‘Michael’s sympathies are with the miners.’
‘So are mine, young lady. Excellent fellow, the miner – but unfortunately cursed with leaders. The mine-owners are in the same case. Those precious leaders are going to grind the country’s nose before they’ve done. Inconvenient product – coal; it’s blackened our faces, and now it’s going to black our eyes. Not a merry old soul! Well, good-bye! My love to Kit, and tell Michael to keep his head.”
This was precisely what Michael was trying to do. When ‘the Great War’ broke out, though just old enough to fight, he had been too young to appreciate the fatalism which creeps over human nature with the approach of crisis. He was appreciating it now before ‘the Great Strike’, together with the peculiar value which the human being attaches to saving face. He noticed that both sides had expressed the intention of meeting the other side in every way, without, of course, making any concessions whatever; the slogans, ‘Longer hours, less wages’, ‘Not a minute more, not a bob off’, curtsied, and got more and more distant as they neared each other. And now, with the ill-disguised impatience of his somewhat mercurial nature, Michael was watching the sober and tentative approaches of the typical Britons in whose hands any chance of mediation lay. When, on that memorable Monday, not merely the faces of the gentlemen with slogans, but the very faces of the typical Britons were suddenly confronted with the need for being saved, he knew that all was up; and returning from the House of Commons at midnight, he looked at his sleeping wife. Should he wake Fleur and tell her that the country was ‘for it’, or should he not? Why spoil her beauty sleep? She would know soon enough. Besides, she wouldn’t take it seriously. Passing into his dressing-room, he stood looking out of the window at the dark Square below. A general strike at a few hours’ notice! ‘Some’ test of the British character! The British character? Suspicion had been dawning on Michael for years that its appearances were deceptive; that Members of Parliament, theatregoers, trotty little ladies with dresses tight blown about trotty little figures, plethoric generals in armchairs, pettish and petted poets, parsons in pulpits, posters in the street – above all, the Press, were not representative of the national disposition. If the papers were not to come out, one would at least get a chance of feeling and seeing the British character; owing to the papers, one never had seen or felt it clearly during the war, at least not in England. In the trenches, of course, one had – there, sentiment and hate, advertisement and moonshine, had been ‘taboo’, and with a grim humour the Briton had just ‘carried on’, unornamental and sublime, in the mud and the blood, the stink and the racket, and the endless nightmare of being pitchforked into fire without rhyme or reason! The Briton’s defiant humour that grew better as things grew worse, would – he felt – get its chance again now. And, turning from the window, he undressed and went back into the bedroom.
Fleur was awake.
‘Well, Michael?’
‘The strike’s on.’
‘What a bore!’
‘Yes; we shall have to exert ourselves.’
‘What did they appoint that Commission for, and pay all that subsidy, if not to avoid things?’
‘My dear girl, that’s there common sense – no good at all.’
‘Why can’t they come to an agreement?’
‘Because they’ve got to save face. Saving face is the strongest motive in the world.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, it caused the war; it’s causing the strike now; without “saving face” there’d probably be no life on the earth at all by this time.’
Michael kissed her.
‘I suppose you’ll have to do something,’ she said, sleepily. ‘There won’t be much to talk about in the House while this is on,’
‘No; we shall sit and glower at each other, and use the word “formula” at stated intervals.’
‘I wish we had a Mussolini.’
‘I don’t. You pay for him in the long run. Look at Diaz and Mexico; or Lenin and Russia; or Napoleon and France; or Cromwell and England, for the matter of that.’
‘Charles the Second,’ murmured Fleur into her pillow ‘was rather a dear.’
Michael stayed awake a little, disturbed by the kiss, slept a little, woke again. To save face! No one would make a move because of their faces. For nearly an hour he lay trying to think out a way of saving them all, then fell asleep. He woke at seven with the feeling that he had wasted his time. Under the appearance of concern for the country, and professions of anxiety to find a ‘formula’, too many personal feelings, motives, and prejudices were at work. As before the war, there was a profound longing for the humiliation and dejection of the adversary; each wished his face saved at the expense of the other fellow’s!