by John Buchan
“There must be no more war,” he said. “Now is the time, when all men have seen its folly, to purge mankind of that ancient auto-intoxication. But you will not do this only by erecting a supra-national machine for peace. I am a supporter of the League of Nations — beyond doubt, but it is not enough. You cannot have a League without the nations, and these nations must first of all be re-made. Only then can you have a new world-mind. Chiefly Germany and Britain, for these are the key-points. France is a great people unlike all others, but France will never stand out. She will fall in — after protestations — with the general sense of humanity, and presently make herself its high priest and interpreter. That is her métier — she gives form to what others originate. America! She is a world to herself, and will walk alone and listen to no one’s advice till she learns the folly of it by harsh experience. Like our practical people she will practise the mistakes of her predecessors till she finds them out. But Germany must set her house in order without delay, for delay means disaster. Britain, too, for you are still the pivot of the world, and if you fall no one can stand. I am not very happy about your Britain. You will pardon a stranger for his arrogance, but I do not think you are yet awake. We Germans are awake — to a far more difficult task than yours, and wakefulness, however unpleasant, is better than sleep.”
He broke off to answer a question of Lamancha’s, which had to be repeated twice before he grasped its purport. Adam turned to Stannix.
“Lord, I wish I had your gift of tongues, Adam,” the latter said. “I am not much of a judge, but you seem to speak rather better German than Loeffler. . . . You asked me about Utlaw before dinner, and I hadn’t the chance to reply. I heard this afternoon that he had missed the Union secretaryship. They have taken Potter. A bad mistake, I think, in their own interest, but that’s not any concern of mine. What worries me is its effect on Utlaw. He is bound to be pretty sick about it. I only hope it won’t make him run out.”
“How do you mean?”
“Forswear his class. Utlaw’s strength is that he is class-conscious in the only reasonable way. He knows his people through and through, and, while he is just a little above them so as to give him the vantage for leadership, he is bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. He is loyal to them and they know it, but he’s too loyal to them to tell them lies and mislead them, and they know that too. But he’s devouringly ambitious, and a man of his brains won’t stand being elbowed aside by nonentities. We mustn’t forget the cut-throat competition among the Labour people. There are too many running for the same stakes, and if a man stumbles he’s trampled down. It’s a far crueller business than in our own jog-trot party. Besides, they are eaten up with vanity.”
“Utlaw has no vanity.”
Stannix pursed his lips.
“Perhaps not. But all his competitors have it abundantly, and that means that merit isn’t given a chance. How can it be if everybody thinks himself God Almighty. . . . I am not so sure that Utlaw has none, either. He wouldn’t be human if he hadn’t. He has been up here at the Economy Commission, as you know, and has done amazingly well. I’ve rarely seen a better performance. Made his points clearly and neatly — always ready to meet a sound argument and genially contemptuous of a bad one — prepared to give way with a good grace when necessary — accepted gratefully half a loaf and adroitly swapped it for a whole one — he has a real genius for affairs. Compliments were flying about, Trant made a pet of him, and Geraldine laid himself out to be gracious. The man couldn’t help being flattered. Now what I ask is, with all this reputation behind him, how he is going to take being turned down by his own people.”
“I don’t think he’ll play the fool,” said Adam firmly.
“I hope not, but the temptation will be great, and I think too well of him to want him on our side. His strength is to stay where Providence has put him. . . . Happily I don’t suppose he could afford to cut the painter. He hasn’t a bob, I’m told.”
After dinner Adam saw no more of Loeffler, who had a short talk with the royal personage, and then seemed to be engaged in conference with various members of the Cabinet. The Lamanchas’ house was well adapted for entertaining, and the big rooms were not inconveniently crowded. Adam found a corner by the balustrade at the head of the main staircase, where he could see the guests arriving in the hall below and the procession upwards to where they were received by the host and hostess. It amused him to watch this particular ritual on the few occasions when he went to parties — the free-and-easy ascent, the sudden moment of self-consciousness as they made their bow, the drifting off into absorbed little coteries. Most people had a party guise, something different in their faces as well as in their clothes, a relapse to the common denominator of the herd. But some retained a rugged individuality and so were out of the picture. Thirlstone, for instance, who looked a backwoodsman however he was dressed, and Manton, the steeplechase rider, whose trousers always suggested breeches.
One man he noted on the staircase who was different from the others. He was taking nothing for granted, for his eager, curious eyes darted about with evident enjoyment, as if he were a child out for a treat. Adam saw that it was Utlaw, rather smart, with a flower in his buttonhole, and a new dress-suit, which had certainly not been made in Birkpool. He saw too that the uplifted face had recognised him, recognised him with surprise. So he did not move from his place, for the time had come to drop the bagman.
Utlaw made his way to him.
“Good Lord, Milford,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“I dined here,” said Adam. “The Lamanchas are old friends of mine.”
Utlaw’s eyes were on his medal ribbons.
“The D.S.O. and a bar. I thought you told me you weren’t in the war. You didn’t get that for staying at home.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t in the war. I said I wasn’t fighting.”
“Your service must have been pretty active, anyway, or you wouldn’t have got that. Look here, Milford, what sort of a game have you been playing with me? What about the bagman in Mrs Gallop’s upstairs room?”
Adam laughed.
“You invented that for yourself, you know. I only didn’t undeceive you. I went to Birkpool to make friends with you and I hope I have succeeded?”
Utlaw’s face, which for a moment had clouded, broke into a grin.
“You jolly well have, old chap. And I can tell you I want all the friends I’ve got. Have you heard that they’ve turned me down for the Union secretaryship? Dirty work at the cross-roads! My lads in Birkpool will have something to say about that. . . .”
He broke off and advanced to greet a lady who had just arrived and who seemed to welcome the meeting. Adam saw that it was Mrs Pomfrey.
III
For some months Adam was little absent from Birkpool.
His relations with Utlaw were on a new basis. He was still to most people the commercial gentleman who lodged with Mrs Gallop, but Utlaw was aware that he played other parts into which he forbore to enquire, though he showed his awareness by often asking his opinion about this man and that and his views on popular feeling. But he treated him now not only as a friend but as a counsellor, the repository of much knowledge which he did not himself possess.
Clearly Utlaw was going through a difficult time. Robson, though given up by the doctors, obstinately refused to die, and the East Flackington seat, which might have been a consolation for the loss of the Union secretaryship, had not yet come his way. He had lost something of his easy mastery of his job — was no longer “on the top of it,” to use his own phrase; he was self-conscious and inclined to be irritable, and Florrie in the background was no peacemaker. He must have told her something of Adam’s real position, for she showed a new desire for his society, and would pour out her grievances to him. Her politics now were her husband’s career, nothing else. She was inclined to be impatient with any who raised difficulties for him in his daily work, and she was beginning to be contemptuous about the leaders of his party. “Ther
e’s only one relic of feudalism left in Britain,” she used to declare, “the super-fatted, hermetically-sealed, feudal aristocracy of the trade unions. People like Judson and Potter are the real oligarchs. Compared to them Lord Armine is a Jacobin.” Adam recognised the sentence from a recent anonymous article in the press, of whose authorship he was now made aware. Florrie was trying to supplement their income by journalism, and succeeding.
It was his business to keep Utlaw to his job in spite of his wife, and he found it increasingly difficult. Utlaw had lost some of his old mastery over his people; he was still a leader, but a leader without any clear purpose. He had lost his single-heartedness, and appeared not to regret it. He invited Creevey to Birkpool to talk to a big debating society which he had founded, and though Creevey’s brilliant opportunism may have been unintelligible to most of his audience, it seemed to be acceptable to Utlaw, and it helped to confuse the minds of some of his chief lieutenants. The man’s opinions were in a flux. More serious, he seemed to be slipping away from his class. He was less a worker in a wide movement than the chief of a private army of condottieri which he might swing over to any side.
Frank Alban was also difficult. His first months at St Mark’s had been the biggest sensation Birkpool had ever known. The church was crowded, and Frank’s sermons to his disgust were reported in the popular London press. That soon passed, but he remained a potent influence, and the Albanites became a force in the city. So long as he dealt with faith there was no opposition, but when he turned to works he encountered ugly obstacles. He had a remarkable way of handling boys, and his first big enterprise was a chain of boys’ clubs in which he enlisted as fellow-workers an assortment of Birkpool youth. But presently he came hard up against social evils in the employment of boy labour and the eternal housing tangle, and he broke his shins against many educational and industrial stone walls. Birkpool did not know what to make of this turbulent priest who was not content to stick to his own calling, and Frank had moments of bitter hopelessness.
Adam was his chief consultant, and in his case as in Utlaw’s the difficulty was to keep him to his job. He had much of Newman’s gallant intransigence, but that inability to compromise, which gave him his power as a preacher, made his path thorny in practical affairs. The temptation was to retire inside his own soul, the old temptation of the saint. His high-strung spirituality was in perpetual danger of being introverted, and the crusader of retiring to his cell.
In dealing with him Adam had an ally in Kenneth Armine. The Mayor was not a saint, but he was notably a crusader. His father died about this time, and the new Marquis of Warmestre had now the House of Lords as a platform. On several occasions he uplifted his voice there to the amazement of his friends and the embarrassment of his party, and he could draw large audiences in most parts of the land. His creed was a hotch-potch, much of it crude and boyish, but it was preached with amazing gusto, and one or two dogmas stood out like rocks in a yeasty ocean. One was the gravity of the times, since Britain and the world stood at the cross-roads. Another was the need for a great effort of intelligence, sacrifice, and discipline if the people were to pull through. When his critics pointed out that much of his stuff was not remarkable for its intelligence, he joyfully agreed. That was not his business, he said; he was no thinker, his job was to stir up the thinkers; but he knew the one thing needful, which might be hid from the wise but was revealed to plain fellows like himself.
“Send brother Frank to me,” he would say; “I’ll cure him of his megrims. Hang it all, does the man expect to find his job easy? Mine is as stiff as Hades, and it’s by a long chalk simpler than his. I’ll keep him up to the mark. . . . No, I’m enjoying myself. Jackie hates it, and I’m sorry about that, but I’m bound to go through with it. We’ve got a chance here, what with Frank and Utlaw to help me, and I’m going to see that we don’t miss it. It’s the only way, you know. You can’t fire the country as a whole — too big and too damp. You must take it bit by bit. If we kindle Birkpool the blaze will spread, and presently we’ll have a glorious bonfire of rubbish.”
One day Adam visited Scrope at the same house in the Northamptonshire village where he had first met him. He had had a letter from Freddy Shaston telling him that the old man was failing rapidly and could not last long. “He wants to see you and you must go. Take the chance, for a lot of wisdom will leave the world with him.” Adam had come to know Shaston well. A partner in a firm of stockbrokers, his real business in life was to be Scrope’s chela, to be his eyes and ears for a world in which he could no longer mingle. He had no desire to do anything, only to find out about things; as he said, his job was Intelligence not Operations, but it was a task in which he had few equals.
It was a bleak day in December, and there was no sitting out, as on the first visit, in a garden heavy with autumn blossom. The garden was now sprinkled with snow. Adam found Scrope propped up with pillows in an arm-chair beside a blazing fire, and the first glance showed him that he had not many weeks to live. The vigour which he had recovered in the war had ebbed, the face had fallen in and the cheekbones stood out white and shining, the voice had lost its crispness and came out slow and flat and languid. But there was still humour and interest in the old eyes.
“I have gone back to sanctuary,” he said, “my last sanctuary. I am very near that happy island of which you told me. What, by the way, was its name? Eilean Bàn?”
He looked for a little into the fire and smiled.
“You still frequent it? Not in the body, of course. You cannot go back to it yet awhile. But it is more to you than a pleasant fancy, I think. It is a Paradise to which you will some day return. But you must earn the right to it. Is it not so? . . . You see I understand you, for all my life I too have lived with dreams.”
For some time he seemed to be sunk in a feebleness from which he could not rouse himself. He asked questions and did not wait for their answer. Then some wave of life flowed back into his body, and he sat more upright among his pillows. “Give me a cigarette, please,” he said, “one of the little black ones in the Chinese box. I allow myself six in the day. Now I think we can talk. . . . Have you found your Messiah?”
“No,” said Adam. “I do not think there will be any one Messiah.”
Scrope nodded.
“I think likewise. The day has gone when one man could swing the world into a new orbit. It is too large, this world, and people speak with too many tongues. But you have found something? Shall I guess? You have found one who may be a John the Baptist, and you have found an apostle or two? Am I right? You see, I have been trying to follow your doings a little. I have learned much of Birkpool.”
“I can have no secrets from you,” Adam said. “I have found a man who preaches the fear of God. I have found a man who can lead. And I have found a man who has a fire in his belly and fears nothing.”
Scrope mused.
“And your hope is that these may be the grain of mustard seed which will grow into a great tree — an Yggdrasil with its roots in the sea and its shadow over all the land? Something that will bind together the loose soil of the country? Well, I agree with you in one thing. Our malady to-day is disintegration. We are in danger of splitting into nebulæ of whirling atoms. There is no cohesion in any of our beliefs and institutions, and what is worse, we have lost the desire for cohesion. It is a pleasant world for some people. Mr Warren Creevey, for instance. He loves dilapidation, for it gives scope to his swift flashing mind. Also he makes much money by it. He would keep the world disintegrated if he could, for he has no interest in things that endure. He is a good Heraclitean, and worships the flux. . . . A pleasant world for such as he, but a dangerous world. Do you see much of Mr Creevey?”
Adam replied that he met him occasionally, but did not know him well.
“No! Then my prophecy is not yet fulfilled that your lines of life would cross. But I stick to it. Somewhen, somewhere, somehow you will do battle with him. . . . And now for the apostles you have discovered.”
; “Do you know them?” Adam asked.
Scrope smiled.
“I can guess them. Yes, I know a good deal about them. I do not think your discernment has been at fault. But — but!! I would prepare you for disappointments. No one of them is quite of your own totem, and they may fail you. Your John the Baptist may grow weary of the Scribes and Pharisees and flee to his hermitage — or, worse still, to a papal throne. Your leader may lead his people into the desert and lose them there. Your fearless man may become muscle-bound and the fire die out of him. One and all may get soft or sour. That is the trouble of working through other people. Are you prepared for that? You are? Well, what then?”
“I shall find others.”
“Doubtless. But they also may fail you. And meanwhile time is passing and any day crisis may be upon us. . . . You wish to be a king-maker, but what if there are no kings? The king-maker may be forced in spite of himself to be royal.”
Adam shook his head.
“Not this one. He knows his limitations. I have no power except in the shadows.”
“I think you may be deceiving yourself. Power is one and indivisible. It is only an accident whether it works behind the scenes or on the stage. . . . Listen to me, my friend. You have a divine patience and have been content to work at that for which you are least fitted — imponderable, monotonous things — a touch here and an adjustment there. You have succeeded — perhaps. But what of those other gifts, your real gifts? You say you have found the man who is fearless. But you yourself fear nothing but God. You have found a leader. But leadership is only courage and wisdom and a great carelessness of self. Do you lack these things? Will you not be forced some day into the light?”
Once again, as at Birkpool after the Marrish business, doubt descended upon Adam’s mind. Scrope’s confidence in him seemed to be a searchlight which revealed his own incapacity. He was not a leader, and yet he was essaying the task of a leader — to shape men’s souls. Was he succeeding? Could he succeed? Were they not slipping away from him? He had trained himself for one purpose, and that was sacrifice, but in this work the utmost sacrifice of himself would avail nothing. He was attempting a creative task, but had God destined him for any such high purpose? Was not the clay exalting itself above the potter?