"The nobles ... have nearly ceased either to guide or misguide; ...
the Noble has changed his fighting sword into a court rapier; and
now loyally attends his King as ministering satellite; divides the
spoil, not now by violence and murder, but by soliciting and
finesse.... For the rest, their privileges every way are now much
curtailed.... Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of
dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously.... Nevertheless, one
has still partly a feeling with the lady Maréchale: 'Depend upon
it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality.'
These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could not
have been there."—Thomas Carlyle, "The French Revolution."
Somewhere in my library at Lake House there is a little volume of essays
entitled "History Re-written." It is a collection of jeux d'esprit
exhumed from a dozen reviews by an author whose imagination loved to
annihilate a single historical fact and reconstruct the changed
consequences. There is one picture of the Greeks flying in disorder
before the triumphant Darius on the plain of Marathon, and the
subjection of Europe to an Eastern despotism; another of Julius Cæsar
successfully defending himself against his would-be assassins; a third
of Mahomet dying of starvation during the Hegira. I recall a study of
Luther overwhelming the Vatican in argument, Columbus shipwrecked in
mid-Atlantic, the Regiment of Flanders firing on the Paris mob,
Napoleon leading the Grand Armée to luxurious winter quarters in Moscow.
Sometimes I wonder whether history would have had to be much re-written
if the King of England and the German Emperor had been personally more
cordial from 1901 to 1910; whether, too, destiny could have been cheated
if Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had lived another five years. "C.-B."
laboured for peace, and his honesty was not called in question; there
was always the certainty that democracy the world over would one day
grow strong enough to forbid war; there was always the chance that this
decisive strength would come before a military party could issue its
mobilization orders.
I know I speak in a minority of one: a thousand pens have shown that war
was pre-ordained: yet—I wonder if the writers guess how nearly it was
avoided. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned, there was no one of
equal authority to carry on his work. For a space the unconvinced
preached disarmament to the unbelieving, then impatiently girded
themselves for war. The Japanese Alliance, the French Entente, the
Russian rapprochement were good platform points for a German
scaremonger. If we had continued working for peace and keeping free of
continental engagements, I wonder whether our teaching would have had
time to bear fruit. My uncle Bertrand thought so and, though my
political beliefs are too unstable to matter, he converted me from a
showy Liberal Imperialism to an old-fashioned peaceful insularity. The
change came gradually. My allegiance to the party weakened when Bill
after Bill was contemptuously rejected in the House of Lords, and our
leaders fulminated and declined battle. Thereafter a certain uneasiness
was occasioned by the vagaries of the Foreign Office. Ostensibly our
French Entente was formed to facilitate the settlement of outstanding
questions in North Africa; and, though we were told from the Treasury
Bench that militarily we were still uncommitted, Lobby gossip had a
dozen disquieting theories of new secret engagements. Bertrand used to
get his knuckles rapped for indiscreet questions to the Foreign
Secretary, but rebuffs from mandarins only increased his suspicion that
the whole truth was being withheld from the House of Commons.
Growing distrust of a brilliant and exasperatingly Celestial Ministry
determined the course of my later years in Parliament. O'Rane left
England at the end of 1906, my constituents rejected me in the first
election of 1910; in the intervening time I joined an advanced Radical
group in advocating better international understandings and immediate
war on the House of Lords. They were the three busiest years of my life,
and, when my uncle set his peace organization to work, a day of sixteen
hours was divided equally between Fleet Street, the House, and the
Central Disarmament Committee in Princes Gardens.
Of the outside world I saw even less than in my first session when I was
a loyal party man; and, if there had been no Liberal Bills for Loring to
wreck, I should have lost touch with all my former friends. As it was,
he would ask me with exaggerated fear how much time I gave him to make
peace with his Maker. I would expound the only possible solution of the
House of Lords problem—(there were always six at any given time, all
mutually destructive)—and under the shadow of the guillotine we would
adjourn for dinner and inquire whether anything had been heard of Raney.
It is almost superfluous to say that no letter was ever received from
him, but Summertown cabled laconically at two-month intervals, and
distorted messages reached us from Sally Farwell or Lady Marlyn. It was
agreed that whichever first received news of the wanderers should
immediately communicate with the other, and the formula—"Lord Loring's
compliments, and will you dine with him to-night?"—nine times out of
ten meant that the long-suffering Lady Marlyn had recently been handed a
flimsy sheet with some such words as "All well Raney married to Dowager
Queen of Siam leaving to-day for Java."
When I think of Loring at this time I always recall Burgess's parting
advice on our last day at Melton. Few men who prophesied so freely could
boast of making so few mistakes; he had predicted that there was no
third course beyond a definite career such as the Diplomatic Service and
a dilettante politico-social existence of drift such as Loring now
pursued. It does not lie in my mouth to pass judgement, but I was sorry
to see a man with ten times my ability dabbling in life as negligently
as he did. His whole energy was devoted to recapturing the last
enchantments of the Middle Ages: ecclesiastically, politically and
socially he stood for a vanished order and, when his own generation
declined to jump backward across the centuries, he shrugged his
shoulders in good-humoured contempt and walked his road
alone—obstinate, aloof and correct to the last button of his boot. In
the Lords he led the wildest of the Backwoodsmen groups, in Society he
fluttered with a swarm where all were called by the Christian name and
each took pride in the large number of people he did not know.
Failure is so little honoured that there is something pathetic in the
sight of a man refusing to be modernized. At the same time, though my
instincts are Bohemian, I am glad to think that at least one section of
society refused to be bought up by the invaders who now assailed London
with a handful of bank cheques. These years were the era of Adolf
Erckmann and his retainers; their war-paint and war-cries, their
ruthlessness and ferocity of attack led Loring to dub them "les
Apaches," and for seven or eight years before the outbreak of war there
was truceless fighting between the old order and the new. Before it was
over, Loring was beaten. He kept his own house free of the invaders and
occasionally raided their camp and rescued a prisoner. Summertown, for
example, had been captured for a time and came near to swelling the
number of Peerage and Stage romances. It is to Loring's sole credit that
the indiscretion was scotched. But a few local successes could not be
magnified into a general victory, and by 1914 London lay at the feet of
Erckmann, Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a few other chiefs with their
followers drawn from every quarter of England.
Erckmann's first purchase was Lord Pennington—who indeed was on sale
for anyone who would give him five meals a day, excitement, noise, youth
and not too intellectual conversation. Next came Mrs. Welman, whose
spirit yet lived amid the dusts and draughts and dressing-rooms of that
Avenue Theatre she had forsaken to marry her wealthy paralytic husband.
Thereafter it was simply a question of capillary attraction. The titles
glamoured the stage, the stage fascinated the titles, and Erckmann, if
he did not attract, at least paid for all. It was a motley gathering
with a sadly draggled reputation here and there: you would find one or
two Americans, several Jews, a few Germans and an astonishing number of
young-men-about-town getting rich without undue toil on the wizard
Erckmann's advice. "You wand a good dime, hein?" he would say
invitingly. "You gome with me, my vriend." And they came.
According to their lights, too, they had the best time in the world.
Ever trooping together from limelight to limelight, you would find a row
of them in the stalls for any first night: the Royal Box was always
theirs for a costume ball, and visitors to a regatta would punt half a
mile to see the splendour of their house-boat. Should you enter a
restaurant, their presence would be betrayed by the free-and-easy
relations existing between themselves and the waiters—whom they called
by nicknames: and, were you a recluse, the "Tickler" would portray the
whole horde on Erckmann's lawn at Marlow, or you could sit by your
fireside, the "Catch" open on your knees, envying them their presence in
"Lord Pennington's house-party in Buckinghamshire."
I give them all credit for their powers of organization. A charity ball
in their prehensile hands went with an undoubted swing, and no one who
spent a week-end in their company could reasonably complain of dullness.
I remember that the papers for some months were full of "Ragging in
Country House" cases; there was the mock burglary at Pennington's place,
Erckmann's launch tried to shoot Marlow Weir at three o'clock in the
morning, and the unexplained fire in Mrs. Welman's Surrey cottage burned
one of her maids to death. Some thought that they went perhaps a little
too far in this last escapade, and for a time the Smart Set dropped out
of the public gaze. Then the Dean of St. Pancras, struggling into the
mantle of Savonarola, devoted a course of Advent sermons to
anathematizing them on the curious ground that they were responsible for
a falling birth-rate, and the discussion—with this decanal benediction
on it—became brisk and general.
There were houses in London where I met them, and tables where I supped
with voluble, fluffy little footlight favourites whose accent and choice
of language were notably more literary at the beginning of the meal than
at the end. Dozens of carmined lips used to ask whether I had seen their
"show"; other dozens described their next engagements and the number of
pounds a week they had just refused. I floundered by the hour in
contemporary theatrical history and daringly discussed actor managers by
their Christian names.
Loring had no taste for such adventures. To be an Apache was to be
refused admission to his house. He complained of their vitality and
confessed weakness in repartee when accosted as a "sport" or informed
that he "must have a drink."
"We get at cross-purposes," he sighed, stretching himself to his full,
handsome, six foot three and smoothing his moustache. "The fault's mine,
but there it is. I've arrived fainting at the end of a long journey
because I've not got the buffet manner with barmaids."
As a fellow-member of the "Eclectic," I was on nodding terms with
Erckmann, but to the end he and Loring never met. Perhaps a dozen other
hosts and hostesses ranged themselves on the side of old-fashioned
prudery, including for a time Lady Dainton, who assured me that she did
not know what Society was coming to. I was dining with her one evening
towards the end of 1907 to meet the girl Tom had just engaged himself to
marry.
"I mean I would never dream of letting Sonia know such people, don't you
know?" she told me.
"I share your view," I said, finding time to recall that in the
Daintons' first London Season Sonia had habitually attended the meetings
of the Four-in-hand Club on Erckmann's box seat.
"You wait till I'm married, mother!" said Sonia, who had overheard the
conversation.
"When's the great event coming off?" I asked.
"Oh, not at present," said Lady Dainton rather hurriedly. "I don't want
two weddings in the family at the same time. Besides, Tony's only been
at the Bar a short time. We must wait till his position's a little more
established, don't you know?"
I agreed, as I always agree with Lady Dainton. Yet as I walked home that
night I murmured to myself some hackneyed lines from Robert Burns. If
there was one thing more certain to my mind than another, it was that
the ever-shrewd Anthony Crabtree relied on the Daintons and the
"desperate thing" of marriage to establish his position.
I saw and heard no more of the family until the autumn. One morning in
October Loring rang me up with the news that Summertown was in London,
dining that night at Hale's. I was invited to meet him and found that
eleven months' travel had altogether failed to mature him. A spasmodic,
sandy moustache hinted at increasing age, but in other respects he was
the same freckled, snub-nosed embodiment of irresponsibility as ever.
The same taste for local colour characterized him as when on his return
from America he lisped of candy, cocktails, dollar-bills and the art of
clubbing as practised by the New York police: he was now the completest
Anglo-Indian I have ever met, and his conversation sparkled with sahibs
and white men, the Rains and the Hot Weather, the Hills in general and
half-sacred Simla in particular. Mr. Warren Hastings, looking sourly
down from the wall of Hale's coffee-room, must have seen us as seated at
endless Tiffin—paid by means of Chits—where Saises, Khitmutgars and
Ayahs entered and salaamed, and twenty-one gun salutes boomed faintly in
the distance—as men have politely sat for years round any returned
traveller or student of Kipling's Indian stories.
"What have you done with Raney?" Loring asked as the Odyssey drew to its
close.
"I left him in Paris," was the answer. "We were going on to Spain, but
the guv'nor don't think he's a suitable companion for a simple,
unspoiled lad like me. My own adored mother's choice, too, mark you."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Phew! What didn't?" Summertown leant back with his thumbs thrust
importantly into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I suppose you fellows
don't appreciate it's been touch and go for a European War? Nothing but
the well-known family tact of the Marlyns——"
"Get to the point," Loring ordered him.
Summertown bowed his head to the reproof.
"We came back overland from Vladivostock to Moscow," he said, "and about
that point Raney recollected that his foot was on his native heath and
all that sort of thing. We sprang lightly out of the train, seized our
grips and Baedeckers, and sauntered round Russia and Poland, eventually
bringing up at a spot called Hungary—where, by the way, there's a drink
called Tokay ... All right, but you do spoil a good story, you know.
From Hungary it is, as they say, a mere step to Austria. So we stepped.
Raney's a most astonishing fellow, you know," he explained, in a short
digression. "He's lived in all these places and talks the lingo like a
beastly native. However, to resume my absorbing narrative, the moon
shone out one night and discovered us eating scrambled eggs at a cabaret
called the 'Chat Noir,' which being interpreted is 'Black Cat'——"
"Thank you," I said.
"The fruits of travel," he answered, with a bow. "To us enters, as they
say in the stage directions, a flat-nosed brute who craves the favour of
a match. Raney gave him some chat in Hungarian—which for some dam'
silly reason I could never understand is called Magyar—and in a moment
they were thick as thieves. I didn't know what all the eloquence was
about, but they kept dragging in a chap called Kossuth——"
"I think I've heard the name somewhere," said Loring.
Summertown looked at him with admiration.
"I thought it was one of the filthy waters they give you when you're
doing a cure. Kossuth, yes. If you're one of the heads you pronounce it
Koshoot and spell it Metternich. Well, these lads spat Magyar at each
other and clinked glasses till the band broke down and everybody was
staring at our table. Then an Austrian officer in a dream of a grey
cloak strolled up and made some offensive remark. Of course, in mere
vulgar abuse, dear old Raney's a pretty tidy performer, and they did
'emselves proud. I heard the name O'Rane sandwiched in between the
gutturals, and then the Austrian got home with some pretty phrase. Raney
went white as the proverbial sheet, picked up his glove from the table
and gave that officer the most God Almighty welt across the face that
I've ever seen. There—was—the—devil of a scene. I thought you
exchanged cards about this point and then nipped over the frontier,
leaving the other chap and the seconds and doctors and grave-diggers to
keep the appointment for you. Not a bit of it here! Every cursed
Austrian in that place jumped up, yelling his damnedest; every dog of an
Hungarian did the same. One of the orchestra was a Bohemian, and he
broke his 'cello over an Hungarian's head, and there was an Italian
behind the bar who walked into the Austrians with a cocktail shaker. I
picked up a chair and shouted, 'Vive Kossuth!' never dreaming the poor
chap had been dead for years, and then tables and sofas hurtled through
the air till the police came in and killed anybody who hadn't been
killed already—I'm free to admit I faded away as soon as I'd smashed
the last lamp. I thought Raney'd come, too, but he saw it out and was
duly marched away with his flat-nosed friend through a perfect forest of
drawn swords. It was about one o'clock in the morning, and I didn't
think it was healthy to stay up any longer."
He paused to refresh his parched throat.
"Next day I went round to the Embassy," he continued, "and there I had
the surprise of my life. While I was improving my mind in the East, that
eminently respectable Councillor of Embassy, my father, had been shifted
from Paris and sent to Vienna as Chargé d'Affaires. He was very glad to
see me, of course, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn't help
feeling I should have preferred to carry my little troubles to another
man. I toned my story down a good bit, and after some agitated notes and
interviews Raney was brought up for judgement with an armed escort. Most
of him was in a sling, and the rest just hung down in strips from the
bones. As soon as they started talking I found we'd fairly done it in
the night before. Our flat-nosed Hungarian friend was mixed up with a
Secret Society and pretty consistently shadowed by the police. He and
Raney had fraternized and exchanged cards, and, apparently old O'Rane
wasn't much of a popular favorite in Austria. He and Vive Kossuth had
caused the Government all kinds of vexation which weren't forgotten
though both of them were dead, and when the flat-nosed man drank to
their pious memory and Raney held forth on Hungarian Independence, you
can imagine the Austrian contingent was no end restive.
"The poor old Guv'nor had his work cut out to smooth things down. For
about an hour he buttered 'em all up and apologized to everybody,
swearing that Raney was tight—which was an absolute lie. There was a
fine recommendation to mercy and an allusion to a father's feeling—lump
in the throat, all that sort of thing—and then the Guv'nor closed down.
I hoped it was all over, but the Austrian lads were out for blood—we
had to pay for all the damage, and our friend the officer was trundled
along in a wheeled chair to receive our apologies, and then the Minister
of the Interior, or the Prefect of Police, or some bug like that, popped
into another room with the Guv'nor and dictated terms for the future.
I got off with a caution, but poor old Raney took it in the neck. They
stripped him and measured him and took his finger-prints and
photographed him about a dozen times. And in the afternoon an escort of
soldiers frog's-marched us to the Bavarian frontier and took a tender
farewell, with a plain statement in writing that, if ever Raney put one
toe of either foot on an inch of his Imperial Majesty Franz Josef's
territory from now till the end of time, he'd first of all be shot and
then disembowelled and then confined in a fortress for the rest of his
days. The Guv'nor don't fancy me for the Diplomatic; he says I want
discipline, so the Army's going to try its hand on me." He shrugged his
shoulders tolerantly. "I don't mind, it's all in the day's work, but I'd
have you observe the kind of man my sainted mother sends me abroad with
on the grounds that I should only get up to mischief if I went alone."
Of O'Rane's future movements Summertown could tell us nothing beyond the
fact that he was shortly starting for Mexico, and that letters to his
bank would, in due course, be forwarded.
"I shall write to him to-night," said Loring, as we walked up St.
James's Street. Summertown had heard that roulette was being played
illicitly somewhere in Chelsea and was anxious to check the accuracy of
the report.
"At this hour?" I asked, glancing at my watch. It was past one o'clock.
"I can do it in three lines," he answered. "It's about his friend
Crabtree. Have you heard?"
"I can believe anything of him," I said, as I resigned myself to listen.
"Then you haven't heard. Well, the engagement's off. I met your cousin
Violet at lunch to-day, and she had it from Lady Dainton. No reason
given."
"Either of us can supply it," I said.
Loring made no comment.
"Sonia can do better than that," he said, after we had walked for some
time in silence.
"So, possibly, can Crabtree," I suggested. "In her present state——"
"My dear George, she's still a child," he answered, with some warmth.
"There are children and children." I had neither forgiven nor forgotten
her behaviour to O'Rane for a year or two.
"I don't think the man who marries Sonia is at all to be pitied," Loring
said rather aggressively.
The words may have meant that such a man was to be envied—or equally
that he took the risk with his eyes open. But we were at the corner of
Half Moon Street, and Loring had waved good-night and was walking
towards Curzon Street before I was ready to ask him.
I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard
labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return
from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed
into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with
the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard
news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.
Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East
Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has
discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from
Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's
explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane,
he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to
the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar;
later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with
scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and
unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was
leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney
himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the
Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether
without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that
had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I
heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.
In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have
mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the
Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British entente. Secret
treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the
Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness,
and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was
joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's
Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a fainéant Duma hardly
availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg
streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to
be drawn into the entente, well and good; there could be no need for
so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were
dividing Europe into two groups,—at best for a competition in
armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,—then the men and women
whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble
their rulers were meditating.
In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer
desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war
might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by
Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed
till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my
creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as
then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a pro rata
reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national
armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world
with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not
materialize to-day or to-morrow, but—as O'Rane was fond of
saying—slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between
individuals did not come in a night.
Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to
judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall;
perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be—and there is little
doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent
diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the
armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manœuvres;
certainly a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for
the Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers
provided a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and
drudgery, there was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign;
l'appétit vient en mangeant, and to some extent we succumbed to the
enthusiasm we tried to inspire in others.
Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar
movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League,"
floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an
army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every
quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that
would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the
lands of sympathizers and suspects.
The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our
attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for
delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a
few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details,
and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the
draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent
suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including
lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.
I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself
qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper.
We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by
hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a
century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained
journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide—but
never thwart—our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to
conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and
eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine
careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the
position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement
revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on
the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty
pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful,
and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and
the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing
was too great or too small for our attention....
Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to
speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of
men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to
regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the
"Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes
knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the
quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with
excited suggestions.
"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked
World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay—I don't
mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a
paper...."
And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title,
suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay
its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never
to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own
price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this
about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was
discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a
deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the
Watchman about it."
Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest
with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was
promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's
contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was
descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus.
Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving
tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into
the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled
for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be
tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the
Sensations they had effected—the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the
"Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo"
carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as épatant
a sensation of universal disarmament—or, for the matter of that,
bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform—but a narrow
Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me
shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or
worse we had to get on without them.
Sir John Woburn himself I never met—and am the first to regret the
loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling
interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably
worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine
was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an
impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no
ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in
contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man
who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as
they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.
The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under
Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening
Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled—Penelope
fashion—the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His
was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a
Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and
an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader,
Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war,
which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his
impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the
voluntary system by day.
"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and
might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give
its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater
for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."
"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in
questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily
commercial.
After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real
Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our
first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a
hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet
with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the
provinces—which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local
colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried
in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a
telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed
the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which
staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no
longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought
me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles—and seemed
pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared
manuscripts.
M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with
lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long,
I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when
Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would
lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the
invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And,
when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some
new édition de luxe, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man,
don't you think you could give me some reviewing to do?" Publishers at
one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements
in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head
knowingly and reassured me.
"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy.
He kens well—if you don't—that good reviews never yet sold a bad book,
nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."
The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was
sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda
developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand
could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of
the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and
there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as
his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too
bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his
function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the
Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and
a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.
No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the
Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little
of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled
every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909
Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly,
there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who
did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our
oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided
into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of
Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized
publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone
else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.
The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle,
international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party
group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed
forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came
from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were
bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for
the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of
resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the
capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to
Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor
Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to
lose by war.
Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late
summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues,
what—if anything—the Disarmament League had achieved for all its
pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think
we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African
War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself
and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no
audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and
can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United
States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people
might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we
impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts'
national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army
Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army
of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the
illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building
programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries.
Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government
had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.
Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I
must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the
present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of
some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both
these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand
years of Christian teaching.
But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I
have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse
must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910.
When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours
had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were
engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on
the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be
undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria,
Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the
kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the
United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In
the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental
journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced
them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into
groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with
results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those
unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes
the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of
strenuous goodwill.
The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British
Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing
Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee
of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical
Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free
Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return
visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and
shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the
House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him
company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not
wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to
lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.
It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a
fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me
that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had
seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening
time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and
almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met
in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily
attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I
played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for
the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera,
only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of
foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations.
We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news
to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the
silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction
of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in
very truth be dead.
And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old
covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the
wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.
"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at
the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."
"If you tell me the little man's been writing to you," were Loring's
first words, "I'm afraid I shan't believe you."
I helped him to take his coat off and led the way into the dining-room.
"I wouldn't insult your intelligence with such a story," I answered. "It
was infinitely more Raneyesque."
"Well, where is he and what's he doing?"
"Where did he say he was going? What did he say he would do?" I
asked in turn. "My dear Jim, Raney's one of those people whose dreams
come true. He told us he was going to Mexico, and he's gone to Mexico;
he told us he was going to make money, and I gather he's making the
devil of a lot."
"When's he coming home?" Loring asked.
I was about to admit ignorance when an old recollection stirred in my
brain and I completed the history.
"He told me he would dine with me in this room on the first of May
next year. He will dine—at that time—in this place."
Loring helped himself to plovers' eggs and began slowly to remove the
shells.
"The little man's born out of time, you know," he said, with a laugh.
"He belongs to the spacious days of Elizabeth. I'm glad he's in luck.
God knows, if ever a man deserved it, if ever there was poetic justice
for real pluck ..." he left the sentence eloquently unfinished. "Drive
ahead, George."
"In time," I said, "and at a price."
Nearly four years in the House of Commons had made me quite shameless in
the matter of log-rolling. I held Loring to ransom and refused to utter
another word about O'Rane until he had promised to let me descend on
House of Steynes with a party of ten French journalists who were
arriving in England in two months' time and had to be shown every side
of English social life. It was a preposterous request for me to make,
and Loring very properly refused it—not once but several times. Only at
the end of a long and—if I may say so—well chosen dinner, when I
declined even to mention O'Rane's name, did he show a willingness to
compromise.
"Have it your own way!" he exclaimed impatiently. "I shan't be there,
though."
"My dear Jim, unless you're there from start to finish——"
"This is sheer blackmail!" he cried.
"As you will," I answered, folding my arms obstinately.
"You're a dirty dog, George," he answered, with slow scorn. "I suppose I
shall have to promise, though."
Before telling my tale, I had to explain how it had reached me. The
previous evening had been devoted to one of many all-night sittings on
the interminable 1909 Budget. I walked home between five and six o'clock
in the morning, as the returning market-carts rumbled sleepily westward
along Knightsbridge, and belated revellers in vivid dresses and with
tired, white faces flashed by in taxis and private cars. My head was
aching, my lungs seemed charged with the poisoned air of the House, and
I was chilled to the marrow of my bones; cursing a factious Opposition,
I had reached the door of my uncle's house in Princes Gardens and was
fumbling for my latch-key, when I noticed a man sitting on the steps
with his head on his knees and his hands clasped round his legs. He
awoke as I tried to squeeze by him, rubbed his eyes, yawned, gazed round
him, and then scrambled stiffly to his feet.
"Maybe you're Mr. George Oakleigh?" he asked, with an American
intonation almost too strong to be natural. And then, when I bowed in
assent, "Gee, but it's cold waiting. D'ye think I could come in for a
piece? I've been sitting here since ten last night."
My first desire was for a hot bath, my second for bed. Both points were
clearly propounded to the American.
"Guess that'll keep," he answered easily. "I've a message from your
friend David O'Rane." He felt in his pocket and produced a card with the
name "James Morris." and some address that I have forgotten in Mexico
City. On the back was pencilled, "Please give bearer any assistance he
may require. D. O'R."
"What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?" I asked unenthusiastically,
fingering the card and then glancing at my watch.
"A warm room and something to eat," he answered, with a shiver. "My
name's not Morris, by the way, but it'll serve. And I'm not a native of
Mexico, but that'll serve. My folk come from this side of the water,
but they're not proud of me for some reason. By the same token, I shan't
keep you long from your bath. I'm known in Knightsbridge. 'Late to bed
and early to rise, Is the rule for Knightsbridge, if you're wise.' All
right, I'm not jagged."
Mr. Morris's manner was so unprepossessing that nothing but my regard
for O'Rane would have induced me to admit him to the house at this—or
any—hour. In appearance, the man was of medium size with powerful hands
and thin, riding legs. His hair and skin were fair, his eyes grey, and
his features regular though weak. All pretension to good looks,
however, was ruined by his expression, which was an unattractive blend
of cunning and effrontery. His lower lip shot out at the end of a
sentence, as though to conceal the weak line of his chin: deep furrows
from nose to mouth formed themselves into a perpetual sneer; the pale
eyes were half hidden under their insolent, drooping lids. And with it
all there was something pitiful about the man: he was so young, not more
than two and twenty; the recklessness was so crude, the frailty of
character so patent. He seemed like a highly strung child who had been
bullied into obstinacy and violence by an unsympathetic nurse. And that,
I believe, was in fact one part of his history.
"Come in, Mr. Morris," I said, opening the door. "I shall be glad to
hear any news of O'Rane and to do anything I can for a friend of his."
"A name to conjure with, seemingly," said Morris, with a malicious
smile.
"O'Rane's?"
"I reckon so. You'll admit you didn't precisely freeze on to me at first
sight. However, no ill feeling."
"It was an unusual hour for a call," I replied.
"And I looked an unusual sort of a customer, eh? Well, never mind.
What's this? Cheese? I can do with some of that. No whiskey! I don't use
spirits nowadays, not since I met O'Rane."
We sat in silence while he munched bread and cheese, contentedly
glancing round the room at the pictures or, when he thought I was not
looking, letting his eyes rest on me. The curtains were still drawn, and
the yellow light from the chandelier, feeble by contrast with the cold,
diamond clarity of the dawn outside, lent an added element of the
fantastic to our meeting. I lit a cigar, settled wearily into my chair
and told him not to hurry himself.
"Well, start at the beginning," he said at length, "I met him eighteen
months ago in Tomlinson's Saloon, Acacia Avenue, Mexico City. He hadn't
been in the country more than a few days—landed with five thousand
dollars he'd made out Africa way and was looking for likely oil
propositions. I was with the Central Syndicate in those days. No need to
ask why I was in the accursed country at all, or what I was doing. The
Syndicate made me cashier in their innocence of heart, and, though I
wasn't overpaid, their bookkeeping left loopholes for a man of
enterprise. I used those loopholes some. By the time I met O'Rane, the
Syndicate had lent me 4000 dollars—more'n eight hundred pounds—without
knowing it. We weren't in sight of an audit, I'd got months to doctor
the entries, it was roses all the way." Truculently he thrust forward
his lower lip, every inch of him the bragging schoolboy. "Then—I had
ninety minutes' warning—the Syndicate started in for amalgamation with
the Southern Combine, the accountants rolled up for the valuation—and I
thought Mexico City wasn't good for my health."
He paused dramatically, finished his soda water and put down the empty
glass.
"That's when I met O'Rane," he went on. "There wasn't much packing or
leave-taking to get through. I booked express for New Orleans and turned
into Tomlinson's till it was time to get under way for the depot. That's
where they took me—I was a fool to run before evening, it was bound to
arouse suspicion. I'd been talking to O'Rane a matter of half an
hour—oil prospects and such like—when I felt a hand on my shoulder and
a shiver down my spine."
He paused again and helped himself to a cigar.
"To this day I don't know why he did it," he resumed, "but I'd not been
four and twenty hours in my cell when they told me there was a visitor
wanting to speak with me.
"'Tell him I'm only at home on the sixth Friday of the month,' I said.
"I didn't want any durned visitors. He came in, though—leastways he
came to the door and peeked through the grille.
"'Morning,' says he, 'you remember we met in Tomlinson's yesterday. My
name's O'Rane.'
"'I've not got a card,' says I, 'but you'll find full particulars in the
book upstairs.'
"I wasn't out to be civil and I thought he'd taken the hint and
cleared. He was still at the grille, though, next time I looked up.
"'Which college were you?' he asks after a bit—for all the world as if
we were still drinking cocktails in Tomlinson's. College! If he'd asked
my views on Bacon and Shakespeare....
"'What the hell's that to you?' I blazed out.
"'It was Merton or Corpus, but I can't remember which,' he says.
"I didn't say anything to that.
"'I was at the House,' he went on. 'I wanted to see if I couldn't give
you a lift up. What's the amount in dispute?'
"'Four thousand,' I answered and heard him whistle.
"'Pounds?' he asks.
"'No such luck,' I said. 'Dollars.' I mean, to be lagged for that....
"Believe me or not, that man O'Rane sighed with relief.
"'I can manage that,' he said. 'So long.'
"Next morning they let me out. There may have been more surprised men in
Mexico City, but, if there were, I didn't meet 'em. How he squared the
Syndicate and the officials and the whole durned Criminal Code of
Mexico, I don't know. I didn't ask. I had a bath and a shave at his
hotel, then he gave me breakfast, then a cigar, and then we put up our
feet and talked.
"'You'd better quit Mexico City for a piece,' he began.
"I nodded. The same great thought had occurred to me.
"'I'm out for oil,' he went on, 'd'you care to come?'
"'D'you care about having me?' I suggested.
"'I shouldn't have asked you if I didn't,' he says.
"'I'd look for oil in hell for you,' I said.
"We shook on that.
"'We shall rough it some,' he warned me. 'Better hear the terms first.
Item one: I'll never ask you to do a thing I won't do myself.'
"'Done!' I said.
"'Then that's about all,' says he, taking his feet off the table and
looking at his watch. 'Half profits for each, and I'm to say when the
proposition's worked out.'"
Mr. James Morris, as he chose to call himself, late of Merton (or Corpus
Christi) College, Oxford, knocked the ash off his cigar and looked round
the library.
"You've not got such a thing as a large scale map of Mexico, have you?"
he asked. "Well, it doesn't matter. I guess the places would mostly be
only names to you. We started West—Gonsalo way—and we worked some.
Living Springs was our first success, and we let the Southern Combine
have an option on that so as we could buy plant for the St. Esmond
concession, and six months' working of St. Esmond gave us capital to buy
out the Gonsalo Development Syndicate and round off our holding. Since
then we've struck oil at Pica, Melango and Long Valley."
He paused considerately to let the unfamiliar names sink into my memory.
"In eighteen months we've never looked back," he went on, with rising
enthusiasm. "Every dollar we made went back to the business—barring
what we needed to live on, and that was mostly bread, meat and tobacco,
with an occasional new pair of boots or breeches to keep us decent. And
then three months ago we started prospecting in new territory—I can't
tell you where it is, 'cos we're still negotiating. I found the oil, and
O'Rane did the rest. He thinks it's the richest thing we've ever
struck and he's going to collar the proposition. The territory's about
the size of Scotland, and the concession will run to anything between
one and two million dollars."
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scribbled some figures on the
back.
"We're selling our shirts to get it," he told me. "O'Rane never borrows
money, but he's sent me over here to float a company to buy everything
we've found or made in the last year and a half. He couldn't come
himself: the sweepings of God's universe that we call our labour would
be drunk by ten and knifing each other by ten-thirty without him to get
a cinch on 'em. If I bring it off, we shall have enough for the
concession. Maybe it won't pan out as rich as we hope, and then we start
again at the bottom. That's the sort of risk he loves taking.
That's—that's just O'Rane. Maybe he's right, and there's oil enough to
flood Sahara. Put the concession at a million dollars and the average
yield at ten per cent on your capital. A hundred thousand dollars per
annum—gross. Take half of that away for working expenses—fifty
thousand, net. Half profits on that, twenty-five thousand dollars a
year—£5000 for each of us.
"O'Rane says he'll be satisfied with that. When we touch total net
profit of fifty thousand dollars, he'll sell out or turn the proposition
over to a company. Then he'll come back to England and go into
Parliament and cut a dash. And I—well, I'll have to say good-bye to
him, I guess."
He stopped abruptly as though there were much more that he would have
liked to say. We sat smoking in silence for a few moments. Morris's raw,
ill-regulated susceptibilities had made him an easy victim to Raney's
personality: perhaps he was already wondering what to do when the
strange partnership dissolved, and Raney returned alone—perhaps he
recognized his own inability to continue the work single-handed when the
inspiration and driving force were removed: perhaps, as his eyes glanced
out on the silence and desolation of Knightsbridge, he was weighing the
possibility of starting afresh and making a new home for himself in a
Western capital.
For myself, I had no other thought than that I should have liked a man
to speak of me as Morris had spoken of O'Rane. I should have welcomed a
little of his humanity, his singleness of heart and his unshakeable
faith in himself. While he worked in shirt and trousers or ventured his
last hundreds on an admitted scamp or staked everything he had won on
the chance of greater winnings, I was sitting tired and chilled by my
late hours at the House, ruling Morris out from my list of desirable
acquaintances on the ground that I disliked his manner and appearance,
possibly even wondering if he were to be trusted to put down the silver
cigar cutter before he left....
"Is there anything I can do for you, Morris?" I asked with a sudden
shock of penitence at my own insular prejudice.
He noticed that I had dropped the 'Mister' and seemed gratified.
"Guess not, thanks," he answered, yawning and stretching himself. "I've
got the proposition pretty nigh fixed. I'll take any message you like to
send O'Rane. He sent love to everybody and would like to hear from you.
There's not much time or accommodation for writing out there. Our first
camp was two blankets, a packing case and a banjo. When I went down with
fever he gave me ragtime back-numbers and stories from the 'Earthly
Paradise.' The man could make his pile doing memory stunts at a dime
show. God! if I hadn't been so weak I could have laughed some. William
Morris in Central America, in a bell tent bunged up with oil samples and
quinine bottles." He glanced round the room at the shining mahogany
furniture, and his toe tested the thickness of the carpet. "Well,
good-bye," he said. "I'm pleased to have met you."
As he stood with outstretched hand, there was little enough of the
American about him for all his laboured transatlanticisms.
"Are you and he all alone?" I asked.
"God! no. Not now. We've got the off-scourings of every nation and most
of the saloons of Mexico City working for us. They're a dandy lot, but
it's pretty to see O'Rane handling them. If ever you lose your faith in
human nature, come and see him licking half-castes and Gringoes into
shape. They'd string up old man Diaz and make O'Rane president for the
asking. Well, I must be going."
"Look here," I said, as we shook hands again, "you must come and dine
with me——"
He stopped me with a shake of the head.
"Thanks. I don't show up in the West End by day. I spend my mornings
down town—Mincing Lane way—and then I retire up stage. 'Sides, I'm due
to sail on Friday if I can get fixed by then."
I walked with him to the front door and watched him appreciatively
sniffing the early morning air.
"Good old London!" he exclaimed, and then with a return of his former
sneering arrogance, "D'you ever see X——?"
The name he mentioned was borne by a well-known Permanent
Under-Secretary in one of the Government offices. He was a regular
visitor at my uncle's house.
"And his wife?" Morris pursued. "Well, next time you run across her,
just tell her that all's well in the New World. Good-bye."
When I had finished my story, Loring threw away the stump of his cigar
and stretched himself.
"As I told you earlier in the evening," he observed, "the little man has
been born about three centuries too late."
I always regarded Loring as the possessor of one sterling quality.
Selfish he might be, or indolent, or inconsiderate, an old maid in his
fussy little rules of everyday existence and an incurable romantic in
his attitude to the life of the twentieth century. With it all he was a
man of his word. Under blackmail he had pledged himself to entertain my
French journalists, and when the time came for fulfilling the pledge he
smiled welcome on them in the hall of House of Steynes.
Indeed, so admirable was his manner that I retired unreluctantly from
competition. Raney's messenger, the self-styled "James Morris," had
called on me in June; the evangelists of Universal Brotherhood arrived
in July, and for more sweltering weeks than I like to count, mine was
the privilege of giving them tea and speeches on the Terrace, escorting
them in unsuitable clothes to Goodwood and more speeches and
misinforming them on subjects of historical interest in Westminster
Abbey and St. Paul's—a course which afforded them opportunity of
correcting me in further speeches, to the sluggish perplexity of the
vergers.
In August, the hoarse, limp mass of us repaired to Euston and House of
Steynes. Old Lady Loring was, perhaps fortunately, with Amy at
Baden-Baden, though four days can be interminably long even in a
bachelor party. Our host, however, put his heart into the work; with a
grim thoroughness we visited Holyrood and Arthur's Seat, the Highlands
and Islands and dismissed our guests fraternally with the clang of Clyde
hammers resounding in their ears and an obstinate conviction that they
had enjoyed themselves.
"And now," said Loring to my uncle as we walked out of the Waverley
Station, "now for an All-British holiday. You can stay another week,
sir? No women till my mother comes back—I thought that would appeal to
you. You, George? Then the only thing to do is to find a telegraph
office and invite everybody we can think of."
Two days later, by persuasion on our part and perjury on theirs, we had
snatched a dozen men from the same number of protesting hostesses. Tom
Dainton was on his honeymoon—surely the least romantic of its kind for
anyone who knew Tom or could imagine an ox-eyed wife yet more silent
than himself!—but Sam came up to say good-bye before sailing for India
with his regiment, and we had the luck to catch Mayhew on leave from
Budapest. Summertown escaped the vigilance of his Colonel for half the
time, and Arden telegraphed at some expense: "One resents these short
notices but if one can be assured that the Waterloo brandy is not yet
finished one may perhaps sacrifice oneself for one's friends but one
cannot allow ones' acceptance to be taken as establishing a precedent."
The party was a rare antidote for anyone suffering from too much House
of Commons and general propaganda. We bathed and lay about in long
chairs and bathed again and enjoyed the delicious, lazy conversation
wherein the speakers fall half asleep between the drawling sentences,
and nobody makes epigrams or debating points, and nothing matters.
Valentine Arden, exquisite, precious and inscrutable as ever, would
unbend from time to time and speak as though he no longer feared a
charge of enthusiasm. His books were attracting considerable attention
with their sparkle and passionless satire, and his talk left the
impression on my mind that for all his youth the satire was not wholly
cheap effect.
He analysed contemporary literature with the eyes of a man whose
profession is to study technique, emphasizing the essentially derivative
character of modern writing with its sex psychology borrowed from
France, its Pottery School and Dartmoor School imitating Hardy, its
intensive vision applied by the admirers of James. His final judgement
was depressing, for there was nothing new except Wells and Conrad and
little that was good. We were too much obsessed by our environment to
produce or care for great books. Nothing was worth achieving or
describing, unless it were an invitation to dine with royalty or a
treatise on sexual pathology.
The childlike preoccupation of grown men and women in the infinite
littleness of social life was an irresistible mark for the satire of a
man whose deliberate and effective pose was to exaggerate the fastidious
artificiality of his generation. Valentine Arden had a courageous and
altogether scornful soul. I have seen him enter the Ritz, thin and white
as an Aubrey Beardsley pierrot, in a black coat lined with heliotrope
silk. I have watched strong-minded young women humbling themselves
before him because they knew his indifference to their charms, and I
have marked the haughtiest of nervous hostesses exerting themselves to
secure his comfort. In his early days no man of my time was so
successful in getting taken at his own valuation. Later when his
position was assured, half London was civil in the expectation of
appearing in his next book; the other half in hopes of being left out.
Mayhew's riotous fancy was little subdued by twelve months in a foreign
capital devoted to special correspondence by day and the study of
Austro-Hungary's myriad tongues by night. He was hardly less omniscient
than in the old Fleet Street days when he dined with me at the Eclectic
and prefaced preposterous stories with "The Prime Minister said to me in
the Lobby only this afternoon, 'My dear Mayhew, I don't want this to go
any further, but ...'" I remember the late absorption of Bosnia and
Herzegovina left him tolerably sagacious.
"I don't think people in this country realize what a near thing it
was," he said, with a grave shake of the head. "It's a diplomatic
triumph for the old Emperor, but he'd better not try to repeat it.
Russia's got a long memory. At present she's recovering slowly from the
Japanese War and wasn't equal to taking on Austria and Germany at the
same time. Devil of it is, you never know where the thing'll stop.
Russia brings in France, France may bring us in.... It's a great pity
someone can't hold the Balkans under the sea for five minutes."
I have a fairly long memory, and five years later I quoted Mayhew's
words to him. He was honest enough to say that he had forgotten them and
that the two Balkan wars had converted him to my own belief that a
European war was too big a thing for any power to begin.
House of Steynes was an asylum from the House of Commons, but we could
not keep altogether free from politics. No one who remembers the 1909
Session will be surprised. I believe my record for divisions under the
famous Budget was equalled by two men and beaten by three. It was the
great fight of our time. I had been getting a bad name with the Whips,
and observant eyes on the opposite side were already marking me down a
possible renegade. That wicked old wire-puller, the Duchess of Ross, on
ten minutes' acquaintance at a Foreign Office reception invited me to
stay at Herrig Castle to complete the conversion. I would have accepted
in a spirit of adventure had it not been for the Budget; but any man
with one drop of Radical blood in his veins felt, as I did, that
Democracy was fighting for its life.
I shall not revive the old battle that we fought in the House and
refought with Loring. I only allude to it because of the change that
controversy wrought in his life, a change he was already beginning
resignedly to contemplate.
"There is good in all things, even your Budget," he told my uncle
ironically. "One irresponsible, hereditary legislator will be able to
retire with dignity."
"Our whole democratic development for fifty years is based on the
financial monopoly of the Commons," Bertrand answered.
To my mind the saddest effect of political life is the ease with which
even considerable intellects come to live by catch-phrases.
"That's little recommendation in my eyes, sir," Loring answered. "Come!
Come! Let's die fighting! If we let this through—to the tune of the
Land Song—there's nothing you won't be able to pass as a Money Bill.
And there's always the chance that the country may support us."
"And you'd make every future Budget fight for its life like this
one—against an irresponsible House?"
Not lightly did my uncle forget his all-night sittings and endless
perambulations through the lobbies.
"If you choose to call us irresponsible," said Loring, with a shrug of
the shoulders. "I submit there's still room for a long view, a patience,
an aloofness from the heated quarrel of the moment. Tradition should be
represented, sir—as it's represented by college Fellows or
Benchers——"
"The two most reactionary, uncontrolled, mediaeval-minded bodies you
could have chosen," my uncle commented in one hurried breath.
"And aren't you proud of them both, sir?" Loring flashed back. "As they
were and are and always will be? Aren't you proud to be a T.C.D. man and
a member of the Inner Temple?"
"No!" said Bertrand contemptuously.
"Your hand on your heart, sir?" Loring persisted.
My uncle laughed and made no reply.
When the Budget went to the Lords, Loring voted for its rejection. When
the Parliament Bill was presented, he continued his opposition; not even
the threat of five hundred new creations shook his consistency. I
sometimes think his whole life was symbolized by his struggle in the
dwindling ranks of the "Die Hards." His last words—"This is the appeal
I make to your Lordships. It is unlikely that I shall have the honour
again to address your Lordships' House...."—were characteristic of his
refusal to compromise with modernity. When the Parliament Bill secured
its final reading, Loring left the House of Lords for ever.
After the rest of the party was dispersed I stayed on for a couple of
days until Lady Loring and Amy arrived. One of the two days was Loring's
birthday, and I found him in a state of altogether ridiculous depression
when we met after breakfast.
"Twenty-nine!" he exclaimed in acknowledgement of my good wishes. "It's
the devil of an age, George."
"Not for a confirmed pessimist," I said. "Every hour brings release
nearer."
"I shall have to get married, you know," he observed reflectively.
"As one goes misère in Nap?" I inquired.
He was really thinking aloud and quite properly ignored my question.
"I suppose it's the right thing to do," he said. "The Cardinal's my heir
at present, and after him there's no one to succeed. George, it must be
a damned uncomfortable state, in spite of the novelists. Think of having
a woman always living with you——"
"According to the modern novelists," I said, "they always live with
someone else."
"Well, even that seems uncomfortable."
"For you or the other man? It depends on the wife, and in any case I
don't know that you need consider him except on broad humanitarian
principles. Jim, if I may advise you, don't be glamoured by the idea of
being faithful to one woman all your life. You have formed certain
habits——"
"My dear George, don't rub it in! I don't envy the woman who marries me.
But I'm not likely to grow more domesticated by remaining a bachelor."
"Have you anyone in mind?" I asked, as I poured myself out a cup of tea.
"Several," he answered vaguely.
"Then why not leave it at that?" I suggested.
When Amy arrived the following day I found her alone in the morning-room
and asked whether she was responsible for turning her brother's thoughts
into this channel. For answer she frowned slightly and brushed the
curls away from her forehead.
"In other words, you don't approve of her?" I said.
"I approve of anyone Jim marries," she replied, with a touch of loyal
defiance. "That doesn't mean I shan't do all I can to prevent a great
mistake being made."
"It would simplify things enormously," I observed, "if I knew who was
being discussed."
"There are two of them. You must learn to use your eyes, George."
"But till a fortnight ago I hadn't seen Jim for years."
"Well, if you stay here another fortnight—— You're not really going
to-morrow, are you?"
"I'll stay a week to save Jim from bigamy," I said.
"Oh, it isn't that." She walked over to the writing-table and came back
with a sheet of paper containing the names of the following day's party.
"He wants to marry one of them, and I want him to marry the other."
I glanced at the list, and "Miss Hunter-Oakleigh" caught my eye.
"Violet's one," I said. Then I observed another name and handed the
sheet back to Amy. "Thanks. I have seen indications."
Amy fretted the paper with her fingers.
"I haven't a word against Sonia," she said. "If Jim marries her, I—all
of us, mother and I and everybody—shall try to make a success of it."
She stopped, and shook her head with misgiving. "I'm sure it's a
mistake, though. She's got very little heart, and Jim's nothing like
brutal enough to keep her in order. And I'm afraid he'll find she's got
nothing but her looks. That's what's attracted him. Violet's pretty
enough, Heaven knows, but Sonia——" She shrugged her shoulders
helplessly. "I can understand any man being mad about her. And she knows
it, and expects men to go mad about her. I don't think she'll be
content with one man's devotion. Someone will come along.... George, I
hate to talk like this, but a lioness and her cub aren't in it with me
where Jim's concerned. He and mother are all I've got in the world, and
if anyone came along and spoiled his life ... I should be quite capable
of murder."
"Who invited Violet?" I asked. Before leaving London I had dined with
her and her young brother. She had said nothing about coming to
Scotland.
"I did," Amy answered. "I wrote to her from Baden-Baden."
"I suppose she would marry Jim?"
"That's one of the questions you musn't put to a woman," Amy answered,
with a laugh.
The following day brought Violet and the Daintons, as well as a number
of other people in whom I was not so immediately interested.
There was a certain want of ease about our meeting, for I fancy Sir
Roger was as frightened of his host as I was of Lady Dainton. The two of
us withdrew without prearrangement to the smoking-room and exchanged
quiet confidences till it was time to dress for dinner. I sat next to
Sonia at that meal and was sensible of an agreeable change in her
manner. We had not met since her rupture with Crabtree, and I imagine
that two years' retirement had given her leisure for salutary
reflection. She was subdued and polite to people older than
herself—cordial even to members of her own sex; and so little attention
had she received in her exile that she was gracious to quite
inconsequential men whose function in the old days would have been to
hover deferentially around her, awaiting orders.
"I'm so glad its you and not a stranger," she was good enough to tell me
as we went in. "How's everybody and what have you all been doing?"
I dealt with the comprehensive question through three courses, and at
the end she asked with a momentary heightening of colour whether I had
heard anything of O'Rane.
"I'm glad he's doing well," she remarked indifferently, when I had
sketched his career from the Imperial Hapsburg cells by way of Mombasa
to Mexico. "George, I suppose you thought I treated him very badly?"
"Even if I thought so, I shouldn't say so," I answered. "I imagine
there are easier and more restful things in life than to be loved by
Raney. Not that his devotion has aged you noticeably."
"My dear, I'm twenty-two!" She studied her own reflection in the silver
plate before her. "When you see him, tell him to shed a tear over my
remains," she went on mournfully.
"He's twenty-six himself," I said. "And Jim and I are twenty-nine, which
is far more important, though I may say I now look on thirty without a
tremor."
"Oh, age doesn't matter for a man," she answered, with a touch of
impatience. "You've got work to do. When you're simply waiting for
someone to take compassion on you ..."
"There is still hope even at twenty-two," I said.
"But when twenty-two becomes twenty-three, and then twenty-four, and
then twenty-five.... It's rot being a girl, George!" she exclaimed, with
something of the old fire in her brown eyes. "I always think—I'm not a
Suffragette, of course—I always think if we could look forward to any
kind of career——"
"But there are scores," I said.
"Not for—for us," she answered. "Talk to mother about it. Girls like
Amy or Violet or me, you understand."
Lady Dainton was sitting on my left, and when opportunity offered I
opened with a platitude on the economic position of woman. It took her a
moment to get her bearings, for she and Loring had been discussing the
misdeeds of the Apaches. A very pretty quarrel in their ranks had been
extensively reported for some months, starting from the night when
Erckmann charged Crabtree's vaunted cousin, Lord Beaumorris, with
cheating at baccarat. Beaumorris, whose bankruptcy discharge had been
suspended in consequence of a technicality concerned with undisclosed
assets, had frankly joined the Apaches for what he could make out of
them. Erckmann felt that rules must be observed even in baccarat, even
as played by Beaumorris. "Ve vos all chentlemens here, yes, no," as
Summertown, who had witnessed the scene, informed me.
Not content with the verbal charge, Erckmann laid indiscreet pen to
paper and was in immediate receipt of a writ for libel. The jury
disagreed, and Beaumorris, venting his feelings in the Press, took
occasion to call Erckmann an Illicit Diamond Buyer. Proceedings were
promptly taken for criminal libel aggravated by attempted blackmail. The
jury again disagreed, and, though both Erckmann and Beaumorris now left
the court with equally tarnished records, nothing would satisfy
Beaumorris but an action for malicious prosecution.
It required the time of one judge sitting six days a week to keep
abreast of Apache litigation. As a taxpayer, I sometimes wondered
whether either reputation was worth five thousand pounds a year of
public money.
"The position of women?" Lady Dainton repeated in answer to my question.
"It depends so much on the woman, don't you think? If a girl's young and
pretty and has a little money and goes about in Society, don't you know?
she usually makes a good match." Her eyes looked past me for a moment
and rested on Sonia. "As for the others...."
I really forget what their fate was to be. No doubt their prospects,
too, depended on the possession of a determined mother. Evil
associations corrupt good manners, and I heard Lady Dainton issue
herself an invitation at Loring's expense in a way Crabtree himself
could not have bettered. We were discussing plans for the winter, and
Loring mentioned the possibility of taking his yacht for a three or four
months' cruise in the Mediterranean. I was invited, but had to refuse,
because a general election was impending; Lady Dainton invited herself
and Sonia, leaving Sir Roger behind to recapture the Melton seat;
despite the superhuman efforts of Amy Loring, my cousin Violet was not
approached.
"That absolutely decides it," Amy said ruefully. "I shan't give in. I
shall go too and do everything in my power to stop it, but I'm afraid
he's caught."
"'There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip,'" I announced, in my
more banal manner.
I had occasion to envy Loring and the passengers of the "White Seal"
during the next few months. A second winter election, the false
enthusiasm and cheap victories of the platform, the endless canvass and
cold wet nights and days as my car splashed through the crumbling lanes
of Wiltshire—all would have been a heavy price to pay even had I been
returned. But the shrewd voters of the Cranborne Division were not a
second time to be gulled—at least by me. There was a clear House of
Lords issue: my old opponent, the Honourable Trevor Lawless, fought on
the anti-Home-Rule "ticket," I once again on the sanctity of Free Trade
reinforced by Land Reform. He was elected by a twelve-hundred majority,
and I, in an interview with the spirituous, rain-soaked reporter of the
"Cranborne Progressive and East Wilts Liberal Gazette," claimed a moral
victory for the House of Commons control of finance.
To anyone who knew the 1906 Parliament when there was not room on the
Government side for all the ministerialists, the first 1910 election was
profoundly depressing. My uncle's majority was brought down to
forty-seven, and many a Unionist, returned like Sir Roger Dainton after
four years' absence, could say that the country was perceptibly
returning to its senses.
"There's no victory without its casualty list," I replied to my friend
Jellaby, the Whip, when he telegraphed a message of sympathy. There
seemed nothing amiss with the sentiment, and I consoled myself with the
prospect of wintering at San Remo with my mother.
"Can give you another seat to fight," Jellaby wired back, as my packing
came to an end, and I ordered myself a place in the train-de-luxe.
"Must resist casualty habit," I returned and abandoned England for two
months.
April was well advanced by the time I came back to Princes Gardens.
When the bitterness of defeat is past, I know few sensations sweeter
than that of not being in the House of Commons. It was irritating at
first to be debarred from the smoking-room, but, as master of my own
time, with no more interrupted dinners, no autumn sessions and no
deputations to Ministers, I wondered what frenzy of enthusiasm could
have made me for four years the slave of an urbane but vigilant young
man like Jellaby, whose one duty in life was to lay me by the heels if I
tried to leave the House unpaired.
"I said you'd outgrow the phase," my uncle commented one morning at
breakfast. His daily post-bag brought him hundreds of letters; mine,
since I had parted from Westminster, a couple of dozen at the outside.
"I may stand again if I can arrange always to winter on the
Mediterranean," I said, "or if I can get returned unopposed. London in
March and the Great Movement of Men in the Cranborne Division don't
appeal to me, Bertrand, as they once did."
"What are you going to do with yourself?" he asked.
"Enjoy life," I answered appreciatively. "Read books again, dine at the
Club a bit, run over to Normandy in the summer, see my friends.... By
the way, the Lorings are back. He wants me to lunch with him today."
The note of invitation had piqued my curiosity. With his instinctive
fear of giving himself away Loring had written no more than: "Lunch 2
p.m. here. Help me with heavy case of conscience." I sent an acceptance
by telephone, sat half the morning in the Park watching the passers-by
and in due course made my way to Curzon Street. The air was redolent of
spring, and in its fire the whole world seemed to have flung its winter
garment. Light dresses fluttered in the warm breeze, everything was new
and clean and young; the very cart-horses welcomed the advent of May
with shining harness and gay ribbons.
"You don't look as if your conscience were troubling you," I said to
Loring when luncheon was over, and we were sitting alone over our coffee
and cigars. He had come back with a clear eye and bronzed cheek, radiant
with health and good spirits. "Did you have a good time?"
"Wonderful!" His enthusiasm was rare and strange. "Incredibly
wonderful!"
"I forget who was there," I said.
"Oh, a mob of people. The only ones that mattered were Lady Dainton——"
"Who petrifies me," I interrupted.
"And Sonia."
He paused. I knocked the ash from my cigar and said nothing.
"George, Sonia and I are engaged."
I still said nothing.
"For God's sake take some notice!" he exclaimed.
"Is this your case of conscience?" I asked. "You want to get out of it?"
Loring clasped his forehead with both hands in utter despair.
"And you used to be quite intelligent!" he groaned. "I'm serious,
George. Sonia's promised to marry me; Lady Dainton's good enough to make
no objection——"
"She wouldn't," I murmured.
" ... My mother and Amy are simply in love with her...."
Mentally I congratulated Lady Amy on her loyalty.
"And now you want my blessing?" I hazarded. "Well, best of luck to you,
Jim."
"Thanks, old man. I want more than that, though. Something that Amy said
made me think that little Raney had once been rather in love with Sonia.
You know him better than I do: what does it amount to? Whenever I've
seen them together, they were fighting like cats."
"Amy was referring to something that happened a good time ago," I
answered. In retrospect I am still struck with the diplomacy of my
words.
"Oh, it's ancient history?" Loring looked relieved. "I was afraid—I
mean, short of giving up Sonia, there's nothing in the world I wouldn't
do to avoid hurting the little man's feelings."
"If you'd care for me to write," I began, in off-hand fashion.
"That's what I was going to ask you to do. George, you've never been in
love...."
"For some unaccountable reason, all newly engaged men pay their bachelor
friends that compliment," I said.
"Well, you haven't, or you wouldn't be so damned cold-blooded about it.
Honestly, until last night I didn't know what happiness was——"
"This is all rather vieux jeu," I objected.
"It was just as we got into the Channel." The expression in his eyes had
grown dreamy and distant. "We were on deck, she and I——"
"I will not submit to this, Jim!" I said.
He laughed as a drunken man laughs.
"If you won't, somebody else will have to," he said. "I'm—I'm simply
bursting with it. For sheer dullness—on my soul, George, I'll never ask
you to lunch with me again, in this world or the next."
"The veiled compliment is wasted on you," I said.
As I walked home, I took stock of the position. Granted that I had been
dull, I was no actor and could affect little rapture at the prospect of
losing my best friend, however deep his momentary intoxication. And
every word that Amy had said to me at House of Steynes the previous
summer stood as true as when she spoke it, and I added my endorsement.
Sonia had been as entirely charming on that occasion as she had been
exasperating in the same place some years earlier when Crabtree first
proposed to her. If I have suggested corporal punishment for her, it
must be remembered that bachelors are sometimes lacking in the finer
chivalry; but which Sonia Jim was marrying remained, I felt, to be seen.
There would, indeed, be discoveries, on both sides, for Loring at
nine-and-twenty had his share of angularity.
And I was not easy in my mind about the way O'Rane would take the news.
It is true I had never regarded his attachment very seriously from the
time when the undergraduate of twenty became engaged to the temporary
debutante of sixteen; true also that three and a half years abroad had
probably made a very different man of him. At the same time, I recalled
his passionate outburst on the lawn at Crowley Court when Lady Dainton
declined to recognize the engagement; and it did not need a man who knew
him as well as I did to appreciate his curious tenacity of character. I
came to feel that the news would hit him hard.
My letter of explanation was not easy to write. I roughed out one draft
and tore it up; then a second, then a third. Bertrand put his head in at
my door to say he was dining at the House, and I hurriedly changed my
clothes and drove down to the Club. There I made a fourth attempt as
unsatisfactory as the first three, thrust it impatiently into my pocket,
and walked into the hall to read the latest telegrams.
"You said eight o'clock. I'm before my time, but I'll wait out in St.
James's Street if you like."
I spun round at the touch of fingers on my shoulders. Only one voice in
the world held as much music in it—low and vibrant, setting my nerves
a-tingle.
"You are as dramatic as ever, Raney," I said.
"Shall I go and wait outside? You might answer my question."
"And in other respects you don't seemed to have changed." I looked him
up and down and turned him to the light. His fingers as he shook hands
were as hard and strong as steel cable; he was slender and wiry as a
greyhound, with the big eyes, smooth features and bodily grace of a
girl.
"You're trained down pretty fine," I said. "And your hair's as untidy as
ever—my dear fellow! don't touch it! It's one of your charms. You have
also reverted to a hybrid twang reminiscent of twelve years ago in a
certain great public school——"
He handed his hat and coat to a page-boy and pointed to the dining-room
door.
"I've had nothing to eat since breakfast, George."
"Two Hoola-Hoolas, please," I called out to a waiter. "In the strangers'
room. Raney, it's the devil of a long time since I saw you last."
"Did you expect me?" he demanded, with a child's eagerness to find out
whether his little piece of theatricality had succeeded.
"The very cart-horses of London expected you," I said. "I observed them
with ribbons on their tails as I went to lunch with one Loring. 'It is
the first of May,' I said. I suppose you'd like me to order you some
dinner."
"Then you didn't really think I should turn up?" he asked, glancing up
from the bill of fare I had handed him.
"Not wanting to eat two dinners in one night, I forbore to order
anything until I'd seen whether you were alive."
His deep-set black eyes became charged with laughter.
"Alive!" he exclaimed. "I'm not twenty-seven yet, George, and I've done
all my work in life. I've made all kinds of money. I could eat two
dinners every night if I wanted to. I can start seriously now; I'm the
equal of you or Jim or anyone. Not literally, of course; he'd call me a
pauper. It's a matter of degree, but I shall never again be handicapped
by not having money." The waiter arrived with the cocktails: O'Rane
raised his glass and bowed: "Say you're glad to see me, old man."
"I don't think the point was ever seriously challenged," I said.
"Continued prosperity! I don't use the word luck with you."
As we sat down to dinner his eyes were brimming with tears.
Some day I should like to write a series of books about O'Rane. I should
not mind if they were little read, I should not mind if they were read
and disbelieved; they will never come from his pen, and, as he confided
more in me than in anyone else, I feel a responsibility to the
half-dozen of his friends who may survive the war. Midnight was long
past before the tale of his adventures was done—the selected tale of
such adventures as he thought would interest me.
"And now?" I asked, as the smoking-room waiter came in and looked
pointedly at the clock.
"Ah God! one sniff of England—
To greet our flesh and blood—
To hear the hansoms slurring
Once more through London mud!"
He walked to the window and gazed down on the stream of cars, their dark
paint gleaming in the lamplight as they glided down Pall Mall from the
Carlton and hummed richly up St. James's Street or disappeared into the
silence of the Park.
"I'm going to have a long night in a real bed," he announced, "as
distinct from either a berth or bare boards in a tent——"
"I can give you all that in Princes Gardens," I interrupted.
"Later, old man, if I may. I've sent my baggage to the Charing Cross
Hotel. To-morrow I shall call on Loring, see who else is in town——"
His words brought me face to face with the problem I had been shirking
all the evening.
"I wrote you a letter to-night before dinner," I said as we walked down
to the hall. "I'll post it so that it reaches you to-morrow morning.
Raney, I'm afraid you won't care much about the contents."
He raised his eyebrows in surprise.
"Why not give it me now?" he asked.
"You may prefer to digest it alone," I said.
He held out his hand with a determined little smile.
"I'll take it home and read it," he promised. "I can't sleep with
unknown perils hanging over me."
I gave him the letter, and we parted on the understanding that he was to
call round in Princes Gardens as soon as he was sufficiently rested.
I have no idea how he slept that night. Next morning there was no sign
of him, and in the afternoon when I went to make inquiries at the
Charing Cross Hotel I was handed a pencil note scrawled on the back of
my own envelope to him.
"My apologies to your uncle. Just off to Flushing to complete my rest
cure."
When I met Sonia and Loring at dinner the following night, I told them
that I had caught a glimpse of O'Rane on his way through London from
Mexico to the Continent. They were politely interested.
I have reached an age when some four-fifths of my contemporaries are
married. It is a melancholy exercise familiar to all bachelors to count
the number of friendships that have closed on one side with a silver
cigarette-box and on the other with an invitation to dinner in a very
new house. "I want you and my wife to be great friends," Benedict has
written. Usually I have wondered what he could see in his common-place
partner, and always the little woman has marvelled that Benedict and I
have any bond of union. Sometimes I can see him growing wistful in
recollection of old times—and this makes her jealous; sometimes
marriage obliterates the past, and we both decide, without a word
exchanged, to leave our friendship in its grave. The little dinners end
early—and yet seem strangely long. We meet perhaps once a year after
that, and I affect interest in curiously raw babies; but the Benedicts,
man and wife, as a rule become too much absorbed in their family to care
for interlopers. Sometimes I give a christening present and make rash
promises by the font; and then nothing happens until half a generation
later my god-children present themselves for confirmation....
In one or two instances the intimacy has endured by my keeping out of
the way in the early years. Anyone who knew Loring or Sonia at all could
guess that they would require time and infinite patience to arrive at a
modus vivendi; and I knew both so well that I felt sure they wanted no
spectators. Two days after the engagement I invited them to dine with me
at the Ritz; four months later Lake House was thrown open to them if
they cared to come. My services were at their disposal, but I could see
from our first meeting that there was no easy time before them. The
pace was too hot, and they both had too much mettle. I recall that my
excellently served dinner was of the gloomiest, though the Ritz was
newly opened and still amusing at this time. Loring would gaze raptly at
Sonia, his soup-spoon half-way to his lips; Sonia for no visible reason
would touch his hand, and they would both smile mysteriously. Not till
dinner was over, and we were seated in the lounge with our coffee, could
I rouse them from their dream.
"The great event?" Loring echoed, when I asked if any date had been
fixed. "There you rather have me."
"In about three years," murmured Sonia, with a note of discontent in her
voice.
"What are you waiting for?" I asked as I offered him a cigar.
He accepted it and then replaced it in the box, saying he would prefer a
cigarette. So many cheap jokes are made at the expense of the newly
engaged that I refrained from comment when a confirmed cigar-smoker
reformed and wasted his time on cigarettes. The reason was never a
moment in doubt, for he was rewarded with a smile as the cigar was
returned.
"We neither of us want a long engagement," he explained, and then to
Sonia, "Do we, darling?"
"There's no point in it," answered Sonia, whose experience was
discouraging to procrastination.
"Well, this is May," Loring reckoned. "Lady Dainton won't have a May
marriage. June? The only thing is, there's such a devil of a lot——"
"Jim!"
Loring laughed.
"Sorry! There's such a lot to do first. The place at Chepstow's in a
fearful state; I must put electric light in the Dower House before my
mother can move in. As for the barrack in Roscommon——"
"But we can't live in more than one place at a time," Sonia objected.
"I only want to make them fit for you, darling," he protested.
"I should have thought your agent——" sighed Sonia; then, turning
ruefully to me, "and of course I've got to be sent out on approval for
everyone to find fault with——"
Loring pressed her hand reassuringly. "Don't you worry about that," he
begged.
"But it's you I want to marry, dear!" she answered, putting her face
close to his and looking into his eyes.
"It's always done," Loring protested weakly. "We don't want to give
offence, do we, sweetheart? And it's only three or four houses——"
Sonia shook her head, unconvinced by his understatement. To be related
to half the Catholic families in England has its drawbacks, and it was
not easy to shorten the list of unavoidable visits. From Yorkshire and
the Fleming-Althorps they would have to go on to the Wrefords of Wreford
Abbey, and once in Northumberland there was no excuse for not visiting
the Knightriders in Inverness—Lady Knightrider and Lady Loring were
sisters—and from Scotland to Ireland and Ireland back to Wales.... It
was a formidable tour, and I began to regard Sonia's estimate of three
years as not unreasonable. On the principle that one more or less made
little difference, Lake House was included in the itinerary en route
for the Hunter-Oakleighs in Dublin. A woman might say that Sonia was not
reluctant to drive in triumph to my cousin's door; as a man I have no
hesitation in saying that Loring and Violet had been such good friends
in the past that he was not in the least anxious to meet her for the
present.
Sonia suddenly laid her hand caressingly on his arm.
"Jim, dear," she pleaded, "why can't we be married at once—quite
quietly—and then stay with all these people afterwards?"
"I promised your mother we'd have the wedding at the Oratory," he
reminded her.
"Yes, but we needn't invite anyone."
"They'll be awfully hurt if they're not asked."
"Oh! what nonsense!" she exclaimed. "Who is there? George, will you be
offended if you're not invited?"
"It would be the truest kindness," I said. By old-fashioned standards
her anxiety to get married was hardly decent, but Sonia paid scanty
respect to old-fashioned standards.
"What did I tell you, Jim?" she cried triumphantly. "You go to mother
and tell her it's all fixed for the first of June and nobody's to be
invited."
Two days later I met Lady Dainton at luncheon and asked her what had
been decided.
"It'll be some time in June or July," she told me, adding with emphasis,
"at the Oratory, as we arranged at first. Jim had an absurd idea of not
inviting anyone. So like a man, don't you know? making a hole-and-corner
business. Anyone in his position, don't you know?—it's expected of
them."
So it was decreed that fitting publicity should be given to the
ceremony, but the date was not to be either in June or July. On the
sixth of May King Edward died, and England was plunged into mourning.
When the funeral was over, I discussed with Bertrand the desirability of
spending the summer in Ireland. The House of Commons had no longer a
claim on me, and there would be no London Season. He was strongly
opposed to the idea, however, and urged me to stay in town and try to
make capital out of the sobered state of the public mind. A eulogistic
Press was for ever talking of the late King's diplomacy and peaceful
arts; my uncle wished to test the sincerity of the panegyrists and
encourage the Government to make some offer of proportional disarmament.
So for three summer months I went back to Bouverie Street and the
Committee Room in Princes Gardens. The results of our renewed campaign
are a matter of common knowledge: representations were made to Germany,
a tortuous diplomatic debate was carried on and a year later, before any
conclusion could be reached, the gunboat "Panther" steamed south to
Agadir. There were wild stories of a German plan to occupy Northern
France, wilder projects of landing British troops on the Belgian coast;
a Mansion House speech less euphuistic and platitudinous than most,
gossip at the Eclectic Club about an ultimatum.
Bertrand was silent and uncommunicative in these days, but, as the
menace of war withdrew, I could see him deriving philosophic
satisfaction from the crisis.
"That's twice in three years, George," he observed one night when I was
dining with him at the Club. "Is modern war too big a thing? Are
they all afraid to start it? You remember when Bosnia and Herzegovina
were grabbed in 1908? Russia threatened Austria, Germany threatened
Russia—and Russia backed down. Diplomacy's like poker, you know, the
hands are not played. The same thing's happened now; we've threatened
Germany, and she's counted her army corps and battleships and decided
she isn't strong enough. Well, George, if the cards are never to be
played, why should sane governments go on raising each other? Four aces
bear the same relation to two as two to one-why can't we stop this
ruinous armament race?"
But the Agadir incident was still a year ahead of us when O'Rane
returned from the Continent at the end of July and stayed behind for a
last cigar at the end of a Thursday dinner.
"I've been a Breslau merchant the last few months, sir," he told us when
my uncle asked for news. "I've been eating, drinking, smoking
German——"
"You'll end your days in a fortress, Raney," I observed.
"I think not. That paper of yours, 'Peace,' has a large circulation. All
the politicians and most of the Army read it."
"This is fame," I said to Bertrand.
"They regard it as the swan-song of the effete British," said O'Rane.
"The merchants and journalists and so on are with you because Germany's
so hard-up with all her insane preparations that a tax on capital may
come any day. The German government's different: it thinks you're either
not equal to the strain or else you're hypnotizing them to drop their
weapons before you strike. The German's an odd creature, sir; he thinks
everyone's like himself without any of his virtues. King Edward and Grey
have made something of a ring-fence round Germany; if Bismarck and the
old Emperor had done the same thing, they'd be declaring war now.
Ergo, we're going to declare war. I'm afraid it will come, sir. I've
brought you back some books on Pan-Germanism by a miscreant called
Bernhardi: the Bernhardi temperament can only be destroyed by an
unsuccessful war or a revolution or State bankruptcy. So far as I can
see, our job for the next few years will be to wake up this country and
make it prepared for all emergencies."
"How'd you set about it?" I asked.
"I'm going to wander round England and see what people are saying. I'm
out of touch with politics here, but some years ago I prophesied a
revolution in this peaceful land and I want to see if the temper of the
working classes is different from what it was in the old days when I was
a manual labourer here. Will you be in Ireland later on, George? I
should like to come and see you if I may."
"Fix your own time," I said. "I've got a half-promise from Loring and
Sonia, but nothing's decided."
He thought over my words for a few moments and then got up to go.
"After all," he said, as I helped him into his coat, "if they don't mind
meeting me, I oughtn't to mind meeting them."
For three months I had had a certain want of sympathy on my conscience.
"Raney!" I began, and then stopped.
"Don't trouble, old man," he answered, reading my thoughts. "That book's
closed—for the present, at least. They're not married yet, either."
"Good night, Raney," I said, shaking hands.
He laughed a little sardonically and ran down the steps into the night.
At the beginning of September I received a wire from O'Rane to say that
he would be with me on the tenth. Two days later Loring telegraphed from
Fishguard Harbour that he and Sonia were actually on their way to
Ireland. I should not have deliberately timed their visits to coincide,
but Loring's arrangements had been so unsettled that at his request I
made my own independently. Twice during August Sonia had fixed a date,
twice Loring had written with contrite apology to cancel it and suggest
another. It was all his fault, circumstances over which he had no
control.... The excuses ran so smoothly that even my mother, most
charitable and unsuspicious of women, became convinced that it was not
his fault.
I had no one staying with me when they arrived, white and tired after
their journey, and Sonia sighed with relief when my mother told her so
the first night.
"I'm worn out with trying to keep new people distinct," she said. "As
for Jim, his hair's falling out under the strain."
He had shaved off his moustache—as I advised him to do five years
before—but otherwise seemed unchanged save for a tired look about the
eyes and a slightly subdued manner of speaking.
"Mr. O'Rane's coming the day after to-morrow," said my sister. "It won't
be so quiet when he's here."
Sonia made no comment and plunged into a description of the houses they
had visited during the last three months.
"Jim's uncle, Lord Deningham, is the next," she said. "Down in Clare.
All the clan's being gathered to receive us, and I'm simply petrified at
the thought of it. They'll all hate me——"
"Darling!" Jim interposed.
"They will," she repeated obstinately. "That's next Wednesday. Can you
stand us for five days, Mrs. Oakleigh?"
"As long as you can stop," said my mother.
When the ladies had left us after dinner I congratulated Loring on the
absence of his moustache.
"Sonia didn't like it," he explained. "Port? By all means. I'm as tired
as a dog. It's gone off thundering well, and they all loved her, as I
knew they would. All the same, a long engagement's a strain."
"It isn't the long engagement," I said. "It's being in love. When you're
safely married and don't have to sprinkle 'darlings' like a pepper-pot
and can take the best chair and be snappy at breakfast——"
"Oh, you bachelors," he interrupted with a laugh. "A long engagement has
its points, though." Quite frequently it prevents marriage, but I saw
no object in putting this view before him. "We've been rubbing off the
corners, weeding out undesirable friends—— Oh, you're safe, but Sonia
rather bars Val Arden, and young Summertown's developing into too much
of an Apache for my taste. We're shaking down."
"And how soon will you both be purged of all your sins?" I asked.
He did not hear the question and sat staring thoughtfully at the
decanter.
"I'm afraid she finds the religious part rather hard to pick up," he
said. "She will call all Catholics 'Papists.' I don't mind, but some
of my people.... And when she first met the Cardinal, she insisted on
shaking his hand. Of course, it's a very small point; you musn't think
I'm finding fault with her. How did you think she was looking?"
"Very well," I said. "The new pearl-collar suits her."
"It isn't new," he corrected me. "We've had it in the family for some
time." His voice became confidential and his manner eager, as with a man
mutely asking for sympathy. "Absolutely between ourselves, George, there
was rather a row about it. I got the bank to send all our stuff down to
House of Steynes, and she insisted on wearing some of it. My poor mother
was fearfully shocked—and said she oughtn't to have touched it till she
was married. Once again, it's a very small point."
His vigorously defensive tone, adopted to answer criticisms I had not
made, led me to think there had been numerous small points for
arbitration and diplomacy—as when Sonia wished to modernize the 'Mary
Queen of Scots' room at Steynes that had been untouched since the young
queen slept there in the second year of her reign.
"You'll shake down," I agreed encouragingly when he made me throw away a
half-smoked cigar because the people in the drawing-room would be
wondering what had happened to us.
"Oh Lord, yes!" he answered cheerfully over his shoulder as he pulled up
a chair and began to talk to my mother.
Sonia was standing by the window looking out over the lake. Presently
she walked out on the terrace and called to Loring to join her. For a
few minutes I watched them standing on the lowest terrace in earnest
conversation, then they returned to the house and Sonia asked to be
allowed to go to bed.
"Tell me when you'd like to turn in yourself," I said to Loring when we
were alone in the smoking-room for a last drink.
He walked up and down restlessly, glancing at the pictures and books,
and finally coming to anchor opposite my chair.
"Did Beryl say you were expecting Raney here?" he asked, sipping his
whiskey and soda and staring rather hard at the floor.
"The day after to-morrow," I said.
"The deuce you are!" He put down his tumbler and resumed his restless
walk. "This is devilish awkward, George. Not to put too fine a point on
it, Sonia refuses to meet him."
"What's the trouble?" I asked. It would be interesting to hear her
reasons as expressed to Loring.
He tramped up and down until I pushed a chair in his way and made him
sit down.
"Women are beyond me," he complained. "I don't know the rights of the
case, but she says he was very insulting to her."
"But when was all this?" I asked. "I didn't know she'd seen him."
"Oh, it was years ago—down at Crowley—before he went abroad. Raney's
got a very sharp tongue and keeps no sort of check on it, you know."
"Yes, I don't defend what he said on that occasion," I put in.
Loring looked at me in surprise.
"You knew about it?"
"I was in the room," I said, "and anything I didn't hear he came and
told me in my bedroom that night."
"Well, what the devil did he say?" he demanded indignantly.
"It's ancient history now, Jim."
"Sonia's kept it pretty fresh in her mind," he retorted.
I might have recalled to them both a dinner-table scene at House of
Steynes thirteen months before when Sonia inquired how Raney was getting
on in Mexico and expressed a more than friendly desire to see him on his
return. That was, of course, before the engagement to Loring.
"What d'you suggest?" I contented myself with asking.
"I think we'd better clear out," he answered, with emphasis on the
pronoun.
"To the Deninghams?"
"They can't take us till Wednesday. Sonia talks about going to an hotel,
but that's out of the question. I'd better take her back to London——"
"And cut the Deninghams?"
"Oh, I can't do that. He's my mother's only brother, you know."
"Do I understand you're proposing to take her from Kerry to London and
back again from London to Clare in five, four days?" He was silent.
"What does she say, Jim?"
"Refuses point-blank," he answered despairingly.
I walked over to the writing table and took out a telegraph form.
"The simplest thing is to put Raney off for the present," I said.
He made no answer, but, when my tea was brought me next morning, there
was a pencilled note lying on the tray, "Thanks, old man.—L."
It was a clear victory for Sonia, but she was sufficiently shame-faced
for the remainder of the visit to make me think she was getting little
pleasure out of her triumph. From time to time my mother asked me why
they did not advance the date of the wedding, but, according to Sonia, a
mischievous fairy seemed to be playing tricks with the calendar. For a
marriage in Advent Jim would require dispensation; Lady Loring always
had to spend the early months of the year abroad; "and his old Pope
would excommunicate him," Sonia told me, "if he tried to have the
wedding in Lent. And then it would be May, and then some other Royalty
would go and die...."
Until my conversation with her I had in my ignorance never appreciated
how strongly the position of the celibate was entrenched.
O'Rane arrived at the end of the following week and asked whether Jim
and Sonia were still with me.
"So that was the reason of your wire," he observed, when I told him they
had left on the Wednesday. "Which was it?" I asked him whether he had
had a good crossing. "Oh, well, I know it wasn't Jim," he said. "'Nous
devons adorer Dieu, mon fils, mais c'est un grand mystère de sa
providence qu'il ait crée la femme.'"
"Perhaps Jim is thinking that at this moment," I said, and the subject
was dropped.
O'Rane's visit gave me my first opportunity of following up the Mexican
adventure from the point at which "Mr. James Morris" had left it. The
company, I found, had been launched successfully, if not quite at
Morris's optimistic valuation; the mysterious new concession—"about the
size of Scotland"—was promising well, though the working expenses were
unexpectedly heavy. I gathered that the partnership was drawing a profit
of 15,000 dollars a year, or, in English money, about fifteen hundred
pounds for each partner.
"But that's all in Morris's hands," said O'Rane. "I've cut my connexion
and I'm going into English politics. All this time since I met you I've
been wandering about, listening and watching. This country is
disgustingly rich, George, demoralized by it—from the Government that
flings millions about in fancy social reforms to the mill-hand who
wastes shillings a week on cinematograph shows and roller-skating rinks.
Utterly demoralized! Nobody cares for anything but extravagant
pleasures; they are not even interested in the House of Lords fight. And
the more that's spent on top the more they want to spend below. That
revolution's coming all right."
"I shall believe in it when I see it," I said.
At the end of a week he left me, as ever, without a hint where he was
going or what he proposed to do. I stayed at Lake House till the second
election of 1910, when Bertrand telegraphed to me to come and help him.
Loring dined with me at the Club one night when the election was over,
and suggested that I should accompany his mother, sister, the Daintons
and himself to the South of France. The invitation was half-hearted, and
I felt I had better wait until the process of rubbing off the corners
was nearer completion. They left in January and returned in the first
week in March. I was apprised of their presence in London by a special
messenger, who pursued me, note in hand, from Princes Gardens to the
House, where I had been dining with my uncle, and from the house to the
Eclectic Club.
The note was in Loring's writing and begged me to come at once to Curzon
Street.
"I suppose they've fixed the date at last," I said to Bertrand as he
dropped me on his way home. "Now I shall be stuck with the privilege of
being best man."
It was after midnight when I arrived at Loring House. Jim was in the
library, walking restlessly up and down and filling the fireplace with
half-smoked cigarettes. He was in evening dress, and an overcoat and
silk hat lay on the arm of a sofa.
"Come in!" he exclaimed, without interrupting his caged-lion walk.
"Sorry to drag you out at this time of night. Have a drink? Have
something to smoke. Sit down, won't you?"
He spoke in short, staccato sentences, waving a hand vaguely in the
direction of the tantalus and cigars. The intensity of his manner was
infectious: I pulled up a chair and settled myself to listen.
"Now then——" I began, as the door closed.
"It's ... it's come, George!" he stammered. "I'm up to my neck, and
you're the only man who can pull me out."
"Drive ahead!" I said.
"Sonia's broken it off!"
It would be affectation for me to pretend I was as much surprised as
Loring expected me to be. The engagement had, in my eyes, been
singularly unsuitable from the first, and one or both seemed destined
to lead a life of misery; but I half thought that both parties would go
through with the marriage out of pride or obstinacy. Loring was as much
in love with Sonia as Sonia's mother was in love with his position.
Seemingly I had underestimated the havoc wrought in the girl's nerves by
her years of crude excitement.
"Tell me as much as you think fit," I said. "I'll do anything I can."
He thought for a moment, as if uncertain where to start.
"It's my fault," he began. "I can see that now. We oughtn't to have made
the engagement so long—neither of us could stand the strain. I hurried
things on as much as I could, but Sonia ... I don't know, she must have
wondered where it was all leading to. I rather sickened her, I'm afraid.
You see, I don't know much about women.... I've met any number, of
course, but I haven't had many intimate women friends. They never
interested me much till I got engaged to her. Consequently I've never
appreciated their likes and dislikes. Case in point, Sonia told me last
week that she'd scream if I called her 'darling' again. Now I should
have thought.... Well, anyway, it seemed quite harmless and natural to
me.... A small point, but it just shows you what a lot of knowing women
take.... Got a cigarette on you?"
I threw him my case.
"What was the casus belli?" I asked, but for the moment he would not
be drawn from his generalizations.
"I think it was partly physical, too," he went on. "I tired the poor
child out—rushing round and seeing people. She couldn't stand the
strain. And she saw too much of me.... I was always there, dogging her
steps.... She couldn't get away from me. This last visit to the Riviera
was a hopeless mistake from every point of view."
He flung away the cigarette he had just lighted. We seemed to be getting
gradually nearer something tangible, and, as he gazed bewilderedly round
to see where he had put my case, I asked, "What happened out there?"
"Nothing," he answered. "It was to-night. We got back this afternoon and
all went for a farewell dinner to Brown's Hotel. The Daintons are
stopping there. Sonia was very quiet all through the dinner and, when my
mother and Amy went home and we were left alone to say good-night, she
said she'd got something to tell me. I waited, she hummed and hawed a
bit and then asked me what the rule in our Church was about the children
of mixed marriages. I told her they had to be brought up as Catholics.
"'And what happens if I object?' she asked.
"I told her I couldn't get a dispensation for the marriage at all unless
she gave me an undertaking to this effect." He paused in pathetic
bewilderment. "I can't understand her raising the question at all at
this time of day; I explained the whole position to her before we became
engaged, and she didn't object then.
"'Well,' she said, 'I can't consent to have my children brought up in a
different faith.'"
Loring passed his hands over his eyes and dropped limply into a chair.
"That was rather a facer for me, George," he went on. "Either we had to
marry without a dispensation—and that meant excommunication for me—or
we couldn't get married at all. I thought it over very carefully. I'm a
precious bad Catholic.... I mean, I've been brought up in the Church,
and we all of us always have been Catholics, but I don't believe half
the doctrines and I don't go to church once in a blue moon. I call
myself one, just as you call yourself a member of the Church of England.
We're probably both of us 'Nothing-arians,' only we don't recant or make
a fuss about it.... I began to wonder if I could tell 'em to
excommunicate me and be damned. It would mean an awful wrench. My mother
takes it all very seriously, and we English Catholic families all hang
together rather, and I'm a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and all that
sort of thing. I tell you, I didn't half like doing it, but it seemed
the only thing, and eventually I told Sonia I'd lump the dispensation
and risk the consequences."
He paused and lit another cigarette.
"I thought that would have ended the trouble," he went on, with a sigh.
"It seemed to be only the beginning. She was awfully good about it at
first and said she couldn't make discord between my family and myself. I
told her I was very fond of my mother, but that I was fonder of her than
of anybody in the world. Then ... I don't know, I couldn't follow her
... she started on another tack altogether and said I should always be a
Catholic at heart and that I should try to go back to the Church and
take the children with me.... These damned unborn children ...! I told
her—as much as I could cram into three sentences—what my whole
attitude towards religion boiled down to. And then the row started. We
both of us talked together, and neither of us listened to the other or
finished our arguments, and at the end of half an hour Sonia began to
cry, and I felt a perfect brute, and it ended with her sending me away
and saying she could never marry a man who didn't believe in God."
Loring mopped his forehead.
"I feel absolutely done in," he murmured.
I mixed him a generous whisky and soda and asked what he wanted done.
His face was haggard, and for a big man he seemed suddenly dried up and
shrivelled.
"You must go round and talk to her," he said. "You've known her since
she was a kid. Explain that I didn't mean what I said, apologize for
me——"
I shook my head.
"It'll do no good," I said. "You're not to blame."
"But my dear fellow——!" he began excitedly, as though I had paid no
attention to what he had told me.
"Look it in the face, Jim," I said, shaking my head again. "She's tired
of you."
He picked up his tumbler and then put it down untasted.
"I don't believe it," he answered, with sublime simplicity.
"You've got to."
"But—but—but," he stammered. "We've never had a shadow of a
disagreement until to-night."
"You didn't see it and you always gave way and smoothed things over."
"There never was anything to smooth over. Till this infernal
religious question started——"
"It was religion to-day, it'll be the colour of your eyes or the shape
of your nose to-morrow."
Loring stared at me as though suspicious of an ill-timed humour.
"You're wrong, George, absolutely wrong. I know you're wrong."
I shrugged my shoulders and left it at that.
"I'll do whatever you think best," I said.
"I knew you would!" he exclaimed eagerly. "Well, I've told you. You must
go round to-morrow morning——"
"And if she refuses to see me?"
"She won't!"
"If," I persisted.
Loring jumped up excitedly.
"My dear chap, she simply musn't break off the engagement! Leave me out
of it, tell her only to consider her own position." He paused in fresh
embarrassment. "You remember the trouble over that swine Crabtree?" he
went on diffidently. "We can't have a repetition of that! You know as
well as I do, a girl who's always breaking off engagements.... Get her
to look at it from that point of view!"
I rose up and dusted the ash from my shirt-front.
"She's tired of you," I repeated, with all the brutal directness I could
put into my tone.
"Well—and if she is?" The tone no less than the words hinted that he
might be beginning to share my opinion.
"You want the engagement renewed on those terms?"
"I don't want the Crabtree business over again?" he answered, fencing
with my question.
"I'll call on her to-morrow," I said, "unless you ring me up before
ten."
At eleven next morning I called at Brown's Hotel. The porter who sent up
my name brought back word that Miss Dainton regretted she was unable to
see me. On receipt of my report Loring sent round a letter by the hand
of one of his footmen. Lady Dainton drove to Curzon Street between
twelve and one and was closeted with Loring for half an hour. What took
place at the interview I have never inquired. Loring came into the
library at the end of it with a sheet of notepaper in his hand. His face
was white, and there were dark rings under his eyes.
"Get this into the papers for me, will you?" he said dispassionately.
"It's no good, she's immovable. I'm going away for a bit. We'd better
not run the risk of meeting for the present. I'm starting at once, by
the way, so I'm not likely to see you again before I go. I'm more
grateful than I can say for all you've done. Good-bye."
As I drove down to Printing House Square I glanced at the sheet of
paper. "The marriage arranged between the Marquess Loring and Miss Sonia
Dainton," it ran, "will not take place."
That night I had some difficulty in getting to sleep. The "Maxims" of
the Duc de la Rochefoucauld lay on the table by my bed, and I opened the
book at random.
"It is commonly the Fault of People in Love," wrote that polished cynic,
"that they are not sensible when they cease to be beloved."
