Stephen McKenna

“ 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. ”

“ A London fog, as I had told Barbara, was no new phenomenon to me; apart from its dirt, I rather enjoyed one for its mystery and romance. If the order of interrogation had been reversed, I should have assured the policeman that I anticipated no trouble and that the hunger-marchers were too tired, too ill-acquainted with London to provoke a riot. I believed every word that I had said to my wife; I am not more nervous than most short-sighted and unadventurous men of forty ”

“ 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. ”

“ Face to face with this slow bleeding to death, I could not shrug my shoulders and drift away for a holiday with Barbara. The peace of the world seemed a madman’s dream when we could not stop this butchery at our doors. Day after day Bertrand and I wrote and talked, interviewed and argued. On one set of lips or another, every public man was by now branded as a traitor who had threatened rebellion in Ulster or a traitor who had broken faith with the South. ”

“ I murmured, as a new wrangle broke out between Clifford and Lucien. “The German menace has gone, but there’s a French menace coming. Nine or ten months ago I told Lucien in Paris that his people were at the top of their prestige; now they’re the most hated, feared and despised people in Europe. A mad war, a mad peace . . .”
“And nothing to prevent another war as mad,” Hornbeck began. Then we stood without speaking, in a silence that spread over London, freezing sound and movement. ”

“ Raney would not have summoned me for a trifle; if he needed me, there was danger; yet I had told Barbara that I should be as safe with him as if I stayed in Seymour Street. . . .
From Chancery Lane I stumbled to my office at a pace that left no time for morbid fancies. O’Rane was in my room, sitting by the fire and slapping a stick lazily against his boot. I have never seen any one less like a figure of destiny, urging me to an unknown doom. At the vaguest hint, he would have insisted on my going back to Barbara. ”

“ When we abandoned conjecture for the concrete plans that each was making for himself, I felt that—in the words used at a dinner to Eric Lane in New York—‘the convulsion’s as great, when you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a soldier.’ Sam Dainton, after ten years’ service, was leaving the army, “to prey on society”, as he put it. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the cheap press that came into existence when England was taught, willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything to gain and nothing to risk. ”

“ If Lucien de Grammont and Clifford van Oss fairly represented the first two, the simple faith of the French—embodied in M. Clemenceau—was being betrayed by every one else at the very moment when M. Clemenceau was betraying the simple faith of President Wilson. Recalling that the world was to have been made safe for democracy, I wondered if another war must be fought before democracy was made safe for the world. According to one or other of us, it was the greed and bad faith of Great Britain, America and France which was wholly and solely responsible for our present perils. ”

“ Instead of thanking us for pulling them out of the mire, they think they won the war single-handed and our job is just to foot the bill. Hang it all, Raney, we spent more money and provided more ammunition than any one else; we raised about five million men; we stayed on to clear the Germans out of France when it was all we could do to keep the French in the war at all; and, when our papers were gushing about the splendid unity, the French government was making us pay rent for the trenches our men occupied to defend their miserable country. They’re the meanest hounds on earth. ”

“ O’Rane cried. “It changed when man turned sick at gladiatorial shows and slavery and torture. It will change again when men find that cooperation is more comfortable than competition. But you’ll have competition always—the competition of the rich with the poor, among individuals and nations, the inevitable forerunner to every revolution and war—so long as you crystallize an unequal distribution of wealth.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I reached Fetter Lane next morning, I was greeted by Spence-Atkins with news which made Saltash’s predictions obsolete and O’Rane’s researches premature. With or without our reminder that the business of a government was to govern, ministers were hatching a new Irish policy. Like most Irish policies, it could be guaranteed to divide England even if it failed to unite Ireland; and I felt then and later that the decay of the coalition set in on this day. Like all new moves in the Irish game at this time, it was certain to keep me in London when I wanted to take Barbara to Scotland. ”

“ Um, Crawleigh. You English have seen a million or two of your best men killed or wounded. . . . Whose child is that? . . . You’ve seen new debt piled up to the tune of thousands of millions. . . . How do, Lady Crawleigh? . . . I’m an Irishman. . . . Violet, my dear! . . . And a liberal. I’ve seen liberalism stamped out of existence and the Irish party broken. . . . Lady Dainton, your humble servant. Find me a seat, George, there’s a good boy.”
Most of us knew my uncle well enough to imagine his violent anger if any one else had dared to be so despondent. ”

“ I looked down on a seething mass of heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate, among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.” ”

“ You’ve been waiting for me to say I’ve outgrown my love for Eric, so that you could tell me—Oakleigh-fashion—that you’d always known time would cure all things. Well, I was wrong; and I have outgrown my love. Does it help you to know that? The difficulty is, George, that I don’t want to be forgiven. I’m not a child, I’m not an unsuccessful attempt to be a man; I’m a woman.”
“And being a woman . . .”
Barbara laid her hand over my lips:
“Shall I say it for you? ‘Being a woman, you don’t know what you do want.’ It’s quite true, even though all the Oakleighs in history have said it. ”

“ People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh attorney: ‘Oh, how vulgar!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield. ”

“ He was very small, very hirsute, very quick; though his eyes were brown, they seemed to shine red; and, as he looked scornfully round O’Rane’s warm library, I felt that his little teeth were seeking a hand to bite.
“There’d be less talk of bolshevism, if people knew what they were talking about,” he announced with a bluntness that was in painful contrast to the bishop’s courtly patience. “The government says it doesn’t know what to do; let’s see if any one else does. When folk are starving, they know what to do.” ”

“ O’Rane wrote at this time, “when the armistice was proclaimed. If you’d shouted ‘as you were’ from the Woolworth Tower, you couldn’t have scattered people more quickly. ‘As you were before the war’ is the general feeling. I expect it’s been the same in England. We must do better than that.” . . .
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” said Violet.
“And I’m not sure that I can put it into words,” I answered. “In general terms, no sacrifice was too great in the war; I want people to feel no sacrifice is too great in peace. ”