Sylvia & Michael Part 30

"Are you talking seriously?" Sylvia asked. "You can't really connote what you say."

Hazlewood indicated the room where they were dining.

"Which are the English diplomats?" he demanded.

"That's perfectly easy to tell," she replied.

"And why?" he went on. "Simply because they've made no concession to being in Nish at a moment of crisis. I invite you to regard my friend Harry Vereker. See how he defies any Horatian regret for lapsed years.

Positively he is still at Oxford. Can't you hear above all this clatter of cosmopolitanism in a pigsty the suave insistency of his voice impressing upon you by its quality of immutable self-a.s.surance that, whatever happens to the rest of the world, nothing vitally deformative ever happens to England?"

"But what has the voice of a secretary to do with the military abuse of Latin derivations?"

"Not much, I admit, except in its serene ruthlessness. An English officer compels a Latin verb to fit in with his notion of what a Latin verb ought to do just in the same way as he expects a Spaniard to regard with pleasure his occupation of Gibraltar: any protest by a grammarian or an idealistic politician would strike him as impertinent. Harry Vereker's voice is a still more ineradicable manifestation of the spirit. Listen! He is asking the waiter in Serbian for salt, but he does so in a way that reminds one of mankind's concession to animals in using forms of communication that the latter can understand. It is not to be supposed that the dog invented patting: Harry's Serbian is his way of patting the waiter: it is his language, not the waiter's. Personally I can't help confessing that I admire this att.i.tude to the world, and I only wish that it could be eternally preserved. The great historical tragedy of this war--I'm putting on one side for the moment the countless personal tragedies that are included in it, and trying to regard the war as Mr. Buckle regarded civilization--the great historical tragedy will be the Englishman's loss of his personality. When we look back at the historical tragedy of the fall of the Roman Empire, we think less of the _civis Roma.n.u.s sum_ than of the monuments of architecture, law, political craft, and the rest that remain imperishably part of human progress. In the same way a thousand years hence I a.s.sume that the British Empire will be considered to have played a part only second to the Roman Empire in the manifest results of its domination. But what has been lost and what will be lost is the individual Roman's att.i.tude and the individual Englishman's. Not all the remains of the Roman Empire have been enough really to preserve for us the indefinable flavor of being a Roman, and with much more material at his disposal I defy the perfect cosmopolitan of mixed Aryan, Mongol, and Semitic blood to realize a thousand years from now Harry Vereker's tone of voice in asking that waiter for the salt. No, no, the cosmopolitan of the future will turn aside from the records of the past and in Esperanto murmur sadly to himself that something is missing from his appreciation.

Perhaps I can ill.u.s.trate my meaning better if I compare the Athenians with the French. I feel that the art of both enduring through time to come will be enough. I have no regret for the personal att.i.tude of the Athenian, and in the same way I don't feel that the cosmopolitan of a thousand years hence will lose anything by not meeting the Frenchman of to-day. It is Athens and France rather than the Athenian or the Frenchman of which the world is enamoured. How often have I heard a foreigner say: 'The politics of England do not please me: I find it a brigand policy, but the individual Englishman is always a gentleman.' An individual Englishman like Byron is worth more to England than twenty Chamberlains or Greys, who yet have more right to represent their country: he comes as such a romantic surprise. A Frenchman like Lafayette is taken for granted. The word of an Englishman is proverbial; the perfidy of Albion equally so."

"And the Germans?" Sylvia asked.

"Oh, they have never been thought worthy of a generalization. We have apprehended them vaguely as one apprehends pigs--as a nation of gross feeders and badly dressed women drinking a mixture of treacle and onions they call beer, with a reputation for guttural peregrination and philosophy."

"Their music," Sylvia protested.

"Yes, that is difficult to explain. Yes, I think we must give them that; but when we remember Bach and Schumann, we must not forget Wagner and the German band."

"I think your characterization is rather crude," Sylvia said.

"It is crude. But there is no bygone civilization with which Germanic _Kultur_ can be compared. So as with any novelty one depends upon a sneer to hide one's own ignorance."

"The Italians interest me more," Sylvia said.

"The Italians seem to me rather to resemble the English, and naturally, because they are the most direct heirs of Rome. I'm bound to say that I don't believe in an imperial future for them now. It's surely impossible to revive Rome. They still preserve an immense capacity for political craft, but it is an egotism that lacks the sublime unconsciousness of English egotism. The Italians have never recovered from _Il Principe_ of Machiavelli. It's an eclectic statecraft; like their painting from Raphael onward, it's too _soigne_. Moreover, Italy suffers from the perpetual sacrifice of the southern Italian to the northern. The real Italians belong to the south, and for me the _risorgimento_ has always been a phenix rising from the ashes of the south; the bird is most efficient, but I distrust its aquiline appearance. One of the most remarkable surprises of this war has been the superior fighting quality--the more quickly beating heart--of the Neapolitans and Sicilians. I found the same surprising quality in the Greeks during the last Balkan war. To me, who regard the Mediterranean as still _the_ civilized sea of the world, the triumph of Naples has been a delight."

"And the Russians?" Sylvia went on.

"Ah, the future of Russia is as much an unknown quant.i.ty as the future of womanhood. Personally I am convinced that the next great civilization will be Slavonic, and my chief grudge against mortality is that I must die long before it even begins to draw near, for it is still as far away as Johannine Christianity will be from the Petrine Christianity to which we have been too long devoted. But when it does come, I am sure that it will easily surpa.s.s all previous civilizations, because I believe it will resolve the eternal dualism in humanity that hitherto we have expressed roughly by Empire and Papacy or by Church and State. I envisage Russia as containing the civilization of the soul, though G.o.d knows through what agony of blood and tears it may have to pa.s.s before it can express what it contains. In Russia there still exists a genuine wors.h.i.+p of the Czar as a superior being, and a nation that respects the divinity about a king is still as deep in the mire of fetichism as the most debased Melanesians. We wors.h.i.+p kings in England, I admit, but only sn.o.bbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our most exalted sn.o.bs dream of paying divine honors to kings.h.i.+p; we are too much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to an inherited consciousness of Caesarian excesses."

"And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia.

"Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers--a cocotte with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment.

Austria! rouged and raddled, plumped and corseted, a suitable mistress for that licentious but still tragic old buffoon who rules her."

"What a wonderful sermon on so slight a text as a friend's asking a Serbian waiter for salt," Sylvia said.

"Ah, you led me away from the main thread by asking me direct questions.

I meant to confine myself to England."

"_On peut toujours revenir aux moutons_" Sylvia said.

"New Zealand mutton, eh?" Hazlewood laughed. "Wasn't it a New Zealander who was to meditate upon the British Empire a thousand years hence amid the ruins of St. Paul's?"

"Well, go on," she urged.

"You're one of those listening sirens so much more fatal than the singing variety," he laughed.

"Oh, but I'm very rarely a good listener," she protested.

Hazlewood bowed.

"And don't forget that sirens have always an _arriere-pensee_," she went on. "However well you talk, you'll find that I shall demand something in return for my attention. Don't look alarmed; it won't involve you personally."

Sylvia was getting a good deal of pleasure out of his monologue; it was just what her nerves needed, this sense of being entertained while all the time she preserved, so far as any reality of personal intercourse was concerned, a complete detachment. She was quite definitely aware of wanting Hazlewood to exhaust himself that she might either bring her part of the conversation round to Michael or, at any rate, exact from him an excuse for lingering in Nish until Michael should come there. Now her host was off again:

"Have you ever thought," he was asking her, "about the appropriateness of our national animal--the British lion? We are rather apt to regard the lion as a bluff, hearty sort of beast with a loud roar and a consciousness of being the finest beast anywhere about. But, after all, the lion is one of the great cats. He's something much finer than the British bulldog, which, with most unnecessary self-depreciation, we have elected as our secondary pattern or prototype among the animals. There are few animals so profoundly, so densely, so hopelessly stupid as the bulldog. Its chief virtue is alleged to be its never knowing when it is beaten, but this is only an incidental ignorance merged in its ignorance of everything. Why a dog that approximates in character to a mule and in appearance to a hippopotamus should be accepted as the representative of English character I don't know. The attribution takes its place with some of the great fundamental mysteries of human conduct; it is comparable with those other riddles of why a chauffeur always waits till you get into the car again before he turns round, or why kidneys are so rare in beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, or why every man in the course of his life has either wanted to buy or has bought a rustic summer-house.

The lion, however, really is typical of the Englishman: somewhat blond and very agile, physically courageous, morally timid, fierce, full of domestic virtues, tolerant of jackals, generous, cunning, graceful, arrogant, and acquisitive: he seems to me a perfect symbol of the British race."

"Is your friend at the diplomats' table so very leonine?" Sylvia asked.

"Oh no, Harry is the individual Englishman; the lion represents the race."

"But the race is an acc.u.mulation of individuals."

"I say, don't listen too intelligently," Hazlewood begged. "It's not fair either to my babbling or to your own dinner."

"Well, I want to bring you back to the point you made when you talked about the historical tragedy of this war."

Hazlewood looked serious.

"I meant what I said. I've just come from the grave of what was England, and already the deeds at Gallipoli have taken on the aspect of a heroic frieze. We might have repeated Gallipoli here in Serbia, but we sha'n't; we've learned our lesson; I do not think that on such a scale such decorative heroism can ever happen again. Gallipoli saw the death of the amateur; and a conservative like myself feels the historical tragedy of such a death. I suppose there are few people who would be prepared to argue that such a spirit ought to be purchased at such a price, and yet I don't know--I believe I would. I wasn't in Flanders at the beginning; but I imagine the same spirit existed there. Don't you remember the childlike, amateurish pleasure that all the soldiers took in being ferried across the Channel without anybody's knowing they had gone? The successful secrecy compensated them for all that h.e.l.l of Mons.

You'll never again hear of that childlike enjoyment. Very soon we shall have conscription, and from that moment the amateur in a position of responsibility who sacrifices any man's life to his own sense of exterior form will become a criminal. Surely it is an appalling tragedy that we sha'n't be able to carry on such a war as this without conscription? England, our England, disappears with conscription: nothing will ever be the same again. They accused us of decadence, but had you seen that landing last April--had you seen that immortal division of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, and Welshmen literally dyeing the sea with their blood, you could never have thought of decadence again. And yet, mark my words, so much of England was lost upon that day that already the unthinking herd led by the newspapers, which are always waiting to hail the new king, talks of the landing as famous chiefly for the Australian share in it. My G.o.d, it enrages me to read about the Australians when I think of that deathless dead division.

Whatever else may happen in this war, whatever our fate at the hands of intriguing politicians and backbiting generals, England was herself upon that day: it stands with Trafalgar and Agincourt in a trinity of imperishable glory."

"But why do you say that so much of England was lost? You don't think we shall disgrace ourselves henceforth in this war?"

"We have already done so morally in failing to come to the help of the Serbians. Gallipoli turned us into professionals, and though I'm not saying that there is a single good professional argument in favor of helping Serbia, I still believe against all professionals that we shall pay for our failure in bitter years of prolonged war. The Dardanelles could have been forced. What stopped it? Professional jealousy at home."

"It's a hard thing of which to accuse the people at home."

"It was a hard thing to land that day at Sedd-el-bahr, but it was done.

No, we've fallen a prey to the glamour of Teutonism, and of being expedient and Hunnish. By the time the war is over I don't doubt we shall be a very pretty imitation of the real article that we're setting out to destroy. But, thank Heaven, we shall always be able to point to Mons and to Antwerp and to Gallipoli: though we are fast forgetting to be gentlemen, we've already forgotten more than the Germans ever dreamed of in that direction. Mind you, I'm not attempting to say that we haven't got to hit below the belt: we have, because we are fighting with foul fighters; but that is what I conceive to be the historical tragedy of this war--the debas.e.m.e.nt of our ideals in order that we may compete with the Germans, and with the old men in morocco-chairs at home, and with the guttural press. I remember how the waning moon of dawn came up out of Asia while we were still waiting for news of the Suvla landing.

There was a tattoo of musketry over the sea, a lisp of wind in the sandy gra.s.s; and in a moment of apprehensive chill I divined that with a failure at Suvla this waning moon was the last moon that would rise upon the old way of thinking, the rare old way of acting, the old, old merry England built in a thousand years."

"But a greater England may arise from that failure."

"Yes, but it won't be our England. The grave of our England was dug by the Victorians; this generation has planted the flowers upon it; the monument will be raised by the new generation. Oh yes, I know, it's an egotistical regret, a superficial and sentimental regret, if you will, but you must allow some of us to cherish it; otherwise we could not go on. And in the end I believe history will indorse the school of thought I follow. In the end I'm convinced that it will blame the men who failed to see that England was great by the measure of her greatness, and that the real way to win this war was by what were sneeringly called side-shows. All our history has been the alternate failure and triumph of our side-shows; we made ourselves what we are by side-shows."

Hazlewood swept from the table the pile of crumbs he had been building while he was talking, and smiled at Sylvia.

"It's your turn now," he said.