CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE CABINET COUNCIL
Section 1
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. . . .
