it was my intention that he should cooperate with me. If I seemed a doctrinaire to Lucien, a fanatic to Hornbeck and a ‘bolshevist’—whatever that might mean—to Deganway, I seemed to myself the mildest revolutionary that had ever schemed to carry out a revolution by deputy. When, at this time, people talked of “winning the peace” and asked what we meant to do, I felt and said that no active man or woman who had survived the war was justified in sitting idle. I was ready to write, speak and subscribe money on behalf of any organization that would rouse the world to the danger which I saw threatening it. I would work for my “will to peace” as others worked, in the years that followed and along lines which I deplored, for the League of Nations. I lacked the fire and the endurance, however, to inspire a crusade. This, I felt, was O’Rane’s part.

Nevertheless, from our first conversation I divined that we were thinking on different planes. To “make the war worth while”, in my view, was to secure, first and foremost, that there should be no future wars. Perhaps because he had spent so many months in America, where by now the world seemed already to have been made “safe for democracy”, perhaps because he had seen too much of the late war to fancy that any one wanted more of it, O’Rane assumed the end at which I was aiming.

“If the war is to be made ‘worth while’,” he pronounced at the end of our first night together, “we have ... in some way ... to make England ...”

“ ‘A land fit for heroes’ and what not,” Philip Hornbeck interrupted flippantly.

After that, though we conducted our debates in private, I felt that O’Rane’s enthusiasm was sapping my will to the point when I should be drawn from my own leisurely crusade and pressed into his. If, at the end of ten days, he returned to London without me, I can only explain his failure by saying that in the meantime I had fallen to the assault of a yet more formidable enthusiast.