On the twenty-eighth of June 1914 I stood on the edge of the kerb in Piccadilly Circus and looked at London. I did not know it but I was taking my last look at the city – as a Londoner. And yet perhaps I did know it.

I was feeling free and as it were without weight. It was a delicious day, the sky very high and bright above the Fountain; the flower-girls had brought with them a perfect mountain of colour. The Circus was blocked and blocked and blocked again with vehicles. The Season had a week to run but was at its height. But I was going that night for a long stay to the birthplace of my great-great-grandfather, Dr John Brown, at Duns in Berwickshire. I was finished with the Season. I was tired out and my private affairs in literature were all arranged for me. I had ‘made my effort,’ as racing people say, during the last six months. I had always held two things. No man should write more than one novel. No man should write that novel before he is forty. I had been forty six months before. On my birthday I had sat down to write that novel. It was done and I thought it would stand. There was to be no more writing for me – not even any dabbling in literary affairs.

The English Review seemed then profoundly to have done its work. Ezra and his gang of young lions raged through London. They were producing an organ of their own. It was called – prophetically– Blast.

One day Ezra and the young man I have called Mr D. Z. took me for a walk. In Holland Street D. Z. had grasped my arm as if he had been a police constable. Those walks were slightly tormenting. Ezra talked incessantly on one side of me in his incomprehensible Philadelphian which was already ageing. That made it all the more incomprehensible. Mr D. Z., dark, a little less hirsute but more and more like a conspirator went on and on in a vitriolic murmur. On this occasion he raised his voice for a little to be heard by me but not by Ezra. Ezra would not have stood for it.

D. Z. said:

‘Tu sais, tu es foûtu! Foûtu! Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact. Your generation has gone. What is the sense of you and Conrad and Impressionism? You stand for Impressionism. It is finished. Foûtu. Blasted too! This is the future. What does anyone want with your old-fashioned stuff? You try to make people believe that they are passing through an experience when they read you. You write these immense long stories, recounted by a doctor at table or a ship’s captain in an inn. You take ages to get these fellows in. In order to make your stuff seem convincing. Who wants to be convinced? Get a move on. Get out or get under.

‘This is the day of Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism. What people want is me, not you. They want to see me. A Vortex. To liven them up. You and Conrad had the idea of concealing yourself when you wrote. I display myself all over the page. In every word. I … I … I…’

He struck his chest dramatically and repeated: ‘I … I … I … The Vortex. Blast all the rest.’ I was reminded of a young lady I once went to call on and who came running downstairs exclaiming:

‘Devil, devil, devil, take them all but me.’

But Mr D. Z. was perfectly right. I don’t mean that I only thought then that he was right. I think it now. Impressionism was dead. The day of all those explosive sounds had come. But louder Blasts soon drowned them out and put back the hands of the clock to somewhere a good deal the other side of mere Impressionism. But, in that moment they were undoubtedly all right. It was in a sense another foreign invasion, like the one with which this book opens. There was hardly a born Londoner in it. D. Z., Ezra, H. D. the beautiful poetess, Epstein, Fletcher, Robert Frost, Eliot were all Transatlantically born from the point of view of London. Henri Gaudier was a Marseillaise. They had all become Londoners because London was unrivalled in its powers of assimilation – the great, easy going, tolerant, lovable old dressing-gown of a place that it was then but was never more to be.

Those young people had done their best to make a man of me. They had dragged me around to conspiracies, nightclubs, lectures where Marinetti howled and made noises like machine-guns. They had even tried to involve me in their splits. Of course they split. The Ezra-D. Z. contingent blasted another contingent led by Mr Nevinson the artist. Those continued I think to call themselves Futurists. I was I suppose identified with the Vorticists. At any rate for years after that every time that Mr Nevinson met me he would say: ‘How fat you are!’– which was supposed to be blasting. Ezra on the other hand – out of affection – used to call me ‘the pink egg’. So they pranced and roared and blew blasts on their bugles and round them the monuments of London tottered.

I went home after that conversation and wrote my farewell to literature – quite formally. It was printed in a short-lived periodical called The Thrush. Thrushes had no chance of making themselves heard in those days. The Vorticists kindly serialised my novel – my Great Auk’s Egg, they called it. The Great Auk lays one egg and bursts. That bird was no louder than a thrush in the pages of Blast.

So I was done with Letters – and with the Left. Of what I was going to do I had little notion. But Provence still called. I had paid a prolonged visit to the neighbourhood of Tarascon just before and chosen my house. I had written a long poem about Heaven which I had placed in the Alpilles, tiny grey mountains just outside the town of Tartarin. That poem had produced remarkable reverberations in America. It was given prizes, crowned with gilt laurel leaves. Leaders were written about it in many of the newspapers of the Eastern seaboard. It was said to have put up the marriage-rates in New York. Poor Elinor Wylie, the beautiful poetess and most beautiful woman, told me that she and her husband, William Benet, had become engaged whilst reading my poem to each other in Central Park.

In England its publication was stopped by the police. Mr Courtney proposed to publish it in the Fortnightly Review but was a little afraid. Masterman took it to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary said that if it were published he would have to authorise a prosecution. It gave a materialist picture of heaven. God appeared in it. It is against the law for God to appear in England.

That poem was, during the war, published under the auspices of the Ministry of Information – as government propaganda! It might encourage young men who were about to die if they thought they would go to a nice heaven.

Masterman had a good deal of it by heart. Whilst we had been in Germany together he had driven me nearly crazy by quoting at the most inopportune moments – when I was making out a railway schedule or deciphering the bills of our party – by remarking in his solemn and unctuous parliamentary voice:

We had gone up the Rhine from the source to Bingen, crossed over the Eiffel range to Trêves, visited the battlefields of 1870. All the time I was trying to keep Masterman’s nose on the grindstone. He was supposed, with my interpretation, to be interviewing German waiters as to the workings of their Insurance Act. At Metz he asked a waiter what nationality he considered himself to be. The waiter answered:

‘Muss-Preussen’ – ‘Obligatory Prussian.’ After that Masterman was saying on every available occasion: ‘Muss-Preussen – We’re all going to be Muss-Preussens before long, Ford old dear.’

We drove in a horse-drawn landau to Sedan. Masterman had finally struck against waiter-interviews. He wanted to see battlefields. He had a passion for the study of military strategy. I should never have gone to see a battlefield. Masterman knew the position of every battalion of Wurtembergers or Saxons at every hour during the day of the battle.

As we drove back, the coachman from his box called down about half a dozen times:

‘Wollen die Excellenzen durch Frankreich fahren?’ ‘Do the Excellencies wish to be driven through France?’ It was the first time we had been called Excellencies. We travelled incognito. Masterman said:

‘What’s he saying? What’s he saying?’

Wherever a German had been buried in French soil along that border the Prussians had driven out a tongue of land and made it German. The direct road went all through these strips. The apples on a tree in that late July weather might be half German, half French. Masterman said:

‘Before long, Ford old dear, the taxi-men in Piccadilly will be saying: “Do you want to be taken through England or up Oxford Strasse?”’

He had a sardonic humour, that large, sleepy, always smiling, crooked-nosed statesman.

At Metz Station the station master – of the rank of major-general and covered with decorations – was waiting for us at the salute at the foot of the immense flight of granite steps.

He said:

‘Will the Excellencies deign to hurry a little? We are keeping our Constantinople-Berlin Express waiting for them.’

Mrs Masterman had a kodak. She shot it at everything she passed. It was forbidden to photograph anything in the Metz district. She snapshotted policemen, generals on horseback, troops on the march, odd-looking new ditches and mounds, placarded Verboten, and running as if without purpose along hill sides. On the boat before Bingen, the camera had got out of order. It had been repaired in Trêves. When she developed all her films after arriving in London there was not one that shewed anything but the extreme tops of church steeples, the eagles on the tops of generals’ helmets, or the tops of the heads of storks standing over their nests on gables. They used to manage some things quite well in old Germany. They did not want to interfere with the innocent amusements of a British Cabinet Minister’s wife but they had had her camera lens elevated by the repairer.

When we got back to Trêves I went up a hill with Mrs Masterman so that she might photograph the great view, going into France. There was on top of the hill a column and on top of the column a colossal virgin. The view from the top of the column was so immense and impressive that she said Charlie must see it. Charlie did not much like climbing.

So I took him up there that afternoon. He refused to climb the column, but the view from the base was sufficient. We lay sleepily on the turf in the hot afternoon.

Seven hundred feet below us a great, beautiful white bird, with the tips of its wings turned back, glided noiselessly along above a green field. It dipped with supreme grace to rest. I had never seen an aeroplane before. So the first I ever saw was a German war-plane and I saw it from above. We were looking over the Trêves aerodrome.

I was studying my map. I said:

‘There’s Longwy…’

Masterman whose eyes had been closed sat bolt upright and said:

‘Where? … Where’s Longwy?’

The Daily Mail that we received with the other papers from England had been very pointedly and with great satisfaction calling attention to Longwy. The French had been making enormous fortifications and massing troops out there in the grey district over which the heat shimmered. That was why I had said: ‘There’s Longwy.’

Masterman looked at the small, dark patch in that plain for a very long time. Suddenly he said:

‘By this date next year we shall be at war with Germany.’ It was then the second of August 1913. He was two days out.

As for me, I screamed with laughter. It was almost too good a joke. I knew Germany as well as it was possible to know a country; I had lived there for long periods; I had connections with her from innumerable angles. I had even at one time contemplated settling in Germany for good. I had found that impossible because life there was too bitter and hard and the poverty too great. If I had two settled convictions they were those of pity for the distress of the German people and absolute belief in their love of peace. I still retain my absolute belief in their love of peace. Just before that date I had made a speech at a dinner of one of the great City Companies – the Cordwainers, I think. I had declared my conviction that nothing in the world would ever make the German people go to war. The authorities might wish it, but the people would refuse. It was mostly among members of the Left that I had lived in Germany. Substantially that was what happened. German Authority did not win the war because the heart of the people would not stay the distance. Of that I am convinced.

I went on jeering and jeering at Masterman. I said: ‘You Liberals are all mad. I suppose your friend Dai Bach wants to prevent German pheasants from eating German mangold wurzels. Why should Germany go to war?’

He said grimly:

‘The roar of foreign guns has not been heard in London since 1662. And then only that once. You’ll have that experience in 1914. Germany will go to war next August because by then she will be on the verge of bankruptcy.’

We never mentioned the subject again till the third of August 1914. On that day Masterman told me that a majority of the Cabinet, of which majority he was one, had delivered an ultimatum to Germany which meant certain war … if the German troops crossed the Belgian frontier.

I said – it was in the hall of the Foreign Office in Whitehall:

‘The German troops will never cross the Belgian frontier… Never… Never… Never…’

Next morning about eleven his secretary rang me up and said:

‘Mr Masterman asks me to tell you that the Germans crossed the Belgian frontier near a place called Gemmenich at four o’clock this morning.’

Gemmenich is near Spa. I knew Spa as well as it was possible to know a small town that one visits frequently and whose Spa doctor attended to one’s family’s complaints.

I shall say nothing more about the war. But at Spa on the day after Masterman had made that prophecy there happened one of the great tragedies of my life. We had bought a good deal of wine from the landlord of the Hotel zur Post in Trêves. I had been there often and knew him well. As a reward for having brought him a British Excellency he gave me a bottle of 1813 brandy. In the Mosel there is a stone that is only uncovered in years of great drought – which are years of glorious vintages. On such years they chain a barrel of brandy to that stone. When it is again uncovered they remove the old barrel and chain on a new one. That stone had not been uncovered since 1813. The bottle that the host gave me had been filled from the 1813 barrel.

I told Masterman that the host had given it to him. I liked to see him look pleased: his face lit up so cherubically.

He was immensely pleased. He said:

‘Hurray. We will give it to George when he comes to lunch. He’s a connoisseur of liqueurs.’ Only a little later he would have wished to fill his liqueur glasses on such occasions with prussic acid. Or perhaps castor oil.

The almost worse tragedy was this. In the night at Spa Masterman had toothache. He poured by degrees the whole of that 1813 brandy into his mouth and spat it out again. By ringing the bell he could have procured a bottle of 1913 brandy for one franc fifty.

So I stood on the kerb in the Circus and felt adrift.

The day before I had attended the congress of German professors of history that had assembled in London. Professor Belbrück had been immensely interested in the scorpion that I carried in my cigarette case. It came from the Château d’Amour in the Alpilles. It died next day. From there I had taken some Americans to see the House of Commons. Mr Burns had kindly shewed them around. As we stood in Westminster Hall he pointed to the arch at the end of the building and said:

‘The first time I went through there was on my head. I was being thrown out.’ He explained that he had been with some deputation visiting some Minister when he had been a working man and his remarks had given offence.

I said: ‘Well, John, the next time you distinguish yourself here it will be by throwing Christabel out through that arch.’

Christabel Pankhurst was the leader of the W.S.P.U. – the Militant Suffragettes. Burns exclaimed: ‘My God, is there a raid coming?’ He turned white as chalk; his features expressed panic. He dashed up to the nearest policeman and I could hear him telling the man to telephone to Scotland Yard for reinforcements. That was what happened when you merely mentioned those ladies in the precincts of the House of Commons in those days.

We were sitting at tea on the terrace with one of the other Ministers when Mr Justice Darling became visible at a distance. The Minister said:

‘There’s old Darling. He’s trying the Suffragettes. We’ve promised him an earldom if he gives it to them hot.’

I took it that he was joking. But perhaps he wasn’t. That is why I do not mention his name.

I said: ‘Why don’t you give women the vote?’

He answered: ‘I’ll tell you. My election agent tells me that if women had the vote in my constituency they would vote two to one against me and I should lose my seat. What price my seat?’

I was supposed by those gentlemen to be in the inner council of the Suffragettes and to arrange outrages for them. I wasn’t. But I had the most intense admiration for those noble and beautiful-souled women and I gave them all the help I could both in writing and with suggestions. I wrote for them a pamphlet called This Monstrous Regiment of Women. It is the only work of mine that I care to mention by name in these pages … and proud of it still.

I will give in twenty-five words the reason for my conviction. In England of those days the only people who were refused the right of citizenship were children, criminals, lunatics – and the mothers of our children.

That seems to be a sufficient reason. It is not a good thing for children that their mothers should be branded as one with criminals and lunatics. I think that the only reason I had in my mind for returning, if I ever returned, to London was my determination to aid those women in attaining what they wanted and anxiety as to the future. The militant agitation had reached such extreme lengths and the government’s opposition was so stubborn, I was filled with real dread. I knew of thousands – but thousands and thousands – of women who were ready and would for certain sacrifice their lives to their cause in the coming autumn. The House was shortly to rise and there would be peace on the whole till September. I did not see how the country could possibly go on.

And the thought of the sufferings, mental or physical, of those women tormented me. They were the best women in the country. In the world or ever perhaps. They shrank unspeakably from publicity and from physical suffering. Yet they confronted both as unshrinkingly.

I had stopped to dinner in the House with Mr Hugh Law, Nationalist Member for I think a division of Dublin. I was warmly friendly with many Irish M.P.s and their supporters. I used to give a small tennis party every Thursday afternoon and the most frequent players – apart from Ezra, who plays tennis like a galvanised agile gibbon – had been Irish members of whatever complexion. Mr Law the Nationalist would play side by side with Mr Moore the Ulster Unionist. They would crack provincial jokes one with the other all through the afternoon with Ezra standing on his head on the other side of the net. In the evening from opposite sides of the House of Commons they would call down the curse of God one upon the other with unmistakable passion and sincerity. I knew quite well the two gentlemen I have mentioned, Mr Stephen Gwynn, Professor Kettle, a number of Ulster gun-runners and a number of violent Sinn Feiners. So that obviously I could know nothing about the Irish question. I once tried from the lips of several Nationalists of differing shades of opinion to give some account in an editorial in the English Review of an outrage that excited them all equally. But when Mr Law and Mr Gwynn and Mr Kettle and several others had had their say I could not tell, as it were, whether the member of the Royal Irish Constabulary had murdered the widow woman and stolen her goose or whether the widow’s goose had bitten the policeman’s leg off. And it was all inextricably mixed up with the fact that Dublin Castle would pay no attention to the disgraceful condition of the door to the telephone bureau in Rathmines sub-post office.

So after dinner that night I had finally said to Mr Law:

‘What do you want: how would you propose to settle the Irish question?’

He said: ‘Do you want to know? People don’t really want to know.’

I said that I wanted it passionately. A dreamy look came into his poetic eyes.

He said: ‘Och. Just give me the Connaught Rangers and let me go through the three counties with them.’

It would no doubt have settled the question. The Connaught Rangers were the toughest Catholic Irish troops in His Majesty’s Army. The three counties were the loyal and Protestant North.

Two years ago I happened to find in New York my engagement book for 1914. As I had made up my mind to make that city my headquarters from then on I had taken a number of old papers over there in order to sort them out and store them. The engagement book was by chance among them. It was tied up with the soiled, soaked translation into French of my one novel. I had begun to make it in Bécourt-Bécordel wood in July 1916.

The engagement book was an amazing, packed affair. From the middle of May to the end of June, except for the week-ends which I had spent either at Selsey where I lived next to Masterman and the editor of the Outlook or at other people’s country houses – there were only six days on which I did not have at least three dinner and after-dinner dates. There would be a dinner, a theatre or a party, a dance. Usually a breakfast at four after that. Or Ezra and his gang carried me off to their night club which was kept by Mme. Strindberg, decorated by Epstein and situate underground.

London was adorable then at four in the morning after a good dance. You walked along the south side of the park in the lovely pearl-grey coolness of the dawn. A sparrow would chirp with a great volume of distinct sound in the silence. Another sparrow, another – a dozen, a hundred, ten thousand. They would be like the violins of an orchestra. Then the blackbirds awakened, then the thrushes, then the chaffinches. It became the sound of an immense choir with the fuller notes of the merle family making obligatos over the chattering counterpoint of the sparrows. Then, as like as not, you turned into the house of someone who had gone before you from the dance to grill sausages and make coffee. There you breakfasted – usually on the lead roof above a smoking room, giving on to a deep garden. There would be birds there too. Those who cannot remember London then do not know what life holds. Alas…

I had behind me other activities. I wrote a shadow play for Mme. Strindberg and had to act it myself in place of the lovely actress who should have done it. A too ardent admirer of Mme. Strindberg had stolen the manuscript because he could not bear to let my play be produced.

One night I came home rather earlier than usual and found Lady Gregory camped on my doorstep. She said:

‘You have got to finance and manage the Irish Players.’

I said:

‘Delighted! But why?’

Miss Maire O’Neill, the adorable Pegeen Mike of The Playboy of the Western World, had attended a public meeting of Suffragettes. Miss Horniman, the guarantor of the company in England, had telegraphed from Liverpool that she would withdraw the subsidy if she did not receive an unconditional apology from every member of the company. The company had refused.

Lady Gregory said:

‘You will have to do it. You are responsible for the Suffragettes. It was reading you made Maire O’Neill go to that meeting.’

I said: ‘How much do you want?’ She said: ‘Two thousand pounds.’ I said: ‘All right. I will get it for you,’ and we drove to the theatre, where W. B. Yeats was rehearsing The Well of the Saints.

Their publicity had not been very well managed and we put on the Playboy for the first time to a nearly empty house. The critics had very few of them cared to come. The Irish Players played that play as if it had been the direst tragedy ever written. For the second performance I had bought all the reserved seats in the house and had sent them to all London. All London came. You never saw such a house. It contained over half the Cabinet and more than half of the Opposition Front Bench. Mr Balfour and Mr Burns sat together in the middle of the front row of the stalls; there were ambassadors; shoals of titles. We just missed having royalty because there was something going on at the other Court. Ours was the Court Theatre.

The Players played the Playboy as if it had been a roaring farce. The night before it might have been Oedipus Tyrannus. It is susceptible of both treatments.

Ellen Terry said a pretty thing. At the supper that we gave on the stage she lost a great paste star that she had been wearing. When it was given back to her she held it over Maire O’Neill’s head. She said:

‘My dear, “A star danced and underneath it you were born.” This is the star. Take it.’ It had been said to her before that. She meant that she was resigning her place to that young thing. She had the most graceful gestures and kindnesses of any woman that ever lived.

Four – or perhaps three – Christmas days ago I saw those same Irish players playing Juno and the Paycock in New York to five people, including two that I had brought. They came home with me after the play and I gave them grilled sausages and Dublin stout. It must have been Mr Allen Tate, the beautiful poet, who found those not too easily found comestibles in New York on Christmas Day at one in the morning. They were as gay as on the second night of the Playboy at the Court.

The money for the subsidy did not at first seem difficult to obtain. But an unforeseen difficulty arose. I had organised one or two drawing-room meetings at the houses of people like Governors of the Bank of England, who lent them kindly enough. We needed a relatively small sum – for the company was doing pretty well. The Playboy at least played to bumper houses. There was by then a committee of which Mr Shaw was the president.

We organised a really swell meeting in the studio of Mr Jacob Epstein at Chelsea. There must have been an enormous sum of money represented in that room. I had to make my appeal for funds first because I was going on somewhere else. I made the silly sort of speech that you make on such occasions. I said that if you wanted to keep Ireland quiet the best thing you could do would be to give the Irish an Abbey Theatre in every village. The Irish Company was called the Abbey Theatre Company. Before I had finished speaking the Monds, Wertheimers, Speyers and the usual subscribers to things of the sort had sent me up notes saying that they would subscribe between them a good deal more than was needed. I hurried away rejoicing.

When I went home to dress Lady Gregory was again occupying my doorstep. She said:

‘What are we to do now?’ I asked about what. She said:

‘To raise that money.’

Mr Bernard Shaw had spoken after me. He had said:

‘You idle rich. You are the last sort of people who should come to a meeting like this. Catch you subscribing a penny! All you think of is …’I don’t remember what it was but his words were to that effect. All those subscribers had withdrawn their promises of subscriptions. We had to begin all over again.

A little earlier in the season London had been startled by an invitation running You are invited to Dinner at the Pall Mall Restaurant to Celebrate the three hundred and fifty-seventh anniversary of one of the Weddings of Mary Queen of Scots. No one knew who had issued the invitation. But a great many people went and we met every one that we knew and a great many people that we were glad to know. The dinner was admirable, the wines exceedingly well selected. Still we had no idea who were our host and hostesses. Suddenly a delightfully dainty little blonde lady escorted by an extraordinarily humorous looking red-headed Scotsman was on a little dais making a little speech with a strong Chicagoan intonation. She said:

‘Friends. Today is my birthday. I was in London and lonely. I wanted you all to dine with me. But I knew you would none of you dine with me if I said “ Please come and dine with Mary Borden Turner on her birthday.” So I looked in the calendar and found it was the wedding anniversary of another Mary.’

The gentleman who had escorted her burst into laughter. He was the husband of that delightful person. Mrs Turner immediately became an extremely popular London hostess. She had taken the manor house in the village of my great-great-grandfather’s birth. That ancestor of mine was a remarkable person. He was the first anti-lancet doctor. The Scots doctors expelled him from the Scottish faculty of medicine; their English confrères put him into prison where he died. Napoleon always had any of John Brown’s pupils whom his forces took prisoner released as benefactors to humanity.

It was with the consciousness at the back of my head that I was going to visit the birthplace and be sheltered by the roof of the Turners that I stood on the kerb in the Circus and looked up at the sky. I was not to look up at that sky again until it was dark indeed. As a matter of fact one looks very seldom at the skies in great cities. But on that night all London was blacker than the grave. She had attained to a gravity and augustness that she had never had before. She had come into line with all the great capitals of the world. She had heard the roar of foreign guns and had suffered.

I went home to pack my things. Next morning I was on the high platform of Berwick station. Berwick town is in Berwickshire and Berwickshire in Scotland. But Berwick town is neither English nor Scottish. It is ‘juist Berwick’. The King’s proclamations are ordered to be affixed to the church doors of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and the town of Berwick-on-Tweed. I once had a cousin who was Mayoress of Berwick.

The air was very clear. The North Sea very blue. London was far away. I bought a newspaper – a Liberal sheet of the more grandmotherly kind. It told me that the Suffragettes were naughty, naughty girls and that they must be stopped. It was very angry with the King over several pages. The King was acting almost – oh, but only just almost – unconstitutionally. He had asked all the leaders of all the Irish parties to meet in a Round Table conference at Buckingham Palace under his own Presidency. The Daily News said it was a really very naughty King.

I imagined I knew all about that. I had seen Masterman really angry for the first time in my life. He said that the King was impossible to get on with. He was as determined that the Irish Question should be settled to the satisfaction of all his Irish subjects as his father had been to have the Entente Cordiale with France. The Cabinet was unanimously against the Buckingham Palace conference. They wanted to do nothing that could enhance Royal prestige. The matter had come to an absolute impasse.

Finally, according to Masterman – and I made a note of his words immediately afterwards; it was the only note I ever made but the occasion seemed very extraordinary – the King had said:

‘Very well, gentlemen. I am the richest commoner in England. If you wish me to abdicate I will abdicate, supposing that to be the wish of the country. But before that we will have a general election and I have not much doubt as to the results as between you and me.’ So he had his conference.

I was immensely glad. All my life I had been a passionate Home Ruler. I hate, I hate, I hate – three times – the idea of people of one race and religion being ruled over by people of alien race and another religion. But the Irish Question was a nightmare – a worse nightmare than the case of the Suffragettes. Here was a majority of one island with a minority of another religion and at intense enmity one with the other. The thought of the Connaught Rangers or the King’s Royal Rifles going through the Three Counties was unspeakable. And then … inside the territory of that Protestant minority was a tiny Catholic minority, as inside the Catholic territory of the majority was a small Protestant minority. Not even an Abbey Theatre in every village in Ireland could stop bloodshed in that sorrowful country. So I was glad the King was determined to have that question settled to the satisfaction of all parties of his Irish subjects. There had been a mutiny of English officers in the camp at Curragh outside Dublin…

I was putting down the paper with its large anti-Royal and antifeminine headings. I had a sudden sinking at the heart – a most sinister feeling. There was a three-line paragraph – such is editorial prescience – tucked away at the bottom of a page and headed minutely:

It was London’s news of the 28th June, 1914, reaching me there in a border town.

I said to myself:

‘Oh, the Socialists and Labour will stop a war. They are the tail that wags the Liberal dog all the world over.’ I really believed it and got into the branch train for Duns with a serene heart.

Duns Manor was delightful. The hospitable Turners had allowed me to suggest some of the guests. So Mr D. Z. was there, and Ezra was to have come, and the turf of the Scottish lawns was like close fine carpeting and the soft Scottish sunshine and the soft Scottish showers did the heart good. And my grandfather’s birthplace was a pretty old cottage and I played golf on Morpeth Town links with a cobbler, a descendant of my great-great-grandfather’s great uncle. He was a wonderful player. He carried a cleek with him and a couple of balls on his morning walk across the links from his cottage in the outskirts to his cobbler’s stall in the town. Before every difficult shot he said:

‘Aye, this will take some heid wark,’ and took from his pocket, whilst he surveyed the line his ball was to take, an immense flask that he called a half mutchkin. He drank slowly and long. Then his ball lay dead.

We sat on the lawns in the sunlight and people read aloud – which I like very much. D. Z. had brought the proofs from Blast of my one novel. I read that. Mrs Turner who, as Mary Borden, has become a novelist of really great gifts and authenticity, read from some magazine the instalments of the work of a writer of whom I had never heard. His name was James Joyce. I thought the magazine was the Little Review and the story Ulysses, but I have been reminded that it could not have been. It must then have been the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. So for me Armageddon was bridged.

On the fourth of August the Northern Edition of the Daily Mail appeared with, on its placards:

50 West 12th Street, New York     

4th Nov. MCMXXX

Cap Brun, 8th August MCMXXXI