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When our other guests had left us, Bertrand, Barbara and I set ourselves to collect our headquarters staff.

“Old men,” boomed my uncle oracularly, “make wars; and young men fight them. We must be surrounded by the young men.”

He then sat back, in the attitude which had become characteristic of him since his stroke, with his hairy, gnarled hands clasped over the ivory knob of his stick. I saw Barbara’s dark eyes shining as she hurried indoors and returned to the verandah with a pencil and paper. In her absence, Bertrand sought to seduce me by describing my room at the office and hinting at the furniture which he proposed to transfer from Princes Gardens. He resented my criticism that we were setting out to convert the world with six dubious Sheraton chairs and less than six more than dubious phrases; but, as we drafted our programme, I became ever more gloomily convinced that we were losing sight of the essentials in a wanton outburst of ornamentation. My excellent and unpractical colleagues agreed that we could have a delicious meal sent in from the Greyfriars Tavern for the editorial dinners; Barbara fought gamely for a weekly cartoon; Bertrand informed us, with an air of originality, that the youth of the nation were the trustees of posterity; and no one said a word about our gospel or our prophets.

“All the conditions are new,” my uncle reminded me at short intervals. “We need new men, new methods. A new spirit ...”

And, while he coined phrases and Barbara designed our front page, I thought over the young men whom I had met when I was working at the Admiralty. Spence-Atkins and Jefferson Wright were still on Hornbeck’s “live register” of unemployed; and I invited them to take charge of our foreign policy and economics. That their names were unknown seemed a recommendation to Bertrand, who exclaimed in high glee:

“New men! To catch the other new men!”

On that, I presented him with a cynical jack-of-all-trades whom Hornbeck had engaged for his experience in the deeper waters of undetected roguery. I have no proof that Triskett’s hands were soiled, though a man whose friends included the scamps of every race and country must have lived under constant temptation to blackmail. I did not propose to give him free scope in what he wrote; but I thought that his curious information might sometimes illuminate an obscure motive.

“A new man to catch the other new men,” Bertrand repeated.

“A thief to catch a thief,” I answered; “but, if it’s youth you want, these men are all under thirty-five.”

The average was reduced further when, at Barbara’s suggestion, I invited a novelist of thirty, a poet of twenty-five and a composer of nineteen to take our artistic pages under their protection. They were all, she told me, touched with genius. I was also becoming reckless.

“And now,” said Bertrand, “can you set them to work in three months’ time? You’ll want that to get in touch with new conditions. You must study life in the marketplace, George. Mass-feeling. The great movement of men.... We’ll have our first editorial dinner somewhere about the end of March.”

“I should have it,” I suggested, “on the first of April.”

When my uncle returned a few weeks later, we returned with him; and, while Barbara made our house ready for party-meetings and drawing-room conclaves, I carried the dubious Sheraton chairs to Fetter Lane and passed from the Eclectic Club to my uncle’s study in Princes Gardens, in leisurely pursuit of the great movement of men.

I doubt if I have at any time felt more out of my element. I could understand O’Rane’s contention that, for all they won from civilization, the vast majority of mankind would be no worse off by taking to the hills and woods as bandits. I was prepared to work quite reasonably hard for my rooted faith that, if this vast majority was to be saved, it must be saved by its own efforts. I could sympathize with the proselytes to the League of Nations, though I placed no reliance in a league that did not make disarmament its first condition of membership. What I wholly failed to grasp was my uncle’s objective in taking an expensive office, exhuming our old manager from his retirement and entering the name of our paper once more at Stationer’s Hall.

London had never, in all my experience, been so little interested in politics.

“What’s been happening?,” Sam Dainton echoed when I took Barbara to dine with his parents. “Well, I’ve awarded myself the order of the bowler-hat; and I had the hell of a time in Paris after I left you; and now I’m thinking how I can make a bit of money.”

“Same here,” added John Gaymer. “If you come across anything, George ...”

“Oh, the family first,” Laurence interrupted. “Dear Cousin George ...”

The conversation at most dinner-parties in these weeks seemed to run on ways and means. Seizing on the jargon of the times at a moment when every one else was abandoning it, Lady Dainton described herself facetiously as “one of the new poor” and denounced every more fortunate neighbour as a “profiteer”, though I could not see that her novel poverty compelled her to retrenchment nor that her scorn for profiteers prevented Sir Roger’s trying to sell Crowley Court, at three times what he gave for it, to one of “the new rich”. In place of retrenchment I found a bewildering blend of ingenuity, industry and blackmail on the part of those who insisted on a life of pleasure and could find no one to finance it for them. Day after day, Barbara was dragged to new shops, where her friends sold her hats at exorbitant prices. Other friends offered to decorate our house. Others, again, begged me to open a “social” column in Peace and to put them in charge of it.

“You can’t expect people to take much interest in public affairs,” Lady Dainton said to me at this first dinner. “There are so many other things! These children”—she looked benevolently round the table at the girls she had collected for the approval of her necessitous son—“they don’t know what society was before the war. They’ve none of them even been presented, so you can imagine the flutter they’re in. Their first season!”

“I shouldn’t have thought any one had the money to make much of a season,” I objected, with a cast back to her late confession of universal ruin.

“The war has only transferred it from one pocket to another,” she assured me.

This dark saying was made plain in these first unsettled days before the rebirth of our paper, when I drifted about London, analysing the atmosphere of the armistice. Less diplomatically, Lady Dainton might have said that, if the natives had too little money, the foreigners had too much; and, without a trace of diplomacy, a number of my acquaintances seemed to be coaxing it back from the new pockets to the old. With my own ears I heard the Duchess of Ross demanding a list of the Americans she could advantageously invite to her house. I listened with amusement as Clifford van Oss tried to explain politely that the people on whom she fawned were not received in New York. And I watched Sir Adolf Erckmann being made a test case for the date at which a wealthy man with a German name could be received by his less wealthy friends.

“The great movement of men isn’t carrying me anywhere in particular,” I confessed to Bertrand as the day of our first issue drew near. “I’ve met a number of spongers, lately, and a greater number of snobs. Which are the more to be pitied ...”

“That’s only a phase,” my uncle answered. “London’s only a part of England; these people are only a part of London. While you were a boy, you must have seen the Rand Jews agonizing to fill their houses; and you saw the ‘new poor’ of the Harcourt death duties taking all they could get.”

“And we saw the result in the last years before the war,” I said, as Sir Adolf Erckmann shambled out of earshot. Could we give rein to our racial prejudices, I never knew whether I would sooner lynch him or the girls, like Sonia Dainton, who in those days had endured his odious familiarities for the sake of a string-quartet, a champagne supper and a free drive home in an Erckmann car. “A whole generation grew up in the belief that man had a natural right to be amused at some one else’s expense.”

“You’d have found the same thing in Rome and Nineveh,” said Bertrand. “Whenever a conspicuous social position is divorced from the means to keep it up ... That’s not a thing to notice. I told you to study the movement of men because one class is being squeezed out of existence. It may last my time, but it won’t last yours. It was never a big class, but in some ways it was the best. Now the sons have been killed; and the parents are crippled with taxation. Who’s coming to take their place, George? That’s the riddle for boys like you; and it’s to the newcomers we must appeal.... Is everything ready for our first number?”

“As ready as it can be,” I answered, “without a principle, a policy or even a catchword.”

When I went to Fetter Lane for the ceremony of ordering the machinists to print off, I was glad to see that my colleagues shewed no lack of enthusiasm. Headed by Bertrand, we marched to the Clock Tower Press and stood in a half-circle till he should give the sign. Martin Luther, printing his own bibles, could hardly have been more impressive; and, as we marched back to toast Bertrand in tepid champagne, the day seemed pregnant with fate.

“All the same,” I said, as we dispersed, “you’ve none of you suggested a single reason why any one should want to buy this paper. People are simply not thinking of politics.”

“They will, when they come out of their fool’s paradise,” answered Bertrand.

With a prediction so vague I could not contend. Reconstruction, of which I had heard so much in the last years of the war, appeared to stop short when private lives and fortunes had been reconstructed. Employment was good; money was plentiful; trade was booming; and, after we had spent five million pounds a day without suffering for it, after we had found work for every one at his own price, it was not wonderful if the laws of political economy seemed to have been suspended. My brother-in-law Gervaise was but one of many whom I settled on the permanent wage-sheet of the country; during the next few days I was to help Sam Dainton into an engineering firm at Hartlepool and to be told that the directors could accommodate as many more of the same kind as I chose to send.

It was too good to be true; it was too good to last; but, while it lasted, I felt we could expect little support for gloomy vaticinations that were being falsified under our eyes.