They had at once started arguing—or, rather, each had started exposing his views. Christopher stated what he was going to do, and Mark his horror at what Christopher proposed. Mark’s horror came from the fact that Christopher proposed to eschew comfort. An Englishmen’s duty is to secure for himself forever reasonable clothing, a clean shirt a day, a couple of mutton chops grilled without condiments, two floury potatoes, an apple pie with a piece of Stilton and pulled bread, a pint of Club Médoc, a clean room, in the winter a good fire in the grate, a comfortable armchair, a comfortable woman to see that all these were prepared for you, to keep you warm in bed and to brush your bowler and fold your umbrella in the morning. When you had that secure for life, you could do what you liked provided that what you did never endangered that security. What was to be said against that?
Christopher had nothing to advance except that he was not going to live in that way. He was not going to live in that way unless he could secure that, or something like it, by his own talents. His only available and at the same time marketable talent was his gift for knowing genuine old furniture. So he was going to make a living out of old furniture. He had had his scheme perfectly matured; he had even secured an American partner, a fellow who had as great a gift for the cajolement of American purchasers of old stuff as he, Christopher, had for its discovery. It was still the war then, but Christopher and his partner, between them, had predicted the American mopping up of the world’s gold supply and the consequent stripping of European houses of old stuff. … At that you could make a living.
Other careers, he said, were barred to him. The Department of Statistics, in which he had formerly had a post, had absolutely cold-shouldered him. They were not only adamant, they were also vindictive against civil servants who had become serving soldiers. They took the view that those members of their staffs who had preferred serving were idle and dissolute fellows who had merely taken up arms in order to satisfy their lusts for women. Women had naturally preferred soldiers to civilians; the civilians were now getting back on them. That was natural.
Mark agreed that it was natural. Before he had been interested in his brother as a serving soldier, he had been inclined to consider most soldiers as incompetent over Transport and, in general, nuisances. He agreed, too, that Christopher could not go back to the Department. There he was certainly a marked man. He could possibly have insisted on his rights to be taken back even though his lungs, being by now pretty damaged by exposure, might afford them a pretext for legally refusing him. H.M. Civil Service and Departments have the right to refuse employment to persons likely to become unfit for good. A man who has lost an eye may be refused by any Department because he may lose the other and so become liable for a pension. But, even if Christopher forced himself on the Department, they would have their bad mark against him. He had been too rude to them during the war when they had tried to force him to employ himself in the faking of statistics that the Ministry had coerced the Department into supplying in order to dish the French, who demanded more troops.
With that point of view, Mark found himself entirely in sympathy. His long association with Marie Léonie, his respect for the way in which she had her head screwed on, the constant intimacy with the life and point of view of French individuals of the petite bourgeoisie which her gossip had given him—all these things, together with his despair for the future of his own country, had given him a very considerable belief in the destinies and, indeed, in the virtues of the country across the Channel. It would, therefore, have been very distasteful to him that his brother should take pay from an organization that had been employed to deal treacherously with our Allies. It had, indeed, become extremely distasteful to him to take pay himself from a Government that had forced such a course upon the nation, and he would thankfully have resigned from his Office if he had not considered that his services were indispensable to the successful prosecution of the war which was then still proceeding. He wanted to be done with it, but, at the moment, he saw no chance. The war was by then obviously proceeding towards a successful issue. Owing to the military genius of the French, who, by then, had the supreme command, the enemy nations were daily being forced to abandon great stretches of territory. But that only made the calls on Transport the greater, whilst, if we were successfully and unwastefully to occupy the enemy capital, as at that date he imagined that we obviously must, the demand for the provision of Transport must become almost unmeasurable.
Still, that was no argument for the reentry of his brother into the service of the country. As he saw things, public life had become—and must remain for a long period—so demoralized by the members of the then Government, with their devious foreign policies and their intimacies with a class of shady financiers such as had never hitherto had any finger in the English political pie—public life had become so discreditable an affair that the only remedy was for the real governing classes to retire altogether from public pursuits. Things, in short, must become
