Читать книгу To-morrow and To-morrow - Stephen McKenna - Страница 21

Table of Contents

Bertrand’s descent upon Cannes may be likened to the unheralded arrival of the headmaster in a form-room that has for some time been left to its own devices.

“ ‘The Theodosian code’,” Laurence recited virtuously, “ ‘was published in Constantinople on the 15th of February, 438 ...’ If Bertrand tries to find me a job, say I’m suited, thank you.”

The rest of us, for all our feeling that we were drowsing in a back-water, looked regretfully at the blazing hibiscus-hedge and guiltily at one another.

“We all ought to be going back,” said Barbara, who—six weeks before—had never wished to see Dover Cliffs again.

I asked what good we could do; I nearly told her what harm we could not avoid doing, for Eric Lane had crossed from New York on O’Rane’s boat and was now in London. Bertrand’s outpouring, however, was beyond the range of argument.

“You will find,” he predicted, “that the world is entering on a new glacial age of materialism. We must fight it.”

And his method of fighting it was to resurrect our old paper, to set me in the old editorial chair, to sweep the country with new propaganda and to create a new political party in the dining-room of Seymour Street.

Those who have never edited a paper are inclined to compare themselves with Delane at his most legendary; and the comparison is seldom favourable to Delane or to The Times. Those who have never tried to influence opinion—as my uncle and I tried in six years’ devoted service to the Disarmament League—become in their daydreams a rival to Parnell or Gladstone and convert mass-meetings with a single speech. Hard-won experience had taught me better, yet this is what Bertrand proposed; and Barbara, I knew, was seeing herself already as the maker of cabinets and the adviser of kings.

“Read your Balzac,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript. “London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like Paris in the restoration-period ...”

It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and, as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know, had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman, certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in France.

I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her empire.

When my uncle arrived, his mood was made apparent by the sombre opening statement that nations got the governments they deserved. He added, with fine public spirit, that the worst result of the election was the lack of an effective opposition. Then less impersonal feelings broke through: he charged ministers with treating the fourteen points as ‘a scrap of paper’ and recommended a strait-waistcoat for all who escaped the lamp-post. Sitting in a half-circle round his chair, with Lucien’s international parliament huddled on our fringe, we were castigated with a fury that would have been better deserved if we had in fact uttered the vain things with which we were charged: we had promised that there should be no punitive damages and now we were threatening to squeeze Germany like an orange; we were pledged to try the kaiser, if not to execute him without trial; we were to restore our trade by destroying our best customer.

“If I’d asked for the kaiser’s head on a charger,” Bertrand thundered, “you’d have promised me two heads on two chargers.”

When the first fury had abated, Lucien fanned it to life by a reference to the peace of Brest-Litovsk, demanding why Germany should be treated more tenderly in defeat than she had treated others in victory.

“If England had been invaded ...” he went on with a kindling eye. “The mistake your prime minister made was that he didn’t say enough.”

“You should have thought of all that before you agreed to the armistice,” Bertrand retorted.

“Well, say, the terms of the armistice ...” began Clifford van Oss.

I have no doubt he was going to say that, if the French quoted one set of undertakings against us, then America, which had drawn the terms, would speedily quote another. My uncle, however, who detested what he called “the American habit of making speeches instead of conversing”, broke in with a speech of his own:

“Not that it matters whether he said too little or too much! The speeches have served their turn. I tell you, Lloyd-George is a better journalist than Northcliffe in knowing what the public will want the day after to-morrow! He knew that, when the troops came home to find no job waiting for them, people would forget they’d ever called him ‘the man who won the war’. Before they forgot him for high taxation, high prices, falling wages and a creeping paralysis of unemployment, he had to make himself snug. And he has! Five years of autocratic power with the certainty that something must turn up; five years’ support from the Curzons and Milners who’d never have seen the back-door of office without him; five years’ support from the Monds and Greenwoods of the liberal second-eleven; five years’ support from every man who’s lost a son, every woman who can’t make both ends meet. You need only promise to hang the kaiser and make Germany pay: England was worth a general election.”

Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament League in Princes Gardens and hatched Peace out of a grimy office in Bouverie Street.

“You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane.

“Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.”

As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition before he had anything tangible to oppose.

“We must shape the peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must explain what’s expected of her.”

I capitulated without even taking my hours of grace. When Bertrand stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals, but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation.

“Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is greater than the liberal party.”

“In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not be difficult. But you don’t believe you’re going to make a new party of any kind.”

Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain, Gladstone and Asquith.

“If we can bring liberalism back to life,” he sighed, “a party will form without our help: all we need is a rallying-point. I mean something bigger than electoral reform and tariff squabbles, George: I mean a liberal spirit in politics. At the beginning, I should have called this a liberal war. When Wilson aimed at a peace that should leave nobody too strong, nobody too much broken, I called that a liberal spirit. I wrote to you about the glacial age of materialism, because a liberal spirit is the only thing that can melt it. Every individual, every country will fight for its own hand: it’s instinctive, like food-hoarding in 1914. Does Lucien care if Russia’s starving? Does van Oss care if England’s crippled with debt? Does any one care if the majority get less than the best out of life? Devil take the hindmost! That’s the spirit we have to fight.”

“But can it be done with a sixpenny review?,” I asked.