A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (25 page)

Lessingham paused half-way down the second flight and laughed.
‘I
don't know anyone with exactly my abilities, so your Kantian principle of the universal doesn't work very well here. As for my duty, I do it according to my lights. And I think, with respect, I'm rather a better judge of it than you are.'

'Well and I think, with respect, you're
a
damned unsatisfactory hound.'

Lessingham said nothing, but his nostrils hardened. Presently, as they walked on, he said quietly, with
a
tang of raillery in his voice that lightened the sting of the words,
‘I
thought you'd something important to talk about. If you've only come over to quarrel with me you'd better go home again. I've enough eggs on the spit without a dog-fight with you into the bargain.'

They were on the grass now, and the others coming up from the waterside to meet them. With the magnificence of a caballero Eric swept off his hat to his sister-in-law, bent to kiss her hand, then kiss her on both cheeks.
‘
Bless you, dear Mary,' he said.
‘
Make him do something. I can't If he'd gone into politics when I told him to, in fourteen, might have got some of our troubles straightened out before this. If he'd do it now (Hullo, Anne. Hullo, Charles, ha
ven't seen you for years: Taver
ford still standing? Going to have any pheasants this autumn? Fll
come and shoot 'em for you: if I’
m invited, of course)—if he'd do it now,' he turned to Mary again, 'he'd be Prime Minister before he's many years old
er, damn him. Would myself, if I’
d a wife like you.'

"That's the essential qualification, is it? Really, where to hide my blushes, the way you flatter me.'

'Pity is,' Eric said, 'I had been married three times already before you and I met. And if I hadn't, he'd have cut me out all the same, before I'd a chance to start the siege. That's the trick of these younger brothers. And he's youngest, and the worst. Look at the state of the country to-day,' he said: 'strikes all over the place, mines, railways, the Devil knows what. Damn the lot of 'em. They want a master.'

'Why don't you give them one?' said Lessingham dryly.

'It's what I'm trying to do. The trouble with your husband,' he took Mary's arm, 'you can take it from me, is that he was born about three hundred years too late.'

Lessingham said, Three hundred and sixty, I've always thought. Get out before the Stuarts came in: I prefer t
hat Tudor atmosphere. Or be born
, say, six hundred years ago: have a dukedom in Italy: arts of peace and art of war, both
in excelsis.
War was part of the humanities as the condottieri waged it, until the French and the Spaniards came down over the Alps and showed them what. I should have enjoyed myself in the skin of our maternal ancestor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Or go back a thousand years, to the days of our ancestor on the other side and your namesake: Eric Blood-axe. Or the Persian wars. Or Troy. But what does it matter, the time one is born in? A man can build his freedom in any age, any land. I can live as well to-day as I could have in Egil Skallagrimson's time, or Sir Walter Ralegh's. If I couldn't, I'd be a failure then too.'

Eric snorted like a bull. 'I can't understand chaps like you. Hankering already for the next war, or a revolution.'

'You certainly don't understand me,' said Lessingham very quietly.

Charles shook his head. ' "There ain't going to be no" next war.'

'Isn't there?' said Lessingham. 'Who's going to stop it?'

'I don't know. But it's got to be stopped. Or alternatively, the whole show goes west. Don't you agree, Edward? What did you and I fight for?'

Lessingham made no reply for a moment: only a myriad most slight and subtle alterations charactered the eagle in him against mountain and sky. 'Fight for?' he said at last. 'The motive, you mean? or the accomplished fact? I suppose we went into it because we were fighting men, and had a mind to defend what we cared for. And in the event I think we'll find we've preserved England as a land for eunuchs to dwell in, and made the world safe for short-haired females.'

'That's only superficial,' said Charles.

Eric gave a great guffaw. 'Two distinct operations, ladies and gents; and yet, you observe, the product identical in both cases—Now I've shocked you, Mary. I do beg your pardon.'

'Not in the least. Fm not shocked. It's simply that that sort of witticism doesn't frightfully amuse me. Shall we leave them to their argy-bargyings?' she said to Anne, and walked away with her toward the house.

'Superficial, my dear Charles? May be,' said Lessingham. 'So too is the surface of the grass-growth, seen from an aeroplane, superficial; but yet you can tell by it where the buried cities lie, accurately, street by street, feet-deep under the earth, in Mesopotamia.'

These are things that will pass. All part of the mess-up. But if they are to pass,—then, no "next war". Another war would put the lid on it.'

'I see no early prospect of their passing,' said Lessingham. 'They have hardly begun. There's a promising future for them and for what they stand for.'

Charles Bremmerdale grunted.
‘I
don't deny the danger,' he said, very quiet and serious. 'I think nothing will do but a real change of heart. We've said that about the enemy till one's nauseated. Got to say it now to ourselves, and do it,—or else. I do what I can. I think one's got to.'

Lessingham looked at him with a queer and uncustomed tenderness in his speckled grey eyes. "Forty-five million hearts to change over?' he said. 'And that's only a beginning. My dear Charles, what we're really up to is—if
we
can—to make the world safe for big business: for a new kind of slave state: that's the first deep current under the surface, evolution towards Hobbes's Leviathan and away from the individual. And your unhaired woman (they'll be as common as the cartway soon) and your unmasculated man, are part of the engine, worker ants, worker termites, neuters: worthless lives to themselves, which only exist to run the engine, which itself exists only to run. Until it runs down. And then sink with stink
ad Tartara Termagorum.'

Eric's laugh came short, sharp, and harsh, like an eagle's bark. "The only true word Plato ever said,' said he, the brass tenor of his voice contrasting with his brother's basso profondo, 'was that the world will never go right till philosophers are kings.'

'He said one or two true things besides that,' said Lessingham.

'What? O yes, I can think of one:
about the highhearted man.’

"That such kind of men have wrought the greatest evils both upon cities and upon private persons, and also the greatest benefits, according to their bent of mind? Yes, and then he says a weak nature can be cause of no great thing, neither of a good thing nor of an evil. Well, that's not true. Many weak natures together can be cause of the greatest evils: most of all if they are used by a scoundrel of genius as his instruments. And that is the rock on which all revolutions run to wreck.'

Charles said, 'Why not a man of genius to use them for good ends?'

'Because smallness of spirit,' answered Lessingham, 'is an apt instrument for evil: an unhandy one for good. And yet all the chat to-day is, that democratic institutions are somehow going to be the salvation of the civilized world.'

‘
Well,' said Charles, 'what's your alternative?'

‘I
see none, on the grand scale. The folly lies not in supporting democracy as a
pis aller,
but in singing hymns to it, treating it as something fundamentally good. No hard thinking, no resolute policy, even when our foot is on their neck: instead, a reiteration (like a bunch of superannuated school-ma'ams) of comfortable platitudes, with our eyes on the bal
lot-box. We have defeated "Prus
sianism". Have we so? I thought the object in war was to defeat your enemy, not defeat some absurd abstraction. We gave him an armistice when, at the last gasp, he asked for it. Now we're going to dictate terms of peace, in Paris apparently. I'd rather have carried the war to destruction clean through Germany, defeated him bloodily beyond cavil or equivocation, let him taste it at his own fire side, and dictated peace in Berlin. If we'd lost a hundred thousand lives by doing it (and we shouldn't have: nothing like it), it would have been worth the price.'

'And you one of them, perhaps?' said Charles.

'Certainly: gladly: and I one of them. For if we'd done it we could now be generous without risk of misunderstanding. As it is, I fancy we're going to be rather less than generous. And a load of mischief to come of it Even if it doesn't cost us all the fruits of these past four years, and leave us the job to do all over again.'

Eric said, 'I dislike talking to you, Edward, on world politics. You depress me.'

'You shouldn't be so easily depressed.'

‘
I always remember what you said before the war, about modern war between Great Powers in Europe: what it would mean. Do you remember? Knock two chestnuts together on strings (game of conquerors): no harm done. But try that game with two expensive gold watches, and see what happens.'

The event hasn't proved that the analogy works, though,' said Charles.

'Hasn't yet,'' said Eric. 'But don't you go imagining we're out of the wood yet, my boy. Not by the hell of a long way. Edward's a cynical dog, damn him. But he talks sense.'

‘
Edward's not a cynic,' said Charles. 'He's a philosopher. And a poet.'

'And a painter. And a man of affairs. And a cantankerous devil. And, (to give him his due), a damn good solider,' said Eric.

Lessingham laughed. 'If I'm a philosopher, I love England, and you, brother, as my real Englishman. But this is the time for looking at ourselves in foreign looking-glasses. Scaliger said, four centuries ago, "The English are proud, savage, insolent, untruthful, lazy, inhospitable, ungainly, stupid, and perfidious".'

'Good God,' said Eric. 'And there's a Japanese proverb: "When a fool spits at Heaven, the spittle falls back in his own face".'

'Well?' said Lessingham.
‘
Do you want to have a look at the new mistals we're building at the farm?'

As they came up upon the terrace Mary met them, with Anne Bremmerdale. She said, 'Have you seen Mr. Milcrest?'

'No,' said Lessingham. 'And I don't desperately want to.'

'He's hunting for you with some things from the post office.'

'Confound them.' 'Here he comes.'

'What's the use of you as a secretary?' said Lessingham, as Milcrest, heated with the chase, handed him two terracotta envelopes. 'Couldn't you burn the beastly things, or drown them, or lose them till to-morrow?'

'If you'll give me an indemnity in advance, sir.'

'What's that you say?' Lessingham was undoing the envelope marked
Priority:
he read it through swiftly, then again slowly, then, upon a salvo of damns, began striding up and down oblivious of his company, hands in his pockets, brow black as thunder. After two or three turns, so, he opened the second telegram and, having read it, stood for perhaps twenty seconds as if withdrawn into himself. 'Bad news for you, old man,' he said, turning to his brother. 'And for me, and the dear girl': he looked at Anne, whose grey eyes, very like his own, waited on his words. He handed Eric the telegram. "There'll be one for you, no doubt, at Snittlegarth.' Anne came and read it over Eric's shoulder: with difficulty, for his big hand shook and made the words run together. 'Didn't live long to enjoy his K.C.B.,' he said gruffly, almost brutally; but Mary thought she saw in the hard blue eyes of him, as he turned away, something incongruously like a tear.

Fanny Chedisford was writing letters in the drawing-room. Mary came and said to her, 'You and I will have to keep each other company to-morrow.' Fanny looked up brightly, but her expression changed. 'We've just heard,' Mary said: 'my youngest brother-in-law, Will Lessingham, died suddenly in London last night Rather
a
favourite.'

'O Mary, I am so terribly sorry.'

'Edward has to go up by the night train to-morrow in any case: some important conference suddenly called at the Foreign Office. Anne and Charles are off at once, after lunch, by car. He was, a bachelor, as you know, and Anne always rather the one in the family for him. We've no details: only that he collapsed in his consulting-room in Harley Street.'

'You're not going yourself?'

'No. Couldn't do anything. I don't like funerals, and Edward doesn't like them for me. I don't like them for him either. However.'

Fanny was prodding at the blotting-paper with her pen. 'A terrible loss to his profession. I remember him so well in the old days: always coming to stay with Anne. How old was he?'

'Eric, Frederick, Antony and Margaret, William, Anne —he came between the twins and Anne: forty-one this year, I think.'

‘
Young.'

'One used not to think forty young. Too young, certainly.'

'I can't get hold of Edward,' said Eric, coming in from the hall. 'Seems to have locked himself into the library, and told the servants he's not to be disturbed.'