The Balliols (34 page)

In consequence his memories ofthat August were London ones;
of scare headlines: of newspaper boys announcing sensation upon sensation: of rumours: of men in his club who had this, that or the other thing, on the very best authority. They were such memories that he shared with a million other Londoners. There were those other ones that were personal to himself.

There was the Bank Holiday Monday, with war practically certain; with Ruth suddenly flinging down the paper on the breakfast table, rising to her feet, her meal half finished, walking over to the window, leaning there, her head on her hand, staring at the garden. Francis saying “I suppose this means I shan't be able to have my holiday in France”; Ruth swinging round from the window, on her face a look of anger that was almost hatred. “Your holiday!” then turning back to stare out of the window. Francis's mouth gaped wide, as though he had been struck across the face. Jane stretching out a consoling hand: “Darling, you shall have the loveliest holiday when it's over.”

There was the first board-meeting of Peel & Hardy. As he passed through the counting-house on his way to the board-room, he found half the staff grouped round a khaki-clad figure. He paused, for an explanation.

“It's Walker, sir, he's been called up. He's come to say goodbye to us.”

In his short-tunicked, baggy-trousered, high-collared uniform, he looked very much as he had done seven years earlier when he had appealed to the board for a rise of wages. There was the same roguish twinkle in his eye. Though his hair had been clipped close where it would show beneath his hat, the front lock still curled with an auburn daring.

Balliol shook him by the hand.

“I'd no idea you were a reservist.”

“I'm not, sir. A terrier; joined up last year; thought as ‘ow it'd get me a good ‘oliday fer nothink. Seems like I'm getting it.”

Balliol recounted the incident in the board-room afterwards. Lord Huntercoombe nodded his head sagely.

“I remember him; liked the look of him. A rascal. I like rascals. Not enough of 'em nowadays. Everyone too well-behaved. No spirit. I suggest that as he's the first man from this office to join the colours, the board should make him a present of five pounds. He won't be the first to go. My boy's in camp. His commission will be through now any day.”

On his way back that evening Balliol saw a huge crowd gathered round a platform in Trafalgar Square. The platform was decorated with the Union Jack and the flags of France, Belgium, Russia. A dozen or so persons were seated upon the platform. Several of their faces were familiar to Balliol. There were two Cabinet ministers, a Conservative ex-minister. There was the Bishop of Banchester; a nonconformist publicist; a couple of Socialists; a prominent Trades Union official. It was a gathering representative of the main half-dozen currents of English thought. A tall, strong-featured woman was speaking. She wore a tailor-made coat and skirt. As she spoke, she kept her hand in her coat pocket. Her voice was clear-toned; the sentences short, tense, banged home, one after the other: as a shoemaker bangs nails into a sole.

Balliol stopped. It was nearly a year since he had seen his sister. They had never really liked each other. He knew he had no right to blame her for Lucy's accident; but he did. She knew he did: and she resented it. Their meetings had been less and less frequent, more and more formal, till they had become little more than an occasional “duty” dinner. The last two invitations she had declined. She was too busy, she had said. He could well believe it. Speaking here, heckling there; scarcely ever long out of the press; harried by the “cat and mouse” act; a political refugee. But now apparently all that was over. She had called down the curtain. All her energies, all the scope of her organization were flung into the war.

He listened to her speech.

“We must close the ranks. Three weeks ago those who stood before you now were, in our different ways, sworn enemies of one another. We were opposed by irreconcilably hostile points of view. We were prepared to fight with our last breath for what we held and still hold to be the truth. To-day, in the face of a greater danger, a more ruthless foe, we stand united. We have forgotten our points at issue. We have only one enemy; a common enemy. Till that enemy is broken and humbled we shall fight side by side. We must close the ranks.”

From the huge crowd rose a swelling murmur of applause. Yes, she could move audiences, all right. She was strong and she spoke the truth. She had no axe to grind. She was an important woman, he supposed. One of the people who influenced events. It was hard to realize that one's sister should be somebody that mattered.

He found, on his return, in the hall a large canvas kit-bag. It was stamped with the letters I.C.O.T.C.

“What
is
the meaning of this?” he asked.

But he did not need telling. He read the reply in the eager, excited expression of Hugh's face.

“When do you go?” he asked.

“Not to camp for another fortnight. There'll be some preliminary training in the Inns of Court depot at Lincoln's Inn. Then we go to Berkhamsted. I stay here till then. I shall probably get my commission in November.”

“We must try and make things nice for you.”

His son! The Inns of Court; that kit-bag in the hall. An officer in November, and then.… But quite likely the war would be over before then.

Every evening before taking his bath and changing into his velvet dinner-jacket he spent half an hour or so with Helen, telling her a story: some adaptation of Grimm and Andersen: a long serial story that wandered on from evening to evening till he had quite forgotten how the story had begun, where or with what characters. He took care to end upon an atmosphere of suspense, so that the next day he should be able to pick up the thread of the narrative. Helen would say, “The prince was just going to be bewitched by the ogre. Quick, daddy, what happened?” Balliol would recount the episode of the ogre. By the time he had finished that, he would be in his stride and able to think of something else.

He would devise episodes for about twenty minutes. “Now it's time for you to say your prayers and go to sleep.” She would jump out of bed, kneel down beside him and repeat her prayers.

This evening, as she knelt, he checked her. “I want you to alter your prayer. I want you, when you get to Hugh, to add ‘who is going to be a soldier, please bring him back safe to us.'“

Helen frowned, memorizing the sentence as though it were a lesson, repeating it over to herself; then bent her head forward into her hands.

“Anyhow, the war won't touch her,” thought Balliol.

She was, it seemed, the only member of the family whom it wouldn't. One morning, half-way through the month, Ruth came down to breakfast with a set, resolute expression on her face.

“It's no good,” she announced. “I can't stand this any more. It's driving me mad. I can't sit about here doing nothing. I've got to do something.”

“What are you going to do,” asked Francis, “sew shirts for soldiers?”

“I don't know what I'm going to do, exactly. I'm going to Aunt Stella. She'll find something for me to do.”

Her mother was about to protest, but Balliol checked her. It was the best thing that she could do, Stella would be able to find something for her: was the one woman who could.

When war broke out, she had an organization ready made that she could put at the disposal of war services. During those first weeks of the war, when everyone wanted to do something and nobody knew what, she was the one person who seemed able to direct their enthusiasm into appropriate channels. She was the chairman of innumerable committees. Letter after letter bearing her signature appeared in the daily Press, suggesting the various ways in which women might be useful. The Suffragettes were the first organized group of women since the days of Boadicea. Their organization was a nucleus from which the main body of woman's war work might be attacked.
Punch
had a cartoon of Kitchener and Stella Balliol standing side by side; the one was beckoning to the men, the other to the women. Each pointed towards a road that, littered in the middle distance with signs of war, led to a shadowly effulgent group of towers labelled Victory. This cartoon was displayed with great prominence in recruiting offices, and outside village halls. No one recalled that three months earlier Stella had been caricatured by the same hand as a wild-haired, ragged-skirted, pince-nezed fanatic, waving a mallet in one hand and a firebrand in the other, to whom an exasperated woman attired according to the dictates of middle-aged suburbanism pointed the finger of ignorant scorn. The caption ran: “If you knew the harm you were doing to
my
cause!” Balliol wondered whether Stella derived an ironic entertainment from the comparison. Probably she was unaware of it. She had a job to do and was busy doing it.

It was the first time that Ruth had visited her aunt's office in the Temple. In consequence, she did not notice, as Lucy would have done, one of the first differences that the war had caused. Miss Draft was no longer seated in the front office. During the last two years Stella, remembering the earlier split that had come into the Union, had held herself a little apart from the central organization. She had worked beside rather than with it; suspecting that a time might come when she would value her independence; when she might want to act alone.

She was glad of her independence when the war began. There
had been several clearly marked points of view at the first committee meeting. There were those who, in view of the Movement's close connection with the Independent Labour Party, were in favour both of opposing the war and taking the opportunities that the war provided of attacking a government that would have its hands half tied. Another section was wholly for the war, was resolved to prosecute this war with all its power, to turn the Movement's paper into an organ for patriotic propaganda, to conduct anti-German and recruiting meetings throughout the country in the same way that they had before conducted suffrage meetings. To both these policies Stella was opposed. To the first for the reason that her whole upbringing had taught her that in time of war there is only one attitude for a patriot: “My country, right or wrong.” The second because she was convinced that such a campaign would sooner or later prove more of a nuisance than a help.

“We must work,” she had asserted, “not independently, but with the government. We must behave as the Conservative politicians are behaving. We must say to them, ‘How can we help you? When? Where?‘ We must show them in what ways we can help them. The war has got to be won. Nothing matters, nothing can matter till it has been won.”

That was how she had argued. She had thought it better not to voice the argument, to her very potent, but whose expression at this moment would be misunderstood, that the Suffragettes, by abandoning their struggle now, would find themselves at the end of the war in an unassailable position. They would have proved their loyalty and their capacity. They would be entitled to their reward. The country would be on their side. In times of war bribes were offered to neutral countries to remain neutral; or to exchange their neutrality for an alliance. The vote was the price which the Suffragettes would receive for their alliance. It would not be phrased that way. But that, in fact, was how the bargain stood.

“Those who think otherwise, can act in such a way as they think right,” said Stella. “But I and those who agree with me will work at the side of whatever government is in office till the war is over.”

She knew that her words would be quoted all over England; that her opinion would be taken as the expressed opinion of the Suffragettes. She would have a large following. Her voice would carry weight when the time for the dictation of terms came. She knew she would carry a large following; and that she would receive the assistance of many, not Suffragettes, who would be ready after the war, because she had led them through the war and earned their
loyalty, to stand at her side should she have need of them in a new campaign.

One old associate she did not, however, take with her. Miss Draft's belligerent spirit was not offered sufficient scope by a vague policy of co-operation. She wanted an active waging of the war. She was eager for a sub-editorship of the new patriotic paper. She devised fierce headlines to stimulate recruiting. She urged women to shun the society of those men of military age who had not offered themselves for service. “No kisses for cowards!” was one of her happiest slogans. She spent two very enjoyable afternoons presenting to such civilians as appeared to her to be between the ages of nineteen and forty a posy of white feathers.

“I'm glad,” was Stella's comment, “that you can still find an outlet for your dislike of the male sex.”

Her place was taken by a brisk, college-trained young woman in spectacles and overall. Her manner was like an advertisement saying, “Nothing of that sort here!“ You were given to understand that apart from office hours she was an attractive girl but that you would never be privileged to see her exercising her attraction; and that because you had exchanged a few sentences with her in an office you were not to imagine that you were introduced. She gave visitors—and the office was so crowded with visitors that the lease of a larger office was in an advanced stage of negotiation—to understand that she was the exceedingly busy mouthpiece of exceedingly busy people; that it was unlikely that she
would
be able to do anything for the applicants, but that the applicant's one chance was a concise brevity. There was, in her opinion, little likelihood of her principal being able to give Miss Ruth Balliol three minutes of her time.

“I think she will. She's my aunt, you know.”

“Oh, in that case.…”

The secretary looked at her suspiciously, then hurried towards the door marked “Private.” She was back almost before she had had time to close the door behind her.