"Our natural resources," he said, "are enormous, but undeveloped. We cannot become strong in a military sense. We cannot possess fleets with which to negotiate——"

I should have said "threaten" instead of "negotiate" for that was plainly what he meant. But statesmen have to be careful in their use of words.

"—Unless we can obtain capital with which to develop our wealth. The great money-lending countries, England and France, ought in their own interests to pour capital into our republics. The return, in the end, would be enormous. But more important still, they would establish a balance of power in the western world. Why do not your financiers understand?"

Again Ascher. Battleships are to be towed across the ocean, from the ship yards of the Clyde to these far-off seas, at the ends of the gossamer threads which Ascher spins. The Gospel and international politics are caught in the same web. I seemed to see Diocletian the Emperor and Saint John, who said, "Love not the world," doing homage together to the power of capital, leading each other by the hand through the mazes of the system of credit.

I saw beautiful scenes, wide harbours where stately ships lay anchored, through whose shining gates fleets of steamers trudged. I never escaped from the knowledge that the gossamer threads stretched from mast to mast, a rigging more essential than the ropes of hemp and wire. I saw the lines of steel on which trains go, stretched out across vast prairies, and knew that they were not in reality lines of steel at all but gossamer threads. I saw torrents made the slaves of man, the weight of falling water transmuted into light and heat and force to drive cars swiftly through city streets; but all the wheels and giant masses of forged steel were tied together by these same slender threads which Ascher spun in the shrine of that Greek temple of his, Ascher and his fellow bankers.

Always the desire was for more capital. There was room for thousands of ships instead of hundreds. There were whole territories over which no trains ran. There was potentiality of wealth so great that, if it were realised, men everywhere would be raised above the fear of want. A whole continent was crying out to Ascher that he should fling his web across it, join point to point with gossamer, in Amazonian jungles, Peruvian mountain heights, Argentine plains and tropical fruit gardens.

I met and talked with many men whose outlook upon life was profoundly interesting to me. Those whom I came to know best were Englishmen or men of English origin. Some of them had built up flourishing businesses, selling the products of English factories. Some acted as the agents of steamboat companies, arranging for freights and settling the destinations of ships which went voyaging. Some grew wheat or bred cattle. Like all Englishmen whose lot is cast in far countries they retained their feeling for England as a home and became conscious as Englishmen in England seldom are, of love for their own land. Like all Englishmen they grumbled ceaselessly at what they loved.

They spoke with contempt of everything English. They abused English business methods and complained that Germans were ousting Englishmen from the markets of the world. They derided English Government and English statesmanship, ignoring party loyalties with a fine impartiality. They decried English social customs, contrasting the freedom of life in the land of their adoption with the convention-bound ways of their home. Yet it always was their home. I felt that, even when their contempt expressed itself in the bitterest words.

Whatever their opinions were or their affectations, however widely their various activities were separated, these men were all consciously dependent on the smooth working of the system of world-wide credit.

They were Ascher's clients, or if not Ascher's, the clients of others like Ascher. They were in a sense Ascher's dependents. They were united to England, to Europe, to each other, by Ascher's threads. Whether they bred cattle and sold them, whether they grew corn, whether they shipped cargoes or imported merchandise, the gossamer net was over them.

I returned to London with these impressions vivid in my mind, perhaps—I tried to persuade myself of this—too vivid. I had travelled, so I argued, under the shadow of a great banker. I had gone among bankers. It was natural, inevitable, that I should see the world through bankers' eyes. Perhaps credit was not after all the life blood of our civilisation. I failed to convince myself. The very fact that I could go so far under the shadow of a bank proves how large a shadow a bank throws. The fact that Ascher's correspondents brought me into touch with every kind of man, goes to show that banking has permeated, leavened life, that human society is saturated with finance.

In a very few months, before the end of the summer which followed my home-coming, I was to see the whole machine stop working suddenly. The war god stalked across the world and brushed aside, broke, tore, tangled up, the gossamer threads. Then, long before his march was done, while awe-struck men and weeping women still listened to the strident clamour of his arms, the spinners of the webs were at work again, patiently joining broken threads, flinging fresh filaments across unbridged gulfs, refastening to their points of attachment the gossamer which seemed so frail, which yet the storm of violence failed to destroy utterly.



CHAPTER X.

I reached home early in May and underwent an experience common, I suppose, to all travellers.

The city clerk, returning after a glorious week in Paris, finds that his family is still interested in the peculiarities of the housemaid, the Maud, or Ethel of the hour. To him, with his heart enlarged by nightly visits to the Folies Bergeres, it seems at first almost impossible that any one can care to talk for hours about the misdeeds of Maud. He knows that he himself was once excited over these domestic problems, but it seems impossible that he ever can be again. Yet he is. A week passes, a week of the old familiar life. The voluptuous joys of Parisian music halls fade into dim memories. The realities of life, the things on which his mind works, are the new lace curtains for the drawing-room window, the ridiculous "swank" of young Jones in the office, and the question of the dismissal of Maud the housemaid.

I found London humming with excitement over Irish affairs and for a while I wondered how any one could think that Irish affairs mattered in the least. Fresh from my wanderings over a huge continent Ireland seemed to me a small place. It took me a week to get my mind into focus again. Then I began once more to see the Home Rule question as it should be seen. South America and Ascher's web of international credit sank into their proper insignificance.

I met Malcolmson in my club a week after my return. He very nearly pulled the buttons off my waistcoat in his eagerness to explain the situation to me. Malcolmson has a vile habit of grabbing the clothes of any one he particularly wants to speak to. If the subject is only moderately interesting he pulls a sleeve or a lappet of a coat. When he has something very important to say, he inserts two fingers between the buttons of your waistcoat and pulls. I knew I was in for something thrilling when he towed me into a quiet corner of the smoking room by my two top buttons.

I have known Malcolmson for nearly twenty years. He was adjutant of my old regiment when I joined. He was senior Major when I resigned my commission. He became colonel a few years later and then retired to his place near Belfast, where he has practised political Protestanism ever since. I have never met any one more sincere than Malcolmson. He believes in civil and religious liberty. He is prepared at any moment to do battle for his faith. I do not know that he really deserves much credit for this, because he is the sort of man who would do battle for the love of it, even if there were no faith to be fought for. Still the fact remains that he has a faith, rather a rare possession.

When he had me cornered near the window of the smoking room, he told me that the hour of battle had almost come. Ulster was drilled, more or less armed, and absolutely united. Rather than endure Home Rule Malcolmson and, I think, a hundred thousand other men were going to lay down their lives. It took Malcolmson more than an hour to tell me that because he kept wandering from the main point in order to abuse the Government and the Irish Party. Of the two he seemed to dislike the Government more.

Irish politics are of all subjects the most wearisome to me; but I must admit that Malcolmson interested me before he stopped talking. I began to wish to hear what Gorman had to say about the matter. I could not imagine that he and his friends contemplated a siege of Belfast, to rank in history alongside of the famous attempt to starve Derry.

There was no difficulty about getting hold of Gorman. In times of furious political excitement he is sure to be found at the post of duty, that is to say, in the smoking room of the House of Commons. I wrote to him and invited him to dine with me in my rooms. It would have been much more convenient to give him dinner at one of my clubs. But I was afraid to do that. I belonged to two clubs in London and unfortunately Malcolmson is a member of both of them. I do not know what would have happened if he had found himself in the same room with Gorman. The threatened civil war might have begun prematurely, and Malcolmson is such a determined warrior that a table fork might easily have become a lethal weapon in his hands. I did not want to have Gorman killed before I heard his opinion about the Ulster situation and I disliked the thought of having to explain the circumstances of his death to the club committee afterwards. There is always an uncertainty about the view which a club committee will take of any unusual event. I might very easily have been asked to resign my membership.

Gorman accepted my invitation, but said he would have to be back in the House of Commons at 9 o'clock. I fixed dinner for half past seven, which gave me nearly an hour and a half with Gorman, more time than Malcolmson had required to state his side of the case.

But Gorman was very much more difficult to deal with. He was not inclined to discuss Home Rule or the Ulster situation. He wanted to talk about Tim's cash register, and, later on, about the new way of putting cinematograph pictures on the stage.

"I have been wandering about since I saw you last," I said, "and I've been in all sorts of strange places. I've lost touch with things at home. Hardly ever saw an English newspaper. I want you to tell me——"

"Interesting time you must have had," said Gorman. "Run across the trail of our friend Ascher much? I expect you did."

Gorman very nearly sidetracked me there. I was strongly tempted to tell him about the impression which Ascher's gossamer had made on me.

"The slime of the financier," said Gorman, "lies pretty thick over the world. You've seen those large black slugs which come out in summer after rain, big juicy fellows which crawl along and leave a shiny track on the grass. They're financiers."

"Yes," I said, "quite so. But tell me about Home Rule."

"It's all right. Can't help becoming law. We have it in our pockets."

"This time next year," I said, "you'll be sitting in a Parliament in Dublin."

"There'll be a Parliament in Dublin all right this time next year; but I'm not sure that I'll be in it. After all, you know, Dublin's rather a one-horse place. I don't see how I could very well live there. I might run over for an important debate now and then, but—— You see I've a lot of interests in London. I suppose you've heard about the new Cash Register Company and what Ascher's done."

"Not a word. Do I still hold those shares of mine?"

"Unless you've sold them you do, but they'll be very little good to you. Ascher has simply thrown away a sure thing. We might have had—well, I needn't mention the sum, but it was a pretty big one. I had the whole business arranged. Those fellows would have paid up. But nothing would do Ascher except to put in his spoon. I'm blest if I see what his game is. He has one of course; but I don't see it."

"Perhaps," I said, "he wants to have your brother's invention worked for what it's worth."

"Rot," said Gorman. "Why should he? I expect he has some dodge for squeezing us out and then getting a bigger price all for himself; but I'm damned if I see how he means to work it. These financial men are as cunning as Satan and they all hang together. We outsiders don't have a chance."

"What about Ulster?" I said. "I was talking to a man last week who told me——"

"All bluff," said Gorman. "Nothing in it. How can they do anything? What Ascher says is that he wants the old company to take up Tim's invention and work it. There's to be additional capital raised and we're to come in as shareholders. Ascher, Stutz & Co. will underwrite the new issues and take three and one-half per cent. That's what he says. But, of course, that's not the real game. There's something behind."

"Doesn't it occur to you that there may be something behind the Ulster movement too?"

"No. What can they do? The Bill will be law before the end of July."

"They say they'll fight."

"Oh," said Gorman, "we've heard all about that till we're sick of the sound of it. There's nothing in it. The thing's as plain as anything can be. We have a majority in Parliament and the bill will be passed. That's all there is to say. I wish to goodness I saw my way as plainly in the cash register affair."

Gorman's faith in parliamentary majorities is extremely touching. I suppose that only politicians believe that the voting of men who are paid to vote really affects things. I doubt whether men of any other profession have the same whole-hearted faith in the efficacy of their own craft. Doctors are often a little sceptical about the value of medicines and operations. No barrister, that I ever met, thinks he achieves justice by arguing points of law. But politicians, even quite intelligent politicians like Gorman, seem really to hold that human life will be altered in some way because they walk round the lobbies of a particular building in London and have their heads counted three or four times an hour. To me it seemed quite plain that Malcolmson would not bate an ounce of his devotion to civil and religious liberty even if Gorman's head were counted every five minutes for ten years and Gorman were paid a thousand a year instead of four hundred a year for letting out his head for the purpose. Why should Malcolmson care how often Gorman is counted? There is in the end only the original Gorman with his single head.

"Anyhow," said Gorman, "I'm keeping in with Mrs. Ascher."

He winked at me as he said this. I like Gorman's way of adding explanatory winks to his remarks. I should frequently miss the meaning, the full meaning of what he says if he did not help out his words with these expressive winks. This time he made me understand that he had no great affection for Mrs. Ascher, regarded her rather as a joke which had worn thin; but hoped to pick up from her some information about her husband's subtle schemes. I knew his hopes were vain. In the first place the Aschers do not talk business to each other and she knows nothing of what he is doing. In the next place Ascher had no underhand plot with regard to the cash register. He was acting in a perfectly open and straightforward way. But Gorman cannot believe that any one is straightforward. That is one of the drawbacks to the profession of politics. The practice of it destroys a man's faith in human honesty.

"How's Tim?" I asked. "Last time I saw him he was in great trouble because Mrs. Ascher said he was committing blasphemy."

"Tim's in England," said Gorman. "I was rather angry with him myself for a while. If he had followed my advice about the cash register——. But Tim always was a fool about money, though he has brains of a sort, lots of them."

"Still working with that circus?"

"Oh, dear no. Left that months ago. He got some money. No, I didn't give it to him. I fancy it must have been Ascher. Anyhow he's got it. He's down in Hertfordshire now, living in a barn."

"Why? A barn seems an odd place to live in. Draughty, I should think."

"He wanted space," said Gorman, "a great deal of space to work at his experiments. I'm inclined to think there may be something in this new idea of his."

"The living picture idea? Making real ghosts of the figures?"

"That's it. And, do you know, he's getting at it. He showed me some perfectly astonishing results the other day. If he pulls it off——"

"You won't let Ascher get hold of it this time," I said.

Gorman frowned.

"I wouldn't let Ascher touch it if I could help it, but what the devil can I do? We shall want capital and I suppose Ascher is no worse than the rest of them."

By "them" Gorman evidently meant capitalists in general and financiers in particular.

"That's the way," he said. "Not only do these scoundrels control politics, reducing the whole system of democracy to a farce——"

"Come now," I said, "don't blame the capitalists for that. Democracy would be a farce if there never was such a thing as a capitalist."

"Not content with that," said Gorman, "they keep an iron grip upon industry. They fatten on the fruits of other men's brains. They hold the working man in thrall, exploiting his energy for their own selfish greed, starving his women and children——"

Gorman ought to keep that sort of thing for public meetings. It is thoroughly bad form to make speeches to an audience of one. I must say that he seldom does. I suppose that his intimate association with Mrs. Ascher had spoiled his manners in this respect. She encouraged him to be oratorical. But I am not Mrs. Ascher, and I saw no reason why I should stand that kind of thing at my own dinner table.

"But the day is coming," I said, "when organised labour will rise in its might and claim its heritage in the fair world which lies bathed in the sunlight of a nobler age."

Gorman looked at me doubtfully for an instant, only for a single instant. Almost immediately his eyes twinkled and he smiled good-humouredly.

"You ought to go in for politics," he said. "You really ought. I apologise. Can't think what came over me to talk like that."

I cannot resist Gorman when he smiles. I felt that I too owed an apology.

"After all," I said, "you must practise somewhere. I don't blame you in the least; though I don't profess to like it. No one can do that sort of thing extempore and if it happens to suit you to rehearse at dinner——"

"Nonsense," said Gorman. "There's not the slightest necessity for practice. I could do it by the hour and work sums in my head at the same time. Any one could."

Gorman is modest. Very few people can make speeches like his, fortunately for the world.

"All the same," he said, reverting abruptly to the starting point of his speech, "it's a pity we have to let Ascher into this new cinematograph racket; but we can't help it. In fact I expect he's in already."

"Lending money to Tim for experiments?"

"He wouldn't do that," said Gorman, "unless he'd made sure of his share of the spoil afterwards."

"Gorman," I said, "why don't you make a law to suppress Ascher. You believe in making laws, and, according to your own showing, that would be a very useful one."

Gorman gave me no answer. I knew he could not, because there is no answer to give. If laws had any effect on life, as Gorman pretends to believe, he would make one which would do away with Ascher. But he knows in his heart that he might just as well make a law forbidding the wind to blow from the east. Instead of taking any notice of my question he pulled out his watch and looked at it.

"Nine o'clock," he said. "I must be off to the House at once. An important division has been arranged for a quarter past. Just ask your man to call a taxi, will you?"

"Why go?" I said. "If the division is arranged the result will be arranged too."

"Of course it is," said Gorman. "You don't suppose the Whips leave that to chance."

"I must say you manage these things very badly. Here you are smoking comfortably after dinner, not in the least inclined to stir, and yet you say you have to go. Why don't you introduce a system of writing cheques? 'Pay the Whip of my Party or bearer 150 votes. Signed Michael Gorman, M. P.'"

"That's rather a good idea," said Gorman. "It would save a lot of trouble."

"The cheque could be passed in to some sort of clearing house where a competent clerk, after going over all the cheques, would strike a balance and place it to the credit of your side or the other. That would be the Government's Majority, and you wouldn't have to go near the House of Commons at all except when you wanted to make a speech. I don't think you need go even then. You might make your speeches quietly in your own home to a couple of reporters."

"It would simplify parliamentary life enormously," said Gorman, "there's no doubt of that. But I don't think it would do. I don't really. The people wouldn't stand it."

"If the people stand the way you go on at present they'll stand anything."

"I wish," said Gorman, "that you'd ring for a taxi." I rang the bell and five minutes later Gorman left me. He had not told me anything about Home Rule, or how his party meant to deal with a recalcitrant Ulster. He seemed very little interested in Ulster. Yet Malcolmson was indubitably in earnest. I felt perfectly sure about that.



CHAPTER XI.

I intended to call on the Aschers as soon as I could after I returned to London. I owed Ascher some thanks for his kindness in providing me with letters of introduction for my tour. However, they heard that I was home again before I managed to pay my visit. I daresay Gorman told them. He sees Mrs. Ascher two or three times a week and he must get tired talking about Ireland. A little item of gossip, like the news of my return, would come as a relief to Gorman, and perhaps even to Mrs. Ascher, after a long course of poetic politics mixed with art.

I had a note from Mrs. Ascher, in which she invited me to dinner.

"Very quietly," she said. "I know my husband would like to have a talk with you, so I shall not ask any one to meet you. Please fix your own night. We have no engagements this week."

I got the note on Monday and fixed Wednesday for our dinner. I could not think that Ascher really wanted to talk to me. I did not see what he had to talk to me about; but I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him about my tour and to give him some idea of the effect which my glimpse at his business had produced on my mind. I also wanted to find out what he thought about Irish affairs. I had heard a good deal more talk about the Ulster situation. Malcolmson got at me nearly every day, and several other men, much more level-headed than Malcolmson, seemed to regard the situation as serious. I heard it hinted that the Army would not relish the idea of shooting the Ulstermen. I understood the feeling. If I were still in the Army I should not like to be told to kill Malcolmson. He was my brother officer at one time, and I found him a good comrade. The same feeling must exist among the rank and file. Northeast Ulster was, at one time, a favourite recruiting ground for the Guards. Malcolmson's volunteer army was leavened with old Guardsmen, reservists, many of them quite well known to the men still serving in the Brigade.

I could not, of course, expect Ascher to be much interested in Irish affairs. Ireland is the one country in the world over which financiers have not cast their net, possibly because they would catch next to nothing there. So we, who escaped the civilisation of Roman law, almost escaped the philosophy of the mediaeval church, were entirely untouched by the culture of the Renaissance, remained a kind of Gideon's fleece when the dew of the industrial system of the 19th century was moistening Europe, are now left untouched by the new civilisation of international finance. Yet Ascher, if not personally interested in our destiny, has a cool and unprejudiced mind. His opinion on Irish affairs would be of the greatest interest to me. I was not satisfied with Gorman's reading of the situation. Nor did I feel sure that Malcolmson, though he was certainly in earnest, quite understood what a big thing he was letting himself in for.

The Aschers live near Golders Hill, a part of London totally unknown to me. They have a large old-fashioned house with a considerable amount of ground round it. Some day when Ascher is dead the house will be pulled down and the grounds cut up into building plots. In the meanwhile Ascher holds it. I suppose it suits him. Neither he nor Mrs. Ascher cares for fashionable life, and a Mayfair address has no attraction for them. The few artistic and musical people whom they wish to know are quite willing to go to Hampstead. Every one else who wants to see Ascher, and a good many people do, calls at his office or dines with him in a club. Ascher knows most of the chief men in the political world, for instance, but even Prime Ministers are not often invited to the house at Golders Hill. If Ascher really controls them, as Gorman says, he does so without allowing them to interfere with his private life.

The house and its appointments impressed me greatly. The architecture was Georgian, a style familiar to any one who has lived much in Dublin. It gave me a feeling of spaciousness and dignity. The men who built these houses knew what it was to live like gentlemen. I can imagine them guilty of various offences against the code of Christian morality, but I do not think they can ever have been either fussy or mean. There is a restlessness about our fashionable imitations of the older kinds of English domestic architecture. Our picturesque gables, dormer windows and rooms with all sorts of odd angles, our finicky windows stuck high up in unexpected parts of walls, our absurd leaded diamond panes and crooked metal fastenings, all make for fussiness of soul. Nor can I believe that people who live under ceilings which they can almost touch ever attain a great and calm outlook upon life.

There was nothing "artistic" about Ascher's house. This surprised me at first. I did not, of course, expect that Mrs. Ascher would have surrounded herself with the maddening kind of furniture which is distinguished by its crookedness and is designed by men who find their inspiration by remembering the things which they see in nightmares. Nor did I think it likely that she would have crammed her rooms with those products of the east which are imported into this country by house furnishers with reputations for aestheticism. I knew that she had passed that stage of culture. But I did expect to find the house full of heavily embroidered copes of mediaeval bishops, hung on screens; candlesticks looted from Spanish monasteries, standing on curiously carved shelves; chairs and cabinets which were genuine relics of the age of Louis XV.; and pictures by artists who lived in Italy before the days when Italians learned to paint.

I found myself in a house which was curiously bare of furniture. There were a few pictures in each of the rooms I entered, modern pictures, and I suppose good, but I am no judge of such things. There were scarcely any ornaments to be seen and very few tables and chairs. My own feeling is that a house should be furnished in such a way as to be thoroughly comfortable. I like deep soft chairs and sofas to sit on. I like to have many small tables on which to lay down books, newspapers and pipes. I like thick carpets and curtains which keep out draughts. I would not live in Ascher's house, even if I were paid for doing so by being given Ascher's fortune. But I would rather live in Ascher's house than in one of those overcrowded museums which are the delight of very wealthy New York Jews. I should, in some moods, find a pleasure in the fine proportions of the rooms which Ascher refuses to spoil. I could never, I know, be happy in a place where I ran the risk of dropping tobacco ashes on thirteenth century tapestry and dared not move suddenly lest I should knock over some priceless piece of china.

We ate at a small table set at one end of a big dining-room, a dining-room in which, I suppose, thirty people could have sat down together comfortably. There was no affectation of shaded lights and gloomy, mysterious spaces. Ascher had aimed at and achieved something like a subdued daylight by means of electric lamps, shaded underneath, which shone on the ceiling. I could see all the corners of the room, the walls with their pictures and the broad floor across which the servants passed. The dinner itself was very short and simple. If I had been actually hungry, as I am in the country after shooting, I should have called the dinner meagre. For a London appetite there was enough, but not more than enough. I might, a younger and more vigorous man would, have got up from the table hungry. But the food was exquisite. The cook must be a descendant of one of those artists whom Lord Beaconsfield described in "Tancred," and he has found in Ascher's house a situation which ought to satisfy him. Ascher does not care for sumptuousness or abundance; but he knows how to eat well. We had one wine, a very delicately flavoured white Italian wine, perhaps from Capri, the juice of some rare crops of grapes in that sunny island.

"We found ourselves in a little difficulty," said Ascher, "when you fixed on to-night for your visit to us."

"I hope," I said, "that I haven't lit on an inconvenient evening. Had you any other engagement?"

I was eating a very small piece of fish when he spoke to me, and was trying to guess what the sauce was flavoured with. It occurred to me suddenly that I might have broken in upon some sort of private anniversary, a day which Ascher and his wife observed as one of abstinence. There was, I could scarcely fail to notice it, a sense of subdued melancholy about our proceedings.

"Oh, no," said Ascher, "but on Wednesdays we always have some music. I was inclined to think that you might have preferred to spend the evening talking, but my wife——"

He looked at Mrs. Ascher. I should very much have preferred talk to music. It was chiefly in order to hear Ascher talk that I had accepted the invitation.

"I know," said Mrs. Ascher, "that Sir James likes music."

She laid a strong emphasis on the word "know," and I felt that she was paying me a nice compliment. What she said was true enough. I do like music, some kinds of music. I had heard for the first time the night before a song, then very popular, with a particularly attractive chorus. It began to run through my head the moment Ascher mentioned music. "I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it." I liked that song. I was not sure that I should like the Aschers' music equally well. However, I had no intention of contradicting Mrs. Ascher.

"I'm passionately fond of music," I said.

Ascher is a singularly guileless man. I cannot imagine how any one so unsuspicious as he is can ever have succeeded as a financier, unless indeed people are far honester about money than they are about anything else. I do not think Mrs. Ascher believed that I am passionately fond of music. Her husband did. The little shadow of anxiety which had rested on his face cleared away. He became almost cheerful.

"To-night," he said, "we are going to hear some of the work of——"

He said a name, but I utterly failed to catch it. I had never heard it before, and it sounded foreign, very foreign indeed, possibly Kurdish.

"———," said Ascher, "is one of the new Russian composers."

I heard the name that time, but I can make no attempt, phonetic or other, to spell it. I suppose it can be spelled, but the letters must be given values quite new to me. The alphabet I am accustomed to is incapable of representing that man's name.

"I daresay you know him," said Mrs. Ascher.

I strongly suspected that she was trying to entrap me. I have never been quite sure of Mrs. Ascher since the day she discovered that I was talking nonsense about the statuette of Psyche. Sometimes she appears to be the kind of foolish woman to whom anything may be said without fear. Sometimes she displays most unexpected intelligence. I looked at her before I answered. Her narrow, pale-green eyes expressed nothing but innocent inquiry. She might conceivably think that I had already made a careful study of the music of the new Russian composer. On the other hand, she might be luring me on to say that I knew music which was to be played in her house that night for the first time. I made up my mind to be safe.

"No," I said, "I never even heard of him."

Then Ascher began to talk about the man and his music. He became more animated than I had ever seen him. It was evident that Russian music interested Ascher far more than finance did; that it was a subject which was capable of wakening real enthusiasm in him. I listened, eating from time to time the delicate morsels of food offered to me and sipping the delicious wine. I did not understand anything Ascher said, and all the names he mentioned were new to me; but for a time I was content to sit in a kind of half-conscious state, hypnotised by the sound of his voice and the feeling that Mrs. Ascher's eyes were fixed on me.

Not until dinner was nearly over did I make an effort to assert myself.

"I was talking to Gorman the other day," I said, "about Irish affairs and especially about the Ulster situation. I have also been hearing Malcolmson's views. Malcolmson is a colonel and an Ulsterman. You know the sort of views an Ulster Colonel would have."

Ascher smiled faintly. He seemed no more than slightly amused at the turn Irish affairs were taking. After all neither international finance nor Russian music was likely to be profoundly affected by the Ulster rebellion. (Malcolmson will not use the word rebellion, but I must. There is no other word to describe the actions he contemplates.) No wonder Ascher takes small interest in the matter. On the other hand, Mrs. Ascher was profoundly moved by the mention of Ulster. I could see genuine passion in her eyes.

"Belfast," she said, "stands for all that is vilest and most hateful in the world. It is worse than Glasgow, worse than Manchester, worse than Birmingham."

Belfast is, no doubt, the main difficulty. If there were no Belfast the resistance of the rest of Ulster would be inconsiderable. I admired the political instinct which enabled Mrs. Ascher to go straight to the very centre of the situation. But, in all probability, Gorman gave her the hint. Gorman does not seem to understand how real the Ulster opposition is, but he has intelligence enough to grasp the importance of Belfast. What puzzled me first was the extreme bitterness with which Mrs. Ascher spoke.

"What has Belfast ever given to the world?" she asked.

"Well," I said, "ships are built there, and of course there's linen. I believe they manufacture tobacco, and——"

"That," said Ascher, "is not quite what my wife means. The gifts which a city or a country give to the world must be of a more permanent kind if they are to be of real value. Ships, linen, tobacco, we use them, and in using we destroy them. They have their value, but it is not a permanent value. Ultimately a city will be judged not by its perishable products, but by——"

"Art," said Mrs. Ascher.

I might have known it. Mrs. Ascher would be sure to judge cities, as she judges men, by their achievement in that particular line. I was bound to admit that the reputation of Belfast falls some way short of that of Athens as a centre of literature and art.

"Or thought," said Ascher, "or criticism. It is curious that a community which is virile and fearless, which is able to look at the world and life through its own eyes, which is indifferent to the general consensus of opinion——"

"Belfast is all that," I said. "I never knew any one who cared less what other people said and thought than Malcolmson."

"Yet," said Ascher, "Belfast has done nothing, thought nothing, seen nothing. But perhaps that is all to come. The future may be, indeed I think must be, very different."

Ascher will never be a real leader of men. His habit of seeing two sides of every question is an incurable weakness in him. Mrs. Ascher does not suffer in that way. She saw no good whatever in Belfast, nor any hope for its future.

"Never," she said, "never. A people who have given themselves over to material things, who accept frankly, without even the hypocrite's tribute to virtue, the money standard of value, who ask 'Does it pay?' and ask nothing else—— Have you ever been in Belfast?"

"Yes," I said, "often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though comfortable."

Mrs. Ascher shuddered.

"Comfortable!" she said. "Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches, comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a set-off to it."

Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress—she wore a very floppy scarlet teagown—rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in Browning's poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things

"When body gets its sop and holds its noise."

"The whole Irish question," said Mrs. Ascher, and she spoke with the most tremendous vehemence, "is a struggle not between political parties—what are political parties?"

"Rotten things," I said. "I quite agree with you there."

"Not between conceptions of religion—— What is religion but the blind gropings of the human soul after some divine perfection vaguely guessed?"

That is not what religion is in Ireland. There is nothing either dim or vague about it there, and nobody gropes. Every one, from the infant school child to the greatest of our six archbishops, is perfectly clear and definite in his religious beliefs and suffers no doubts of any kind. That is why Ireland is recognised everywhere as an island of saints. But of course Mrs. Ascher could not be expected to know that.

"It is a struggle," she said, getting back to the Irish question as the subject of her sentence, "between a people to whom art is an ideal and a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an atheist people."

It has been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Protestant principles. The undertaker will give his views of the Irish question to his assistant while he drives the nails into the lid of my coffin. I should not have supposed that any one could have hit on an aspect of it wholly new to me. But Mrs. Ascher did. Never before had I heard the problem stated as she stated it.

"That," I said, "is an extraordinarily interesting way of looking at it. The only difficulty I see is——"

"It is true," said Mrs. Ascher.

That was precisely my difficulty. It was not true. I went back to my recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness, his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher's account of his position. He would have winked, humourously appreciative of an excellent joke, if any one had told him that he was a crusader, out to wrest the sacred sepulchre of art from the keeping of the Saracens of Ulster.

I did not, of course, attempt to reason with Mrs. Ascher. There is nothing in the world more foolish than trying to reason with a woman who is possessed by a cause. No good ever comes of it. But Mrs. Ascher is quite clever enough to understand a man even if he does not speak. She felt that I should have been glad to argue with her if I had not been afraid. She entered on a long defence of her position.

She began with the Irish Players, and the moment she mentioned them I knew what she was going to say.

"The one instance," she said, "the single example in the modern world of peasant art, from the soil, of the soil, redolent, fragrant of the simple life of men and women, in direct touch with the primal forces of nature itself. There is nothing else quite like those players and their plays. They are the self-revelation, of the peasant soul. From the whitewashed cabins of the country-side, from the streets of tiny, world-forgotten villages, from the islands where the great Atlantic thunders ceaselessly, these have come to call us back to the realities of life, to express again the external verities of art."

That is all very well. I agreed with Mrs. Ascher thoroughly about the art of Synge's plays, and Lady Gregory's and Yeats', and the art of the players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists nor the players are peasants or ever were. They are very clever, sometimes more than clever, members of the educated classes, who see the peasants from outside just as I see them, as Mrs. Ascher would see them if she ever got near enough to what she calls the soil to see a peasant at all.

When Mrs. Ascher had finished with the Irish Players she went on, still in a white heat of excitement, to the attempt to revive the Irish language.

"Where else," she said, "will you find such devotion to a purely spiritual ideal? Here you have a people rising enthusiastically to fight for the preservation of the national language. And its language is the soul of a nation. These splendid efforts are made in defiance of materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price."

"The only flaw in that theory," I said, "is that the people who still have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least. Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to pay them for doing it."

That was the second occasion on which I came near quarrelling with Mrs. Ascher. Yet I am not a man who quarrels easily. Like St. Paul's friends at Corinth, I can suffer fools gladly. But Mrs. Ascher is not a fool. She is a clever woman with a twist in her mind. That is why I find myself saying nasty things to her now and then. I suppose it was Gorman who taught her to be an Irish patriot. If she had been content to follow him as an obedient disciple, I should have put up with all she said politely. But, once started by Gorman, she thought out Ireland for herself and arrived at this amazing theory of hers, her artistic children of light in death grips with mercantile and manufacturing materialists. No wonder she irritated me.

Ascher saved us from a heated argument. Dinner was over. He had smoked his half cigarette. He rose from his chair.

"I expect Mr. Wendall is waiting for us," he said to Mrs. Ascher.

Her face softened as he spoke. The look of fanatical enthusiasm passed out of her eyes. She got up quietly and left the room. Ascher held the door open for her and motioned me to follow her. He took my arm as we passed together down a long corridor.

"Mr. Wendall," he said, "is a young musician who comes to play to us every week. He is a man with a future before him. I think you will enjoy his playing. We are going to the music room."

We went through a small sitting-room, more fully furnished than any other in Ascher's house. It looked as if it were meant to be inhabited by ordinary human beings. It was reserved, so I learned afterwards, for the use of Ascher's guests. We ascended a short flight of stairs and entered the music room. Unlike the dining-room it was only partially lit. A single lamp stood on a little table near the fireplace, and there were two candles on a grand piano in the middle of the room. These made small spots of light in a space of gloom. I felt rather than saw that the room was a large one. I discerned the shapes of four tall, curtainless windows. I saw that except the piano and a few seats near the fireplace there was no furniture. As we entered I heard the sound of an organ, played very softly, somewhere above me.

"Mr. Wendall is here," said Ascher.

He led me over to the fireplace and put me in a deep soft chair. He laid a box of cigarettes beside me and set a vase of spills at my right hand. I gathered that I might smoke, so long as I lit my tobacco noiselessly, with spills kindled in the fire; but that I must not make scratchy sounds by striking matches. Mrs. Ascher sank down in a corner of a large sofa. She lay there with parted lips and half-closed eyes, like some feline creature expectant of sensuous delight. The light from the lamp behind her and the flickering fire played a strange game of shadow-making and shadow-chasing among the folds of her scarlet gown. Ascher sat down beside her.

The organ was played very softly. I found out that it was placed in a gallery above the door by which we had entered. I saw the pipes, like a clump of tall spears, barely discernible in the gloom. There was no light in the gallery. Mr. Wendall was no doubt there and was able to play without seeing a printed score. I supposed that he was playing the music of the new Russian composer. Whatever he played he failed to catch my attention, though the sounds were vaguely soothing. I found myself thinking that Mrs. Ascher had no right to be furiously angry with the people of Belfast for making their churches comfortable. This was her form of worship, and never were any devotees more luxuriously placed than we were. If her soul can soar to spiritual heights from the depths of silken cushions, surely a linen-draper may find it possible to pray in a cushioned pew.

I was mistaken about the music I was listening to. Mr. Wendall was only soothing his nerves with organ sounds while he waited for us. When he discovered our presence he left the gallery and descended to the room in which we sat, by a narrow stairway. No greeting of any kind passed between him and the Aschers. He went straight to the piano without giving any sign that he knew of our presence. I lit a cigarette and prepared to endure what was in store for me.

At first the new Russian music struck me as merely noisy. I found no sense or rhythm in it. Then I began to feel slightly excited. The excitement grew on me in a curious way. I looked at the Aschers. He was sitting nearly bolt upright, very rigid, in a corner on the sofa. She lay back, as she had lain before, with her hands on her lap. The only change that I noted in her attitude was that her fists were clenched tightly. Mr. Wendall stopped playing abruptly. There was a short interval of silence, through which I seemed to feel the last chord that was struck vibrating in my spine.

Then he began to play again. Once more the feeling of excitement came on me. I am far from being a Puritan, but I suppose I have inherited from generations of sternly Protestant ancestors some kind of moral prejudice. I felt, as the excitement grew intenser, that I had discovered a new, supremely delightful kind of sin. There came to my memory the names of ancient gods and goddesses denounced by the prophets of Israel: Peor and Baalim, Milcom, Moloch, Ashtaroth. I knew why the people loved to worship them. I remembered that Milton had rejoiced in the names of these half-forgotten deities, and that Milton loved music. No doubt he, too, understood this way of sinning and, very rightly, he placed the gods of it in hell. Wendall, at the piano, stopped and began again. He did this many times. His music was loud sometimes, sometimes soft, but it did not fail to create the sense of passionate deliciousness and, for a time, a longing for more of it.

After a while my senses grew numb, sated I suppose. I looked over at the Aschers. She still lay as she had lain at first, but her fists were no longer clenched. All her muscles seemed to be relaxed. Ascher had crept over close to her. He lay back beside her, and I saw that he held one of her hands clasped in his. His eyes were fixed intently on hers, and even as I watched I saw her lids droop before his gaze. She gave a long, soft sigh of satisfaction.

I realised that Ascher and his wife were lovers still, though they had been married for a score or more of years. That strange emotion, which touches human life with romance for a year or two and then fades into a tolerant companionship, had endured with them. In some way altogether unknown to me the music and all the art in which they delighted had the power of; stimulating afresh or re-creating again and again the passion which drew them together. Under the influence of art they enjoyed a mystical communion with each other, not wholly spiritual, but like all mysticism, a mixture of the physical, the ecstasy of contact, actual or imagined, with yearnings and emotions in which the body has no part.

I suppose the music had its effect on me, too, gave me for a few moments a power of sympathy not usually mine. I understood Ascher as I had never understood him before. I knew that the man I had hitherto seen, austere, calm, intellectual, the great financier whom the world sought, was a man with a mask before his face; that accident and the excitement of the music had enabled me to see the face behind the mask. I understood, or supposed I understood, Mrs. Ascher, too. All her foolish fine phrases and absurd enthusiasms were like cries in which tortured creatures find some kind of relief from pain, or the low, crooning laughter of a young mother with her baby at her breast. They were the inevitable, almost hysterical gaspings of a spirit wrought upon over highly and over often by the passion of romantic love. A mask hid the man's face. The woman was not strong enough to wear it.



CHAPTER XII.

It is difficult now, in 1915, to regard the things which happened during the first half of last year as events in any proper sense of the word. But at the time they excited us all very much, and we felt that the whole future of the country, the empire, perhaps of the human race, depended on how the Government met the crisis with which it was faced. It seems curious that we could have believed such a thing, but we did.

I remember quite distinctly the circumstances under which I first heard the news of the protest made by certain cavalry officers against what they supposed to be the Government's policy in Ulster. I am not, thank God, called upon to pass a judgment on that very tangled business, or to give any opinion about the rights or wrongs of either side. I do not even profess to know the facts. Indeed I am inclined to doubt whether there were any facts. In affairs conducted mainly by politicians there seldom are facts. There are statements, explanations, pledges and recriminations in great abundance; but facts are not to be discovered, for the sufficient reason that they are not there. What happened or seemed to happen was described as a plot, a mare's nest, an aristocratic conspiracy, an assertion of principle, a mutiny, a declaration of loyalty, and a newspaper scare, according to the taste of the person who was speaking. The safest thing to call it, I think, is an incident.

I went down to the club at twelve o'clock, intending to smoke a cigar and look at the picture papers before luncheon. I found Malcolmson in the outer hall. His head was bent over the machine which reels off strips of paper with the latest news printed on them. The machine was ticking vigorously, and I knew by the tense attitude in which Malcolmson was standing that something very important must have happened. My first impulse was to slip quietly past and get away to the smoking room before he saw me. I like Malcolmson, but he is tiresome, particularly tiresome when there is important news. I crossed the hall cautiously, keeping an eye on him, hoping that he would not look round till I was safe.

Malcolmson has reached that time of life at which a man's neck begins to bulge over his collar at the back, forming a kind of roll of rather hairy flesh, along which the starched linen marks a deep line from ear to ear. I noticed as I passed that Malcolmson's neck was far more swollen than usual and, that it was rapidly changing colour from its ordinary brick red to a deep purple. The sight was so strange and startling that I stopped for a minute to see what would happen next. I have never heard of a man's neck bursting under pressure of strong excitement, but Malcolmson's looked as if it must break out in some way. While I was watching, the machine suddenly stopped ticking and Malcolmson turned round. His face was nearly as purple as his neck. His moustache, always bristly, looked as if it was composed of fine wires charged with electricity. His eyes were blazing with excitement.

"Come here, Digby," he said. "Come here and read this."

He caught up the paper which the machine had disgorged and allowed it to hang across his hands in graceful festoons. There seemed to me to be a great deal of it.

"I wish you'd tell me about it," I said. "I hate reading those things. The print is so queer."

I knew that Malcolmson would tell me about it whether I read it for myself or not. There was no use getting a double dose of the news whatever it was.

"The damned Government's done for at last," said Malcolmson triumphantly, "and Home Rule's as dead as a door nail."

"Good," I said. "Now we shall all be able to settle down. How did it happen? Earthquake in Dublin? But that would hardly do it. Cabinet Ministers committed suicide unanimously?"

"The Army," said Malcolmson, "has refused to fire on us. I knew they would and they have."

"Were they asked to?" I said.

"Asked to!" said Malcolmson. "They were told to, ordered to. We've had our private information of what was going on. We've known all about it for a week or more. Belfast was to be bombarded by the Fleet. Two brigades of infantry were to cross the Boyne and march on Portadown. The cavalry, supported by light artillery, were to take Enniskillen by surprise. We were to be mowed down, mowed down and sabred before we had time to mobilise. The most infamous plot in modern times. A second St. Bartholomew's massacre. But thank God the Army is loyal. I cross to-night to take my place with my men."

An ill-tempered, captious man might have suggested that Malcolmson ought to have taken his place with his men—a regiment of volunteers I suppose—a little sooner. According to his own account, the peril had been real a week before, but was over before he told me about it. The Government which had planned the massacre was dead and damned. The Army had refused to carry out the infamous plot. It seemed a mere piece of bravado, under the circumstances, to take up arms. But I knew Malcolmson better than to suppose that he wanted to swagger when swaggering was safe. His mind might be in a muddled state. Judging by the way he talked to me, it was very muddled indeed. But his heart was sound, and no risk would have daunted him.

"Let's have a glass of sherry and a biscuit," I said. "You'll want something to steady your nerves."

But Malcolmson, for once, for the only time since I have known him, was unwilling to sit down and talk. His train, supposing that he took the quickest route to Belfast, did not leave Euston till 8 or 9 o'clock at night; but he felt that he must be up and doing at once. He fussed out of the club, and for some time I saw no more of him.

I waited until the hall porter had cut up the slips of paper which fell from the clicking machine and pinned the bits to the notice boards. Then I read the news for myself. These machines are singularly unintelligent. They mix up the items of news in a very irritating way. Sometimes a sheet begins with the assassination of a foreign prime minister, breaks off suddenly to announce the name of a winning horse, goes back to the prime minister, starts a divorce case abruptly and then gives a few Stock Exchange quotations. I hate news which comes to me in this disjointed way, and never attempt to learn anything from the machine until the hall porter has edited the sheets. He cuts them up, gets all the racing news on one board, the Stock Exchange and the Divorce Court on another and makes a continuous narrative of political news, assassinations, picturesque shipwrecks and such matters on the largest and most prominent of the notice boards.

I found when I did read that Malcolmson had built up a lofty structure on a very small foundation. Something had evidently happened among the soldiers stationed at the Curragh Camp; but the first account telegraphed over from Ireland left me in grave doubt. It was a question whether the men had actually been told to shoot Malcolmson and refused to obey orders; or had been asked, politely, if they would like to shoot Malcolmson and said they would rather not. The one thing which emerged with any sort of clearness was that Malcolmson would not be shot. This made my mind easy. I went into the dining-room and had some luncheon.

Early in the afternoon I collected six evening papers, three belonging to each side. I found the Unionist writers unanimous on two points. The Army had saved the Empire and the Government would be obliged to resign. The Liberal scribes took another view of the situation. According to them the Army had been seduced from its loyalty by the intrigues of fascinating and fashionable Delilahs, but the will of the people must, nevertheless, prevail. Newspaper writers on the Liberal side are far more intelligent than their opponents. It was a stupid thing, in the early part of 1914, to talk about saving the Empire. No one at that time cared anything about the Empire. Very few people believed that it existed. It was worse than stupid to suggest that the Government would resign. The country was utterly weary of General Elections and was planning its summer holiday. Public sympathy was hopelessly alienated by that kind, of talk. On the other hand, the fashionable Delilah story was a brilliant invention. There is nothing dearer to the heart of the English middle classes and working men than the belief that every woman with a dress allowance of more than L200 a year is a courtesan. The suggestion that these immoral Phrynes were bartering their charms for power to thwart the will of the people was just the sort of thing to raise a tempest of enthusiasm.

Almost anything might have happened if the Government had had the courage to follow up its advantage. Fortunately—from Malcolmson's point of view—it did not venture to shut up all women of title, under fifty years of age, in houses of correction; a course which would have convinced the general public that Home Rule was a sound thing. It spent a fortnight or so contradicting everybody who said anything, including itself, and then apologised for being misunderstood.

However, that anti-climax was still some way off.

I stuffed the three Liberal papers into my pocket and went to call on Lady Kingscourt. She is the only peeress I am intimate with who moves in really fashionable circles and is both rich and beautiful. It would have been interesting to hear what she said when I pointed out to her that she had been seducing subalterns. She was not at home when I reached her house. The butler told me that she had gone to a bazaar got up to raise funds for the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families' Association, in itself a suspicious circumstance. If I were Lady Kingscourt and my character was attacked as hers was, I should keep clear of any charity with the word soldier in its name. I was sorry to miss her, though I scarcely expected that she would have tried to fascinate me. It is a good many years since I resigned my commission.

The next person I thought of seeing was Gorman. It was nearly five o'clock, so I went to the House of Commons.

Gorman, when I found him, seemed very much pleased to see me, and was in a hospitable mood. He took me to a room, which must have originally been meant for a cellar, and gave me tea.

"I've been ringing you up on the telephone all day," he said, "and couldn't get you. Where have you been?"

"Down at the club," I said, "talking to Malcolmson about the plot—what you'd call the situation I suppose. You can hardly be expected to admit that there is a plot. Now, do tell me what you think about the situation."

"Damn the situation!" said Gorman.

"That," I said, "seems the sensible view to take. Is it the one usually held? Is that what they're saying up there?"

I pointed to the ceiling with my thumb. Somewhere above my head, it might be supposed, statesmen with furrowed brows were taking anxious counsel together for the safety of the nation, retiring now and then when utterly exhausted, to damn the situation in private rooms.

"Some of them are a bit fussed," said Gorman. "Silly asses! But it isn't that wretched business that I wanted to speak to you about."

"Good gracious! Do you mean to say that you can talk of anything else? that you didn't ring me up to tell me what will happen?"

"Nothing will happen," said Gorman. "Two or three muddled-headed young fools at the Curragh will get court-martialled. That's all. What I wanted to see you about is this new invention of Tim's. There's really something in it."

"Gorman," I said. "You're fiddling while Rome is burning. How can you reconcile it to your conscience to play with cinematographs when a horrible conspiracy is threatening life and liberty?"

"Surely," said Gorman, "you don't really believe that we plotted, as they call it, to murder people in Belfast?"

"I don't know whether you did or not," I said. "But that's not the conspiracy I'm alluding to. Look here."

I pulled out of my pocket the three papers which I had meant for Lady Kingscourt and showed Gorman the articles about the fashionable ladies seducing soldiers.

"You can't expect our side," I said, "to sit down under this kind of thing without a struggle. We shall make counter accusations. I shall do it myself if nobody else does. I'm warning you beforehand, Gorman, so that you won't be surprised when you find your character in rags."

Gorman looked at his watch.

"I know you like talking that sort of nonsense," he said, "and I don't mind listening, not a bit; but just let me ask you this before you start. Will you come down with me this evening and see Tim's invention? If you will I'll order a motor from Harrod's or somewhere, and we'll run down after dinner. There's no use going in broad daylight, for we can't see the thing properly till after dark."

"I shall be delighted," I said.

"Very well. Excuse me a moment while I go and get on the 'phone to engage the motor."

I waited, feeling a little sore. I daresay I do talk nonsense and like talking it, but no politician who ever lived has a right to tell me so. I intended to greet Gorman when he returned with the proverb about living in glass houses and throwing stones. He came back, smiling radiantly. My ill-humour passed away at once.

"Now," he said, "go on with what you were telling me.

"I pointed out to you," I said, "that duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and other abandoned women of that kind have been flirting with military officers in such a way as to interfere with the governing of this country in accordance with the principles of democracy."

"Is that what they say?" said Gorman.

He picked up one of the papers which I had laid on the table and satisfied himself that the thing was really in print.

"Well," he said, "they had to say something. I daresay people will believe them. The English are an extraordinarily credulous race, fools in fact. That's why I'm a Home Ruler."

"You must remember," I said, "that I'm a Unionist."

"Are you? Speaking confidentially, now, are you really?"

"My father was," I said, "and I don't like to see these things in print about the party without making some kind of reply. What I'm thinking of doing is writing a sort of circular letter to all the papers on our side and saying that to my certain knowledge you and Mrs. Ascher have been using undue and unfair influence over each other for the last six months. If it's wrong for a woman to talk politics to a soldier it must be much more wrong for one to talk art to a politician."

"Mrs. Ascher," said Gorman, "is an extraordinary woman. The more I see of her, the less inclined I am to be surprised at anything she says or does. She's tremendously keen just now on Home Rule and Ireland generally."

"That is amazing," I said.

"It isn't in itself," said Gorman, "but the way she gets at it is. I mean that theory of hers about——"

"Yes. I know. She will insist on thinking that you and everybody else on your side are artists."

"And yet," said Gorman, "I can't persuade her to look at Tim's new invention."

Mrs. Ascher's prejudice against cinematographs, improved or unimproved, was certainly strong. I found it hard to understand exactly how she felt. She found no difficulty in regarding Gorman, a devoted politician, as a hero. When she had no objection to the form of entertainment with which he provided the public, it was difficult to see why she kicked against moving pictures. I should have thought that the performances at Westminster were considerably more vulgar, certainly far less original and striking, than the things shown on the cinematograph.

Gorman and I dined at Scott's, chiefly on lobsters, at seven o'clock, an uncomfortably early hour. We had a twenty-five-mile drive before us to reach the farm, somewhere in the depths of Hertfordshire, where Tim was making his experiments. The drive was a very pleasant one. The first part of it lay along one of the great artery roads which lead from the centre of London to the North. The evening was fine and warm without being stuffy, one of those evenings which are the peculiar glory of the early English summer. It seemed to me that many thousands of people were passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through the traffic. Stout, middle-aged men, with fat, middle-aged women beside them, drove sturdy ponies, or lean, high-stepping horses, in curious old-fashioned gigs. Motor cyclists, young men with outstretched chins and set faces, sped by us, outstripping our car. Others we passed, riders who had side cars attached to their cycles, young men these, too, but soberer, weighted with responsibility. They had their wives in the side cars, wives who looked little more than girls, though many of them held babies in their arms, and one now and then had a well-grown child wrapped in rugs at her feet.

"Life!" said Gorman, waving his cigar comprehensively towards the moving crowds. "Wonderful thing life! Keeps going on. Don't know why it should, but it does. Nothing seems to make any difference to it."

"Not even your politics," I said. "Curious thing, isn't it, how little all that fuss of yours matters? It doesn't make any difference which of your parties is in power. All this goes on just the same. That young fellow—there, the one who didn't quite break his neck at the lamp post—would go down to his office to-morrow exactly as he always does, if every member of the House of Commons dies in the night. You see that girl with the baby—the one on our left—she'd have had that baby just the same if the Long Parliament were still sitting. None of your laws could have made her have that baby, or stopped her. You are simply fussing in an unimportant way, raising silly little clouds of dust which will settle down again at once. She's keeping the world going and she probably doesn't even know the name of the Prime Minister."

"That's all very well," said Gorman, "but we're seeing that these people get their rights, their fair share of what's going. If it wasn't for us and the laws we pass, the rich would grow richer and richer while these men and women would gradually sink into the position of slaves. I'm not a socialist. I don't believe in that theory; but capitalists have had things far too much their own way in the past."

"Ascher!"

"Oh, Ascher! I like Ascher, of course, personally; but speaking of him as a typical member of a class, he's simply a parasite. All financiers are. He ought to be abolished, wiped out, done away with. He fulfils no useful function."

Our motor sped along. A cycle with a side car just kept pace with us for a while. A nice, clean-shaven, honest-looking young fellow was in the saddle. His girl-wife sat beside him in the basket-work slipper which he dragged along. It was her baby which I had pointed out to Gorman a moment before.

"Perhaps," I said, "they have had tinned peaches for tea."

"Very likely," said Gorman, "just the sort of thing they would have. I know that class. Lived among them for years. He comes home at half past six. She has put on a clean blouse and tidied her hair so that he'll kiss her, and he does. Then he kisses the baby, probably likes doing that, too, as it's the first. Then he has a wash and she brings in the tea. Bread and butter for her with a pot of marmalade, an egg—at this time of year certainly an egg—for him."

"And tinned peaches."

"Eaten with teaspoons out of saucers," said Gorman, "and they'll enjoy them far more than you did that lobster salad at Scott's."

"I'm sure they will. And that is just where Ascher comes in."

"I don't see it," said Gorman, "unless you mean that they'd be eating hothouse peaches if there were no Aschers."

I did not mean that. I am, indeed, pretty sure that if there were no Aschers, if Gorman succeeded in abolishing the class, neither the city clerk, nor his pretty wife, nor any one else in England would eat hothouse peaches. There would not be any. I am inclined to think that if Ascher were done away with there would not even be any tinned peaches. Tinned peaches come from California. Somebody grows them there. That man must be kept going, fed, clothed sufficiently, housed, while the peach trees grow. He must be financed. Somebody else collects the peaches, puts them into tins, solders air-tight lids on them, pastes labels round them. He works with borrowed money. Somebody packs the tins in huge cases, puts them in trains, piles them into ships, despatches them to London, getting his power to do these things in some mysterious way from Ascher.

"While she washes up the cups and saucers," said Gorman, "he brings round that motor cycle."

"Paid for," I said, "in monthly instalments."

"Probably," said Gorman, "with a deposit of L25 to start with."

"It's Ascher," I said, "who makes that possible."

"It's Ascher," said Gorman, "who makes that necessary. If it were not for Ascher's rake-off, the tax he levies on every industry, the machine could be bought right out for the original L25 and there would be no instalments to be paid."

Possibly. But the tires of the machine were made of rubber. I remembered my visit to Para, the broad, steaming Amazon, the great ships crawling slowly past walls of forest trees, the pallid white men, the melancholy Indians. It may be possible to devise some other means of getting the precious gum from the Brazilian forest; but at present the whole business is dependent on Ascher.

We left that motor cycle behind us at last and sped faster along a stretch of road where the traffic was less dense.

"You notice," said Gorman, "the way London is swallowing up the country. That was once a rural inn."

I had observed what Gorman pointed out to me. Here and there along the road, a mile or so apart from each other, we came on old buildings, a group of cottages, a farm house, an inn. These were solidly built after the good old fashion. It had seemed wasteful to pull them down. The waves of the advancing tide of London reached them, passed them, swept beyond them, left them standing.

"Quite a few years ago," said Gorman, "those houses stood in the middle of fields, and the people who lived in them ate the food that grew at their doors."

"No tinned peaches," I said, "no bicycles."

"And no Ascher," said Gorman.

"Well," I said, "we can't go back."

"In Ireland," he said, "we needn't go on. If we can only get clear of this cursed capitalistic civilisation of England—that's what I mean by being a Home Ruler."

"You think," I said, "that we should be too wise to accept the yoke of Ascher, to barter our freedom for tinned peaches."

"We'll get the tinned peaches, too."

"No, you won't. If you have civilisation—and that includes a lot of things besides tinned peaches, tobacco for instance, Gorman. If you want a cigar you'll have to put up with Ascher. But I daresay you'd be better without it. Only I don't think I'll live in your Ireland, Gorman."

We passed away from London in the end, got out beyond the last tentative reachings of the speculative builder, into country lane-ways. There were hedges covered with hawthorn, and the scent of it reached us as we rushed past. Gorman threw away a half-smoked cigar. Perhaps he wanted to enjoy the country smells. Perhaps he was preparing himself for life in the new Ireland which he hoped to bring into being.

We reached the barn in which Tim Gorman lived, at about nine o'clock. He was waiting for us, dressed in his best clothes. I knew they were his best clothes because they were creased all over in wrong places, showing that they had been packed away tightly in some receptacle too small to hold them. It is only holiday clothes which are treated in this way. Besides putting on this suit, Tim had paid us the compliment of washing his face and hands for the first time, I imagine, for many days.

He shook hands with me shyly, and greeted his brother with obvious nervousness.

"I have everything ready," he said, "quite ready. But I can't promise—— You may be disappointed—— I've had endless difficulties—— If you will allow me to explain——"

"Not a bit of good explaining to us," said Gorman. "All we're capable of judging is the results."

Tim sighed and led us into the barn.

It was a large, bare room, ventilated—no one could say it was lit—by three or four unglazed openings in the wall. These Tim blocked with hay so as to exclude the lingering twilight of the summer evening.

At one end of the building was a stage, built, I thought, of fragments of packing cases. It was very hard to be sure about anything, for we had nothing except the light of two candles to see by, but the stage looked exceedingly frail. I should not have cared to walk across it. However, as it turned out, that did not matter. The stage was used only by ghosts, the phantoms which Tim created, and they weighed nothing. Tim himself, when it became necessary for him to adjust some part of his apparatus, crept about underneath the stage.

At the other end of the barn was an optical lantern, fitted with the usual mechanism for the exhibition of films. Half way down the room was a camp bedstead, covered with one brown blanket. Tim invited us to sit on it.

"It doesn't often break down," he said.

"If it breaks down at all," said Gorman, "I'll not risk it. I'd rather sit on the floor."

Gorman is a heavy man. I think he was right to avoid the bed. I sat down cautiously on one end of it. The middle part looked more comfortable, but I felt more secure with the legs immediately underneath me.

"It's all right," said Tim, "quite all right. I fixed it just before you came in."

That bed, a tin basin and two very dirty towels were the only articles of household furniture in the place. I suppose Tim had his meals with the farmer who owned the barn. No inspired artist, toiling frenziedly with a masterpiece in a garret, ever lived a more Spartan life than Tim Gorman did in that barn. Whatever money he had was certainly not spent on his personal comfort. On the other hand, a good deal of money had been spent on tools and material of various kinds. Packing cases stood piled together against the walls. The straw in which their contents had been wrapped littered the floor. I discerned, as my eyes got used to the gloom, a quantity of carpenters' tools near the stage, and, beside them, a confused heap of the mysterious implements of the plumber's trade.

While I was looking round me and the elder Gorman was wriggling about on the floor, Tim worked the lantern behind our backs. The thing, or some part of it, hissed in an alarming way. Then it made a whirring noise and a bright beam of light shot across the room. A very curious thing happened to that light. Instead of splashing against the far wall of the barn, exhibiting the cracks and ridges of the masonry, it stopped at the stage and spread itself in a kind of irregular globe. We sat in the dark. Across the room stretched the shaft of intense light, making the dust particles visible. Then, just as when a child blows soap bubbles through a tube, the light became globular.

"Put out the candles," said Tim.

They stood, flaming feebly, on the floor between Gorman and me. I extinguished them. Tim's machine gave a sharp click. Figures appeared suddenly in the middle of the globe of light. A man, then two women, then a dog. I do not know, and at the time I did not care in the least, what the figures were supposed to be saying or doing. It was sufficient for me that they were there. I saw them, not as flat, sharply outlined silhouettes, but as if they had been solid bodies. I saw them with softened outlines, through two eyes instead of a monocle. I saw them surrounded by an atmosphere.

"Pretty good, isn't it?" said Gorman. "Tim, turn on that running girl. I want Sir James to see how you get the effect of her going further and further away."

The running girl was the best thing accomplished by the old cinematograph. I never witness her race without a certain feeling of breathlessness. But Tim's girl ran far better. She was amazingly real. When she had finished her course, Gorman struck a match and lit the candles again.

"That'll do, Tim," he said. "We've seen enough."

"I'd like to show you the horses," said Tim. "I think the horses galloping are the best thing I've got."

"We'll take your word for the horses," said Gorman. "Shut off that light of yours and stop the whizzing noise. I want to talk." He turned to me. "Well?"

"It's marvellous," I said.

"There's money in it," said Gorman. "Piles and piles of money. The only question is, Who's to get it?"

"Tim," I said, "is the one who deserves it."

"Tim will get his share whatever happens. The real question is, How are we to prevent Ascher grabbing all the rest?"

Tim had finished quieting his machine and came over to us.

"Michael," he said, "I want L100."

"What for?"

"I want more mirrors. The ones I'm using aren't perfect. I must have others."

"The ones you have," said Gorman, "are good enough for the present. When we get a bit further on and see how this business is going to be managed, we may get you other mirrors."

"Very well," said Tim, "I'll ask Ascher for the money. He'll give it to me. I'd have asked him a week ago only you made me promise not to take any more money from him without telling you."

"If you take money from Ascher," said Gorman, "he'll simply collar your whole invention. You'll find in the end that it will be his, not yours. He'll get every penny that's made out of it, and then he'll tell you that you owe him more than you can pay. I've told you all along that that's what will happen if you go borrowing from Ascher."

"I don't care," said Tim, "so long as I get it perfected I don't care what happens."

"Damn!" said Gorman.

There was some excuse for him. Tim's attitude was hopelessly unpractical.

"Don't you see," said Tim, "that this is a wonderful thing? It's one of the greatest things that any one has done for a long time. It's a new thing."

The note of weak obstinacy which was in his voice when he first spoke had died out of it. He was pleading with his brother as a child might beg for something from a grown-up man.

"That's exactly what I do see," said Gorman.

"Then why won't you let me perfect it? It doesn't matter—sure, you know yourself, Michael, that it doesn't matter what happens if only I get it right."

I thought for a moment that the boy was going to cry. He pulled himself together with a sort of choked sob and then suddenly flashed into a rage.

"I will ask Ascher for the money," he said. "I will, I will. Damn you, Michael! I'll give it all to Ascher, everything I have. Everything I ever invent. I'll tell him all I've found out. I'll make it his."

Then with another swift change of mood the boy turned to me and began to plead again.

"Tell him to give me the money," he said. "Or make him let me ask Ascher for it. He'll do it if you speak to him. I don't want to quarrel with Michael. I don't want to do anything he says is wrong. But I must have that money. Don't you see I must? I can't get on without it?"

"Listen to me, Tim," I said; "if I give you the L100 you want——"

"I could manage with L100," said Tim. "But it would be much better if I had L150."

"A hundred," I said, "and no more. If I give it to you, will you promise to bring that apparatus of yours up to London and exhibit your results to a few friends of mine there?"

"Yes, I will. Of course I will. May I order the new mirrors to-morrow and say that you'll pay for them?"

"You may. But remember——"

"Oh, that will be all right," said Tim. "As soon as ever it is perfected——"

"Perfect or imperfect," I said, "you've promised to show it off when I ask you to."

Gorman and I drove home together. At first he would do nothing except grumble about his brother's childish obstinacy.

"Can't understand," he said, "how any man with brains can be such a fool."

Then when he had worked off the fine edge of his irritation he began to thank me.

"It was good of you, very," he said, "to put down the money. I'd have done it myself, if I could have laid my hand on the amount he wanted. But just at this moment I can't. All the same I don't see what good that L100 is going to do. The thing's perfect enough for all practical purposes already. I saw nothing wrong with it."

"Nor did I."

"Then what the devil does he want to do with it? If the thing works all right, what's the sense of tinkering with it?"

"That's the artistic soul," I said, "never satisfied, always reaching upwards towards the unattained. It's the same with Mrs. Ascher."

"Of all the damned idiocies," said Gorman, "that artistic soul is the damnedest."

I said nothing more for several minutes. I knew it would take Gorman some time to recover from the mention of the artistic soul. When I thought he had regained his self-possession I went on speaking.

"My idea," I said, "is to hire a small hall, and to invite a number of well-off people to see Tim's show. You'll want money in the end, you know."

"Not much," said Gorman. "A few thousands will be enough. It isn't as if we had to manufacture anything."

"If you get what you want," I said, "in small sums from a number of people, you'll be able to keep control of the thing yourself, and you needn't be afraid of Ascher. Not that I believe Ascher would swindle, you. I think Ascher's an honest man."

"Ascher's a financier," said Gorman. "That's enough for me."



CHAPTER XIII.

I never suspected Malcolmson of the cheap kind of military ardour which shows itself in the girding on of swords after the hour of danger is past. He is the kind of man who likes taking risks, and I have not the slightest doubt that if he had really known beforehand that the Government was "plotting" to invade Ulster he would have been found entrenched, with a loaded rifle beside him, on the north bank of the Boyne. What I did think, when he left London suddenly to place himself at the head of his men, was that he had been a little carried away by the excitement of the times; that he was moved, as many people are, when startling events happen, to do something, without any very distinct idea of what is to be done. But even that suspicion wronged Malcolmson. Either he or some one else had devised an effective counterplot; effective considered as a second act in a comic opera. Perhaps I ought not to say comic opera. There is a certain reasonableness in the schemes of every comic opera. Our affairs in the early part of 1914 were moving through an atmosphere like that of "Alice in Wonderland." The Government was a sort of Duchess, affecting to regard Ulster as the baby which was beaten when it sneezed because it could if it chose thoroughly enjoy the pepper of Home Rule. The Opposition, on the other hand, with its eye also on Ulster, kept saying in tones of awestruck warning, "Beware the Jabberwock, my son." Malcolmson seemed to be a kind of White Knight, lovable, simple-minded, chivalrous, but a little out of place in the world.

However, Malcolmson and his friends, considered as characters in "Alice in Wonderland," were effective, far more effective than the poor White Knight ever was. They bought a lot of guns somewhere, perhaps in Hamburg. They hired a ship and loaded her with the guns. They sailed her into Larne Harbour and said to the Government, "Now, come on if you dare."

The Government, having previously issued a solemn proclamation forbidding the importation of arms into Ireland, took up the attitude of Mr. Winkle and said it was just going to begin. It rolled up its sleeves and clenched its fists and said for the second time and with considerable emphasis that it was just going to begin, Malcolmson danced about, coat off, battle light in eye, and kept shouting: "Come on!" The Government, taking off its collar and tie, said: "Just you wait till I get at you."

Gorman took a sane, though I think incorrect, view of the situation.

"The English people," he said, "are hopeless fools. It's almost impossible to deal with them. They are actually beginning to believe that Ulster is in earnest."

"Well," I said, "that's only fair. They've been believing that you're in earnest for quite a long time now. Ulster ought to have its turn."

Gorman, though a politician, is essentially a just man. He admitted the truth of what I had said.. He went further. He admitted that Malcolmson's coup was exceedingly well conceived.

"It's just the sort of thing," he said, "which appeals to Englishmen. Reason is wasted on them."

"Don't be too hard on the English," I said. "It's the same everywhere in the world. Government through the people, of the people, by, with, from, to and for the people, is always unreasonable."

"It's the theatrical which pays," said Gorman. "I didn't think those fellows in Belfast had brains enough to grasp that fact, but apparently they have. I must say that this gun-running performance of theirs is good. It has the quality which Americans describe as 'punch.' It has stirred the popular imagination. It has got right across the footlights. It has fetched the audience."

"Awkward situation for you," I said.

"We'll have to do something," said Gorman.

"Arrest the ringleaders? Imprison Malcolmson?"

"Lord, no. We may be fools, but we're not such fools as that."

"Still," I said, "he's broken the law. After all, a party like yours in close alliance with the Government of the country must do something to maintain the majesty of the law."

"Law be damned," said Gorman. "What the devil does law matter to us or the Government either? What we've got to consider is popular opinion."

"And that," I said, "seems to be setting against you. According to the theory of democracy as I understand it, you're bound to go the way popular opinion is blowing you. You can't, without gross inconsistency, start beating to windward against it."

"Winds sometimes change," said Gorman.

"They do. This one has. It was all in your favour a fortnight ago. Now, what with your 'plot' and this really striking little episode in Larne——"

"The art of government," said Gorman, "consists in manipulating the wind, making it blow the way it's wanted to. What we've got to do is to go one better than the Ulster men."

"Ah," I said, "they imported rifles. You might land a shipload of large cannons. Is that the idea?"

"They needn't necessarily be real cannons. I don't think our funds would run to real cannons. Besides, what good would they be when we had them? But you've got the main idea all right. Our game is to pull off something which will startle the blessed British public, impress it with the fact that we're just as desperate as the other fellows."

"What about the police?" I said. "The police have always had a down on your side. It's a tradition in the force."

"The police aren't fools," said Gorman. "They know jolly well that any policemen who attempted to interfere with our coup, whatever it may be, would simply be dismissed. After all, we're not doing any harm. We're not going to shoot any one. We're simply going to influence public opinion. Every one has a right to do that. By the way, did I mention that my play is being revived? Talking of public opinion reminded me of it. It had quite a success when it was first put on."

Gorman is charming. He never sticks to one subject long enough to be really tiresome.

"I'm delighted to hear it," I said. "I hope it will-do even better this time."

"It ought to," said Gorman. "We've got a capital press agent, and, of course, my name is far better known than it was. It isn't every day the public gets a play written by a Member of Parliament."