Permission to Resign

by Ann Bridge

  Having thanked the messenger for the trouble to which he had been put in making his way out from Oxford at night, and expressing my regret that at so late an hour I could not direct the servants to give him any refreshment, I went into my own study to collect myself before going to my father’s room to tell him what had happened. When I did tell him he was very much upset, but I noticed at the time and have remembered ever since that the impact of this shocking news upon him was different from what it would have been upon a younger man. My father’s brain at eighty-six years of age was still perfectly clear, but it seemed to me that he had moved so far from the strivings and passions and turbulence of middle life towards the peace and detachment which a singularly well-balanced nature and a profound sense of spiritual values had prepared for his old age, that he could accept in its true light as a mere modification of exterior circumstances a shock which I, for my part, found barely tolerable.

  People frequently say that they have passed a sleepless night, but in fact a night wholly without sleep is very rare for healthy people. This night was one of the few on which I have not slept at all, and it was indeed a very memorable and important vigil. For me the religious experience is to want nothing for myself, to be rid of myself, being in this way liberated and ready to to be identified through worship with goodness and beauty. The blow which I had received had this liberating effect, so that in the same moment that I was assaulted by pain I found myself outside myself, and apprehended that pain and pleasure and personality were, so to speak, irrelevant to my true purpose, which was to be something not myself. Such a thing had never happened to me before, and I must add that it has never happened to me again. I knew at the time that the revelation would become dim, and so it has; but I know quite well that what I think happened really did happen, that what I now see through a glass darkly then filled the whole range of my vision. My concern ever since has been to get back to where in those moments I belonged.

  Something else of importance was brought home to me simultaneously which also related to the nature of suffering in general as much as to the ‘Francs Case’ and my part in it. I felt that I had been selected for a particularly hazardous and alarming duty. Irrespective of the whole rather distasteful setting and of any real or imputed delinquencies on my part, I had suddenly been called upon to leave the ranks of ordinary people and put my faith and courage to the test. It was of overwhelming importance that in this I should not fail, for the spiritual well-being of others seemed for this brief instant of time to have been put into my custody. It was irrelevant that others did not know, and would probably never know of the struggle or of my part in it. If my fortitude now failed, the failure would recoil on the heads of others; if it did not fail I should have rendered them a real service. What little courage I myself had was inadequate to this end, but it was not my business to rely upon myself. My affair was to make myself a channel through which courage from some other source could flow; to be a willing, almost a passive instrument; to be poor in spirit. Nor was I alone in this emergency. I was surrounded by a great company who in their time had been exposed to anxieties and losses and humiliations and the relentless fatigues of pain. They rode behind me clothed in the panoply of fortitude, and if I did not fail them now, all would draw strength and increase from my fidelity.’

  Chapter IV

  Amie Fremantle (whose family are old friends of ours) reviewing my book Facts and Fictions in the New York Times, took me to task for not having included the episode of the Francs Case. This would have been wholly inappropriate and out of key with the rest of the book, which is a light and cheerful account of the real adventures which lay behind my various novels. However, she quoted two or three sentences from my husband’s account, printed above, and added: ‘Perhaps Ann Bridge will some day write a novel about the separate effect of one experience upon two people.’ This was rather astute. My own account of the whole business, which now follows, shows clearly enough that though it was a searing experience for me, and taxed my fortitude severely, I did not reap the same sort of spiritual harvest that my husband did; as usual, I was absorbed in the practical aspects. (I was in fact christened Mary, but that was a mistake; I should have been called Martha.)

  And there is another point which I wish to take up here. More than one person of mature experience and sound judgement to whom I have shown the contemporary account that now follows have – cautiously or bluntly according to temperament – expressed the view that it shows my husband in a poor light; that he did nothing much to save himself, while I came home from abroad and fought his battles for him quickly and triumphantly.

  This criticism, if made by wise persons, is still more likely to be made by what Virginia Woolf called ‘the Common Reader’, and so I think it right to rebut it in advance. It arises, I think partly from ignorance of the circumstances, and partly from inattentive reading. My husband was told to resign; he duly tendered his resignation to the Head of the Foreign Office, then Sir William Tyrrell, and accompanied it by a memorandum pointing out some of the inaccuracies and mis-statements of fact in the Report on which his condemnation was based. This was a very telling document, but Sir William practically suppressed it; even Walford Selby, the Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, had never heard of its existence, let alone seen it, till I handed him a copy forty-eight hours after my return, at least a fortnight after it was sent in. Nor did the Foreign Office accept my husband’s resignation, and until it had been accepted he was still a member of the Service. He felt that this precluded him from taking any other steps to defend himself, or authorizing anyone else to do so. (Hence his refusal even to see Will Arnold-Forster, adviser to the Labour Party on Foreign Affairs, although Will was one of his oldest, dearest, and closest friends, and begged to be allowed at least to come and talk to him.) In effect, by not accepting the resignation, the Foreign Office (or Sir William Tyrrell) effectually muzzled my husband, with the strict sense of official propriety then obtaining in the Service.

  Even if his resignation had been accepted, it would have been highly inappropriate for the victim to go round himself brandishing the memorandum, which was, in fact, a very complete rebuttal of the worst accusations against him, and an admirable defence; whereas, for his wife to do so seemed to me – and to those, like Walford Selby and Sir Victor Wellesley, one of the Deputy Under-Secretaries of State, to whom I showed a copy – a perfectly right and proper action.

  Now, Sir Warren Fisher had been Chairman of the Board of Enquiry, and it was obvious to all who knew him that the one hope of getting a reversal of the monstrous verdict on my husband was somehow to upset Fisher, and shake his complacently stubborn conviction that the picture of Owen drawn in the Board’s Report was a fair and accurate one. Here again, helped by Nevile and Portia Bland, Owen began this process himself. This is what I mean when I refer to ‘inattentive reading’ by his critics. I have said quite clearly in my account of this episode that when the Blands had Fisher and Owen to luncheon together at their house, Fisher, as Portia was driving him back to the Treasury afterwards, ‘shed tears’. Now the Head of the Civil Service doesn’t weep in other people’s cars, in broad daylight, unless he is very much upset indeed; and this effect was produced entirely by Owen himself – I was still out in Switzerland. (Nevile Bland, recalling this occasion, told a friend of ours recently that Owen’s first words to Fisher, on being introduced, were, ‘Well, for a clever man, you have written a lot of bloody nonsense’.) And, at the same luncheon, as I have also recorded, Owen was astute enough to give Fisher that early letter of mine from Chateau d’Oex, quoted in my account, rightly judging that it would upset him still more; it did, and moved him to send me that little note of attempted consolation which gave me the opportunity to reply to him at length, mentioning the mistake in the Report about Owen’s seniority. If I had not already been in correspondence with him I should never have dared to ring up the Treasury from 19 Dean’s Yard (the private house of the Headmaster of Westminster Sc
hool) on the afternoon of my return home, which led to that momentous luncheon at Fisher’s flat, from which all the rest flowed.

  Oh no, I think Owen did all that could be expected of any man in his situation to help himself; that he then got ill was not his fault. If one gets influenza and has a high temperature the doctor sends one to bed, and there one has to stay till the temperature goes down and one has recovered – as in due course happened to him.

  And I also think this misapprehension about him is partly my own fault, and is due to the exuberance with which I reported what was, in spite of the initial misery, a rather exhilarating experience for me. His Majesty’s Government had made a wrong and cruel decision; with endless help from all sides, they were induced to reverse it. This does not happen every day; still less do common mortals have a hand in bringing it about.

  My contemporary account follows.

  Part Two

  Chapter I

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, 28 February 1928, I received the following telegram at the Villa Prima-Flora, Chateau d’Oex, a pension where I was staying with my son of ten – ‘Am thinking much of you love Helen.’

  I had known that the Report of the Board of Enquiry set up in connection with the so-called ‘Francs Case’ was to be presented to the Government at the end of the previous week, consequently this telegram from my sister alarmed me very much. I at once telegraphed to my husband as follows: ‘Bitte Resultat sofort telegraphieren man kondoliert und ich weiss nichts. [Please telegraph result immediately people are condoling and I know nothing.] Marianne.’

  I got no reply that evening, and spent a wretched night. The Continental Daily Mail reaches Chateau d’Oex at 9.30 a.m., and I had a dread of reading bad news first in the Press – or of having to face curiosity or condolence from comparative strangers without knowledge or time to brace myself to meet it. Till my sister’s telegram came I had not been seriously disturbed – so many people in the Foreign Office were, to my knowledge, involved, and my husband’s dealings had been so small in comparison with those of others that a reprimand, or a year’s loss of seniority, at the very worst, was all I had feared. But such a telegram could only mean bad news, and I hardly slept. At eight next morning while I was still in bed hearing John’s Latin preparation, a telegram was brought in; the maid waited while I read it. It was from Owen, in answer to mine, and said: ‘Don dismissed me to resign Maxse loses three years seniority others reprimanded remember it is courage that counts not circumstances. Owen.’

  I read it, and told Jeanne ‘Il n’y a pas de réponse’.

  John wanted to know what it was about.

  ‘Only business – no one is ill – they are all right’, I told him, and then went on with my knitting and made him go on with his prep.

  When he had gone off to school I got up and dressed, and went down and sought out Madame Juvet in the kitchen. I thought it expedient to tell her, partly because of the curiosity aroused in the chalet by two telegrams in twenty-four hours, partly because I knew she would see it in the Swiss papers at noon, and also because I did not particularly want M. Juvet to have the London news on the wireless at meals that day. She was, as always, extremely kind and extremely sensible.

  ‘I am sorry’, she said – and then, stirring my porridge, ‘I suppose it will mean beginning all over again?’

  I assured her that that was indeed so. She then told me how her husband’s business had failed after the War, and how they had been ruined, with five children, and had come through in spite of everything. She exhorted me to courage and faith, in a very simple but compelling way – we kissed, my landlady and I, with a tear or two, and then I went off and had my breakfast.

  Soon after nine I went down to the town to buy a Daily Mail. There is a short cut through the fields below the chalet, across the railway, and through a gap in the fence behind the English Church, which brings you out just opposite the Librairie Martin. Such cowardice will hardly be believed, but I went by this route to avoid meeting anyone. I bought my paper and glanced at the headlines in the shop. There it was, sure enough, in blinding capitals:

  ‘FOREIGN OFFICE SCANDAL

  MR GREGORY DISMISSED

  MR OWEN O’MALLEY PERMITTED TO RESIGN’

  I hid the paper in my jacket – I could not bear to be seen with it in my hand in the street just then – went up to the Post Office, and sent off my telegram to Owen: ‘My dear don’t worry secunda adversa fortuna vicissim sed amor virtusque semper. Marianne.’

  When I had done this I sat on the bench in the little upstairs room outside the telegraph office and read my Daily Mail – it was empty there, and quiet, and warm, and I was very cold. I read it all – the torrents of condemnation in the leader, the incredible tone of the Report. It was not given in full, but there was enough to stagger me. I could not think what could conceivably have happened for such a case to be made out. It was like getting a lot of blows on the head with a heavy hammer, one after another.

  At last I saw that it was nearly eleven o’clock. I had a job to do at once, and I went and did it, leaving my Mail on the bench. I went up to the English School and asked for the Headmaster. There is half an hour’s break at eleven and I knew he would be free. When he came out I told him what had happened and asked if he would like me to take John away from the school. He was puzzled and worried, but said no, of course not – as I left he said ‘So sorry!’

  (A few days later this same headmaster, whose acquaintance I had only made a few weeks before, sought me out and told me, very diffidently, that he felt we had been treated with grave injustice; that he realized that things would be hard for us for some time to come, and if we cared to agree to the arrangement, he would like to take our boy into his school and keep him till he went to public school – a period of over three years – at less than half fees. We did not accept; but I should like to put on record, and here to do honour to, the generosity and sense of fair play of a man of little showing, not rich, to almost total strangers.)

  Then I went back to the Librairie Martin. By this time the English papers had arrived and I got a Times and a Morning Post. I didn’t buy any more because they cost 50 centimes each and I was not feeling very rich. I returned by the fields, crossed the railway, and sat down in the sun on a ladder under a big barn below the chalet – it is a place screened from observation more or less, and there I read my papers. They were as bad as the Mail, or worse – not a word of pity or sympathy anywhere. After reading them I felt more battered and blinded than ever. But it was getting on for lunchtime, so I hid them in my coat again and went in and got tidy and went down to lunch.

  After lunch I wrote to Owen. Then I took John out. I do not remember where we went, but we had a jolly walk with lots of fun, and then tea. Afterwards he went off to a Latin lesson, and I don’t remember what I did, but when he came in I had the room all tidy for him to do his prep in, and when that was done I put him to bed, with jokes over the bath and reading aloud. Then I went down to dinner. It may be thought rather morbid and foolish to have found these meals with sixteen people a strain that first day, but I did find them so. Still, I was sure that it was no good giving in to such feelings, so I went into the salon after dinner as usual and read till Mr King, a master at John’s school, came, when we played Bridge till bedtime.

  Mrs Renton, a woman in the chalet, to her eternal honour, came straight into my room at some period that day and said she was very sorry and that it was a damned shame. She also said that if I should want to go home she would look after John for me.

  After that it was just a case of writing letters and getting – or not getting – letters. Sometimes I did not get a letter from Owen for forty-eight hours. Then I could not sleep. When I had had a letter I generally slept. May and Archie Bell sent a good telegram saying ‘Official friends seem to recognize necessity for exerting themselves as regards future’, which was a sort of prop. The letters speak for themselves. At one point, three days after hearing the news – it was on the Saturday – I dec
ided that I must go home to Owen. And next day there was a case of scarlet fever at the chalet and in the school. So we were in quarantine and I could not go, and had to fall back on letters again.

  This prolegomena I have purposely written in order to give the moral background, so to speak, from which our great effort was launched, so far as I was concerned. I have left the letters to speak for themselves of the spiritual struggle to accept the loss of all earthly things, even our good name, and to maintain our integrity under injustice. But in days to come, in good and in ill fortune, I wish to remember those first hours of shock, of helplessness, and of isolation, just as they were; and to remember not only that I lived through them but that out of them came the strength to cooperate with Owen in his struggle for life.

  ‘And if I drink oblivion of a day

  So shorten I the stature of my soul.’

  Chapter II

  The whole business of the reversal of the verdict is very curious and intricate and – almost – accidental; one episode leading on to another in a way at once so involved and so haphazard that it is hard to apportion the responsibility for the final success. But the first and one of the biggest marks goes to Nevile Bland. He decided that Owen and Sir Warren Fisher must meet, and had them to lunch at his house on 29 February. They talked religion and metaphysics, and it is hard to know which was most surprised to find that the other cared more about such things than about anything else. Fisher certainly suffered a strong revulsion of feeling, and as Portia Bland drove him back to the Treasury shed tears. He wrote Owen two letters, which follow, and sent him some books – the Verba Christi and some by Grayson.