By STEPHEN McKENNA

NOVELS:

To-Morrow and To-Morrow

Vindication

The Commandment of Moses

Soliloquy

The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman

The Sensationalists:

I Lady Lilith

II The Education of Eric Lane

III The Secret Victory

Sonia Married

Midas and Son

Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave

Sonia

The Sixth Sense

Sheila Intervenes

The Reluctant Lover

By Intervention of Providence

While I Remember

Tex: A Chapter in the Life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

TO-MORROW AND

TO-MORROW . . .

A NOVEL

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1924

Copyright, 1924,

By Stephen McKenna.

All rights reserved

Published, October, 1924

Printed in the United States of America

TO

MARION

Three years ago, The Secret Victory brought to an end the trilogy which I called The Sensationalists. This book and the antecedent volumes—Lady Lilith and The Education of Eric Lane—described the fortunes of certain men and women who constituted part of the larger groups which I had approached in Sonia, Midas and Son and Sonia Married.

By the accident of birth, fortune or talent, “these our actors” were made to fill a position—before, during and after the war—which attracted to them more attention than was warranted by their historical importance. My defence—if I must defend myself—is that the butterfly in every age has claimed more notice than the bee. The social scene, to change my metaphor, presented by so single-minded a writer as Mr. Greville has to find room for the D’Orsays, the Egremonts, the Sidney Smiths and the Madame de Lievens, who throng his stage in act after act, as well as for the Peels, Wellingtons and Melbournes.

Is a defence still necessary for continuing the life of a character from one novel to another? Mr. Disraeli, in his splendid progress through a part of Mr. Greville’s period, refused to cut the thread of an imaginary existence at the moment when his last page was bound into its cover; and the novel-sequence which aims to describe a social and political scene must, no less than succeeding volumes of memoirs, call back to the stage the same leaders and the same camp-followers. If this present series have any artistic or historical value, I should like it to be found in the completed picture.

I attempted, in Sonia, to trace the adolescence of the generation that grew to manhood in time to meet the shock of the war. That war ends in the first line of the present volume; and, before the last page, the government that was charged to bring peace back to the sparse survivors has itself passed away. One phase in history has been concluded; and this series, which aimed at describing a single English scene in the life of a single generation, ends with the end of that phase.

I ask no one to share any regret which I may feel in taking leave of characters that have been my constant companions for more than eight years. If they are no more likable than the men and women we meet in daily life, I have at least never allowed parental affection to cover up their shortcomings. I present them to you as a small mark of a deep devotion.

Stephen McKenna.

“All our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.” . . .

Shakespeare: Macbeth.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

TRUCE

“ ‘Rise up, rise up, thou Dives, and take again thy gold,

And thy women and thy housen as they were to thee of old.

It may be grace hath found thee

In the furnace where We bound thee,

And that thou shalt bring the peace My Son foretold.’ ”

Rudyard Kipling: The Peace of Dives.

1

“The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month . . .”

Though the departmental order was marked “secret”, I did not hesitate to give my wife a hint of its contents. All the world—if the armistice were accepted—could read the news next morning. And the armistice would be accepted. Silence hung over town and country throughout the misty, long hours of Sunday: it was, I felt, as though all England were at prayer. Faint restlessness muttered throughout the lagging, cold hours of Sunday night: it was as though all England were keeping vigil.

“You can’t doubt,” I told Barbara, as we parted at the door of the Admiralty. “With any luck, the news is waiting for me.”

“I can’t believe,” she answered. “Four years and three months. Nearly a fifth of my whole life. I’m used to the war . . . almost. I don’t see why it should ever stop.”

2

It was my turn for late duty; but, when I reached my room, I found a message:

“Captain Hornbeck’s compliments; and it will not be necessary for Commander Oakleigh to stay unless he wishes.”

Peace was not yet come, then, or Philip Hornbeck would have told me; it would come that night, or he would not have granted me leave of absence. The Admiralty, meanwhile, could not have been more silent if the old world had died in giving birth to the new.

“You got my chit?,” Hornbeck asked in an undertone, when I went to report. “Unless you want to hang about here . . .”

“My taste for bureaucracy,” I answered, with a glance of loathing at his “IN”, “OUT” and “PENDING” trays, “has been cured.” How long did Barbara say the war had lasted? Since 1914? Yes, four years and three months had passed since I began to masquerade unconvincingly as an officer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the actors, artists, barristers and stockbrokers who combined to make up my section of the intelligence department, I had talked a hundred times of the day when we should have taken our last undeserved salute and laid aside the latest of our comic-opera uniforms. Now it was come. “As I’m here, I may as well lend a hand. I suppose they’re bound to sign?”

Hornbeck unlocked a row of japanned boxes and glanced perfunctorily at his secret files before plunging them in the fire.

“It won’t come through in time for the morning papers, so I’m getting rid of the evidence before I’m told not to,” he chuckled. “ ‘The eleventh hour . . . of the eleventh day . . . of the eleventh month.’ Sounds as if a journalist had had something to do with that!” One file slipped to the floor; and I read on the faded docket “Goeben and Breslau, 1914”. It had been a very long war. “Lord! These papers are a satire on the vanity of human wishes!,” he drawled. “You can give all your people leave for the day. They won’t be in a fit state to work . . . even if you had any work to give them. And I suppose you won’t have. It . . . takes you some time to grasp that it’s all over,” he added, checking half way to the fire and staring bemusedly at the papers in his hands. Looking at him, I needed time to recall that he had been a young man when war broke out. “What are you and Lady Barbara going to do with yourselves?,” he asked after a pause.

“Get away to the sun,” I answered with the grim determination of a man whose vitality was spent for lack of rest and good food.

“Wonder . . . what will happen . . . to us,” Hornbeck pondered, punctuating his words with abrupt shrieks of rending paper. “No more wars; . . . no more navies . . . or armies.”

“Well, you of all men are entitled to a holiday,” I said. Four years of Whitehall had made him short-sighted and round-shouldered; his square, wooden face was pallid; and his slow speech argued a tired brain.

“Everything will seem a bit flat now,” muttered one of the most powerful men in England, who within the next few days or hours would be as inconsequential as myself. Beyond a narrow circle described round the Treasury Exchange, the name of Captain Hornbeck was unknown; the weight and cunning of his hand, however, had been felt for more than four years in Mexican revolutions, Greek coups d’état and Russian counter-revolutions. The papers which he was destroying ranged from reports on South American credit-transfers to track-charts of North Atlantic commerce-raiders. “This is what the N.O. has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days,” he went on. “Now that we’ve finished it . . .”

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he threw open the window. From force of habit, he switched off the lights before pulling up the blind; then, as the last night of the war engulfed him in a grey eddy of fog, he laughed at his own forgetfulness.

“There’s still a fair-sized mess to clean up,” I reminded him, as he raked with irresolute fingers the memoranda that constituted the Admiralty’s suggestions for the peace conference.

“Ah, I must leave that to you politicians,” he laughed. “And I don’t envy you the job. A world without war . . . It’s a thing we’ve never seen, George. And when you consider that we’re all of us demoralized and most of us bankrupt . . . I suppose friend Woodrow knows what he wants, but I don’t believe any one else does. . . . Doctor feller once told me that, when a baby’s born, it comes into the world with its fists clenched. I sometimes wonder if war isn’t a natural instinct.”

“Self-preservation is the first natural instinct,” I answered; “but it’s not consistent with modern methods of fighting.”

“Oh, I know. This war will be a friendly scrap by comparison with the next.”

“It’s stopping,” I said, “just when we were beginning to learn something of mass-production, mass-enlistment, mass-mobilization of resources, mass-destruction.”

Hornbeck strolled to a vast wall-map of the world and stared at it, with his hands dug deep into his pockets.

“In the next war, we shan’t attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants,” he predicted. “The air-raids and the blockade have caught the civilian.”

“And no country will be allowed to remain neutral,” I added, “any more than Luxemburg and Greece in this war.”

“Until, at the end, when the human population of the earth has been destroyed with typhoid-germs and poison-gas, you’ll be left with two submersible flying-tanks chasing each other among the ice of the North Pole.”

He stirred the fire to a blaze and began once more to feed it with the papers from his private safe. I might have helped him; but this news of approaching peace seemed to relax all my muscles. For the first time in more than four years I could look beyond the work of the moment and see myself as an individual. When I was less tired, I could go back to the old life; and, for a man with a competence, life in England had been more than tolerable until the fourth of August, 1914.

“Don’t let’s talk about the next war,” I said. “Unless we can find a substitute . . .”

“People talked like that after Waterloo,” Hornbeck murmured.

“I expect they talked like that after the siege of Troy; but they always sowed their peace with the seeds of the next war.”

The night air was chilling the room; and Hornbeck interrupted his task of destruction to shut the window.

“Well, what kind of peace do you want now?,” he asked, with a smile half mocking, half wistful playing over his tired face. “This war followed inevitably on the war of ’70, which followed inevitably on the nationalist wars, which followed inevitably on Napoleon’s conquests. Will you divide the world now according to nationalities? I’m afraid you’ll have new wars in Poland, Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, Turkey; not to mention Egypt and India. People talk about a United States of the World; but, when you’ve been getting the last ounce out of national spirit for all these years, you won’t persuade white men to take their orders from an international committee of dagos.”

I turned from the wall-map to the official estimates of casualties in all countries.

“When people remember what a bloody business war is . . .” I began.

“We had South Africa and Japan to warn us!” he interrupted. “The next generation . . . George, I promise you that, unless you get your new heaven and your new earth functioning at once, you’ll drift back to the only kind of life a nation knows. Fear and arrogance; insane hatred and colossal stupidity. Periodically the world will panic into war, which is the only final solution known to history.” . . .

“The only one we’ve tried; and it’s a solution of nothing,” I answered. “My God, if I didn’t believe this was really a war to end war . . .”

I paused as Hornbeck was called to the telephone. He listened for a moment, nodded to me and took down his coat and cap. Even he could work no longer; and, as I walked home alone, I tried to understand that the “war to end war” had itself ended. In four years I had forgotten how London looked before the lamps were shrouded and the hoardings placarded with patriotic appeals. Their purpose was accomplished; a uniform would soon be as rare as civilian clothes were now; the hospitals would empty; the blue coats and red ties of the convalescents would disappear.

The city was very silent; but at eleven o’clock, I imagined, there would be such a silence as would make men think that the earth was halting in her course. Out there, over the water, some would adventure amicably into the enemy’s lines; some would drift back to their base; most would wait dumbly for orders; and one man would be the last to die in the Great War.

At the top of Waterloo Place I found a policeman flashing his lantern on the doors and shutters of the shops.

“I think you’d like to know that the Germans have accepted the armistice,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” he answered with a salute.

A taxi crawled westward across Piccadilly Circus; and I told the driver.

“They ’ave, ’ave they?,” he muttered in perplexity. “Oh, they ’ave. . . . Well . . .”

I hesitated long before reckoning the number of those for whom peace came too late. In ’14 my generation was of an age to be called for the hottest and the longest of the fighting. Sam Dainton had escaped with a flesh wound, Jack Waring with a split head and a broken nerve, David O’Rane with the loss of his sight; these, with the five or six who had failed to pass the doctors or had been tied to a mission abroad, were all that remained of the friends who had said good-bye to their schools in the last years of the nineteenth century.

A lifetime had passed since we all talked of what we would do “on the day peace is signed”; and yet, when we spoke of “last summer”, we always meant “the summer before the war”. It was, at the same time, an eternity and an episode.

“So,” I reflected at the door of my house in Seymour Street, “one school of political thought in France looked upon the Revolution and the Empire.”

From force of habit, I headed for the hot milk in my dressing-room and rang to have my bath prepared. Then I recollected that I need never again work by night and sleep by day.

“I’ll breakfast first,” I told Barbara’s maid. “And I shan’t go to bed this morning. The armistice has been signed.” The girl tried to speak, but could only turn away with a sob that sounded like “dad”. “Has her ladyship been called?,” I asked.

Still unable to speak, the girl shook her head and nodded in the direction of a breakfast-tray.

3

Barbara was asleep, with a light burning by her side and an open book face-downwards on the bed. At last, I told myself, I could see something of my wife. I should be able to read the new poets and novelists who overflowed her cases. At last we could entertain our friends again. At last, after eight months, we could have our honeymoon. Barbara looked dangerously fragile. As I watched her, one hand was drawn slowly up the sheet; and the fingers were almost transparent. Her head turned restlessly from side to side; and I knew that she was dreaming. There was a whispered sigh; and I felt that her dreams were unhappy.

“George! Oh, it’s you!,” she exclaimed with a throb of relief; and, as she brushed the cloudy hair back from her face, I saw that her big, deep-set eyes were black and anguished.

“Who else should it be?,” I asked, as I draped a shawl over her thin shoulders and kissed her flushed cheeks. “They’ve signed, Babs. It’s all over.”

“It’s . . . all . . . over?,” she repeated dreamily.

“Yes. I telephoned to your mother from the Admiralty. They’re safe: Neave and Charlie.”

Silence fell between us until Barbara covered her face and murmured: “Thank God!” Then she sat up and stared round the shadowy room:

“What . . . what are we going to do now?”

Within an hour I felt that most people would be asking themselves that question:

“I don’t know. For this morning Phil Hornbeck suggested that I should invite a few friends to my room in case there’s anything to see. Afterwards . . .”

“Afterwards you must take me away!,” she cried. “You’re quite sure there’s been no mistake?”

“Quite sure!,” I answered, as I sat down by the telephone and tried to remember which of our friends we should both care to have with us at the moment when peace dawned.

A change had overtaken London by the time that I set out to collect my party. As on August bank-holiday four years earlier, when I drove about Gloucestershire, with Loring and O’Rane, waiting for news, the city had an air of suspended animation. Of the twenty strangers who interrogated me on my way across the park, not one had more doubt that the terms would be accepted than that the sun would rise on the morrow. And yet, so nicely balanced were hope and fear, I should have been surprised if any one had laid me long odds on peace. Like Barbara, they were grown used to the war. As I spread the news from house to house, every one said: ‘What time is it now?’; and it seemed as if the eleventh hour of the eleventh day would never come. There was a muddle-headed point of honour, too, that no one should betray even impatience.

“Oh, yes, I’ll look in, if I have nothing better to do. You might have called here instead of bringing me to this infernal contraption,” growled my uncle Bertrand, who always visited his hatred of the telephone on the heads of those who addressed him by it. “That all you have to say? Filson! Filson!,” I heard him calling to his man. “They’ve signed!”

Lady Dainton, whom I invited for the sake of old associations, murmured: “Thank you so much. I know Roger will be interested,” as though I had announced a minor change in the cabinet. Raymond Stornaway said: “I trust this doesn’t mean a general holiday: I’ve the very devil of a day’s work ahead of me.” My sister Beryl hoped that I had not gone to the expense of buying that new uniform.

I had already warned old Lady Loring by telephone; and, when I reached Curzon Street, I found my cousin Violet dressed to go out and playing in the hall with her boy.

“I’m waiting to be told what to do next,” was her greeting.

Though she had worn her deep mourning for more than three years, her little white face looked pathetically young and helpless. I wondered what kind of life she could expect from the armistice.

“We’re all in the same boat,” I answered. “I called to suggest that you should bring Sandy to the Admiralty. My father could just remember the Famine; my mother remembers the crowds in the streets when Sebastopol fell. Sandy may carry away something to fix this, eighty years hence, as the day when the Great War ended.”

“I wonder if people will talk about it then as ‘the Great War’?,” Violet mused.

As she buttoned her boy into his coat, I felt that she was thinking only of the day when her husband of a month, with all that health, fortune, rank and riches could give him, drifted whimsically to France, in the meshes of a machine which he ridiculed, there to die in defence of one country, which he faintly despised, against another, which he mildly disliked. Violet had been left with a son to bring up and a vast estate to administer. She would never, I knew, marry again; and, now that the war was over, she saw herself fading into the twilight of life to dwell with ghosts and memories and dreams.

“The Great Waste,” I suggested, as we set out. “If any one could have foreseen, four years ago, how this would end, I wonder if there’d have been a war? I tremble to think what the world will look like when we have time to take stock.”

In our passage from Loring House to the Admiralty, I found that the news had spread before us; and young Lucien de Grammont, speeding towards the French Embassy, stopped long enough to vent on us his disappointment that the allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender.

“Those accursed Americans!,” he cried. “But for them, peace would have been signed in Berlin! Now in fifty years’ time . . . Well, let us hope we shan’t be alive to see it.”

As he flung off in furious disappointment, I ventured the opinion that, but for the Americans, a German peace might have been dictated in Paris. Then we pressed through the crowd in the Processional Avenue and took up our positions to see at least the greatest war in history ending. My secretary had cleared the table of its trays; and we sat in a row, looking through the mist of Horse Guards’ Parade and trying to guess what was going to happen. The Crawleighs had arrived before us and were talking to Raymond Stornaway; Sir Roger and Lady Dainton followed on our heels; and our last inch of space was filled when my uncle Bertrand, puffing and growling at the stairs, lumbered in with heavy tread and demanded in the loud voice of incipient deafness why it was necessary to collect this nest of magpies.

“Disreputable old wrecks we are!,” he muttered with a glance of sour and comprehensive disfavour from Lord Crawleigh to Sir Roger Dainton and from Sir Roger Dainton to Raymond Stornaway. The grey November light, shining on a row of bent backs and haggard faces, made us older than our years. “We’ve had our chance,” he continued; “I believe the only way of stopping war is to have conscription for all men and women over fifty and to call up the oldest classes first.”

“So that you could hear men of thirty boasting that they’d ‘given’ two grandfathers to the army?,” asked Raymond.

“They’d still be of an age to be kicked, if they tried that kind of cant. . . . No, but I’m sufficiently sick of everything to feel it’s indecent for me to be alive when mere children are wearing black for men who might have been my grandsons. Eighty-four. . . . Most of my friends will tell you I’ve lived twenty years too long; and, on my soul, I believe they’re right.”

“You said something of the kind on the day war broke out,” I reminded him. “Now that it’s all over . . .?”

Bertrand gathered himself for attack, towering over me with his hands on his hips till the silence of the room daunted him. Then he shrugged his shoulders and turned, with a savage tug at his black walrus-moustache, to shake hands with his neighbours:

“I don’t detect any great reason for optimism. 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. My father-in-law, however, felt obliged to pick up the gage.

“You mean that we should be no worse off,” he suggested, “if the Germans had drawn up the terms and we had accepted them?”

“Not quite,” Bertrand conceded, “not quite. . . . I beg your pardon, Barbara my dear, I didn’t see you! . . . If you know your Bible, my dear Crawleigh, you’ll recollect that a Jew called Samson tried to get level with the Philistines by pulling a heavy roof down on their heads. He got level; but he paid for it with his life. Some one pulled away the pillars that had been holding up our civilization for Heaven knows how many centuries. Credit, commerce, law and order, faith and morals, production, exchange, distribution: they’ve all toppled; and they’ve toppled on the heads of all of us. You’ll see as soon as peace really sets in. No! No, Crawleigh! This war should have ended two years ago, while there were still a few tiles left on the roof!”

I recalled my uncle’s warning, on the day war broke out, that freedom of speech was dead; on the day it ended, he asserted his right to it with a truculence that had been shouted down when he pleaded for “a patched-up peace” at the end of 1916, before the United States came in, and again in 1917 when the Lansdowne letter was published.

“Lucien de Grammont wants to go on to Berlin,” I said.

Bertrand clasped his hands over the crook of his stick and nodded scornfully at a headstrong world that refused to take his advice. His expression and attitude reminded me of Dr. Johnson, in the celebrated picture, awaiting an audience with Lord Chesterfield.

“He forgets, perhaps, that we at least went into this war to uphold the neutrality of Belgium. We stayed in to make the Germans pay for the damage they’d done there. Later . . . Later, we were told that the French must have Alsace-Lorraine, Russia must have Constantinople, Italy must have an infernal place called the Trentino. And any stray islands or continents where a German or the ally of a German has ever set foot must be taken away and given to somebody else. It may be all very right and proper; but that wasn’t our aim in 1914.”

More was coming; but his audience began to shew signs of hostility; and Violet intervened by setting her boy on the old man’s knee and whispering:

“You mustn’t quarrel on a day like this. Help me to shew him the different nationalities, Uncle Bertrand. Sandy! Sandy! You see the little man down there by the tree. D’you know what he is? He’s a Jap. Japanese.”

“Jap-an-ese,” Sandy repeated slowly.

“Those are Americans,” she continued, with her finger pointing to three grave, lean-faced young officers. “Amer-i-cans.”

“Call ’em ‘Yanks’, most noble marquess,” grunted Bertrand, who—with much else that was Johnsonian—exhibited the doctor’s unreasoning antipathy to the new world.

“Merry-cans,” Sandy repeated.

“There’s a Frenchman! There’s a Canadian! See, Sandy? Uncle Bertrand, find me an Italian,” Violet pleaded. “I don’t know how much this mite will remember, but it is rather marvellous to see them all together. That’s a South African, isn’t it? Oh, and a poor soul with only one leg. There’ll still be plenty of them for him to see when he’s grown up. I wish I could find an Italian!”

The open space under my window had filled so rapidly that it was hardly possible for any one to move. Typists from the government offices, in short skirts and transparent blouses, were standing on tiptoe, bare-headed in the biting cold, staring bright-eyed over the shoulders of those in front. There were soldiers, in uniform and in their hospital undress; sailors; nurses; government messengers with battered red boxes; a park-keeper; two clergymen; some errand-boys; and a thousand nondescripts. At one moment they were very silent; at another, they broke into feverish conversation with unknown neighbours, occasionally shaking hands and cheering a foreign uniform.

“Five minutes to eleven,” muttered a voice which I could not identify.

4

The emotions of the crowd were reacting on us. Behind me, I could hear murmurs like the soughing of wind, rising and falling with the murmurs of the crowd. When hands were excitedly shaken below us, I felt Barbara’s fingers gripping my wrist and saw Violet bending to kiss the silken curls of her child’s head.

Out there, over the water, the ‘cease-fire’ must be travelling down the unending shambles of the two opposing lines. The shadow that had darkened the world for more than four years had at last been driven away; and no one was going to be mutilated or killed any more. All—more than all—that we set out to do in 1914 had been accomplished; and the bound heads and empty sleeves of the survivors, the black dresses of those with no survivors to welcome, testified to the cost. Of the uniforms below us, some had first been donned in Tasmania, some in Natal, others on the Alaskan border. Belgium and Servia, Russia and France, Portugal and Japan, Italy and Rumania: all had joined hands with our English-speaking peoples to hem in the wild beast. Throughout the night, the news had crackled from Poldhu to the Azores, from Arlington to Seattle, that the wild beast was subdued. It had flashed to lonely patrols through the frost of the North Sea and the fire of the Persian Gulf; two hundred million men were now standing silent, with their eyes on their watches; and I fancied again the unearthly hush that must drop on the world when the last war ended.

In spite of Bertrand, in spite of Lucien de Grammont, in spite of Hornbeck I believed that it was the last war.

Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp! The maroons were like the rending of colossal drums. Burp! . . . Burp! . . . Burp! Sandy turned wide eyes of alarm upon us and buried his face in Violet’s bosom. Burp! Burp! Burp!

“Eleven o’clock,” muttered Roger Dainton in a quavering voice.

My secretary collapsed into a chair, murmuring “Air-raid”; and, though I knew that air-raids had now passed into history, I imagined for a moment that the last ‘scrap of paper’ had followed the first and that London and Paris were to be laid in ruins.

Burp! . . . Burp! Burp!

There was no concerted cheering from the crowd below; but I had a curious feeling that the next man but one, down all that line from the Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, had opened his lips and was waiting for a neighbour to cheer with him. Heads were turning in every direction; eyes were gazing upward, as though they expected to see “Peace” written across the sky in letters of flame; bodies, for a moment, were very still.

Then that vast sea of men and women gathered itself up and poured with a hoarse roar towards the Palace. There was a check, and I fancy the first-comers must have been pressed against the railings; I threw open my window in time to hear a mutter rolling from lip to lip: “The king! They’re calling for the king.” Later, though we could see and hear nothing of it, the word was passed: “The king! He’s speaking”; later still: “He’s finished! Give him a cheer! Hip, hip! Come on.”

The human sea must have eddied at the Palace. Five minutes later, as the crowd below my window surged forward, a returning stream poured down the Processional Avenue into Trafalgar Square; and a new current set in towards the Abbey. There was little cheering now, though every one made individual noises of greeting and laughter. A War Office car hooted its deliberate way across Horse Guards’ Parade and was promptly seized by three wounded soldiers and four girl-clerks, who ranged themselves along the running-boards and perched on the bonnet. As though all had been awaiting a signal, the crowd broke into little groups and swept like swarming bees upon every vehicle in sight. So long as all could move, it did not matter whither they hurried: something, all seemed to feel, must be happening somewhere else.

“The war’s over!,” some one cried; and mechanically, like hysterical children, a dozen others repeated uncomprehendingly: “The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over! The war’s over.” . . .

“And the funny thing,” said Raymond Stornaway, blowing his nose vigorously, “is that they don’t know what to do next.”

“Do we?,” asked Bertrand; and, for once, he seemed less anxious to instruct than to be instructed.

5

No one wanted to speak first. No one wanted to move. No one cared to look any one else in the eyes. Lady Crawleigh, I think, was the first to recover; and she was slipping out of the room, with a twisted smile, when Raymond put his back to the door and took the position in hand with a general invitation to lunch with him at the Carlton.

“No speeches or ‘celebrations’,” he promised. “If you’ll fight your way there as best you can, I’ll telephone for a table.”

With the exception of Violet, we were glad to have our minds made up for us. Bertrand was right: we none of us knew what to do next. The movements of the crowd had become rhythmical by the time that we set out. Every cab and bus was loaded with excited clusters of men and women who seemed ready to do anything but remain still. Boys with paper caps and empty tins marched aimlessly at the head of irregular battalions; overwrought girls and grave grey-beards tramped with arms linked, sublimely unselfconscious. The streets were carpeted with torn paper. An indistinguishable hum of voices floated over and about us, still seeming—as before—to come from our next neighbour but one; and on every face was written vague relief, vague good-will, dawning disappointment and vast perplexity.

“ ‘They order this matter, I said, better in France’,” quoted Raymond, as we drifted slowly through the crowd to kill time before luncheon. “The English don’t know how to express their emotions.”

“They haven’t had much time yet to think what their emotions are,” I reminded him. “What’s the next stage? Babs and I are going off to the Riviera as soon as we can. But after that?”

“My work will go on,” Raymond murmured with a rueful glance down Pall Mall. We were within sight of the unwieldy mansion from whose roof young Deryk Lancing fell or flung himself on the eve of the war. The estate, I believe, was valued at about twenty-five million pounds sterling; and a freakish will had laid upon Raymond’s shoulders the task of distributing a fortune which Deryk himself could not control nor keep from increasing. “You can come and help me, if you like, George.”

“Thanks, I’ve done the last day’s work of my life,” I answered; “but I’ve lived so long at other people’s orders that I’ve forgotten how to take a holiday.”

The rest of our party was awaiting us by the door of the restaurant; and throughout the meal we talked, for talking’s sake, of the fourteen points and the probable terms of peace. Though we had all accepted Raymond’s invitation with relief, we were more sincerely relieved when luncheon came to an end. We wanted to think; and, when I had written a formal request for immediate demobilization, I took Barbara home. The streets were emptying as the silent crowds began to feel that they could not for ever tramp to and fro or steal aimless rides. Hunger was driving them in search of food; and the sunless November afternoon, already touched with frost, was mottling their white faces and chapped hands.

“I feel . . . dazed,” Barbara signed, as we got into a taxi with her parents.

“We all do,” answered Lady Crawleigh.

As we drove away, I watched our party scattering. From their silence I judged the Crawleighs were trying to realize that their two elder boys were safe at last; the Daintons, walking close together with bent heads, were no doubt thinking of the son who would not return. As my uncle’s big, lonely figure disappeared from sight, I fancied that he might indeed be feeling he had lived too long. William the Fourth had completed half his reign when Bertrand was born: a man who had survived the nineteenth century, the Victorian era and the greatest war in history might well shrink aghast from the unknown future.

6

At Barbara’s thoughts I could make no guess. Before the war, she had been more mercilessly pursued by publicity than any one of her generation. When our engagement was announced, I slunk like a criminal past the contents-bills that proclaimed a “Famous Society Beauty Engaged”; and, on the day of the wedding, when the traffic was held up for three hours and the auxiliary police were numbered by hundreds, the London crowd was certainly far more concerned to catch a glimpse of Lady Barbara Neave than to hear that the Channel ports were safe. Since our marriage, she had hardly appeared in public; but, as she crouched over the fire without speaking, I wondered what picture she was composing for her life in the unknown, new peace.

When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck, confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions and lay down that night with the same confused recollections.

There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not know how to give it words.

“I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara, as we went up to bed.

“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered. We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess, would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We shall be useless for years,” I said.

“I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused.

“That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms. And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has been spared invasion.”

Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent street.

“The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she murmured. “We . . . Well, I suppose we go on from that?”

“If we want to.”

“Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call our souls our own.”

“I wonder whether we ever shall again,” I said, as I filled my final pipe. That last night of peace lingered more vividly in my memory than any since. War was certain. We had read Grey’s speech; and I walked with O’Rane up and down the valley-terrace, trying to decide what we were fighting to preserve. “We want something more than the status quo,” I told Barbara. “That night . . . There was no question, then, of a general levy: the war must be over in a few months, and only the regular army would fight. Well, we’d seen Jack Summertown and a car-load of officers driving off the night before: they were a small minority who were quite clearly going to risk their skins for the rest of us. Were we worth it? I told Raney that I’d like to shew something that was better worth fighting for.”

“And haven’t we? When you think how every one has worked and fought . . .”

“But now that it’s all over?,” I persisted. “Raney said that people couldn’t come back from the war to take up the old futility; you couldn’t set up social barriers between men who had undertaken the same charge. It was unthinkable to save a country from invasion in order to perpetuate things like sweated labour. I wonder.” . . .

“What a long time ago it all seems!”

There was no cynicism in Barbara’s voice; but, if anybody spoke nowadays of a new world, his words were dismissed as Fleet Street rhetoric or Downing Street claptrap; and, though not one man of all the thousands who would be returning in the next few days was likely to say that he had risked his life to perpetuate sweated labour, I could not imagine that many would exert themselves to abolish it.

Exertion! I was too tired to undress! The world might be bankrupt and yet survive; the world might be decimated and yet make good its wastage; first and foremost, the world was weary to the marrow of its bones.

CHAPTER TWO

RETROSPECT

“Now tell us what ’t was all about,”

Young Peterkin, he cries;

And little Wilhelmine looks up

With wonder-waiting eyes;

“Now tell us all about the war,

And what they fought each other for.”

“It was the English,” Kaspar cried,

“Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for,

I could not well make out;

But every body said,” quoth he,

“That ’t was a famous victory. . . .

. . . . . . .

“With fire and sword the country round

Was wasted far and wide,

And many a childing mother then,

And new-born baby died;

But things like that, you know, must be

At every famous victory. . . .

. . . . . . .

“And every body praised the Duke

Who this great fight did win.”

“But what good came of it at last?”

Quoth little Peterkin.

“Why that I cannot tell,” said he,

“But ’t was a famous victory.”

Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim.

1

When we set out for Cannes three days after my demobilization, I intended to remain out of England for at least a twelvemonth. Since the night when Hornbeck and I waited for news of the armistice I had thought many times of his blank and puzzled confession: ‘This is what the N.O. has been training for, ever since the old Britannia days.’ If I had not also been preparing for the peace and for the war which preceded it, I had at least toiled for the whole of my adult life to preserve the peace which preceded the war. Now I could have adapted Hornbeck’s reasoning of ‘no more wars, no more armies and navies’ to my own case; and, when my friends asked me what I was going to do now, I might have said: ‘No more wars, no more politics or journalism on the old lines.’

And this, I take it, was the attitude of all who had even a smattering of modern history. From the moment when I warned Barbara that we should perhaps never again be able to call our souls our own, I realized that the armistice had ended nothing but the long business of killing. The victors would now contend for the fruits of their victory, as Russians, Prussians and British had contended in the Congress of Vienna; the vanquished would struggle to preserve in defeat all that compassion, adroitness and obstinacy could secure them, as Talleyrand had struggled for France after Waterloo. The alliance, if it was like any other of modern times, would be strained and perhaps broken in the first weeks of peace, as after our wars with Louis XIV and Napoleon. We should hear men speaking, as de Grammont and Hornbeck already spoke, of “the next war”. Any one who was concerned to avert that must be prepared for a continued effort in which he might truly be unable to call his soul his own.

2

Such energy or ability as I possess were ready to be thrown into the common stock. I had told Philip Hornbeck that the war would have been fought to no purpose if we failed to discover a means of preventing future wars. My difficulty was to know where my own very moderate ability and energy were to be applied. The leading articles and public speeches of these days, taking their time from President Wilson, were familiarizing the idea of a league of nations. Neither speech nor article, however, made clear how the league could be helped to birth by the good-will of insignificant, isolated individuals. I debated with Bertrand whether I should stand again for parliament; but my radicalism from 1906 to 1910 was too strong for the taste of Frank Jellaby and the other liberal whips; it would be repugnant now to every section of an assembly that had sunk party divisions and was aiming at an agreed peace. Very much as Bishop Blougram counselled Gigadibs to “overhaul theology”, my uncle suggested sardonically that I should examine the creeds which I had been professing for the last quarter of a century and see how much of them the war had left. He did not, however, urge my returning to the House; and, if the outbreak of war had justified him in discontinuing our propaganda in Peace, the end of the war was hardly the occasion for resurrecting it.

“I’m more completely out of a job than any of you,” I told Hornbeck when my old colleagues at the Admiralty entertained me to a farewell dinner on my last night in England. “An obsolete political editor . . .”

“Lucky man!,” he sighed enviously. “I’ve been warned for duty when the peace conference opens. And, after that, I’m to convert the intelligence department here to peace uses. Beating swords into plough-shares; and what not.”

“If I thought I could be of any use to you . . .,” I began, with temperate enthusiasm; but Hornbeck shook his head and nodded meaningly towards the men at the far end of the table.

“I’ve already more than I know what to do with,” he murmured ruefully. “You don’t need a job, but most of these fellows do; and it’ll be harder for them to find one than for you. The war was the opportunity of a lifetime for most of them; but when it’s a question of conventional, peace-time billets . . .”

Hornbeck shrugged his shoulders and looked with mingled pride and amusement at the flock which he had collected. There were men and women, married and single, old and young; drawn from a dozen different professions, they were alike in nothing but their admitted ignorance of civil-service ways. And, in the hands of Hornbeck, this ignorance had been converted into an asset. As the department is dead, I can praise it—without offence—for loyalty, hard work and efficiency such as I have never seen excelled; without offence, too, I hope, I can say that we were the strangest collection of government officials that one man ever assembled below one roof. The war, if it did nothing else, gave scope to our versatility. At this dinner I recollect that Bellamy, the actor, sat next to Clayton, the paper-manufacturer. On his other side was Whitburn, the chancery silk; and, beyond him, old Norton, the banker. Next to him sat my private slave and fact-finder, Spence-Atkins, who had reached manhood as a traveller in Manchester goods and, on being discharged for neglect of business, had drifted about the world, collecting figures and languages. Next to him, again, was Jefferson Wright, who began the war as a mathematical coach, lost a hand at Neuve Chapelle, formed the statistical branch of the Purchase-and-Supply Department, seconded himself to the Admiralty and ended mysteriously as a brigadier on the pay-roll of the Ministry of Labour.

“It takes all kinds to make an intelligence department,” I said.

“I wish I could find something for them to do now,” answered Hornbeck; and I remember his words as the first hint of the human dislocation that would come as the country declared itself in a state of peace.

In the meantime, our conversation at this dinner strengthened my feeling that I could do no good by remaining in England at present; and I had excellent private reasons for wishing to go abroad and to keep my wife abroad. Until conditions were normal, we did not even know where to live. Most of my income was derived from Ireland: sentiment and duty required that I should spend part of my time there as soon as the country was habitable; and, now that my sister was married and my mother had made her home in the south of France, Barbara might well grasp at the chance of escaping from England.

“Quite deliberately, I feel as if I never wanted to go back,” she announced next day, as we watched the white cliffs of Dover fading from view.

“But London, without you, would simply not be London!,” said Lucien de Grammont, who was taking us to stay with him at his father’s house by the Etoile.

“It will perhaps be better for London, certainly better for me, if we both make a fresh start,” she answered. “I’m rather tired of it all.”

“Of London in war? Naturally!,” Lucien persisted. “And for the first months after the war, when we look for the familiar faces and have to tell ourselves that they will not come back . . . Later on . . .”

“Later on, we must see how we feel,” I said; and the conversation swung on to a less dangerous tack.

Though we never discussed her adventures in the days before our marriage, I felt that Barbara was thinking less of the familiar faces, which she would not see again, than of those which would inevitably reappear in London when each man returned to his own place. Among our distressingly free-spoken friends it was commonly reported that she was half engaged at the beginning of the war to young Jack Waring; and, though she never pretended to be in love with him, the engagement—according to the Crawleighs—kept her from marrying Eric Lane, with whom she was in love beyond all shadow of doubt. Jack was in England looking for work. Eric had been lecturing and travelling in America and Japan; he would be coming to England as soon as he had a new play to produce. I did not want Barbara to be reminded, I did not want to be reminded myself, that she only married me when Eric vanished from her world.

“We want to begin our married life in some place with no associations,” she went on, half to herself. Then, as though to protest that she was not thinking of Eric, she looked up with a smile and took my arm. “George and I have had no honeymoon yet; and my beloved parents didn’t make things very comfortable for us when I married without a dispensation. Perhaps they’ll be more reconciled if we give them a holiday. . . . How soon will peace be signed?”

“That depends how soon the conference opens,” Lucien answered with a shrug. “You are to have your general election first; and we . . . you will not find we are in any hurry. There are nearly five lost years to make up. France too is tired.”

The lost years were being recovered when we reached Paris in the last days of November. We had seen the war ending in London; here we watched it being buried. Every one who could get a passport and a ticket seemed, like us, to be heading for the Riviera and spending a week in Paris on the way. Every one, too, seemed to share our vagueness and indifference to what lay ahead of this holiday. For the first time in four years, our time was our own; for the first time in four years Paris could dine and dance without fear of being bombed or shelled. Barbara bought frocks; Lucien arranged parties; and I added the hall of the Ritz to the brief list—headed by Port Said and Charing Cross—of the places where a man, without waiting unduly long, can be sure of meeting every one who has ever crossed his path before.

I doubt if in any other single week I have eaten so many meals or spent so much money. From time to time Lucien grumbled half-heartedly at all this waste of time: he had been recalled from the embassy in London to assist in drafting the agenda for the conference, and I felt he owed a grumble to his conscience. For myself, I blessed every hour of delay that enabled us to shed the memories of the last five years and to forget the acerbities of the last five months. Lucien had long been an old enough friend to drop his diplomatic reserve in talking to me; and there were times, before and after the expeditions to Gallipoli and Salonica, before and after the United States entered the war, before and after the Italian reverse and the Russian collapse, when the alliance would have been severed if we had been responsible for it. Now, as I told him, this brief spell of dissipation had saved us from becoming stale. With Victor Boscarelli, from the Italian embassy, and Clifford van Oss, from the American Red Cross, we formed a private international alliance, each entertaining the others by turn and all swearing friendships that death itself would be powerless to sunder. A critic might have been puzzled to say whether Clifford’s Italian was worse than my French; but our radiant good-will transcended the halting interpretation of words, and I felt a warmer liking for my neighbours than I had ever, in my pitiable insularity, been able to achieve before with men of another race.

“At last,” I pointed out to Lucien, “we can talk amicably without discussing whether one country did all the work and another made all the money. There’s a real understanding. France, England, America: all are at the very top of their prestige. If we can pull together, we can make what we like of the peace.”

“I still think we ought to have gone on to Berlin,” he persisted. “However, if you back us up and if we can get what we want without it, I shan’t complain.”

“Remember you’re all coming to stay with us at Cannes,” I said.

And, on that word, we set out for a house where the rumour of war and world-settlement seemed never to have penetrated.

Looking back on the three months which we spent with my mother, I am in one way reminded of the two years which Jack Waring passed as a prisoner in Germany. So complete was our isolation that, when we emerged from it, we found a world of peace hardly less different from the one we had left than Jack’s war-world of tanks and gothas and tear-shells was different from the one which was blotted out in the early days of 1915. In the first weeks we saw no visitors; we read no papers; and, when we were rested enough to think and talk, we turned to the days when the world had last been at peace and speculated why the war had come and how other wars were to be prevented.

The last of my reasons for hurrying abroad was that I could take up no work in England until I had discharged the task which Violet Loring imposed on me within a few hours of her husband’s death. As the world in which we had been brought up was swallowed by the war, she asked me to set down my memories of it for the later instruction of her boy. I had carried my account to 1915; but, after that, the mass of material was too great for me to attack in odd hours after my work at the Admiralty. A steamer-trunk, filled with memoirs and monographs, kept me company to Cannes; and, in the few weeks that remained before my cousin came to demand her bond, I philosophized about the deluge and described the world before it and speculated about the world that would appear when the waters had subsided.

Small wonder if at this time, with my mother placidly dipping into Victorian biographies and with Barbara dreaming over her share in the history I was writing, we knew little and cared less about what was happening in Paris and London, Washington and Rome! While Lucien de Grammont drew the lines of a recreated Europe, I was living again through the years when Sandy Loring’s father and I were fellow-fags and fellow-monitors at Melton, when we were freshmen at Oxford, when we ventured together into Edwardian London. The dead so came to life, as I wrote about them, that sometimes I would lay down my pen and forget the war for the days before David O’Rane was blinded and Tom Dainton killed, the days when every one was quoting Barbara’s latest epigram and discussing Val Arden’s last novel, the days when Sonia Dainton broke a heart a week and an engagement a season. Musing of days and nights softened by time, I felt that never had there been such years in the life of any country, never had there been women and men like those of our generation.

“In two or three years I expect everything will be very much as it was before the war,” predicted Barbara.

“The people will be different,” I answered; “and they’ll make everything else different. Sandy’s world will never be like Jim’s.”

And then I fell to wondering what Sandy’s father would have made of the new dispensation which was taking shape before our eyes. He and I, who agreed on little else, agreed that we were saying good-bye, that last night at Loring Castle, to a phase in history. The old ruling families had lost their power since the first marquess commanded his fifteen seats in the unreformed House of Commons and “Trimmer” Crawleigh dodged in and out of George the Fourth’s ministries, leaving a broken government in his train; under a new distribution of wealth they might lose their prestige. The arrivistes of the nineties, who had floated on waves of beer and diamonds into the arid heights of a depressed territorial aristocracy, would find their places taken, in the nineteen-twenties, by social adventurers of ambition equal to Lady Dainton’s and of wealth greater than Sir Adolph Erckmann’s. A new class of politician, officer, publicist and financier must inevitably be brought to birth by the new demands of public life: the sons of the new men would quickly preponderate in the old schools and universities, their daughters would soon come to dominate a new society. That which I had denounced, in my hotter radical days, as “privilege” would count for less in Sandy Loring’s life.

It was not within my terms of reference to say if the one order was in any way better or worse than the other: it was different. My haphazard recollections, covering a period of about fifteen years, were chosen solely for the light which they threw on the generation that was of military age when war broke out.

“As,” I wrote in conclusion, “the French Revolution challenged and overthrew the territorial aristocracies and feudal kingships of the middle ages, so the Great War challenged the systems which the French Revolution had evolved in their place.”

There—for the moment—I stopped, for no one could say what systems the Great War would evolve in place of those which it overturned. Later, in brooding over these reminiscences of a vanished generation, I began to read a moral into them; and, on the morning of Violet’s arrival, when Barbara bent over my chair to ask if I had finished my work, I had to answer that, so far as I could see, it was only beginning.

“If I’m right,” I explained, “the old governing classes are being superseded, under our eyes . . .”

“The new lot will pick up the old ideas,” she interrupted.

“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said.

3

My discovery—the one incontrovertible moral that I could read into the war—had been made by others before me; and I doubt not that some at least of them reached it by the same road after toiling conscientiously through the official explanations and apologies which every foreign office in Europe issued in proof of its own innocence. The polychromatic outpouring of white papers, green books and red books was succeeded by a vaster flood of unofficial polemics, in which defensive chancellors and prime ministers, field-marshals and admirals demonstrated that some one else was responsible for the war and that peace would have been preserved or victory secured if only their advice had been followed. To the strategical arguments I paid little attention: nothing will make me understand strategy by land or sea, and it was hardly relevant to my main enquiry. The diplomatic defence, on the other hand, I studied with care, deciding—as, I imagine, most people outside Germany have decided independently—that, while Berlin was guilty of starting the conflagration, every other power lent a hand in piling up an inflammable heap of suspicions, jealousies and misunderstandings. It was this conclusion that pointed me my moral.

“And what do you make of it all?,” my mother asked as I laid aside the last of these bitter, aggressive manifestoes.

“Well,” I said, “whoever made the war, it’s clear that no single country, no single form of government was able to keep the peace.”

With that conclusion no one could disagree.

“In contrasting Jim’s world with the present,” I told Violet Loring, when my essay was ready for her criticism, “the outstanding lesson is that the government of man by his fellow-man has broken down in every form that’s been tried. You had constitutional monarchy in England, absolutism in Russia, a republic in France and America, a feudal kingship in Austria-Hungary. None of them could perform the elementary duty of protecting the life and liberty of their citizens. Those who took no part lived on the sufferance of the belligerents. From China to Honduras . . .”

“When once war breaks out . . .” Violet began helplessly.

“The governments that allowed war to break out failed in their first duty,” I maintained. “By negligence or malignity or impotence they’re responsible for the death or mutilation of some ten million human beings. It’s not enough to put the blame on Germany or the kaiser or Bernhardi. If a homicidal maniac runs amok in England, we blame the police for not stopping him.”

While my cousin turned the pages of my manuscript, I flung a similar cold douche of first principles over the head of Philip Hornbeck, who had come to us for a week between dismantling his old department and erecting the new.

“If you’d had a bigger police-force,” he suggested, “your homicidal maniac would have had no run for his money. If we’d smashed the German navy while it was building . . .”

“And turned homicidal maniac on our own account?,” I interrupted.

“If you like to put it that way. It’s not much use arguing with me, George, because I’m one of the old impenitents who believe that there will always be wars and what not. Admitting that it’s the duty of all governments to keep the peace, admitting that every government has failed in its duty, what are you going to do then?”

“Try a different kind of government,” I answered.

“A soviet?,” he asked. “If the aristocracy and bourgeoisie have failed, that’s all you have left.”

“I’d sooner have a soviet that thought it could keep peace than an aristocracy that admits it can’t.”

“You should go and live in Russia,” Hornbeck recommended.

The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making peace.

“Is this going to be a lasting settlement?,” I asked Lucien de Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda.

“We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.”

“Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?”

“I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.”

“Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a self-confessed failure.”

Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed:

“I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!”

And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion.

“You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of the war. When once the racket begins . . .”