Part 26 (2/2)
I
But life goes on without the smallest regard for individual preoccupations. You may take up what att.i.tude you like towards it or, with the majority, you may take up no att.i.tude towards it but immerse yourself in the stupendous importance of your own affairs and disclaim any connection with life. It doesn't matter tuppence to life. The ostrich, on much the same principle, buries its head in the sand; and just as forces outside the sand ultimately get the ostrich, so life, all the time, is ma.s.sively getting you.
You have to go along with it.
And in October of the following year, October, 1913, life was going along at a most delirious and thrilling and entirely fascinating speed.
There never was such a delicious and exciting and progressive year as between October, 1912, and October, 1913.
And it certainly took not the remotest notice of Sabre.
In February, Lord Roberts, at Bristol, opened a provincial campaign for National Service. The best people--that is to say those who did not openly laugh at it or, being scaremongers, rabidly approve it--considered it a great shame and a great pity that the poor old man should thus victimise those closing years of his life which should have been spent in that honourable retirement which is the right place for fussy old people of both s.e.xes and all walks of life.
Sabre, reading the reports of the campaign--two or three lines--could not but reflect how events were falsifying, and continued to falsify the predictions of the intense Otway in this regard. Deliciously pleasant relations with Germany were variously evidenced throughout 1913. The King and Queen attended in Berlin the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, and the popular Press, in picture and paragraph, told the genial British public what a thoroughly delightful girl the Kaiser's daughter was. The Kaiser let off loud ”Hochs!” of friendly pride, and the Press of the world responded with warm ”Hochs” of admiration and tribute; and the Kaiser, glowing with generous warmth, celebrated the occasion by releasing and handsomely pardoning three of those very British ”spies”
to whose incarceration in German fortresses (Sabre recalled) the intense Otway had attached such deep significance. This was a signal for more mutual ”Hochs.” Later the Prince of Wales visited Germany and made there an extended stay of nine weeks; and in June the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emperor William's accession was ”Hoch'd” throughout the German Empire and admiringly ”Hoch'd” back again from all quarters of the civilised globe.
It was all splendid and gratifying and deeply comforting. So many ”Hochs!” and such fervent and sincere ”Hochs!” never boomed across the seas of the world, and particularly the North Sea or (nice and friendly to think) German Ocean, in any year as in the year 1913.
II
Not that relations with Germany counted for anything in the whirl of intensely agreeable sensations of these excellent days. Their entirely pleasing trend prevented the scaremongers from interfering with full enjoyment of the intensely agreeable sensations; otherwise they were, by comparison with more serious excitements, completely negligible. The excitements were endless and of every nature. At one moment the British Public was stirred to its depths in depths not often touched (in 1913) by reading of Scott's glorious death in the Antarctic; at another it was unspeakably moved by the disqualification of the Derby winner for b.u.mping and boring. In one week it was being thrilled with sympathy by the superb heroism and the appalling death-roll, four hundred twenty-nine, in the Welsh colliery disaster at Senghenydd; in another thrilled with horror and indignation at the baseness of a sympathetic strike. In one month was immense excitement because the strike of eleven thousand insufferable London taxi-drivers drove everybody into the splendid busses; and in another month immense excitement because the strike of all the insufferable London bus-drivers drove everybody into the splendid taxis. M. Pegond accomplished the astounding feat of flying upside down at Juvisy without being killed and then came and flew upside down without being killed at Brooklands. One man flew over the Simplon Pa.s.s and another over the Alps. Colonel Cody flew to his death in one waterplane, and Mr. Hawker made a superb failure to fly around Great Britain in another waterplane. The suffragists threw noisome and inflammable matter into the letter boxes, bombs into Mr. Lloyd George's house at Walton and into other almost equally sacred shrines of the great, stones into windows, axes into pictures, chained their misguided bodies to railings and gates, jammed their miserable bodies into prisons, hunger-struck their abominable bodies out again, and hurled their outrageous bodies in front of the sacred race for the Derby at Epsom, and the only less sacred race for the Gold Cup at Ascot.
It was terrific!
At one moment the loyal public were thrilled by the magnificent enrolment of the Ulster Volunteers, and at another moment outraged by the seditious and mutinous enrolment of the Nationalist Volunteers; in one month the devoted Commons read a third time the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill, and in the very same month the stiff-necked and abominable Lords for the third time threw out the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill. It was terrific. The newspapers could scarcely print it--or anything--terrifically enough. Adjectives and epithets became exhausted with overwork and burst. The word crisis lost all meaning. There was such a welter of crises that the explosions of those that came to a head were unnoticed and pushed away into the obscurest corners of the newspapers, before the alarming swelling of those freshly rus.h.i.+ng to a head. It was magnificent. It was a deliciously thrilling and emotional year. A terrific and stupendous year. Many well-known people died.
III
It was naturally a year of strong partisans.h.i.+p. A year of violent feelings violently expressed; and amidst them, and because of them, Sabre found with new certainty that he had no violent feelings.
Increasingly he came to know that he had well expressed his const.i.tutional habit, the outstanding trait in his character, when, on the day of that talk in the office with Nona, he had spoken of his disastrous inability--disastrous from the point of view of being satisfactory to single-minded persons, or of pulling out that big booming stuff called success--to see a thing, whatever it might be, from a single point of view and go all out for it from that point of view.
”Convictions,” he had said, and often in the welter of antagonistic convictions of 1913 thought again, ”Convictions. If you're going to pull out this big booming stuff they call success, if you're going to be _satisfactory_ to anybody or to anything, you must shut down on everybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. And narrower than that--not only convictions but conviction. Conviction that your side is the right side and that the other side is wrong, wrong to h.e.l.l.”
And he had no such convictions. Above all, and most emphatically, he had never the conviction that his side, whichever side it might be in any of the issues daily tabled for men's discussion, was the right side and the other side the wrong and wicked and disastrous side.
He used to think, ”I can't stand shouting and I can't stand smas.h.i.+ng.
And that's all there is. These newspapers and these arguments you hear--it's all shouting and smas.h.i.+ng. It's never thinking and building.
It's all destructive; never constructive. All blind hatred of the other views, never fair examination of them. You get some of these Unionists together, my cla.s.s, my friends. They say absolutely nothing else but d.a.m.ning and blasting and foaming at Lloyd George and Asquith and the trade-unionists. Absolutely nothing else at all. And you get some of these other chaps together, or their newspapers, and it's exactly the same thing the other way about. And yet we're all in the same boat.
There's only one _life_--only one _living_--and we're all in it. Come into it the same way and go out of it the same way; and all up against the same real facts as we are against the same weather. That fire the other night in High Street. All sorts of people, every sort of person, lent a hand in putting it out. And that frightful railway disaster at Aisgill; all sorts of people worked together in rescuing. No one stopped to ask whether the pa.s.sengers were first cla.s.s or third. Well, that's the sort of thing that gets me. Fire and disaster--those are facts and everybody gets to and deals with them. And if there was a big war everybody would get to and fight it. And yet all these political and social things are just as much facts that affect everybody, and all anybody can do is to shout and smash up the other man's rights in them.
They all do it--in everything. Religion's as bad as any--worse. Here's one of these bishops saying he can't countenance Churchmen preaching in chapels or dissenters being invited to preach in churches because the Church must stand by the rock principles of its creed, and to preach in a chapel would mean politely not touching on those principles. You'd think heaven didn't come into the business at all. And you'd think that life doesn't come into the business of living at all. All smas.h.i.+ng....
Well, I can't stick shouting and I can't stick smas.h.i.+ng.”
IV
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