The Rustle of Silk Part 6

V

It was George Lytham.

The editor of a new weekly called _Reconstruction_ which had not as yet done more than take its place among all those elder brothers on the bookstalls which were suffering from a combination of hardening of the arteries and shrinkage of the exchequer, Lytham was a live wire, a man who could make mistakes, eat his own words, and having gone halfway up the wrong road, turn around without giving a curse for what other men would call dignity and retrace his steps at a run. Eton and Balliol, he had been a wet-bob, had a chest like a prize fighter and a forearm as hard as a cricket bat. The third son of old Lord Lockinge, he had sat in the House as member for one of those agricultural const.i.tuencies which are too dull and scattered to attract Radical propagandists and nearly always plump for Unionism. He had quickly made his mark. _Punch_ drew him in rowing shorts after his maiden speech and the Northcliff press made a point of referring to him as Young Lochinvar. But he had chucked the House in disgust after two years of it, one year of enormous enthusiasm during which he had worked like a dog and another year of sickly pessimism and disillusion brought about by contact with a set of political crows who fluttered over the carca.s.s of England,-traditionless, illiterate, dishonest, of low minds and low accents, led by the Old Bad Men who had inherited the right or tricked their way to the front benches and had all died before the War but were still living and still clinging to office. He owed allegiance to no leader and had started _Reconstruction_, backed with the money of the great mine owners and merchants who should have been members of the Cabinet, for the purpose of cleaning out the Augean stables. He numbered among his contributors every political free-thinker in England,-ex-members of Parliament, ex-war correspondents who spoke with horror of bra.s.s hats, and men who had served in all capacities in the War and were, for that reason, determined to remove the frightful burden of taxation caused by the maintenance of a great war machine for the indulgence of escapades in Mesopotamia and Ireland.

Lytham was young,-not yet thirty-five; unmarried, so that his purpose was single, his time his own. His paper was his wife and he was out for blood,-not with a bludgeon, not with a gun, but with an intellect which, supported by other intellects, alone provided some hope for the future of England and the Human Family. He had fastened upon Fallaray and dogged his heels. He regarded him as a brother, was ready to back him through thick and thin and had come home with him that night to discuss one or two of the great questions of the moment and to make plans for quick functioning.

When Fallaray led the way into his den and turned up the lights-all of them, so that there should be no shadows in the room and no ghosts-Lytham took his place with his back to the fire, standing in the frame of black oak like the picture of a crusader who had left his armor at home; he liked that room for its size and simplicity and tradition, its books and prints and unashamed early-Victorianism. He was as tall as Fallaray but not as thin and did not look as though the fires of his soul had burnt him down to the bone. His hair was brown and crisp and short, his moustache small, his nose straight and his eyes large and full of humor and irony. Except for his mouth there was nothing sensitive in his face and the only sign of restlessness that he permitted himself to show was in his habit of lighting one cigarette from the b.u.t.t of another just finished,-the cheapest stinkers that were on the market and which had been smoked by the men of the regiment to which he had been attached from the beginning to the end of the War,-f.a.gs, in other words. His holder was far too long for the comfort of people who stood too close.

"Now, Fallaray," he said, "let's get down to it."

Fallaray sat on the edge of his desk which he gripped tight with both his hands. "I'm ready," he answered.

"The point is this. You have come out against reprisals, which means that you have dared to voice the overwhelming sentiment of the country at a moment when the Government has plumped for whole hoggism and given Sinn Fein its finest advertis.e.m.e.nt. So far so good. But this is only the beginning. To carry the thing on to its right conclusion, you must not only resign from the Cabinet but you must lead us to an immediate settlement of the Irish question. You must organize all that section of British opinion and American opinion-which counts for so much-and work for the overthrow of the coalition government. Will you do it?"

"Of course."

"Ah!"

"But wait a second. Here we are marching with France into Germany, occupying towns for the purpose of wringing out of these whimpering liars the fruits of victory which they say they cannot pay and which they may not be able to pay. Already the fires of Bolshevism are breaking out everywhere as a result. Are we to put the Irish question before one that is surrounded with the most amazing threads of difficulty and may lead to the death of Europe? In other words, my dear Lytham, is murder and arson in one small island of greater importance to the world at this moment than the possibility of a new and even more terrible war in Europe, with disease and famine following at its heels?

The men I have served with during the last war say 'no.' They have even gone so far as to dine here to-night with my wife to try and get her to move me out of what they call my rut,-to persuade me, because they have failed to do so, to shelve the Irish question and back up France in her perfectly righteous demand for reparations. I can't make up my mind whether I will see this German question through, or swing body and soul to the Irish question and handicap them in this new crisis. If you've got anything to say, for G.o.d's sake, say it."

For a moment Lytham had nothing to say. It did seem to him, as he stood there in that quiet room with all its books and with hardly a sound coming in from the street below, that the troubles of that green and egotistical island melted away before those which did not affect merely England and France and Germany, Austria, Russia, Poland, Belgium but America also. It did seem to him that the murder of a few Britishers, a handful of loyal Irishmen and the reprisals of the Black and Tans for cowardly ambushes, brutally carried out, were in the nature of a side show in a circus of shows, of a small family quarrel in a city of families who were up against a frightful epidemic,-and he didn't know what to say.

The two men looked into each other's eyes, searched each other's hearts and waited, listening, for an inspiration,-from G.o.d probably, whose children had become strangely out of hand.

Thus they stood, silent and without a sign, as others were standing,-bewildered, embarra.s.sed, groping.

And then the door was flung open.

VI

Feo Fallaray's ideas of evening clothes were curious. Her smock-frock, or wrapper, or whatever she called the thing, had a s.h.i.+mmer of green about it. Her stockings were green and she wore round her head a circlet of the most marvelous pieces of jade. The result was bizarre and made her look as though she were in fancy dress. She might have been an English Polaire ready to enter the smarter Bohemian circles of a London Montmartre. Or, to quote the remark of a woman in the opposite set, "a pre-Raphaelite flapper."

She drew up short on seeing Lytham. He was no friend of hers. He was far too normal, far too earnest, and both his hands were on the wheel. But with all the audacity of which she was past mistress, she gave him one of her widest smiles. "Oh, it's you," she said. "They told me some one was with my beloved husband. Well, how's young Lochinvar?"

Lytham bowed profoundly and touched her hand with the tips of his fingers. "Very well, thank you," he said. How he detested green. If he had been married and his wife had dared to appear in such a frock, he would have returned her to her mother for good.

Fallaray rose from the desk on which he was sitting and walked to the farthest end of the room. There was no one in the world who gave him such a sense of irritation as this woman did.

"I'm not welcome, I know," said Feo, "but I thought you might like me to come and tell you what happened to-night, Arthur."

Fallaray turned, but did not look at her. "Thanks so much," he said.

"Yes. You're very kind. I'm afraid you've been pretty badly bored."

She echoed the word, giving it all its dictionary interpretations and some which are certainly not in any dictionary.

"When I see those people," she said, "I marvel at our ever having got through the War. Well, the end of it is that I am to ask you to reconsider your att.i.tude. The argument is that your secession puts them into the cart just at a moment when they think, rightly or wrongly, that they are forcing the fear of G.o.d into the Sinn Feiners. They can't imagine that my influence with you is absolutely nil, because they have the bourgeois idea of marriage and think that because two people are tied together by Church and law they must of necessity be in full sympathy. So all I can do is to make my report and add on my own account that I never saw such a set of petty opportunists in all my career."

Lytham gave her a match for the cigarette that she had put into a black holder with a narrow band of diamonds. "Did you give them any views of your own?" he asked.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]

"Rather," she said, the light on her hair like moonlight on black water.

"I held forth at length with my back to the fireplace. As a matter of fact, quite on the spur of the moment, I handed them a very brilliant idea."

"Yes?" It was a little incredulous.

"Yes, odd as it very obviously seems to you, Lochinvar. I said that I thought that this was the psychological moment for a nice piece of theatricality. I said that some one, probably Kipling, should draft a letter for the King, in which he should set forth the fact that he was going to withdraw every one of his soldiers and all his officials from Ireland at once and leave the Irish to run themselves, giving them the same kind of dominion government that they have in Australia and Canada, wis.h.i.+ng them G.o.dspeed and a happy Easter,-a manly, colloquial letter, very simple and direct, and ending with a touch of real emotion, the sort of thing that the King would write on his own, better than any one."

There was a moment's pause, during which Lytham darted a quick look at Fallaray. A gleam came into the eyes of both men.

"What did they say to that?" he asked.

"My dear man, what do you suppose they said? Having no imagination and precious little knowledge of the facts of the case, they dragged in Ulster and talked about civil war, which I think is absurd, because already, as Arthur knows perfectly well, Ulster is feeling the pinch of the boycott and has deserted Carson to a man. They're longing for a settlement and only anxious to go on making bawbees in the good old Scotch Presbyterian manner.-They couldn't see, and I don't suppose they will ever be made to see, this lot, that a letter from the King would immediately have the effect of withdrawing all the sympathy from the Irish and reduce them from martyrs to the level of ordinary human beings. They couldn't see that every Irish grievance would be taken away in one fell swoop, that the priests would be left without a leg to stand on and that above all America would be the first to say 'Now show us.'

It would be a frightful blow to Collins and de Valera and also to the Germans and the Sinn Feiners in the United States, and make all the world admire the British sense of sportsmans.h.i.+p,-which we have almost lost by everything that has been done during and since the War by our people in Ireland.-What do _you_ think of it,-both of you?"

She threw her head back and waited for a scoffing laugh from Lytham and a look from her husband that would move her to ribaldry. Her long white neck rose out of her queer gown like a pillar, the pieces of jade in her hair s.h.i.+mmered oddly and there was the gleam of undergraduate ragging in her eyes.

Fallaray looked at his wife for the first time. "It was an inspiration,"

he said. "I confess that I have never thought of this solution."

Feo was amazed but bowed ironically. "Very generous, Arthur, very generous. I couldn't have been married to you all this time without having acquired a certain amount of intelligence, though, could I?" Even at such a moment she could not remain serious, although she was perfectly ready to confess to a considerable flutter of vanity at Fallaray's favorable comment.

"My G.o.d," said George Lytham, "it takes a woman to think of a thing like this."

"You'll make me swollen-headed in a moment, you two."

Lytham took no further notice of her. He strode over to Fallaray. "Could this be done? I quite agree with your wife in her interpretation of the effect of such a letter and of course it could be made the sort of human doc.u.ment which would electrify the world. I agree, too, that once our soldiers were withdrawn with all the bra.s.s hats from the castle, the huge majority of reasonable Irishmen would insist on taking hold of things against the very small minority of Republicans who have merely used Ireland as a means of feathering their own nests, and be obliged to prove that they are fit to run their own country without b.l.o.o.d.y squabbles, cat-calling, filthy recriminations and all the other things for which they have earned a historical reputation. But-can it be done?"

Fallaray paced up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his back and his great shoulders rounded. Lytham and Lady Feo watched him.

It was a peculiar moment. They both saw in it the test of Fallaray's imagination and, in a way, humor. They could see that he was looking at this thing from every possible angle, dissecting it as a chemist would dissect bad water. At last he gave a groan and stopped and faced them.

"Not with these men," he said. "Not with this political system, not in these times. Do you imagine for a moment that the present Cabinet holds a single man big enough, humble enough, patriotic enough to permit even the King to step on the stage and absorb the limelight? No. Not one.

There is some microbe in the House of Commons, some atrocious cootie which gets under the skin of its members and poisons them so that they become the victims of a form of egomania of which they never can be cured. Then, too, my dear Lytham, we must get it into our heads that the Irish trouble is like a cancer in the body of the Const.i.tution. We may hit upon a medicine that seems likely to give temporary relief-the withdrawal of the troops, the appointment of a new Lord Lieutenant, even the establishment of a Dominion Government-but we have got to remember that the hatred of the Irish for the English is fundamental and permanent. What may seem to us to-day to offer a solution to this age-old problem becomes futile and unworkable to-morrow. In our efforts to deal with the question we must not allow ourselves to be influenced by the quick transitory events that chase each other across the front pages of the paper. We must, if we can, go to the root of the malady,-the deep human emotion that burns in the hearts and souls of the Irish and endeavor to understand. Otherwise we are as children making foolish marks on s.h.i.+fting sand. What we write to-day is obliterated to-morrow."

He turned about, walked slowly over to the chair at his desk and dropped into it heavily, rising again immediately because Feo was standing.

Seeing which, and having an engagement to join Mrs. Malwood and several others at a private dance club, she made for the door. "Well," she said, "there it is. I did my best for you."

"An excellent best," said Fallaray. "Thank you again. Are you leaving us?"

She waved her hand, that long able hand which might have achieved good things but for that fatal kink in her,-and went.