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Sonia: Between Two Worlds

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Title: Sonia: Between Two Worlds

Author: Stephen McKenna


        
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                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS ***

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SONIA
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

BY
STEPHEN McKENNA

[Illustration: Logo]

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


TO
A VERY GALLANT LADY


     "_The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart
     of fools is in the house of mirth._"

     ECCLESIASTES VII. 4




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                 PAGE
   I. THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES       11

  II. THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN         59

 III. BERTRAND OAKLEIGH                  123

  IV. SONIA DAINTON                      187

   V. LORING                             229

  VI. THE YEARS OF CARNIVAL              292

 VII. THE FIVE DAYS                      325

VIII. DEAD YESTERDAY                     359

  IX. THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHWOMAN      395

   X. AMID THE BLAZE OF NOON             420

  XI. WATCHING FOR THE DAWN              442

 XII. UNBORN TO-MORROW                   462




SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS


SONIA




CHAPTER I

THE STRANGER WITHIN OUR GATES

     "I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves, and
       my shears,
     All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
     Only I cut on the timber, only I carved on the stone:
     'After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!'"
                                         RUDYARD KIPLING, "The Palace."


At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at
Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic.
When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had
satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of
Kingship. At his death, three months ago, I understand that his notes on
the precursors of Charlemagne were almost as complete as he desired. "It
is so difficult to know where to start, Mr. Oakleigh," he used to say,
as I picked my steps through the litter of notebooks that cumbered his
tables, chairs and floor.

_Magnis componere parva._ I am sensible of a like difficulty in
attempting to sketch for the benefit of an eight-weeks-old godson the
outlines of a world that was clattering into ruins during the twelve
months anterior to his birth. Even were I desirous of writing a social
history of England for the last thirty years, I should be placing myself
in competition with men more able and better equipped than I am to
describe the politics, the diplomacy, the economics, the art and the
social habits of the past generation. It is wiser to attempt nothing so
comprehensive, but to limit myself to those facets of English life which
I have been compelled--_nolens volens_--to study. Others will come after
me to tell the story in its entirety; the utmost I attempt to record is
circumscribed, personal reminiscence.

If, therefore, this book ever find favour in the eyes for which it was
written, it will be because I have set narrow limits to my task and
confined myself resolutely to those limits. For thirty years I have
lived among what the world has agreed loosely to call "the Governing
Classes." The title may already be obsolescent; sentence of proscription
may, as I write, have been passed on those who bear it. At the lowest
computation those classes will soon have changed beyond recognition in
personnel, function, power and philosophy. This book may then perhaps
have something of historical value in portraying a group of men and
women who were at the same time my personal friends and representative
of those Governing Classes in politics, journalism, commerce and
society. I have drawn them as I saw them, without attempting to select
or label predominant types. And if there be blank spaces on my canvas,
it is to be remembered that I only set out to paint that social group
with which I happened to be brought in contact.

Charles Templeton's difficulty in determining his initial date is in
smaller degree my difficulty. I could give long introductory accounts of
David O'Rane's wanderings before he reached England, or of Jim Loring's
boyhood in Scotland, or the early phases of the Dainton fortunes. To do
so, however, would involve a sacrifice of the unities of time and place;
and when the work was done I should be left with the feeling that it
would have been better done at first hand by O'Rane himself, or Lady
Loring, or Sir Roger Dainton. It is equally difficult to know where the
final line is to be drawn. Nearly a year has already passed since the
events recorded in the last chapter, yet that same chapter brings no
sort of finality to the career of O'Rane, and, should another hand care
to use them, the materials for another volume are rapidly accumulating.

I place my first chapter in the late summer of 1898, my last in August
1915. Neither date has been arbitrarily chosen.


I

In 1898 the month of September found me a guest of Roger Dainton at
Crowley Court in the County of Hampshire.

In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan
mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth
of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly
enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that
year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in
those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social
aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the
Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at
one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from
a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.

Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed
life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with
the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered
in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and
indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire
society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at
Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when
Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting
jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black,
gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his
appearance.

The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy
holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and
were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library,
admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more
arid than "The Sportsman," "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The
Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss
the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective
discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from
our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia,
aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it
had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and
sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston
to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and
proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It
was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians
should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the
rule was never relaxed.

In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the
first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on
Mrs. Dainton's right hand--a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding
red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge
with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the
other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than
half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying
that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some
years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural
lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had
died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one
troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,--or
indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"--imperturbable, dreamy, detached
and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge
somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the
rest of the microcosm--his parents and masters included--found him as
enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There
is nothing he cannot or will do"--as Villiers, the master of the Under
Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.

At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with
Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me--a blue-eyed,
fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting
and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining
chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of
Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant--a taciturn boy with
a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he
was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of
propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though
I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found
his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only
in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.

The one member of the family not present was Sonia, the only daughter,
who, in consideration of her eleventh birthday, had been allowed to stay
up till a quarter to eight, but no later. I suppose the child got her
looks from her mother, though by this time Mrs. Dainton was verging on
stoutness, with a mottled skin and hair beginning to seem dry and
lustreless. Sonia, with her velvety brown eyes, her white skin and her
dark hair certainly owed nothing to her father, who was one of the most
commonplace men I have ever met, whether in mind or appearance. Of
medium height, with a weatherbeaten face and mouse-coloured hair, he was
growing fleshy--with that uneven distribution of flesh that assails so
many men of his age-and suggesting to an observer that eating and
exercise were now moving in inverse ratio. I liked him then--as I like
him still--but in looking back over seventeen years I find my regard
mingled with a certain pathos; he was so ineffectual, so immature and of
so uncritical a mind: above all, he was so grateful to anyone who would
be polite to him in his own house.

The Entrance Examination at Melton took place the day before term, and
in the afternoon Mrs. Dainton suggested that some of us should drive
over to the school, inquire how Sam had fared and bring him back to
Crowley Court for dinner. As the others were playing tennis, Sonia and
I climbed into the high four-wheeled dogcart and were slowly driven by
her father up the five-mile hill that separated us from the town.

Melton is one of those places that never change. In a hundred years'
time I have no doubt it will present the same appearance of warm, grey,
placid beauty as on that September afternoon, when we emerged from the
Forest to find the school standing out against the setting sun like a
group of temples on a modern Acropolis. Leaving the dogcart at the
"Raven," we covered the last half mile on foot, and, while Dainton
called on the Head, I took Sonia to Big Gateway and led her on a tour of
inspection round the school. After seventeen years and for all its
familiarity I can recall the beauty of the scene in its unwonted holiday
desolation. Standing in the Gateway with our faces to the north, we had
College to our right and the Head's house to our left; on the eastern,
western and northern sides of the Great Court lay the nine
boarding-houses, and through the middle of Matheson's, in line with Big
Gateway, ran the Norman tunnel leading to Cloisters, Chapel and Great
School.

It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged
me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the
waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia
creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk,
and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She
inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred
windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and
two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round
Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from
which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday
of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken
tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that
adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.

Leaving Matheson's we strolled through Cloisters, and I pointed out the
bachelor masters' quarters on one side and on the other the famous
"Fighting Green," in which no fights had taken place within human
memory. We put our heads inside Chapel, crossed into Great School and
walked its length to the dais where stood Ockley's Chair, Bishop Adam's
Birch Table and the carved seats of the Monitorial Council running in a
half-circle like the places of the priests in the Theatre of Dionysus. I
was still descanting on the dignity of that same Council, of which I had
lately become a member, when a bell rang faintly in the distance, and we
had to retrace our steps to meet the Entrance Examination candidates,
who were pouring out of School Library and scattering in search of their
anxious parents or guardians.

Sam Dainton headed the stream of inky-fingered twelve-year-olds, only
pausing in his precipitant course down School Steps to roll his
examination paper into a hard ball and thrust it inside the collar of a
smaller, unknown and--so far as I could see--entirely inoffensive
fellow-candidate.

"How did you get on?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, I dunno," Sam answered modestly; and then to me, "I say, Oakleigh,
who were Abana and Pharpar?"

I made some discreet reference to the rivers of Damascus.

"Golly!" he moaned, with a face of woe. "I said they were the jewels in
the breastplate of the High Priest. Never mind. Can't be helped. The
chap in front of me said they were Eli's two sons, but that's rot, 'cos
_they_ were Gog and Magog. I got _that_ right. Did you come over alone?"

"Your father's here," I said. "He's bribing Burgess not to read your
papers. We'd better get back to Big Gateway."

We were half-way across Great Court when one of the Head's library
windows opened, and Burgess, with his quaint, mannered courtesy, asked
permission to have a word with me if I could spare him the time. I
entered what was then, and probably is still, the untidiest room in
England. Since the death of his wife ten years before, Burgess had
ruled, or been ruled, with the aid of a capable housekeeper whose tenure
of office depended on her undertaking never to touch a book or paper in
the gloomy, low-ceilinged library. From that bargain she can never have
departed. Overflowing the shelves and tables, piled up in the embrasures
of the windows, littered carelessly in fireplace or wastepaper basket,
lay ten years' accumulation of reports, complaints, presentation copies,
text-books, magazines and daily papers.

"Some day it must all be swept and garnished, laddie," he would say when
the last of twelve unsmokable pipes had disappeared behind the coal box.
"But I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world....
Never take to smoking, laddie; it's a vile, unclean practice." And
pending the day when the Augean stable was to be cleansed, he would walk
down to Grantham's, the big Melton bookseller, cram the pockets of his
cassock with new books, pick his way slowly back to the school, reading
as rapidly as his tobacco-stained forefinger could hack the pages, and
drop the newest acquisition in the handiest corner of the dusty, dim
library.

"Laddie, there is a stranger within our gates, seeking admittance. He
will not be denied."

Burgess's meaning was seldom to be grasped in his first or second
sentence. I waited while he fumbled for a pipe in the pocket of the old
silk cassock, without which none of us had ever seen him. By 1898, at
the age of five-and-fifty, his physical appearance had run through the
gamut of its changes and become fixed. When last we met, seventeen years
later, his body was no more thin or bent, his face no more cadaverous,
his brown eyes no more melancholy, his voice no more tired and his long
white hair no whit less thick than on that September afternoon. And thus
he will remain till a puff of wind stronger than the generality blows
away the ascetic, wasted frame, and the gentle, sing-song voice is heard
no more.

"Where is the divinity that doth hedge a king about?" he demanded of
Dainton, or me, or the world at large. "I sat in this, my Holy Place,
when a serving-man told me that one stood without and would have speech
with me. I bade him begone. 'He insists,' said my serving-man." Burgess
sighed and gently shrugged his shoulders. "The sons of Zeruiah are too
hard for me. I bade him enter, and there came to me a lad no bigger than
a man's hand. 'Thy name and business, laddie?' I asked. He told me he
was known to men as 'David O'Rane,' a wanderer for the first time
setting foot in the Promised Land. His speech was the speech of men in
far places, who go down to the sea in ships and behold the wonders of
the Lord. Shortly he bade me 'See here,' and stated that he proposed to
come to my old school anyway, and that was the way _he_ regarded the
proposition."

"An American, sir?" I asked.

"An Irishman from thine own Isle of Unrest, laddie," Burgess answered.
"Journeying from Dan to Beersheba, and pricking through America on his
way."

He paused, and Dainton asked what had happened next.

"He is fifteen years of age--a year too old by the rules. My Shibboleths
were demanded of the young men at nine-thirty this morning; by the rules
he is half a day too late. Rules, the laddie told me, were for ordinary
men at ordinary times. 'I, at least,' I said, 'am an ordinary man.' And
he smiled and held his peace. 'Who will rid me of this proud scholar?' I
asked, and he answered not a word. I threw him books, and he translated
them--Homer and Thucydides and the dark places of Theocritus. 'Thou art
too old, laddie,' I told him, 'for me to take thee in.' He walked to the
door and I asked him whither he went. 'To a decent school,' he made
answer. 'No decent school will take Melton's rejections,' I told him.
'Then let them share Melton's shame,' he rejoined. I bade him tarry and
tell me of his wanderings. He sits within."

Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more
matches.

"Are you admitting him, sir?" I asked.

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned
to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"

Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he
ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or
the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned
to address me.

"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of
Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just man, I would place him
in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this
world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag--like Dainton
minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules.
He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all
weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed
secretly with thee, laddie, and, when thou goest hence to thine own
place, lo! it will be forgotten as a dream that is past."

I bowed in acquiescence.

"Forget not this one thing," he added. "He is a stranger within our
gates, having neither kith nor kin. Much will he teach us; somewhat,
maybe, can we teach him. Make his path smooth, laddie."

"I'll do my best, sir," I promised. "Where's he going to be till term
begins?"

"The Lord will provide," answered Burgess absently. It was his
invariable formula when at a loss for a more suitable reply.

Dainton rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Look here, Dr. Burgess," he suggested. "Why shouldn't I take charge of
him for a night and a day?"

Burgess eyed him thoughtfully.

"A night and a day are twenty-four hours," he said.

"We shall be nine to one," answered Dainton reassuringly.

"You have not seen him yet."

Burgess rose from his chair and rang the bell. A moment later the door
opened, and O'Rane entered the library. He was a boy of medium height
with black hair parted in the middle, after the American fashion,
unusually large black eyes and bronzed face and hands. Though the black
eyes sometimes lost their dreaminess and became charged with sudden
passion, though the sunken cheeks and sharply outlined bones of the face
gave him something of a starving animal's desperation, the reality was
considerably less formidable than I had imagined from Burgess's
description. In manner he was a curious mixture of the old and new. On
being introduced, he drew himself up and clicked his heels, and in
speaking he showed a tendency to gesticulate; then without warning his
voice would take on a Western drawl, and unexpected transatlanticisms
would crop up in his speech.

On learning Dainton's proposal he bowed and accepted with a guarded
politeness. We made our way into Great Court, found Sonia and Sam, and
set out for the "Raven." On reaching home I mentioned to Loring that we
had a new boy requiring a certain amount of special consideration; we
span a coin, and Loring took O'Rane for a fag, while Sam was allotted to
me. The stranger within our gates said little that night or next
morning, though all of us tried, one after another, to engage him in
conversation. The ways of the house seemed unfamiliar to him, and he
wandered round thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets, rather
ostentatiously avoiding any advances.

The next evening, after an early dinner, the racing omnibus was brought
round to the door. Tom Dainton, looking like a prize-fighter with his
bony, red face and vast double-breasted overcoat, clambered on to the
box-seat; Loring, recumbent in an arm-chair till the last possible
moment, dragged his sleepy, long body upright and climbed, with a drowsy
protest, to Tom's side; Sutcliffe, with his shock of red hair bared to
the night and his spectacles gleaming in the light of the lamps, hurried
the immaculate and aesthetic Draycott into place and scrambled up behind
him. Sam, overcome with sudden timidity and a sense that the familiar
was fading past recall, kissed his mother and mounted shyly, indicating
a vacant seat for O'Rane. I stayed behind to check the luggage, unearth
the coach-horn and wave good-bye, then leapt on the back step and gave
the signal for departure.

As we started down the drive at a canter, our hosts stood silhouetted
against the lights of the hall. Dainton removed one hand from the torn
pocket of the old shooting-jacket and waved farewell; Mrs. Dainton bowed
majestically; Sonia, bare-legged and sandalled, with a gold bracelet
round one ankle and the face of a Sistine Madonna, raised both hands to
her lips and blew a cloud of tempestuous kisses.

Loring turned encouragingly to Sam.

"My lad, I wouldn't be in your shoes for a thousand pounds this coming
year."

Sam smiled without conviction.

"The tumbril passed rapidly down the Rue St. Honoré," Loring went on,
"amid the jeers of the populace. This day's victims included the younger
Dainton and the _emigré_ O'Rane. Both preserved an attitude of stoical
indifference till they came in sight of the Place de la Revolution, when
Dainton broke down and wept piteously...."

"I didn't," said Sam indignantly.

Loring laughed to himself.

"Cheer up, Sambo," he said. "You're not really to be pitied. O'Rane's
going to be my fag."

"Poor brute," said Draycott.

"Who? O'Rane or me?"

"O'Rane, of course."

Loring smiled round the company, turned in his seat and composed himself
for slumber. O'Rane looked with interest and a shade of defiance from
one face to another.


II

The first few days of the school year were always a busy time for the
seniors. Matheson, a mild-eyed mathematician in Holy Orders, with a
family defying even his powers of enumeration, observed the wholesome
principle of leaving the monitors to take care of his house--a task
which, I can say after six years' experience, one generation after
another performed with efficiency, justice and a sense of
responsibility. His official duties, so far as we could see, were
confined to carving the joints at luncheon, giving leave-out, wandering
in a transient, embarrassed fashion round Hall when the monitors were
taking prep., and scrawling his endorsement of his colleagues'
scurrility and invective at the foot of the monthly reports.

When not in form nor engaged in one or other of these functions, he
retired to a faded study and struggled with the weekly acrostic in
"Vanity Fair." Once each season, when the Cup Team had successfully
challenged all comers for possession of the shield, Matheson would
emerge dazedly from the half-light, summon the house to a supper in
Hall, and after a prodigal distribution of steak-and-kidney pie, ham,
tongue, cold fowl, brawn, jelly, meringues, jam roll, lemonade and
diluted claret-cup, hold forth with shining eyes and throbbing voice on
the glories of British Sport and the umbilical connection between the
playing fields of Eton and the battle of Waterloo. It was always a
_tour-de-force_ of simple-minded sincerity; he spoke as one whose heart
was stirred to its depths by the growing glories of his house. And we
cheered encouragingly and thought the better of him for it.

There was little opportunity of making O'Rane's path smooth in the early
days. At Loring's orders and in accordance with the immemorial
"Substance and Shadow" institution, O'Rane was set at the feet of a
senior fag, by name Mayhew, with instructions to learn all that was to
be learned during his days of sanctuary. For a fortnight no master could
send him to Detention School nor give him lines; he could dodge every
practice game on Little End, wear button boots, break bounds, refuse to
fag, cut roll-call, or talk in prep. with complete physical impunity. At
the end of the second week he had theoretically tasted of the Tree of
Knowledge. Ignorance of rules could no longer be pleaded in extenuation
of their breach, and justice went untempered by mercy, save in that no
boy could be thrashed twice in ten days without written authorization
from his housemaster or the Head.

On the last evening of grace I was seated in Loring's study after prep.
when Mayhew came in with the cocoa saucepan and cups.

"Does O'Rane know the rules now?" Loring asked. "I haven't seen him on
Little End so far."

"I think I've told him everything," Mayhew answered.

"Has he got his footer change yet?"

Mayhew hesitated in some embarrassment.

"He hadn't the last time I talked to him about it."

"He must look sharp," said Loring. "Four times next week, or--he knows
the penalty."

Mayhew nodded, and the subject was dropped for a week. Then I was
summoned to a Monitors' Meeting. Loring, as ever, lay full length on the
floor in front of his fire, Tom Dainton sprawled in the arm-chair,
little Draycott swung his legs in their carefully creased trousers from
one corner of the table, and I occupied the only vacant seat in the
window.

"About this fellow O'Rane," yawned Loring from the hearthrug. "He's cut
Little End all this week, so I propose to have him up and inquire the
reason. If none's forthcoming, he must die the death. All agreed?"

He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper
basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The
studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where
the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks
on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was
the business of the junior in Hall at that moment--"lag of Hall," as he
was called--to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two
blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence
descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a
hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at
the door.

"Send O'Rane here."

Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys
who were _not_ O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like
the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're
wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep
'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old
man!" Then there came a second knock at the door.

Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc
round one knee.

"Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked.

"No."

"You know you have to go four times a week?"

"Yes."

"Have you leave off from Matheson?"

"No."

"Do you wish to appeal?"

Within living memory no boy in Matheson's had ever exercised his right
of appeal--a tribute, I hope, to the substantial justice of succeeding
generations of monitors. O'Rane looked round at the four of us with a
mixture of sullenness and timidity in his expressive black eyes.

"Guess I'm up against some blamed rule?" he hazarded.

Loring nodded.

"Then there's mighty little use in plaguing old man Matheson."

Loring threw his cane over to Draycott, the captain of football. "Clear
Hall," he said to O'Rane.

On receipt of the order there was a scuffling of feet as forty boys
jumped up from tables, forms and window-seats. "Clear Hall" was taken up
as the marching refrain, and, as the monitors filed in by one door, the
last stragglers hurried out by the other, and eighty critical,
experienced ears were expectantly strained to appraise the artistry of
Draycott's execution. Loring, who was equally averse from thrashing a
boy or being present when another carried out the sentence, crossed the
room and gazed out of the window.

It was soon over. O'Rane hurried out of Hall, breathing quickly and with
rather a flushed face. As he opened the door, interested voices
chorused, "Bad luck, Spitfire!" "Who did it?" "I say, you got it pretty
tight, Spitfire!" "Was it Draycott? He's not bad for a beginner." We
filed back to the study; the date, offence and victim's name were
entered in the Black Book and initialled by Draycott, and we dispersed
to our own quarters.

A week later Loring ambled into my study with the remark that O'Rane had
still failed to put in an appearance on Little End.

"I don't know what's the matter with him," he said. "If he thinks by
just being obstinate...." He left the sentence unfinished. All his life
Loring had the makings of a martinet, and when roused from his
constitutional lethargy could himself be as obstinate as most people.
"He's laying up trouble for his little self when the week's out, if he
isn't careful."

"What sort of a fag is he?" I asked.

"Oh, not bad. Always looks as if he'd like to throw the boots at my head
instead of taking 'em to the boot-room. That's just his fun, though--the
playful way of the vengeful Celt. The only thing I care about is that he
takes them there."

"I expect he'll shake down in time," I said.

Loring shrugged his shoulders and yawned. "He's pretty generally barred
in Hall. Never speaks to anyone, and, if anyone speaks to him, it
usually ends in a scrap. He's got the temper of the very devil. The best
thing that could happen to him would be if twenty of them sat on his
head and ragged him scientifically, just to show him he's not God
Almighty's elder brother, even if he _did_ get into the Under Sixth
straight away."

The end of the week showed no improvement, and O'Rane was once more had
up and thrashed. A fortnight later the procedure was faithfully
repeated. It was a Saturday night, and when execution had been done, I
stayed behind in Loring's study after Draycott and Dainton had left us.
There was no prep., and the juniors were reading, fighting, singing, and
roasting chestnuts till prayer-time.

"You know I'm about sick of this," remarked Loring, meditatively
stirring the fire with the richly carved leg of a chair purloined from
Draycott's study.

"O'Rane?" I asked.

"Yes; Dainton pretty well cut him in two to-night. It's like hitting a
girl."

"He's a tough little beast," I remarked for want of something better to
say.

"He's a pig-headed little devil," Loring rejoined irritably. "What does
he think he gains by it? Does he imagine we shall get tired of it in
time?"

"Don't ask me," I said.

He rolled over on one side and banged the door with the chair-leg.
"Send O'Rane here," he said, when a fag answered the summons, and to me
as the door closed, "I propose to ask _him_."

O'Rane, when he appeared, looked white and tired, but there was a
sullen, smouldering fire in his dark eyes, and his under-lip was thrust
truculently forward. Silently he put the saucepan on the fire, produced
cocoa and a cake from one of the cupboards and set about opening a fresh
tin of condensed milk.

"Is there anything else you want?" he asked, when the task was finished.

"Yes; I should like a moment's conversation with you. Take the
arm-chair."

Silently the order was obeyed. As I looked at the thin wrists and
ankles, the slight frame made the slighter by the loose American-cut
trousers, I appreciated the justice of Loring's remark about 'hitting a
girl.'

"What have I done _now_?" he asked wearily.

Loring propped his back against the wall.

"Look here, young man, does it amuse you to be thrashed once in ten
days?"

O'Rane's eyes burned with defiance.

"Guess I can hold out as long as you."

"That wasn't my question," said Loring. "Does it ...?"

"D'you think it amuses anyone to be thrashed by Dainton?"

"No. And it doesn't amuse Dainton to thrash you, or the rest of us to
have to look on. I don't know whether you think you'll tire us out. If
you do, it's only fair to warn you that as long as I am head of this
house I propose to see that the rules are obeyed."

O'Rane rose from his chair as though the interview were ending.

"Guess I've stuck out worse than this in my time," he observed.

Loring waved him back to his chair. "What's the difficulty?" he
demanded. "Why won't you play footer like everybody else?"

O'Rane snorted contemptuously.

"I came here to be educated, not to kick a dime ball about."

We were in the days prior to "Stalky and Co."; "The Islanders" lay in
the womb of time; never before had I heard public-school sport
criticized, at any rate inside a public school. Loring expounded the
approved defence of games: their benefit to health, the fostering of a
communal spirit, good temper in defeat, moderation in triumph. For a man
who had abandoned Big Side on the day when attendance there ceased to be
compulsory for him, the exposition was astonishingly eloquent.

"Guess I didn't come here for that," was all O'Rane would answer.

"Afraid you'll find it's one of the incidentals," Loring rejoined. "I've
been through it, Oakleigh's been through it, we've all been through it.
It's part of the discipline of the place--like fagging. You don't refuse
to do that."

"I'd cleaned a saucepan or two before I came here. 'Sides, that doesn't
take time like footling away an afternoon on Little End."

Loring sat with his chin on his knees, perpending his next words. I took
occasion to ask how O'Rane spent his precious afternoons.

"In the library mostly. Sometimes in the town hall. Old man Burgess gave
me leave."

"What in the name of fortune d'you find to do there?" I asked.

"It's the only place hereabouts where they keep continental papers. I've
got some leeway to make up."

We sat in silence till the saucepan boiled, and Loring started handing
round the cocoa.

"Then we're to have a repetition of this business every ten days till
you get into the Sixth? Tell me--frankly--are you enjoying yourself
here?"

"Reckon I didn't come here to enjoy myself."

Loring sighed impatiently.

"Do, for the Lord's sake, stick to the question," he said.

O'Rane's lips curled in a sneer that was almost audible before he spoke.

"I'm having a real bully time in a nickle-plated public school with the
English aristocracy crawling round like ants on a side-walk." The words
poured out in a single breath. "Guess I can't help enjoying myself."

"D'you get on well with the other fellows?"

"Would you get on well in the middle of a flock of sheep?"

Loring shook his head with a gesture of despair.

"You know, you're not giving yourself a fair chance," he told him.
"What's the point of going through life with your hand against every
man?"

"And every man's hand against me."

"I dare say. Whose fault is it, you silly ass?"

O'Rane laughed ironically.

"Mine without a doubt."

Loring tried a fresh cast.

"How d'you get on with Villiers?" he asked.

"Like oil and water. He sees fit to make fun of me before the form--says
I can't talk English because I say 'grass' and not 'grarse' like the
sheep. If I can't talk English, I can't--but I can talk to him in
Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Gaelic and Magyar. Then he
reports me to the Head."

I did my best not to laugh, but his palpable sense of injustice was
sufficiently sincere to be ludicrous.

"I now understand why you go by the name of Spitfire," Loring remarked.

"The dago that first called me that has a broken thumb to remember it
by."

At this moment the prayer-bell began to ring, and O'Rane jumped up from
his chair. As I strolled in to prayers, Loring called down grievous
curses on the race to which O'Rane and I belonged.

"What are we going to do with him, George?" he demanded. "This is mere
cruelty to children."

The answer came after call-over. O'Rane passed us at the foot of the
stairs on his way to Middle Dormitory. There was the ghost of a smile on
his lips as he bade us good-night.

"Good-night, O'Rane," I responded.

"We shall meet in ten days' time."

Loring linked arms with me and entered Draycott's study.

"The fellow's mad, you know," he decided.


III

To give O'Rane his due, for nine days out of ten--or, in less diplomatic
language, between thrashings--he caused us singularly little trouble.
When Loring, who as a Catholic was excused Early Chapel, hurried through
Hall on his way to Mass at St. Peter's, he would find O'Rane recumbent
on a form in front of the fire, peacefully reading till first Roll Call.
In the afternoon, when I came back from a walk, he would have changed
his position, and I could be sure of finding him curled up in a
window-seat with the line of his thin shoulder-blades clearly showing
through his coat. As a fag Loring reported him efficient, punctual and
tolerably obliging, though their conversation seldom matured into
anything more than question and answer. The _modus vivendi_ was
uncomfortable, but no compromise seemed possible without a surrender of
principle.

I believe Matheson descended from Olympus on one occasion and told
O'Rane that such slackness in an Under-Sixth-form boy was a deplorable
example to the other juniors. The irresistible reply was, of course,
that leisure could be purchased at a price, and, as no one else seemed
anxious to come into avoidable conflict with authority, the example
could hardly be called effectively corrupting. Matheson rubbed his chin
and retired to think it over; O'Rane returned, sardonically smiling, to
his book.

With the rest of Hall his relations at this time were frankly hostile.
Mayhew, who was too good-natured and buoyant ever to have an enemy, and
Sam Dainton, whose salt he had eaten, were able to preserve a show of
intimacy; between them they induced him to discontinue parting his hair
in the middle, and on one Leave-out Day to walk over for luncheon at
Crowley Court. Almost everyone else regarded him with dislike tempered
by a certain discreet fear. Conversations were conducted for his benefit
in approved American dialect; knots of boys, too numerous for one man to
tackle, gathered round and poured opprobrium on him when he cut the
first round of the Cup Ties. Beyond possibility of doubt he was shown
that the one unforgivable sin was "Side," and that he was prone to
commit that sin not infrequently. More, he transgressed in unfamiliar
ways. It was no ordinary question of wearing exceptional clothes,
adopting a lordliness of speech, or cultivating an _impressement_ of
manner; he frankly snubbed the Hall veterans like Sinclair, who was in
the Team, professed contemptuous indifference to the prestige or welfare
of the house, and on at least one occasion strolled unconcernedly into
the Head's library after Sunday Chapel, thereby ranking himself with the
highest in the land. Theoretically Burgess was at home on Sunday
evenings to anyone who cared to drop in for a talk; in practice the
Sixth, and the Sixth only, conceived themselves capable of appreciating
him or worthy of the privilege.

I had no idea that one boy could disgruntle a house so completely. Had
his fellows been content to leave him entirely alone, their path and his
would have been appreciably smoother; passive disapprobation, however,
is a sterile policy for a boy to adopt, and the outspoken asides and
collective imitations continued until O'Rane put himself beyond the pale
of civilization by his quarrel with Sinclair.

The material for a breach had been accumulating for some time. Sinclair,
an old "Colour" and the head of the previous season's bowling averages,
represented tradition and the established order. He was a thick-set,
bull-necked and slightly bandy-legged boy of sixteen with a complete
inability to learn anything that had ever found its way into a book. For
five terms he had resisted every effort of his form-master, Bracebridge,
to lever him out of the Remove and on the eve of superannuation was
still ranking as a junior, the object of veneration to new boys, of
sympathy to those who were promoted over his head and of inarticulate
dissatisfaction to himself. Something was wrong with a system that left
him in Hall--the school slow bowler, still technically liable to be
fagged. Something was wrong, and more was required to set it right than
the veneration of new boys. And then there came a new boy who boasted he
had never seen cricket played and never wanted to; who cut football
practice and absented himself from Cup Ties; whose lashing tongue and
the blasphemous resources of a dozen languages made short work of
exhortations and protests and who seemingly came to Melton with no other
object than a desire to revile every institution of public-school life.
It was beneath Sinclair's dignity to hover on O'Rane's flank and whistle
"Yankee Doodle," but he made himself the rallying point for all sane
arbiters of good taste, and indulged in immeasurable silent disapproval.

One Saturday night I was having cocoa in Draycott's study--an æsthetic
room with grey paper and a large number of Meissonier artist's-proofs.
For bravado--or because Matheson seldom visited a monitor's study--one
shelf of his bookcase was filled with the "Yellow Book," another with
Ibsen's plays, and a third with the poetry of Swinburne. My host,
chiefly memorable to me in those days by reason of his violet silk
socks, was dispensing hospitality, when Loring drifted sleepily in and
demanded to partake of the feast.

"You must bring your own cup or have a dirty one," said Draycott,
inspecting his cupboard shelves.

"Bang on the door and get one washed," Loring recommended, throwing
himself on to the rug in front of the fire.

"It's no good. All the fags are over in Matheson's side, getting Leave
Out for Wednesday."

"Well, bang and go on banging. They must come back _some_ time."

Draycott kicked the door and waited. The only fags in Hall at the time
were Sinclair, whose leave had been stopped for the rest of the term,
and O'Rane, who was going over to Crowley Court. Sam Dainton had
undertaken to get leave for both. The law and custom of the constitution
were thrown into conflict, for, while custom decreed that a "school
Colour" was never fagged, in the eyes of the law Sinclair was
technically "lag of Hall."

"Fag wanted," Sinclair murmured, hardly looking up from his imposition.

O'Rane, who had entered for the Shelton Greek verse prize and was
engaged in making his fair copy, glanced casually round the room.

"_I_'m not lag," he observed.

At the sound of voices Draycott repeated his summons.

"I'm blowed if _I_ go," said Sinclair. Then, as O'Rane sat bent over his
copy of verses, "Go on, will you?"


     "Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed
         Murmured like a noontide bee,
     Shall I nestle near thy side?
     Would'st thou me? And I replied,
              No, not thee!"


O'Rane read the lines aloud, dipped his pen in the ink and began
writing.

"Of course, if you want me to _make_ you...." said Sinclair menacingly.

There was a moment's pause, both boys rose from their seats, Sinclair
took a step forward, they closed. What immediately followed is not
clear, but, when Draycott indignantly flung his door open and advanced
into Hall, he found Sinclair sprawling on the floor and gasping out,
"You're breaking my arm, damn you!" while O'Rane sat on the small of his
back and twisted his arm every time the words "Damn you!" passed his
lips.

"Are you lag, Sinclair?" Draycott asked, artistically dispassionate.
"Take this cup down and wash it."

Sinclair rose and obeyed; O'Rane returned to his interrupted copy of
verses, and that same evening after prayers both were thrashed for the
comprehensive offense of "ragging."

"I hope they make it hot for that young swine," Loring remarked, as he
flung his cane into the corner. Many years had gone by since a member of
the Team had been thrashed, but the case could not be overlooked.
Feeling ran high in the studies, and a good deal higher in Hall. We
could hear the Democracy working itself into a frenzy of indignation and
sympathy, and the lights in Middle Dormitory had not been turned out for
more than five minutes when Loring's prayer began to be answered.

We had adjourned to Tom Dainton's Spartan study--two uninhabitable
chairs and a pair of boxing-gloves--and were still discussing the
enormity of O'Rane's offence when a sound of scuffling made itself heard
above. Then there came a thud, renewed scuffling, two more thuds, some
angry voices, a fourth thud, a sharp cry--and sudden silence.

Loring leapt to his feet with anxiety in his grey eyes.

"Hope to God they haven't killed him!" he exclaimed.

We bounded up the stairs to Middle Dormitory. As our footsteps rang out
on the stone floor of the passage, bare feet pattered over bare boards,
and a dozen spring-mattresses creaked uneasily as their tenants leapt
back into bed.

"What's all this row about?" Loring demanded, as he flung open the door.

The moonlight, flooding in through the uncurtained windows, showed us
fifteen boys in bed, driven thither by an instinct older and stronger
than chivalry; the sixteenth stood with his head bent over a basin,
blood flowing freely from a cut on his forehead.

Loring picked his way through a jungle of scattered clothes and
overturned chairs.

"What's happened, Palmer?" he asked.

"I knocked my head against the chest of drawers," was the strictly
truthful answer. "It's only a scratch."

"Ragging, I suppose? Why were you out of bed after Lights Out?"

Palmer preserved a discreet silence.

"Anybody else been out of bed?" Loring demanded of the twilit room.

"Say, Loring, I guess this is _my_ funeral," drawled O'Rane in answer.
"_I_ opened up his durned head for him."

"I was in it too," said Sinclair.

"So was I."

"So was I."

Loring turned to Palmer. "Put on a dressing-gown and go down to the
matron's room. You other fellows--anyone who's been out of bed, put on
his trousers and come down to my study. O'Rane and Sinclair, you stay
where you are."

On the wholesale execution that followed there is no need to dwell.
Castigation in bulk, for some obscure reason, was always known as a
'Regatta' at Melton, and, as Regattas went, this was celebrated on a
lavish scale.

"Now I suppose I shall have to show that little beast up to Matheson,"
said Loring, when all was over. "And I hope Matheson'll give it to him
tight. Life's not safe in the same house with him."

There was a knock at the door, and one of our late victims entered in
tweed trousers, felt slippers, and pyjama jacket. The bitterness of
death was past, and he smiled cheerfully.

"I say, Loring, you know, it wasn't altogether O'Rane's fault. I started
it."

Loring looked at the speaker with cold surprise.

"So far as I remember, you've been dealt with."

"Yes, but I didn't want to get him into a row with Matheson. We were
about ten to one."

"You seem to have come off second-best," suggested Draycott.

"I know. He's got some filthy Japanese trick. He'd take on half the
school as soon as look at them. Palmer doesn't want a row on _his_
account."

Loring meditated with his hands in his pockets. "Well, you go off to bed
now, Venables," he said. "And when you get there, stay there. Good
night."

There the matter ended for a time. After first Roll Call next day,
Palmer embarked on a long and patient explanation of his bandaged head.
He had been walking quietly down the middle of the dormitory when he
caught his foot in the cord of someone else's dressing-gown. Pitching
forward and trying to recover his balance.... Matheson shook an
uncomprehending head and hurried away to Chapel.

Public opinion in Hall rose tempestuously within measurable distance of
assassination point.


IV

The morrow of the Regatta was a Sunday. I spent the morning dutifully
writing to my mother in Ireland and in the afternoon suggested to Loring
that if he wished to preserve his figure he had better come for a walk
with me. The bait was taken. He had a horror of becoming fat, and,
though in fact no heavier than was to be expected of a man with his
frame, could usually be roused from his Sunday occupation of pasting
book-plates into large-paper éditions-de-luxe by a hint that his weight
was rising visibly.

We crossed Great Court, span a coin at Big Gateway and chose the Forest
road in the direction of Crowley. As bounds--for all but monitors--ended
at the far side of the cricket ground, we anticipated an uninterrupted
walk. It was a mild afternoon for the end of October, and we went at an
easy pace through the town and into the half-mile belt of trees that
screened Melton from the south-west wind and marked the beginning of the
long hill which sloped down and down past Crowley Court and Bishop's
Cross to Southampton. Mr. Gladstone had died in the May of that year,
and Loring, fresh from some hasty, ill-written memoir, was full of the
dream once dreamt by the youthful Gladstone in the shadow of St.
Peter's, that the world might one day see again the union of all
Christian Churches. The traditional and picturesque had captured his
imagination as they were to capture it throughout life. He re-created
the dream with rare enthusiasm until we were brought to a standstill on
the farther fringe of Swanley Forest.

Anyone who is familiar with the neighbourhood of Melton knows that the
Southampton road takes a sharp turn to the right at the second milestone
on leaving the Forest. We had pushed our way through the fallen leaves
and rounded the bend, when I noticed a figure seated on the milestone.
The back was turned to us, and the head was bowed as though in sleep.

Loring paused to inhale the sweet, heavy air of the pine woods.

"Humpty Dumpty will have a great fall," he remarked, "if he goes to
sleep on milestones."

"It's somebody from the school," I said.

On the ground by the side of the stone lay a straw hat such as--for no
conceivable reason--we were compelled to wear in all weathers. Loring
moved forward and then stopped suddenly.

"Oh, my Lord!" he exclaimed. "As if we hadn't thrashed the fellow till
we were tired of it!"

I took a second look. The back was bowed till the shoulder-blades stood
out in two sharp points, the chin rested on the knees and two thin hands
were clasped round two thinner ankles. The attitude was unmistakable,
even if I had not recognized the silky black hair floating back from the
forehead as the wind blew softly inland from the sea. We walked on and
stopped beside him; his eyes were gazing far out over the distant
Channel, and he failed to observe our approach.

"A good view," said Loring.

"She's a Royal Mail boat. Lisbon, Gib., Teneriffe, B.A., Rio." I could
hardly see the ship, but a wreathing spiral of smoke, mingling with the
low clouds, gave me her position. "There's been a home-bound Orient, and
two P. and O.'s, and a D.O.A., oh, and one British India. Two a minute,
and steaming, steaming to the uttermost parts of the earth."

He spoke in a dreamy, sing-song voice, and his soul was five thousand
miles from Melton.

"Is this a usual pitch of yours?" Loring asked.

"It is. When a man wants to think and be alone with no one but his own
self by.... There's days you can smell the sea, and days when the air's
so clean and clear you could put out your hand and touch one of the
little ships...." His voice sank almost to a whisper, " ... to show the
love you have for her, and the lonely, cold sea she's ploughing up into
white foam."

Loring looked at me in amazement and shook his head helplessly. To him,
who had at that time never set foot in Ireland, the soft and unexpected
Irish intonation of O'Rane's voice conveyed nothing; he was as yet
unacquainted with the Celtic luxuriance of misery.

"O'Rane!" I said.

His head turned slowly, and, as his eyes met ours, their expression was
transformed. Dreaminess and melancholy rushed out of him as his spirit
returned from afar; in less than a second he was English again--with
occasional lapses into the cadence and phraseology of America.

"Guess I'm up against another of your everlasting rules, Loring," he
said.

"The rules aren't mine," Loring returned pleasantly. "I found 'em
here--five years ago. I only have to see they're kept."

"And, if I try to break them, you'll try to break me? Do you think
you'll succeed?" he demanded defiantly.

Loring laughed, and by the narrowing of O'Rane's eyes I could see he did
not relish laughter at his own expense.

"I've never given the matter a thought."

"In ten--in eight days' time you'll thrash me for walking two miles
through Swanley Forest?"

"No--for breaking bounds. If I _do_ thrash you. Frankly, I'm getting
rather sick of it. Probably you are too. I'm going to suggest that you
should accompany Oakleigh and me back to school; you're not breaking
bounds if you're with us."

O'Rane looked at him for a moment, and his lip curled.

"Mediaevalism tempered by Jesuitism."

Loring smiled good-humouredly. "Not very gracious, is it? And we
probably shan't agree over Jesuits."

O'Rane, to his credit, blushed.

"I apologize. I forgot you were a...."

Loring waved away the apology.

"That's all right," he said. "But why come to the oldest school in
England if you object to mediaevalism? Possibly you weren't consulted,
but, as you _are_ here, why not take the place as you find it, or else
clear out?"

O'Rane's grip tightened on his ankles.

"I shall stay here till I'm ready for Oxford and I shall stay at Oxford
till I've got everything this country can give me. Guess I've knocked
about a bit in my time and somehow I was always on the underneath side.
Greasy Levantines, Chinese storekeepers, American-German-Jews. I'm a bit
tired of it. I want to get on top. I've seen Englishmen in most parts of
the world--mostly on top--I'm going to join 'em, and get some of my own
back grinding other people's faces."

Loring looked at his watch.

"If you don't want to be late for Chapel, it's time we started back.
Look here, grinding other people's faces is a laudable ambition so far
as it goes, but it's rather remote. How old are you? Fifteen? Well,
you've got another three years here, and you can spend 'em in one of two
ways. We can go on thrashing you this term at the rate of once in ten
days; then you'll get into the Sixth, there won't be many rules to
break, and, if you break 'em, Burgess'll sack you. That apart, you can
go on living your present life, without a friend in the school, taking
no share in the school, no use to man or beast. Or, on the other hand,
you can make the best of a bad job and live on decent terms with your
neighbours. I make no suggestion. I only ask if there's any particular
point in regarding everyone as your natural enemy?"

We walked for a hundred yards or so in silence. Then O'Rane said:

"It doesn't occur to you that every man _is_ the natural enemy of every
other man?"

Loring flicked a stone out of the road with the point of his stick.

"Because it isn't true," he said.

"When there are two men and only food for one? You'd fight me to the
death for that one loaf."

"In practice, yes. Theoretically, I should halve it with you. That's
the sort of public-school idea."

"And it doesn't square with the practice. I'm out for the loaves before
someone else gets them."

"Always assuming he isn't stronger than you," said Loring.

"Then I'll try and make myself stronger than him."

"And the end of the world will come when the strongest man has starved
everyone else. A happy world, O'Rane, a happy end to it, and a glorious
use of physical strength."

"That's been the world's rule so far."

"Utter bunkum!" Loring stopped and faced his antagonist. We had reached
the cricket ground and the beginning of bounds, so that O'Rane no longer
needed a convoy. "For the first years of your life you were so weak that
it took one woman to feed you and another to put your clothes on so that
you shouldn't die of exposure. On your theory there wouldn't be a woman
left alive, far less a child. You must find some other answer to the
riddle of existence. You can't do much with all-round hate and
promiscuous throat-cutting."

"If someone takes a knife to me, I'll try to get in first blow," O'Rane
persisted obstinately.

"Well, that's a slight improvement on knifing at sight. The next
discovery for you to make is that your neighbours don't _all_ want to
trample on you."

O'Rane's eyes fired with sudden, vengeful passion.

"Guess you were born on top, Loring."

"Yes, I've had a very easy time." He swung his stick thoughtfully and
looked up the hill at the school buildings aglow in the light of the
setting sun. "But it hasn't made me want to walk on other people's
faces. You see, one day the positions might be reversed, so why make
enemies? Besides, there's enough misery in the world without adding to
it unnecessarily. If I had any energy to spare, I might even try to
reduce it. Overhaul your philosophy a bit, O'Rane." A child, bowling a
hoop, ran down the road and narrowly avoided treading on my toes. Loring
pressed the incident into service. "On your showing, Oakleigh ought to
have brained that kid, instead of which he moved politely out of the
way. The strong yielding to the weak. Think it over, and you'll find
life isn't a bit clear cut. It's full of inconsistencies and oppositions
and compromises; we do things for the most illogical reasons. Well,
you're back in bounds, and, if you like to stay, you can, and, if you
prefer to go on by yourself, we shan't be offended. You're going on? All
right; good-bye."

As O'Rane strode away in the twilight I complimented Loring on his
discourse.

"The heavy father," he muttered. "And a fat lot of good it's done. You
know, that fellow's three parts mad. What were his people thinking
about, sending him here?"

"I don't think he's got any," I said.

Loring linked arms with me, and we returned to the school without the
exchange of a word. As we entered Big Gateway, he observed:

"He must have been pretty well hammered by someone to get into this
state."

And half-way across Great Court I heard him murmur:

"Lonely little devil."


V

Three days later came the second Leave-out Day of term. Loring and I had
been invited over to Crowley Court, and after Roll Call we changed our
clothes and assembled outside Burgess's house to await the racing
omnibus that Dainton was bringing to meet us.

"Are we all here?" Tom asked, as his father came in sight, walking the
horses slowly up the hill.

"O'Rane's not coming," Sam answered. "He hasn't finished his 'Shelton'
yet."

"All aboard then."

We drove away through the Forest belt, made a large luncheon at Crowley
Court, spent the afternoon engaged in a sanguinary ratting expedition
round Dainton's farm buildings and returned to Melton in time for house
prayers. When we left in the morning, Sinclair and O'Rane had been
seated at opposite ends of Hall, employed respectively on overdue
impositions and a prize copy of verses. On our way back we passed them
walking arm in arm up the hill to Big Gateway and found them, later in
the evening, sharing the same form in front of the fire and talking in
apparent peace.

"The age of miracles is not yet past," I said to Loring, as I went in to
prayers.

"O'Rane told me they'd made it up," he answered, "when he came in to
take my boots down."

A term or two later I heard the story of the reconciliation. As the last
of us left the house for Leave Out, O'Rane picked up his papers, flung
them into his locker and crossed to Sinclair's end of Hall.

"May I speak to you a moment?" he asked.

"It's a free country," was the uncompromising answer.

"Well, I guess there's a certain amount of unfriendliness between us. Is
there any use in keeping it up?"

Sinclair looked at him in some surprise, then returned to his writing.

O'Rane sat down on the table, and Sinclair ostentatiously gathered up
his books and retired to a window-seat where there was only room for
one. "I'm quite happy as I am," he said.

"See here," said O'Rane, without attempting to follow him, "it's going
to be a bit awkward if we live three years in the same house without
speaking."

"Don't worry about me," Sinclair answered, without looking up. "I shan't
be here three years."

"Well, two, if you're so blamed particular."

"Or two either. They'll fire me out at the end of this term."

O'Rane jumped down from the table and walked to the window with his
hands in his pockets.

"What the deuce for?" he demanded.

"Super-ed of course, you fool."

Softly whistling, O'Rane picked up the first half-finished imposition.

"Won't you get your remove?" he asked.

"Not an earthly. _I_ can't do their dam' stuff."

"You can do this thing: A train going forty miles an hour...."

Sinclair flamed with sudden anger.

"Oh, do, for God's sake, go away and leave me in peace," he cried. "I
dare say it's all very easy for people like you...."

"But I'll show you how to do it."

"I don't _want_ to be shown. If I've been shown once I've been shown a
million times. It's _no good_! Bracebridge says, 'D'you follow that?'
and I say, 'Yes,' and all the time I've not the foggiest conception what
he's driving at."

Taking the pen from the other's hand O'Rane wrote down three lines of
figures and handed Sinclair the answer.

"And what good d'you think that is?"

"I just think that this is a poorish way of spending a Leave-out Day,"
O'Rane answered. "If you finish the things off...."

"It's all right, my leave's stopped."

O'Rane propped Sinclair's book against the window-ledge and began
writing. Outside the sun was shining in the deserted Great Court, and a
southerly breeze caught up the fallen creeper leaves and blew them with
a dry rustle across the grey flagstones.

"That's no reason for wasting all day over muck of this kind," he
remarked. "One pipe letting water into a cistern at the rate of ten
gallons a minute, and another pipe letting it out.... If you make up
your mind to get a remove, guess nothing'll stop you. That's the way I
regard the proposition. If you make up your mind to do any dam' thing in
this world.... Turn up the answers and see if I've got it right. Our old
friend the clock: when will the hands next be at right angles? Echo
answers 'When?' I wonder if anybody finds the slightest use for all this
bilge when once he's quit school. Turn up the answers. _He's_ fixed. How
many more have you got to do?"

"Four."

"Anything else?"

"An abstract of three chapters of Div." Sinclair had almost forgotten
the quarrel and the enormity of O'Rane's "Side," and was looking with
surprised admiration at the quickly moving pen.

"We'll do that this afternoon. I'll give tongue, and you can write it
down. See here, surely if you can make old man Bracebridge give you--or
us--decent marks every day for prep...."

"That won't help in the exams."

O'Rane worked three more problems in silence; then he said:

"We must fix the exams. somehow. I don't see it yet, but it can be done.
We'll circumvent Bracebridge. And the answer is one ton, three
hundredweights, no quarters, eleven pounds, twelve ounces." He threw
down his pen and rose with a yawn. "Come for a walk; it's only eleven."

Sinclair felt that some expression of thanks was due from him. It was
not easy to frame it, and he was still half-consciously resentful of
O'Rane's unasked interference.

"Aren't you taking Leave?" he growled.

"No."

"I thought you were going home with young Dainton."

"I cried off."

A ray of light struggled fitfully through the clouds of Sinclair's
brain.

"Did you stay here just to ass about with this filth?" he demanded,
rather red in the face, pointing contemptuously to the pile of
impositions.

"Well, as I was doing nothing...."

"Rot! Did you or did you not?"

"Yes; I did."

Sinclair meditated in an embarrassed silence; then he held out his hand.

"You know, Spitfire, you're not half such a swine as I thought," he
admitted handsomely.

"Go and get your hat," O'Rane ordered. "I'll wait for you on Little
End."

They walked in Swanley Forest till luncheon, returned to Matheson's for
a hurried meal, and set out again along the favourite, forbidden
Southampton road. As we returned from Crowley Court, we passed them
between the cricket ground and Big Gateway, trudging with arms linked,
tired and happy. At the porter's lodge O'Rane darted aside to inspect
the notice-board.

"I wanted to see when the Shelton's had to be sent in," he explained.

"Are you going in for it?"

"I don't know. They've got to reach Burgess to-morrow. Come back to
Matheson's and finish the Div."

In the still deserted Hall Sinclair sat, pen in hand, while O'Rane
rapidly turned the pages of an Old Testament history and dictated an
irreligious abstract. As each sheet was finished, it was blotted and
placed on one side. Once O'Rane exhibited some modest sleight of hand.
Sinclair had written his name at the top of a fresh piece of paper, and
before anything could be added O'Rane begged him to poke the fire. On
his return to the table the sheet had disappeared.

Late that night, when Leave was over, and Hall resounded with the voices
of elegant young men in brown boots, coloured waistcoats and other
unacademic costume, O'Rane descended with inkpot and pen to the
changing-room. Seating himself on an upturned boot-basket, he produced
from one pocket the foolscap sheet with Sinclair's name at the head,
from another an incredibly neat fair-copy of a set of Greek Alcaics.
Working quickly and in a bad light he produced a far from tidy version,
with sloping lines, sprawling characters and not infrequent blots. As
the prayer-bell began to ring he endorsed an envelope with the words,
"Shelton Greek Verse Prize: The Rev. A. A. Burgess, Litt.D.," and
dropped it into the house letter-box.

A week later the results were announced in Great School. We were
assembled for prayers when Burgess walked down between the rows of
chairs, mounted the dais and paused by the Birch Table. In his hand was
the Honour Book, in which were entered the names of all prize-winners
together with the subject set and the winning composition. Leaving the
book on the table, he unslung his gown from his shoulder, pulled it over
his cassock and sank into the great carved chair of Ockley in the middle
of the Monitorial Council, facing the school.

Sutcliffe, the captain, seated on his right, inquired if the Shelton
Compositions had been judged.


     "Aequam memento rebus in arduis
            Servare mentem,"


Burgess answered. "Thou art not the man, laddie."

"Is it Loring?" I asked from the other side.

"The prize has not gone to my illustrious Sixth."

"O'Rane," Loring murmured, looking down the school.

"Neither to the less illustrious Under Sixth," said Burgess. He arose
and strode to the Birch Table. "The result of the Shelton Greek Verse
Prize is as follows: First, Sinclair. _Proxime accesserunt_ Sutcliffe
and Loring. There were twenty-three entries. I believe this is the first
time the prize has been won by a member of the Remove. Sinclair will
stay behind after prayers."

He stalked back to his seat, and the school, after a moment's perplexed
hesitation, broke into tumultuous applause. As the name was given out I
heard a whispered, "Who? Sinclair? Rot!" Yet there was no one else of
that name in the school. Bracebridge spun round in his chair to gaze at
his astonishing pupil, and I could see Sinclair, scarlet of face,
half-rising from his seat, when Burgess threw his cassock on to the
floor and intoned the "Oremus."

There was little reverence in that day's prayers. As monitor of the week
I knelt in front of the Birch Table and out of the corner of my eye
could see the Fourth patting Sinclair surreptitiously on the back and
the Shell turning round with admiring grimaces. Burgess alone seemed
unsurprised. "_In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_," he
intoned as I finished reading prayers. "_Ire licet_," he called out, as
I returned to his side. The lower forms filed out, till the whole of
Great School below the dais was empty, and Sinclair stood blushing by
the Birch Table. Burgess opened the Honour Book and ran quickly through
the back pages for two years.

"This is the first school prize thou hast won, laddie?" he demanded.
"Let it not be the last. Come hither, and on the tablets of thy mind
record these my words. Here thou writest thy name, and here the date,
and here the English and here thy polished Greek. In a fair, round hand,
laddie."

He closed the book with a snap and struggled out of his gown.

"I'm ... I'm afraid there's a mistake, sir," Sinclair stammered.

"It is as thou sayest. A proparoxyton in the third line where an oxyton
should have been. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of
this life, but it may be thou wilt live to see a murrain upon the land,
destroying the Scribes of Oxford and the Pharisees of Cambridge, and on
that day the last Greek accent will be flung headlong into the Pit. Till
that day come, thou shalt continue to pay thy tithe of mint and dill and
cummin to the monks of Alexandria."

Sinclair stared at him in piteous bewilderment.

"But I never wrote those lines, sir," he protested.

"Small were thine honour, laddie, if thou hadst." He glanced at the
topmost of the pile of compositions. "Of the making of blots there is no
end. Wherefore I said, 'in thy fairest, roundest hand.'"

He rose to his feet and walked down school, while the rest of us
followed a few paces behind. Sinclair made one last attempt.

"Sir, I don't know what an Alcaic _is_!"

Burgess laid a hand on his shoulder.

"When the sun of yestere'en sank to rest, laddie, I sat in judgement on
these verses. And when he rose in the east this morning, lo! I laboured
still at my task. Peradventure thou didst write them in thy sleep.
Peradventure as in the book of 'Trilby'--nay, laddie, start not! it is
no play of Sophocles. But why vex the soul with idle questionings?
Should thy feet bear thee to the Common Room, laddie, I pray thee ask
Mr. Bracebridge to commune with me in my house. Mine eyes are dim, yet I
descry a young man by the steps of the Temple. Thou sayest it is the
young O'Rane? Bid him to me, an he be not taken up with higher thoughts.
Good night, laddies!"

With an answering 'good night' we dispersed to our houses and left him
to walk across Great Court with O'Rane.

"In the third line, laddie," I heard him beginning, "a proparoxyton
where an oxyton should have been."

O'Rane looked up, unabashed, but with generous admiration.

"Didn't I make it oxyton, sir?" he asked.

"Thou didst not. And wherefore didst thou counterfeit the image and
superscription of Sinclair?"

O'Rane hesitated discreetly, but, as Burgess too was silent, he elected
to embark on a candid explanation.

"_He_ wrote his name, sir, and then I bagged the paper...."

"'Bagged,' laddie? What strange tongue is this?"

"Stole, sir. I stole the paper and wrote the verses underneath. He
doesn't know anything about it."

"Yet wherefore?"

O'Rane shrugged his shoulders.

"It seemed such rot--so hard on him, sir, to be super-ed just because he
can't get his remove."

Burgess smoothed his beard and looked at O'Rane with tired,
expressionless eyes.

"But the marks for the Shelton Prize are not taken into account in
awarding removes," he said.

"No, sir, but you yourself said he was the first fellow to win the prize
out of the Remove. It'll be jolly hard to super him after that."

They had crossed Great Court and were standing at the door of the Head's
house.

"And thine own day of reckoning, David O'Rane? Whereof shall that be?"

O'Rane made no answer for some moments; then in a tone from which he
strove in vain to banish the note of disappointment:

"I've lost the prize, sir, anyway."

"Thou wilt yet be young when the season returns to us again. But thou
hast made of me a mockery and a scorn in the market-place. An thou trip
a second time, this place will know thee no more. Good-night, laddie."

"Good-night, sir, and thank you, sir." He lingered for a moment.
"Sir...."

"Go thy ways in peace, David O'Rane."

"Sir, how did you know it was I?"

"Me, laddie, me. For thirty lean years have I wrestled with the tyranny
of Miles Coverdale. Laddie, I am old and broken, but whensoever thou
hast stripes laid upon thee for contumacy, whensoever thou breakest
bounds or breakest heads, whensoever thou blasphemest in Pentecostal
tongues, be assured that the Unsleeping Eye watcheth thee. And now Mr.
Bracebridge would have speech of me."

O'Rane turned away, and Burgess addressed the newcomer.

"I'm starting an Army Class this term," he said. "I shall take Sinclair
from your form."

"I didn't know he was thinking of the Army," answered Bracebridge.

Burgess fitted his latch-key into the door.

"The Lord will provide," he observed mournfully.


VI

The episode of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize marked a turning-point in
O'Rane's early career at Melton and revealed to me for the first time
his resourcefulness and concentrated determination no less than his
innate and unconscious love of the dramatic. The story was all over the
house that evening and was to spread throughout the school next day.
Ishmael found himself of a sudden venerated and courted, and to do him
justice he was far too young and human to remain uninfluenced.
"Spitfire" dropped into desuetude as a nickname and was replaced by
"Raney"; there were no more concerted "raggings" or resultant cut
heads, and the former eccentricities of an outsider became the caprices
of a hero. In a night and a morning O'Rane became a political leader.

The change was effected with little or no sacrifice of principle. He
still came up for judgement before us once every ten days and was
formally and efficiently chastised until the end of term, when he
received his remove into the Sixth. The flow of his criticism was
unchecked, but no longer so bitterly resented. With a little assistance
from Sinclair and Mayhew, his social qualities were brought into play:
we would hear his voice leading an unlawful sing-song in Middle
Dormitory, occasionally he contributed to Mayhew's manuscript "Junior
Mathesonian," and an echo of wild stories came to us with all the
violence and bloodshed of the late Græco-Turkish War, to be followed by
anecdotes of life in the Straits Settlements and Bret Harte tales of the
Farther West. No one believed a half of what he said, but the
stories--as stories--were good. His personality developed and lent
weight to his opinions and criticism; he grew gradually more mellow,
less alien in speech and habit of mind. His face became less thin, and
the practice of promiscuous expectoration left him.

I was to have ocular proof of his new ascendancy before the end of the
term. The evening of the last Saturday I was condemned to spend in Hall.
There was a high, three-panelled board over the fireplace, carved with
the names of monitors and members of either Eleven, and, as I was at
that time credited with some facility in the use of a chisel, the
unanimous vote of my fellows entrusted me with the arduous task of
bringing the jealously guarded record up to date. Planting a chair in
the fireplace, to the enduring mortification of a chestnut-roasting
party, I settled to my work. The fags gradually resumed their
interrupted occupations, and in the intervals of hammering I caught
fragments of triangular conversation.

"I say, Raney," Palmer began, "is it true you're coming to watch the Cup
Tie on Tuesday?"

O'Rane, seated for purposes of his own on the top of the lockers, six
feet up the side of the wall, grunted and went on reading.

"It isn't compulsory, you know," Palmer went on. "You won't be thrashed
if you don't."

"Silence, _canaille_," O'Rane murmured.

"I suppose you know the way to Little End? Across the court and under
the arch.... I'll show you, if you like. The Matheson colours are blue
and white. The game's quite easy to follow. There are two goals...."

O'Rane yawned indolently, closed his book and threw it at the speaker.

"See here, sonny, you'll rupture yourself if you do too much funny-dog.
I'm just coming to your dime-show to watch you beach-combers doing your
stunt. And when it's all over I want you to start in and tell me what
good you think you've done."

One or two voices raised themselves improvingly in defence of sport, the
tradition of fair play, working for one's side and not for one's self,
physical fitness and the like--much as Loring had done a few weeks
earlier.

"You bat-eared lot!" was O'Rane's withering commentary.

"Everyone knows you're an unpatriotic hog," observed Venables.

"'Cos I don't kick a filthy bit of skin about in the slime? You lousy,
over-fed lap-dog, a fat lot you know about patriotism! See here,
Venables, what _use_ d'you think you are? Can you ride? No. Can you
shoot? No. Can you row? Can you swim? Can you save yourself a
God-Almighty thrashing any time I care to foul my hands on you?"

"If you fought fair...." Venables began indignantly.

"I fight with my two hands same as you. 'Course, if you fool round with
your everlasting Queensberry Rules, don't be surprised if I hitch you
out of your pants and break an arm or two. And, meantime, you sit and
hand out gaff about patriotism and the fine man you're growing into by
playing football. All the time you know you'd be turned up and smacked
if you didn't, and you don't cotton on to that. I've a good mind to take
you in hand, Venables."

Mayhew, who was struggling with the current number of his paper, laid
his pen down and addressed the meeting.

"Proposed that O'Rane do now shut his face," he suggested.

"Seconded!" cried Sinclair, who was lying on his back in the middle
window-seat, drinking cocoa through a length of rubber tubing stolen
from the laboratory.

O'Rane smiled and drummed his heels against the echoing locker doors.

"Sinks, come here!" he commanded.

There was no movement on Sinclair's part.

"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old
man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to
me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart,
peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat
thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy
life be labour and sorrow."

Unprotesting and under the eyes of Hall, Sinclair rolled off the
window-seat and ambled round to O'Rane's corner.

"What's the row?" he demanded.

"I'm going to make a man of Venables--make men of them all," was the
reply.

There was a whispered consultation, and I caught
"Mud-Crushers"--contemptuous appellation of a despised Cadet Corps. "No,
I'm blowed if I do," Sinclair flung up to the figure on the lockers.
"_I_ will if _you_ will," whispered O'Rane. A moment's hesitation
followed. "It'll be rather a rag," Sinclair admitted.

"We'll start on Palmer," O'Rane pronounced. "He's the biggest. Hither,
Palmer."

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Palmer, still with a cross of
sticking-plaster on his forehead, look up from his book.

"Go to----," he began valiantly enough, and then anticlimactically as he
caught sight of me, "What d'you want?"

"Thee, laddie. Sinks and I are old men, broken with the teares and
sorrows of this life. If you _don't_ come, I don't mind telling you
you'll get kidney-punch in Dormitory to-night. That's better. I'm
joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. Sinks is joining too. He didn't want
to, but I threatened him with kidney-punch."

"More fool him," returned Palmer, preparing to go back to his book.

"Half a sec.," cried Sinclair, with a restraining hand on his shoulder.
"Raney and I are joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. If you don't join
too, and recruit Cottrell, you'll get kidney-punch from us both."

Palmer looked his persecutors up and down. He was no coward and would
have left enduring marks on Sinclair, but of O'Rane's disabling,
Japanese methods no one had yet made beginning or end.

"But what's the good of my mucking about in a filthy uniform?" he
demanded. "I'm going to be a land agent."

"Decide. Don't argue," ordered O'Rane. "Think how useful a little rifle
practice will be when you're invited to murder hapless driven birds."

"But it's all rot...."

O'Rane waved him away. "If you will arrange to be in bed at 9.45
to-night, Sinks and I will give ourselves the pleasure of waiting on
you."

Palmer hesitated a moment longer.

"Oh, anything for a quiet life," he exclaimed.

"Now go and recruit Venables," said O'Rane. "Sinks and I are old men,
broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. We should hate to be
dragged into a vulgar brawl, but you may use our names as a guarantee of
good faith. I saw a man killed with a kidney-punch out in Kobe once."

The recruiting was going briskly forward when I gathered up my mallet
and chisel, picked the chair out of the fireplace and returned to my
study. Early in life O'Rane had learned three lessons in collective
psychology: a sense of humour is a strong ally; fifty sheep follow when
one has butted a gap in a hedge; and the basis of democracy is that all
men are entitled to see that their neighbours suffer equally with
themselves.

After Third Hour on Monday a batch of forty-three recruits (the Corps
was unfashionable in Matheson's) presented themselves at the door of the
Armoury graded according to height. I was passing through Cloisters with
Tom Dainton, and we heard Sinclair's voice leading the marching song:


     "Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em!"


The words aptly described the internal relationships of the Press Gang.
The smallest fag marched under the suspicious eye of one slightly larger
than himself, the slightly larger was in turn under the surveillance of
a fag yet larger. There was an eleventh-hour flicker of mutiny, promptly
extinguished.

"I'm hanged if I can see the fun of this," cried Venables, flinging down
the pen.

Sinclair, Palmer and Cottrell had already signed and were with
difficulty restrained from tearing the would-be deserter limb from limb.

"It's the damnedest silly rot I was ever mixed up with," he grumbled, as
he signed his name viciously in the Recruits' Book. "Nobody but a
congenital idiot like Raney----Here, Carlisle, come and sign, curse
you!"

Two days later, term came to an end. My mother and sister were in Cairo,
and as I did not fancy spending Christmas by myself in the wilds of the
County Kerry, I had accepted Loring's invitation to stay with him in
London. We were almost the last to shake little Matheson's hand and
leave the house, for Loring never cared what train he took, so long as
he was not hurried. He was now lying contentedly back in his arm-chair,
divested of his responsibilities as Head of the house and appreciatively
tasting the first savour of the holidays. It was three o'clock in the
afternoon, and O'Rane had just finished packing the last box of books.

"Is there anything more?" he asked, stretching his back and brushing the
dust from his clothes.

"I think not, thanks. You're not a bad fag, young man. I'm quite sorry
you've got into the Sixth."

"No more of our ten-day meetings," said O'Rane.

Loring half-closed his eyes.

"Believe me or not," he said, "I always regarded those meetings as a
blot on our otherwise delectable friendship. Are you going home for the
holidays, Spitfire?"

"I haven't got a home," O'Rane answered, with a sudden return of his old
sullenness.

Loring opened his eyes and bowed apologetically.

"Sorry. I didn't know. No offence meant. What _are_ you going to do with
yourself?"

"Oh, I shall find something to do."

"Would it amuse you to stay with me any part of the time? Oakleigh's
coming, in case you feel you can't stand me alone. I'll take you to a
Christmas pantomime as a reward for being a good little fag."

"It's awfully kind of you, Loring." O'Rane hesitated and grew very red.
"I don't think I shall have time, though."

"Not for one night, even? Loring House, Curzon Street, will find me all
the holidays."

"I'm afraid I shall be working."

"Bunkum! You've not got any work to do."

"I _have_."

"What kind?"

The old expression of defiance battling with prolonged persecution came
into O'Rane's black eyes. "If you _must_ know," he said, "I came here
with enough money for one term and I must raise some more. It's awfully
kind of you, though. Good-bye. I hope you'll have a pleasant time.
Good-bye, Oakleigh."

As the door closed behind him, Loring turned to me with a rueful shake
of the head.

"I seem to have a genius for putting my foot into it with him," he
observed.

"It couldn't be helped," I said. "He's a mysterious little animal."

Loring sat staring into the fire. At length he roused himself with the
question:

"But what's he going to do with his little self? I rather feel as if
I'd been what he'd call a 'God-Almighty brute' to him this term. I'd no
idea he was ... I wonder if the Guv'nor can do anything for him."

"I shouldn't dare," I said.

Loring stretched himself and looked for his coat and hat.

"Come along if we're going to catch the 4.10," he said. "I say, what a
cheerful prospect for the little beast to look forward to, if he has to
do this every holiday."

We were a small party at Loring House that Christmas. The Marquess
divided his time between London and Monmouthshire according to the
weather and the possibility of hunting; Lady Loring departed to San Remo
with the New Year; and Lady Amy arrived spasmodically for a night and a
day between visits to school friends, sometimes alone, but once with my
cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, with whom at this time Loring was
unblushingly in love. For the most part we had the great house to
ourselves for such times as we could spare to be at home. And the
arrangement suited all parties. Though devoted to his mother and sister,
I always fancied there was a perplexed misunderstanding between Jim and
his father. I do not suggest a want of affection, but their minds were
cast in different moulds, and I sometimes wonder if the Marquess, with
his zest for pleasure and society, ever found common ground with his
serious, detached and incurably romantic son. Be that as it may, we had
no time to get bored with our own society. Loring's passion for the
theatre dated from early years, and if we went once we went five times a
week for the period of the holidays. The day was not hard to get
through, as we ran breakfast and luncheon into one, rode in the Park on
fine afternoons and returned in time to drink a cup of tea, dress, and
dine out at one or other of Loring's favourite eating-houses. Lady Amy
accompanied us when she was in town,--a tall, grey-eyed, dark-haired
girl of sixteen she was then, wonderfully like her good-looking brother
in speech, appearance and manner,--but as a rule the two of us roamed
London by ourselves.

Taken all in all, they were very pleasant holidays, though in the last
seventeen years I have forgotten nine-tenths of what we did or where we
went. Our New Year's Eve party, however, lingers in my memory. Lord
Loring took us all to supper at the Empire Hotel. It was the first time
I had been there, and from our place overlooking the river we commanded
the room. To this day I can recall something of the crowded, brilliantly
lit scene; the little tables with their pink-shaded lights, the red
uniforms of the orchestra, the waiters in their knee-breeches and silk
stockings, the white shoulders of the women and the shimmer of their
diamonds. Party followed party, till it seemed as if the great room
could never contain them, and in the entrance-hall beyond the stairs we
could see fresh parties arriving, more ermine cloaks being shed, new
ranks of men settling their waistcoats and straightening their ties as
they approached with an air of well-bred, bored indifference, bowing to
friends here and there and working slowly forward in search of their
tables.

"Not a bad sight, is it?" said Lord Loring. "They stage-manage the thing
very fairly well. If only our waiter would unbend to take our orders."
He looked round and caught sight of the manager with a plan of the
restaurant in his hand, allotting tables and ushering parties through
the narrow gangways.

"I'll catch hold of this fellow," said Jim, rising up and intercepting
the manager. There was a moment's conversation, punctuated by
deprecatory play of the hands and apologetic shrugging of the shoulders.
"He says our man will be here in a minute. A wild Grand Duke has just
arrived here from Russia and lost his suite on the way. Apparently our
waiter is the only man who speaks the lingo."

Lord Loring accepted the situation and began to describe the
arrangements for marking the arrival of midnight. On the first stroke of
twelve all lights were to be put out; as the last died away there would
be a peal of bells, limelight would be thrown on the entrance-hall, and
a sledge drawn by dogs would make its appearance with a child on board
to symbolize the advent of the New Year.... He interrupted his account
to give the order for supper to our waiter who had at last arrived.

"Then link hands for 'Auld Lang Syne,'" added Lady Loring.

At that moment I received a disconcerting kick and looked up to find Jim
gazing at the end of the table where his father was seated. I followed
the direction of his eyes, saw the waiter raise his head and take the
wine-list, and as he did so I caught a glimpse of his face.

In a claret-coloured livery coat, black knee-breeches and white
stockings stood David O'Rane. Our eyes met, but he gave no sign of
recognition and a moment later he had hurried away with an obsequious
"Very good, my lord."

As we waited for our coats an hour or two later, Jim whispered, "I'm
going to tell the Guv'nor. It's hardly decent, you know. A Meltonian
assing about like that. The Guv'nor must get him out of it." He turned
to his father. "I say, dad, did you particularly notice our waiter?"

"Yes. Rather a capable youngster, I thought."

"Well, he's ... he's...." Jim stammered unwontedly and seemed suddenly
to repent his purpose.

"What about him?" asked Lord Loring.

"Oh, nothing. He comes from Melton, that's all."

"From the 'Raven'?"

"No, another place farther up the hill," Jim answered vaguely.

"Funny you should meet him here," observed Lord Loring, as he lit a
cigar.

And with those words the subject was dropped.




CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN

[Greek: tên te gar polin koinên parechomen, kai ouk estin hote
xenêlasiais apeirgomen tina ê mathêmatos ê theamatos, ho mê kryphthen an
tis tôn polemiôn idôn ôphelêtheiê, pisteuontes ou tais paraskeuais to
pleon kai apatais ê tô aph' hêmôn autôn es ta erga eupsychô; kai en tais
paideiais hoi men epiponô askêsei euthys neoi ontes to andreion
meterchontai, hêmeis de aneimenôs diaitômenoi ouden hêsson epi tous
isopaleis kindynous chôroumen.]--THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.


I

After the tempestuous months consequent on O'Rane's arrival at Melton,
the two succeeding terms were a time of slumber and peace. The omnibus
study next to Prayer Room became vacant at Christmas, and on our return
at the end of January we found Mayhew, Sinclair and O'Rane in
possession. We found also an ominous hand-printing-press clamped on to
the window-sill, and from this injudicious outcome of an uncle's
Christmas largess Mayhew set himself to produce a weekly sheet rivalling
"The Times" in authority, the "Spectator" in elegance, and the "Junius
Letters" in pointedness of criticism and personality.

Before the term was a month old the Editor had sunk to the thankless and
unclean position of compositor, while O'Rane, with his natural taste for
ascendancy, poured forth an effervescent stream of leaders, lampoons,
parodies, dialogues, stories and poems. It was not easy for anyone of
less dominant personality to get his voice heard or his pen's product
read during the periods of O'Rane's midsummer madness. At such times he
seemed to lose every restraint of sobriety and in a riot of high spirits
would be found organizing stupendous practical jokes or subjecting the
very stones of Great Court to satirical tirades in facile impromptu
verse. Throughout life his vitality was amazing, and from time to time
at school and Oxford it seemed as though he must break out or choke.

Thanks to the printing-press, Mayhew found the circulation of the
"Junior Mathesonian" rising with each issue. I have a complete set
somewhere, and to read again the ebullitions of O'Rane's untiring pen is
to see again the wild, black-eyed, lean-faced, Villonesque figure of the
author. He was always at enmity with someone, and the last word in each
altercation is usually to be found in his weekly "Dialogues of the
Damned," in which the enemy of the moment is depicted explaining to the
Devil his presence in hell.

Beresford, Second Master, headed the list. As a disciplinarian who had
six several times failed to secure a headmastership elsewhere, he was a
formidable authority on the rules and traditions of the school and knew
to a nicety exactly where Burgess's loose grip and casual methods were
lowering the prestige of Melton. Without in any way opposing the
existing policy of letting the Sixth run the school, Beresford gladly
conceded that the Sixth should at least set an example. This, he held,
was not done when one member roamed dreamily along the Southampton road
and engaged in conversation with the varied, disreputable,
semi-seafaring tramps who begged their way through Melton to London and
on whose account the great road was put out of bounds for all juniors.
Burgess declined to limit bounds farther, but supported his colleague to
the extent of a few words with O'Rane--a course that strengthened
Beresford's conviction that Melton was going to the dogs and sowed
plentiful resentment in the breast of O'Rane.

I see no purpose in following up in detail the quarrel with Greenwood
(Dialogue III) over the Promenade Concert and the unexplained wrecking
of No. 1 Music Room; nor with Ponsonby (Dialogue VII-) over the Freedom
of the Press. The "J.M.," smudgily printed by Mayhew and ornately
illustrated by Draycott, was certainly not intended to enter the shabby,
panelled Common Room over Big Gateway. The internecine animosity of the
great, however, is sometimes more marked than their discretion, and
Hanson, who had not spoken to Grimshaw since their whist quarrel five
years earlier, allowed himself to be seen in one of the bursting Common
Room arm-chairs with his feet in the fender and his trousers scorching,
engaged in delighted perusal of the Grimshaw Dialogue. Inasmuch as
Grimshaw favoured the boys of his own house against all comers, he was
unpopular, and the Grimshaw number of the "J.M." was received with
grateful appreciation by all his colleagues, with the exception of
Beresford, who had suffered in silence from an earlier week's attack.
Succeeding issues were received with slightly less favour, as the
minority of victims grew in number. With the appearance of "J.M. VII,"
Ponsonby decided to refer the case to Burgess and with the support of
six actual fellow-sufferers and a dozen awaiting their turn, he
constituted himself a deputation. The Head was sympathetic but not
helpful. The paper, he pointed out, was issued only to subscribers and
seemingly contained nothing of the blasphemous or obscene.

"If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness," said Burgess,
"reason would that I should bear with you."

"I don't feel that any boy--let alone a Sixth-form boy--should be
allowed to circulate studied insults to the Staff," rejoined Ponsonby.

"If it be a question of words and names," Burgess advised, "look ye to
it."

"O'Rane's in the Sixth," Ponsonby objected. "Unless he's degraded from
Sixth-form rank, what am I to do?"

Burgess affected to think deeply.

"The Lord will provide," he said.

The "Dialogues of the Damned" are an incomplete series, arrested in
mid-course at No. VII; the "J.M.," however, had a life of more than two
years and only died when O'Rane, as captain of the school, had to edit
the official "Meltonian."

A remove into the Sixth at Melton marked an epoch in most lives. There
was, and is, only one Burgess in the scholastic system, and until you
met him five hours a day for six days a week you could form no estimate
of the range of his knowledge. Every school has its Under Sixth, its
Villiers and its mixed assembly of brilliant boys awaiting their remove,
mediocre boys who have come to stay and dull boys charitably piloted and
tugged into the haven of rest because their housemasters do not care to
make monitors of boys in the Fifth. In my time the lot of Villiers was
not to be envied, for the dullards slept, the mediocre ragged, and the
scholars had to do their best to snatch instruction from the ruins of
Babel, assisted by a man whose boast would never have been that he was a
ruler of men or an inspired teacher and whose blood almost audibly
rushed to his head as he strove to maintain discipline.

Thirty years before Villiers had taken a first in Mods., and though the
fine edge of his mind had lost its keenness, he held to the Mods.
tradition that the Classics should be read in bulk. That, indeed, is the
best thing I remember about the man or his system. We scampered through
the "Odyssey," "Æneid," and plays of Sophocles at a great rate and with
no attention to detail. Pure scholarship, if it ever came, was to come
later, and in the meantime Villiers saved succeeding generations from
the reproach levelled against a classical education--that the fruit of
many years' plodding is to be measured by the assimilation of one book
of Horace's Odes or a single play by Euripides. Villiers left us, and we
left Villiers, with more than a smattering of great literature.

In the Sixth we read as much or as little as we pleased. Most of us had
a scholarship in view, and the degree of our unpreparedness was the
degree of attention with which we confined ourselves to the text. Beyond
that minimum the rule was to sit and encourage Burgess to talk.
Sometimes he would forget a book and, for want of fixed work, open a
Lexicon and choose a word at random. He would give us the childhood and
old age of that word, its parents and uttermost collaterals; and from a
single word he would treat of ethnology as revealed by language and
comparative civilization as measured by the limits of a vocabulary. And
from comparative civilization to the institutions and faiths on which a
society is built up--the religion and magic that shroud the dark days of
the human mind.

Even to a temperamental iconoclast such as O'Rane, I fancy Burgess came
as a revelation. At the term's end he showed me a manuscript book
entitled "Notes on Theophrastus." To do Burgess justice we had read
three pages in thirteen weeks; the rest of the book was consecrated to
_obiter dicta_: "The Trade Routes of Turkestan"; "Lost Processes in
Stained Glass"; "The Origin of Playing Cards"; "The Margin of Error in
Modern Field Artillery"; "The Institution of Arbitrage"; "The Minaret as
a Feature in Architecture"; "Surgery in Mediæval China"--and a score of
other subjects. Theophrastus bored us, and we decided to take him as
read. The decision once adopted, there was no difficulty in keeping
Burgess away from the text.

On reflection I think that O'Rane may, in his turn, have been a
revelation to Burgess as much as to the rest of the form. If omniscience
were the order of the day, O'Rane seems to have decided to be
omniscient. It was a fixed principle with him never to bring books into
form. Burgess would look wearily round and say, "O'Rane, wilt thou read
from 'Protinus Aeneas celeri certare sagitta,' laddie?" And Raney, with
his hands clasped behind his back and eyes gazing across to the big open
fire, would recite thirty, fifty or a hundred lines as Burgess might
decide, in a voice that would cause him to be taken untrained on any
stage. In part it was a studied pose, in part I believe he never forgot
anything he had twice read. And his memory was minutely accurate. I
recall a disputation on one of Bentley's emendations of Horace; neither
Burgess nor O'Rane had a book, but each was prepared to go to the stake
for his own version. Sutcliffe was eventually dispatched to School
Library, and a reference to the text showed that Burgess was wrong.

"Where were you before you came here?" Loring asked that evening, when
O'Rane and I were sitting in his study after prayers.

"Guess I was in most places," O'Rane answered from the depths of the
arm-chair and a book.

"Where were you educated, fathead? And don't 'guess,' it's a vile
Americanism."

Loring affected great precision of speech.

"I--fancy--I--received--instruction--from--numerous--persons--in--a--
var-i-ety--of--places." And then with a sudden blaze of light in his big
eyes:


     "Much have I seen and known, cities of men,
     And manners, climates, councils, governments,
     Myself not least, but honoured of them all...


My God! 'honoured of them all!'" He stopped suddenly.

"The next time you break out, you'll get the cocoa-saucepan at your
head," I warned him. "Now answer Jim's question."

O'Rane sat staring at the fire until Loring threw a wastepaper basket at
him.

"If you start scrapping----" he began. "Oh, what was your dam' silly
question? Dear man, I was born in Prague, and, as I never stayed six
months in the same country till I came to England, you can see my
education was a bit of mixed grill. Father ..." he hesitated; it was the
first time I had heard him mention any relation, " ... father used to
teach me a bit himself. And once or twice I had a tutor. And for the
most part he used to lay on a local priest. That's why I can hardly
understand the way you chaps pronounce Latin and Greek. And then the
Great Interregnum, the Wanderjahre...."

"Most of your life's been that," I commented.

"Ah, I did this stunt alone--before I came here. After the war."

"The Greek War?" Loring asked.

"Surely. They killed my father, did the Turks. And when I'd buried him
there was nothing much to wait for. He'd given every last penny to the
Greeks, so I cleared out and came to England by way of Japan and the
States and a few other places. It was all valuable experience," he
added, with a concentrated bitterness that made my blood run cold. When
O'Rane spoke in that tone, I could imagine him primed and anxious for
murder.


     "And drunk delight of battle with my peers
     Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,"


he went on. "'Delight of battle'! Oh, my God! These poets and modern
war!"

"Did you see anything of it?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I was a kid of thirteen. I saw the--results ... when
they brought my father back to the Piræus."

Loring had been lying on his back with his hands locked under his head.
He roused himself now to turn on one side and face O'Rane.

"Was your father Lord O'Rane?" he asked.

Raney's face grew hard and defiant.

"He was."

Loring nodded. "When he was killed the Guv'nor noticed the name. I
rather think your property marches with some of ours. You're County
Longford, aren't you?"

"The property is. I, Lord Chepstow, am what you would doubtless call a
bastard."

Loring sprang to his feet.

"Raney, you damned little swine----!"

"It's true!" O'Rane answered, jumping up and facing him.

"It's not true that I would ...!"

"Oh, perhaps not. But I've been called it--and by lineal descendants of
the Unrepentant Thief, too. You've got nickel-plated manners, of
course."

"If you were worth a curse, you'd apologize," said Loring, hotly.

O'Rane reflected.

"What for?" he demanded. "I'm not ashamed of my father, Loring."

"You'd be a pretty fair louse if you were. Don't make me lose my temper
again, you little beast."

O'Rane held out his hand with a curious, embarrassed smile.

"Sorry, Loring. Is that good enough?"

"We can rub along on that."

Some years later my guardian, Bertrand Oakleigh, appeased my curiosity
on the subject of the O'Rane fortunes. "The Liberator," after a crowded
boyhood of agitation and intrigue, became so deeply implicated in
certain acts of Fenianism that he had to leave Ireland in disguise and
live abroad for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wandered from
one capital to another, preaching insurrection and being disowned by the
Government of his own country. When the Foreign Office papers of the
period are made public, his name will be found forming the subject of
heated diplomatic dispatches. As a neutral his conduct was far from
correct in the Polish rising of '63 and the Balkan trouble of '76. When
he lived as the guest of the exiled Louis Kossuth, pressure was brought
to bear by the secret police, and he moved north into Switzerland. There
he met Mrs. Raynter, one of the famous three beautiful Taverton sisters.
The influence of Lord O'Rane's personality was not confined to political
audiences: she lived with him for three years, and died in giving birth
to a son. When Lord O'Rane himself succumbed to wounds received in the
Græco-Turkish War, he was only in the fifties. The measure of his power
and sway is to be found less in any positive achievement than in the
terror he inspired in the less stable Governments of Europe from Russia
to Spain.


II

Winter softened into spring, and spring lengthened into the summer that
was to be my last at Melton. The few remaining months are engraved
deeply on my memory as though I lived an intenser life to capture the
last shreds of heritage that the school held out to me. As in a sudden
mellowing I found myself on terms of unexpected friendliness with
people I had previously disliked or despised. Beresford--lank
disciplinarian--invited me to dine in College, and revealed himself
unwontedly human and well-informed on Rudyard Kipling; Ponsonby, whom I
had lightly written of as a pretentious ass, proved on better
acquaintance to be a man of self-paralysing shyness who lived in almost
physical dread of his form; Grimshaw, most stolid of men in official
life, shone without warning as a raconteur and mimic of his colleagues.
I dined or breakfasted with them all, not excluding little Matheson with
his unwieldy tribe of children, and we talked unbroken "shop" and
disinterred old scandals and parted with a sentimental, "You'll be sorry
to leave Melton?" "Very sorry, sir."

The vanity of eighteen is long dead, and I can recall with amusement
that I had serious misgivings for the school's future after I should
have left. For five years and more it had been all my world. I
remembered the veneration with which, as a fag, I had gazed on the
gladiators of the Eleven and the Witan of the Sixth--gazed and flushed
with self-consciousness and shy gratification when one of them ordered
me to carry his books across Great Court. In time I too had made my way
into the Sixth; there was at first nothing very wonderful or dignified
about the position, but by no immoderate stretch of imagination I could
fancy myself venerated as I had venerated the heroes of five years
before. And without doubt I looked proudly on my work in the Monitorial
Council: we had been strict but not harsh, reserved but not aloof,
reformers but not iconoclasts--statesmen to a man. At every point we
seemed superior to our immediate predecessors, and the only bitterness
in our cup was brought by the reflection that this Golden Age would so
soon pass away. It was inconceivable that youngsters like Marlowe,
Clayton or Dennis could fill our shoes. They were boys. I remember that
Loring and I took Clayton on one side and revealed some few of the
secrets of our successful rule; I remember, too, how extraordinarily
Clayton resented our patronage....

The recorded history of the last two terms is meagre, but I recollect
that O'Rane came twice into conflict with authority before we parted.
The first time was an unhappy occasion when the May-Day celebrations of
the Melton carpet-makers coincided with one of his periodical outbursts.
A plethoric meeting of somnolent workmen was being somewhat furtively
held in the more somnolent market square; moist, earnest speakers
declaimed under a hot sun to a listless audience. When Dainton and I
passed through the square, oratory was getting worsted, and the meeting
was summoning resolution to spend the rest of the warm May afternoon in
sleep. Then O'Rane appeared galvanically from the West. And soon
afterwards from the East, with dragging steps and eyes glued to his
book, came Burgess in cap and cassock, his pockets swollen with the
books he had bought in Grantham's.

That night O'Rane spent forty-five minutes in the Head's house--an
unusual time for anything but sentence of expulsion. Loring and I were
walking up and down Great Court with our watches in our hands, prepared
to intercede with speeches of incredible eloquence if the worst came to
the worst. Through the bright, unblinded library windows we could see
Raney pleading; the back of Burgess's white head was visible above his
chair, motionless, and seemingly inexorable.

"What's happened?"

The door had opened slowly and shut with a clang. O'Rane was walking
towards us with a white face that belied his jaunty step.

"It's not to occur again." The anticlimax was an unintentional trick of
phrasing. "Well, it won't. I can't work _that_ lay a second time. D'you
know he sacked me within five seconds of my entering the room?
I--had--to--fight--for--very--life." He breathed hard, linked arms and
marched us off for a walk around the Cloisters.

"Drive ahead," said Loring.

"'Laddie, thy portion is with the malefactors. Get thee gone, and walk
henceforth in outer darkness.' I say, the old man's formidable when he's
angry. I said nothing, and he waved me to the door. I didn't move. 'Get
thee gone, laddie,' he thundered, 'and let not the sun of to-morrow rise
to find thee in this place.' I asked him what I'd done; he sort of
suggested that I really knew all the time. I told him _my_ version."
O'Rane stopped and drew back a step with arms outstretched. "I told him
I'd found that sweet May-Day meeting with potbellied whimperers gassing
over an Eight Hour Day and drinking enough beer to drown 'emselves in.
The May-Days _I_ know were the ones where the mob broke up half Turin
and were shot down by the soldiery: they were men with something to
fight for--and ready to fight for it. These sodden voter vermin! If
they'd organize with their cursed votes--if they'd fight--if they'd do
anything--if they were in earnest----! My God, your English Labour!" His
utterance quickened and his voice grew animated to the point of passion.
"I told these scabrous dogs to put their lousy shoulders to the wheel.
God knows what I didn't call 'em, but they were too sodden to mind, and
I found I was speaking in French half the time. Then they got an idea
I'd come over from Paris to champion them, and they cheered no end. So I
taught 'em the 'Marseillaise,' and half-way through the second verse
Burgess drifted into view. I told him in his library as I'm telling you
here...."

"I hope to the Lord you didn't!" Loring interjected.

"I told him every last word." The Cloisters echoed with his excitement.
"You bat-ears, you don't understand! _He_ did!"

"What did he say?" I asked.

O'Rane hesitated. "He hinted that I wasn't accountable for my actions."

I burst out laughing. The words were so obviously inadequate.

"That's a curious reason for not sacking you," was Loring's comment.

O'Rane's black eyes, seemingly fixed on a gargoyle over Chapel door,
were gazing into infinity.

"He said it was the Call of the Blood. And I--I--I just said nothing."
His voice sank to a whisper. "I hardly understood."

The vision was for his eyes alone, and to us, uncomprehending, the rapt
expression of his face and tense poise of the body was curiously
disconcerting. Awkwardly self-conscious, Loring stepped forward and
thrust his arm through O'Rane's.

"Pull yourself together, my son," he said.

O'Rane shook free of his arm. "You don't understand! But _he_ did. He
knew it all. There was one crossed to France in the Revolution, and him
they guillotined because he was too powerful. And two died for Greece,
and one went fighting for the North and the slaves. And one died by the
wayside as the king's troops entered Rome. And one tended lepers in a
South Pacific island." He strode up to Loring and stared him defiantly
in the face. "And some day men will follow me as they never followed
_one_ of the others!"

"Come to earth, you lunatic," said Loring; and I was grateful to him for
the chill banality of the words.

O'Rane turned disgustedly on his heel.

"You wouldn't understand if you lived to be a thousand," he flung back
over his shoulder.

"Come back!" Loring called. "There's nothing to get shirty about."

"You've the soul of a flunkey!"

"All right; so much the worse for me."

"And anyone who's not got your own servants' half spirit you call a
lunatic!"

Loring sat down on the stone seat that ran round the inner wall of
Cloisters and beckoned to O'Rane to join him.

"Come and cool down a bit, Raney," he urged. "And for the Lord's sake
don't make such a row or you'll bring Linden and Smollet out of their
rooms."

"You've got a bourgeoise mind, Loring," said O'Rane reflectively.

"Agreed, but don't shout," Loring returned imperturbably. "I want you to
tell me--_quite_ quietly--how you prove your nobility of soul by running
the risk of getting sacked for the sake of making an idiotic speech to a
mob of workmen who didn't particularly want to hear you? You tell me I
shall never understand, but do at least tell me what I've missed."

"A soul," O'Rane answered simply.

"It's like trying to argue with a woman," said Loring in despair.

The prayer-bell began to ring in the distance, and we made our way out
of the Cloisters and across Great Court. O'Rane, at the last moment,
decided to stay behind, and we left him curled up on the stone seat, his
thin, clean features white in the moonlight and his great deep-set eyes
gazing abstractedly across Fighting Green. He was back in Matheson's for
Roll Call and sauntered into my study with his hands in his pockets and
a straw in his mouth. The flame of emotion had burnt itself out, and he
seemed cold, tired, and a little melancholy.

"Humble apologies and all that sort of thing," he began, holding out his
hand to Loring.

"You haven't told us why you did it?" I reminded him.

He wrinkled his brow and shook his head in perplexity.

"Didn't seem as if I could help it. 'Man was born free and is everywhere
in chains.' I've been through a bit--trying to get enough to feed and
clothe myself--and it was hell. And sometimes it all comes back to me
and I want to blow the whole world up.... And sometimes I dream what a
glorious thing we could make of life, even for the men who sweep the
chimneys and mend the sewers.... To-day...." He shrugged his shoulders.
"I'd forgotten the everlasting Press. After the kings, the nobles; after
the nobles, the people; and after the people, the Press. So Burgess
says. And Melton's not strong enough to stand the racket if every
beach-comber with a halfpenny in his pocket can read that a Melton boy
led the 'Marseillaise' in Market Square."

"Quite right, too. It gives the school a dam' bad name."

"Oh, I agree--now," he answered limply. "He told me to choose my
punishment."

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I said, 'You aren't sacking me then, sir?' He said, 'Sacking, laddie?
What strange tongue is this?' And then I knew I was all right.
Clayton'll be captain next year. He'd have made _me_, otherwise. Can't
be helped. And I guess I got Melton in my vest pocket most ways.
Good-night, bat-ears. I'm going to bed."

As the door closed behind him Loring sighed to himself.

"If he isn't sacked for this, he'll be sacked for something else," he
predicted. "I hope it won't be till I'm gone, because he refreshes me.
D'you remember his first term?"

"He's extraordinarily popular now," I said.

"He's the most fearless little beast I ever met. And there's such a
glorious uncertainty about him. One moment he's your long-lost brother,
the next he's slanging you like a pickpocket in about six languages, the
next he's apologizing and shaking hands. I suppose he'll be captain the
year after next. It'll be an eventful time for the school."

O'Rane's other conflict with authority was less impassioned and on a
smaller scale. He had absented himself from Chapel for the better part
of the term, and Burgess one day inquired the reason.

"I don't believe all the stuff they hand out there, sir."

"Have I asked thee to believe it, laddie?" demanded Burgess, who had
almost ceased to expect polished diction from O'Rane.

"Well, sir, if I _pretend_ to believe it...."

"Have I asked thee to pretend, laddie?"

"But if I go, sir, people naturally assume...."

"And how long has David O'Rane given ear to the vain repetitions of the
Synagogue and Market-place?"

For the moment Raney experienced some difficulty in finding an answer.
Then he said:

"I'll go if you want me to, sir."

"Laddie, thou art of an age to determine this for thyself. I am an old
man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. Peradventure the
wisdom and truth that were taught me while I hanged yet upon my mother's
breast no longer charm the ears of the younger men. Peradventure


     "The Saints and Sages that discussed
     Of the two Worlds so learnedly are thrust
         Like Foolish Prophets forth; their words to scorn
     Are scattered, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust."


Herein thou must walk thine own road, laddie.


     "Certain points, left wholly to himself,
     When once a man has arbitrated on,
     We say he must succeed there or go hang.

     . . . . he must avouch,
     Or follow, at the least, sufficiently,
     The form of faith his conscience holds the best,
     Whate'er the process of conviction was:
     For nothing can compensate his mistake
     On such a point, the man himself being judge:
     He cannot wed twice, nor twice lose his soul."


An thou thinkest thou canst learn aught from the life of the man Christ
Jesus, laddie, thy time will not be lost."

Thereafter O'Rane attended Chapel with assiduity until the breaking-up
service on the last day.

For weeks we had been saying good-bye to Melton, dismantling our
studies, packing our books, seeking our porters and groundmen to press
upon them our last tip. The final morning saw us seated betimes at
Leaving Breakfast--a quaint Saturnalia whereat all discipline departed
and every junior in Hall was compelled to read a rimed criticism of the
departing monitors. I recall that Tom Dainton, who had almost
single-handed won the Cricket Shield and established Matheson's in a
tenth year of unbroken tenure, received a rousing send-off; Loring and I
were let down lightly, while Draycott was pointedly informed that his
hair was unduly long and his clothes an eyesore.

We were allowed no reply to the chastening criticism, but acerbity was
forgotten when we joined hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne" with one foot
on the table. For five years to my certain knowledge the long table had
collapsed annually under the unwonted strain; to break at least one leg
was now part of the accepted ritual, and, though Matheson had spent
money and thought on a cunning scheme of underpinning, by dint of
concerted rocking and a sword-dance executed by Dainton, we wrung a
groan from the ill-used board and doubled all four legs into the
attitude of a kneeling camel before the bell sounded for first Roll
Call.

My last Chapel was Loring's first. Catholic or no he felt the service
was not to be missed. We sat side by side, and determined there should
be none of the foolish weakness exhibited by other generations of
leaving monitors. Yet as the organ started to play the last hymn, he
failed to rise, and, as voices all around me began to sing, "Lead,
Kindly Light," I found I could not join in.

From Chapel we went to Big School for our last Roll Call. The prize
compositions of the year were read aloud, and the scholarship results at
Oxford and Cambridge announced. There followed a long distribution of
gilt-edged, calf-bound books; three malefactors were led to Bishop
Adam's Birch Table and flicked publicly across the back of the hand;
there remained but one thing more.

"School Monitors!" Burgess called out.

All ten of us lined up facing the Council with our backs to the school.
The birch was handed to Sutcliffe, who reversed it restored it to
Burgess and returned--divested of authority--to Second Monitor's seat.
The ritual was repeated with the other nine, and Burgess called up the
new monitors. To each of them the birch was handed and by each returned.
Then Clayton, the Captain-Elect, rose from Sutcliffe's old seat,
advanced to the edge of the dais, knelt down in front of the Birch
Table, facing the school, and read the old Latin prayers that--despite
their taint of popery--Queen Elizabeth had authorized us to continue,
always provided we dropped the monkish pronunciation.

The last scene was laid in Burgess's library, where each of us was
presented with a copy of Browning's "Men and Women."

"Peradventure ye have heard his words upon my lips ere now," he said.
"Laddie, these partings like me not. I am an old man, broken with the
cares and sorrows of this world, yet it may be that in this transitory
life an old man's counsel may avail you in the dark places of the earth.
Come to me, laddies, if ye judge not an old man's arm to be too weak to
help you. At this time and in this place will I say but this: Sutcliffe,
thou wilt consume thy days weighing the jots and tittles of learning.
Therein is thine heart buried, and I do not gainsay thee. Dainton, thou
shalt be known in Judah as a mighty man of valour. Thou art ceasing to
be a child and must put away childish things. Hearken no more to the
voice of children playing in the market-place; gird thee for battle to
be a soldier of the Lord. Oakleigh, thine heart melteth away and
becometh water all too easily. Thou hast riches and learning, but little
singleness of purpose. Not for thee the dust of the arena--thou art too
prone to hesitate and weigh thy doubt. Best canst thou serve thy
neighbour by girding on the harness of others; thou hast friends and
kinsmen in the first places of the Synagogue: succour them."

He looked at Loring and paused. "Laddie, I could have made of thee a
scholar, but thou wouldst not. Thou canst be a statesman, but thou wilt
not. The illusion of a great position surrounds thee, and thou art
content to gather in thy vessels of gold and silver, thine ivory and
peacocks, thy choice books and paintings. Anon thou wilt awaken and
question thyself, saying, 'Wherefore have I lived?' Ere that day come I
counsel thee to journey to a far country on an embassage from thy
soveran lord. I charge thee to scorn the delights of Babylon lest, in
the empty show of Kingship, the vanity of gorgeous apparel, the uttering
of words in thy Council of Elders, thou conceive that thy duty to God
and to thy neighbour hath been fulfilled. Laddies, an old man's blessing
goeth with you."


III

And thus we were taught and fitted to be rulers of men.

As the London train steamed away from Melton Station, Loring leant out
of the carriage window for a last sight of the school buildings
clustering white in the July sunshine on the crest of the hill. Secretly
I believe we were both feeling what a strange place Melton would be
without us.

"Six years, old son!" he observed, drawing his head in. "Dam' good years
they were, too. Wonder how long it'll be before you Radicals abolish
places like this."

"There are lots of other things I'd abolish first," I said. It was a
mental convention with Loring to regard me as a jaundiced, fanatical
Marat, and with the argumentativeness of youth I played up to his lead.

"What _good_ has Melton done?" he challenged.

At one time my faith in public schools was such that I generously
pitied anyone who had struggled to manhood in outer darkness. Infirmity
of judgement or approaching middle age make it daily harder for me to
divide the institutions of the world into the Absolutely Good or the
Utterly Bad. It is probably wise to raise up a class of men who shall be
educated and not technically instructed--wide horizons and an infinite
capacity for learning constitute an aim sufficiently exalted. That was
the aim of Melton, and we were well educated within narrow limits that
excluded modern history, economics, English literature, science and
modern languages. We never strove to be practical and had a pathetic
belief in the validity of pure scholarship as an equipment for life.

I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy,
subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to
go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I
still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is
adequate--conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in
other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's
impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her
public schools.

The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept
us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of
co-ordination and discipline--as other nations may perhaps learn those
same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and
light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among
members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I
seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the
scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought
up to the public-school standard of conduct.

No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class,
will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly
characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its
intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness
and its pragmatical efficiency. I never 'sneaked' though the price of
silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor,
though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never
entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff,
though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with
others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other,
and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally
unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good
Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the
challenge.

There _is_ no Radicalism in schools--I had no business to use the word.
After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling
kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly
thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking
bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the
conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in
thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list
could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I
was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies
reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a
cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles,
"but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but
one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a
husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and
so on."

In moments of uncritical pride I judge the tree by its fruit. It is the
public school men, grumbling at their work, who--shall we say?--govern
the Indian Empire, with resentment of praise from others and no thoughts
of praising themselves. Versatile, light-hearted and infinitely
resourceful if cholera sweep the land, they will step from one dead
man's shoes to another's and leave a village to govern a province.
Haggard and drawn with long weeks of eighteen-hour days, they will yet
find time to mistrust the man who is not of their race or speech or
school and growl at him who offends by his clothes or enthusiasm or
aspirates. And the Indian Empire goes afresh to perdition with every new
fall in the rupee or change in the colour of the Government minute
paper. In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt
never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet
criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one
miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his
fellows will come out on strike.

"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.

In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my
consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred
visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. At eighteen
everything seemed so easy: the world was blind but not selfish--except
for the high and dry Tories who were to be quietly put out of the way if
they proved obdurate; everyone else would yield to reason--and my
eloquence.

The favourite vision was a crowded meeting swayed to laughter or tears
or passion by my words--a memory of Mr. Gladstone's last public speech
on the Armenian atrocities. At other times when my Irish fluency had
been too rudely interrupted, I pictured myself as heir to Parnell's
heritage of masterful silence. Cold, inflexible, contemptuous--I had
seen him in Dublin when I was a boy of seven, and externals counted for
so much that will-power seemed a matter of compressed lips and folded
arms. I was but eighteen, and my Radicalism a matter of inheritance
rather than conviction. It took years of painful disillusionment to
discover how much fanaticism is required to shake the resolution of
others; and years more to find how completely I was lacking in it. One
morning, when I had attempted to catch the Speaker's eye some fourteen
times in the course of an all-night sitting, I walked out of the House
and spent the day asleep in a Turkish bath; on waking I recalled
Burgess's words, "Not for thee the dust of the arena, laddie." The
superman vision was at last dispelled.

"Well, I had a dam' good time there," I said to Loring, by way of
closing the Melton debate.

In common with many others Loring drew pleadings against Radicalism
which would have delighted a lawyer. To begin with, there _were_ no such
people as Radicals--he at any rate had never met them. The professed
Radicals of his acquaintance were a handful of mere agitators,
misleading a too credulous electorate that was not yet fit to exercise
the franchise; morally the Radical party was negligible because its sole
ambition was, by sheer force of numbers, to take away anything anybody
had got--he for one would never acquiesce in confiscation merely because
a majority voted it. Then in our arguments I would confront him with the
Will of the People--for some strange reason only capable of
interpretation by Radicals. The phrase had a curious hypnotic effect on
us both, for he would invariably retaliate with the statement that the
sole custodians of the People's Will were to be found in the House of
Lords. And infallibly we would both lose our tempers over the first Home
Rule Bill.

"At heart you're quite sound," he was good enough to say on this
occasion.

On reaching London we drove to Loring House, where I spent the night
before crossing to Ireland. A month later we met for Horse Show week.
Loring stayed with me, and we went to Dublin together to join the
Hunter-Oakleighs, who were cousins of mine and at this time head of the
Catholic branch of the family. Half-way through September I put in a
week at House of Steynes, and was not surprised to find that Loring had
included my cousin Violet in the party. In the first week of October we
returned to London, picked up Draycott, who had spent a stifling summer,
loose-tied and low-collared, in the Quarter Latin, and descended upon
Oxford to order the decoration of our rooms.

Draycott had been banished to Old Library, to his present disgust and
subsequent reconciliation, and allotted a gloomy first-floor set which
for the next three years was the scene of "Planchette" séances and
roulette parties. Loring and I had been given one of the coveted double
suites in Tom, and for the length of an afternoon we condemned furniture
and carpets, issued orders to a deferential, tired upholsterer, and
finally emerged into the autumn sunlight of the Quad with a feeling of
modest triumph that there would be few rooms in Oxford to compare with
ours.

On the following Friday we made our first informal appearance.

Writing after sixteen years that have been neither unvaried nor
uneventful, I find that Oxford lingers in my memory as an adventure
never before experienced even in my first days at Melton, never
afterwards repeated even when I lived first in London, or fought my
Wiltshire elections, or entered the House. I like to fill a fresh pipe
and lean back in my chair, conjuring up a thousand little personal
scenes--of no importance in the world to anyone but myself: my first
Sunday luncheon, when I was the guest of Jerry Westermark, and if the
rest of the company were third-year men like him, entitled to an
arm-chair by the fire in Junior Common Room. The first luncheon I myself
gave half-way through the term, my anxiety not to leave out even one of
my new friends, and my anger with Crabtree of Magdalen who invited
himself at the last moment and filled me with eleventh-hour fears that
the food would run short. My first "Grind," where I pocketed ten pounds
by backing Loring, who won the race at the price of a broken
collar-bone. My first Commem. when I lost my heart to Amy Loring. My
first appearance in the schools and my confounding _ad hoc_ knowledge of
St. Paul's journey. My first....

It is always the first impression that seems to endure longest, but
there were friendships I made and lost wherein I can fix no date. Tom
Dainton, over the way at Oriel, dropped out of my circle some time or
other; we nodded on meeting at the Club, and each would invite the
other's assistance in entertaining his relations, but a day came when I
felt unworthy of Tom's earnest and muscular Blues. And I have no doubt
he shook a puzzled head over the "footlers" with whom I had cast in my
lot. Equally there came a day when I found myself using a man's
Christian name for the first time, and the last piece of ice drifted out
to sea.

I like to recreate the atmosphere of eager activity, of new-won freedom
and approaching maturity. Six years at Melton had been a time of bells
and chapels, first schools and roll-calls, compulsory games and "Lights
Out"; at Oxford I was a man, with liberty in moderation to cut lectures
and private hours, go to bed when I liked, organize a banquet and
participate from time to time in wholesale destruction of property, no
man saying me nay. The differences were great enough to mask the
resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new House
Standard with more than Meltonian observance of taboo rules and caste
distinctions. We wore no College colours, we dressed for the theatre,
and the "Rowing Push" were at pains not to know the "Footlers" who
beagled or hunted. But we were all unconscious and in deadly earnest,
whether we testified to our abhorrence to Balliol, or walked up
Headington Hill and back by Mesopotamia discussing the abolition of
private property or lounged in chairs round a piled-up fire talking and
smoking--and, for variety, smoking and talking.

Not unless I die and be born again shall I a second time know the joy of
living in a city of three thousand men, all of them my soul's
friends--save such as came from other colleges or the despised quarters
of my own.

"Oakum, come and talk to me!"

I can still hear the voice echoing through the morning silence of Peck,
still see a foreshortened face, chin on hands, and white teeth gripping
a straight-grained pipe.

"Hallo, Geoffrey! D'you think I could get one of your windows?"

"Better not try!"

There is a pause in the dialogue while I kick up a handful of small
stones and leap nimbly away from the siphon which Geoffrey Hale has just
stolen from Rawbones, his neighbor across the landing, and shattered in
a thousand pieces not three feet from where I stand. A stone rises.

"Poor shooting!" from Geoffrey.

My next aim is better, and there is the sharp musical note of broken
glass. Thirty heads projecting over thirty flower-boxes chant in chorus,
"Porter-r-r! Mr. Oakleigh!" while I abandon dignity and hasten to the
nearest staircase, to the end that one broken window may be distributed
throughout the College and charged to "General Damage Account." Rawbones
will bear the undivided charges of his siphon.

In the early months of the war I had occasion to spend a few hours in
Oxford. The colleges were filled with soldiers and the Schools had been
turned into a hospital, while Belgian refugees looked unfamiliarly down
from the choicest rooms in St. Aldates or the High. It was the Oxford of
a nightmare, but, though I saw no more than a dozen undergraduates
throughout the city, there was hardly college or shop or house that did
not hold the spirit of a man I had known. Ghostly, muffled rowing men
still ran through the Meadows in the gathering dusk of a winter
afternoon; ghostly scholars on bicycles, with tattered gowns wrapped
round their necks and square notebooks clutched precariously under their
arms, shot tinkling under the very wheels of the sempiternal
horse-trams; ghostly hunting men, mud-splashed and weary, cracked
conscientious whips in the middle of the Quad. At six-and-thirty the
elasticity and _abandon_ are gone, but I would give much to shout one
more conversation from one drawing-room window to another, to spend an
hour pouring hot sealing-wax into the keyhole of a neighbor's oak, to
deck a life-size Apollo Belvedere in cap and gown and deposit him in
Draycott's bed. The power and daring have left me, but I thank Heaven
that the wish remains.

On the first day Loring and I advanced silently and with sudden shyness
through Tom Gate. The knots of men in lodge or street were
embarrassingly preoccupied and indifferent to us. Never had I imagined
that the great personalities of a public school could count for so
little. "The Earl of Chepstow; Mr. G. Oakleigh," picked out in white on
a black ground, reminded us reassuringly that we too had a stake in the
College, but for an hour we were well content to arrange our books and
experiment with the ordering of our furniture, deliberately shrinking
from an appearance in public until the time came for us to present
ourselves to the Dean. In Hall, and on our way to be admitted by the
Vice-Chancellor, we fell in with other Meltonians and offered the
effusive friendship of loneliness to men perhaps previously ignored.
Here and there I met someone I had not seen since private-school days.
Once the alliance was formed under stress of agglomeration, we spent the
remainder of the afternoon in a serried mass inspecting each other's
rooms, ordering wine, tobacco and bedroom ware in the town and at
tea-time valorously venturing into the Junior Common Room.

Within the next two days Loring and I received a number of cards,
unceremoniously doled out by a messenger in short-sighted communion with
a manuscript list of all freshmen worth knowing, as compiled by an
informal committee of second and third year men. A number of Athletic
Secretaries wrung from us promises of conditional allegiance which we
were too timorous to withhold, and our respective tutors propounded what
lectures and private hours we were to attend. Within a week we had
returned many of the calls, ceremoniously and in person, returning a
second and third time if our host were not at home; breakfast
invitations began to be bandied about, and the Clubs in search of new
members examined our eligibility.

As the one Liberal in a room full of silent Imperialists who consumed
surprising quantities of dessert and paid no attention to the debate
beyond applauding perfunctorily at the end of each oration, I remember
impassionately haranguing the "Twenty Club" on the unreasonableness of
Chamberlain's attitude towards President Kruger. At the "Mermaids,"
where the consumption of food and drink was even greater, I read the
part of "Charles Surface"; nay, more, in a burst of enthusiasm I
perpetrated a paper on "Irish Music" for the Essay Club, in those days a
despised and persecuted church not infrequently screwed up in the
catacombs of Meadow Buildings and left to support life on coffee, walnut
cake, pure reason and some astonishingly rich Lowland dialects.
Liberalism burned flickeringly in the autumn of '99, and the University
Liberal clubs contended with flattering rivalry for my unresisting and
largely uninterested body.

The term was still young when Loring was elected a members of the
Loders, and soon afterwards he joined the Bullingdon. As he now dined
at the Club table in Hall, I gathered Draycott and Mowbray, a Wykehamist
named Finck-Boynton and two Etonians, Bertie Grainger and Mark Seton,
and founded a mess next to the Guest Table, whence we could throw bread
at almost any friend in Hall. There we sat and criticized the kitchen,
the High Table and our neighbors, decided a hundred knotty points of
conduct and elaborated a pose which should mark us out as men of
originality, fearlessness and distinction without any of the distressing
immaturity of mind betrayed by our fellow-freshmen.

In looking back on the early days I find something very ingenuous and
engaging in our delusion of originality. Whether we ragged the rooms of
the meek, hysterical Ainsworth (who was alleged to hold private
prayer-meetings and intercede by name for the souls of lost
undergraduates), whether we serenaded Greatorex, the mathematical tutor,
on the night he had a Colonial Bishop staying with him, whether we
established an informal breakfast club at the Clarendon because we could
get no hot food in College on Sundays, we were soberly and seriously
convinced that earlier generations had never thought of doing such
things before. For three years I watched with mild exasperation three
successive drafts of amazingly juvenile men clumsily aping the
achievements of us, their seniors.

New prejudices grew to a rank birth, but one or two old convictions came
to be shaken. I no longer looked on Eton as a forcing-house of
ineffective snobbery, nor on Winchester as the home of well-bred,
uniform inertia; I ceased to say that while one Carthusian was
occasionally tolerable, more than one would dominate and scatter the
most varied society; gradually I found that something might be said even
for men who had never been to a public school. Loring shook his head in
puzzled and not entirely affected disapproval of my social adventures
and, though punctiliously courteous to my guests, would not infrequently
condemn them categorically as "stumers" when they were gone.

Yet on reflection I learned more of men and books from a reserved and
aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch graduates than from many
a more decorative sect in the first-floor rooms of Canterbury. McBain, a
threadbare Aberdonian, would drift in on a Sunday night, when Loring was
away dining with the Loders, and we would sit till the small hours
talking of Renan and a non-miraculous Christianity. Frazar, who was
taking the Modern Language School, would lie back sipping whisky and
filling the grate with half-smoked cigarettes as he talked of life at
the Sorbonne and the wonderful appreciation of modern French poetry that
he would one day publish. Carmichael, an embittered, one-idea
revolutionary, would throw Marx at my head and give fierce descriptions
of his Board-school struggles before a scholarship set him free to
peddle his brains in the market on equal terms with his fellows. At
Melton we seemed all drawn from one class, brought up in the same
channels of thought, given the same books to read.

When educational reformers fill "The Times" with their screeds, I am
tempted to wonder whether it much matters what a man be taught so long
as he meet enough men who have been taught something else. I worked hard
at Oxford and did tolerably well in the Schools: perhaps they taught me
how to learn, but the gaps in my knowledge when I came down make me look
on the curriculum as "a chaos upheld by Providence." And then I think of
three thousand men from a hundred schools and a thousand homes, flung
behind the enchanted, crumbling walls to bring their theories, ethics,
enthusiasms and limitations into the common stock; and at such times I
wonder what better schooling a Royal Commission could secure for the
plastic imagination of nineteen.

For all our poses Oxford gave us a taste of that world in which most of
us were to pass our lives--an obsolete, artificial, inadequate world if
you will, but the one wherein we had to find social and administrative
salvation. We felt the heavy democratic control of public opinion when
the notoriety-hunting Glynne was ducked in Mercury for giving luncheons
in his rooms to the too-well-known Gracie (I never discovered her
surname) from the florists in the Broad; we saw something of the ideal
Equality of Opportunity when Carmichael went from a scholarship to a
fellowship and then to a provincial Professorship of Economics and
ultimately to an exalted position in, I think, the Board of Education;
by the College cliques and fashions, the social mistrust and jealousies,
the canons and taboos, we were in some sort forearmed against the
absurdities, the unworthiness and irreconcilabilities that awaited us
outside Oxford.

A fruitful lesson of my first term was furnished by the Duke of Flint.
He was a freshman, an Etonian, a "Gourmet" and a member of the
Bullingdon. Any week in which he was drunk less than five times was no
ordinary week; any story that could be repeated in decent company was
not from his hiccoughing lips. Without question the most unmitigated
degenerate I have ever met, the sole excuse to be made for him was that
by inheritance his blood was sufficiently tainted to infect a dozen
generations. Yet I cannot think it was in a spirit of commiseration that
Oxford took the little ruffian to its bosom, inviting him to its
luncheons and electing him to its clubs; there was something at once
shamefaced and defiant in the way his friends proclaimed--without
challenge--that he was "not at all a bad fellow, really; rather fun, in
fact." From the night when he staggered down the High in the purple
dress coat of the "Gourmets," breaking the shop windows with his bare
hand and I bound him up and put him to bed, to the day not many weeks
ago when he died of general paralysis, I watched his social career with
interest.

We none of us had much time for introspection in those eager, early
days. I was swearing rapid friendships, eating aldermanic banquets and
conscientiously flitting from one to another of my new clubs with the
zeal of a neophyte and the greed of a man who knows that after the dull,
inadequate dinner of Hall an unlimited dessert awaits him. Loring and I
had refused to compete for the Melton close scholarships, as the money
was not essential to us, and we could now idle for a twelvemonth over
Pass Mods. and leave three serious years for our final schools. A
minimum of lectures satisfied our tutors, and the rest of the time we
could argue and read and smoke eternally new and expensive mixtures,
which we backed against all comers and changed perhaps thrice in a term.

Once I came near my sole acquaintance with martyrdom. It was in the
early weeks of the South African War, when to be a pro-Boer was not
healthy. The wholeness of my skin and the peace of our rooms were due in
equal measure to the fact that I had many friends and that those who
knew me not agreed with Loring that I could not really mean what I said.
My fellow-rebel Manders, who knew no one and only left his garret in
Meadows to bicycle hotly round outlying Oxfordshire villages preaching
sedition, was incontinently divested of his trousers and hurled into
Mercury.

"These damned farmers!" Loring exclaimed, as he returned to our rooms,
leaving Manders to retrieve his spectacles and wade inshore. "They've
got to be taught a lesson."

"It'll cost you a hundred million pounds," I answered. "God knows how
many men. And all because the said farmers claim the right to keep their
own territory to themselves."

"A hundred million pounds!" he snorted.

"That's what Labouchere said the other night in the House," I retorted,
with an undergraduate's faith in the figures and opinions of others.

"Oh, of course, if you believe a man like that! A man who frankly
doesn't believe in the Empire. A Little Englander ..."

"I shouldn't be surprised if he was right," I said.

"Just for a few pounds you'd rather like to see us beaten," he cried. To
this hour I recall with amazement the passions aroused by that war.

"I'm not in favour of a war against a free people conducted on behalf of
Illicit Diamond Buyers. Besides the few pounds there are men's
lives--and a little question of right and wrong."

"You ought to support your country right _or_ wrong."

"I beg to differ," I said, and we carried the discussion heatedly back
to Majuba and the question whether or no Mr. Gladstone's body should be
exhumed and hung in chains.

The war was to come very near home before many weeks had passed. After
Black Friday, Roger Dainton raised a troop of horse and took them out;
Tom Dainton was given a university commission and followed a few weeks
later. In the Easter term "The Earl of Chepstow" was painted out and
"The Marquess Loring" substituted. The "damned farmers" had added a very
pleasant, easy-going, undistinguished man to the lengthening list of
casualties.


IV

To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the
South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as
a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We
were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his
death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face
white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he
said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed
to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission
came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I
remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my
private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two
years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came
in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately--as it seemed--we were
busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.

One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian
position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window
half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the
service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from
every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet
quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some
conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some realization of the
gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that
she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as
though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should
venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that
England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.

The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's
boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the
splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the
severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee
pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by
fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday
and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We
made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted,
and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with
triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At
the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death.
Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the
shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led
formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first
year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously
artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a
country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us.
After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we
grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of
gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.

At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men,
who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent,
returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the
beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received
a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons
back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since
leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old
party" would be invited, we accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was
doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us,
and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.

I remember--though it is a petty enough thing to recall--rather
resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked--a
set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its
members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a
considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and
private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an
unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a
view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest
sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour
of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality--Turkish
coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan maté,
Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be
sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless
_apéritif_ unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college
it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a
pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent
style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once
decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture
Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger
Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a
stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that
the plaster casts were hidden.

Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or
explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption.
He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life,
relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years
before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the
end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office
before they were restored to their family.

On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over
to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me. In the absence of her husband
she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and
this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had
been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing
would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made
life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was
not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.

"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting
one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."

So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of
several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be
inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and
was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds
till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.

As soon as I promised to drive over to the school, Sonia announced her
intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been
something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her
news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that
hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane
liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were
good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road
dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic
vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved
endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently
alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and
feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and
lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a
sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a
great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable
drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in
the reality of his dreams were Sonia and--the dreamer.

We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to
let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at
Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down
Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of
Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole
and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one
shoulder like a military overcoat.

"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands.
"A reed shaken by the wind?"

"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.

He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with
his silky white hair.

"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.

"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.

Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back
again to me.

"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his
life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did
not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound
of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the
isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had
finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."

Sonia and I squeezed our way in among two or three hundred parents who
had profited by proximity to the Head to inquire how 'Bernard' had fared
that term; the giant intellect of Burgess we left to discover unaided
who 'Bernard' might be. We listened to the Prize Compositions, the
Honours of the year, and the removes of the term. Then Sonia's hand
slipped through my arm, and her brown eyes suddenly softened. The prizes
were being distributed, and we watched and listened until I, at any
rate, grew sore-handed and weary of hearing O'Rane's name called out. I
began, too, to pity the fags who would have to stagger across Great
Court under the growing burden of that calf-bound, gilt-edged pile. He
himself went through the ceremony in a dispirited, listless fashion, his
thoughts running forward to the moment when he would have to reverse the
birch and hand it back to Burgess, while the new captain slipped into
his seat and read prayers over his body.

"_In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._ I should like all boys
who are leaving this term to say good-bye to me in my house. _Ire
licet._"

The school poured out into Great Court and formed up in a double line.
O'Rane was cheered from School Steps to the Head's house, as no one to
my knowledge had been cheered since Pelham gave up his house and retired
after forty-three years. The Leaving Books were handed out,--still "Men
and Women" as in my day,--the last hand-shakes exchanged. Outside the
library windows the school was waiting for O'Rane's reappearance.

"Be not overmuch puffed up with pride, laddie," said Burgess, when they
were alone. "Boy is a creature of simple faith and easy enthusiasm.
True, in thine youth thou wast clept 'Spitfire' and 'The Vengeful
Celt'----"

"Sir ...?"

Burgess waved away the interruption. "Did I not tell thee of the
Unsleeping Eye? Laddie, I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows
of this life, yet it may be that the counsel of age may profit a young
man. Yet not with thee. To thee I say not, 'Do this' or 'Do that'; there
is nought thou canst not do, laddie--thou also art among the prophets."
He held out his hand abruptly, and O'Rane took it.

"Sir, I want to thank you ..." he began.

"For that I forbade thee not when thou didst crave admittance?"

"A thousand things beside that, sir. Everything ..."

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping, laddie," said Burgess gently,
disengaging his hand. "And thy father and I were young men together.
Thou didst know this thing?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yet thou namedst it not?"

O'Rane hesitated and then burst out with a touch of his old universal
defiance.

"I wanted to make you take me on my merits, sir."

"Hard is the way of him who would presume to offer help to David
O'Rane!" Burgess answered, with a shake of the head.

"But I'd won through _so_ far, sir; I wanted to see how much longer----"

"I blame thee not, laddie. Well, thou hast endured to the end and hast
brought new honour to my kingdom. Counsel I withhold from thee: truly
the Lord will provide. Fare thee well, David O'Rane."

On our way back to Crowley Court I put Raney outside, in case he
preferred the company of his own thoughts for the present. He sat for a
few moments with his chin on his chest, but as the car left the town he
engaged the chauffeur in earnest conversation, and as we slowed down in
front of the house he jumped out and came to the door with the words,
"Simpson damns electricity and steam. He swears by oil. Well, if cars
are going to knock out horses and you need petrol to drive your cars,
there's going to be a tremendous demand for oil in the near future. I
want to get in before the rush, I'm going to study oil----"

"You're a soulless Wall Street punter," I said.

Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist
eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history,
and--characteristically enough--he was ready to fling the whole blazing
vigour of his vitality into the next.

"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.

"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.

Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the
first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we
were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers
and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly
canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the other.
Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out
disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's
argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own
satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had
taken place.

"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last
round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing
knocked into us."

O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As
the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he
caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.

"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand!
From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted
stiffening.' My God!"

"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.

"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could
put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't
read the foreign papers."

Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when
Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten
days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the
continental Press.

"D'you _still_ do that?" I asked.

"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold
of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George.
They--simply--_hate_--us--abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us
as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and
we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."

"Who _wants_ to attack us?" I asked.

"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia,
as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of
the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people
talking like that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."

He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a
savage twist of his heel.

"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a
damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"

"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we
mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other
power."

My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had
been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a
year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress
from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by
profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews
which it conjured up.

"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want
another."

"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to
war."

"I doubt it," I said. "The temptation's too great. The first day I was
given an air-gun--this is many years ago, Raney--I winged a harmless,
necessary milch cow. The alpha and omega of British policy should be to
have a navy so efficient that no one can attack us and an army so
inefficient that we daren't attack anyone else. If you aim at all-round
efficiency, you'll probably have the rest of Europe on your back and
you'll certainly go bankrupt."

He was preparing an explosive retort when one of the drawing-room
windows opened, and Sonia came toward us.

"Bedtime?" I asked, as she held out her hand.

"Rot, isn't it?" she answered, wrinkling her nose. "I shall be sixteen
next birthday, too."

"When _I_ was your age ..." O'Rane began improvingly.

"I used to thrash you two or three times a month," I put in.

Sonia looked at him wonderingly.

"Is that true, David?" she demanded.

He nodded his head.

"You beast, George!" Sonia burst out with a concentrated venom that
abashed me.

O'Rane glanced in momentary surprise at the rigid indignant little
figure with the clenched fists and bitten lip. Then he caught her up in
his arms.

"Bambina, you're the only person in the whole world who loves me. George
couldn't help himself, though; I was out for trouble. And I could have
knocked him down and broken every bone in his body if I'd wanted
to--just as I could now. Only he was right and I was wrong. Kiss me
good-night, sweetheart."

He lowered her gently till her feet touched the ground, but sudden
shyness had come over her, and she would only hold out a hand.

"Clearly I'm in the way," I said, as I moved towards the house.

"I'm coming too," Sonia called out. "No, David, you're grown up now."

He snorted indignantly.

"That's a rotten reason. Are you never going to kiss me again? This
year?" She shook her head. "Next year? Some time?"

"Some time. Perhaps."

She ran into the house, and O'Rane and I took one more turn along the
terrace before following her.

"Grown up!" he exclaimed, after a moment's silence.

"That's still rankling?" I asked.

"No, I was just thinking. I fancy I was pretty well grown up before we
ever met, George."

"As much as you ever will be," I suggested.

"As much as I ever want to be, old son. It's been like an extraordinary
dream, you know, these last four years. Everything topsy-turvy.... I was
years and years older than you and Jim when you used to thrash me.... If
you can imagine yourself coming to a place like Melton after knocking
about all round the world, living from hand to mouth.... The holidays
were the time I really worked. Do you remember when you and Jim found me
at the Empire Hotel? You've never mentioned it from that day to this.
_I_'m not ashamed of it and, though you two had your eyes bulging out of
your head, I don't suppose with all your conventionality you think the
worse of me for it. Anyway I don't care a damn if you do." He paused and
lit a cigarette. "I'm going to have a holiday now, George. Idle about
till October. And then in the holidays--vacations, you call 'em, don't
you?--I shall get hold of soft, genteel jobs--private tutor to
aristocratic imbeciles----"

"And then?"

He yawned luxuriantly.

"And then I shall settle down to earn a great deal of money. I'm never
going through the old mill again, George. And when I've earned it I
shall buy a villa at Naples and rot there. Are you going into the
drawing-room? I don't think I shall, it's such a grand night out here. I
want to think over this amazing country of yours, where a man can drop
from the skies--I was junior steward on a 'Three Funnel' liner just
before--drop down, find his feet, find people to employ him and weigh
him out scholarships.... George, so far as I can make out, after four
years here, there's not a damn thing you don't fling open to the veriest
dago and pay him handsome to take the job. 'Ejectum litore, egentem
excepi....' No, that's a bad omen." He spun round and smote me on the
shoulder. "I owe a lot to this rotten country and I shall owe a lot more
before I'm through with it. Now I'm going to take charge of the piano
and sing songs to you...."

It was O'Rane who went into the drawing-room, and I who stayed outside
in enjoyment of the night. Roger Dainton took the opportunity of a quiet
stroll and a few moments' conversation. While in London he had been
sounded in the matter of a baronetcy. I believed him when he protested
that his troop of yeomanry had been raised without any thought of what
honours or decorations he might draw from the lucky tub after the war. I
almost believed him when he said he thought of accepting the offer
because it would gratify his wife. And I felt a certain wonder and pity
that in his curiously unfriended state, half-way between two social
spheres, he should come for advice to a man less than half his own age.


V

"LODGINGS FOR THE OCTOBER TERM"

Square cards inscribed with that device had offered me welcome for three
years, and in the last term of my third year Loring and I settled
seriously to the task of finding a new home against the day when we
should be flung, time-expired, from our loved quarters in Tom.
'Seriously' in spirit if not in method, for we chartered a
coach-and-four, invited a dozen men to breakfast and set out from
Canterbury Gate with luncheon-baskets sufficient to feed a company.
Proceeding impressively up King Edward Street we doubled back into St.
Ebbs in search of what Loring called "working-class tenements for
virtuous Radicals." Failing to find anything that suited us, we returned
by Brewer Street and inspected Micklem Hall, but there was a garden
attached, and we should have been constrained to walk a beagle-puppy.
Leaving the last question open, I dispossessed Loring of the box-seat
and drove for the next half-hour, because he had laid me five to three
that there was no such college as Wadham, and seven to two that if there
were I could not find it.

I remember we lunched a mile or two north of Woodstock because Crabtree
of Magdalen, who had as usual invited himself and assumed direction of
our movements, insisted that our last year must be undisturbed. In the
late evening we returned triumphantly to Oxford and collided with a tram
at the bottom of the Turl. A languid voice from the first-floor window
of 93D High Street inquired if we needed anything.

"Lodgings for the October and two succeeding terms," Loring called back.

"These aren't bad digs," answered the voice, and Crabtree was left to
sort out the Corporation tram while Loring and I inspected the house
opposite.

"They've got the makings of very decent quarters," he admitted
handsomely. "Decoration vile," he added in an aside, "but then, what
d'you expect of a B.N.C. man?" A furtive creature with obliquity of
vision ushered us in. "We must get rid of him, George. Find out whether
he is the landlord or a B.N.C. don or merely our young friend's male
parent."

I ascertained that the man of repellent aspect was the landlord.

"I suppose we must take your ghastly digs," said Loring between a yawn
and a sigh.

The following October we moved in and gave a housewarming--with the town
band engaged to play waltzes outside while we dined. It was a bachelor
dinner, but Grayes of Trinity and Henderson and Billings of the House
chartered rooms at the "Dumb Bell," and came over in Empire gowns,
chestnut wigs, cloaks and cigarettes. We danced until the band went home
to bed and then led our guests round to inspect and praise our
decorations and observe the absence of Pringle, the landlord, who had
been exiled to a cottage on Boar's Hill.

"Best bedroom, second-best bedroom," Loring explained. "Spare bedrooms
also ran. Bathroom. All that messuage. Lounge. Kitchen. Usual offices.
Hot and cold. Electric lights and bells. Gent's eligible town
residence."

It was eligible in every way, with window-seats overlooking the High
from which we could watch passers-by surreptitiously trying to pick up
the half-crown that Loring from time to time glued to the pavement. The
house had been repainted inside and out, there were new carpets and
furniture, a grand piano in one room and two Siamese kittens in every
other. Old Lady Loring used to complain of dust when she came to visit
us, but her son assured her that this was but a concession to my
democratic spirit. We were certainly comfortable. As Loring observed the
first night, "Now we've every excuse for neglecting our work."

He was reading Greats; I, History. We both expected seconds, hoped for
firsts and told our friends thirds. What our tutors thought, I have no
idea. Loring never consulted his unduly.

"I pay the College eight pounds a term tuition fees," he reasoned. "I'll
make it twice that if they'll leave me alone. I want to think. Your
society alone, George, is an Undenominational Education."

So he breakfasted at nine, cut lectures till one, lunched at the Club
and hacked twenty miles in the afternoon. From tea till dinner he would
wander round Oxford buying prints and large-paper editions; after dinner
he would take a kitten on his knee and read German metaphysics aloud to
it with a wealth of feeling in his voice. At eleven we would pay one or
two calls or sit talking till a late hour.

It was Andrew Lang, I believe, who said that the reason why there were
no good books on Oxford life was because they were all written by women
who had spent one day in--Cambridge. I sometimes fancy that Oxford
reformers are really Oxford novelists off duty. We went through the
transition from boyhood to man's estate in some of this world's
loveliest surroundings. Does it matter what we read or when we read it?
A time had to come when each of us had the choice of working uncompelled
or not working at all; we could not be given lines and detention all our
life, and at Oxford I worked hard. So did Loring, for all his outward
pose of idleness. We read seven hours a day for two-thirds of the
vacation and were not wholly unoccupied even during term.

Looking back on it all I can find no period of mental development to
compare with my last year at Oxford. It was no small thing to read a
thousand years of history, however superficially. I began to touch
general principles, to discard cherished preconceptions, and little by
little to hammer out a philosophy of my own. In political science and
economy Loring's school overlapped mine to some extent, and in the
rambling 'School shop' we talked lay the germ of the Thursday Club.
Every week of term and for a year or two after I came down, some ten of
us would meet and dine together. There was a "book of the week"--too
long or dull for all to read--which one would undertake to digest and
expound. "Saint Simon's Memoirs," the "Contrat Social," the "Paston
Letters" were among the works we had served up to us minced and
réchauffé.

Later on, when Loring had dropped out, we became more purely political.
Carmichael brought us in touch with socialist writers, and a week-end
visit from Baxter Whittingham of Lincoln and Shadwell was responsible
for my brief taste of working-class conditions some years later. I
cannot hope that everyone nowadays looks at "Thursday Essays," which we
published in 1904 as a statement of Young Oxford Liberalism, but, though
it had little effect on the outside world, it consolidated its authors.
Seddon of Corpus, who wrote on "Unemployment," is now in the Insurance
Commission; Terry of Lincoln, the author of "Small Holdings," was
private secretary to the President of the Board of Agriculture; Ainger,
Mansfield, Gregory and I, who spread ourselves on "Public Economy,"
"Federation and the National Ideal," "The Tendrils of Socialism," and
"The Irish Question Once More," all found our way into the House at the
time of the 1906 Election.

Loring, too, matured on lines of his own. It would perhaps be truer to
say that he developed that dual personality of which the germs had been
existent at Melton. He was a cynic and idealist,--no uncommon union,--a
pessimist and a practical reformer, honestly believing that the world
was gradually deteriorating, that to cleanse the corruption was beyond
man's powers, and yet that it was worth his own while to run the lost
race to a finish.

I always fancy I can trace three phases through which he passed, three
sources of inspiration. At school his taste for the romantic and
picturesque found satisfaction in the Church of which he was a member:
Eternal Rome captured his imagination, and, while I aspired to a vague
universal brotherhood, he hoped and believed that Temporal Power would
some day be once more oecumenical and that the warring world would in
time find peace in a new age of faith. Oxford and the society of his
fellow Catholics broke into the dream. Doctrinally he was unsettled by
the philosophy he read for 'Greats' and the fabric and organization of
his Church brought disillusionment when he saw them at close quarters.
Old Lord Loring had made the house in Curzon Street a centre for English
Catholicism. I remember balls and bazaars, receptions and
committee-meetings without end, Catholic marquesses were rare, they had
to work hard; they were also valuable as giving social respectability to
a persecuted Church. An inconspicuous, undistinguished peer assumed
rather an exalted position in a small religious communion where everyone
knew everyone else. I imagine more people spoke of 'dear Lord Loring'
than would have been the case had his religion been, say, that of the
Established Church. His son felt and expressed extreme repugnance for
the position he was expected to fill. The Catholic Church _in partibus
infidelium_ was not a trading company, and he declined to have his name
published on the prospectus to inspire confidence among doubting
subscribers.

On ceasing to be a Catholic in anything but name, he had a second bout
of mediaevalism, and dreamed, as Disraeli dreamed in the 'Young England'
days, of a re-vitalized, ascendant aristocracy. The reality of the dream
passed quickly; it is questionable how much faith Disraeli himself put
into his vision, though anything was possible while the political
revolution of the first Reform Bill was still seething. It is doubtful
if Loring ever considered his idealized aristocracy of philosopher-kings
otherwise than with a sentimental, unhistorical regret. And when he
abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated either by the spiritual
influence of his Church or the temporal influence of his order, I think
he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated at all. Life thereafter
became a private, personal matter; he preserved a fastidious sense of
what was incumbent on him to do and a pride in not being false to his
own standards. What happened to the world outside his gates was an
irrelevance with which, in his growing detachment and surface cynicism,
he declined to interest himself.

It was at Oxford that he passed from the first to the second of his
three phases. We were none of us more than a few months distant from the
untravelled world of men's work--sub-consciously we were all striving
after a self-expression that should leave its mark on that work. Heaven
be thanked! not one of us dreamed how ineffective our personalities were
to prove, how unromantic our humdrum work, how meagre our hard-bought
results! In the twelve years that passed between these last terms and
the outbreak of a war that at least brought spaciousness back to human
life, I can think of only one of my friends who failed to become in
greater or less degree commonplace. That was O'Rane, and his store of
the romantic could never quite be exhausted. He was too fearless of
soul. A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and
conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To
defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not
infrequently saves his soul.

O'Rane came up in my last year as one of a mixed draft from Melton.
Mayhew and Sam Dainton we knew, but the others were little more than
names to us. Dutifully Loring and I gave a couple of Sunday breakfasts
and sighed when our guest left us for a walk round the Parks before
luncheon. The meals were as difficult as they were long, for the
freshmen were shy, and we had outgrown our taste for early morning
banquets. When conversation was fanned into life, we found it sadly
juvenile. Were we not fourth-year men, a thought jaded, and with
difficulty interested in anecdotes of a scout's eccentricities or
descriptions of unsuccessful flight from proctors? When the last guest
pocketed his half-guinea straight-grained pipe (which we had been forced
to admire) and clattered down the stairs to walk a dejected terrier of
mixed ancestry through Oxford, Loring shook his head despairingly.

"We were _not_ like that, George," he asserted.

"We were rather a good year, of course," I agreed.

He emptied a succession of ash trays, thoughtfully replaced the cushions
on the sofas and straightened the antimacassars.

"Twelve of them, weren't there?" he asked. "And they'll all invite us
back, every jack man of them."

"And we shall have to go, too," I also sighed, "and make sport for them,
after waiting half an hour in a room full of unknown while our host
hurriedly splashes himself next door and apologizes for having forgotten
all about the invitation.

"_We_ never did that!"

"Once," I said.

We called on O'Rane the first night of term, and compelled him to dine
with us the second. I had not forgotten a slight disappointment of my
own early days. One of my best friends at Melton had been Jerry Pinsent:
we shared the omnibus-study in Matheson's and stayed with each other in
the holidays. I fully expected that, as a second-year man, he would take
me by the hand and guide my feet among the pitfalls of
etiquette--largely the imagination of a self-conscious freshman--with
which I understood Oxford to be set. Pinsent was affable, even kindly.
He offered me a seat in his mess and introduced me to his friends. Alas!
it was not enough. I found it indecent that he should have surrounded
himself so completely and so speedily. I was immoderately jealous of his
friends' free-and-easy Christian-name habit, and as two of them were
Blues (Pinsent himself was a fine oar until he broke his wrist in a
bicycling accident) I decided very unworthily that he was a snob and a
faithless friend. With equal self-consciousness I determined that O'Rane
should never charge me with aloofness or want of cordiality.

We invited no one to meet him. There would be time for that later, and
in any case he was likely to be known all over Oxford before the term
was out.

"He shall stand on his hind-legs and do his tricks for us alone," said
Loring, who pretended to laugh at O'Rane in order to conceal an
admiration not far removed from affection. "The wild beast that has been
fed into domesticity."

There was little enough of the wild beast about O'Rane in the year of
grace 1902. The starved look had gone out of his face, and his eyes were
no longer those of a hunted animal at bay. We leant out of the window
to squirt soda-water on to him as he came down the High with light,
swinging step and an engaging devil-may-care swagger. He walked
bareheaded, and the fine, black hair--ornately parted and brushed for
the occasion--blew into disorder as the autumn wind swept down the
street with a scent of fallen leaves and a hint of the dying year.

"You know, Raney, you'd have made an extraordinarily beautiful girl,"
said Loring reflectively as they met.

"If the Almighty'd known the Marquess Loring had any feeling in the
matter----" O'Rane began.

"Poets would have immortalized your eyes," Loring pursued with a yawn,
"Painters would have died in despair of representing their shadowy,
unfathomable depths----" He raised his hand and waved it rhythmically.
"'Their shadowy, unfathomable depths,' you can't keep from blank verse!
Have a cigarette, little stranger. Being an alleged man, you're a bit
undersized and effeminate."

O'Rane caught Loring by one wrist and with a single movement brought him
to his knees.

"Effeminate?" he demanded.

Loring attempted to reconcile dignity with a kneeling position.

"Oh, you've got a certain vulgar strength," he admitted, "like most
modern girls. But you've got the hands and feet of a professional
beauty. Of course you may not have stopped growing yet."

"I'm five feet nine! I admit I've not much _fat_ on me!"

Honour was satisfied, and I separated the combatants. For his height
Loring was very well proportioned, but he hated an imputation of fatness
almost as much as O'Rane hated being teased about his slightness of body
or smallness of bone. He certainly made up into a very beautiful woman
when the O.U.D.S. played "Henry V" and he took the part of Katherine.
The intention had been to follow the practice of years and invite a
professional actress from London; O'Rane's performance, however, was too
good to be set aside. I have a photograph of the company with Raney
seated in the middle. With his small, sensitive mouth and white teeth,
his clean-cut nose and long-lashed, large black eyes, he makes a very
attractive girl.

"This is a wonderful place," he said, as we sat down to dinner. "I've
been sight-seeing to-day."

"Anything worth seeing?" asked Loring, whose substantially accurate
boast it was that he had never been within the walls of a strange
college.

We found that O'Rane had been prompt and thorough, ranging from the
"Light of the World" in Keble Chapel to the scene of Amy Robsart's
death, and from the gardens of Worcester to Addison's Walk. He talked of
Grinling Gibbons' carving with a facility I envied when it was my fate
to conduct my mother and sister round Oxford.

"Wonderful place," he repeated. "Choked up with the débris of
mediaevalism. Atmosphere rather worse than a tropical swamp. Last refuge
of dead enthusiasms and hotbed of sprouting affectations."

He jerked out the criticism and turned his attention to the soup.

"You're very disturbing, Raney," I said. "For four years you knocked
Melton inside out; can't you leave Oxford alone? I'm rather fond of it."

"So am I--already. I'm fond of any place that picks a man up and sets
him on his legs. I'm fond of England as you two can never be."

"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned, Raney."

"If to be grateful is to be old-fashioned." He leant back and gazed at
the ceiling. "I think it's a workable philosophy. There are people who
can do things I can't do, and there are people who can't do the things I
can. It's a long scale--strong, less strong, weak, more weak. If every
man helped the man below him.... You fellows would say I'm
superstitious. I dare say. If you're the one man to come out of an
earthquake alive, you start believing in a special providence.... I've
been helped a bit--and I've once or twice helped another man. Whenever I
could, in fact. And from the depths of my soul I believe if I said 'no'
when I was asked...." He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence
unfinished.

"Well, go on!" It was Loring who spoke, not without interest. "What
would happen?"

"I should be damned out of hand. I don't mean a bolt from heaven, but I
... I should never be able to do anything again. I should be hamstrung."

"Black superstition," was Loring's comment.

"Not a bit of it! There's a fear of subjective damnation far more
vigorous than the outer darkness and worm-that-dies-not nonsense."

"You're on too high a plane for dinner," said Loring. "You should
cultivate the pleonectic side of life. I've had two roes on toast, and
I'm going to have a third."


VI

Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early
in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute
'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a
day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at
dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The
cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an
attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said--what was true enough--that
life under such conditions was not worth living; we added--what was less
true--that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.

Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice
a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which--as we were out of
College--other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been
infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still
happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who--so
far as I could see--were living solely for pleasure.

In Oxford during springtime, with the chestnuts, lilac and laburnum
blazing into colour, it is nothing short of sacrilege to read Select
Charters and Documents of Constitutional History. As the evenings
lengthened we used to find alfresco coffee-parties being held in a
corner of Peck. I made the acquaintance of Summertown, an irrepressible
freckled, red-haired little Etonian, the permanent thorn in the side of
his father, Lord Marlyn, who was at this time Councillor of Embassy in
Paris. It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the
Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed.
O'Rane would be found at the piano,--or on top of it with a guitar
across his knees,--and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker
chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the
window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early
stars shining down from the darkening sky.

I had predicted that Raney's personality would impress itself upon
Oxford, though I never underestimated the difficulty in a place so given
over to particularism and fierce local jealousies. At this time the only
men who had a reputation outside their own colleges were perhaps six in
number: Blair of Trinity, who walked round Oxford of an afternoon with a
hawk on his wrist; "Pongo" Jerrold, who kept pedigree bloodhounds;
Granville, the President of the O.U.D.S.; Johnny Carstairs, who removed
the minute hand from the post office clock in St. Aldate's every night
of the Michaelmas term; and perhaps two more, of whom O'Rane was one. As
so often, the world knew him for his accidents and overlooked his
essence. He was quoted as a Union speaker of wild gesticulation and
frenzied Celtic eloquence; as a pamphleteer and lampoonist who could
seemingly write impromptu verse on any subject, in all metres and most
languages; as the author of ninety-five per cent of "The Critic," a
short-lived weekly started by Mayhew, who, I am convinced, would
establish morning, evening, monthly and quarterly periodicals the day
after being washed up on the beach of a desert island.

Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and
irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the
comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality.
With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could
show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the
table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street
on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the
arrangement of a dinner, as he was then--as always--sublimely
indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know
was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and
pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were
short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed
'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be
found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member
of Senior Common Room.

"_Sacre nom de chien!_" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one
night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and
spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog
collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the
Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh
breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in
Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete,
Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office
clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an
undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! _A bas les snobs!_" He
seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of
Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic
scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a
History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. _Conspuez les
accapareurs!_" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through
the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of
a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced.
"Come and sing to 'em, George!


     As one that for a weary space hath dined
     Lulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."


He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be
greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a
dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed intoxication might be "a good
dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."

"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint?
Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be
'ick."

I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened
to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had
broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been
the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Ball

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