‘At twenty-eight you ought to be courting a girl of twenty-one instead of trying to marry a woman of thirty,’ I told him without compunction, but he only answered gravely:
‘I am not interested in immaturity.’
He was at any rate, I thought, of the War generation, and that was all that really mattered. Had he been post-war I could not under any circumstances have married him, for within the range of my contemporaries a gulf wider than any decade divides those who experienced the War as adults from their juniors by only a year or two who grew up immediately afterwards. Even as it was, I announced my engagement with every symptom of scepticism to the much-enduring Winifred, who had never attempted to influence my decision although at that time my marriage seemed likely to involve considerable disruption in her own existence.
There were too many potential slips between a betrothal and a wedding - as I of all people ought to know, I thought sadly. Marriage perhaps a year hence, with all the possibilities of death and accident and disagreement that twelve months contained, seemed almost equivalent, just then, to no marriage at all. Anyhow, I felt, it was quite absurd to marry so late in the day, after I’d turned thirty, when I had been in love for the first time such years and years ago. But eventually I was to realise that half my generation of women seemed to be marrying as late as I was, or even later, and their children and mine would be contemporaries - still babies when we were reaching the end of our thirties. This belated maternity, as I now admit, has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.
‘There is indeed no second best in life,’ I wrote to G., not untruthfully, at the end of June. ‘One can assuredly say that one thing will be different from another, but one must not - indeed one cannot - say that it will never be as good, or better. You rightly said that there can be no such assessment of experience . . . I had forgotten that I am still quite young - the world of sorrow and experience seemed so old.’
After my inordinate encounters with a large and disputatious family, I felt thankful that G. appeared to have no relatives in the world apart from his retired cleric of a father, though I was sorry that I should never know his dead, courageous mother, a fierce advocate of woman suffrage who had found in the movement for the vote the chief inspiration of her brief, turbulent life. In type and in temperament he resembled her, I gathered; the rampageous feminism of The Dark Tide had certainly struck a responsive note. My own parents accepted G. with resolute benevolence, and took very well this apparently precipitate arrangement; they were hardened by now to my singular preference for highly intelligent young men with no money except that which they could make by their brains. Quite suddenly, too, I realised - for I was now old enough to realise - that the inevitable clash between the generations diminishes, also inevitably, with the passing of the years.
For a short time, G. and I discussed getting married very soon, but I did not, as yet, feel quite ready for this, nor wish temporarily to adjust my life and work to the unknown conditions of the New World until I had fulfilled my determination to discover, by an expedition through Central Europe, the after-effects of the War upon the Old. Eventually we agreed to postpone our marriage until his return for the Long Vacation in June 1925 - though I never concurred in this ‘sensible’ decision with the full consent of my will. Apprehension was too familiar and weary a companion to be suffered patiently for nearly another year, and its persistence was not banished by the inward conviction, inherited from the War, that for me the love of men was for ever destined to be inconclusive and impermanent. By allowing myself to become engaged to G., I knew that I had once more put myself into the hands of fate, towards which, since Edward’s death, I had done my best to remain, in personal matters, cautiously on the defensive.
‘All happiness to me is incredible,’ I wrote to G. in July. ‘The supreme moments of the War did not bring happiness; how should they, lived as they were under the shadow of death? . . . My obstinate diffidence arises partly . . . because I am afraid of giving life the means wherewith to deal me another of its major blows . . . So like me to get engaged to someone who has to go abroad even when there is no war.’
4
For the time being, however, I determined to forget the ten months of suspense that were still several weeks away, and gave myself up to a summer of week-ends spent in G.’s company alternately in London and Oxford, with long mellow evenings on the river above the Cherwell Hotel or below Magdalen Bridge, and week-day intervals in which daily letters, added to the normal routine of writing and lecturing, made being engaged almost an occupation in itself. But other and more public happenings also brought an eventful summer, and with my journey through Central Europe in front of me, even the most absorbing personal preoccupations could not blind me to those international changes which appeared possible now that Socialist Governments, for the first time since the War, flourished simultaneously in both England and France.
At the end of July the Inter-Allied Conference in London opened its discussions on the best method of getting the Dawes Plan to work in Germany, and the arrival of the German delegation at this conference began, as one weekly paper remarked, a ‘peace after the War’ phase which the Treaty of Versailles should have inaugurated but did not.
‘To-day,’ I wrote to G. on August 4th, ‘ends the black decade that began with August 4th, 1914; perhaps if life is not too unkind . . . it also begins a very different ten years which, though they can never efface the memory of the others, will remove the bitterness from experience and leave only the triumph and the glory.’
With growing excitement I read that the French had agreed, as part of the Dawes Plan, to withdraw from the Ruhr within one year; Appenweier and Offenburg were evacuated, in token of good faith, before the end of August, though both Nationalists and Communists, strong in Germany after the May elections held in the fierce atmosphere of the Ruhr occupation, criticised the Conference for not insisting upon the immediate departure of the French. In England the Conference decisions were received favourably enough by all political Parties, since Russia had long replaced Germany as international bogy; the real sources of Tory perturbation were the Anglo-Soviet Conference in August, and the arrest and discharge of Mr Campbell, the Communist editor of the Workers’ Weekly, which was to lead in two months’ time to the ‘Scarlet Letter Election’ of 1924.
At Oxford, during my week-ends, I found these political events reflected in a number of Summer Schools; once or twice, with ironic memories of my enthusiasm at St Hilda’s eleven years before, I dropped in to listen, with the critical ears of a speaker, to Professor A. E. Zimmern brilliantly expounding his views on America to the League of Nations Union, and Messrs C. F. G. Masterman and H. D. Henderson, then editor of the Nation, telling Young Liberals what they ought to think of the international situation. This politically conscious atmosphere was emphasised, for me, by the presence in Oxford of a number of G.’s college friends, each one of whom was destined, nearly a decade later, to occupy some prominent niche in the world of affairs; they included a future newspaper leader-writer, the editor-to-be of an intellectual monthly, and the subsequent holder of a professorial Chair at a university in the north of England.
Early in September we spent our last week in England at G.’s North Oxford rooms; nothing, I told him, remembering Edward at Waterloo, would persuade me to watch him sail for America, so we agreed to part in Oxford on September 10th. His boat was due to leave Liverpool on the 12th, and I arranged to start on the same date with Winifred for Geneva. The tormenting psychological readjustments which the process of getting to know someone intimately always involves had united with the agitating prospect of re-adapting my aims and activities to marriage to impart to that summer a sense of prolonged conflict, but those final days in each other’s company, with their mornings of work, their afternoon walks, and their quiet meals together, seemed to resemble a hap
py married life more completely, and more encouragingly, than I had thought possible. The imminent parting, however, stirred me to familiar meditations on the subject of separation and loss, which were rendered the more poignant by the sudden death, in Yorkshire, of an old friend of Winifred’s - a naval officer whom I also had known.
‘I don’t think victory over death,’ I wrote to her, ‘is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold; a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was . . . That’s why those war victories with which I was specially associated are still incomplete. That the people faced their own deaths without fear I have no doubt. It is through me that the victory is incomplete, because I cannot always quite feel that their deaths matter less to me than the fact that they lived, nor reconcile their departure, with all their aspirations unfulfilled, with my own scheme of life.’
On our last afternoon, G. and I had tea together in the Trout Inn at Godstow; outside the window a sudden shower of rain beat in thin silver spears upon the flaming snapdragons in the garden, until the steaming mist from the ground intensified their colour with the soft, unearthly radiance which flowers have always worn for me in moments of heightened emotion. That night, Oxford station was chill and heavy with the gloom of a wet September evening as we waited for the last train to London; its ill-lighted darkness and the consciousness of coming separation renewed the feeling of sick inertia that came when wartime leave had ended and someone was returning to the front. In the depths of memory I knew that, for those of us who were now experienced and disillusioned, no parting would ever again have quite that quality of desolation and finality which overwhelms the moment of farewell to one’s first love in early youth, but I shivered so much with cold that G. took off the scarf he was wearing and wrapped it round me as we sat together on a draughty seat, wishing that the train would come, yet dreading it as though it were death.
When it finally arrived, the once familiar necessity of keeping up an appearance of self-possession while saying good-bye brought back the atmosphere of the War more profoundly than ever, and I spent the journey to London huddled into a corner in the half-sleep of sorrowful dejection. The next morning but one, after an exhausting day of packing enough books, clothes and papers to last us for three months, Winifred and I set out for Geneva on the first stage of that journey which was to show us the aftermath of war in those countries that our own had once so expensively defeated.
5
We found Geneva convulsed with excitement over the birth of the Protocol, a new international agreement which was intended to fill the gaps left in the Covenant of the League of Nations, and to make future war more than ever improbable.
In the opening days of the Assembly, Mr MacDonald and M. Herriot - whose France had certainly seemed an easier and more courteous France to travel through than the brusque Poincaréan territory of the year before - had made ‘Arbitration, Security and Disarmament’ the triple slogan of the hour; they had wrung one another’s hands in public, had been photographed together, and now had left Geneva to simmer pleasantly in a consoling atmosphere of peace and goodwill very different from the hectic antagonism aroused by the Corfu dispute of the previous September. Even the idea of Germany’s admission to the League was being benevolently discussed, and although in the view of the League of Nations Union group at the Hotel Richmond there was far too much wooing of America, who ought to be shown quite plainly that Geneva could manage without her, the prospects of ultimate co-operation by the United States looked more promising than they had appeared since the War.
‘I sometimes wonder which will happen first,’ I wrote to G., after a somewhat less dove-like note than was customary that autumn had been introduced by the discussions of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation over an offer to the League by the ingenious French of an Institute in Paris, ‘the shattering of the League in a great explosion between Teutonic reason and Latin logic, or the entry of America to hold the balance between English idealism and French realism.’
In those days our eyes were still held Europewards by the political and social aftermath of the War, and few prophets foresaw the possibility of an even more profound clash nearly ten years later between oriental aggressiveness and occidental timidity.
One afternoon, in the hall of the Palais des Nations, I encountered the representative of the Daily News, whom I had met once or twice at the League of Nations Union. On hearing that I was going on to Germany and Austria he promised me some useful introductions, but added immediately: ‘What are you doing wandering about Central Europe after that notice I saw in The Times?’
‘Oh, I don’t allow such personal things to affect my work,’ I replied, with a nonchalant bravado that I was far from feeling, for now that G. had gone, and the compelling influence of his presence no longer absorbed and flattered me week after week, the conflict between work and personal relationships which marriage would bring had begun to perplex and harass my thoughts more than ever. To escape for the moment from this perturbation, I plunged furiously into the activities of Geneva, which for me, that chilly September, were by no means light; I was again representing Time and Tide, and had undertaken, with Winifred, to do the Press and publicity work for the Union, which involved sending continual small articles to headquarters in London for distribution to the provincial Press. Several of these described the Mosul boundary dispute, which Fehdi Bey had just brought before the Council. ‘The Turks are here,’ I told G., ‘discussing Iraq, and politely but fundamentally disagreeing with Lord Parmoor.’ One or two of these Council meetings threatened to leave politeness very far behind, and an electrical outburst was once only just averted by the error of a translator, who in the heated controversial confusion inadvertently described the debated territory as ‘le Vilayet de Parmoor’.
On one of our last days in Geneva we heard the Third Committee of the Assembly, with M. Politis as chairman and Dr Beneš as rapporteur, discussing the Protocol, in evening dress, until long after midnight, and it seemed to me deeply significant that a conference in which several Great Powers were taking part should have been dominated by Greece and Czechoslovakia.
‘To-morrow may or may not be a memorable day,’ ran a letter to G., in which I endeavoured to season hope by the stern salt of a realism that was to prove prophetic; ‘the Protocol is to be presented to the Assembly, but one can never be sure whether these League things are going to make history or not . . . There is such immense enthusiasm here; then the delegates return, to be soused with cold water in their own countries.’
In the end the completion of the Protocol was delayed by a Japanese amendment which nearly wrecked the proceedings. We had left Geneva on our way to the Saar Valley before Mrs H. M. Swanwick, as one of the British delegates, delivered the final speech summing up the progress made by the Assembly towards Arbitration, Security and Disarmament, and thus broke the tradition which had hitherto insisted that ‘lady speakers’ and ‘lady delegates’, however expert their knowledge of other subjects, must interest themselves first and foremost in the humanitarian activities of the League.
From Geneva we journeyed to Bale through the sudden mellow warmth of a perfect autumn afternoon; ‘sunlit woods splashed with orange and yellow ochre,’ I described to G., in a letter written in the train; ‘the lake blue-green and smooth as glass; mountains like giant shadows crowding to the shore; the summit of Mt Blanc glowing like a pink topaz in the misty sky. Wonderful world; only wish you were here with me and could see it.’
In a hand-case we carried impressive introductions from the International Federation of League of Nations Societies to the French authorities in the Ruhr and the Quakers at Essen. The League officials had been less helpful - ‘everyone on the Secretariat pretends they know nothing about the Ruhr,’ I had complained to G.; ‘I suppose they still feel injured
because Reparations have not been referred to the League’ - but they had given us one or two letters for presentation in the Saar Valley, and Miss Sara Wambaugh, the American expert on plebiscites whom we had met at one of the committees, had advised us to enter the Ruhr from Düsseldorf, which, as one of the first sanctions provided for by the Treaty of Versailles, was itself neither in the Ruhr nor the Rhineland.
On the whole our experimental journey had aroused sympathetic interest in Geneva, and we had been presented, as we had hoped, with a good deal of useful advice from various international experts. Among these were an eminent professor and his French wife, who invited me, on my last evening, to a small dinner-party at the International Club, which included the secretary of the American Foreign Policy Association and a Jugoslav member of the Secretariat. Conversation had turned, inevitably, upon national characteristics; the English, it seemed to be generally agreed, found more difficulty than any nation in getting on to friendly terms with others on the Continent, for while Latins, and even Americans, could reach the subject of politics, or their own souls, in five minutes, the English thought it bad taste to discuss religion, or politics, or their feelings, or themselves, or other people; and after all, inquired the Frenchwoman pertinently, ‘what else is left?’
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 67