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“You heard what Sonia said about Stornaway’s proposal?,” O’Rane began on the second day.

The rest of the party had disappeared to Monte Carlo; and I was imprisoned in the shade of a palm-tree until I surrendered or bolted.

“He made the same proposal to me,” I said. “I turned it down because I thought there was more important work nearer to hand.”

“Our work won’t lack in importance.”

“Then you’ve accepted his offer?,” I asked. “You’re giving up the House?”

“I’m committed in principle,” he answered. “Yes, I shan’t stand again: this coupon business leaves no scope for the independent member. Why the prime minister wants an election at all, when his position is impregnable ...”

“He wants to keep it impregnable,” I said. “Well, you’re going in with Raymond to succeed where Deryk Lancing and his father and every millionaire in history has so far failed? It’s easier to make money honestly than to spend it wisely, you’ll find. How much is there?”

“About twelve hundred thousand a year.”

“You can do a lot of harm with that,” I said. “How will you spend it?”

“For the first year or two it’s ear-marked for universities and hospitals.”

“And after that?”

“We might make the war worth while,” he laughed. “But you must help. The trouble with England at present is that we’ve so little sense of responsibility. Isn’t it about time we educated people up to a civic conscience? In the war, I admit ...”

“You found a hundred men who would die for their country to one who would live for it.”

“Because, in peace, we call people ‘good citizens’ if they obey the laws and pay their taxes. That’s not enough for a civilized state, George! Good God, when a man commits murder, we hire another man to hang him! It’s you and I who ought to be hanged for not teaching him our own reverence for law. We hire people to persecute other people for beating their wives or neglecting their children or concealing their diseases! It’s we who ought to be persecuted. Illness, to me, is the wound inflicted on society by the indifference of the healthy. Poverty. Degradation.” ...

“And your civic conscience ...?,” I reminded him.

“Another word for imagination! You’d be ashamed of yourself if your tenants in Ireland died of want; if the men drank or the women turned prostitutes. Yet I’ve seen sights in different parts of the world that would make your blood run cold. Famines and pestilences and massacres. Things we don’t allow in England: we’ve got that far. Now it’s time we went farther. If the war’s to be worth while, you must satisfy yourself that what has been saved was worth saving.”

“But how on earth are you to do it?”

In other days I had heard Aylmer Lancing, as he wheeled himself with slow impatience about his workroom, muttering of a dread project to corner the raw material of high explosives throughout the world. Some Central American republic was causing him trouble; and he had decided to make future wars impossible. Later, I had been present when Raymond Stornaway schemed to force up the standard of living for manual labour by paying uneconomic wages in one place and raising a storm of envious discontent in every other. Both men had been wonderfully convincing; but they had done nothing. Behind O’Rane’s shining eyes, in a stain of shadow between two white sheets of sunshine, I seemed now to see Raymond’s tired face at his luncheon-party on Armistice Day.

“So far,” said O’Rane thoughtfully, “no one’s gone about it in the right way.”

“It was not for want of intelligence. Can it be that the modern world has grown too fast for any one to control it?”

If I had not parted with my little monograph on the war, I should have liked to explore this idea that civilization was bursting like an overripe fruit. Everywhere, in my own lifetime, I had seen fourth-dimensional energy collecting in a world of three dimensions. At a far distance, I had watched the Harrimans and Carnegies and Rockefellers bowing under wealth too great for a single man’s direction; and, since we began to raise men a hundred thousand at a time and to spend money at the rate of millions a day, I was convinced that we were operating forces which we could not control. For twenty years I had tried to “think imperially”, but I doubt if Mr. Chamberlain himself would have recognized the British Empire as I saw it represented from my window at the Admiralty on Armistice Day: in fifty years it had changed to something that might become a federation of British states but had certainly ceased to be an empire. America had ceased to be a nation without becoming even a federation. When I heard of a gas that would destroy whole cities, when I read of private fortunes that could buy whole countries, I felt that the earth was hardly big enough for its Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords; the Rockefellers and Hearsts and Fords themselves seemed hardly big enough for the monsters they had created.

“No one,” said O’Rane, “has spent twelve hundred thousand a year to spread his own doctrines. We’ll buy up derelict palaces like Braye and Eldridge; turn ’em into schools for the new poor who can’t afford Eton and the new rich who can’t get in. We’ll stuff them with scholarships to attract the brightest wits; we’ll have our subjects taught, as we want them taught, by giving prizes at Oxford and Cambridge. And, when the best men in every profession, every walk of life, are men who’ve been through our mill, we can convert the world.”

What the text-books of a civic conscience were to be I did not enquire at this stage. If O’Rane aspired to make each man love his neighbour as himself, that was an aspiration towards which the Christian churches, usually with relatively greater wealth, often with the power of the sword and always with a grip on the fears and hopes of the faithful, had been working for nearly two thousand years.

“The late war,” I propounded, “was not a good advertisement for Christian teaching.”

“Because Christianity has never been brought to men’s doors and into their lives.

‘What ragamuffin-saint

Believes God watches him continually,

As he believes in fire that it will burn,

Or rain that it will drench him?’

I often wonder what would have happened to Christianity if it had come into the world with our modern means of communication.”

We were still arguing when the rest of the party returned; and, until the brief winter twilight faded, we sat and spent Stornaway’s money for him. To this day I can see the half-circle of light dresses and the fire-fly movements of the men’s cigarettes; I can see faces white with avarice and eyes dark with excitement.

“Over a million a year ...,” Barbara gasped.

“I told you we were going to be the big new noise in London,” said Sonia complacently. “George, of course, thinks he’s very superior.” ...

“I only think it’s a tremendous responsibility,” I defended myself.

“If the job’s too big, we can turn it down,” said O’Rane.

“The others thought that, too,” I warned him.

It was a strange discussion, which ultimately became a monologue of foreboding. As all the world knows, Aylmer Lancing made his first fortune by chance and then found that he could not help adding to it; after buying the site of a burnt city, he had to build a city on the site; he constructed railroads to feed his city and manufactured agricultural machinery to pay for the food. Daily, until his breakdown, he grew richer; and, in the long years of his dying, he was to find that, while the hospitals, the universities, the museums and galleries could live on his bounty for a year, after that he must invent new outlets.

“If your income’s too big, you can always reduce your capital,” Sam Dainton contributed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”

“With a capital of five-and-twenty million?,” I asked. “It’s not a simple question of dropping bags of gold into the sea.”

Early in his career, as I told them, Aylmer Lancing had tried to sell the New-Mexico-Montana Railroad when it was threatened by the South-Western Trunk. As he unloaded, the price fell; and, as the price fell, others unloaded too. A panic set in at one moment, to be ended the next by a rumour that Lancing was selling a bear. Up went the price; and Aylmer sold his last share on a soaring market, to find himself the richer by several million dollars.

In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors, Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England. Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt.

“I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his problem, but none of them solved it.”