dare. I’m stronger than you. Yah!’ That’s patriotism. I’ve seen it working out in bloodshed and brutality from the Zambesi to the Rhine.”
Bertram made a violent protest against that line of reasoning.
“I utterly disagree. If you deny patriotism, you rule out human nature and one of its strongest instincts.”
“I don’t deny it,” said Henry Carvell, with a touch of impatience. “I denounce it. What virtue do you see in it?”
“Love of familiar things in life. Loyalty to the ideas of one’s own people, their code of honour and all that. Men will die in defence of those things, in the last ditch.”
“Why die?” asked Christy, grinning at Bertram in a friendly way. “Why get into ditches? Why not talk it out with the other fellow whose ideas, most likely, are exactly the same?”
Hubert Melvin, the novelist, took up the argument. He was a chubby little man with a bald head, a great expanse of brow, and a plump, good-natured face, like Shakespeare without his beard and dignity.
“Our friend, Pollard, is enlarging the definition of patriotism. He seems to be talking about sacrifice for the ideals of life. They reach beyond frontiers. They’re not limited to a particular patch of earth hedged round by jealousy and governed by a small group of rascals calling themselves patriots! Of course men will die for what they believe to be the true faith.”
“Quite so,” agreed Henry Carvell. “Unfortunately, all national education—in a South African tribe or a European state—is intensive suggestion to primitive minds that their community, alone in the world, is in possession of the true faith. Their tribal custom becomes the only code of honour. They are encouraged to impose it, with missionary and murderous zeal, upon the rest of humanity. German ‘Kultur,’ for example, British ‘Justice,’ French ‘Liberty,’ and so on.”
“British Justice is a pretty good thing,” said Bertram. “We believe in fair play.”
“In Ireland?” asked Christy, and Bertram was silent. No, somehow, for five hundred years, British Justice had rather fallen down in Ireland. It had been dragged into the mud since the War.
These conversations in Christy’s room were altering his whole outlook on life, drawing him further and further away from the ideas of Joyce and her people. He resisted some of the extreme doctrines put forth calmly, as though they were accepted platitudes, by Christy’s friends, but he found himself agreeing more and more with their fundamental principles, and leaning heavily to their side of life’s argument.
These men, Henry Carvell, the war correspondent, Hubert Melvin, the novelist, Arthur Birchington, the critic, Nat Verney, the Labour member, W. E. Lawless, the political economist, and Bernard Hall, the editor of The New World—to name but a few of those who came to Christy’s rooms—differed from each other in a thousand ways of thought, never agreed in detail, engaged each other in endless controversy, over words, quotations, facts, ideas, philosophy, but Bertram, as an outsider and a younger man, seemed to discover in them some common denominator of character and quality.
What was it that bound them by invisible threads? Not any party creed, for some called themselves Liberals, and others Socialists, and others Individualists, and others declined all labels. Not any code of caste, for they belonged to different strata of English life, by birth and education.
Henry Carvell had been a Balliol man and a rowing Blue, before he disappeared into the wilds of Central Africa on his first expedition.
Hubert Melvin, who wrote satirical novels, had never been educated at all, according to his own account, and belonged to that vague, ill-defined middle-class which stretches around London from the mean streets of Brixton to the garden suburbs of Wimbledon, and treks northward from the artistic seclusion of St. John’s Wood to the outer wilds of Golders Green and Finchley.
Nat Verney, the Labour member, had wielded a pick in the mines of Lancashire before taking a course, out of Trade Union Funds, at the London School of Economics.
W. E. Lawless, the economist, had been President of the Union at Oxford, his father was the well-known Judge, and his mother the beautiful Gwendoline Ashley, daughter of the actor.
Bernard Hall, whose editorship of The New World had founded something like a new school of English journalism—critical, scholarly, pledged to international peace, scornful of popular clamour and political insincerity, had been educated in France and Switzerland, and his swarthy face, his dark, brooding eyes, and the passionate temperament which he tried to hide under a mask of irony, came from a French mother and a Colonel of Seaforth Highlanders, his father.
A strangely assorted crowd, not more like each other in experience and heritage than others who drifted into Christy’s rooms. What, then, brought them together, and inspired them with some common quality and purpose?
Bertram thought he had found the key to the puzzle in the word “Tolerance.” These men were wonderfully tolerant of things that divide other men—religion, race, social environment. Henry Carvell had been brought up as a Catholic, Christy was an advanced sceptic on all religion, Lawless, a Christian Scientist. They had no race hatreds. At a time when the English people, and especially English women, continued to keep the hate fires burning against “the Hun” who had caused such agony in the world, these friends of Christy’s denounced the Peace Treaty as an outrage, because of its harsh terms to the beaten enemy, raged against the continuance of the blockade which had forced the Germans to accept its “humiliations” and “injustice”—
“It’s new in our code,” said Carvell, “to make war on women and children,”—and they believed that by generosity the German people could be induced to abandon their militarism and link up with a peaceful democracy in Europe.
There were times when Bertram, listening to this talk, felt uneasy, guilty of something like treachery. These men were too tolerant. They seemed more sensitive, sometimes, to the sufferings of the German people than to the sacrifice of their own. He quarrelled with them for that, and was beaten every time in argument because he found himself yielding to their sense of chivalry, to their belief in the “common man,” to their faith in the ultimate commonsense of an educated democracy, to their hatred of cruelty.
No, it was not tolerance that he found the binding link between them, for they were violently intolerant of those whom they called “reactionaries”—all men not in agreement with themselves—arrogantly intolerant of ignorance and stupidity in high places. What seemed to bind them in intellectual sympathy was hatred of cruelty, to humble men, to women and children, to primitive races, even to animals and birds. They were instinctive and educated Pacifists, believing in the power of the spirit, rather than in physical force, in civilisation rather than in conflict, in liberty and not in oppression, in free-will, and not in discipline.
“Discipline is death,” said Christy, and when Bertram cried out against that as blasphemy, he consented to modify his statement by admitting the necessity of “self-discipline,” based on understanding and consent, but not imposed by external authority.
“We must kill the instinct of cruelty in the human brain,” said Bernard Hall, of The New World, and the flame in him leapt through his cold mask. “We must give up teaching our children the old cave-man stuff, about soldier heroes and hunters of beasts. We must make it a public shame for women to be seen wearing the plumage of lovely birds.”
This hatred of cruelty was at the bottom of their arguments about the Peace Treaty. It coloured their views on India, Ireland, Egypt, the exploitation of Africa, the Negro problem in the United States, the unemployed problem in England, the relations between Capital and Labour, even the question of Divorce.
It was all very difficult. … It would be more difficult with Joyce, if he allied himself definitely with this group of men and their philosophy. He felt they were trying to “convert” him, to win him over wholly to their side.
“You ought to join us,” said Nat Verney, the Labour member. “Labour has need of lads like you. The younger Intellectuals.”