6

Rud returned to the Group in a state of extreme mental excitement.

"I've got it," he said, "about the League of Nations. I understand 1919–20. It's all as clear as daylight."

Chiffan nodded expectantly with a faint smile.

"Yet I never saw it before. These Liberals open one's eyes."

Real affection shone in Chiffan's regard. He was beginning to feel a genuine parental glow at Rud's impassioned discoveries. If Rud neither begat nor conceived nor created, he was, at any rate, a magnificent obstetrician.

"In 1918," said Rud, "the need for such a world unification and socialisation as we are planning was as manifest as it is now. It stared the world in the face. But—"

The Group waited to see its own revelation plain.

"It meant a fundamental change in nearly every system of human activities. That is to say, it meant a reconstructed management. It meant new patterns in politics, world economics, a new world education, a wider way of living for everyone, and nobody among all the worthy people to whom the settlement was entrusted could really stand up to that prospect. Because it meant that they too had to be renewed. They had to adapt or they had to go. An age of extreme experimentation was inevitable. It was in the air in 1918. The rulers and leaders shirked it. Not consciously perhaps but subconsciously the ruling people resisted every rational step forward. It was bound to be a vast, step, I admit, and into a strange world. For some of them it was not so much a step as a precipice. So they decided that the mass of people in the world were unprepared for it—while as a matter of fact it was they themselves who were unprepared for it. See?"

Chiffan's face answered that question.

"Lord, what a pleasure it is to get back to you chaps and talk freely! I've been diplomatic all day. Now let me splutter…Where was I? In 1918, I say, the ruling classes everywhere had nightmares of the Last Trump. Everywhere. They woke up again, clear that nothing of that sort must happen. The dear old world, which makes us all we are, must remain. They decided not to resurrect, Last Trump or no. 'What is this about a readjusted world?' they said. 'Let us have no extravagance. Let us go gradually,' they said, 'let us go very, very gradually—in other words, let us do just as little as possible to alter the rules of the game we have played hitherto. It is a played–out game, yes—we admit that in theory—but how can any of us learn to play an entirely new one all at once? If we have to drop the control of things, what sort of horrid people will replace us? Let us keep our grip and produce something that will look like a World Peace, a Union of Mankind, and at the same time let us see that nothing fundamental is changed about the old Foreign Offices, the old diplomacy, the old sovereignties, the methods we can work, the things we know. Business as usual during the resurrection. We won't attempt to make anything so extravagant as a new world, we will just make a—a nice beginning, an unimplemented promise.'

"In that spirit, I tell you, this great Put–off at Geneva was brought into being. It was a deliberate, almost conscious Put–off. A crash may come later, said their subconsciousnesses; but, anyhow, this patch–up of a League will last our time. Germany must pay and so on, they shall be victims and vanquished according to the best precedents, but the essence of our settlement is that civilisation as we know it will be saved."

Rud repeated: "Civilisation as they knew it! They couldn't think of any other sort of civilisation. Tea when they're called in the morning, and all that.

"That Geneva generation has been tiding over and putting off the new world ever since. Growing old and refusing to see how the real world crisis intensifies with every year of delay. Manifestly to re–make the world means a vast obliteration of traditions and class mentalities, but it has to occur. If they won't make over, it's got to be made over for them. That's where we come in. That re–making is what they call Chaos, and for them it is chaos—the end of everythingobliteration—effacement, anyhow. But for us it is the revolt of common–sense."

"You don't think there were any honest good intentions in that League of Nations experiment?" said Irwell.

"How can one plumb the self–deceptions of the muddy–witted?" said Rud. "There were tons of good intentions. Mountains of good intentions all round the Lake. They were enough to have made Geneva stuffy, even if the mountains didn't. These League of Nations people making believe they were readjusting the world, and elaborately and carefully doing nothing of the sort, stank of moral self–satisfaction.

"For all that, the League of Nations was in effect an almost planned and deliberate abortion of the plain commonsense needs of mankind, an elaborate sabotage of the Common Man's hopes. To save trouble. To save face. It was the petition in bankruptcy of the Liberal mind. This, it said, is all I have. And until the whole of this generation of damned disingenuous Liberals is dead, what passes as Liberalism will still be bolstering up this substitute, this sham, this Make Believe of a New World."

And suddenly he became almost lyric. "For three thousand years the Common Man has been fended off from the full and glorious life he might have had, by Make Believe. For three thousand years in one form or another he has been asking for an unrestricted share in the universal welfare. He has been asking for a fair dividend from civilisation. For all that time, and still it goes on, the advantaged people, the satisfied people, the kings and priests, the owners and traders, the gentlefolk and the leaders he trusted, have been cheating him tacitly or deliberately, out of his proper share and contribution in the common life. Sometimes almost consciously, sometimes subconsciously, cheating themselves about it as well. When he called upon God, they said 'We'll take care of your God for you', and they gave him organised religion. When he calls for Justice, they say 'Everything decently and in order', and give him a nice expensive Law Court beyond his means. When he calls for order and safety too loudly they hit him on the head with a policeman's truncheon. When he sought knowledge, they told him what was good for him. And to protect him from the foreigner, so they said, they got him bombed to hell, trained him to disembowel his fellow common men with bayonets and learn what love of King and Country really means.

"All with the best intentions in the world, mind you.

"Most of these people, I tell you, have acted in perfect good faith. They manage to believe that in sustaining this idiot's muddle they are doing tremendous things—stupendous things—for the Common Man. They can live lives of quiet pride and die quite edifyingly in an undernourished, sweated, driven and frustrated world. Useful public servants! Righteous self–applause! Read their bloody biographies!

"This League of Nations of the Liberals is only the last of the endless succession of Make Believes that have baffled the poor, misinformed, miseducated Common Man. I tell you, stupidity, self–protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture. The League of Nations has been an exposed imposture almost from the start, an impotent substitute for effort, and it has wasted two decades, twenty crucial years, of human possibility, the first third of the lives of all of us here in effect…We who will never have lives again."

Chiffan put his hands on either side of his chin. He reflected aloud: "This sort of analysis applies, mutatis mutandis, to almost every established institution."

"Essentially, yes."

"Established institutions. You hate them all," said Chiffan. "Because they stand in our way to a rational, happy, splendid world."

Chiffan smiled, faintly sceptical. "You just hate them because they are established institutions."

Rud considered this for a moment and then, with a leap of frankness: "Yes, Chiffan—I hate them because they are established institutions. They confine and stifle me. As they do you. But they die, they die. Not fast enough, but they die. And the League of Nations generation is dying, and the dear old scholarly Liberals are dying, the class of the last great Make Believe are dying, man by man, day by day. And as that generation, with all its self–preserving hypocrisies, fades and dies, the stage is cleared—

"Partially cleared," said Chiffan.

"More or less cleared," said Rud. "Cleared perhaps enough."

Chiffan thought of saying something more. He saw something like an appeal to him in Rud's eye and he said no more. "For us," said Irwell.

"For the Common–sense of the Common Man," said Rud, with a last rhetorical flourish, "to come to its own."