In the Days of the Comet

And what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at which I was present, the council that was held two days later in Melmount’s bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the constitution of the World State.  I was there because it was convenient for me to stay with Melmount.  I had nowhere to go particularly, and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his share of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers of the world.  I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph available, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and sat at his desk to write at his dictation.  It is characteristic of the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of the old epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthand and that there was no telephone whatever in the place.  Every message had to be taken to the village post-office in that grocer’s shop at Menton, half a mile away. . . .  So I sat in the back of Melmount’s room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such memoranda as were needed.  At that time his room seemed to me the most beautifully furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid cheerfulness of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay just in front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the silver equipage of the desk I used.  I know now that my presence in that room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the coming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations.  In the old days a cabinet council was a secret conclave, secrecy and furtiveness were in the texture of all public life.  In the old days everybody was always keeping something back from somebody, being wary and cunning, prevaricating, misleading—­for the most part for no reason at all.  Almost unnoticed, that secrecy had dropped out of life.

I close my eyes and see those men again, hear their deliberating voices.  First I see them a little diffusely in the cold explicitness of daylight, and then concentrated and drawn together amidst the shadow and mystery about shaded lamps.  Integral to this and very clear is the memory of biscuit crumbs and a drop of spilt water, that at first stood shining upon and then sank into the green table-cloth. . . .

I remember particularly the figure of Lord Adisham.  He came to the bungalow a day before the others, because he was Melmount’s personal friend.  Let me describe this statesman to you, this one of the fifteen men who made the last war.  He was the youngest member of the Government, and an altogether pleasant and sunny man of forty.  He had a clear profile to his clean gray face, a smiling eye, a friendly, careful voice upon his thin, clean-shaven lips, an easy disabusing manner.  He had the perfect quality of a man who had fallen easily into a place prepared for him.  He had the temperament of what we used to call a philosopher—­an indifferent, that is to say.  The Change had caught him at his week-end recreation, fly-fishing; and, indeed, he said, I remember, that he recovered to find himself with his head within a yard of the water’s brim.  In times of crisis Lord Adisham invariably went fly-fishing at the week-end to keep his mind in tone, and when there was no crisis then there was nothing he liked so much to do as fly-fishing, and so, of course, as there was nothing to prevent it, he fished.  He came resolved, among other things, to give up fly-fishing altogether.  I was present when he came to Melmount, and heard him say as much; and by a more naive route it was evident that he had arrived at the same scheme of intention as my master.  I left them to talk, but afterward I came back to take down their long telegrams to their coming colleagues.  He was, no doubt, as profoundly affected as Melmount by the Change, but his tricks of civility and irony and acceptable humor had survived the Change, and he expressed his altered attitude, his expanded emotions, in a quaint modification of the old-time man-of-the-world style, with excessive moderation, with a trained horror of the enthusiasm that swayed him.

These fifteen men who ruled the British Empire were curiously unlike anything I had expected, and I watched them intently whenever my services were not in request.  They made a peculiar class at that time, these English politicians and statesmen, a class that has now completely passed away.  In some respects they were unlike the statesmen of any other region of the world, and I do not find that any really adequate account remains of them. . . .  Perhaps you are a reader of the old books.  If so, you will find them rendered with a note of hostile exaggeration by Dickens in “Bleak House,” with a mingling of gross flattery and keen ridicule by Disraeli, who ruled among them accidentally by misunderstanding them and pleasing the court, and all their assumptions are set forth, portentously, perhaps, but truthfully, so far as people of the “permanent official” class saw them, in the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward.  All these books are still in this world and at the disposal of the curious, and in addition the philosopher Bagehot and the picturesque historian Macaulay give something of their method of thinking, the novelist Thackeray skirts the seamy side of their social life, and there are some good passages of irony, personal descriptions, and reminiscence to be found in the “Twentieth Century Garner” from the pens of such writers, for example, as Sidney Low.  But a picture of them as a whole is wanting.  Then they were too near and too great; now, very rapidly, they have become incomprehensible.

We common people of the old time based our conception of our statesmen almost entirely on the caricatures that formed the most powerful weapon in political controversy.  Like almost every main feature of the old condition of things these caricatures were an unanticipated development, they were a sort of parasitic outgrowth from, which had finally altogether replaced, the thin and vague aspirations of the original democratic ideals.  They presented not only the personalities who led our public life, but the most sacred structural conceptions of that life, in ludicrous, vulgar, and dishonorable aspects that in the end came near to destroying entirely all grave and honorable emotion or motive toward the State.  The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat.  The chief ministers of state were pickpockets, washerwomen, clowns, whales, asses, elephants, and what not, and issues that affected the welfare of millions of men were dressed and judged like a rally in some idiotic pantomime.  A tragic war in South Africa, that wrecked many thousand homes, impoverished two whole lands, and brought death and disablement to fifty thousand men, was presented as a quite comical quarrel between a violent queer being named Chamberlain, with an eyeglass, an orchid, and a short temper, and “old Kroojer,” an obstinate and very cunning old man in a shocking bad hat.  The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched Fate—­until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed—­hunger and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame. . . .  These men had come to fame and power in that atmosphere, and to me that day there was the oddest suggestion in them of actors who have suddenly laid aside grotesque and foolish parts; the paint was washed from their faces, the posing put aside.

Even when the presentation was not frankly grotesque and degrading it was entirely misleading.  When I read of Laycock, for example, there arises a picture of a large, active, if a little wrong-headed, intelligence in a compact heroic body, emitting that “Goliath” speech of his that did so much to precipitate hostilities, it tallies not at all with the stammering, high-pitched, slightly bald, and very conscience-stricken personage I saw, nor with Melmount’s contemptuous first description of him.  I doubt if the world at large will ever get a proper vision of those men as they were before the Change.  Each year they pass more and more incredibly beyond our intellectual sympathy.  Our estrangement cannot, indeed, rob them of their portion in the past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality.  The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue.  There they strut through their weird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents, their height preposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their faces covered by great resonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in the foolish idiom of public utterance, disguised beyond any semblance to sane humanity, roaring and squeaking through the public press.  There it stands, this incomprehensible faded show, a thing left on one side, and now still and deserted by any interest, its many emptinesses as inexplicable now as the cruelties of medieval Venice, the theology of old Byzantium.  And they ruled and influenced the lives of nearly a quarter of mankind, these politicians, their clownish conflicts swayed the world, made mirth perhaps, made excitement, and permitted—­infinite misery.

I saw these men quickened indeed by the Change, but still wearing the queer clothing of the old time, the manners and conventions of the old time; if they had disengaged themselves from the outlook of the old time they still had to refer back to it constantly as a common starting-point.  My refreshed intelligence was equal to that, so that I think I did indeed see them.  There was Gorrell-Browning, the Chancellor of the Duchy; I remember him as a big round-faced man, the essential vanity and foolishness of whose expression, whose habit of voluminous platitudinous speech, triumphed absurdly once or twice over the roused spirit within.  He struggled with it, he burlesqued himself, and laughed.  Suddenly he said simply, intensely—­it was a moment for every one of clean, clear pain, “I have been a vain and self-indulgent and presumptuous old man.  I am of little use here.  I have given myself to politics and intrigues, and life is gone from me.”  Then for a long time he sat still.  There was Carton, the Lord Chancellor, a white-faced man with understanding, he had a heavy, shaven face that might have stood among the busts of the Caesars, a slow, elaborating voice, with self-indulgent, slightly oblique, and triumphant lips, and a momentary, voluntary, humorous twinkle.  “We have to forgive,” he said.  “We have to forgive—­even ourselves.”

These two were at the top corner of the table, so that I saw their faces well.  Madgett, the Home Secretary, a smaller man with wrinkled eyebrows and a frozen smile on his thin wry mouth, came next to Carton; he contributed little to the discussion save intelligent comments, and when the electric lights above glowed out, the shadows deepened queerly in his eye-sockets and gave him the quizzical expression of an ironical goblin.  Next him was that great peer, the Earl of Richover, whose self-indulgent indolence had accepted the role of a twentieth-century British Roman patrician of culture, who had divided his time almost equally between his jockeys, politics, and the composition of literary studies in the key of his role.  “We have done nothing worth doing,” he said.  “As for me, I have cut a figure!” He reflected—­no doubt on his ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings. . . .  “I have been a fool,” he said compactly.  They heard him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham.  Ever and again Gurker protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles.  He made his confession for his race.  “We Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much.  Our racial self-conceit has been monstrous.  We seem to have used our ample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into a sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . .  We have had no sense of service to mankind.  Beauty which is godhead—­we made it a possession.”

These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory.  Perhaps, indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not now remember.  How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured.  They had found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment of illumination they had not been ashamed; but they had made no ungentlemanly fuss about the matter.  Eight of that fifteen came from the same school, had gone through an entirely parallel education; some Greek linguistics, some elementary mathematics, some emasculated “science,” a little history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative—­with neither keen swords nor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done.  None of these eight had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers, they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine.  Even their vices and lapses had been according to certain conceptions of good form.  They had all gone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see life—­music-hall life—­had all come to heel again.  Now suddenly they discovered their limitations. . . .

“What are we to do?” asked Melmount.  “We have awakened; this empire in our hands. . . .”  I know this will seem the most fabulous of all the things I have to tell of the old order, but, indeed, I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears.  It is a fact that this group of men who constituted the Government of one-fifth of the habitable land of the earth, who ruled over a million of armed men, who had such navies as mankind had never seen before, whose empire of nations, tongues, peoples still dazzles in these greater days, had no common idea whatever of what they meant to do with the world.  They had been a Government for three long years, and before the Change came to them it had never even occurred to them that it was necessary to have no common idea.  There was no common idea at all.  That great empire was no more than a thing adrift, an aimless thing that ate and drank and slept and bore arms, and was inordinately proud of itself because it had chanced to happen.  It had no plan, no intention; it meant nothing at all.  And the other great empires adrift, perilously adrift like marine mines, were in the self-same case.  Absurd as a British cabinet council must seem to you now, it was no whit more absurd than the controlling ganglion, autocratic council, president’s committee, or what not, of each of its blind rivals. . . .