Part 32 (1/2)

She is an American, not a German, and the Americans pay high honour to their humourists. Perhaps she has lived too long with Ascher. Perhaps she has devoted herself too much to art and her steady contemplation of the sublime has killed her sense of the ridiculous. At all events it is dead. She has no humour now.

It is almost impossible to imagine that any woman would have been capable of calling in Gorman and me as advisers and helpers at a critical moment of her life. Yet that is what Mrs. Ascher did.

We obeyed the summons of course, both of us.

Gorman got there first. I found him seated opposite Mrs. Ascher in the large drawing-room of the house in Hampstead. Mrs. Ascher is lacking in humour, but she has a fine sense of dramatic propriety. Great decisions can only be come to fittingly, mighty spiritual tragedies can only be satisfactorily enacted, in s.p.a.cious rooms. And there must be emptiness.

Knicknacks and pretty ornaments kill high emotion. The chamber of a dainty woman, the room which delicate feminity has made its own, will suit a light flirtation, the love-making of a summer afternoon, but deep pa.s.sion is out of place in it.

I walked cautiously across a wide s.p.a.ce of slippery floor in order to shake hands with Mrs. Ascher. I saw that Gorman was sitting in a huge straight-backed chair with heavily carved elbow rests. It was the sort of chair which would have suited a bishop--in the chancel of his cathedral, not in his private room--. and a major excommunication might very suitably have been delivered from it.

”I am in great trouble,” said Mrs. Ascher, ”and I have asked you two to come to me because you are my friends. I was right to call you, was I not?”

She looked at Gorman and then at me, evidently expecting us to make a confession of friends.h.i.+p for her. Gorman wriggled in a way that made me think the carving of the chair must be sticking into him somewhere. But he did not fail Mrs. Ascher.

”You were right,” he said with deep feeling, ”altogether right.”

I was not going to be outdone by Gorman.

”'A friend,'” I said, ”'must bear a friend's infirmities.'”

The quotation was not wholly happy, but Mrs. Ascher seemed to like it.

She smiled gratefully.

”My husband,” she said.

I knew it must be her husband's affairs which were troubling her.

”He is in a very difficult position,” I said. ”I had a long talk with him the other night. It seems to me that he has to choose between----”

Gorman interrupted me.

”He's in an infernally awkward hole,” he said. ”The English people will lose their tempers to a certainty, not at first perhaps, but as soon as anything goes against them. When they do they'll make things d.a.m.nably unpleasant for any one who's suspected of being German or even remotely connected with Germany. That's the sort of people the English are.

And Ascher is just the man they'll fasten on at once. They'll hunt him down.”

Mrs. Ascher looked at Gorman while he spoke. Her face expressed a quiet dignity.

”That is not the difficulty,” she said. ”What people say or think of us or do to us does not matter. We live our own lives. We can always live them, apart from, above the bitter voices of the crowd.”

”All the same,” said Gorman, ”it will be unpleasant It will be a great deal worse than merely unpleasant. If I were Ascher I should get on the safe side at once. I should give a thumping big subscription--50,000 or something that will attract attention--to some popular fund. I should offer to present the War Office with half a dozen aeroplanes to be called 'The Ascher Flying Fleet'; or a first-rate cannon of the largest size. A good deal can be done to shut people's mouths in that sort of way.”

”You do not understand,” said Mrs. Ascher.

She turned to me, evidently hoping that I would explain Ascher's real difficulty to Gorman. I hesitated for a moment. It was plain to me that though Gorman did not appreciate the reality of the spiritual crisis, he did understand something which had escaped me and, so far as I knew, had escaped Ascher also. I had a vivid recollection of the unenviable position of men suspected of lukewarm patriotism during the Boer War.

In the struggle we were then entering upon popular pa.s.sion would be far more highly excited. The position of the Aschers in England might become impossible.

Gorman with his highly developed faculty for gauging the force and direction of popular opinion understood at once and thoroughly the difficulties that lay before Ascher. What he did not understand was the peculiar difficulty which Ascher felt. I responded to Mrs. Ascher's glance of appeal and tried to explain things to Gorman.

”Ascher,” I said, ”is pulled two ways. His country is pulling him.

That's the call of patriotism. You ought to understand that, Gorman.

You're a tremendous patriot yourself. But if he goes back to his country now he absolutely ruins his business. That means a lot more than merely losing his money. It means more even than losing other people's money, the money of the men who trusted him. It means that he must be false to his commercial honour. You see that, don't you, Gorman? And there doesn't seem any way out of the dilemma. He has got to go back on his patriotism or on his honour. There is no other course.”