She began with the Irish Players, and the moment she mentioned them I knew what she was going to say.

"The one instance," she said, "the single example in the modern world of peasant art, from the soil, of the soil, redolent, fragrant of the simple life of men and women, in direct touch with the primal forces of nature itself. There is nothing else quite like those players and their plays. They are the self-revelation, of the peasant soul. From the whitewashed cabins of the country-side, from the streets of tiny, world-forgotten villages, from the islands where the great Atlantic thunders ceaselessly, these have come to call us back to the realities of life, to express again the external verities of art."

That is all very well. I agreed with Mrs. Ascher thoroughly about the art of Synge's plays, and Lady Gregory's and Yeats', and the art of the players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists nor the players are peasants or ever were. They are very clever, sometimes more than clever, members of the educated cla.s.ses, who see the peasants from outside just as I see them, as Mrs. Ascher would see them if she ever got near enough to what she calls the soil to see a peasant at all.

When Mrs. Ascher had finished with the Irish Players she went on, still in a white heat of excitement, to the attempt to revive the Irish language.

"Where else," she said, "will you find such devotion to a purely spiritual ideal? Here you have a people rising enthusiastically to fight for the preservation of the national language. And its language is the soul of a nation. These splendid efforts are made in defiance of materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price."

"The only flaw in that theory," I said, "is that the people who still have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least.

n.o.body ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an English-speaking middle cla.s.s, who never stop asking the Government to pay them for doing it."

That was the second occasion on which I came near quarrelling with Mrs.

Ascher. Yet I am not a man who quarrels easily. Like St. Paul's friends at Corinth, I can suffer fools gladly. But Mrs. Ascher is not a fool.

She is a clever woman with a twist in her mind. That is why I find myself saying nasty things to her now and then. I suppose it was Gorman who taught her to be an Irish patriot. If she had been content to follow him as an obedient disciple, I should have put up with all she said politely. But, once started by Gorman, she thought out Ireland for herself and arrived at this amazing theory of hers, her artistic children of light in death grips with mercantile and manufacturing materialists. No wonder she irritated me.

Ascher saved us from a heated argument. Dinner was over. He had smoked his half cigarette. He rose from his chair.

"I expect Mr. Wendall is waiting for us," he said to Mrs. Ascher.

Her face softened as he spoke. The look of fanatical enthusiasm pa.s.sed out of her eyes. She got up quietly and left the room. Ascher held the door open for her and motioned me to follow her. He took my arm as we pa.s.sed together down a long corridor.

"Mr. Wendall," he said, "is a young musician who comes to play to us every week. He is a man with a future before him. I think you will enjoy his playing. We are going to the music room."

We went through a small sitting-room, more fully furnished than any other in Ascher's house. It looked as if it were meant to be inhabited by ordinary human beings. It was reserved, so I learned afterwards, for the use of Ascher's guests. We ascended a short flight of stairs and entered the music room. Unlike the dining-room it was only partially lit. A single lamp stood on a little table near the fireplace, and there were two candles on a grand piano in the middle of the room. These made small spots of light in a s.p.a.ce of gloom. I felt rather than saw that the room was a large one. I discerned the shapes of four tall, curtainless windows. I saw that except the piano and a few seats near the fireplace there was no furniture. As we entered I heard the sound of an organ, played very softly, somewhere above me.

"Mr. Wendall is here," said Ascher.

He led me over to the fireplace and put me in a deep soft chair. He laid a box of cigarettes beside me and set a vase of spills at my right hand.

I gathered that I might smoke, so long as I lit my tobacco noiselessly, with spills kindled in the fire; but that I must not make scratchy sounds by striking matches. Mrs. Ascher sank down in a corner of a large sofa. She lay there with parted lips and half-closed eyes, like some feline creature expectant of sensuous delight. The light from the lamp behind her and the flickering fire played a strange game of shadow-making and shadow-chasing among the folds of her scarlet gown.

Ascher sat down beside her.

The organ was played very softly. I found out that it was placed in a gallery above the door by which we had entered. I saw the pipes, like a clump of tall spears, barely discernible in the gloom. There was no light in the gallery. Mr. Wendall was no doubt there and was able to play without seeing a printed score. I supposed that he was playing the music of the new Russian composer. Whatever he played he failed to catch my attention, though the sounds were vaguely soothing. I found myself thinking that Mrs. Ascher had no right to be furiously angry with the people of Belfast for making their churches comfortable. This was her form of worship, and never were any devotees more luxuriously placed than we were. If her soul can soar to spiritual heights from the depths of silken cushions, surely a linen-draper may find it possible to pray in a cushioned pew.

I was mistaken about the music I was listening to. Mr. Wendall was only soothing his nerves with organ sounds while he waited for us. When he discovered our presence he left the gallery and descended to the room in which we sat, by a narrow stairway. No greeting of any kind pa.s.sed between him and the Aschers. He went straight to the piano without giving any sign that he knew of our presence. I lit a cigarette and prepared to endure what was in store for me.

At first the new Russian music struck me as merely noisy. I found no sense or rhythm in it. Then I began to feel slightly excited. The excitement grew on me in a curious way. I looked at the Aschers. He was sitting nearly bolt upright, very rigid, in a corner on the sofa. She lay back, as she had lain before, with her hands on her lap. The only change that I noted in her att.i.tude was that her fists were clenched tightly. Mr. Wendall stopped playing abruptly. There was a short interval of silence, through which I seemed to feel the last chord that was struck vibrating in my spine.

Then he began to play again. Once more the feeling of excitement came on me. I am far from being a Puritan, but I suppose I have inherited from generations of sternly Protestant ancestors some kind of moral prejudice. I felt, as the excitement grew intenser, that I had discovered a new, supremely delightful kind of sin. There came to my memory the names of ancient G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses denounced by the prophets of Israel: Peor and Baalim, Milcom, Moloch, Ashtaroth. I knew why the people loved to worship them. I remembered that Milton had rejoiced in the names of these half-forgotten deities, and that Milton loved music.

No doubt he, too, understood this way of sinning and, very rightly, he placed the G.o.ds of it in h.e.l.l. Wendall, at the piano, stopped and began again. He did this many times. His music was loud sometimes, sometimes soft, but it did not fail to create the sense of pa.s.sionate deliciousness and, for a time, a longing for more of it.

After a while my senses grew numb, sated I suppose. I looked over at the Aschers. She still lay as she had lain at first, but her fists were no longer clenched. All her muscles seemed to be relaxed. Ascher had crept over close to her. He lay back beside her, and I saw that he held one of her hands clasped in his. His eyes were fixed intently on hers, and even as I watched I saw her lids droop before his gaze. She gave a long, soft sigh of satisfaction.

I realised that Ascher and his wife were lovers still, though they had been married for a score or more of years. That strange emotion, which touches human life with romance for a year or two and then fades into a tolerant companionship, had endured with them. In some way altogether unknown to me the music and all the art in which they delighted had the power of; stimulating afresh or re-creating again and again the pa.s.sion which drew them together. Under the influence of art they enjoyed a mystical communion with each other, not wholly spiritual, but like all mysticism, a mixture of the physical, the ecstasy of contact, actual or imagined, with yearnings and emotions in which the body has no part.

I suppose the music had its effect on me, too, gave me for a few moments a power of sympathy not usually mine. I understood Ascher as I had never understood him before. I knew that the man I had hitherto seen, austere, calm, intellectual, the great financier whom the world sought, was a man with a mask before his face; that accident and the excitement of the music had enabled me to see the face behind the mask. I understood, or supposed I understood, Mrs. Ascher, too. All her foolish fine phrases and absurd enthusiasms were like cries in which tortured creatures find some kind of relief from pain, or the low, crooning laughter of a young mother with her baby at her breast. They were the inevitable, almost hysterical gaspings of a spirit wrought upon over highly and over often by the pa.s.sion of romantic love. A mask hid the man's face. The woman was not strong enough to wear it.

CHAPTER XII.

It is difficult now, in 1915, to regard the things which happened during the first half of last year as events in any proper sense of the word.

But at the time they excited us all very much, and we felt that the whole future of the country, the empire, perhaps of the human race, depended on how the Government met the crisis with which it was faced.

It seems curious that we could have believed such a thing, but we did.

I remember quite distinctly the circ.u.mstances under which I first heard the news of the protest made by certain cavalry officers against what they supposed to be the Government's policy in Ulster. I am not, thank G.o.d, called upon to pa.s.s a judgment on that very tangled business, or to give any opinion about the rights or wrongs of either side. I do not even profess to know the facts. Indeed I am inclined to doubt whether there were any facts. In affairs conducted mainly by politicians there seldom are facts. There are statements, explanations, pledges and recriminations in great abundance; but facts are not to be discovered, for the sufficient reason that they are not there. What happened or seemed to happen was described as a plot, a mare's nest, an aristocratic conspiracy, an a.s.sertion of principle, a mutiny, a declaration of loyalty, and a newspaper scare, according to the taste of the person who was speaking. The safest thing to call it, I think, is an incident.

I went down to the club at twelve o'clock, intending to smoke a cigar and look at the picture papers before luncheon. I found Malcolmson in the outer hall. His head was bent over the machine which reels off strips of paper with the latest news printed on them. The machine was ticking vigorously, and I knew by the tense att.i.tude in which Malcolmson was standing that something very important must have happened. My first impulse was to slip quietly past and get away to the smoking room before he saw me. I like Malcolmson, but he is tiresome, particularly tiresome when there is important news. I crossed the hall cautiously, keeping an eye on him, hoping that he would not look round till I was safe.

Malcolmson has reached that time of life at which a man's neck begins to bulge over his collar at the back, forming a kind of roll of rather hairy flesh, along which the starched linen marks a deep line from ear to ear. I noticed as I pa.s.sed that Malcolmson's neck was far more swollen than usual and, that it was rapidly changing colour from its ordinary brick red to a deep purple. The sight was so strange and startling that I stopped for a minute to see what would happen next.

I have never heard of a man's neck bursting under pressure of strong excitement, but Malcolmson's looked as if it must break out in some way. While I was watching, the machine suddenly stopped ticking and Malcolmson turned round. His face was nearly as purple as his neck. His moustache, always bristly, looked as if it was composed of fine wires charged with electricity. His eyes were blazing with excitement.

"Come here, Digby," he said. "Come here and read this."

He caught up the paper which the machine had disgorged and allowed it to hang across his hands in graceful festoons. There seemed to me to be a great deal of it.

"I wish you'd tell me about it," I said. "I hate reading those things.

The print is so queer."

I knew that Malcolmson would tell me about it whether I read it for myself or not. There was no use getting a double dose of the news whatever it was.

"The d.a.m.ned Government's done for at last," said Malcolmson triumphantly, "and Home Rule's as dead as a door nail."

"Good," I said. "Now we shall all be able to settle down. How did it happen? Earthquake in Dublin? But that would hardly do it. Cabinet Ministers committed suicide unanimously?"

"The Army," said Malcolmson, "has refused to fire on us. I knew they would and they have."

"Were they asked to?" I said.

"Asked to!" said Malcolmson. "They were told to, ordered to. We've had our private information of what was going on. We've known all about it for a week or more. Belfast was to be bombarded by the Fleet. Two brigades of infantry were to cross the Boyne and march on Portadown.

The cavalry, supported by light artillery, were to take Enniskillen by surprise. We were to be mowed down, mowed down and sabred before we had time to mobilise. The most infamous plot in modern times. A second St. Bartholomew's ma.s.sacre. But thank G.o.d the Army is loyal. I cross to-night to take my place with my men."

An ill-tempered, captious man might have suggested that Malcolmson ought to have taken his place with his men--a regiment of volunteers I suppose--a little sooner. According to his own account, the peril had been real a week before, but was over before he told me about it. The Government which had planned the ma.s.sacre was dead and d.a.m.ned. The Army had refused to carry out the infamous plot. It seemed a mere piece of bravado, under the circ.u.mstances, to take up arms. But I knew Malcolmson better than to suppose that he wanted to swagger when swaggering was safe. His mind might be in a muddled state. Judging by the way he talked to me, it was very muddled indeed. But his heart was sound, and no risk would have daunted him.

"Let's have a gla.s.s of sherry and a biscuit," I said. "You'll want something to steady your nerves."

But Malcolmson, for once, for the only time since I have known him, was unwilling to sit down and talk. His train, supposing that he took the quickest route to Belfast, did not leave Euston till 8 or 9 o'clock at night; but he felt that he must be up and doing at once. He fussed out of the club, and for some time I saw no more of him.

I waited until the hall porter had cut up the slips of paper which fell from the clicking machine and pinned the bits to the notice boards. Then I read the news for myself. These machines are singularly unintelligent.

They mix up the items of news in a very irritating way. Sometimes a sheet begins with the a.s.sa.s.sination of a foreign prime minister, breaks off suddenly to announce the name of a winning horse, goes back to the prime minister, starts a divorce case abruptly and then gives a few Stock Exchange quotations. I hate news which comes to me in this disjointed way, and never attempt to learn anything from the machine until the hall porter has edited the sheets. He cuts them up, gets all the racing news on one board, the Stock Exchange and the Divorce Court on another and makes a continuous narrative of political news, a.s.sa.s.sinations, picturesque shipwrecks and such matters on the largest and most prominent of the notice boards.

I found when I did read that Malcolmson had built up a lofty structure on a very small foundation. Something had evidently happened among the soldiers stationed at the Curragh Camp; but the first account telegraphed over from Ireland left me in grave doubt. It was a question whether the men had actually been told to shoot Malcolmson and refused to obey orders; or had been asked, politely, if they would like to shoot Malcolmson and said they would rather not. The one thing which emerged with any sort of clearness was that Malcolmson would not be shot. This made my mind easy. I went into the dining-room and had some luncheon.

Early in the afternoon I collected six evening papers, three belonging to each side. I found the Unionist writers unanimous on two points. The Army had saved the Empire and the Government would be obliged to resign.

The Liberal scribes took another view of the situation. According to them the Army had been seduced from its loyalty by the intrigues of fascinating and fashionable Delilahs, but the will of the people must, nevertheless, prevail. Newspaper writers on the Liberal side are far more intelligent than their opponents. It was a stupid thing, in the early part of 1914, to talk about saving the Empire. No one at that time cared anything about the Empire. Very few people believed that it existed. It was worse than stupid to suggest that the Government would resign. The country was utterly weary of General Elections and was planning its summer holiday. Public sympathy was hopelessly alienated by that kind, of talk. On the other hand, the fashionable Delilah story was a brilliant invention. There is nothing dearer to the heart of the English middle cla.s.ses and working men than the belief that every woman with a dress allowance of more than 200 a year is a courtesan. The suggestion that these immoral Phrynes were bartering their charms for power to thwart the will of the people was just the sort of thing to raise a tempest of enthusiasm.

Almost anything might have happened if the Government had had the courage to follow up its advantage. Fortunately--from Malcolmson's point of view--it did not venture to shut up all women of t.i.tle, under fifty years of age, in houses of correction; a course which would have convinced the general public that Home Rule was a sound thing. It spent a fortnight or so contradicting everybody who said anything, including itself, and then apologised for being misunderstood.