Guy Renton (40 page)

After the dinner a small proportion of the gathering went to the Secretary's flat. He had a large living-room in the centre of which was a tall-backed chair. He sat in it like a heathen god and guests came up in turn to discuss his speech with him. It was a gay enough occasion, but once again Guy was conscious of an unhealthy, emotional undercurrent.

“Are you fairly high up in this?” he inquired of Rex.

Rex nodded. “How does it appeal to you?”

“I'm as much in the air as when I came here.”

Rex pursed his lips. “Um, perhaps you are: but that's inevitable. You asked me about masonry just now. You aren't one, are you? No, I thought as much. There's a parallel to this extent: no one knows much about masonry until he joins. He feels it's a good thing because he respects the men who he knows are masons. If you felt, for instance, after this evening, after seeing the kind of people who have joined us, that it's something you'd like to know a little more about . . .” Rex paused, looking at him interrogatively. Guy shook his head.

“I'm very sorry. I'm afraid I'm a great disappointment to you. But I have to go my own way.”

Thinking it over the next day, it seemed to him as fantastic as it had when he had read the green-covered pamphlet. The bulk of the men at the dinner no doubt considered themselves highly patriotic, far better citizens than people like himself. Yet actually their desire to reform the world was prompted far less by a desire to improve the lot of their country or their fellow men than by a dissatisfaction with their own positions. They were all of them in one way or another disappointed men; at least the leaders were. They were men of ability up to a certain point: as Rex had been; they all felt they had been ignored; and they refused to believe that the secondary position that they occupied was due to any inadequacy in themselves; it must be due to the inefficiency, the implied inequalities in the present system.

Yet there was, he felt at the same time, in many of the rank and file, a very definite idealism. That earnest bespectacled young man, for instance, was seriously concerned about the state of the world; wanted to do something about it and didn't quite know what. He had asked Guy if he were married. Guy shook his head. “Have you anyone dependent on you?” he had asked.

“No, no entanglements.”

“That means that you're the very kind of person that the Mistery needs: someone who can devote his whole life to it; who hasn't given hostages to fortune. I wish I were in your place; not of course that I resent those responsibilities: they are a privilege, the Controller explained that to me. But I wish I could do more.”

There was a look in his face that made Guy feel humble. All over the country, all over Europe, there were men like this who genuinely felt a need of service; it was on their idealism that the rebels based their
coups d'état:
they were the rank and file; and the Controllers, whoever they might be, saw to it that such men were kept always in the background, were never given authority, accepted orders but never issued them. That was, he suspected, what made this new type of demagogue so hard to defeat. Inspired by the most selfish, often the most base personal appetites, he appealed to noble and unselfish instincts; he exploited not what was lowest but what was best in human nature.

Between Rex and Franklin there was more in common than either would have cared to admit, and to each the Civil War in Spain gave a sense of purpose.

To Guy its outbreak had come as no particular surprise. For a long time previously he had received disquieting rumours from the Jerez wine shippers. “If I were you I should lay in as much sherry as you can,” one of the salesmen warned him. “No one can tell what's cooking. The Government is very weak: like the Kerensky Government. The same thing that happened in Russia may happen here, the extreme Left take over and Spain go Communist. In that case, the wine industry will be nationalized. Lay in all you can.”

Every week some fresh rumour had reached the office of the pace at which the machinery of government was breaking down: then came the news of Franco's
coup d'état
An excited and enthusiastic report reached him from his friends in Jerez. “This is marvellous. We have taken the Communists by surprise. We've beaten them to it; by the skin of our teeth. The take-over could not have been more smooth. If only it had been as smooth elsewhere, but it can only be a question of time.”

The
coup d'état
had come as no great surprise to Guy. But the course it followed did. He had not foreseen, he could not have foreseen, the strength of loyalist resistance, the consequent intervention, first of Italian troops and then of German airmen, with Russia tardily and sulkily giving the government half-hearted help, finally the enrolment of the International Brigade.

Franklin was jubilant.

“What did I tell you? Doesn't this justify everything I've said? Fascism leads to war: the aristocrats and landowners aren't going to resign without a fight: why should they? The people have had
to fight for every concession they've been ever granted: the party bosses stick together: Italy and Germany can't afford to have liberal opinions flourishing in the same continent. That would undermine their power. The showdown's come at last. Unless we support the government, democracy will be dead in Europe.”

He talked of the civil war not as a disaster, but as the prelude of a new dispensation. Guy's arguments were unavailing. “For a century and a half,” Guy said, “the Spaniards have been fighting among themselves. Why should this one civil war be so very different?”

“Because of the world situation. Two forces are in conflict: Fascism and Democracy. Spain is the battlefield. If we lose in Spain, we shall lose everywhere.”

“Suppose you were a Spaniard and saw your country going to pot; suppose you were convinced that the extreme Left of the government was going to take control, and establish a Communist régime as it did in Russia. Would you have sat still and let it happen?”

“There's no reason to believe it would have happened.”

“I can show you documents that were captured at Communist headquarters when Franco's men took over.”

“You could, I'm sure, and I'd answer that they were forgeries. Every belligerent issues that kind of propaganda. Look at all those German atrocities we used to hear about.”

“Quite a few of them were true.”

“Many more were not. I know there are arguments for the Franco side. I spend half my time answering them, but the essential fact is this, Fascist forces are trying to overthrow a freely-elected government; if Fascism wins in Spain, then it'll turn on France; before we know where we are Rex will be staging a
coup d'état
in London, with Himmler's S.S. troops to back him.”

Franklin was as busy now as he had been idle two years back, raising funds for medical supplies, organizing committees, public meetings, protest marches. “It's a great relief to have him so happily occupied,'' was Daphne's comment. “It gives me far more spare time to devote to Julia. I've neglected that girl in the past.”

She did not pretend to be an enthusiastic partisan, but she gave Franklin her support; she had bought a house in Chelsea, in Tedworth Square. She allowed him to use it for his meetings.

That winter in company with many million others, Guy listened to King Edward's Abdication speech. He listened to it alone. He could not believe that it was happening. For so long now he had thought of Edward as his future King, as the figurehead, the spokesman of his generation. They were of an age. George V had been his father's King: the embodiment of the ideals and the traditions of his father's generation. When he had listened eleven months earlier to the ticking of the clock upon the radio and the intermittent bulletin ‘the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close', he had a son's sense of loss; of tribute and gratitude and high regard.

This was a very different feeling; he was losing now not his father's King, but his; the man who had shared the ambitions and ideals of his own generation, the war-time generation; who had been made and shaped by the same forces, the same destiny, who had the same rebelliousness against stuffed shirt Torydom, the same impatience with obsolete tradition. When he had heard criticism of the Prince of Wales by the older generation, he had felt that in accepting the challenge of those criticisms he was defending his own world; the right of the man who had risked his life in action to decide on how to use the life he had been spared; the right to play hard if you worked hard.

He had looked forward to Edward's reign as the vindication, the apotheosis of his own generation's point of view. He had foreseen the triumphant success of his reign as the defence, the justification of the things he valued. For close on quarter of a century he had felt himself identified with the man who was to be his monarch. And now it was all over: a week of gossip, and his King an exile.

There were those of his friends who looked on this abdication as the betrayal of a trust. He was not one of them. He was not sure indeed that in this final act, Edward was not more supremely the spokesman of his age than ever he had been on his long tours of Empire. He had, by this one act, given his answer to the problem that more than any other had perplexed the men and women of the war-generation, the problem of ‘free love', the belief, in reaction against Victorian prudery and restraint, that love need not involve shackles. Edward had given his answer to that problem. Real love when it came did not admit a halfway house.

The speech ran to its close, and silence followed, as it had eleven months before. Guy sat there brooding, motionless, while the only man whom he would ever be able to think of as ‘his King' started his lonely journey to an unguessed destiny.

Next time Guy met Rex, he remembered Lucy's remark about the Mistery waiting for the time to ask the King to take over. He did not seriously believe that the Duke of Windsor had ever interested himself in the Mistery, if indeed he had even heard of it, but he wondered whether the change of monarch had had any effect upon Rex's plans. “Is the Mistery flourishing?” he asked.

“As far as I know.”

“If you don't know, who does?”

“As a matter of fact I know less than anyone. I've resigned.”

“But why?”

“It's a long story. One of the chief officers got divorced and had to resign.”

“What difference does a divorce make?”

“All the difference, in an organization like the Mistery. You have to be above suspicion. But I didn't quite like the way the chief body set about it. It was through this particular officer that I had come to join. I didn't want to stay on without him. And I was beginning to wonder whether the Mistery was down my street. I believe I'm on to something that is more my line.”

Politics, a training cadre, the New Party, the English Mistery. What would it be next, Guy wondered.

London was hung with flags, its shops were bright with coronation souvenirs, but a cloud of omen overhung the pageant. How much had happened since the Silver Jubilee of two years ago. Italian arms were conquering Abyssinia: the field-grey uniforms had crossed the Rhine; the British Navy, so it was rumoured, had
not dared to pit itself against Italian airmen. The Spanish Civil War was rousing increasingly violent emotion among neutrals. The Left Wing was clamouring for intervention. The slogan of ‘Unite against Fascism and War' had been replaced with a demand for a holy Popular Front war against the Rome-Berlin Axis. The ordinary Briton was being assured by the extremists of both sides that he could sit on the fence no longer, that he must make his choice between Tyranny and Freedom; each side calling itself Freedom and labelling its opponents Tyranny. The average Briton, confronted with the swastika on one hand and the sickle on the other, was unsure which he distrusted more. There was a cold civil war in England; friend was divided against friend, and family against family. The Rentons were not to be immune.

It came, the sudden showdown, without warning. Half a dozen sentences and the thing had happened. It took place in Guy's flat. Lucy and Rex had come up for the day. Lucy had been complaining that she never saw Franklin or Margery, so Guy had organized an impromptu lunch party. It should have been the friendliest of occasions: but no occasion was safe then. At any moment Spain might be discussed. The most innocent topic led to it.

Guy was remarking on the excellence of some of the South African wines.

“I was trying one of their sherries the other day. It was as good as any except the very best Spanish sherry.”

“What a good way of imposing sanctions,” Franklin said. “Put a prohibitive duty on all Spanish wine. You'd be helping a Dominion and cutting at a Franco source of revenue.”

“That's almost as silly,” Margery protested, “as refusing to play Wagner during the war.”

“Not at all. It couldn't help the Germans if we played Wagner, it couldn't harm them if we didn't. But it would hurt the Spanish rebels if they couldn't get foreign currency.”

“I don't really see why I should deprive myself of the pleasure of drinking Teo Pepe because there's a civil war in Spain,” she countered.

It was the kind of conversation that is begun innocently, and that some neutral usually and purposely sidetracks when it
threatens to become difficult. But there had been so many such conversations during the last nine months: they had ceased to be a bore and become an irritation. Guy had lost patience with it. He let the talk go on. It became acrimonious, Franklin persisting in his argument until Rex who had remained commendably silent for several minutes suddenly snapped out:

“If you feel so keen about this wretched war, why don't you follow the example of those other parlour pinks and enlist in the International Brigade?”

The answer came back like a volleyed tennis-ball. “As a matter of fact I have. But I didn't want to be dramatic over it.”