Told by an Idiot (34 page)

Idealists, such as Stanley Croft, though they did not admire the Treaty of Versailles, saw it as the material out of which the living temple of peace might yet be built, on that great corner-stone, the League of Nations. The League of Nations was to the peace-wishers as his creed is to the Christian; it bound them to believe in a number of difficult, happy, unlikely and highly incompatible things, such as lasting peace, the freedom of small nations, arbitration between large ones, and so forth. They joined the League of Nations Union, full of hope and faith. Stanley did so, at its inception, and became, in fact, a speaker on platforms in the cause.

Stanley, in her late fifties, looked and spoke well on platforms; she looked both nice and important. Her blue eyes, under their thick, level brows, were as starry as ever, her voice as deep and full and good, her mind young and alert. A clever, high-minded, balanced, vigorous, educated matron of close on sixty; that was
what Stanley was. She was the kind of matron to whom younger women gave their confidence. Her son and daughter did not give her their whole confidence, but that was not her fault.

Billy was demobilised. A seamed scar cut across his cheek, and his eyes were queer and sulky and brooding. He disliked by now his wife Dot. She reciprocated the feeling, and very soon left him for another, so he divorced her. Stanley could not help being glad, Dot had been such a mistake. She was not the kind of wife to help her husband in his parliamentary career. She was more the kind who succeeds him in it, but even that Stanley could not know in 1919, and she regarded Dot, as, from every point of view, a wash-out.

“Look here, mother,” Billy said to her, with nervous, sulky decision, “I can’t go back to that secretary job. Nor any other job of that kind. Sitting jobs and writing jobs bore me stiff. I’ve done too much sitting, in those beastly trenches. And politics anyhow seem to me plain rot. I want to train for a vet. I’m awfully sorry if you’re sick about it, but there it is. Why don’t you make Molly take on a secretary-to-a-Liberal job? She couldn’t be worse than I was, anyhow.”

“A vet, Billy! Darling boy, why a vet? Why not a human doctor, if you must be something of that sort?”

“Want to be a vet,” said Billy, and was.

As to Molly, she became secretary to no Liberal, for she married, in 1919, a flight commander, and his politics, if any, were Coalition-Unionist.

So much for Stanley’s hopes for political careers for her children. She sighed, and accepted the inevitable, and put her hope more than ever in the League of Nations. If that could not save the world, nothing could. . . .

Certainly nothing could, said Rome. Nothing ever had yet. At least, what did people mean, precisely, by save? Words, words, words. They signified, as commonly and lightly used, so very little.

The post-war period swung and jolted along, like a crazy, broken-down charabanc full of persons of varying degrees of mental weakness, all out on an asylum treat. Every now and then the charabanc stopped for a picnic, or conference, at some nice Continental or English watering-place, and there were very cosy, chatty, happy, expensive little times, enjoyed by all, and really not doing very much more harm to Europe than any other form of treat would have done, since they had, as a rule (the amusing reconstruction of the map of Europe once effected), practically no effects of any kind, beyond, of course, strengthening the already perfect harmony prevalent among the victorious allied nations.

Reparations was the great topic at these chats; but it was and is such a very difficult topic that no one there (no one there being very clever) made much of it, and it has not really been decided about even now.

International politics were, in fact, in the years following the great war, even more greatly confused than is usual. Only one great international principle remained, as ever, admirably lucid—that principle so simply explained by M. Anatole France’s Penguin peasant to the Porpoise philosopher.

“Vous n’aimez pas les Marsouins?”

“Nous les haïssons.”

“Pour quelle raison les haïssez-vous?”

“Vous le demandez? Les Marsouins ne sont-ils pas les voisins des Pingouins?”

“Sans doute.”

“Eh bien, c’est pour cela que les Pingouins haïssent les Marsouins.”

“Est-ce une raison?”

“Certainement. Qui dit voisins dit ennemis. . . . Vous ne savez donc pas ce que c’est que le patriotisme?”

There was no confusion here.

Home politics, in each country, seemed to lack even this dominant
motif
, and confusion reigned unrelieved. In Great Britain a Coalition Government was in power. The usual view about this government is that it was worse and more incompetent than other governments; but it seems bold to go as far as this. “The nation wants a return to a frank party government,” non-coalition Liberals and Conservatives began saying, and said without intermission until they got it, in 1923. They sometimes explained why they preferred a frank party government, but none of their reasons seemed very good reasons; the real reason was that they, very properly and naturally, wished their own party to be in power. The Die-Hards and the Wee Frees came to be regarded as valiant, incorruptible little bands, daring to stand alone; Co-Liberals and Co-Unionists were understood, somehow, to have compromised with Satan for reward. There is a good deal of unkindness in political life.

Meanwhile, the people settled down, were demobilised from the army, and from the various valuable services which they had been rendering to their country, and began to fall back into the old grooves, began to recover, at least partially, from the war. But the war had left its heritage, of poverty, of wealth, of disease, of misery, of discontent, of feverish unrest.

“Now to write again,” said Imogen, and did so, but found it difficult, for the nervous strain of the years past, and the silliness of the avocations she had pursued through them, had paralysed initiative, and given her, in common with many others, an inclination to sally forth after breakfast and catch a train or a bus, seeking such employment as might be created for her, instead of creating her own. The helpless industry of the slave had become hers, and to regain that of the independent and self-propelled worker was a slow business.

Further, she was absorbed, shaken and disturbed by a confusing and mystifying love into which she had fallen, blind and unaware, even before peace had descended. All values were to her subverted; she fumbled blindly at a world grown strange, a world as to whose meaning and whose laws she groped in the dark, and emotion drowned her like a flood.

There revived in force about this time the curious old legend about the young. The post-war young, they were now called, and once more people began to believe and to say that one young person closely resembles other young persons, and many more things about them.

“The war,” they said, “has caused a hiatus, and thought has broken with tradition. Thus youth is no longer willing to accept forms and formulæ only on account of their age. It has set out on a voyage of inquiry, and, finding some things which are doubtful and others which are insufficient, is searching for forms of expression more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge.”

Many novels were written about the New Young, half in reprobation, half in applause; famous literary men praised them in speeches; they were much spoken of in newspapers. All the things were said of them that have been said of the young at all times, only now their newness, their special quality, was attributed to the European war, in which they were too young to have actively participated, but which had, it was believed, exercised upon them some mystic and transmuting influence. Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. “Will these qualities wear off?” precise-minded and puzzled inquirers asked, “when the present young are thirty and middle-aged, will they still possess them? Do the qualities depend upon their age, or upon the period of the world’s history in which they happen to be that age?” But no precise or satisfactory reply was ever given. It never is. Inquirers into the exact meaning of popular theories and phrases are of all persons the least and the worst answered. You may, for instance, inquire of a popular preacher, or any one else, who denounces his countrymen as “pagan ”(as speakers,
and even Bishops, at religious gatherings have been known to do) what, exactly, he means by this word, and you will find that he means irreligious, and is apparently oblivious of the fact that pagans were and are, in their village simplicity, the most religious persons who have ever flourished, having more gods to the square mile than the Christian or any other Church has ever possessed or desired, and paying these gods more devout and more earnest devotion than you will meet even among Anglo-Catholics in congress. To be pagan may not be very intelligent; it is rustic and superstitious, but it is at least religious. Yet you will hear the word “pagan ”flung loosely about for “irreligious,” or sometimes as meaning joyous, material and comfort-loving, whereas the simple pagans walked the earth full of what is called holy awe and that mystic faith in unseen powers which is the antithesis of materialism, and gloomy with apprehension of the visitations of their horrid and vindictive gods; and, though no doubt, like all men, they loved comfort, they only obtained, just as we do, as much of that as they could afford. And, whatever Bishops mean by pagan, as applied to modern Englishmen, it is almost certain that they do not mean all this.

Never, perhaps, was thinking, writing and talking looser, vaguer, and more sentimental than in the years following the European war. It was as if that disaster had torn great holes in the human intelligence, which it could ill afford. There was much writing, both of verse and prose, much public and private speaking, much looking for employment and not finding it, much chat about the building of new houses, much foolish legislation, much murder and suicide, much amazement on the part of the press. Newspapers are always easily amazed, but since the war weakened even their intelligence there could not be so much as a
little extra departure from railway stations on a Bank Holiday (surely most natural, if one thinks it out) without the ingenuous press placarding London with “Amazing scenes.” The press was even amazed if a married couple sought divorce, or if it thundered, or was at all warm. “Scenes,” they would say, “scenes; ”and the eager reader, searching their columns for these, could find none worthy of the name. One pictures newspaper reporters going about, struck dumb with amazement at every smallest incident in this amazing life we lead, hurrying lack to their offices and communicating their emotion to editors, news editors and leader writers, so that the whole staff gapes, round-eyed, at the astonishing world on which they have to comment. An ingenuous race; but they make the mistake of forgetting that many of their readers are so very experienced thay they are seldom surprised at anything.

During these years, the sex disability as regards the suffrage being now removed, women stood freely for Parliament, but the electorate, being mostly of the male sex, showed that the only women they desired to have in Parliament were the wives of former members who had ceased to function as such, through death, peerag
e, or personal habits. Many women, including Stanley Croft, who, of course, stood herself, found this very disheartening. It seemed that the only chance for a woman who desired a political career was to marry a member and then put him out of action. Such women as were political in their own persons, who were educated and informed on one or more public topics, had small chance. “We don’t want to be ruled by the ladies,” the electorate firmly maintained. “It’s not their job. Their place is, etc.”

The world had not changed much since the reign of Queen Victoria.

And so, with the French firmly and happily settled in the Ruhr, their hearts full of furious fancies, declaring that it would not be French to stamp on a beaten foe, but that their just debts they would have, with Germany rapidly breaking to pieces, drifting towards the rocks of anarchy or monarchy, and working day and night at the industry of printing million-mark notes, with Russia damned, as usual, beyond any conceivable recovery, with Italy suffering from a violent attack of Fascismo, with Austria counted quite out, with a set of horrid, noisy and self-conscious little war-born States in the heart of Europe, all neighbours and all feeling and acting as such, with Turkey making of herself as much of an all-round nuisance as usual, with Great Britain anxiously, perspiringly endeavouring both to arrest the progressive wreckage of Europe and to keep on terms with her late allies, and with Ireland enjoying at last the peace and blessings of Home Rule, Europe entered on her fifth year since the Armistice.

In this year Maurice’s paper perished, having long ceased to pay its way, and, in fact, like so many papers, suffering loss on each copy that was bought. This is as natural a state of affairs for papers as living on overdrafts is for private persons, but neither state, unfortunately, can last for ever. The money behind the
Gadfly
at last gave out, and the
Gadfly
ceased to be. Maurice, at the age of sixty-five, was deprived of his job and his salary, and became a free-lance, but no less fiery and stubborn, journalist. There were more things to oppose, in his view, than ever before, and he
opposed them at large, in the hospitable pages of many a friendly periodical. His opposition had no effect on the affairs of the world, but, in combination with an adequate supply of alcoholic nourishment and his blessed emancipation from married life, it caused him to remain self-respecting and fit, kept senility at bay, and assisted him to bear up against the repeated shocks of Roger’s published works.