3

To these conferences in the Steenhold flat there presently came a bunch of young men from Lord Horatio Bohun's once hopeful Popular Socialist Party. At first they argued with Rud, and then they crystallised about him. "But this is our stuff," they said. "No," said Rud, "it's what your stuff ought to be. If it had more bones and less white meat."

They were ripe for Rud. The spirit of their movement was changing, and they realised the need for a renewal of its vitality. They were growing up mentally, and the idea of being thoroughly disagreeable to Jews and long–haired communists no longer satisfied them as an objective in life. They no longer flaunted it in decorative purple shirts because the wearing of party uniforms was now rather heavily penalised, and that loss of colour also was reflected in their bearing.

The biggest of them was a man named Rogers, some sort of amateur boxing champion, with a streak of almost maternal protectiveness in him and a bias for a good clean vigorous fight. He did not mind very much what the fight was about, and he hated to think it might lead to bad feeling. Bodisham, another of them, seemed to be a born director; he would have been an able producer of films or plays and he played chess and was said to play bridge with a swift, uncanny realisation of how the game was going. Later on he was to justify his reputation and become a brilliant controller of meetings and party manoeuvres. And he was to end as one of the greatest of constructive statesmen. Rud perhaps had a quicker grasp of a general situation, but it was instinctive, not reasoned; Bodisham's turn for either massed details or isolated details was not to be equalled. And when it was a question of the scientific handling of a problem, Rud gave way to Bodisham perforce. Bodisham had come out of the London School of Economics; his first ambition had been to supplement the mental deficiencies of Bohun. When he had found that they were not to be supplemented, he had turned to Rud. He was the only one of the Group who wore spectacles; it seemed to accentuate his claim to be the intellectual influence in the party. Irwell came in from a stockbroker's office. He was living by sub–editing a financial paper, and when he talked of money the others listened with respect.

Another of this bunch was a man whom Rud had a haunting sense of having met before. His name was Colin Dreed. At first Rud could not think where they might have met, and then he identified him, though not with absolute certainty, as one of two purple shirts who had visited his rooms in his second year. Dreed perhaps had an equivalent doubt, and at times Rud would catch a slight perplexity in his eyes, an expression of inadequate recognition. But nothing was ever said about it. Dreed was now nearly an adult and no longer that bright potential furniture–smasher of Rud's second year. But he was still essentially a partisan. He did whatever he was told, and he always did it with a faint suggestion of surprise at not having thought of so obvious a thing himself. But he never thought of it himself. One or two other purple shirts and ex–purple shirts came less regularly and talked less freely, but these were the nuclear personalities of what was destined to be Rud's primary organisation.

It was evident to him that all these young men were extremely dissatisfied with Bohun's leadership, and that they did not know clearly what to do about it. They felt misdirected and frustrated, and yet they still retained something of the good intentions that had brought them into his movement. Many years ago Lord Horatio had come into British politics with a considerable flourish, as a young man of wealth, position and influence, destined to play a brilliantly unorthodox role in public affairs. He had also evidently proposed to himself a wide conspicuousness as a splendid individual. He had narrowly escaped the House of Lords; his brother was the Duke of Wybrow, a defective so defective as to be unfitted for anything but procreation, in which indeed he had been eminently successful. So Horatio, cut off from any hope of a dukedom and a senatorial career by a growing zareba of nephews, had decided to be the British Julius Caesar; the Duce, the leader of a renascent patriotic Britain. Plus Byron without the limp. At first everything seemed to favour him. There had been only one insurmountable obstacle to his ambitions, but that was hidden from him, a complete lack of originality in his make–up. He was so completely destitute of ideas that he had no idea he had no ideas. He behaved therefore as though he had ideas, and for a time there were admirers to share his illusion.

He had been what is called a "spoilt" child, the favoured younger brother, and he was still essentially "Lord Horry". He had one of those faces whose features seem asymmetrical and confused when seen in front, but which have a certain resemblance to handsomeness in profile; he was pale, freckled and red–haired, with the rebellious forelock so frequent with romantic personalities, and his voice was arrogant and adenoidal. He carried himself with a certain solemn haughtiness, breathing heavily, with a projected chest balanced stiffly against a projected behind. At first he had proposed himself as the rising hope of the Liberal Party; but in those days very little was left of the Liberal Party except rising hopes; many of them were already middle–aged, and they had shown very clearly that an addition to their numbers would be unwelcome. He was an imperious rather than a patient wooer, and so he had transferred his proffer of leadership almost convulsively to the Communist wing of the Labour Party.

Here again his reception was inadequate; the Labour Party did not seem to realise in the least what an accession this splendid and brilliant young aristocrat would be to its all too pedestrian front, and while he was still reluctantly realising this poverty of the leftish imagination, the successes of Mussolini and the Nazis gave a new turn to his ambitions. He became the sedulous student and ape of the Italian and German adventurers, not realising that there was a certain incongruity between their methods and formulae and the peculiar large scepticism of the Anglo–Saxon tradition, with its lamentable disposition towards facetiousness on serious occasions. What was more natural than for the rejected romantic leader of the Reds to invert himself in another swift transformation, become an anti–Red, and stretch out his strong right arm to protect the rich old ladies of the land from the Red Horror? They responded to his heroic gesture with copious subscriptions and profuse press support. Lord Thunderclap and all the Daily Clarion group of newspapers hailed him with enthusiasm. He was speedily in a position to provide headquarters, highly decorative purple shirts, brown belts and a sense of purpose to a perceptible following of unemployed young men. So far as the police would let him—and at first they let him quite a lot if only on account of his rank—he organised a series of demonstrations against the Reds, and he induced the Jews to advertise him by a campaign of annoyance and menace against these far too responsive, expressive, tactless and unendearing people.

So it was Lord Horatio after his abortive explorations of the alternative avenues to the Left of life, made his definitive entrance upon the political scene from the Right. No further transformation was possible for him for there was nothing more for him to copy. He was now past the first blush and beauty of youth, and he found himself in a bright limelight of expectation. For a time—indeed until the dynastic trouble about the Duke of Windsor in 1937 superseded him—the first question the travelling Englishman was asked was "What is this new man, Lord Bohun, going to do?"

To which the more intelligent Englishman said: "He isn't much of a man and he isn't going to do anything."

"But that's what they said of Hitler."

"But Hitler was a national growth, and Bohun isn't even a growth…"

What the less intelligent Englishman said about him varied, and, anyhow, it does not matter now.

There he was upon the British scene in a nimbus of expectation. He took large halls and addressed meetings at which he regurgitated the masticated leading articles of the opposition press—and more particularly those of the Daily Clarion. He never made an original remark, he never coined a phrase of his own, not even by accident. He organised processions, which had a diminishingly irritating effect, in Jewish districts. Nothing ever ensued from the meetings and processions except a dribble of police court proceedings that died away Then he would pass out of the headlines for a space and then again would come another great and entirely vacuous meeting and another temporary obstruction in the streets.

Slowly, incredulously, the world realised that Lord Horatio was doing nothing, and did not know how to do anything. But he kept up his movement with all the dignity of Tristram Shandy's bull.

He was too vain and jealous to associate any original or vigorous intelligence with himself. Helpful people of initiative and ambition joined him, only to drop off disappointed. Instead he gathered about himself parasitic adherents of impeccable dullness, and he organised a wonderful "training school" of Popular Socialist speakers. They were given little books of pros and cons—remarkable pros and cons—and general advice. But it is hard to train men to meet the unexpected interruption. These trained and paid supporters did not so much speak at his meetings as imitate speaking. They learnt the sounds and gestures of demonstration and conviction, but nothing more. They brought down the emphatic fist upon the suffering palm in the vain hope of giving platitude the flavour of inspiration, and a few determined interruptors could make a dreadful mess of them.

Sometimes Lord Horatio was out of the papers for weeks at a time, and then he would be back again, delivering the same old speech and demonstrating nothing by the same old demonstration. He was especially prevalent in spring. May and June seemed to excite him. It looked as though he was destined to become a seasonal feature in English life, like the Royal Academy or the Boat Race. Whenever there was a socialist or pacifist or communist gathering, or indeed any sort of mass meeting, the purple banners of the Popular Socialists with their golden tassels turned up in slowly dwindling force, always under almost excessive police protection, and always making a scuffling rather than triumphant exit from the field of debate.

The nimbler years slipped by, and even his loyalest adherents were forced to realise the progressive ravages of middle–age upon his former fatuous élan. His pogroms, such as they were, lost pep. The Daily Clarion ceased to feature him. It did not so much turn against him as fade away from him. It looked as though he and his Popular Socialists were going to sit down and fade out altogether. This sessile disposition on the part of their leader was a source of grave discontent to many of the youngsters who had got into belts and purple shirts and broken their adolescent voices shouting "We want Bo–oo–un" in those so much more promising early days. More and more he had to rely on the subsidised element in his following. More and more did the growing tension of the super–armament period emphasise his essential unreality, his amateurism.

At one or two of his recent meetings unidentified and disregarded voices had cried out "Get on with it!"

The world situation darkened. The sense of impending catastrophe increased. All over the world it was felt that the now–or–never moment was approaching. There was a sort of paralysis of grim expectation. In 1940 the chief employment of human leisure was anti–aircraft drill; a quarter of a million bombers were in commission, and everywhere men excavated. Political life changed its character. Political thought intensified. The taste for mild rioting was declining under a burthen of apprehensive responsibility. The newspapers bore anxiety on their foreheads.

The publics in the old democratic countries had had the educational spectacle of a decade of blustering dictatorship in Europe. They were capable now of immense scepticisms and increasingly resistent to the vague promises of merely personal leadership. "You are anti–Bolshevik and anti–Jew, you declare the government is corrupt and incompetent and so forth, and that's all very acceptable," said the mind of the common man. "But what are you going to make and what are you going to do if we put you in power?"

Beneath Bohun's feet, at his headquarters, the germs of a "Ginger Group" stirred and grew. Out of deference to his ruddy forelock it called itself "Real Ginger". It desired a programme, a creed. It desired explicitness. It took a definite form in Steenhold's flat one evening when, after a dissertation of Rud's, certain letters of power, namely, "B.M.G." were pronounced. Which letters being interpreted signified no longer "Balfour must go" as they had originally done—but "Bohun". And the man who said them was Rogers.

He hit his knees with his fist, he said the mystical letters and glared around him.