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In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing.

As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination, the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace, like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit these undiscoverable Baltic states.

“The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals. “If you would look at politics from a European point of view, George ...”

“It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted, “that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our contribution in money, men, ships ...”

Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation, had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted.

For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm of bees.

“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is your remedy against future wars?”

If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short head behind him.

“Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I asked Lucien.

“Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn.

“That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.”

“And you don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!”

“With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck whispered.

Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England. I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common effort for a common cause.

“Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile.

“I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the same kind of criminal nonsense?”

“Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings, you make on the roundabouts.”

“If you want to go back ...,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh, when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand.

It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he had lost his seat.

In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s.

“Bertrand beaten?,” I cried. “That’s been a safe radical seat for fifty years!”

“Where are the English papers?,” O’Rane asked.

“It must have been an odd election if he couldn’t get in,” said Hornbeck.

Thanks to our isolation, I think we were all taken equally by surprise. As I read out the strength of the new parties, our tranquil garden became like a stricken field the day after battle. For a time we tried to count the dead; then we found it simpler to hunt for the living.

“Runciman’s gone!,” I cried. “McKenna’s gone ...” Then the tragedy changed to farce. “Asquith’s gone!”

Laurence caught the paper from my hand:

“Coalition-liberal ... Coalition-liberal ... Coalition-unionist.” ...

“The old liberal party’s dead!,” I exclaimed. “There’s a handful of independents.” ...

“Ireland, except in the north, has gone solid for Sinn Fein,” Hornbeck read out over my shoulder.

“Labour will be the biggest single party in the House,” said Laurence.

“You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of rot,” Hornbeck reminded me.

Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia, two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five years before, had flung bombs at another.

“It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered.

Hornbeck read remorselessly on.

“The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the end.

“But we can! We must!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name ... We went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now, when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”

None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old dispensation could not make peace?

We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance, if we had been given the least warning how the election was being conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section, the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support, though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time. Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words. The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh.

“If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference ...” Hornbeck muttered.

“These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up to a civic conscience.”

“I must be getting back to London,” was all he would answer.

I was reminded irresistibly of a similar party, similarly dispersing in the first days of August four and a half years earlier. We had all said then that we must get back to London; we could none of us have said what we expected to do there.

“You’ll wait till Bertrand comes,” I begged.

“Yes. I don’t suppose a day or two more or less will make much difference,” said O’Rane. “After all these years, too ... It’s a curious thing, George; we’re both of us Irishmen, both of us men of peace; and, most of all, we’re reformers. All our working life we’ve seen the reforms nearest our hearts postponed and postponed by an eruption in Ireland or by a threat of European war. God forgive me, I had to stand as a tory and a militarist, because I saw this war coming! Overboard went all my dreams of making life tolerable for the sons of Ishmael! And now again!”

I might have added that it was this feeling of futility which kept me from standing again for parliament when I lost my seat in 1910.

“Until these same sons of Ishmael strike against war,” I answered, “it’s idle to think of improving their lot.”

“And yet it’s so little I’m asking!,” he sighed. “I only want every man to have freedom to work ... and save money ... and marry ... and have children ... without interfering with his neighbours ... and without interference from them. I want him to spend his old age in the comfort and peace of mind which he has earned. His children must be born healthy, to work, to save, to marry, to live and die as he has done. If civilized society can’t give him that ... And it can’t so long as a country contains one single prison or workhouse or infirmary or brothel ...”

“I suspect there were brothels in the golden age,” I interposed.

O’Rane leant forward and gripped my wrist till I winced with the pain.

“In the golden age,” he answered between his teeth, “there were hopeless, uncaring cynics, who said that prostitution was the oldest profession in the world. Slavery was the oldest solution of all labour problems. Torture was the oldest safeguard of civil authority. The moral sense of the world must be roused till it sweeps away prostitution and disease, as it swept away torture and slavery. It was not to keep them flourishing that we went to war. And we can’t sweep them away while another war threatens.” ...

He broke off, as my mother came into the garden with the day’s letters; and, as I struggled against the impact of my uncle’s fury, I recognized that I was being assailed by a stronger enthusiast even than O’Rane and being asked to save by propaganda a world that I thought had already been saved by war.