“But....”
“Strasser just hasn’t the spunk. He’s like Röhm, who resigned his command and vanished abroad instead of sending his thugs to take the man for a ride and be done with him. That’s what all those Nazi ‘leaders’ are like: they’ll fight each other like cats for the second place, but only Hitler wants to be first. I once knew a racehorse like that: it would run almost neck-and-neck with the winner but never would stick its nose out in front.”
“That horse must have lost you a packet,” Lepowski murmured.
“It would—if I hadn’t backed it both ways.... But come back to Hitler. The policy-rumpus had no importance: what mattered was Gregor—that champion Fisher of Men whom Hitler himself had sent forth to fish—reporting nets now so heavy with fish that they threatened to break: it was high time to haul them in.”
“Yet I’m told that at Bamberg they argued their rival policies out ding-dong and right round the clock before the Strasser Line was outvoted.”
“Policies!” Reinhold exclaimed in disgust: “There lies Strasser’s perennial weakness. To Hitler a policy’s merely a means of gaining ascendancy over divers assortments of men, and wholly expendable once it’s no longer of use. He was just as conscious as you are that Strasser was likely to make a better impression up here than himself, which is why he sent Strasser—the beauty of all this being that these were Strasser’s Bolshy ideas being preached which he’d never endorsed himself, so once they had served their purpose recruiting hordes of the impecunious, Hitler was perfectly free to disown them before they started alarming the rich. No, the only future I see for Gregor is more of this same perpetual plowing and sowing new fields for Hitler to reap, till the poor old work-horse has wholly exhausted his usefulness: then he’ll be sent to the knacker’s, like Ludendorff.”
Count Lepowski paused for thought. “This must be much what those big brown intelligent eyes of that club-footed Judas perceived: for I’m told that he uttered no word in sup-port of his master at Bamberg, and nowadays eats out of Hitler’s hand.”
“Göbbels knows which side his bread is buttered. He only speaks when he’s sure of applause, and would rather cut out his tongue than defend the losing side.”
Lepowski turned his face to the stove in silence, and spat.
*
By the truce patched up at Bamberg with Hitler’s arms round Strasser’s reluctant neck and the voluble Göbbels apparently stricken dumb, Strasser continued free to say what he liked provided it brought in votes but was forced to renounce all attempts to dictate the Party Line. In return, Hitler confirmed him as chief official voice in the North of the One Indivisible Nazi Party. In short the net hadn’t broken, and Strasser’s whole miraculous draught of fishes was safely landed—by Hitler.
29
That autumn Mary insisted on sleeping upstairs once more like everyone else: so Gilbert must have a lift installed, and one she could work herself. It took the workmen ages putting it in: it was nearly winter before they had finally got it fixed. By this time her legs had wasted a lot, but in compensation her arms and hands grew even stronger than normal. Over her bed they had fixed a kind of trapeze with which she could swing her bulk on and off the bed unaided: before very long her arms and hands seemed strong as an ape’s—till there came a day when the crushable Polly flinched from her mother’s hug.
Those powerful hands propelled her chair much faster than anyone traveled on foot, so perforce they had to allow her to go about mostly alone. But her growing recklessness drove Nurse nearly out of her tiny wits. By December she found she could even force her chair up the ramp and into a horse-box. This was a feat which she kept to herself; and exactly one year from the day of her fall she had herself boxed to the Tottersdown Boxing Day Meet. There the Master loudly hailed a “Brave little woman—a plucked-un!”—though privately thinking (like most of the Field) that this skull-at-the-feast was in pretty poor taste; and the nervous horses had certainly thought so too when the ramp came down and her self-propelled chair bounced out on the Tottersdown gravel.
So another year drew to its end. Jeremy wrote to say that he couldn’t get Christmas leave (he was something called “Resident Clerk” at the Admiralty, something which saved him the rent of digs) but they’d give him the New Year instead. On New Year’s Eve his father was taking a watchnight service, so Joan and Jeremy dined at Mellton to see the last of this Year of Disaster with Mary, Augustine—and Gilbert.
The first four did their best, but the fifth seemed determined to make it a gloomy affair. Jeremy told them his Resident Clerkship required him to be on perpetual nightcall, ready to think up and issue appropriate orders—he and the Duty Commander between them—if (say) the whole Royal Navy capsized in the dark, or if mutineers dragged a Commander-in-chief from his bed in pajamas and hanged him high from the yard-arm....
Gilbert hinted that any such orders which Jeremy issued would probably make things worse; and Jeremy proudly agreed. He then went on to describe how even his china chamber-pot carried Their Lordships’ tinted foul-anchor crest, which exactly denoted his status: for Admirals had them of finest porcelain crested in gold, and so on right down the Naval Stores pecking-order to “Chamber-pots, Earthenware, Plain” (for ratings) and even “Chamber-pots, Rubber, Lunatics for the use of....”
But Gilbert was still not amused. Gilbert indeed—with his second honeymoon plainly gone the way of his first one—remained a picture of gloom throughout, except for a notable change of manner when talking to Joan. Mary seemed badly on edge, wheeling away from the table on any excuse or none; and when dinner was over her noiseless chair relentlessly circled her little drawing-room flock like a sheepdog shepherding sheep. Moreover, whenever she (rarely) came to rest she would talk about nothing but politics. Gilbert refused to respond: like a drunkard reformed who shies at a bottle of gin, he shied off the subject. Yet tactless Mary persisted....
It seemed as if 1926 would never arrive, nor Wantage bring in the punch.
“She wants him to go,” said Joan, as Joan and Jeremy bicycled home in the dark.
“To rejoin his fellow-Meistersingers of Westminster?—Yes, you’re probably right.”
“Mary’s a sensible girl. She knows what a hell in the end they’ll be laying up for them both if he won’t.”
“What’s more, you’d better look out!” the nephew bluntly informed his aunt: “Our saintly Gilbert is after you.”
Then they pedaled in silence a bit, till Jeremy added: “Mary doesn’t miss much....”
“Yes,” said Joan a little off-handedly: “Didn’t you notice how very much better old Wantage is looking since Mary saw that his thyroid was bigger and had it cut?”
30
Mary was cautious: she never proposed out loud that Gilbert should go back to politics, merely kept talking about them and wanting the latest political inside news. But it wasn’t long before she had him corresponding again with that eminent Liberal figure Sir John Simon; and two or three weeks after Easter, Mary invited the Great Man down. Busy though Simon was just then at the Bar, he accepted. Augustine was then back in Wales; and after dinner Sir John and the other two Liberal guests retired to the study with Gilbert.
The times were crucial indeed: for this was the April of 1926, and a General Strike in support of the miners was growing more and more likely. Before the War, coal had been one of Britain’s principal exports and fortunes were made; but now the mines were ceasing to pay and the owners insisted on lower wages and longer hours of work. A General Strike had already been threatened last summer; but Baldwin had staved it off in the end by granting a nine-months’ subsidy—ample time, he maintained, for the industry putting its own house in order; but now the nine months were running out with nothing whatever done, and Baldwin had flatly refused to renew the subsidy. Things looked ugly indeed. Nobody knew what a General Strike might bring, but most people feared the worst: for it hardly seemed possible Britain could go on escaping the virus of violent Revolution which since the War had swe
pt the Continent—just as in 1918 the Continental infection of Spanish Flu had finally crossed the Channel. In Britain the Communist Party was small; but that seemed deliberate policy, aimed at establishing highly-trained cadres of subversives to work in secret and largely through stooges, inflaming the workers’ relations with bosses wherever they got the chance. By now their leaders were mostly in prison, but nobody really knew how far the movement had got....
Thus there was plenty of pessimist talk in Gilbert’s study that night; but Gilbert found Simon himself “remarkably cool and clear-headed” (or so he told Mary afterwards, tucking her up in bed) “for times like these, when Emotion so easily gets the better of Judgement.” For Simon had flatly refused to panic. Let others go white at the gills at the thought of a coming blood-bath: let Karl Marx turn in his Highgate grave and prick up his ears for the rumble of British tumbrils rolling at last—this former Attorney-General only seemed willing to talk tonight of his firmly-held view that General Strikes were illegal. Indeed it might well be his duty to rise in the House in order to point this out, for it seemed only fair to warn the poor fellows what risks they were running of civil actions against them for damages.
Gilbert asked him for chapter and verse: whereon Simon explained that a General Strike was bound to entail men downing their tools without having given whatever notice their contracts required. They surely must understand this would render them liable in the Courts if employers should choose to sue; but did the General Council inciting them realize they too risked in Law every private penny their purses contained? And further: interpreting strictly the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 not even a so-called “sympathy” strike by a single uninvolved Union could properly claim protection for Union funds—still less could a General Strike: for that couldn’t be reckoned a genuine Trades Dispute, since it wasn’t aimed at any employer but openly aimed at extracting a mining subsidy out of the Public Purse over Parliament’s head. Sir John had no intention of using a word so emotive in any public speech, but in private agreed that the only word for coercing the Crown by non-parliamentary means—in other words, by force whether armed or not—was Rebellion.
However, the busy Sir John kept putting off making his speech; and when Baldwin’s patient negotiations had finally failed, at midnight on Monday the Third of May the General Strike had begun.
Everyone rallied behind the honest and even Quixotic Baldwin, the man they believed to detest all crunches (indeed last July’s derided appeaser) now brought face-to-face with things which have had to come to the crunch. Baldwin was stressing the Constitutional point that yielding to outside pressure like this must sound the death-knell of parliamentary rule; and even Thomas (the railwaymen’s leader) had answered that once the Constitution was challenged “then God help Britain unless the Government won!”—and had stumbled out of the House of Commons in tears.
Baldwin had broadcast a simple man-to-man plea to the nation; and thousands were queuing all day to enlist in a Glorious Army of Amateur Blacklegs.... So how could our Cincinatus linger still at the plow? Could even a fairly broad hint from Mary be needed that Now was the Time for All Good Men to Come to the Aid of the Country? True, that “awkward question” of whether the erring Liberal Party deserved his support any longer remained unresolved; but could this matter at times like the present when None was for the Party and All were for the State?
Yet Simon had still not spoken. Gilbert must strongly urge him to speak, with his legal proofs that this was a blow which a Faction unlawfully aimed at the Common Weal....
Lloyd George—because he presumably thought they would win—was believed to be backing the strikers; and this must finally cost him all decent Liberal Party support, so with Asquith gone to the Lords if Simon played his cards right.... Indeed did Gilbert’s conscience allow him to stay with the Liberal Party at all, then he might do worse than hitch his wagon to Simon.
Mary was urging him openly now; and yet when it came to the point Gilbert felt strangely loth to abandon his charge of the prickly Mary and go, for virtue as well as vice can turn to a habit surprisingly hard to break. However, at last (though not till the morning of Thursday May the Sixth) the Daimler set out for London with Gilbert inside it and all the cans of petrol the car could hold: for even to have himself driven to London by Trivett seemed safer than amateur engine-drivers.
As Gilbert was trundled to London he thought about Baldwin, become overnight a national father-figure whose fairness and honesty even the Labourites almost trusted. Baldwin (thought Gilbert) had certainly grown to his job. Now-a-days few recalled their surprise when the King had chosen this unknown Baldwin instead of the Great Lord Curzon to follow the mortally-sick Bonar Law as head of His Majesty’s Government. Even then the man had seemed in no hurry to try and impress himself on the public mind—except by quietly demonstrating the end in Affairs of State of all Lloyd-Georgian trickery.
Baldwin.... You couldn’t deny him a certain magnanimous streak: when Churchill left the Liberals Baldwin had welcomed him, even appointing him Chancellor.
31
There can’t have been many British Prime Ministers quite so unknown to the Public as Baldwin when first he moved into Number Ten.
Barely a year ago—which was back in Jeremy’s “Post-ulant” days in the Order of Civil Servants—Augustine one morning had called at the Admiralty, bent on routing him out. Augustine belonged to the Travelers’ (not that he used it much, but his family always had): the Club was in strolling distance, so now he invited Jeremy there to lunch. On their way in to eat, Jeremy nudged him: “Why—look who’s here!”
At a nearby table, Augustine noticed only an unmistakable Welshman with half-closed humorous eyes and a beaky nose: a distinguished, but also a taking middle-aged face—and as shrewd as a basket of weasels....
“Well?” said Jeremy afterwards over their coffee: “Tell me about your eminent fellow-Traveler.” Augustine shook his head. “Don’t you even know who he is?” Augustine said No. “But you’d guess?”
“Some South Wales mining valley. They’re mostly brainy enough, but this one must have had just that little extra it takes to escape to London and land him a cushy job.”
“You boob! That’s only Tom Jones, a mere Eminence Grise: what I meant was the other bloke.” So far as Augustine recalled, the man’s vis-à-vis had been typical City: most probably head of some fossilized family firm. One seemed to remember a square slab of yellowish face with drooping eyes, a nobbly nose and a wide-stretched mouth like a frog’s; but the creature had looked so solid and dull it was hard to imagine the link between this incongruous pair.... “That was Stanley Baldwin.”
“A brandy?”
“No thanks, or I’ll snore too loud in the office and wake the others.” Jeremy looked at his watch.
As the friends descended the steps to Pall Mall, “Politics always gets only the second-raters,” Augustine resumed: “But even so....”
“Don’t be misled by his looks,” said Jeremy: “Baldwin’s a downy old bird—as he’d have to be, getting involved in putting the skids underneath Lloyd George as he did in ’22.”
“How was that?”
“Surely even you know that in ’22 the Conservatives broke with Lloyd George’s wartime Coalition, fought the Election on party lines and won? Behind the scenes, Baldwin was in it all up to the neck.... And yet,” said Jeremy sounding puzzled, “Baldwin appears to be moved by ambition as little as you and me. It was purest accident plonked him in Number Ten; and I’m told he nearly refused.”
“Accident?”
“Two of them: Bonar’s cancer and Curzon’s coronet.—Three of them rather, because his only Cabinet job had been Board of Trade till a few months before when McKenna turned down the Exchequer: he wouldn’t have otherwise even been in the running.” Jeremy paused at the top of Duke of York’s Steps to indulge in a pinch of snuff. “I suppose you knew he was Kipling’s cousin?”
“He does indeed seem accident-prone! It’s a bit like a Kipling char
acter though, to take on a thankless job just because there didn’t seem anyone competent else.”
“Kipling—whose most successful work of fiction of all is the British Raj, which everyone thinks is true.... So now you suggest he invented his Cousin Stanley as well?”
Augustine took hold of Jeremy’s arm and gently swung it: “Come off it, you!”
“But I like your idea! It’s pure Pirandello....”
“No, off your ‘fictional’ British Raj when you know that the bloody thing’s all too real.”
“So Kipling has hoodwinked even you?”
“Damn it,” Augustine suddenly blurted out: “It’s time you and I grew up!”
Jeremy winced. “All right then, make me admit that a red rash covers indeed a third of the globe, and one-third of mankind is entitled to some sort of British passport.... But have a heart! You seem to forget my Branch is the one which works with the Naval Staff; and that even my Section is ‘Ships,’ so I’m sick to death of my nose getting rubbed all day in Old Nanny Pax-Britannica.” Jeremy rounded his delicate lips and emitted a raspberry.
“One thing I never realized quite till I went there,” Augustine pursued undeterred, “is how, in spite of their money and size, the Americans don’t even want to compete with ourselves in terms of international power. They don’t see anything in it for them—any more than you and I see anything in it for us! But there’s nobody really left in Europe either, so whether we like to admit it or not we are probably easily now the most powerful state in the world.”
“And with half the shipping afloat,” said Jeremy, “flying the Old Red Duster! The whole thing has got out of hand. Although there’s no longer nowadays any aggressive ‘Drang’ about it, this ramshackle Empire Baldwin has shouldered just goes on growing—a banyan tree, blindly dangling aerial roots from the tips of its branches which turn into extra trunks wherever they touch the soil. Self-governing White Dominions—Protectorates—Colonies—India—and nowadays Mandates....”