I SAID that Florence Barclay was an equivalent for Turgenev. But I could wish that, eleven years ago, I had elected to read some popular writer in whom I could trace a closer parallel, a similarity of plot as well as atmosphere. For it would not be difficult to find in the Family Herald stories that would in synopsis seem to resemble very closely those of Turgenev. The plot of On the Eve or A House of Gentlefolk might well have appealed to the writer of slushy sentimental romances. In the type of story that Turgenev wrote, the story of memory and regret, the boundary between excellence and rubbish is very narrow, and only a lax sentimentalist or a man of genius would attempt to tell it. Talent would be frightened by the simple triangle of Spring Floods and of Smoke. It would seem ordinary, as would that of Rudin and The House of Gentlefolk. A man’s wife is unfaithful. He leaves her, and in time, believing her to be dead, falls in love with a young girl and proposes marriage. But the wife returns and his happiness is shattered. “What!” says the professional novelist, “that old theme; the person who returns from the grave at the eleventh hour and upsets everything. But that has been done a hundred times. It is impossibly vieux jeu. In farce, in light opera, perhaps, but in serious drama....” The writer of talent must take unusual and difficult situations. He must find originality in the employment of new material. The broad field has been ploughed too many times, has yielded too many harvests. It must lie fallow for a while.

I remember talking once with W. L. George of the eternal appeal of a good story, and of how the first business of the novelist was to tell a story. “Possibly,” he said, “but I will tell you a true story, a universal story, and you will not dare to write it. It is the story of Edwin and Angelina. Edwin is a clerk in the office of Angelina’s father. He is sent up to the house with messages for his employer, and passes Angelina in the hall. Their eyes meet and he knows that he is in love. A few days later there is a football match between the office team and that of a neighbouring factory. Edwin wins the match with a brilliant last-minute goal, but in doing so he breaks his arm. Angelina is watching the match. Edwin becomes her hero. Soon afterwards they again meet in the hall. She asks him about his arm. They talk together, and discover in a short while that they are in love. Of course, Angelina’s father refuses to countenance the match. He has his own plans for his daughter. The lovers are forbidden to meet. Angelina falls sick. They send her to the South of France; but she grows worse. She is listless and despondent. The doctor says that unless she is given an interest in life she will die. All that money can provide is showered on her. But she becomes thinner and paler every day. At last the mother intervenes, ‘She must see Edwin.’ The father tardily assents. There is a reunion of the lovers, and the miracle happens. The book ends with marriage bells. It is a true story,” he concluded, “but you wouldn’t dare to write it.”

I agreed. “Only two people could write it,” I said. “Turgenev, or a merchant of popular fiction.”

Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narrative are so smooth, so clear, and bring the river bed so close to us that we hardly realise how deep they are. It is not till we see the blunders that others make with the Turgenev technique that we realise to what an extent he is supreme. And it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene twilight that harmonises and consoles. It is of these things that Turgenev speaks—simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love. A man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial become the excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant, after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in lesser writers a series of devices.

And yet it is thus that life is always getting its effects; sometimes with our co-operation. We return after certain months to the ball-room where we first encountered love, to the restaurant where we first spoke of love, to the woods that were the shelter and the screen of our first love-making. But at such moments the scene has been set too carefully; the climax is manufactured. We have known beforehand the nature of the emotion we are to experience; we force it to the required pitch of intensity. And that is bad technique. Only if we stand aside and let life tell our story for us, shall we happen on the inevitable, the unpremeditated moment.

In the early spring of 1921 I wrote a sketch of an ex-officer; it was an attempt to interpret the spirit of post-war disillusionment, and I selected as its subject a clerk in a large advertising agency and christened him Evan Miller.

He occupied in Johnson’s renowned establishment an obscure position. He sat in a small room with two male typists at the top of three flights of stairs. He sorted out press cuttings, despatched the right copy to the right papers, entered up the proofs in a large folio, checked the returned slips, supplied a head clerk with lists giving the space rates and percentages allowed to agents. It was routine work that required an orderly mind; that quality Miller possessed, and his employers estimated its value at three pounds five shillings a week. An unexciting job for a man who three years earlier had been in command of a company of Fusiliers.

But it was the best he had been able to find, and his friends had assured him that he had been remarkably lucky to get it. As soon as the Armistice was signed he had commenced a series of desperate assaults on the War Office; he had claimed in turn to be a pivotal man, an educational authority, a university student. He had even considered an appeal on sympathetic grounds. Finally, he was allowed to transfer his commission from the regular army to the reserve of officers, and in April he was able to walk a free man down Savile Row and carefully finger the tailor’s samples of tweed and serge. Great days, undoubtedly. He had a good balance at Cox’s; a large gratuity was due to him. For two months he enjoyed himself. Then he began to look for a job. He had hoped vaguely for some sort of Government post with a good salary and not a great deal of work. But he soon discovered that Whitehall was more than full, and that civil service jobs abroad were going to the men from the Universities. He felt lost in a world that moved so fast and with such complete detachment from his interests.

At last, through the influence of a fellow-officer, he had got this advertising job. “And very lucky too,” he had been told.

Miller did not appreciate his fortune. At first he had managed to work himself into a mood of self-complacence; every evening, as he walked home from the office, he had reminded himself that a year ago he had been standing in a narrow trench waiting for the stand to, with the prospect of a cold night, to be spent either in patrols or in working parties; whereas now he was going back to a good dinner, a warm fire, and, afterwards, a soft bed—a very different proposition. And, as he sat reading the paper, he remembered pleasantly the cold wind that swept over the lonely hills. He always thought of France as he walked home. “A year ago,” he would say to himself, and try to reconstruct the scene; where had he been, what had he been doing, what had he thought; only twelve months ago he had belonged to a different life.

And then, when November had passed, it was “two years ago” that he found himself saying, for, after the Armistice, there had not seemed anything particular to remember. “Two years ago”—and he saw himself once again in the mud and cold of Bullecourt during those dark weeks over which had hung the menace of the great advance; strangely quiet days. There had been rain in January, cruel driving rain; the main trench had been three feet deep in mud and men had stuck in it for hours. But February had been fine and warm with a suggestion of spring. They had been out of the line just then, and he had gone for long rides to Peronne and Baupaume in the faint mild sunshine. He had been very happy, and the memory of that happiness caused him an insidious disquiet. As he walked back from the office he found himself thinking less of the mud and cold, the fatigue and danger, than of the warm comfort of the mess; the friendliness of those long evenings, when they sat round the stove and had opened bottle after bottle of port. In particular, he remembered that last night at Ervillers, when they had collected a huge beam from a neighbouring ruin and had piled up an enormous fire; he remembered how they had undressed before it, and how the light had flickered on past midnight, and that when he had woken at three o’clock, it had still glowed dimly. They had had good times, and he could not help contrasting them with this present uneventful routine of home and office. Nothing unexpected ever happened. An evening of desultory conversation. Bed. Next morning the hurried breakfast; the scramble for shoes and hat and coat; the uncomfortable journey in the tube, with the same faces opposite him, the same heavy, taciturn, discontented faces; and the squash in the lift; the bad-tempered, ill-mannered crowd; and, afterwards, from 9.30 till 5.30 in that small room at the top of the third flight of stairs with two male typists, with neither of whom he had anything in common and who were both secretly a little glad to see an ex-officer reduced to the same position as themselves, he sat arranging proofs, checking the copy, filing lists.

Occasionally he had to answer an inquiry on the telephone, and this was the one excitement of his day. The telephone had always possessed a fascination for him, and whenever he heard the bell ring in the next room he would put down his pen and wait, listening for the sound of a chair pushed back, an opened door, and the short, “Mr Miller, you’re wanted on the ’phone.” It was always the same thing—an inquiry about space rate, or the date of a special issue, but he never failed to experience a tremor of excitement as he ran into the next room and took up the receiver.

Nothing unexpected ever happened; there was nothing to look forward to; each day was exactly like the one that had gone before; he did not, indeed, see how anything could ever happen now. He would remain in that office for the rest of his life. In the end he might become manager of a department. At the age of forty he might have a large enough salary to be able to think of marriage. Forty! How often had they agreed in the mess that love was the privilege of the young. As far as he could see, everyone else was in the same boat. He used to go round occasionally to the long bar at the Troc: a melancholy sight. In 1917 it had been full of young officers, eager, light-hearted, home on leave with pay in their pockets and in their hearts a reckless determination to make the most of what little time was left them. The same fellows were there now, young men in mufti, leaning across the bar sipping their cocktails, raising their glasses to the light, exchanging their “cheeriohs.” But the lightheartedness had left them; their faces were set in lines of sullen discontent; they would stand and talk together of France and their experiences there. The unpleasant memories had been effaced. Already they had forgotten. They were unhappy in the present; they remembered they had been happy in the past.

And, with a vague nostalgia, Miller appreciated that in France, in spite of the danger and discomfort, there had been always something to look forward to. There had been the mail, a relief, the taking over of a new bit of line, a continual change, and there had been leave—how wonderful that had been, to count the days to one’s leave, to say to one’s self: “in twenty-three days’ time I shall be in London”; there was nothing like that now. And peace: how often he had talked of it, of all the things he would do, aprÈs la guerre; the future had seemed to him boundless then with opportunities. He had looked forward with a happy confidence to the days of routine and quiet work. He had asked nothing more than that—the resumption of the ordered ways.

He remembered, too, in what spirit he had read three years earlier a novel by Zola called The Soil. He had seen a copy at the railway bookstall at Boulogne with “Suppressed English Edition” printed in thick black lettering across the yellow cover. He was on his way back from leave and he had hoped that the book would help him to pass agreeably the long journey to Baupaume. But he had found it heavy even in its obscenity, and he had discarded it for the light suggestion of Fantasia and Le Rire. Later, however, during the nights of wakefulness in a lonely post, he had returned, for want of anything else to read, to Zola, and he had soon found to his surprise that, instead of turning the pages quickly with prurient fingers in search of the flavoured passage, he was reading the book carefully, word by word, letting it pass slowly before his eyes—a savage spectacle of human life held captive to the soil, of men and women whose actions and desires were controlled by their allegiance to it, and of that fierce ferment of deceit, greed, falsehood, wantonness that the soil turned in its own way to its own use.

It had seemed strange to him, though, that Jean, an old soldier, should be prepared, even after so much adversity, to rejoin the army. It was easy to forget; memory, concerned with the general proportions of a picture, selected what it chose; Miller knew that, but could anyone, he had asked himself, forget the fatigue of a long march, the chill of nightfall in the open, the heartache of separation, the fields of blood and pain. And, putting the book down on the table, he had walked to the head of his dug-out steps and looked out over the long stretch of mangled country. Himself, he never could forget.

But that had been three years earlier, under the flicker of a Verey light, within the range of guns. And now, sitting at a desk with a pile of press-cuttings before him, and the clatter of typewriters beating on his ear, he felt prepared to welcome any change, however violent. If only something would happen. That evening as he walked down Kingsway to Holborn station the newsboys were shouting tidings of another war; across the placards a huge note of interrogation followed the word Berlin. Was it then to begin again—the noise, the cruelty, the carnage? For a moment there passed before his eyes a picture of Passendael as he had last seen it in the October rains, the dead tilted across the lips of shell holes. Then his thoughts returned to the present and its more urgent trouble, the monotony of routine; the type-writers; the proofs; the copy. “Allies to march to Berlin! Paper! Ultimatum to Germany! Paper!” The words were flung out into the mild spring air and the sound floated heedlessly down Kingsway over the heads of the workers, old and young, who were hurrying towards their homes, with faces set in hard lines of dull, sullen resentment. “Start of a New War! Paper!” If only something new would happen. “Ultimatum to Germany! Paper! Allies—Berlin—Paper!” And Evan Miller, in his heart of hearts, hoped that it was true.

That is the story as I wrote it. But life from its vast repertoire can produce always when it chooses, a climax far more complete than any of our contrivance. Sometimes, impatient with our fumbling, it takes the pen from us and writes.

Three weeks later a trade dispute brought England nearer to revolution than it had been for a hundred years. The regular reserve was recalled to the colours and Evan Miller found himself at Shorncliffe reporting at orderly room his existence and unimportance; curiously easy, he would discover, the re-adoption, after an absence of two years, of the formalities of military life; curious, too, how stabilising became, after the casual nature of town engagements, the fixed routine of the parade-ground and the mess. But that would be personal and incidental. The significance, the universally applicable significance of that six weeks’ return to uniform would lie in the chance discovery in the pocket of an old tunic of a piece of paper, placed there hurriedly and forgotten, two years before. There would be nothing romantic about that piece of paper. A memo, from battalion dated the 17th of February 1919. “Please note,” it said, “that you were passed fit for active service by the Medical Board at Dover, the 3rd of December 1918.” Formal enough: to anyone but himself, meaningless enough. The sort of thing with which a dug-out would have become quickly littered had he not possessed a servant. But its discovery would be, for him, that inevitable, that unpremeditated moment, at which every story-teller is aiming and so rarely reaching. He would stand in the centre of the room, the piece of paper in his hand, and before his eyes, and before his brain, the details of the circumstances under which he had last seen it.

In the early spring of 1919 a couple of months’ leave had been granted to all regular officers, and a very great number of them had taken advantage of that leave to file their application for transference to the reserve of officers. It was on the last morning before his leave that he had found waiting for him in the ante-room that memo. from battalion correcting a mistake he had made in his application for leave. He had laughed gaily, confidently. They could send their memos. if they liked, he had told himself. To-morrow he would be in London, and if, during two months, he could achieve no compromise with the Whitehall mandarins he had no right to call himself a soldier. And he pushed the note away into his pocket.

The recovered memory of that gesture of careless confidence would be a mirror in which he could see reflected the significance of the last two years. He would see himself two years earlier, eager and exuberant, tired of army life, anxious for a return to freedom, proudly assured of his capacity to subdue the future. He would remember how his one idea in those days had been to rush away from camp. For the sake of eleven hours in town he had caught a five o’clock train from Grantham on Sunday morning and had not got back to bed till three o’clock. The journey had cost him twenty-seven shillings. His first question on joining a new unit had been, “What chance of leave?” No matter how far from town, how long, how expensive, how uncomfortable the journey—he had been prepared to make it: anything to get back to civil life. And he would see himself now in this aftermath of turmoil, indifferent, passive, dumbly satisfied. He had hardly considered the question of leave. It would cost him over a pound to get to town; it wasn’t worth it. There would be very little for him to do when he got there. A theatre, a dance, a dinner. It was pleasanter on the whole to sit and read Blackwood’s in the mess and play bridge and walk across the cliffs to Folkestone. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to do. He was well enough where he was. The old zest for life had gone, pilfered from him by two years of frustration and disappointment and foiled endeavour. And the realisation of it would be brought to him by the discovery of a crumpled memo., a thing intrinsically worthless, but the focus, the rallying-point of much hard circumstance.

And thus, indeed, it was that, to one at least of many thousands, was brought fully and bitterly the significance of that post-war period, of those treacherous, deceiving years that had glittered so bravely on the horizon, that had looked so warm and hospitable, that had promised so much and had brought so little.

1919 was the year of disillusion, not merely of a political disillusion, of disgust at broken faith and forgotten promises and personal treacheries, but of a profounder, subtler disenchantment, of an awakened sense of life’s deception.

We came back from the trenches, the prison camp, the parade ground, radiantly, unspeakably confident. We had looked forward for so long to peace. There had been times when we hardly thought that it would come, certainly not to us. It was like the city of Heaven—a dazzling, remote prospect. We had come to look on it as a tavern where we should rest after our journey; a huge fire would be blazing in the grate, barons of beef would be set before us, mine host would bring from his cellar his richest chambertin. But we had hardly defined the circumstance of our dream. We saw it with the heightened vision of strained and tired nerves as a land of limitless enchantment. And, when peace came, we settled down and waited for the good things to be set before us. And, of course, they were not set before us. And we had not the vitality to fetch them for ourselves; we were tired, not with the exhaustion that follows a day’s hard work, from which after sleep we awake the fitter, but with the exhaustion of dissipation, of a sleepless night. For too long we had been geared too high. The pressure had been maintained by the intoxication of war conditions. We were like tops that are models of poise and balance only as long as they retain their intensity of speed. The stimulation, the incentive had been removed suddenly. We were weak as a drug fiend who has been deprived of morphia; we became listless, lifeless, indifferent.

We have been described as a generation that has flung up the sponge; and the old men grumble about us in their clubs. “No social sense,” they say. “A generation that thinks of nothing except tennis and dancing. Poor stuff!” Perhaps: it may be we are the seed that has been flung on stony ground, that has sprung up quickly, without root in itself or sustenance. It may be that the hot sun has scorched and withered us. It may be. But the Victorians indulged in such an orgy of self-righteousness. They proclaimed so loudly that they were leaving the world better than they found it: and we know what manner of inheritance they handed down to us. It may be pardoned in us, I think, our indifference to politics, and the rights and wrongs of little nations.

And yet we all of us, four years ago, came back to life with some sort of an ideal of citizenship; we were conscious of our responsibility to the future. “We would make it,” we said, “impossible for there to be ever war again.” We were frightfully anxious to do something, but there did not seem anything in particular for us to do. Those of us who wrote, would not have found it difficult perhaps to sell our pens in the arena of party politics. There were plenty of people ready enough to exploit us. But that was not what we wanted.

During the war many of us had come to look on the Labour party as a sort of fairy godmother. Labour was the only party that had included in its programme a ruthless avoidance of war. And, as the man who is hungry can think only of food, so in 1917 it had seemed to us that the avoidance of war was the one thing that mattered. We expected great things of the Daily Herald. But long before the end of 1919 we had realised that no more bellicose production had been ever presented in large quantities to the public. It had substituted one form of war for another. Nations were not to fight each other, but classes were. The proletariat of the world, with the possible exception of the French, was to ride triumphantly over the mangled remains of the idle and blood-sucking rich. It was to be war to the death. Prizes were offered for the best slogan. The people who had clamoured in 1916 for arbitration and compromise between the demands of Germany and those of the Allies, would not listen to arbitration and compromise when the Tynesider demanded another shilling a day from his employer. The Herald became the champion of every trade dispute, and some of us began to wonder. Was this international peace, we asked ourselves, worth the purchase at such a price? If it came to a fight, would we rather fight beside English navvies and English ploughmen against the navvies and ploughmen of Germany and Russia; or would we rather fight beside English, Russian, French, Belgian, German, and Swedish ploughmen against Russian, English, French, German and Swedish aristocrats, or vice versa? Of two wars, which was the less pernicious? And we began to think that class is a habit that can be changed in half a generation; a man who is a newsboy at seventeen may be a baronet at fifty and a viscount at seventy; but race is a tree planted deeply in firm soil. We can change our class as easily as we can change our clothes; but English blood is English blood in the pit, in Mayfair, in the shires; and we should have no sympathy with that party that strove to divide a people against itself.

Indeed, we were sick of party politics: we were in search of some league of international co-operation of the young people of Europe, which should have the right to direct our destinies. “It had been our war,” we said, “it was going to be our peace.” It sounds foolish now, no doubt, at this distant date, but we believed in it then; we were sincere in our desire for it. They offered us “The League of Youth.”

It was a magnificent affair that inaugural banquet at the Connaught Rooms. Viscount Bryce and Sir Oliver Lodge were the chief speakers, as far as I remember. And a number of other very venerable persons described themselves, like the old gentleman in the story, as being no older than they felt. I don’t think that there were at the high table three people under thirty. And the aims and objects of the League were outlined subsequently in the daily press in an article headed with commendable accuracy, but with a singular absence of self-criticism, “The Age of Youth.” But still we had hopes of it. I found myself vice-president of the Education Committee. One Committee meeting I attended. It was my last.

We assembled to discuss the reformation of the Public Schools. There were eight of us. Four of these were girls, of the Girton-Newnham-1917 Club variety. The other half was composed of a secondary schoolmaster, a journalist, an imponderable young Scot, and myself. The schoolmaster was the president. He knew a good deal about the practical side of the business, and he was, therefore, somewhat sceptical. He opened proceedings with a bland, highly noncommittal speech about “harnessing the activities of youth,” which was very jolly but got us little “forra’der.” The journalist, who was, in a sense, secretary of the affair, then read some letters from people who had been sufficiently far-seeing to decline the honour to co-operate. Then the Scotsman began his innings: it was a good, breezy innings, of the Walter Brearley-Tom Wass variety; vigorous, but with the bat infrequently connected with the ball. His idea was to draft manifestoes, circularise headmasters, and open a press campaign on such as declined co-operation. I suggested that headmasters were busy men, that they had secretaries and waste-paper baskets, and that a press campaign on what would be consequently the entire educational world would be a gallant, but unprofitable, undertaking. This perturbed the Scot.

“What, then,” he asked me, “are we going to do?”

“That,” I said, “is what I have come here this afternoon to learn.”

He emitted a snort of disgust. “But we must do something.” And for the first time one of the four flappers spoke: “We’ve got,” she said, “to justify our existence.”

That is rather what we were in 1919: a number of persons walking about with a pocket full of stones, wondering which window to smash. In the end we found the stones weighed rather heavily and hurt our thighs and spoilt our clothes, and we dropped them on the pavement. It is easy enough to evolve plans of international brotherhood when the Government feeds and boards and clothes you and gives you some twenty-five pounds pocket-money a month. It is less easy when you have to earn your own living. Questions of international policy seemed less important when the morning post brought a yellow form with scarlet letters across the top: “Third and final application.” During the war our liabilities had been those of many million others. In 1919 we entered the glass case of our private lives. We reassumed the habit of our own troubles and our own problems; we became again what Gilbert Frankau describes as the “possessive and predatory male.”