‘Well, then came the last battle of the Marne, and Haig’s great advance, and all the drama and confusion of the autumn months. I lost sight of George, for I was busy with the peace overtures, and I don’t think I even heard of him again till the new year… But the diary tells all about those months. I am giving you the bones of the story, but I am going to burn the diary, for it is too intimate for other eyes… According to it Reggie finished the war as a blazing hero. It was all worked out in detail with maps and diagrams. He had become a corps commander by August, and in October he was the chief fighting figure on the British front, the conduit pipe of Foch’s ideas, for he could work out in practice what the great man saw as a vision. It sounds crazy, but it was so convincingly done that I had to rub my eyes and make myself remember that Reggie was lying in a nameless grave on the Somme and not a household word in two hemispheres… George, too, shared in his glory, but just how was not very clear. Anyway, the brothers were in the front of the stage, Reggie the bigger man and George his civilian adviser and opposite number. I can see now how he got his confidence. He was no longer a struggler, but a made man; he had arrived, he was proved, the world required him. Whatever he said or did must be attended to, and, because he believed this, it was.’
Lamancha whistled long and low. ‘But how could his mind work, if he lived among fairy tales?’ he asked.
‘He didn’t,’ said Sir Arthur. ‘He lived very much in the real world. But he had all the time his private imaginative preserve, into which his normal mind did not penetrate. He drew his confidence from this preserve, and, having once got it, could carry it also into the real world.’
‘Wasn’t he intolerably conceited?’ someone asked.
‘No, for the great man was Reggie and he was only a satellite. He was Reggie’s prophet, and assured enough on that side, but there was no personal arrogance. His dead brother had become, so to speak, his familiar spirit, his demon. The fact is that George was less of an egotist than he had ever been before. His vanity was burned up in a passion of service.
‘I saw him frequently during the first half of ’19, and had many talks with him. He had been returned to Parliament by a big majority, but he wasn’t much in the public eye. He didn’t like the way things were going, but at the same time as a good citizen he declined to make things more difficult for the Government. The diary gives his thoughts at that time. He considered that the soldiers should have had the chief share in the settlement of the world – Foch and Haig and Hindenburg – and Reggie. He held that they would have made a cleaner and fairer job of it than the kind of circus that appeared at Versailles. Perhaps he was right – I can’t be dogmatic, for I was a performer in the circus.
‘That, of course, I didn’t know till the other day. But the change in George Souldern was soon manifest to the whole world. There was the Irish business, when he went down to the worst parts of the South and West, and seemed to be simply asking for a bullet in his head. He was half Irish, you know. He wrote and said quite frankly that he didn’t care a straw whether Ireland was inside or outside the British Empire, that the only thing which mattered was that she should find a soul, and that she had a long road to travel before she got one. He told her that at present she was one vast perambulating humbug, and that till she got a little discipline and sense of realities she would remain on the level of Haiti. Why some gunman didn’t have a shot at him I can’t imagine, except that such naked candour and courage was a new thing and had to be respected… Then there was the Unemployment Commission. You remember the majority report – pious generalities and futile compromises; George’s dissenting report made him for a month the best abused man in Britain, for he was impartially contemptuous of all sides. Today – well, I fancy most of us would agree with George, and I observe that he is frequently quoted by the Labour people.
‘What struck me about his line of country was that it was like that of a good soldier’s. He had the same power of seeing simple facts and of making simple syllogisms, which the clever intellectual – such as George used to be – invariably misses. And there was the soldier’s fidelity and sense of service. George plainly had no axe to grind. He had intellectual courage and would back his views as a general backs his strategy, but he kept always a curious personal modesty. I tell you it seemed nothing short of a miracle to one who had known him in the old days.
‘I accepted it as the act of God and didn’t look for any further explanation. I think that what first set me questioning was his behaviour about Reggie’s memorial. The family wanted a stone put up in the churchyard of the family place in Gloucestershire. George absolutely declined. He stuck his toes into the ground and gave nothing but a flat refusal. One might have thought that the brothers had been estranged, but it was common knowledge that they had been like twins and had written to each other every day.
‘Then there was the business about a memoir of Reggie. The regiment wanted one, and his Staff College contemporaries. Tollett – you remember him, the man on the Third Army Staff – volunteered to write it, of course with George’s assistance. George refused bluntly and said that he felt the strongest distaste for the proposal. Tollett came to me about it, and I had George to luncheon and thrashed it out with him. I found his reasons very difficult to follow, for he objected even to a regimental history being compiled. He admitted that Tollett was as good a man as could be found for the job, but he said he hated the idea. Nobody understood Reggie but himself. Some day, he suggested, he might try to do justice to him in print – but not yet. I put forward all the arguments I could think of, but George was adamant.
‘Walking home, I puzzled a good deal about the affair. It couldn’t be merely the jealousy of a writer who wanted to reserve a good subject for himself – that wasn’t George’s character, and he had no literary vanity. Besides, that wouldn’t explain his aversion to a prosaic regimental chronicle, and still less his objection to the cenotaph in the Gloucestershire churchyard. I wondered if there was not some quirk in George, some odd obsession about his brother. For a moment I thought that he might have been dabbling in spiritualism and have got some message from Reggie, till I remembered that I had heard him a week before declare his unbridled contempt for such mumbo-jumbo.
‘I thought a good deal about it, and the guess I made was that George was living a double life – that in his sub-consciousness Reggie was still alive for him. It was only a guess, but it was fairly near the truth, and last year I had it from his own lips.
‘We were duck-shooting together on Croftsmoor, the big marsh near his home. That had been Reggie’s pet game; he used to be out at all hours in the winter dawns and dusks stalking wildfowl. George never cared for it, or indeed for any field sport. He would take his place at a covert shoot or a grouse drive and was useful enough with a gun, but he would have been the first to disclaim the title of sportsman. But now he was as keen and tireless as Reggie. He kept me out for eight hours in a filthy day of rain wading in trench boots in Gloucestershire mud.
‘We did fairly well, and just before sunset the weather improved. The wind had gone into the north, and promised frost, and as we sat on an old broken-backed stone bridge over one of the dykes, waiting for the birds to be collected from the different stands, the western sky was one broad band of palest gold. We were both tired, and the sudden change from blustering rain to a cold stillness, and from grey mist to colour and light, had a strange effect upon my spirits. I felt peaceful and solemnised. I lit a pipe, but let it go out, for my attention was held by the shoreless ocean in the west, against which the scarp of the Welsh hills showed in a dim silhouette. The sharp air, the wild marsh scents, the faint odour of tobacco awoke in me a thousand half-sad and half-sweet recollections.
‘I couldn’t help it. I said something about Reggie.
‘George was sitting on the bridge with his eyes fixed on the sky. I thought he hadn’t heard me, till suddenly he repeated “Reggie. Yes, old Reggie.”
‘“This was what he loved,” I said.
&n
bsp; ‘“He still loves it,” was the answer, spoken very low. And then he repeated – to himself as it were:
“‘Fight on, fight on,’ said Sir Andrew Barton.
‘Though I be wounded I am not slain.
I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile
And then I’ll rise and fight again.’”
He turned his fine-drawn face to me.
‘“You think Reggie is dead?”
‘I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I stammered, “I suppose—”
‘“What do you mean by death?” His voice was almost shrill. “We know nothing about it. What does it matter if the body is buried in a shell-hole—?”
‘He stopped suddenly, as a lamp goes out when you press the switch. I had the impression that those queer shrill words came not from George but from some other who had joined us.
‘“I believe that the spirit is immortal,” I began.
‘“The spirit—” again the shrill impersonal voice – “I tell you the whole man lives… He is nearer to me than he ever was… we are never parted …”
‘Again the light went out. He seemed to gulp, and when he spoke it was in his natural tones.
‘“I apologise,” he said, “I must seem to you to be talking nonsense… You don’t understand. You would understand, if anyone could, but I can’t explain – yet – some day…”
‘The head-keeper, the beaters and the dogs came out of the reed beds, and at the same time the uncanny glow in the west was shrouded with the film of the coming night. It was almost dark when we turned to walk home, and I was glad of it, for neither of us wished to look at the other’s face.
‘I felt at once embarrassed and enlightened. I had been given a glimpse into the cloudy places of a man’s soul, and had surprised his secret. My guess had been right. In George’s subconscious mind Reggie was still alive – nay more, was progressing in achievement as if he had never disappeared in the March battle. It was no question of a disembodied spirit establishing communication with the living – that was a business I knew nothing about, nor George either. It was a question of life, complete life, in a peculiar world, companionship in some spiritual fourth dimension, and from that companionship he was drawing sustenance. He had learned Reggie’s forthrightness and his happy simplicity… I wondered and I trembled. There is a story of an early Victorian statesman who in his leisure moments played at being Emperor of Byzantium. The old Whig kept the two things strictly separate – he was a pious humanitarian in his English life, though he was a ruthless conqueror in the other. But in George’s case the two were mingling. He was going about his daily duties with the power acquired from his secret world; that secret world, in which, with Reggie, he had become a master, was giving him a mastery over our common life… I did not believe it would last. It was against nature that a man could continue to live as a parasite on the dead.
‘I am almost at the end of my story. Two months later, George became a figure of national importance. It was he who chiefly broke up the Coalition at the Grafton House meeting, and thereby, I suppose, saved his party. His speech, you remember, clove through subtleties and irrelevances with the simple declaration that he could not work with what he could not trust, and unless things changed, must go out of public life. That was Reggie’s manner, you know – pure Reggie. Then came the general election and the new Government, and George, very much to people’s surprise, refused Cabinet office. The reason he gave was that on grounds of principle he had taken a chief part in wrecking the late Ministry, and he felt he could not allow himself to benefit personally by his action. We all thought him high-minded, if finical and quixotic, but the ordinary man liked it – it was a welcome change from the old gang of arrivistes. But it was not the real reason. I found that in the diary.’
Sir Arthur stopped, and there was a silence while he seemed to be fumbling for words.
‘Here we are walking on the edge of great mysteries,’ he continued. ‘The reason why he refused the Prime Minister’s offer was Reggie… Somehow the vital force in that subconscious world of his was ebbing… I cannot explain how, but Reggie was moving away from what we call realities and was beckoning him to follow… The Grafton House speech was George’s last public utterance. Few people saw him after that, for he rarely attended the House. I saw him several times in Gloucestershire… Was he happy? Yes, I should say utterly happy, but too detached, too peaceful, as if he had done with the cares of his world… I think I guessed what was happening, when he told me that he had consented to the cenotaph in the churchyard. He took a good deal of pains about it, too, and chose an inscription, which his maiden aunts thought irreligious. It was Virgil’s “Tendebant manus ripae ulterioris amore”… He withdrew his objection to the memoir, too, and Tollett got to work, but he gave him no help – it was as if he had lost interest… It is an odd thing to say, but I have been waiting for the news which was in last week’s paper.’
‘You don’t mean that he engineered the motor smash?’ Lamancha asked.
‘Oh no,’ said Sir Arthur gently. ‘As I said, we are treading on the brink of great mysteries. Say that it was predestined, fore-ordained, decreed by the Master of Assembly… I know that it had to be. If you join hands with the dead they will pull you over the stream.’
The Last Crusade
It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign, and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance; or, more piously (perhaps more rationally), to the occasional interposition and the irresistible hand of the Great Disposer.
BURKE
One evening the talk at dinner turned on the Press. Lamancha was of opinion that the performances of certain popular newspapers in recent years had killed the old power of the anonymous printed word. ‘They bluffed too high,’ he said, ‘and they had their bluff called. All the delphic oracle business has gone from them. You haven’t today what you used to have – papers from which the ordinary man docilely imbibes all his views. There may be one or two still, but not more.’
Sandy Arbuthnot, who disliked journalism as much as he liked journalists, agreed, but there was a good deal of difference of opinion among the others. Palliser-Yeates thought that the Press had more influence than ever, though it might not be much liked; a man, he said, no longer felt the kind of loyalty towards his newspaper that he felt towards his club and his special brand of cigar, but he was mightily influenced by it all the same. He might read it only for its news, but in the selection of news a paper could wield an uncanny power.
Francis Martendale was the only journalist among us, and he listened with half-closed sleepy eyes. He had been a war correspondent as far back as the days of the South African War, and since then had seen every serious row on the face of the globe. In France he had risen to command a territorial battalion, and that seemed to have satisfied his military interest, for since 1919 he had turned his mind to business. He was part-owner of several provincial papers, and was connected in some way with the great Ladas news agency. He had several characters which he kept rigidly separate. One was a philosopher, for he had translated Henri Poincaré and published an acute little study of Bergson; another was a yachtsman, and he used to race regularly in the twelve-metre class at Cowes. But these were his relaxations, and five days in the week he spent in an office in the Fleet Street neighbourhood. He was an enthusiast about his hobbies and a cynic about his profession, a not uncommon mixture; so we were surprised when he differed from Lamancha and Sandy and agreed with Palliser-Yeates.
‘No doubt the power of the leader-writer has waned,’ he said. ‘A paper cannot set a Cabinet trembling because it doesn’t like its policy. But it can colour the public mind most damnably by a steady drip of tendentious news.’
‘Lies?’ Sandy asked.
‘Not lies – truths judiciously selected – half-truths with no context. Facts – facts all the time. In these days the Press is obliged to
stick to facts. But it can make facts into news, which is a very different class of goods. And it can interpret facts – don’t forget that. It can report that Bur-minster fell asleep at a public dinner – which he did – in such a way as to make everybody think that he was drunk – which he wasn’t.’
‘Rather a dirty game?’ someone put in.
‘Sometimes – often perhaps. But now and then it works out on the side of the angels. Do any of you know Roper Willinck?’
There was a general confession of ignorance.
‘Pity. He would scarcely fit in here, but he is rather a great man and superbly good company. There was a little thing that Willinck once did – or rather helped to do, with about a million other people who hadn’t a notion what was happening. That’s the fun of journalism. You light a match and fling it away, and the fire goes smouldering round the globe, and ten thousand miles off burns down a city. I’ll tell you about it if you like, for it rather proves my point.’
It all began – said Martendale – with an old Wesleyan parson of the name of Tubb, who lived at a place called Rhenosterspruit on the east side of Karroo. He had been a missionary, but the place had grown from a small native reserve to an ordinary up-country dorp; the natives were all Christians now, and he had a congregation of storekeepers, and one or two English farmers, and the landlady of the hotel, and the workmen from an adjacent irrigation dam. Mr Tubb was a man of over seventy, a devoted pastor with a gift of revivalist eloquence, but not generally considered very strong in the head. He was also a bachelor. He had caught a chill and had been a week in bed, but he rose on the Sunday morning to conduct service as usual.