"I should change my metaphor," said Ascher. "It is not a case of a body where the heart pumps blood into the arteries, but of springs which make brooks, brooks which flow into streams, which in their turn feed great rivers. Now those springs will be frozen. In a million places of which you and I do not even know the names, credit will be frozen suddenly.

There will be no water in the brooks and streams. The rivers will run dry."

Ascher had asked for my sympathy. I did my best to give it.

"It's a tremendous responsibility for you," I said, "and men like you.

But you'll pull through. The whole thing can't collapse, simply can't.

It's too big."

"Perhaps," said Ascher, "perhaps. But it is not that side of the matter which I wish to speak to you about. You will forgive me if I say that you can, hardly understand or appreciate it. What I want to say to you is something more personal. I want"--Ascher smiled wanly--"to talk about myself."

"You stand to lose heavily," I said. "I see that."

"I do not know," said Ascher, "whether at the end of a week I shall own one single penny in the world. I may very well have lost everything.

But if that were all I should not trouble much. Merely to lose money--but----"

He stopped speaking, and for a long while sat silent The clock behind me chimed again. It was half past two.

"I suppose," said Ascher, "that you have always thought of me as an Englishman."

"To tell you the truth," I said, "I've never thought whether you are an Englishman or not. I wasn't interested. I suppose I took it for granted that you were English."

"I am a German," said Ascher. "I was born in Hamburg, of German parents.

All my relations are Germans. I came over to England as a young man and went into business here. My business--I do not know why--is one to which Englishmen do not take readily. There are English bankers of course, but not very many English financiers. Yet my particular kind of banking, international banking, can best be carried on in England. That is why I am here, why my business is centred in London, though I myself am not an Englishman. I am a German. Please understand that. My brother is a general in the German Army. My sister's sons are in the German Army and Navy. My blood ties are with the people from whom I came."

I realised that Ascher was stating a case of conscience, was perhaps asking my advice. It seemed to me that there was only one thing which I could advise, only one possible course for Ascher to take. Whatever happened to his business or his private fortune he must be true to his own people. I was about to say this when Ascher raised his hand slightly and stopped me.

"I want you to understand," he said, "my blood ties are with the people from whom I came; but I am now wholly English in my sympathies. I see things from the English point of view, not from the German. I am sure that it will be a good thing for the world if England and her Allies win, a bad thing if Germany is victorious in the war before us. Yet the blood tie remains. Who was the Englishman who said, 'My country, may she always be right, but my country right or wrong'? It seems to me a mean thing to desert my country now, even although I have become a stranger to her. Is it not a kind of disloyalty to range myself with her enemies?"

Again Ascher paused. This time I was less ready to answer him.

"I have also to consider this," he went on, "and here I get to the very heart of my difficulty. I have lived most of my life here, and I have built up my business on an English foundation. I have been able to build it up because I had ready made for me that foundation of integrity which your English merchants have established by centuries of honest dealing.

Without that--if the world had not believed that my business was English, and therefore stable, I could not have built at all or should have built with much greater difficulty. My bank is English, though I, who control it, am not. If I go back to my own people now, now when it seems treachery to desert them, the whole machinery of the vast system of credit which I guide will cease to work, will break to fragments. Of my own loss I say nothing, indeed I think nothing. But what of the other men, thousands of them who are involved with me, whose affairs are inextricably mixed with mine, who have trusted not me, but my bank, trusted it because it is an English inst.i.tution? And it is English. Have I the right to ruin them and to break up my bank, which belongs to your nation, of which in a sense I am no more than a trustee for England? You understand, do you not? My bank is just as certainly of English birth as I am of German birth. Yet it and I are one. We cannot be divided. What am I to do?"

Ascher was asking questions; but I did not think that he was asking them of me. I felt that it was my part to listen, not to answer. Besides what could I answer? Ascher had given me a glimpse of one of those intolerable dilemmas from which there is no way of escape. The choice between right and wrong, when the n.o.bler and baser parts of our nature are in conflict, is often very difficult and painful. But there are times--this was one of them--when two of the n.o.bler, two of the very n.o.blest of our instincts, are set against each other. When we can only do right by doing wrong at the same time, when to be loyal we must turn traitors.

When Ascher spoke again he seemed to have drifted away from the subject of the coming war, the financial catastrophe and his own trouble. I did not, for some time, guess where his words were leading.

"I have been a very careful observer of English life," he said, "ever since I first came to this country, and no cla.s.s in your nation has interested me more than you minor gentry, the second grade of your aristocracy."

"Often spoken of as the squirearchy," I said. "It is generally supposed to be the most useless and the least intelligent part of the community.

It is rapidly disappearing, which, I daresay, is a fortunate thing."

"Your greater n.o.bility," said Ascher, "is modernised, is necessarily more or less cosmopolitan. It has international interests and is occupied with great affairs. It has been forced to accept the standard of ethics in accordance with which great affairs are managed. Your merchants and manufacturers have their own code, by no means a low one, and their theory of right and wrong. Between these two cla.s.ses come the men with lesser t.i.tles or no t.i.tles at all, families which spring from roots centuries deep in the soil of England, men of some wealth, but not of great riches. They have their own standard, their code, their peculiar touchstone for distinguishing fine conduct from its imitation, their ethic."

"Yes," I said, "I can understand your being interested in that. It is a survival of a certain antiquarian value. It is the quaintest standard of conduct imaginable, totally unreasonable and inconsistent. But it exists. There are some things which a gentleman of that cla.s.s will not do."

"Exactly. These men--may I say you, for it is you I am thinking of. You have your sense of honour."

I never was more surprised in my life than I was when Ascher said that to me. Nothing that I have ever said or done in his company could possibly have led him to suppose that I am a victim of that outworn superst.i.tion known as the honour of a gentleman.

"You have an instinct," said Ascher, "inherited through many generations, a highly specialised sense, now nearly infallible, for knowing what is honourable and what is base. I do not know that any of my countrymen have that sense. I am sure that the cla.s.s to which I belong has not. We look at things in a different way."

"A much better way," I said, "more practical."

"Yes, more practical. Better perhaps in the sense of being wiser. But I have a wish, an odd fancy if you like, to see things your way, to guide my conduct according to your standard of honour."

As well as I could make out Ascher was asking me to decide for him on which horn of his infernal dilemma he was to impale himself, and to base my decision on a perfectly absurd and arbitrary set of rules for conduct, none of which could by any possibility be made to apply to a situation like his.

"My dear Ascher," I said, "I can't possibly judge for you."

"You could judge if it were your own case," he said. "You could certainly judge then. Have you ever in your life been in the smallest doubt, even for a moment, about the way of honour, which it is?"

"That is all very well," I said; "I quite admit I do know that. I generally do the other thing, but I know what I ought to do according to the ridiculous standard of my cla.s.s. But I don't know what you ought to do. That's a different thing altogether."

"Because I am not of your cla.s.s? not a gentleman?"

"Don't talk nonsense," I said. "There aren't any gentlemen left. The species is extinct. The very name of it is vulgarised. You're as near being one as anybody I know. And that has nothing to do with it.

Gentleman or not, you've go to decide for yourself. No man living can do it for you."

"Your cla.s.s would decide for me if I belonged to it," said Ascher. "The collective wisdom of your cla.s.s, the cla.s.s instinct. It would make me certain, leave me in no doubt at all, if only I belonged to it, were one of you. The choice I have to make----"

Ascher paused.

"It's a nasty choice to have to make. You've got to be disloyal either way you go. That's what it comes to."

"There is no other way," said Ascher sadly, "no third way."

"Not that I can see."

There was, in fact, a third way, though I did not see it at the time.

Mrs. Ascher discovered it. I heard of it two days later.

CHAPTER XVIII.

No one has greater respect and admiration for Ascher than I have.

I respect his ability. I admire his cool detachment of mind and his unfailing feeling for justice. I recognise in him a magnanimity, a certain knightliness which is very rare. But it is vain to pretend that I can ever regard Ascher as an intimate friend. I am never quite comfortable in his company. He lacks something, something essential. He lacks a sense of humour.

No one in England--no one I suppose in Europe--wanted to make jokes during that critical week which followed my interview with Ascher. The most abandoned buffoon shrank from jesting when every morning brought a fresh declaration of war by one great power on another. But even under such circ.u.mstances the sense of the ridiculous survives--a thing to be carefully concealed--in those who are fortunate enough to possess it Ascher has no sense of the ridiculous. He sees men and women clad in long, stately robes moving through life with grave dignity like Arab chiefs or caliphs of Bagdad. He sees their actions conditioned and to some extent controlled by the influences of majestic inhuman powers, the genii of eastern tales, huge, cloud-girt spirits of oppressive solemnity. In reality most people wear motley all day long and the fairy powers are leprechauns, tricksy, irresponsible sprites, willing enough to make merry with those who can laugh with them; but players of all Puck's tricks on "wisest aunts telling saddest tales."

I sometimes think that it is Ascher's chivalry, his fine knightliness, which has killed his sense of humour. I cannot suppose that Sir Galahad found any delight in the quips of fools. His owl-like eyes, large with the wonder of Holy Grails, looked stupidly on faces wrinkled with merriment. King Arthur could never have talked as he did to Guinevere--Tennyson is my authority for the things he said--if he had not had in him the soul of an earnest member of a. league for the sympathetic study of social problems. Ascher is as chivalrous as any member of King Arthur's fellowship, and humour, if he ever had the sense of it, is dead in him. But perhaps he was born without it and is by nature hopelessly serious because he is a German. For the Germans never seem to be able to appreciate the fact that the grandiose is invariably comic, and that nothing in the world is more difficult than to stand toes to the line of the high heroic without stepping across it into the region of the ridiculous. I think of Wagner's "Parsifal," of Nietzsche's "Zara-thrusta," of the Kaiser Wilhelm's amazing "Weltauf-fa.s.sung," and it seems to me that such things could not be in any nation where one single man knew how to laugh.

If Ascher had in him the faintest glimmering of a sense of humour he would never have appealed to me, choosing the silent and ghostly middle of the night for the performance, to decide his point of honour for him.

What am I that he should imagine me capable of settling high questions of that kind? An expatriated Irishman, a dispossessed landlord, a man without one high ambition, a mere mocker of enthusiasm of every kind.

No one, unless he were absolutely blind to the ridiculous, would have consulted me on such a subject as the honour of a gentleman.

Yet, in her total lack of humour, Mrs. Ascher is as bad as her husband is. If such a thing were possible I should say that she is worse. There is, at all events, less excuse for her. She is not knightly, not very knightly, though she did champion the cause of poor, oppressed Ireland.