← catalogue

Sonia Married

by Stephen McKenna · English · Gutenberg #46096 · 712,648 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sonia Married
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Sonia Married

Author: Stephen McKenna


        
Release date: June 25, 2014 [eBook #46096]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46096

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONIA MARRIED ***

SONIA MARRIED

STEPHEN McKENNA


     "As a clownish Fellow was driving his cart along a deep miry lane,
     the wheel stuck so fast in the clay, that his horse could not draw
     it out. Upon this he fell a bawling and praying to Hercules to come
     and help him. Hercules, looking down from a cloud, bid him not to
     lie there like an idle, dastardly booby as he was, but get up and
     whip his horse, and clap his shoulder stoutly to the wheel, adding
     that this was the only way for him to obtain assistance."

     The Fables of Æsop: "Hercules and the Carter."




SONIA MARRIED

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

AUTHOR OF "SONIA," "MIDAS AND SON," "NINETY-SIX
HOURS' LEAVE," ETC.

[Illustration: Logo]

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


COPYRIGHT, 1919,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE METROPOLITAN PUBLICATIONS, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




EPISTLE DEDICATORY

To WALTER FRANCIS ROCH


My dear Roch,

Ever since you read "SONIA" in manuscript, you have been the book's most
generous critic. May I mark my gratitude for this and for a friendship
older than "SONIA" by dedicating its successor to you? Perhaps you
remember openly doubting whether in fact the spiritual shock of war
could so change and steady Sonia as to make her a fitting wife for any
man, O'Rane most of all; you may recollect my confessing that such a
marriage of hysterical impulse contained the seeds of instant disaster.

Sequels are admittedly failures, but I look on this book less as a
sequel than as an epilogue or footnote. Sonia was not to know happiness
until she had suffered, and the sacrifice in the early days of war was
to many a new and heady self-indulgence. It is the length of the war,
the sickening repetition of one well-placed blow after another on the
same bruised flesh that has tested the survivors. After a year of war
O'Rane could have mustered many followers, when he murmured to himself,
"I--all of us who were out there--have seen it. We can't forget. The
courage, the cold, heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying
man's face.... We must never let it be forgotten, we've earned the
right. As long as a drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or
a woman is driven through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great
thing to ask? To demand of England to remember that the criminals and
loafers and prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters?
And that we've all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too
great a strain on our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but--but _must_
we stand at street corners to tell what we've seen? To ask the
bystanders--and ourselves--whether we went to war to preserve the right
of inflicting pain?"

After four years of war do you find many traces of O'Rane's crusading
spirit? Loring, he and a thousand others intrigued and pulled wires to
be sent out before their turn; since they lost their lives or eyes or
limbs, we have seen their places filled by men who were first jeered and
shamed, later pricked and driven into the army, under the amused gaze of
their more fortunate fellows who had intrigued and pulled wires to be
kept at home! We have watched conscience being made a penal offence and
persecution exalted into patriotism. We have seen self-denial, like
self-sacrifice, made statutory; and the comprehensive plea of war has
excused the recrudescence of that feverish licence which many of us
superstitiously felt the war had been sent to end. Financially, morally
and politically we were living on the last few hundreds of our capital.
And in public life the war stepped in where honour feared to tread.

I dedicate this book to you in sympathy, because we would both
recapture, if we could, O'Rane's first fine careless rapture. But there
is little permanence in collective moral upheavals; action and reaction
are equal and opposite, and the same violence which transformed the
world in 1914 has hastened the return to pre-1914 conditions. The House
of Commons, as you know it, and the society outside the House of
Commons, as I know it, are not going to legislate a new world into
existence in the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. We have worked,
like old Bertrand Oakleigh, through the phases of extravagant hope and
premature pessimism; we are tired and dispirited, chiefly anxious to end
the strain, glad if we can curtail the slaughter, though we are growing
used to this, but concerned more for securing the peace of the world in
our lifetime than for declaring any other dividend on the lives which
have been expended. "We shall be dazed and bruised before an end is
made, laddie, staggering like drunken men," as Dr. Burgess prophesied
in "SONIA," "Peradventure, if ye speak of the Promised Land, men will
arise and stone you with stones, saying, 'Would to God we had died by
the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots,
and when we did eat bread to the full.' I am an old man, laddie, and old
men and weary men, broken with the cares of this life, are fain to go
back to the things they know."

What is left to those who are weak or obstinate enough to feel that the
things they know are capable of improvement and that man is essentially
perfectible? If a collective revival flicker to smoking extinction, can
you attain the same results from the aggregate of individual efforts?
O'Rane, you will find, tries both extremes.

Always cordially yours,

STEPHEN McKENNA.

Lincoln's Inn, 1918.




CONTENTS

                               PAGE
EPISTLE DEDICATORY              vii

CHAPTER
   I AN ARABIAN NIGHT            15

  II THE OPEN DOOR               51

 III SONIA O'RANE                96

  IV THE DOOR CLOSED            146

   V THE LIMITS OF LOYALTY      191

  VI THE UNWRITTEN LAW          241

 VII THE DOOR RE-OPENED         291

VIII SANCTUARY                  338




SONIA MARRIED




CHAPTER ONE

AN ARABIAN NIGHT

     " ... Is it not singular, and almost touching, to see Paris City
     drawn out, in the meek May nights, in civic ceremony, which they
     call 'SOUPER FRATERNEL,' Brotherly Supper?... See it, O Night! With
     cheerfully pledged wine-cup, hobnobbing to the Reign of Liberty,
     Equality, Brotherhood, with their wives in best ribands, with their
     little ones romping round, the Citoyens, in frugal Love-feast, sit
     there. Night in her wide empire sees nothing similar. O my
     brothers, why is the reign of Brotherhood _not_ come; It is come,
     it shall have come, say the Citoyens frugally hobnobbing.--Ah me!
     these everlasting stars, do they not look down 'like glistening
     eyes, bright with immortal pity, over the lot of man!' ..."

     THOMAS CARLYLE: "_French Revolution_."


1

After twelve months in an Austrian internment camp, the roar and
movement, the familiar smell and glare of London streets were
stupefying.

I had arrived in Vienna a week before the mobilisation order was issued;
my mission was to secure the services of certain physicians and surgeons
for a new hospital which I had in contemplation, and, though I was
conscious of unwonted restlessness, though my young friends in the
Chancery were kept working late, the recent ultimatum to Servia could
never, I felt, involve England in war. So time went by, the hotels
emptied, but I preferred to trust my own judgement and went on trusting
it until war had been declared. I knew Vienna so well, I had lived there
so long and made so many friends from my earliest days at the Embassy
that I am afraid I continued to trust my judgement and to back my luck
even after I had become technically scheduled as an enemy alien; and,
when the reluctant authorities more in sorrow than anger placed me under
surveillance, we all felt that a mistake had been made and that I should
have only to ask for my release to obtain it. Was I not well over the
most extravagant military age? Was I not physically unfit to bear arms?
Could I not at any time have left Vienna with the Embassy Staff?

I was to find from August, 1914, until July, 1915, that the aspirations
of the Litany for the well-being of prisoners and captives were
neutralised by the reluctance of constituted authority to disturb the
_status quo_. I was secure in my loose-box on a race-course five miles
from Vienna; wire entanglements discouraged my comings and goings,
arc-lamps laid me bare to the vigilance of the sentries; what good
purpose could be served by setting me at large? My brother made the one
appearance of his life in the House of Lords to raise me as an issue and
to urge the exchange of civilian prisoners; memorials were presented to
the Foreign Office; I am sorry to say that in the first convulsion of
war I and my few thousand fellow prisoners did not matter.

I was interned for a twelvemonth. And, writing now in the third year of
the war, I doubt whether I shall ever make good the knowledge which was
then withheld from me. The newspapers were censored or inspired for
purposes of propaganda; my colourless letters from England were enriched
by half-page smears of indelible black. Between ignorance of what they
might say and what I might receive, my correspondents confined
themselves to business discussions and bald family history. My brother
wrote of his son Archie's death in the retreat from Mons; my niece
Yolande Manisty told me that she and her husband had moved into my house
in Pont Street and were attending to my affairs as best they might. A
further letter brought me the shocking news of Deryk Lancing's death on
the eve of war, with consequences to myself which I required many weeks
to digest.... After that there were guarded and bewildered little notes
from Felix Manisty, who is a greater archaeologist than man of affairs;
there were voluminous technical enquiries from Hatherly, my solicitor, a
weekly budget from Yolande and sporadic outbursts from friends who had
heard of my internment and felt constrained to write one letter to cheer
my loneliness.

In July, after a year of false starts, an exchange of prisoners was
finally arranged; in the last week of the month I returned deviously
through Switzerland and France, landed in a most unrecognisable England,
reported myself at an equally unrecognisable Foreign Office and then
stood, much as I had stood forty years earlier with a crowd of other shy
new boys at Eton, wondering what I was expected to do next. In the roar
and movement, the smell and glare of London streets, I had ceased to
have any property. The people were different, there was an incredible
number of soldiers about. And everyone seemed to have been getting on
very satisfactorily without me....

I remember walking a few steps towards the House of Commons, but I did
not know whether the House was sitting; I turned back to Trafalgar
Square with some idea of taking a train to Hampstead and visiting my
office, but I had abandoned it for twelve months. If I called on
Hatherly in Lincoln's Inn Fields, I should be told that he was at Ripley
Court; if I went home, I should find that Yolande and Felix were both
out.... It was salutary, I am sure, to find the measure of my
importance, but it left me very lonely, I felt for some reason that not
only was I not wanted but that I had no right to be there. England
seemed to have been taken over as a going concern by a new management,
which was in a great hurry....

I passed through the Admiralty Arch and looked round me. New Zealanders
and Australians, bronzed and big-boned in summer khaki, South Africans,
with their hats pinched to a point, were strolling up and down the
Strand, in twos and threes, gravely smoking cigarettes; a slow-speaking
Canadian enquired of me the way to Westminster Abbey; in St. James' Park
two brakes passed me filled with Indian troops, turbaned, silent and
undemonstrative. I remember that certain German prints had described the
British Army as a menagerie....

Through the Arch, I could see a stream of motor omnibuses hurrying into
Trafalgar Square and displaying long posters in a red and white
streak--"LORD KITCHENER WANTS YOU," "LEND YOUR STRONG RIGHT ARM"--on the
Horse Guards' Parade recruits were waiting their turn by the long wooden
sheds at the Downing Street end; the finished soldier came swinging down
the Processional Avenue to the music of a drum and fife band, watched a
little wistfully by a knot of men in service caps, blue jackets, loose
red ties and grey trousers, sometimes pinned emptily at ankle, knee or
hip. Standing on the kerb, a girl of twenty in deep mourning completed
scene and sequence.

I was still gaping like a yokel, when I heard my name called and found
my hand wrung by an officer in unfamiliar naval uniform; and, though we
had sat and voted side by side during his short term in the House,
though I had shot with him a dozen times at his place in Ireland, I had
to look twice before I recognised him as George Oakleigh. We stood
shaking hands, laughing, talking both at once and shaking hands again
until he suggested that I should come into his room at the Admiralty for
a cigarette and a talk. George, whom I had known as a dilettante
journalist and political wire-puller, explained parenthetically that he
had for a year been one of innumerable auxiliary civil servants; I did
not need to be told that he was tired, overworked and vaguely, sullenly
bitter.

"Fancy people going out and trying to slaughter one another on a day
like this!" he cried, looking with pink-lidded eyes at the sparse trees
and scanty shade amid the white flood of sunshine.

"Well, you'd go out, if you had the chance," I said.

"And hate it like Hell all the time!" he murmured reflectively, as he
mechanically took a salute. "I've seen enough people in the casualty
lists to realise that war is a dangerous occupation, Stornaway; and I've
met enough fellows home on leave.... You know Jim Loring's gone, by the
way?" His teeth grated together. "This--this is the very thing that my
uncle Bertrand and I spent half-a-dozen years trying to avert! Well, I
must be getting back to work. If this war's done nothing else, at least
it's cured me of the conventional,
twelve-to-three-with-two-hours-off-for-luncheon view of Government
offices. With me it's nine-thirty to eight, six days' holiday in twelve
months and about one week-end in three."

As I would not come into his office and waste his time there, we wasted
it for a few moments more by the Cook monument. George tried to give me
my bearings, interrupting himself to ask jerkily, "I suppose you've
heard that Jack Summertown's dead? He was knocked out at the same time
as your nephew. And Val Arden?..."

I had an additional tragedy in which Oakleigh did not share, for we were
almost within sight of the house which poor Deryk Lancing had so proudly
adorned: on such another day he had taken me over it, room by room; I
had heard that he died on the very evening that war was declared, yet I
suppose he only anticipated what would have come to anyone of his age in
six months' time.

"I suppose you can't imagine what all this looks like to a man who's
seeing it for the first time," I said. "All this drilling and training.
How many of these fellows will come back, d'you suppose? And what are we
going to get in return?"

He smiled wistfully.

"A lasting peace, I hope. It can never happen again, you know."

"I never thought it could happen this time," I said.

"Well, this is going to prove that war is a failure. Perhaps we needed
the proof.... You'll find that after the war people will begin to do
what we--you and Bertrand and I and a thousand more--tried to make them
do before--remove the incentive to war and the means of making war.
There must be a general disarmament, the military machine must be
broken. You'll find that Germany will be a confederated republic within
twelve months--we can never make peace while there's a Hohenzollern at
large. You know, Stornaway, this war's given us the opportunity of
healing the sore places of Europe, and there's only one way to do it;
when the peace conference begins to sit, it has got to divide the world
according to nationalities. Belgium and France will have to be cleaned
up first of all, and after that we must let the world go as it wants to
go. Alsace-Lorraine will return to France; you'll find north and south
Germany separating; Poland must be reconstituted; Italy will get back
the Trentino and Trieste, though, of course, that leaves Austria without
a port.... But you'll find Austria-Hungary splitting into a thousand
pieces as soon as you apply the principle of nationality. I'm not sure
about Constantinople, but I'm inclined to give it to Russia.... It's
worth some sacrifice to clean up the international anomalies of the
world and to make an end of war."

"It's going to be a big business, George, and a long business," was all
that I would say.

"We're in sight of doing it," he asserted. "The moment we get within
range of Constantinople, Turkey goes out of the war; she's on her last
legs now. Then with Russia bursting in on the southeast and Italy
pressing up from the south, Austria will be the next to go. People who
know tell me she's on the verge of starvation. Then next spring we shall
be bringing off a big offensive on the west. We're so frightfully
handicapped now by lack of shells." He paused and looked at his watch.
"By Jove, I must fly!" he exclaimed. "When shall I see you again? I'm
dining with the Maurice Maitlands to-night and I happen to know that the
Manistys are going to be there. Why don't you invite yourself? You're a
lion, you know; and Connie Maitland will never forgive you, if anyone
else catches hold of you first."

Leaving him to hurry into the Admiralty, I went slowly on foot to Pont
Street. England was an armed camp and munition factory, London a
gigantic General Headquarters. And George, with his rimless eye-glasses
enthusiastically askew and a normally pale face ecstatically flushed,
was throwing corps here and divisions there, dividing the map of the
world by the test of nationality.... I felt giddy.

There was no one at home, when I reached Pont Street, and I explored the
havoc of war as it had invaded the house of a man to whom personal
comfort means much. My butler, footman and chauffeur had enlisted, my
car was wearing itself out in the service of an elderly general; the
ground-floor gave office-room to a railway canteen organisation
administered by my niece, and the rest of the house, when not allocated
to herself or her husband, provided temporary accommodation for derelict
officers and nurses. Never have I felt less wanted.

"But, darling uncle, there's so little that we _can_ do!" Yolande
exclaimed, trying to combine apology and self-defence. "I feel that if
we don't pinch and scrape and slave.... And everyone's in the same
boat.... I bought one black frock when Archie was killed, and I'm not
going to buy another stitch till the war's over. I don't dine out once a
month; and _then_ I don't usually have time to dress."

She was looking a little thin and white-faced; for some reason the
auburn hair which I loved had been cropped short, but she was undaunted
and self-reliant, one of a hundred thousand women to whom the war was
bringing that opportunity for service for which they had so long pined.

The emergence of my nephew Felix from a War Office car completed the
sense of revolution and unreality. That least military of archaeologists
was now arrayed in a staff captain's uniform, which accorded ill with
his glasses and bald head, for duty behind a string of letters and a
telephone extension at the War Office.

"You'll get used to it in time," Yolande laughed, as we set out on foot
for Eaton Place.

My sense of not being wanted certainly evaporated in the warmth of Lady
Maitland's greeting. One of her sons was home on leave from the Front,
and the familiar, red-lacquer drawing-room was filling with a party of
twenty-four, each of whom was acclaimed at a distance, introduced,
epitomised and enlisted for charity or intrigue before he had fairly
crossed the threshold.

"Yolande! My dear, I got your note and I've put off the committee till
Friday," she cried, when our turn came and my niece surrendered to a
resonant kiss on either cheek. "And dear Captain Manisty--there was
something I wanted to see you about.... It'll come back to me. _And_ Mr.
Stornaway!" She surveyed me for a moment with her handsome square head
on one side, then turned to a little group behind her. "My dears, we all
thought he was dead! Mr. Stornaway, I want you all to myself, you're
going to tell me all about your terrible hardships and, before you're a
day older, you're going on my Prisoners of War Relief Committee." She
turned again to explain me to the room. "This is Mr. Stornaway who's
been interned in Austria all this time. He's going to tell us all about
it.... Mr. Stornaway, it's a scandal, we can't get the Government to
act. Now here's Mr. Deganway--you know him?--he's in the Foreign Office
and he tells me that the question of the prisoners----"

She broke off to welcome two new arrivals with a surprised cry of "Lord
Pentyre! And my dear Sir Harry Mordaunt!" as though she had not invited
them. I shook hands with Maitland and was trying to see whom else I
knew, when she returned and remorselessly introduced me to Vincent
Grayle, with whom I have sat in the House for a dozen years. He was
leaning on a stick, and I learned in a galloping exchange of biography
that he had had one knee shattered in the Antwerp expedition and was now
at the War Office, "cleaning up the mess made by the professional
soldiers."

"But what were you doing out there at all?" I asked, clinging to him for
a moment before Lady Maitland could present me to anyone else. We had
been contemporaries, if not friends, at Eton and Trinity, which meant
that he was past fifty.

"Much too good a war to miss!" he answered with a laugh, hobbling away
to be introduced to a young bride in half-mourning who had already
collected two young Maitlands, Pentyre, Deganway and George Oakleigh.

"I expect you find everything a bit changed," said Maitland earnestly,
glancing at his own uniform and speaking as though the war were a secret
in which he was doubtfully initiating me.

"Grayle's much the same," I answered, looking enviously after the viking
figure with the blue eyes, pink and white cheeks and corn-coloured hair.

There was a moment's silence, as my hostess mentally called the roll and
I strolled away before her husband was ready with another platitude.

"Eleanor Ross is _always_ late!" she complained. "Well, you haven't
altered much, Mr. Stornaway."

Nor had she, I answered. The war seemed only to have turned her tireless
energy into new channels. Whereas she had once called for the heads of
Nationalists, strike leaders and, indeed, anyone with whom she chanced
to be in temporary disagreement, she would now, I gathered, be content
with the public execution of the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald
and Sir Ian Hamilton. She seemed the motive power of as many committees
as ever; her house was the meeting-place of as many incongruities as
before, and she was prepared to yoke the meanest of us to one or other
of her charities.

"We must have a talk about the Prisoners," she said, with one eye on the
door. "The Government will do _nothing_, but what do you expect?"

Lowering her voice, she confided that three Ministers, of whom I knew
one to be a bachelor, were married to German wives, while a fourth was
discovered to have arms stacked in his cellar and a wireless
installation on his roof. She told me, further, that we had had enough
of these lawyer-politicians, that the country needed a Man, because the
young shirkers that you met in the street were stealing the work of
those who had patriotically enlisted; the Press, she went on to say, was
a public danger (only exceeded in imbecile virus by the Press Bureau)
and it was high time that in the matter of war we sat at the feet of
Germany. She barely had time to weaken her last effect by declaring the
German military machine, for all its forty years' perfection, to be the
greatest imposture in history, before the Duchess of Ross was announced.

"Odious painted creature. And always late!" Lady Maitland whispered to
me, as she hurried forward with both hands outstretched.

"You look giddy," Yolande murmured.

"And what do you think of England after a year of war?" Eleanor Ross
cried over her shoulder, as we went down to dinner.


2

If Lady Maitland had invited a full account of my internment and had
then scampered away without waiting to hear it, I was not let off so
easily by either of my neighbours at dinner. For the first three courses
I told my tale to the Duchess of Ross, who spent the second three
handing it on to the right, while I turned like an automaton and
repeated my recitation to Lady Pentyre. As I might have foreseen,
knowing their craving to be ahead of the world with any new thing, I was
instantly committed to lunching with both (because each knew so many
people who would be simply dying to meet me and hear all about it); and,
if I bore my cross with resignation, it was because I knew that I was
relieving someone else (he proved to be a submarine commander who had
recently been awarded the Victoria Cross)--and that I should be relieved
in my turn when a greater novelty presented itself--(after three days an
American _Lusitania_ survivor came to my rescue).

I was beginning to get used to the noise and strangeness and to recover
from my first bewilderment, when Lady Maitland rustled to her feet, and
I was left at the mercy of a political argument carried on between my
host and Grayle across my body. So far as I remembered, it concerned the
likelihood of compulsory service, and I was only interested to find
Grayle, the most lawless man of my acquaintance, pleading for more
discipline, while a high-and-dry Tory like Maitland defended Ministers
whom he had styled thieves and common sharpers at the time of the 1909
Budget and the Marconi enquiry. I had almost forgotten my poor little
host's genius for picking up the hastier opinions and less profound
catchwords of the uninformed. George caught my eye and winked, as
Maitland thumped the table impressively, tugged at his moustache and
talked--with a slightly shocked intonation--of "the brain and sinew of
the Government, my dear Grayle." Young Pentyre, as surprise relaxed into
boredom, moved next to me and began a rival conversation.

"Who's the patriotic gentleman?" he whispered. "And why's he so excited
about the jolly old Government?"

"He's got a bee in his bonnet," George explained, "because he fancies he
brought down the old Liberal lot and can't make out why he's not been
given a job in the Coalition."

"But who is he?" Pentyre persisted.

As I had known Grayle longer than anyone present, I took it upon myself
to answer.

We had first met nearly forty years ago as boys at Eton, soon drawing
together in a common recognition, keenly felt and resented, that we were
poorer than our fellows. My father had no business to send me there at
all, but every male Stornaway always had gone to Eton, whether he could
afford it or not. Grayle, the only son of a hard-drinking
Gloucestershire squire, who used to beat him unmercifully, was sent to
school when he grew strong enough to resist parental castigation, with
an idea, I suppose, that others by force of numbers would be able to
continue the beatings. We worked our way up the school together, until
Grayle was withdrawn in consequence of some trouble with a tradesman's
daughter in Slough, and met again at Trinity, when the scandal was half
forgotten. There I remained four years and Grayle four weeks. If I ever
heard the full story of his subsequent, final, cataclysmic quarrel with
his father (they were separated, I know, by the stud-groom and a couple
of strappers), I have forgotten the details; the result of the quarrel
was that Vincent disappeared, and the next time that I saw him was
several years later in New York. I had gone up there from Washington and
ran unexpectedly into Grayle's arms on Fifth Avenue; he was accompanied
by another Trinity man of my year--Guy Bannerman, a brilliant, shiftless
Rabelaisian, whom Grayle with his startling streak of prodigal
generosity had taken in hand and was prepared (as he consistently
proved) to keep afloat. I remember how one of the loudest voices in the
world suddenly silenced the drone of traffic by thundering,

"It's the great anomaly of modern civilisation. What are you going to do
with them? Theoretically they're your equal fellow-citizens, but they
don't vote, they daren't enter a white man's hotel. I can't remember for
the moment whether they're actually increasing in numbers----"

Then I knew, even without sight of the square-faced, bull-necked man
with the familiar grey eyes, dusty hair and capacious loose-lipped
mouth, that Guy Bannerman had discovered America and was concerned to
solve the negro problem. He was on his way to Klondike, where he heard
that gold had been found, and he swore me impressively to secrecy.

"Half New York knows about it already," I had to warn him.

"How did they hear?" he roared.

"You've just told them."

The three of us lunched together, and I found that Grayle, too, was
bound for the gold-fields. Their methods of approach were notably
different, for, while Guy Bannerman informed New York City that any
fool could dig for gold and I retorted that every fool would, Grayle was
compiling an exhaustive list of everything that a gold-digger could need
or be drugged into thinking he needed.

"One wants a pick and shovel, I suppose," Guy ventured, "and--and a
pannikin." His conception of gold-digging impressed me as being
literary.

"And food, drink, lights, clothes, covering, cooking-gear, medicine----"
Grayle struck in ferociously. "No, we're not going to discover the North
West Passage, but we're going to make these swine squeal--and the more
squeals we knock out of them the better I shall be pleased. Tools,
blankets--or rather, sleeping-bags. Tents. Tobacco. Mustn't forget
tobacco. Bags for the gold. I suppose, if you've had a good day, you
sleep with a revolver under your pillow; and stand drinks all round,
which involves the worst obtainable Californian gooseberry. I'm going to
supply the outfit, and they're going to dig the gold. Exploit, or be
exploited. Care to come in with us, Stornaway? Anything you like to put
up, you know...."

He could not persuade me to come and help him exploit, nor could he save
Bannerman from being exploited, but the enterprise as he saw and planned
it was a giant success even in the history of gold-rushes. I believe
Aylmer Lancing supplied the capital; Grayle reached Klondike a week
after the rush had begun and only came east when it was starkly not
worth his while to be left with a month's stores on his hands; then the
insalubrious shanty known as "Grayle's Hotel" was sold by private
treaty, the stock-in-trade was put up to auction on a rising market and
he returned to square his accounts with Lancing in New York.

However much money he made, I dare swear that he returned with even more
experience. For many months many thousands of the world's choicest
blackguards had slept between his blankets, worked with his tools, eaten
his food and sheltered beneath his roofs. Raving with his Californian
gooseberry champagne, a Pittsburg smelter had emptied one of his
six-shooters into the scattering head of his partner; Grayle sold the
coffin and subsequently a coil of rope. He supplied jewellery and
dresses to the women whom he had induced to follow the camp; he peddled
concertinas to the musically-minded. Twice the store was looted, after a
good day and a full dinner, which the looting party instinctively felt
to have been insufficiently full. The first time he convened a public
meeting and asked if it was in the common interest to make him close
down; the second time he began to pack and only unpacked when the leader
had been unobtrusively lynched. As a study in contrasts, Guy Bannerman
spent three months carrying the gold south and bringing back stores;
then he tired of the only work for which he was fit, pocketed his share
of the profits and started digging. The profits were coaxed out of him
by a woman whom he set himself to reclaim--without noticeable
success--and, whereas the gold began to peter out within a month of
Grayle's departure, Bannerman stayed on until his last dollar had passed
to the new proprietor of "Grayle's Hotel."

I met both adventurers in Venezuela, which they had to leave before
their scheduled time, and again at Colon. Then I returned to England and
got myself elected to the House of Commons for the Southdown division of
Sussex; I did not see Grayle again until the 1900 election brought him
into the House, with Guy Bannerman faithfully running the election and
later acting as secretary, shadow, press-cutting agency, collector of
statistics, fact-finder and general parliamentary devil. Then he went
out to South Africa for the second half of the war.

Having seen the man undisguised in two continents, I have always been a
little surprised to find how little he was known here; he can be a very
entertaining ruffian, causing the usually censorious to apologise and
say "a blackguard, but at least he's not a hypocrite, you know;" on the
other hand, through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle-age I seem to
look back on a House of Commons which would not have tolerated him;
perhaps we are more indulgent nowadays, perhaps no one took the trouble
to compile a dossier, perhaps each man felt that his own turn might
come next.

Be that as it may, Grayle succeeded in entering a House that neither
liked nor trusted him. Fishing in troubled waters for twelve years, he
picked up a knowledge of his colleagues, even if he landed no fish;
speculation in countries too enterprising to be critical had made him
rich enough to pay other people's debts and occasionally to compensate
lost honour on behalf of some rising politician with a reputation to
preserve, but he never came into the open until the Marconi enquiry,
when I discovered by the savagery of his attacks on the Government that
he was now a newspaper proprietor. The war gave him his opportunity,
and, according to the far from impartial statement of Bertrand Oakleigh,
who liked an actionable story for its own sake, Grayle was one of the
leaders in organising the Unionist attack on the Liberal Government in
1915.

All this and more I contrived to convey to Pentyre before Grayle had
finished his cigar and signified his willingness to come upstairs.

We were hardly inside the drawing-room before he had limped briskly to
the sofa where the young bride who had been his neighbour at dinner was
seated; she smiled easily, ungratified but obviously conscious of his
admiration, and in a moment they were splashing to the waist in
vivacious badinage. I sought out my niece and tried to secure ten
minutes' quiet discussion of my own affairs.

In one of the first letters to reach me in my internment camp Yolande
cautiously prepared me for bad news; on the next page she announced
young Deryk Lancing's death; a week later I heard--in my loose-box and
amid a smell of straw and whitewash--that the whole estate of some
twenty odd millions had passed to me. I had known old Sir Aylmer
Lancing, the boy's father, ever since I was transferred from Vienna to
Washington, when he was in the fulness of his powers and Deryk was
unborn. Indeed, he had hitched me out of the Diplomatic and given me a
start with one of his own firms of contractors in South America, and
there I had made enough money to retire to affluence when my health
broke down in Panama. I had seen him, too, regularly and intimately for
fifteen years after his stroke; indeed, I had induced my brother to sell
him Ripley Court and I spent so much of my time there that it was
sometimes hard to believe that the great, gaunt house had ever changed
hands. Deryk I had known since he was a boy of eight or nine, brilliant
and precocious, neurotic, impatient and inconsiderate, but winning and
lovable with it all and filled with a blaze of promise. He had succeeded
to the title and estate less than twelve months before he was killed; he
had just become engaged rather romantically to a girl with whom he had
long been in love; and it was on the day when he had been shewing her
the house which I persuaded him to buy and which was waiting for them
both that he had fallen from the roof and been picked up dead and
hideously broken....

I looked round the room, through the rich gleam of Lady Maitland's red
lacquer, at Grayle, sitting with one leg permanently stiff in front of
him, Charles Maitland, already twice wounded, Pentyre in his Guards
uniform, waiting to go out, and my eyes came to rest on Yolande's black
dress.

"You would have thought the war had done enough damage without any
extras of that kind," I said.

"What are you going to do with all the money?" she asked wonderingly.

"I want time to think, Yolande," I said. "I feel a little bit dazed.
It's so much the same--and yet so different. I know this room so well,
Lady Maitland's the same fat, voluble, outrageous, delightful creature
that she always was,--and yet I seemed to have dipped into another
world...."

We were still talking of ourselves and the family when a maid entered to
say that a Mr. Jellaby wished to speak to Colonel Grayle on the
telephone. I smiled in easy triumph as Grayle scrambled to his feet, for
I have so often found Mr. Jellaby wishing to speak to me on the
telephone, and poor Jellaby with tears in his voice has begged me to
help keep a house or stand in readiness for a division or relieve guard
after an all-night sitting.

"If there's a division, I shall take you," Grayle threatened in
retaliation for my smile, as he leaned down for his stick. "One of these
Labour swine making trouble, I expect. We've all got to back the
Government as long as it is the Government."

It was a good guess, for he returned a moment later and dragged me to my
feet with the announcement that Grimthorpe, the A.S.E. man, was
threatening to divide the House unless the Prime Minister gave an
assurance that the National Registration Bill would never be made the
basis of a system of conscription.

"Infernal nuisance, but we shall have to go," he said. "You've got to
start your duties some time, Stornaway, and you may as well keep me
company and start them to-night. Only a formality, you know. Half the
Cabinet's sworn not to graft conscription on to the Bill, and the other
half's sworn it will. Beauty of coalition government!"

More from a desire to see what the House looked like than from any wish
to support Grayle, I allowed myself to be taken away. As I shook hands
with Lady Maitland, he stumped back to his sofa and roundly told the
young bride that he proposed to come and call on her.

"Haven't half finished our conversation," he said in a tone of
authority, "so if you'll tell me your address----"

I chose to think that her manner hardened, as though she felt that
Grayle was taking her for granted too much.

"I'm hardly ever at home," she answered. "My Belgian refugee work----"

"Free in the evenings," he interrupted jerkily. "_My_ only time for
calling."

She hesitated and, as I thought, sank her voice slightly, putting
herself on the defensive.

"You'd only be bored, you know," she warned him. "It isn't an ordinary
house, and you won't meet ordinary people."

"Coming to see _you_," Grayle answered.

"You clearly aren't wanted, Grayle," I said, taking him by the arm. "If
you insist on dragging me to the House, let's start at once."

He shook free of my hand and turned to her, as though he were delivering
an ultimatum.

"You don't want me to come?" he demanded.

"You won't be amused," she answered, this time in unmistakable distress.

"Where do you live?" he asked relentlessly.

"In Westminster." I was rather shocked by the way in which she allowed
him to bully her. "A house called 'The Sanctuary,' on the Embankment,
just by the Tate Gallery."

He repeated the name as we walked downstairs and whistled unsuccessfully
for a taxi. On the steps I told him again that he had been making a
nuisance of himself, for she was probably living in some modest
boarding-house. Grayle would only murmur irrelevantly that she was a
devilish pretty girl, an opinion evidently shared by George Oakleigh and
the Maitland boys, who had surrounded her before Grayle was out of the
room. I cannot remember that her looks left any impression on me at this
meeting.

"'The Sanctuary'," he murmured for the third time, as we set off on foot
for the House. "Didn't happen to hear what her name was, did you? Never
bother about names myself."

"It would be inartistic," I said.

We walked through Eaton Square in silence and along Buckingham Gate and
Birdcage Walk to Parliament Square. As we approached the Palmerston
monument, Grayle touched my arm, pointed ahead and quickened his limping
pace; an open-air meeting of two soldiers, nine loafers and one woman
was being addressed by a shabbily-garbed young man who seemed to be on
the worst possible terms with his audience; Grayle, who has the nose of
a schoolboy or a terrier for any kind of fight, clearly felt that this,
like the war, was too good to miss. What went before, I have, of course,
no means of judging, but such fragments of vituperation as reached me
suggested the wonder why a man, who cared nothing for his hearers,
troubled to harangue an exasperated group, which was quite unconvinced
by his reasoning. The speaker kept his temper; his hearers had lost
theirs from the outset, I should imagine, and this possibly amused him
and justified the effort.

"Go aht and fight yourself," cried one of the soldiers truculently,
"before yer snacks at the men that 'ave been out there."

"I should not der-ream of fighting," the lecturer answered with
practised and very clear enunciation.

"Precious sight too careful of yer dirty skin!"

The lecturer laughed with maddening calm.

"I value my life," he conceded, "but I happen to be brave enough to
value my soul more. I do not choose to be the deluded instrument of
Junkers here or elsewhere, and, had anyone thought you worth educating,
you would not choose it either. My fine fellow, you were before the
war--what? A coal-heaver? But you had no quarrel with the coal-heavers
of Germany, until your Junkers told you to fight; you will again have no
quarrel when your Junkers tell you to stop fighting. I was a medical
student once, I had no quarrel with the medical students of other
nations, nor can I make a quarrel when a Junker tells me to hate, to be
red and angry--if you could see how red and angry you look now!--to stab
and shoot and slash. If I have to kill, let me kill a Junker, who cannot
maintain the peace of the world." He sank his voice with artistic
pretence of talking to himself. "But I was educated, I have thought, I
am not a dog to be whistled to heel or incited to fight other dogs."

In the pause that followed Grayle put his lips to my ear and whispered
behind his hand.

"Get those two Tommies away," he begged. "Dust this fellow's jacket for
him, but can't do it in uniform with men about."

I gripped his arm firmly and tried to drag him away. The war seemed to
have brought all Grayle's latent ferocity to the surface.

"Don't be a fool!" I whispered.

"Not going to let a damned German agent talk sedition in my hearing!" he
cried.

Even as he spoke, the decision was taken out of our hands. The soldier,
rightly or wrongly described as a coal-heaver, stepped forward and
called upon the lecturer to "take that back, will you?" The lecturer
smiled, folded his arms and said nothing, quietly waiting for the
interruption to subside.

"Take that back!" repeated the soldier, with a new note of menace in his
voice, and, when there was no answer, dealt a swinging open-handed blow
to the lecturer's face.

His victim staggered, recovered his balance and stood with lips tightly
compressed and a print of angry scarlet on his cheek. One of the women
had screamed; two of the loafers cried, after deliberation, "Serve him
right!"

"When opposed to truth," the lecturer continued, when he had satisfied
himself that no second blow was coming, "violence is as ineffectual in
the street as on the battlefield. You do not stifle truth by sending a
man to Siberia, as I've seen men sent, though you may remove an
undesirable prefect of police, as I have _seen_ one removed, sky-high in
Kiev, because--well, the truth was not in him. Nor is there truth in
you; there can be no truth in dogs who feed on bones flung from the
table, dogs who rise up raw from their beating and give their lives to
protect their masters."

This time there was no invitation to retract. The same soldier again
stepped quickly forward, threw his arm across his chest and flung the
full weight of his body into a sweeping backhander. The lecturer was
lifted off his feet and carried a yard back, where he struck the
railings and fell in an invertebrate mass with one leg curled under him.
The onlookers craned forward uneasily, glanced at one another and began
to separate in silence, the more quickly when Grayle limped up and
confronted the avenging soldier.

"Clear out of this!" he ordered abruptly.

"'E insulted the uniform, sir," came the husky justification compounded
of alcohol, fear and regard for Grayle's red band and tabs.

"I know all about that. Clear out and take your friends with you. He's
not dead," he added a moment later, when we were alone, contemptuously
exploring the body with his toe. "I don't suppose he's even badly hurt.
I propose to leave him here and tell one of the Bobbies at the
House----"

There was a groan as the toe glided on to an injured part. I asked the
man where he was hurt, and at sound of my voice he opened his eyes,
looked round for a moment and closed them again. I was as yet far from
used to the dim light from the shrouded street-lamps and could only see
that he looked a man between twenty and thirty, shockingly thin of body,
with fair hair, dark blue eyes and a narrow face with high cheek bones.
His air and costume were generally threadbare. More from policy than
compassion Grayle relented somewhat.

"I'll mount guard," he said. "Get hold of a Bobby and a stretcher."


3

To be involved, however innocently, in a street brawl is considerably
more characteristic of Vincent Grayle than of myself. I think that he
should have discontinued the habit at least when he reached the age of
fifty, but I know well that he only regretted his late arrival.

"They keep a stretcher at the House, don't they?" he asked, as he bared
his crop of yellow hair to the wind and lit a cigarette in preparation
for his vigil by the recumbent agitator. "If not, telephone Cannon Row."

I was starting on my way when I collided with a young man who had joined
us unperceived. He was in evening dress with an overcoat across his arm
and a sombre-eyed Saint Bernard at his side.

"Someone hurt?" he enquired, after waving away my apologies. "I thought
I heard the word 'stretcher.'"

"It was only a street row," Grayle explained callously. "This fellow
thought fit to address an anti-recruiting meeting, and his points
weren't very well taken."

The young man wrinkled his forehead, laughed and, after a moment's
thought, slipped his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat.

"Didn't Doctor Johnson say that every man had the right to express his
opinion and that everyone else had the right to knock him down for it?"
he drawled. Then abruptly, "Are you Colonel Grayle, by any chance?"

"I am," Grayle answered with a look of surprise.

"I thought I recognised your voice. I collect voices and I heard you
last week when the National Registration Bill was in Committee. Do you
think it's possible to arrive at a taxi? I live quite near here and I
can take the patient home for treatment."

"But why the deuce should _you_ bother about him?" Grayle asked.

The boy smiled to himself and shrugged his shoulders.

"If we cast him off to a hospital, there'll be all sorts of silly
questions," he explained. "And I'm a bit of an Ishmaelite myself. What's
the extent of the damage?"

The injured man opened his eyes again and reduced his huddled limbs to
some sort of order, not without occasional twinges of pain. He seemed
nothing but skin and loose bones and might well have fainted from
exhaustion rather than injury.

"My left leg's done for," he announced.

The stranger nodded sympathetically.

"Can anyone see a taxi?" he asked. "They've simply disappeared from the
streets of London, like Sam Weller's dead donkeys and postboys. Well,
you men help him up and give him a hoist on to my shoulders. I'm only a
step from here."

At a guess the sprawling figure was some inches taller and at least as
heavy as the new-comer, but my suggestion that we should wait for a taxi
or send for a stretcher was disregarded.

"Perhaps I'm stronger than I look," he told me; to the injured man he
said, "Clasp your hands round my neck; I'll try not to shake you, but it
may come a bit painful. And one of you men look after the steering so
that I don't tumble off the kerb or get run over. The house is just by
the Tate Gallery--a big sort of barn with a lamp over the door--it's
called 'The Sanctuary.'"

Grayle started violently and looked at me, but I had appointed myself
steersman and was heading for Millbank in the wake of the sombre-eyed
Saint Bernard. The young man's looks belied his strength, for he walked
fast enough for Grayle to have difficulty in keeping pace, and, as he
walked, he told us that the expected division was a false alarm and that
the House was up. I hurried along by his side, feeling more and more
that the whole evening had passed in a dream and that I should wake up
to find myself back in my internment camp. The noise and excitement had
tired me into somnolence; the darkened streets added to my feeling of
unreality. The dog with a cane and hat in his jaws, one young man with
another young man sprawling on his shoulders, Grayle panting on one side
and myself guiding the unconvincing procession on the other made up a
picture whose reality I myself doubted more than once.

And the house, when we reached it, was a large brick-and-timber
warehouse, once the property of a wharfinger, before the Embankment was
built, and quite unlike anything that I had expected,--though in keeping
with everything that night. I stood waiting for instructions, for there
was a modern annexe, with a second floor. I learned afterwards that
Whaley, the Pre-Raphaelite, had used the place as a studio.

"It's only about half furnished at present," our young friend informed
us, "and I expect you'll find it very untidy. We've not been married a
month yet. The house was a wedding-present."

I had guessed him to be the husband of the young bride whom we had met
at dinner and could understand why his wife was unprepared for visitors.

"We won't come in," I said, as we stopped under a wrought-iron lamp by a
heavy oak door painted in white gothic characters with the name of the
house.

"Oh, you must!" he cried. "I may want help. You just push the door--it
isn't locked--and, if there's no light on, you'll find the switches to
the right. Don't turn it on, though, till the door's shut, or someone
will run me in for signalling to German aircraft."

Grayle at least seemed to need no second invitation, and, when our host
said that he might want help, I did not see my way to refuse the first.
I confess, too, that I was amused and curious; the boy was attractive,
with mobile face, dark hair and big, black eyes; I liked his quick smile
and rather mischievous laugh, above all, I respected his good-nature in
picking up a total stranger, who, so far as one can justify private acts
of violence, had been most justifiably punished.

We passed through the hall into a lofty room with long windows far up
the walls above ten feet of oak panelling, rough-cut beams melting into
the shadows of the roof and a block-floor half-covered with rugs. On a
dais to our right as we entered stood a long refectory table between two
rows of heavily carved Spanish oak chairs; at the far end was a grand
piano; low book-cases ran round the walls, there were three or four big
oil-paintings above the panelling, and arranged in half-circles round
the two fires were luxuriously large sofas and arm-chairs. I was a
little reminded of a college hall, when I looked at the severe table on
this dais, the black-beamed roof and panelled walls; I thought of the
perfect club smoking room, when I tried one of the chairs; and the whole
room, as I surveyed its warm, bright emptiness from the doorway
suggested a stage scene at the rise of the curtain.

"It's rather jolly, isn't it?" said my host, when I expressed my
admiration. "The bedrooms are all in the new part, but, when we're not
asleep, we shall feed and work and live here. Personally I never want
more than one room and, if this one isn't big enough, I should like to
know what is. I'm sorry my wife isn't in, she could shew you round so
much better; but she's dining out to-night."

He settled the injured man in comfort on a long sofa and went to a
telephone by the piano. While he waited for his call, we were invited to
help ourselves from a side-table on the dais, where a generous choice of
cake, sandwiches, fruit, cold meat, cheese and drinks of many kinds
awaited us. He hoped that we should find something to our taste; people
were apt to drop in at all hours, he assured us, so it was as well to
have something handy. I poured myself out a brandy and soda and accepted
one of his cigars. My young friend took for granted much that is not
usually taken for granted, but I tried to harmonise with his mood and
succeeded better, I think, than Grayle, who walked slowly about the
room, staring at the furniture and pictures, but not committing himself
to criticism. My cigar was hardly alight when the flame-coloured silk
curtain over the door was drawn aside and a girl came in, looked round
at us incuriously and cut herself a slice of cake. As she prepared to
eat it, she caught sight of the figure on the sofa and walked quickly up
to our host, who murmured something and shook his head. Five minutes
later the doctor arrived, and, while he began his examination, I
announced that I must go home.

"My wife will be back any minute now," our host pleaded, putting a
repeater to his ear. "Are you sure you won't stay?"

"Let us come again in day-light," I said. "I'm really rather tired now.
I've been travelling a lot lately."

He bowed with smiling courtesy.

"I won't keep you, but please come whenever you feel inclined to. You
just push the door, as I explained----"

"Don't you ever lock it?" asked Grayle, breaking silence for the first
time since we had set out from Parliament Square.

The young man's black eyes smiled wonderingly.

"Why should I?" he asked.

"Prevent things being stolen," Grayle answered.

"Nobody's stolen anything yet,--and we've been here a week! But, if
anybody _did_ steal, it would probably mean that he wanted it more than
we did."

"What's your _objection_ to locking it?" Grayle pursued.

The boy stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying backwards and
forwards from heel to toe and smiling mischievously, with his luminous
black eyes upon our faces.

"It seems so inhospitable!" he laughed, "and I love symbols."

"But who d'you keep it open for?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

"Your friend, the doctor, his patient, that lady who came in a moment
ago. You, if you will come again."

"I shall certainly come again," I said, as we shook hands.

Walking along Millbank, Grayle broke into an unexpected laugh.

"I thought I'd met most kinds of lunacy," he remarked. "Fellow said he
was in the House, didn't he? I must look him up in the directory
to-morrow and see what their name is. 'The Sanctuary.' I suppose that's
a symbol, too."


4

A reputation for honesty is often embarrassing; when coupled with
efficiency, it is always disastrous. For five-and-twenty years I have
reeled under the name of a "good business man," and this has exposed me
to attack by every impulsive woman and woolly-headed man who has wanted
something done without quite knowing how to do it, who has wished money
collected without quite knowing how to set about it, who has dragged his
committee and himself knee-deep into the mire of stagnant insolvency
without knowing whether to go on or to struggle back. Then someone has
said, "We must co-opt Mr. Raymond Stornaway."

As the reputation has long ceased to be an honour and is now only a
nuisance, I propose to affect no false modesty about it. Before the war
I was always being made a governor of some new school or hospital, and
my success is to be measured by the fact that I almost invariably got my
own way in committee--(if I was not voted into the chair at once, I
overwhelmed the chairman until he yielded place)--and as invariably I
raised the funds which I had been appointed to find. Perhaps I hoped
that, as everyone had comfortably survived my absence for a year, I
should be allowed a respite, but on the morrow of this Arabian Night of
mine I was to discover that London contained as many voluble,
sympathetic and unpractical women as ever, all convinced that they had
only to form a committee of their friends, dispense with book-keeping,
insert their photographs in the illustrated papers and stretch out both
hands to a man who knew a man who had a friend on one of the daily
papers.

Lady Maitland rustled in, grey-haired and majestic, as I was finishing
breakfast the first morning; the Duchess of Ross starved me into
submission before she would let me go down to luncheon; and by night I
was duly included in the Committees of the Belgian Relief Fund, the
Emergency Hospital Fund and the Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The
following day Mountstuart of the Treasury wheedled me into the Deputy
Commissionership of the War Charities Control Department, and I found
myself after an interval of thirty years once more a Government servant,
charged to see that the amateur enthusiasm of Eleanor Ross and her
friends did not defraud the public too flagrantly and that a reasonable
proportion of the money collected was in fact paid over to the objects
for which it had been raised.

Throughout August and the first half of September I set myself to learn
my new duties, spending the morning in the St. James' Street Committee
rooms and the afternoon at the Eaton Hotel, where my Department had been
installed in a faded coffee-room enlivened by a sardonic portrait of
Lord Beaconsfield in Garter robes and made business-like by rickety
trestle tables, paste pots and letter trays, internecine telephones and
japanned deed-boxes earmarked as His Majesty's property by a white crown
and "G.R." It took me several bashful days to grow acclimatised to the
epicene life of the office, but I discovered in time and with relief
that the expensive young women with the Johnsonian capacity for
conversation and tea were every whit as much frightened of me as I of
them. The men afforded material for my insatiable interest in my fellow
creatures; we had a few journalists, a stockbroker or two, several
college tutors, an elderly miscellany which had retired some years
before and was returning to active service for the duration of the war,
two or three men rejected or invalided out of the army and three or four
whose reason for not being in the army was not so obvious--a gathering
which was partly patriotic, wholly impecunious and very different from
the collection of unfledged naked intelligences which were distributed
through the public offices of other days by the Civil Service
Commissioners.

When I had subdued Lady Pentyre in the morning and ploughed through the
familiar files in the afternoon, I devoted the evening to private
business. A year's accumulation of letters made a considerable pile,
which was not reduced by the kindly friends who thought it necessary to
congratulate me on my return; nor was my leisure increased by those
others who invited me to lunch or dinner with a persistency that brooked
no refusal. In time, however, I had read myself abreast of the
periodical literature produced by the hospitals and schools; in time,
too, I began to tackle the Lancing inheritance and paid formal visits to
Ripley Court and the house in Pall Mall to see that they were
satisfactory to the War Office. So long as the war continued, I was not
likely to be faced by poor Deryk Lancing's inability to dispose of the
income of the Trust.

A month slipped imperceptibly away before I had got rid of the arrears
of work and felt justified in taking on extra burdens. Then I paid my
first visit to the House of Commons and tried in one evening to get the
temper of a House which I had left toiling acrimoniously in 1914 with
the third presentation of the Home Rule Bill. The Front Benches were
pleasantly mingled in late-found amity, there was a solid, unquestioning
Ministerial majority, but in place of an official opposition I found a
curious collection of cliques not wholly satisfied with all the heroic
remedies of the Government and fearful that criticism might be construed
as factiousness. I was to find later that, with the abdication of the
House of Commons, all control of administration fell gradually into the
hands of the Press.

The Smoking Room, which--like the rest of London--moved in a regular
cycle of elation and depression, optimism and despair, was in deep gloom
my first night. The recruiting-figures were shrinking daily, we could
look for no help from America and what Lady Maitland called "that Man
Wilson's 'too proud to fight' nonsense." Warsaw had just fallen, and
Russian Poland lay at the mercy of the enemy; earlier in the week, too,
we had experienced our first Zeppelin raid and, while it was easy to
count the casualties and demonstrate the 700,000 to 1 odds against any
one of us being killed, we felt that something remained to be done and
that these birds of death, however exciting to watch, should not be
allowed to fly to and fro at will, hover their destructive hour and
depart unscathed.

As I can do nothing with criticism which is afraid to materialise into
action, I decided to leave the House early and, being at a loose end, to
pay my promised call at "The Sanctuary." The fact that I had let a month
go by without discovering my host's name disturbed me little in a house
where so much was taken for granted, and I boldly pushed open the door,
as I had been bidden, and looked into the long, warm room. By firelight
it seemed empty at first; then I heard voices and saw the disabled
agitator sitting on a sofa with his leg up, talking to the girl whom I
had seen on my last visit. As I hesitated by the door, she jumped up
and made me welcome.

"Leg not right yet, then?" I said, as I joined them by the sofa. "By the
way, my name's Raymond Stornaway."

"Mine's Hilda Merryon," said the girl at once.

I had not had much opportunity of observing her before, but I saw now
that she was young and slight, with black hair and very pale, regular
features. She had in her manner, too, something scornful which I found
immediately antagonistic.

"Oh, I shall be here for weeks," said the young agitator, "if they'll
keep me. We're tuberculous as a family, and the knee will probably turn
out tuberculous. I'm Peter Beresford."

My niece Yolande, who buys all modern poetry that she can find, tells me
that I ought to have been certainly the wiser and perhaps the more
impressed by this information; and, if I had spent the last year in
England instead of abroad, I might very well have read of Beresford's
escapades with the police. Various people have from time to time
contributed fragments of his biography. I believe that he started as the
dreamy and eccentric son of a Lincolnshire family and that on leaving
school he had betaken himself to Moscow on a self-conscious literary
holiday. Once there, he refused to come back. The sombre, intoxicating
magic of Dostoevski had drawn him, Russia laid her spell upon him; and,
when funds from home were cut off, he starved and feasted, worked and
slumbered for two years, until the woman with whom he was living forsook
him. A violent reaction sent him to Cambridge, a strangely experienced
and natively rebellious freshman, for he had written poetry and
abandoned it, read medicine and abandoned it, mixed in revolutionary
society and drifted under a haunting police surveillance which only
relaxed when powerful friends urged his reluctant steps homeward.

"No more public meetings for the present, then," I said.

Anyone may call the words fatuous, but they were harmless and not
ill-natured. I quote them because of their effect in lashing Beresford
to a passion only describable as insane. I have never met anyone who
knew him as a boy, I cannot say whether he was naturally neurotic or
whether too early acquaintance with oppression had warped his mind, but
I saw a good deal of him between this night and our last meeting and I
have consistently felt from the moment of this encounter that he was
separated from certifiable madness by a hair's breadth. He had all the
suspicion, the sudden fury, the courage and the obstinacy of fanaticism,
the whole streaked with morbidity. We talked long that night, and every
chapter of his Russian Odyssey ended with the refrain "Alone of the
beasts man delights in torturing his fellows;" yet, when he described a
meeting in Petersburg being broken up by a charge of Cossacks, I could
have sworn that there was gloating in his tale of casualties, as with a
man who will pay money to stare at physical deformity. Against this, his
hatred of oppression was rooted in a poet's love of beauty. His quarrel
with society in peace was that it made man a soul-stunted slave and the
countryside an industrial ash-heap, in war that it made him a
disembowelled and screaming reproach of the Maker who fashioned him in
His image. Beresford had a sense of colour, form and sound which a man
will never know unless he be born with it. Again and again it came out
in his descriptions. And then I remember his making a sarcastic and
grotesquely ineffectual speech to a knot of drunken loafers.

"Do you feel that the sort of thing you were saying the other night does
much good?" I persisted, as he glared at me, breathing quickly.

His sudden blaze of anger seemed to dab two spots of scarlet on his
shining, prominent cheek-bones.

"For you--_no_ good!" he cried. "I told those fools not to fight, I
asked them what they were fighting for! _They_ didn't know. How should
they? But you know. Keep the dogs fighting one another, and they won't
turn on you. But when your troops come back, the troops that you have
drilled and taught to shoot, when they ask why their companions were
killed----"

The girl relaxed the scornful attitude of aloofness, which she had
preserved throughout the evening, to touch his arm warningly; he coughed
and went back to his cigarette.

I laughed at him, partly because it was good for him and partly to help
me keep my own temper.

"That stuff didn't go down the other night, and it won't go down with
me. You've been talking quite sensibly so far----" He bowed ironically.
"You can't make war without killing people, and there would have been no
peace or safety, if we'd stood out. Of course, if you want to see this
country or Russia treated as Belgium has been treated----"

He snorted contemptuously and told me, as an eye-witness, that the
Belgian atrocities could at their worst always be matched by the Russian
atrocities in East Prussia. ("Alone of the beasts man delights in
torturing his fellows.") But why strain at the gnat and swallow the
camel? The major atrocity was war; and, the greater the war, the greater
the atrocity. "The English were not too humane in South Africa. No. And
South Africa was child's play, it didn't matter who won. You were less
humane still in putting down the Indian Mutiny, where you were fighting
for our lives. Germany is fighting for her life, she must fight how she
can. A screen of women and children before the advancing armies? One
husbands one's troops. The Zeppelin attacks? One always likes to
undermine civilian moral, to make the whimperers at home yelp for peace
on one's own terms--(and are not you high-minded English warring on
civilians--women and children, too--by blockading Germany?). This is a
war of nations with all the nations' human and material resources poured
into the scale. If you want to fight, fight to win! Sink your hospital
ships! They will have to be replaced, and fewer troops, less food, less
ammunition will be carried in consequence."

He threw himself back exhausted and gave way to a fit of coughing which
threatened to tear him in pieces. I looked at my watch and got up to go.

"You should have preached this before the war," I suggested.

"It will be before the next war," he gasped. "And war there will be! I'm
sick of this 'war-to-end-war' claptrap! That's been thought in every
war, it was thought when Europe was leagued against Napoleon, as it is
now leagued against the Kaiser! There will be war until the fools I
addressed that night, those dogs who fight for the masters that betray
them, turn and tear their masters limb from limb. Yes. If they don't do
that before the world is ripe for another vintage, if they wait till
present memories have faded and another generation of old men sits in
power to send young men to their death----"

His pity again became merged in imaginative blood-lust until he seemed
to revel in the horror of his own description. Science was to be applied
without mercy or discrimination. When the maximum of destruction had
been effected in the field, the war would be carried behind the lines to
those who made its continuance possible. There would be no quarter for
prisoners, who might escape, nor for the wounded, who might recover and
fight again. The nurses and doctors who dragged the wounded back to life
and patched them into the semblance of men were making new soldiers; it
was not convenient that the enemy should be presented with new soldiers,
so the war must be continued against these nurses and doctors. And
against the countrymen, who raised food for the troops, and the
artificers, who supplied them with arms, and the women, who came to take
men's places on the farm and in the workshop, and the old men, who lent
money to buy more guns and shells, and the young boys, who day by day
drew nearer to the age when they, too, would be soldiers, and the last
woman in the country, who, if she did nothing else, could bear a child
to the last man....

Beresford's voice rose until it broke, and his words poured out more and
more quickly. The fellow had the impressiveness which is born of
conviction, and the girl by his side no longer attempted to restrain
him, but a sound unheard by me stopped him abruptly, and he glanced over
his shoulder with quick apprehension, as the door opened and closed. It
was not the glance that I associate with an easy conscience, and I was
suddenly sorry for the man. A moment later the hunted look left his
face, as the flame-coloured curtain was drawn aside, and my host
appeared in sight. There was the same whimsical smile in his big, black
eyes that I had seen when we met before--mischievous, kindly, and
baffling. He threw his hat into a chair and gave his cane to the Saint
Bernard to carry; as he came into the room I was struck by the lightness
and grace of his movements. The atmosphere cleared of its electricity.

"Only a small party to-night," he murmured.

The girl on the sofa looked up quickly.

"I'm here," she said, "and Mr. Beresford and----" She hesitated and
blushed to find that she had forgotten my name.

"Raymond Stornaway," I supplemented. "You said I might come again."

He turned and grasped my hand.

"I've heard our friend George Oakleigh speak about you!" he cried. "I
didn't know, the other night, that it was you. Haven't you just been
released from Austria? My wife said something.... They're a funny
people, the Austrians; there's no pleasing them. Now, when they get hold
of you, they simply won't let you go, but the last time I was in the
country--officially--they escorted me over the frontier and hinted that
they'd put a bullet in me, if I ever came back. And all because of a
regrettable little disturbance in Vienna, when an Austrian officer said
things about my father and myself which I thought--and think still--a
gentleman does not say."

As I looked at the animated, thin face, I was trying hard to remember
where I had seen it before. At the mention of Vienna I saw again an
open-fronted café on the Ring-Strasse with white-aproned waiters
bustling, gesticulating and shouting round a swaying mass of combatants;
in the heart of the struggle I saw a thin-faced, black-haired boy
fighting like a tiger; one arm hung limp and helpless by his side or
flapped horribly with the movements of his body, and his face was
streaming with blood. I saw his companion bring down the lamp with a
blow from a chair, I remember how infinitely more alarming and
suggestive the cries, the groans and general tumult of the fight became
in the darkness. It was no affair of mine, however, and I was far down
the Ring-Strasse when the police cut their way into the mêlée with drawn
swords.

"I was in the café at the time," I told him. "You were there with Jack
Summertown. I'm surprised that either of you got out alive."

"You were there?" he echoed with a burst of boyish laughter. "It was a
great night! I've still got some of the marks! I wondered who you
were.... Of course, we've got scores of friends in common. You know
Bertrand Oakleigh in the House? Well, he lives here. The place in
Princes Gardens is being used as a hospital, so George has a room at his
Club and the old man stays with us. He gave us the house--he's always
been astonishingly generous to me--but of course I couldn't accept it
like _that_. I only let him give it to me on condition that I was
allowed to share it with others. Perhaps now my symbolism----"

He broke off with a laugh and asked whether the others had looked after
me well.

"I'm sorry my wife's not here," he said. "Let me see, she wasn't in the
last time, either; the fact is, Colonel Grayle telephoned to say that
he'd been given a box for some theatre and would we dine with him and go
on? I'd already promised to dine at the House and I don't go to the play
much, anyway, but she thought she'd like to go, and she hasn't come in
yet. To-night you've _got_ to wait."

It was half-past eleven, and I held out my watch to him, shaking my
head.

"Look at the time," I said.

He took out the repeater that I had seen before and set it striking.

"I set mine by Big Ben this evening," I told him.

"Ah, but I can't see it. I--haven't the use of my eyes, you know. If you
feel you must go, I will only remind you that the door will be open next
time. I've got any amount to talk to you about, and my wife will be most
frightfully sorry to have missed you again. I rather gathered that you
and Grayle and she had been dining in the same house that night, but you
were at different ends of the table, and she didn't hear your name."

"I don't yet know yours," I said.

"David O'Rane," he answered. "There's no particular reason why you
should, unless George has ever talked to you about me. Now, will you
swear--on your honour--that you'll come again? And it must be before I
go away. Good-night!"




CHAPTER TWO

THE OPEN DOOR

     "I was a baby when my mother died
     And father died and left me in the street.
     I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
     On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and stalks,
     Refuse and rubbish....
     But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets
     Eight years together, as my fortune was,
     Watching folk's faces to know who will fling
     The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,
     And who will curse and kick him for his pains,--
     Which gentleman processional and fine,
     Holding a candle to the Sacrament,
     Will wink and let him lift a plate and catch
     The droppings of the wax to sell again,
     Or holla for the Eight and have him whipped,--
     How say I?--nay, which dog bites, which lets drop
     His bone from the heap of offal in the street,--
     Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
     He learns the look of things, and none the less
     For admonition from the hunger-pinch."
                       ROBERT BROWNING: _Fra Lippo Lippi._


1

It was not until I had introduced some little organisation into my work
that I had opportunity or justification for seeing my friends. I have
reached an age when I like to go early to bed between two long days of
work; I never ceased to wonder, therefore, at the nervous vitality of
some of the people whom I was meeting; London was fuller than I had ever
known it, the customary autumn exodus had ended with the war; and, what
with a few hundred officers home on leave and athirst for amusement,
what with a few thousand girls working in hospitals, canteens and
Government offices, anyone who wanted distraction had not to look long
for it. The restlessness which seized London every summer before the war
seemed to have increased and become permanent, with an astounding new
licence which I found hard to understand. I suppose the war broke down
most of the old social conventions, but I sometimes wondered in the
early days whether there was anything which the strictly brought up and
closely chaperoned young girl of other days was now _not_ allowed to
do....

Young O'Rane carried me off to my first war party. After I had looked
for him unsuccessfully for some weeks, we had been dining at the House
and talking business and school politics, for the Governors of Melton
School had lately co-opted me in place of Aylmer Lancing, and I had
heard from George that O'Rane was temporarily on the staff there. At ten
o'clock he told me that he was due home for a house-warming and plunged
into a description of his domestic life with all the eagerness of a
child--which is what he was--shewing a new toy. Old Bertrand Oakleigh
had given them the house as a wedding present; ever since his illness at
the outbreak of war (no one was allowed to call it a stroke) the old man
had needed some little attention; what easier than to set a couple of
rooms aside for him? And the place was so big that you could give a
shakedown to "most anyone"--and a meal. It was what O'Rane had always
wanted to do--as in the Middle Ages (rather vaguely).... I should hardly
_believe_ some of the people he'd had there even in five weeks....
People were such fun; Beresford, for instance ... full of good stuff,
full of white-hot idealism which only needed to be directed. "And he's
fallen in love with my wife, so she's gently taming him."

He threw out his sentences with jerky exuberance, passionately serious
at one moment and laughing at himself and me the next.

And that girl I had met, Hilda Merryon.... A little throb of anger came
into O'Rane's voice; she had led a most awful life for about three
years; some brute had victimised her, and her sanctimonious devil of a
father had turned her out of the house.... Now she was a new woman,
though years must pass before she overcame her bitterness and hatred
towards the world, and, when he went back to Melton, she was coming as a
sort of secretary....

We had reached the house, and he threw open the door and stood aside to
let me in.

"I hardly felt this was a normal household when I was here before," I
said.

In the light of the hall I could see his black eyes gleaming with
laughter.

"You should hear old Oakleigh!" he suggested. "'It's a phase, my dear
boy. You'll grow out of it. You see the devil of a lot of strange
things, if you live to be as old as I am.'" He paused to laugh at his
own exquisite mimicry of Bertrand's disillusionised, pontifical manner
and gruff, disparaging voice. "Well, _he_ wouldn't eat a twelve-course
dinner with a starving man opposite him.... It makes life so much
easier, if nobody thinks you're quite sane. Won't you go in?"

"Does your wife enter into the spirit of it?" I asked, as I looked at
the silk curtains bellying away from the white walls.

He evaded the direct question almost apologetically.

"It's a big change after the life she led before the war," he conceded,
"but then the war itself is a big change."

He had mentioned a party, but I was hardly prepared for the army of
occupation which I found in the library. Every chair at the long table
was filled, and the guests had overflowed and scattered throughout the
room, bearing their plates and tumblers with them. Mrs. O'Rane jumped up
from her place between Beresford and Deganway, making me welcome and
apologising for having missed me before.

"This is such an irregular ménage," she exclaimed in a clear, high voice
that dominated the clear, high voices around her. "David's at the House
so much, and I spend my days serving out clothes to Belgian refugees,
or finding them houses and work, or getting up concerts and things to
raise money for them, but _somebody's_ sure to be at home at _some_ hour
of the night. This is our house-warming, and of course David forgot all
about it." She twisted her arms round her husband's neck and kissed him
with an ecstasy that told me stabbingly of something that had been left
out of my life, "Admit you did, sweetheart, or you won't get any
supper."

"_I_ remembered! I invited Mr. Stornaway," he protested. "And you're
going to look after him while I strum. You seem to have got some people
here, Sonia. And there's a sort of hint that some of them have been
smoking."

The crowd, the heat, the babble of voices and the fog of tobacco smoke
robbed me of resistance and individuality. Before I had been three
minutes in the room, I was eating a meal which I did not need, drinking
hock-cup which I knew disagreed with me and trying to carry on two
conversations and at the same time to see who was already there and who
was arriving. Lady Maitland introduced me volubly to a watchful-eyed,
supercilious boy whose first play, she assured me, had taken London by
storm. Had I seen it? If not, I must go at once; and she refreshed her
memory of its name by reference to the author. When he escaped in bored
embarrassment from his own biography, she explained loudly a second time
that _that_ was Eric Lane, the great coming dramatist, and confided as
loudly that he was desperately in love with Babs, little Babs Neave,
Barbara Neave, Lady Barbara Neave--it was no use my pretending that I
didn't know her--and that Crawleigh was at his wits' end, because it was
quite out of the question for them to marry, but Babs was such an
extraordinary girl that, if you opposed her, you might simply drive her
into his arms.... Lady Maitland shook her vigorous grey head with an air
of concern and at once asked me to meet "both the silly children" at
luncheon, because it would interest me....

Before the end of supper I was beginning to get my bearings and to
resolve the unassimilated party into its elements. O'Rane was at the
piano, surrounded by George Oakleigh, two shy and hero-worshipping
pupils from Melton, Miss Hilda Merryon--still aloof and implacable--and
Beresford. In the middle of the room I deduced from Sir Roger Dainton's
presence a purely family gathering of Mrs. O'Rane's relations; their
tongues were as busy as their eyes, and they looked slightly
bewildered--as well they might--and a trifle disapproving.

On the dais Mrs. O'Rane ruled supreme. Even without the explanation
which George strolled across to drawl into my ear, I placed her by her
surroundings as belonging to a society with which I was very familiar
before the war. Lady Sally Farwell sat on one side of her, giving an
excellent and somewhat ill-natured imitation of Lady Barbara Neave, who
with young Eric Lane was hardly out of ear-shot. Mr. Evelyn Staines, the
romantic hero of half a hundred musical comedies at the Regency, sat on
the other, looking out of humour, surprisingly unkempt and unexpectedly
old. There was a youthful claque of young officers, two or three
actresses, whose appearance the illustrated papers had made known to me,
and a sprinkling of middle-aged nondescripts. Before the war I used to
organise a good many charity bazaars, charity balls and charity
matinées; and Mrs. O'Rane's troupe was always much in evidence. She has
since told me that she and Sally Farwell appeared in three duologues and
two oriental ballets on my behalf, though I am ashamed to say that my
neglect of details left me ignorant of my indebtedness.

There were a dozen smaller groups, thrust into corners or wedged between
the heavier furniture. I threaded my way in and out with a word here and
a bow there, blinded by the smoke and deafened by the noise. All seemed
to be enjoying themselves, however, and I was reasonably amused and
interested. From time to time, when O'Rane began to sing or whistle to
his own accompaniment, there was a rippling hush; from time to time,
again, he would break off with a sudden laugh and plunge into dance
music, whereat most of us flattened ourselves against the walls, while
Mrs. O'Rane and Mr. Evelyn Staines gave an exhibition of highly
technical stage-dancing.

"I don't quite fit your uncle Bertrand into this," I observed to George,
when we found ourselves out of harm's way on the dais.

"He looked in for a moment to offer Raney his blessing and a cheque.
Fortunately he can't hear much from his end of the house," was the
answer.

Mrs. O'Rane ended a perilous series of movements with a more perilous
leap on to her partner's shoulder and was borne breathless and
triumphant to the table for hock-cup.

"George, are we shocking Mr. Stornaway?" she asked across me. "I'm so
sick of the war!"

She jumped down and looked at me, breathing quickly through parted lips.
Her dress was daring, and at this, my first unhurried sight of her at
close quarters, I was as much fascinated as a man of my age had any
right to be. The face was soft, appealing and warm, with long-lashed
brown eyes, flushed cheeks like ripe apricots and a wistful mouth that
drooped at the corners, when she was disappointed, and pouted
over-quickly when she did not at once get what she wanted. It was a
wilful, impatient little face, exacting and rather obstinate, without
very much depth of character, but amazingly mobile and young, capable of
a child's ecstatic abandonment to happiness and of a melting tenderness
when she looked at her husband's unseeing eyes and whimsical,
self-protective smile.

"In some ways it's extraordinarily like some of his omnium-gatherum
parties at Oxford, Sonia," murmured George, as the tireless fingers at
the piano passed from waltz to march and from march to Scandinavian
boating-song half as old as time.

Mrs. O'Rane's big eyes swam.

"As like as we can make it," she whispered tremulously; and I was
conscious of a new fascination. Though I have never seen a woman or man
more perfectly put together, the head on the neck, the neck on the
shoulders, the hands on the wrists or the wrists on the arms, there was
something skin-deep and mechanical in her beauty--not necessarily
reaching to the heart--until that moment.

The softness passed as suddenly as it had come, and she awoke to a sense
of her duties as hostess.

"I want to introduce you to my mother, Lady Dainton," she told me.

Under cover of the presentation she escaped and in another moment was
darting with the movement of a dragon-fly in search of a partner for the
savage Hawaiian dance which her husband had begun to play. This in turn
she abandoned to give extravagant welcome to Sir Adolphus Erskine and to
thank him for a string of pearls which she held out jubilantly for his
admiring inspection.

My next half-hour was more varied and less pleasant. I was introduced to
Lady Dainton, who claimed acquaintance with my brother and insisted that
we had met at one of Aylmer Lancing's parties at Ripley Court; I was
introduced to her daughter-in-law, who had lately lost her husband and
now engaged me in a sullen debate on compulsory service with a view, so
far as I could follow the poor creature's distraught reasoning, to
securing that as many other women as possible should lose their
husbands. I exchanged a few words with Roger Dainton about the state of
parties in the House and, as I fancied that I had exhausted the family,
found myself confronted once more by Lady Dainton, who led me into a
corner, enquired how long I had known O'Rane and begged me to use
whatever influence I possessed to bring this folly to an end. Since my
first sight of her I had watched a storm-cloud of disapproval banking
up, but I could not imagine why its force should be expended on me.

"I'm not narrow-minded, don't you know?" she informed me with majestic
uncontradictability, "but this is the first time I've seen Sonia since
she was married, and this--this bear-garden is what I find."

There was no disputing the definition, but its application was limited,
for she flung out her arm, until I feared it would leave its socket, in
the direction of an arm-chair where Beresford, shabbier than ever by
contrast with the rather rich clothes around him, was holding forth with
combative resonance on the hypocrisy of our fighting for the free
development of the smaller nationalities while we held our Indian Empire
in unrepresentative thraldom.

"It's not what Sonia's accustomed to, it's not what she has a right to
expect!" exclaimed Lady Dainton with rising indignation. "That--that
_creature_ has been mocking the people who've gone out and given their
lives for their country, when half of us in the room are in mourning. As
for the woman----"

"I really don't feel _I_ can interfere," I interrupted diffidently.

She sighed with an attempt at resignation.

"I didn't know how well you knew David," she said. "Of course, he's a
delightful, gallant, generous soul--nobody's fonder of him than I am--,
but he's so terribly impulsive, don't you know? I really hoped that,
when Sonia consented to marry him, she would--well--_tame_ him a little.
Dear David _will_ pretend that everybody's like everybody else; well, I
don't suppose either of us is a snob, Mr. Stornaway, but there _are_
distinctions, don't you know? We should be called old-fashioned, if we
_said_ anything, but some of the people here to-night--of course,
Sonia's a wonderful actress, much cleverer than half the professionals
you see, so she's got into rather a theatrical set--I suppose that's the
modern spirit; Eleanor Ross had a woman lunching with her to-day who six
months ago--well, she wouldn't have dared.... But when it comes to
turning a private house into a sort of mission-room.... One can carry
democracy to excess, don't you know?"

The voice was rising again, and Mrs. O'Rane danced to my side and
snatched me away on the plea that Lady Maitland wanted to fix a day for
my meeting with Barbara Neave.

"Was darling mother being tiresome?" she asked sympathetically. "The
casual-ward stunt, I suppose?"

"What do you feel about it yourself?" I asked her.

"About David's lame ducks? Oh, he has his friends, and I have mine, and
it's no one else's business." She looked round the crowded room and then
seemed to decide that she had been too brusque. "I don't know--yet,
whether it will answer," she went on uncertainly. "David's always been a
freak about money, he'd always give anything to anybody. Now he says
that he'd be dishonoured, if he took with one hand and refused with the
other.... He's rather absurd, poor darling, because he wouldn't need to
take anything from anybody, if he hadn't been so frightfully smashed up
in the war. And if I don't mind.... It's really rather fun, however mad
it may seem. We've all of us gone mad since the War. Except David. You
didn't know him, but he's almost sane compared with what he was before."
She abandoned her pose of affected insincerity and turned to me with
shining eyes. "You do love David, don't you?" she asked.

"My dear lady, I've only met him twice," I said.

"Isn't that more than enough?" Her expression changed restlessly; and I
remembered wondering how long she would retain her looks, if she
continued to live on her nerves like this. "Too many dam' dull Daintons
here, you know. I made certain mother would think this sort of thing too
Bohemian. She'd like me to have a prim and proper little house in one of
the streets about here and entertain the conventional people in the
conventional way--simply wagging my tail if I enticed an Under-Secretary
here. Mother'd go miles for an Under-Secretary. Well, it's much more fun
inviting the amusing people, the people you _like_. I _am_ rather a
Bohemian, I've always led my own life. I do now. Darling David never
tries to make me do anything or stop me doing anything, he never wants
to know what I've been doing.... All the same, David's 'duty to one's
neighbour' stunt.... Thank goodness! he doesn't expect me to share my
clothes with casual visitors!"

She stood with her eyes fixed thoughtfully and without complete
comprehension on her husband's thin, mobile face. His own, black and
arresting for all their sightlessness, were turned to the rafters and
the shadows of the roof, as he sat with head bent back and fingers idly
modulating. Then Lady Dainton came forward and took her leave; the party
broke up rapidly, and, by the time that I left, only Vincent Grayle
remained, talking to his hostess, while Beresford transferred himself to
the other end of the room, ostentatiously turning his back and resting
his injured leg on the edge of O'Rane's piano stool.


2

I left the grotesque party with the feeling that contrary to all
reasonable expectation I had enjoyed myself immoderately. The enthusiasm
survived the night, and at breakfast the following day I informed
Yolande that I proposed to invite the O'Ranes to dine with us. Here,
however, I was met with unforeseen opposition. I have no idea how the
antagonism started, but at some period of their careers Yolande had
decided that Mrs. O'Rane was of those who "do all the things one doesn't
do," while Mrs. O'Rane has been known to dismiss my niece alliteratively
as a "prig, prude and _poseuse_."

"You'll regret it," Yolande told me frankly enough, sagaciously
smoothing back a strand of auburn hair from her forehead. "She's very
fascinating, but I've an instinct about her, and you'll find she's all
superfluity and flashiness. Any number of people have been in love with
her, of course, but she'll grate on you. Ask any woman."

One dinner, I felt, could not commit me very deeply, and it was my own
house, although I was already debating the desirability of moving into
bachelor quarters and giving up my remaining rooms to the Canteen
Executive. Yolande, however, was to be spared in spite of me.

Whether Mrs. O'Rane disapproved of her as strongly as she disapproved of
Mrs. O'Rane, I am incompetent to say, but I was informed in terms of
suitable regret that she was either dining out or having people to dine
with her every night of the week; was it possible, on the other hand,
for me to come on one of the days when they were at home? I had not yet
finished that talk with David about Melton.... The reminder was perhaps
inserted as a reason for not inviting Yolande.

I chose my night and, within five minutes of entering the house, I
should have confessed, had I been honest with myself, that Yolande was
right. An air of tension greeted me, an interrupted controversy was at
once resumed, and I found myself required by my hostess to arbitrate in
a lovers' quarrel. The cause of dispute was the girl Hilda Merryon,
whose career O'Rane had briefly sketched for my benefit; fortunately she
was not present at the time, but with O'Rane composed, pacific and
unyielding in an arm-chair with his big St. Bernard beside him, Mrs.
O'Rane flushed and aggrieved with one foot on the fender and one bare
arm shielding her face from the fire, and Vincent Grayle, my fellow
guest, directing and perhaps stimulating the controversy, I felt that we
had enough disputants.

"I'll put it to Mr. Stornaway!" cried Mrs. O'Rane, as soon as our
greetings were over. "Mr. Stornaway, we were only married in July, it's
now the end of September, and I don't think David ought to go off and
leave me for three months. It isn't necessary, I've asked him not
to----"

O'Rane stroked the dog's head reflectively.

"But you've told me you can't get away, Sonia," he said at length.
"You've got your Belgian refugee work, you've got a string of
engagements and you've got Beresford laid up for months yet. You
admitted, too, you'd simply be at a loose end in Melton."

"I should be with you." She tossed her head back until she was looking
at him through half-closed eye-lids. "Of course, if you don't want me
..."

"But, darling, your work here ...?"

"Anybody can do that!" Mrs. O'Rane interrupted unguardedly. "That's not
the point, though, and you know it isn't. I say you oughtn't to go. It's
like setting a race-horse to pull a removal van."

In the pause that followed, I wondered what opportunities for
propaganda Lady Dainton had enjoyed since our meeting the week before.

"I've _promised_ to resign the _moment_ I've paid back the money I
_owe_," said O'Rane with emphatic reasonableness.

"The money was given you as a present."

"But I can't take presents of that kind so long as I'm fit to work.
Darling Sonia, you don't imagine I want to go away from you for three
months, do you? If you can come down without leaving your work here
undone----"

"Oh, I should be in the way!" she interrupted with another toss of her
head. "You've got your Hilda."

She looked round the room, pointedly inviting us to follow the direction
of her eyes and nodding at the tidy arrangement of books, the
filing-cabinet, the half-hidden safe and neat library card-catalogue. I
could see O'Rane blushing, as I myself began to blush, that such a scene
should be enacted before comparative strangers.

"You mustn't say things like that," he remonstrated gently; then, with
the lightness of affected inspiration, "We'll put it to Mr. Stornaway,
as you suggest! I'm committed, sir, as I think in honour and certainly
by an understanding with the Headmaster, to go back to Melton on
Thursday. You've met Miss Merryon; I'm taking her with me to act as a
sort of secretary. She'll have rooms in the town and will lend me the
use of her eyes in the evenings;--I was frightfully handicapped last
term and had to take advantage of the boys' good-nature. I know it's an
unusual arrangement, but the circumstances are unusual. I got Dr.
Burgess's approval----"

"Did you tell him anything about her past?" Mrs. O'Rane broke in,
tapping a gold slipper with scarlet heel against the fender.

O'Rane smiled dreamily.

"I'm chiefly concerned with her future," he answered. Something in the
voice and smile told me that he was spiritually as far removed from his
wife as the mad from the sane.

There was a long pause which Grayle broke by shrugging his shoulders,
sighing, shaking his head at Mrs. O'Rane with an expression of rueful
sympathy and finally opening his cigarette-case with a muttered request
for permission to smoke.

"Of course, the world will _say_--," he began.

O'Rane laughed to himself.

"I don't know that I've ever paid much attention to what the world says.
But Mr. Stornaway is going to arbitrate."

I looked at one disputant after another. Mrs. O'Rane's expression can
best be described as mulish; O'Rane was smiling, debonair and yet, I
felt,--it was the first time that I had felt it--unshakable. What part
Grayle was playing I could not determine; if he had been invited to
arbitrate before my arrival, he had not been successful, and I wished
that he would leave me to compose the quarrel uninterrupted.

"If you've promised yourself to Dr. Burgess," I told O'Rane after
consideration, "you can't disappoint him at forty-eight hours' notice.
It's out of the question. You tell me that he approves of your taking
Miss Merryon?"

"He'd do anything for me," O'Rane answered easily.

"Even so, if I may put it bluntly, it's an imprudent thing to do. Surely
the simplest and most natural solution, as well as the pleasantest for
both, is for Mrs. O'Rane to accompany you. If you want work found for
Miss Merryon, that ought not to be difficult in these times; I'll pay
any money for a competent shorthand-writer in my own office."

Neither O'Rane nor his wife offered any criticism, but Grayle
considerately supplied the reason which both were hiding.

"That was discussed, I think," he said, "but I gather Mrs. O'Rane has
her hands pretty full with work here."

"But you said anyone could do that," I reminded her. "And, as long as
Bertrand's here, there'll be some one to look after Beresford."

In addition to Bertrand there were two maids and a plenipotent
housekeeper, for Mrs. O'Rane liked to boast of her domestic
incompetence. Mine was the obvious solution, and I could see that she
recognised it. There was a suppressed yawn--and a gain of three seconds.

"If I died, some one would _have_ to do my work," she admitted, "or, it
wouldn't be done.... But, Mr. Stornaway, David's a member of Parliament,
his whole future is in the House; isn't it ridiculous for him to waste
his time teaching a pack of schoolboys?"

As she shifted her ground, I felt that my work was done.

"I haven't got much future of any kind," I said, "but I'm a
begging-letter writer in the morning and a second-class clerk in a
government office the rest of the day. These are not normal times, Mrs.
O'Rane, and he can't leave his chief stranded at the last moment without
anyone to take his place. When he comes back at Christmas, there'll be
an opportunity for reconsideration."

O'Rane said nothing, and I was disappointed. I felt that, as he had got
his own way, it would have been diplomatic and perhaps convincing to
pretend that he was consenting to a compromise. Mrs. O'Rane looked at
him out of the corner of one eye and pouted openly.

"We might just as well not be married, if you don't want me," she said.

"Come, come! Mrs. O'Rane!" I cried.

I am afraid that the mild protest only inflamed her.

"Well, he doesn't! The other night we were talking about marriage. Peter
Beresford says that any man who loves a woman may do anything to win
her; it doesn't make any difference whether she's married or not----"

O'Rane leaned forward and resumed his stroking of the dog's head.

"Perhaps it makes a difference to the woman," he suggested.

"Then _David_ said," she went on, regardless of this interruption, "that
men and women weren't justified in spoiling each other's lives by
clinging on when one was tired of the other."

Every word was purposefully clear, and at the end she paused
invitingly. O'Rane sprang up with a ring of laughter and held out his
arms to receive her.

"Sweetheart!"

She made no movement until he had come a pace nearer, then she stepped
unrespondingly aside. O'Rane's hands met on the marble of the
mantelpiece.

"I--missed you," he said with a little breathless laugh.

I could not turn to see Grayle's face, but I was rigid with horror that
such a trick should be played on a blind man. Gradually what she had
done dawned on Mrs. O'Rane, and she threw her arms convulsively round
her husband's neck.

"God forgive me!" she whispered. "Oh, my darling, I'm mad! I don't know
what I've been saying!"

I turned to Grayle and asked him for a cigarette. A moment later I heard
a car stopping at the door, and Beresford was helped into the house
after his drive.

From time to time throughout the meal (whenever, perhaps, Mrs. O'Rane
was trying to make amends), my mind went back to the scene. The O'Ranes'
outlook and temperament were so dissimilar that I could see no common
ground between them. The outsider never knows why any two people marry
and is content to believe in the existence of an affinity hidden from
his view. These two were both so full of vitality, both so good-looking,
and, above all, both so young that I tried hard to resist a feeling of
melancholy and to persuade myself that I had been an inadvertent
eavesdropper at the oldest and most trumpery quarrel in the world rather
than the witness of an inevitable breach. The long windows on either
side of the room were warmly curtained in flame-coloured silk; the two
fires glowed comfortingly on to their half-circles of chairs and sofas.
Mrs. O'Rane, who could make a story out of nothing, poured out an
endless stream of anecdotes against herself. When dinner was over and we
left the dais for a distant view of high-hung chandeliers reflected
softly in the gleaming surface of the long refectory table, I could not
but be reminded of the Grail scene in "Parsifal."

The discordant note, the one persistently discordant note, was struck
by Beresford. Alien in mind from the rest of us, he neither forgave nor
forgot the contemptuous toe which had once searched his body for signs
of breakage; and after dinner he withdrew to a far divan and spent the
evening conversing in whispers with Mrs. O'Rane, who sat by him on a
footstool, while he played with her long amber necklace. The rest of us
reverted to a wholly undergraduate disputation, led by O'Rane on the
theme of my own unexpected fortune and developed by me into a
disquisition on education and the art of healing, though every question
and view was put forward in the hope of making my host expound his own
philosophy.

"You can't get efficiency without organisation," Grayle insisted as we
laid the lessons of the war to heart. "Nothing can hold together without
discipline. Look at Germany."

For myself, I have always regarded German organisation as the
over-advertised co-ordination of the largest number of second-rate
intelligences, but the criticism was taken from me by Beresford, who
interrupted his own conversation to inform the room at large that it was
one thing to teach a man how to shoot and quite another to be sure that
he did not end up by shooting his own officers. Mrs. O'Rane held up one
finger and pursed her lips, only to let them break a moment later into a
smile.

"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said
O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind--with
Government sanction--to some one weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ
would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organisation Society, all
the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the
incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency
frightens me."

Whether he was speaking seriously or in paradox, he had struck a note of
idealism which jarred on Grayle, who threw away his cigar half-smoked.

"If we don't learn our lesson out of this war, we don't deserve to win
it," he answered, reaching for his stick.

"But what is the lesson?" O'Rane asked, more of himself than of us. "Do
you men find that you think best at night?" he went on reflectively.
"There's less distraction ... and I'm always thinking at night now. I
would say that every man who comes out of this war alive is a reprieved
man and that we don't deserve to win it unless we learn that the only
crime in all the world is cruelty.... If we can't affect others, we can
at least affect ourselves. It's no use waiting for an act of parliament
to make you humane; if you're prepared to jump into the river to save a
child from drowning, you must be prepared to jump through a window to
save it from starving." He shook his head and turned to me. "But how
you're going to teach that, sir, even with your million a year to endow
schools.... The Church has had Peter's keys for nearly two thousand
years, but how many of us would literally pick a man out of the street,
turn on the hot water for him, lend him a razor and a rig-out, keep him
in funds till his ship comes home...." As he paused, I looked beyond him
to the sofa where Beresford lay idly fingering Mrs. O'Rane's amber
beads. "Of course it's all figurative and the gorgeous imagery of the
East and that sort of thing, but I don't know how any man could remain a
professing Christian for two minutes if he didn't believe that Christ
would bathe the feet of the first tramp on the road. That's far more
important to the human race than the Crucifixion. But then Christ was
always poor, and you can't begin to be charitable until you've known
what it means to be poor." His voice sank and grew silent. "I'm boring
you, Grayle!" he exclaimed penitently, as a boot creaked on the polished
floor.

"I must be getting home," was the answer, following hot-foot on an
ill-suppressed yawn. "Boring me, indeed? Enjoyed it all immensely." He
got up and walked towards Mrs. O'Rane, to whom he bade an elaborate
good-bye, while I followed slowly behind, wondering how such a woman
ever came to marry such a man. "I shan't see you this side of Christmas,
I suppose?"

She looked up a little negligently without releasing Beresford's hand.

"But I thought I was dining with you on Friday?"

"I understood you were going to Melton."

Mrs. O'Rane's expression became blank.

"I must think about this," she said. "Yes. I don't know how long it'll
take me to tidy up things here.... Oh, I shall certainly be in London on
Friday. David darling, you understand that I can't possibly get away at
a moment's notice--any more than you can."

Her husband nodded.

"Come whenever it suits you," he said, as he walked on ahead to open the
door for us.

Grayle lingered behind for a moment in the middle of the room.

"You mustn't stay on my account," he said to Mrs. O'Rane. "It won't be a
_party_, you know."

There was a moment's silence; then she laughed provocatively and gave a
mischievous, sideways glance at Beresford, which only Grayle and I saw.

"Jealous?" I heard.

"Not a bit. I shouldn't like you to come, though, if you were simply
going to be bored."

"Oh, if you'd rather I didn't come, I won't."

I passed into the street and out of earshot. As I shook hands with
O'Rane, Grayle joined us, and we walked towards the House on the
look-out for a taxi. He was silent at first and then started to discuss
the evening _communiqué_ from the Front. I could not help wondering
whether he, too, in middle-aged company under the penetrating chill of
an autumn mist realised that it was beneath his dignity to be flirting
with O'Rane's young wife and doubly ridiculous to be taking it seriously
and devoting an evening's ill-humour to the enterprise.

"Do you care about dining on Friday?" he asked me suddenly. "Mrs.
O'Rane will be there, and I'll rope in some more people."


3

Ever since his return from South Africa, Grayle had occupied a small old
house in Milford Square, with a bleak, discouraged garden bounded at the
far end by a private garage. I always wondered how he confined himself
in so small a space, for his turbulent flaxen head seemed to scrape
every ceiling and it was impossible for anyone to pass him on the stairs
or in the doorway or corridor. When Guy Bannerman was required at the
last moment, as now, to fill an unexpected gap, his loose-knit,
centrifugal body seemed to take up every cubic foot of space not already
appropriated to Grayle's use. But as a rule Guy was not allowed to leave
the big work-room over the garage where he covered himself and his
clothes in three different shades of ink and industriously "got up" his
master's subjects and wrote his master's speeches, while Grayle himself
devoted his talents to cultivating personal relationships, or, as his
enemies would say, to intriguing, from a superstition that, if he ever
let slip a conspiracy, it might not return to him again.

The party was small, the dinner perfectly cooked and served. This, at
least, I had learned to expect from Grayle.

Mrs. O'Rane was on one side of me, and I asked how soon she was going to
Melton, as I had shortly to attend my first meeting of the governing
body. To my surprise I heard that she was not going at present.

"You see, there's my Belgian work," she explained, "and Peter can't walk
yet, and I can't very well leave Mr. Oakleigh to the care of the
servants. Besides I've got an awful lot of other things to do." She
nodded across the table at Lady Barbara Neave. "Mr. Lane's written a
duologue, and Babs and I are acting in it at the Regency. And I've got a
stall at the Albert Hall in November, and I'm sure to be wanted for the
Imperial Hospital Fund _tableaux_. They can't get on without us, can
they, Babs darling?" Lady Barbara jerked her fair head quickly and
returned to her conversation with young Lane. "David was quite right,
too; I should be at a loose end at Melton."

Her reasons flowed easily, but they were not consistent with her earlier
attitude.

"I thought you'd fixed it up the other night," I said.

"No. We had another talk after you'd gone. It's only three months, and,
if he really wants me--" She broke off, leaving me to surmise that she
was engaging in a trial of strength with her husband. "This is quite a
pre-war dinner, isn't it? I love dining with Colonel Grayle; he's one of
the few people who hasn't got the war on the brain. I do get so tired of
war-talk, war-economies, war-work. I wish the thing would end, but
Colonel Grayle says it will never end while the present government's in
power; and Peter says there'll be a revolution when it _does_ end, so
it's a cheerful look-out either way. Don't you think Peter's improved
since he fell in love with me?" She turned to look down the table with
the rapid movement of an animal, and the lamps seemed to strike sparks
of gold from her closely coiled brown hair. "It takes people different
ways; Colonel Grayle will hardly speak to me to-night, just because I
invited him to dinner and then forgot all about it."

"Mrs. O'Rane," I said, "may I tell you that you talk a great deal of
nonsense?"

She darted a glance at me and then opened her eyes very wide, drawing
down the corners of her mouth.

"Ah, you're hating me now! And I thought you were surrendering to my
well-known charm. I _have_ got an incredible amount of charm, haven't
I?"

"We were talking about Melton," I reminded her.

"George--our friend George Oakleigh, I mean; he's known me all my
life--," she went on, imperturbably munching salted almonds, "George
says that, as part of his education, every man ought to marry me for
just one month."

"Actually you've been married two and a half, haven't you?" I enquired.
"Perhaps you haven't arrived at the full inwardness of George's
criticism."

She pouted like a child under reproof.

"I suppose you both mean something horrid." Her eyes lit up
mischievously. "I must tell George I've found an ally for him. He's
always rather loved me, but he says quite definitely that he never
wanted to marry me even for a week. He's always telling me so; that's
why we're such friends. I'm afraid you'll never even _rather_ love me;
and I'm ready to take _such_ a lot of trouble with you."

Mrs. O'Rane's voice is faultlessly clear; I noticed a lull in the
conversation and discovered that she and I were performing a duologue
for the diversion of our fellow-guests and the exasperation of our host.

"Has George told you that you think about yourself too much?" I asked,
as a self-conscious murmur rose once more around us.

"Oh, if you want a list of my bad qualities, go to your niece. I'm not
such a success with serious people, and Yolande talks about 'Ministers,'
when she means 'the Government,' and '25 George II,' when she wants to
quote some musty old law; and she considers herself a political hostess
because she once bribed the Committee of the Aborigines Protection
Society to meet the Governor of the Seychelles at dinner. Yolande would
start a salon on one poet and two private secretaries! Oh, I know she's
your niece, but you can't help that." She paused to draw breath. "George
only thinks that I'm second-rate."

"I think that you're deliberately second-rate," I said. "Which is a
pity. If you'd ever got to grips with life, if you'd suffered or been in
love----"

"D'you mean that I'm not in love with David?"

"You're still trying on emotions in a room full of mirrors. By the way,
we went through all this candour and self-absorption in the 'nineties,
and I think people did it better then. If you'll take advice from a
comparative stranger, twice your age, drop all this patter about this
man and that being in love with you."

Mrs. O'Rane became suddenly majestic.

"You mean I'm behaving disloyally to David?" she demanded.

Her majesty was as superficial and unconvincing as everything else about
her.

"My dear young lady, if you must try these airs and graces, don't try
them on me," I begged, watching curiously to see whether there was any
criticism she would resent so long as it was focussed on her.

She turned slowly away with everything of affronted dignity except its
essence, exactly as I had expected her to do. A moment later she turned
to me again, but by that time Lady Maitland, whose vigorous head and
neck always makes me think of a lioness that has been rolling in French
chalk, had first asked me to find a place in my office for her third
boy, who was leaving school at Christmas and seemed too delicate for the
army, though he was exceptionally quick at figures--just the man that
the Treasury wanted--and then enquired what I knew of the young
Beresford who was staying at "The Sanctuary." She would like me to bring
him to see her as soon as he was able to get out. He was a poet, she
understood; very wrong-headed about the war, but a good talker and
interesting to meet.... She had a small party on Thursday; that man
Christie, who had been removed forcibly from the House for calling the
Speaker a liar and refusing to withdraw, a ritualistic clergyman who was
in conflict with the Court of Arches, an obscure traveller who had
proceeded on foot from Loanda to Port Sudan, the managing director of
the Broadway music-hall and a novelist whose name she had forgotten.

(I may here say that I went and was given the opportunity of stroking
all the lions' necks twelve hours before the proletariat caught sight of
them and of trying to explain Lady Maitland to several little knots of
bewildered Scandinavian and Dutch delegates and some self-conscious and
incorruptible Labour Members who had either resigned from the Ministry
or hoped to get into it. What Lady Maitland thought of the lions, they
and we knew at once; what the lions thought of Lady Maitland they had
hardly time to formulate before being hurried away to tea at Ross House,
dinner with old Lady Pentyre and supper at Mrs. Carmichael's. I have
found it easier never to refuse anything to Lady Maitland, but I
hesitate to reckon how many times in a political crisis I have been
persuaded to lead political aspirants to school. When O'Shaunessy was
returned as a Sinn Feiner and refused to take his seat, I, who had met
him in America five and twenty years before, was deputed to bring him to
luncheon and Federal Home Rule with the Carmichaels, dinner and a
united-Ireland-in-the-face-of-the-enemy with the Duchess of Ross. There
was to have been a patient search for compromise at Lady Pentyre's next
day, but O'Shaunessy shook his head at me over the brim of his tumbler
and confided that these people gave you too much talk and too little to
drink.)

"You'd better get Mrs. O'Rane to bring Beresford," I said. "I hardly
know him."

"Someone must get hold of him before it's too late," Lady Maitland
continued gravely, and I could see that he was going to be adopted,
whether he liked it or not. "I hear he's got great ability, and it's all
misdirected."

"I'd never heard of him before," I confessed. "But then I don't read
modern poetry."

"I heard of him from our host--this is between ourselves, of course--;
there was some question of prosecuting him again for one of his
pamphlets." She raised her voice to demand confirmation of Grayle, but
he would only shake his head rather irritably at her want of discretion
and say that it was not in the province of his department. "I must talk
to dear Sonia about him," she went on, "and we'll arrange a little
meeting."

Not only have I led promising statesmen by the hand, I have myself of
late been alternately schooled and courted in a way that was hardly
known to me before the war. It is partly due, I suppose, to the
suspended animation of the Caucus, partly to the increased number of
groups and their social backers. As Lady Maitland convoyed the other
women to the drawing-room, Grayle threw his sound leg across the
shattered knee and told me he was not at all satisfied about our
reinforcements. At that, after but five weeks in England, I knew what
was coming. Guy Bannerman, with the deep, baying voice of a hound,
supplied the dwindling figures of the daily returns, I criticised the
waste of resources in men and ships on secondary fields of war, Grayle
opined that the country would never appreciate that it was at war until
every man was mobilised in the field, the shipyard or the shop, and
Maitland took the safe but irritating and unhelpful line that Kitchener
knew what he was about and that we must leave it to him.

I preferred to move away and talk to young Lane about his new play, but
Grayle quickly recalled me with an exhortation to join him and his
friends in their effort to galvanise the Government to action. It was
the first of a long series of appeals which terminated a year later with
the unblushing bribe of an office which I had as little fitness or right
to receive as Grayle to offer. I was content to take refuge in
Maitland's advice to leave it to the Government (alternatively to "trust
the P. M."; a surprising political retrogression for a man of his
antecedents), only adding that one Government should not have to
shoulder single responsibility for the joint blunders of all the Allies.

"It's something to cut your losses," said Grayle shortly and with an air
of disappointment, "to drop a mistaken policy when it's proved to be
mistaken. That's what I want to see done; and that's what this gang of
yours won't do. You watch out; France and Russia will make a separate
peace, if we don't pull our weight. Let's come up-stairs."

On entering the drawing-room, Guy Bannerman strolled to the fire and
entered into conversation with Lady Barbara Neave. Left with a choice of
Lady Maitland and Mrs. O'Rane, Grayle pulled up a chair beside Lady
Maitland, while Mrs. O'Rane looked at him like a chess-player
considering his opponent's last move and then smilingly made room for me
on the sofa by her side.

"I thought you were never coming up," she said. "I'm going in a minute,
but Lady Maitland tells me she wants to meet Peter, and I waited to find
out if you'd come, too. Any day next week."

"I shall be delighted," I said. "Friday's my only free night."

"Good. It will be just the four of us. Dear Sir Maurice is such a bore,
poor darling; I really _can't_ invite him. Now I must go. Shall we say
somewhere about eight?"

As she got up, I looked at my watch and found that, for all the
excellence of the dinner and the time that we were charged with spending
over our wine, it was not yet ten. The Maitlands gave no hint of
leaving, nor did Mrs. O'Rane vouchsafe a reason for her early departure.
I saw her shaking hands with Grayle and heard him icily asking her to
wait while he telephoned for a cab. With equal polite iciness of tone
she assured him that she would find one in the Brompton Road. I saw her
smiling mischievously to herself, as she walked out of the room;
Grayle's smile, on his return, was mysterious, and I surmised that
another trial of strength was in progress.

As we stood on the door-step an hour later, I asked him if we were
meeting at "The Sanctuary" the following week.

"She said something about it," he answered, "but I shan't go."

"You're too old for this sort of nonsense, Grayle," I told him.

"What sort of nonsense?"

But before I could answer, a taxi crawled invitingly past the door.


4

I have never been able to cope collectedly with a verbal invitation and
I am now too old to acquire the art. Otherwise I should have found an
excuse for leaving my intimacy with Mrs. O'Rane where it was. I had
dined the first time at "The Sanctuary" for the sake of her husband; he
interested me, baffled me, refused to let me get to grips with him, and
I did not intend to be beaten. His wife, I felt, for all her surface
fascination and vitality, was rather a waste of time. And her retinue of
fashionable actresses, elderly men about town and Guards subalterns was
intellectually too exotic for me. I determined that my second dinner
with her should be my last.

The door was unlocked, when I arrived, and Beresford was in undisputed
possession of the long, warm library, though several large boxes of
chocolates, an earthenware jar of expensive cigarettes, a parcel of
books half out of their paper and string and a profusion of hot-house
flowers dispelled any rash assumption that Mrs. O'Rane was being
neglected by her admirers. And, whilst I waited for her, Beresford told
me that the original party of four had multiplied itself by three. After
a pause, in which he tried not to seem self-conscious, he asked whether
I knew the O'Ranes well and rather wistfully volunteered his opinion
that there was no real sympathy between them and that she was unhappy
and unappreciated.

"I sometimes wonder why she married him," he murmured.

"Presumably because they were in love with each other," I said.

He shook his head with judicial gravity and an air of profounder
knowledge than a middle-aged, unsympathetic man like me could hope to
attain.

"I don't think they're happy. I should like to see her happier, she's
made such a difference in my life. Women mean something more to me,
somehow, since I met her ..." he confided, with a boy's curious passion
to discuss his emotional state with anyone who will listen.

"She hasn't yet learned the difference between happiness and pleasure,"
I told him.

The new tempestuous disorder which the room presented in O'Rane's
absence--paper and string and half-opened parcels abandoned when a more
pressing call made itself heard--struck me as being typical of the
woman. And she was late for dinner, which I consider impolite in a
hostess.

Beresford must have seen a hint of disapproval in my face. "Has it
occurred to you that all this racket is _deliberate_, that she wants to
live in the present ...?"

He relapsed into silence and sat supporting his lean, long face with one
hand. I felt Mrs. O'Rane had civilised him to some purpose and that,
unless he lapsed from civilisation within the next quarter of an hour,
Lady Maitland would find that her rebel-hunt had been in vain. I also
felt that the sooner Mrs. O'Rane rejoined her husband, ceased dining
with Grayle, going to the theatre with young Guardsmen and giving
Beresford the idea that she was lonely, the better for all and
especially for her.

Deganway and Pentyre, who evidently knew Mrs. O'Rane's ways better than
I did, arrived ten minutes later. We were still awaiting our hostess,
when Lady Maitland sailed in and, dispensing with introductions, opened
fire at a distance of twenty paces.

"Darling Sonia not dressed yet? But, then, no one's ever known her in
time for anything. How do you do, Mr. Stornaway? I suppose this is Mr.
Beresford? Now, Mr. Beresford, I want to have a long talk with you; I
hear you're a very original young man and I want to know why you're a
pro-German."

Thus encouraged, Beresford roused himself to demonstrate the difference
between sympathy with German atrocities and antagonism to war and the
system of government which made it possible. I, who have heard him for a
moment haranguing street loafers and have myself engaged in ding-dong
argument with him, little thought to see him so completely routed by the
sonorous enquiries of Lady Maitland, who put a question, announced
parenthetically that she was a woman with no nonsense about her and
flung out a second question before he could answer the first. Deganway
stood polishing his eyeglass and murmuring sagaciously "Yes! Yes!
_That's_ what our good pacifists never condescend to explain." Pentyre
lit a cigarette and confessed to hunger. Two more young officers, whose
names I never heard and whom I have never met again, drifted in with a
"Sonia not down yet?" and also lit cigarettes. I was glad when Mrs.
O'Rane arrived to end Beresford's agony.

Without a word of apology for her lateness, she fluttered like a
butterfly into our midst, brushed Lady Maitland's cheek with her lips
and pirouetted slowly on her toes like a ballet-dancer.

"How d'you like my new dress, children?" she enquired. "Say you do or
you don't, but please don't try to find reasons, or you're sure to go
wrong. Peter's the only one here who knows anything about colour, Lady
Maitland, and everything I wear has to meet with his approval."

She stopped her pirouetting in front of his sofa and stood, panting
slightly and with shining eyes, holding her skirt out on either side and
courtesying low. Beresford appraised it slowly, his head on one side,
fingering the stuff and taking in every detail from the gold and silver
band round her hair to the silk stockings and gilt slippers. An
embarrassed maid awaited her opportunity of announcing dinner, Mrs.
O'Rane threw her head back and smiled at me over her shoulder, with
parted lips.

"Someone appreciates me," she laughed. For the first time I realised
what her young and not very sinful vanity must miss by never being able
to hear a word of pride or praise from her husband. Sonia O'Rane always
reminded me of a child who cannot build a castle in the sand without
dragging someone by the wrist to come and admire it. "I don't think you
did that night at Colonel Grayle's," she said to me. "In fact it was
very forgiving of me to ask you. I've never been so found fault with by
anyone except David, and he's given it up since we married. I sometimes
wonder whether it is because he thinks I'm perfect or only not worth
bothering about now he's got me."

"I only recall saying that you talked a great deal of nonsense," I put
in. "I stand by that."

"Well, that's a nice thing to say when I'd refused three invitations
from people who were just dying to hear me talk. However, I suppose I'm
a cultivated taste."

"And you only invited me in the hope of making me retract," I added.

"Let's have some dinner," she suggested, avoiding my challenge.

She spread out two gleaming white arms with the movement of a bird
taking wing and waltzed to the table, calling to us over her shoulder to
sort ourselves anyhow; the order did not matter as there were ten men
and two women. As the others stood back for me to make my choice, I put
myself on her left with Lady Maitland on the other side.

"When do you go to Melton?" I asked conscientiously, as we settled to
our places.

She pointed a finger at Beresford.

"I can't leave my ewe lamb yet," she answered. "D'you know, last night I
was up with him until nearly three, considering which I think I'm
looking remarkably fresh to-night.... Besides, David hasn't _asked_ me
to come...."

Her clear and slightly over-emphatic voice travelled disconcertingly as
far as Lady Maitland, who enquired with some surprise, "Does Mr.
Beresford live here?" She was answered with a mischievous nod. "My dear,
you know I always say right out whatever's in my mind; well, I don't
think you ought to be doing that. With that blessed creature of a
husband here----"

"But he _brought_ Peter here and _kept_ him here and finally _left_ him
here--whether I liked it or not, Peter dear. Besides, darling Lady
Maitland, I have Mr. Oakleigh to chaperon us, and George drops in every
few hours to see that I'm not disgracing his precious David.... George
once said that I atoned for the number of my flirtations by the
excellence of my technique," she went on irrelevantly. "I think he'd
just fallen out of love with me and pretended that he never _had_ been
in love with me and never would be. You think I'm not good enough for
David, don't you?" she demanded of me. "I think he got the wife he
deserved, and he'll tell you that's the finest compliment anyone can pay
him."

"I'll ask him, if I remember. I'm going to Melton next week. Have you
any message for him?"

She deliberated with one finger pressed to her lips.

"Tell him--exactly what you think of me," she suggested with dancing
eyes. "It'll amuse him much more than a message."

"Are you going down to him this term?"

She shook her head.

"I'm too busy, and he doesn't want me, or he'd have sent for me long
ago. Not that I should have gone, of course...." She glanced quickly
round to satisfy herself that the others were absorbed in their own
conversations; then lowered her voice and laid her hand on my sleeve.
"Mr. Stornaway, you _do_ agree with me that it's absolute rot for him to
be there, don't you? Old Mr. Oakleigh's offered him any money he
wants--again and again; I've got five hundred a year from father; he
could wipe out what he calls his debts and live here with the utmost
ease. And he ought to be in London, he ought to be in the House; there
are all sorts of jobs that he could get in the City.... If you want a
message, tell him that he must choose Melton or me," she went on with a
pout and a rising voice. "If he hasn't chucked Melton by Christmas, I
shall chuck him. Tell him that I shall elope to Sloane Square--I don't
believe _any_one's ever eloped to Sloane Square, but it's the handiest
place in the world; even the Hounslow and Barking non-stop trains stop
there,--so sweet of them, I always think--I shall go there with Peter
and live in his flat and star in revue where I shall be an amazing draw,
you know; and Colonel Grayle would scowl at me from the stage box, and,
darling Lady Maitland, you'd boom me and invite fashionable clergymen to
meet me at lunch, and George would have his car at the stage door to
take me home--I don't know that I _shall_ wait till Christmas."

She paused for lack of breath and looked delightedly round the table. My
expression, I imagine, was bored, Lady Maitland's perplexed; only poor
Beresford's was unaffectedly pained.

"Mr. Stornaway's quite right," Lady Maitland said, when she had
collected herself. "You talk a great deal of nonsense."

"I mean it, though."

"Rubbish, my dear."

Yet I believe that both she and I felt a current of discontent running
underneath the froth of nonsense. Perhaps we shewed it, perhaps Lady
Maitland reconsidered her judgement, for, when Deganway sat down to play
rag-time after dinner and Mrs. O'Rane kicked the rugs aside and began
dancing with Pentyre, she observed at impressive intervals----

"Darling Sonia is always in such spirits".... "I don't think it's quite
the thing for a young man like that--quite good-looking, you know--to be
living here; Mr. O'Rane will have a great deal to answer for, if there's
any unpleasantness, and you can give him that message from _me_." ...
"Tell him a husband's place is beside his wife.... But he must make her
a home where she can live. I forget whether you were here that
night--yes, you were! Well, Lady Dainton's quite right.... Just like the
casual-ward of a workhouse...." "Of course, her mother brought her up
atrociously".... "I really hope that she's going to have a family; it
would just make the difference."

A week later I motored to Melton for the Governors' meeting. Town and
school alike had become almost unrecognisable since my last visit three
or four years earlier. Leagues of huts, miles of tents, acres of pickets
stretched from the outskirts of Melton to the fringe of Swanley Forest;
the drowsy cathedral town was alive with thundering lorries, and the
billeting officer's handiwork was visible at eight windows out of ten.
My car crawled apprehensively through the crowded streets and up the
hill to a school which was half as it had been founded three hundred
years before, half as it had been converted into a military academy
during the last fifteen months. Great Court echoed with the clatter and
scrape of hob-nailed boots, as the corps fell in and marched off to
parade on the practice-ground; one group of signallers on the steps of
the headmaster's house waved frantically to another group by the
entrance to Great School, and, as I wandered into the Cloisters to kill
time before the hour of our meeting, the Green was filled with pigmy
recruits, learning their squad-drill from a husky but intensely
business-like young sergeant. Only a handful of obvious weaklings wore
the old conventional straw hat, grey trousers and dark jacket, and the
open door of the Common Room at Big Gate shewed not more than two-thirds
of the staff in cap and gown.

"War takes on a new horror and hopelessness, when you know that the
schools of France and Germany present the same sight," I said to Dr.
Burgess.

Our meeting was over, and he was conducting me round the unaging school
buildings which I was thenceforth to hold in joint trust. The company
drill on the practice-ground was giving way to a final parade, and we
watched four hundred young soldiers from twelve to eighteen march erect
and with set faces to the Armoury and from the Armoury to Great School
for a lantern lecture on the Dardanelles expedition. A couple of dozen
non-commissioned officers had fallen out and were awaiting a course in
map-reading with their commanding officer.

"Thank Heaven! it will all be over before most of these boys are old
enough to go out and stop bullets," I added.

Dr. Burgess stroked his long beard and shook a mournful head. "Some were
yet in our midst when the appointed season came," he said, pointing to
an already long Roll thumb-tacked to a wire-covered notice-board. "And
they that have returned----" He sighed deeply. "David O'Rane enjoins me
to say that he is within."

We shook hands at the door of a bachelor set of chambers in the
Cloisters, and Dr. Burgess strode back to his house, murmuring
mournfully into his beard. I knocked and entered to find O'Rane
seated--as I might have expected to find a man with his physical dislike
for chairs--in the middle of the floor with the big, patient head of his
Saint Bernard on his knees. Miss Merryon was writing at a table in the
window, and a low wicker-work couch by the fire was timidly occupied by
a flushed and disputatious malefactor. She welcomed me by name to give
the cue before making an excuse to withdraw. I apologised to O'Rane for
disturbing him, but he dismissed the boy and turned with a smile and
sigh of relief.

"We'd both had enough of it," he confessed. "That young man thought fit
to play a practical joke on Miss Merryon, so I've been taking his moral
education in hand, appealing to his self-interest."

He felt for a box of cigarettes and threw them to me. "Well?" I said.

"I remember getting held up at Bâle some years ago," he explained. "I
was on my way home from Italy and I missed the eleven o'clock connection
to Paris. There were crowds of us there--some on our way back from
Italy, like me, some from the winter sports in Switzerland--all ages and
races, on every kind of business or pleasure. The next train to Paris
left the following day, and we had to reconcile ourselves to an
uncomfortable night. Well, I've tried so many varieties of discomfort
that I'm hardened and philosophical; I imagine most people would call
these quarters uncomfortable, but they're nothing like what they were
before Sonia took them in hand last summer."

He waved proudly at a pair of massive, discoloured velvet curtains, a
bamboo overmantel and occasional table, wicker chairs half-buried in
punt cushions and a threadbare carpet tattooed by generations of burning
matches. I put up with the same sort of thing at Trinity, but I was then
nineteen and I had no wife to accommodate. Mrs. O'Rane, I imagine, was
not schooled to discomfort.

"I got a good deal of amusement and interest out of watching the
others," he went on. "The French were the worst--voluble, excited,
indignant, grabbing the best places and all the food they could lay
hands on in the buffet--the way they always behave when they're
travelling; the next worse were the Germans--they were ruder and more
inconsiderate than the French, but not nearly so efficient. The
Americans all set themselves to westernise Europe and started getting
off protests by cable to Paris, ordering special trains and booking
three times the accommodation available at any hotel. The English were
bored, aloof, taking themselves and their troubles very seriously and
refusing to share them with anyone. Well, when the last bedroom had been
snapped up, there were still enough of us benighted to overcrowd the
waiting-rooms and buffet, we were all suffering from a sense of
grievance, and there wasn't enough food to go round. I got wedged into a
corner with a plate of meat and looked on. One of the Englishmen
commented loudly on the noise that a German made in eating soup. The
comment was understood, so the German laid himself out to shew the sort
of noise he _could_ make when he tried. The Englishman wrapped himself
in a ferocious dignity, finished his meal and lit a cigar, sending a
cloud of smoke in the face of one of the Italians. My attention was then
attracted by a brawl in the middle of the buffet; someone had
imprudently left his seat to forage for food, and someone else had
promptly bagged it. As they bickered and gesticulated and finally pushed
each other about and the onlookers took sides and joined in, I said to
myself, 'Lord God! this buffet is just like the world, and these fools
are behaving just as we all behave, and we should all despise and laugh
at ourselves as much as I'm laughing now, if we had any detachment,
self-criticism, humour, logic or God's common sense.'"

O'Rane's black eyes lit up at the memory of the scene.

"I was telling that story to our young friend," he continued with his
baffling smile. "Chivalry? Nothing doing. Moral sanctions and first
causes? Nothing doing. _He_ didn't believe in God, _he_ wasn't going to
Hell, if he misbehaved himself, so why in the name of reason should he
bother?... But I should think I fixed him over my Bâle story.... We had
a hideous night (it was too cold to go and sulk outside--which made the
symbolism more perfect; you can't sulk outside this world, unless you're
prepared to cut your throat); and we might have made it quite
tolerable, if only we'd had a little imagination and kindliness, if we'd
struck an international bargain and surrendered the privilege of eating
soup noisily in return for immunity from cigar smoke in the eyes, if the
chairs had only been given to the women and old men, if someone had only
lent a hand to a poor boy who was coughing himself sick with asthma...."
He whistled reflectively between his teeth for a moment. "Life's like a
club, sir; there are rules and conventions and an endless mass of
tradition--the things we don't do; but the rules were made so long ago,
the conventions only aim at an irreducible minimum. Even so, it's better
than treating the world like a company trading for profit, but we must
modernise the rules. As you know, I always want to delete 'efficiency'
from the English language; efficiency in the Bâle buffet would have
meant that an organised party of four, back to back, could have downed
the rest, grabbed all the food and cleared the till.


  "Keep your temper. Never answer (that was why they spat and swore).
  "Don't hit first, but move together (there's no hurry) to the door.
  "Back to back, and facing outward while the linguist tells 'em how--
  "'Nous sommes allong a notre batteau, nous ne voulong pas un     row.'
  "So the hard, pent rage ate inward, till some idiot went too far ...
  "'Let 'em have it!' and they had it, and the same was serious war,
  "Fist, umbrella, cane, decanter, lamp and beer-mug, chair and boot--
  "Till behind the fleeing legions rose the long, hoarse yell for loot."


O'Rane's luminous black eyes were gleaming with mischief. Remembering my
first sight of him, when he fought for his life in a Vienna café, I
wondered whether any wife, reinforced by any mother, could curb his
restless yearning after action, were it blacking the eye of an oppressor
or slinging a disabled man on to his shoulders.... For all his
cosmopolitan spirit I could not fit him into the Byzantine world in
which Lady Dainton had brought up her daughter nor into the Merveilleuse
society into which her daughter had gravitated.

"It's--it's _really_ only a very big club," he murmured.

"Full of most undesirable members," I suggested. The Bâle story, I
felt, would be wasted on Vincent Grayle.

"They're not acclimatised yet. Now, you'd open the door for the most
undesirable member of the Eclectics, if he had a game leg, yet you laugh
at me if I pick up an injured man in the street and carry him home for
treatment. God's name! Where's the difference? _You're_ not acclimatised
yet, you see. It's to your interest, too.... How is Beresford, by the
way? Sonia's the most undutiful wife in the way of writing; I suppose
it's natural enough, really; she doesn't like having her letters to me
read by anyone else."

I never forgave the old men who advised and hampered me, pinning me to a
career for which I was unsuited and quarrelling with me when I broke
away from it. In my turn I have tried to refrain from advising and
hampering the younger generation--only to find that the younger
generation sometimes makes an astonishing fool of itself and that it is
harder and harder to sit silent and unintervening when someone whom I
like is on the verge of falling downstairs in the dark or of having his
pocket picked. Commenting on the fact that he was at Melton, while his
wife was in London, I warned O'Rane that, with their double portion of
wilfulness and energy, he was taking unnecessary risks with his married
life.

"I've not got much to go on," I admitted, "but that supper-party you
brought me to...."

"That was exceptional," he objected. "And they were Sonia's friends. You
were the only one I invited."

I reminded him of Beresford, Miss Merryon and perhaps three more obvious
recipients of his charity. He coloured slightly and told me that it was
an article of faith with him not to refuse help to anyone who asked.
Then I could see that he was not being honest with himself, for he
shifted his ground, concentrated on Beresford and asserted that his wife
liked him to be in the house.

"But do you think he ought to be there?" I asked, following him on to
the ground which he had chosen. "They're both young, attractive; your
wife's a very fascinating and beautiful woman. She can take care of
herself, of course.... It was in fact commented on at dinner the other
night."

O'Rane wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction.

"He's company for Sonia," he said weakly.

"_You'd_ be company for her, if she came here or you went to live in
London. Much better company, too," I added.

My tone may have betrayed more than I intended to convey, for O'Rane
laughed.

"You don't like her friends? _I_ don't care a great lot for some of
them, but you must remember that she gave up a good deal to marry me--a
very full life--and I can't give her much. What I can give her is the
freest possible hand. That's why I haven't pressed her to come down
here, though, God knows, it's lonely enough without her. By Easter, if
not Christmas----"

"Won't you have given this up by Christmas?" I asked.

His face grew tired and perplexed, and he ran his fingers impatiently
through his hair.

"I don't know. I owe the devil of a lot of money; and I should be damned
body and soul, if I lived on charity when I could earn my own
livelihood. We'll discuss it at Christmas. In the meantime, can you stay
and dine with me in Common Room?"

His invitation was a reminder that I had already stayed perilously long,
if I was to get back to London in time for a dinner engagement.

"See me to my car," I said, as I put on my coat. "Look here, don't think
I'm a mere busybody. You and your wife are such a pair of children that
you mustn't mind a man twice your age telling you, if he thinks you're
behaving foolishly. I strongly advise you to throw this over at
Christmas. Now not another word."

O'Rane walked in silence through the Cloisters with one hand on the
Saint Bernard's collar. As we came into Great Court, he stopped
abruptly.

"Look here, sir; understand one thing," he began. "If you think I mind
or that I'm not grateful to you for speaking like this, I shall never
forgive you. But you say Sonia's to be trusted to take care of herself.
That's enough. If she wasn't----" He shrugged his shoulders--"she
wouldn't be worth keeping. If she fell in love with--who shall we
say?--Beresford and ran away with him, in God's name d'you think I
should want to stop her? I admit I've only been married three months,
but to me love's a thing of perfect, implicit trust. This is between
ourselves, but last week George Oakleigh came down for Founder's Day and
dropped a hint that Sonia was lunching and dining out too much
with--well, I suppose there's no harm in saying it--Grayle. As with you,
someone had commented on it at dinner. I'm afraid I couldn't pump up the
slightest indignation. Grayle's rather in love with her. So's Beresford.
So's that squeaky tame-cat, Deganway, of the Foreign Office. So's one of
my boys here--George's cousin Laurie, who firmly believes that he
brought me up to the scratch and made me propose--rather against my
will. So's young Pentyre, so's half the Brigade. If I wanted to be
jealous, sir, I'm afraid I shouldn't have time. As it is, I'm so proud
of Sonia that I glory in seeing other people proud of her, loving
her.... As for stray comments at dinner--I don't say it's right and I
don't say it's wrong, but she belongs to a very modern school which goes
its own way _without_ regarding stray comments at dinner. But so long as
we agree that she's to be trusted----?"

We had reached Big Gate, and he held out his hand to me with the
mischievous smile which I was beginning to know so well and which always
filled me with a sense of helplessness. As I looked at him with the
October wind blowing through his black hair, I reflected that he must
think me very old-fashioned to be surprised when a three-month-old wife
boasted of the men who were in love with her and her husband derived a
reflected happiness from her successes.

Driving back to London I felt that I was escaping mile by mile from a
bewildering world of serious make-believe.


5

My engagement that night was to dine with Harry Merefield and to discuss
something which, he said, he could explain better by word of mouth than
in a letter. I was intrigued by the invitation, because Merefield at
this time was of considerable account in the Foreign Office. We dined at
his Club, and, as the only other person present was Barton, who had
thrown up his work at Cambridge twelve months before and was now my
official chief in the Treasury, I divined that they contemplated a deal
in my person. The preliminaries were already settled, and, as we drank
our sherry, Merefield confided that the Foreign Office wanted me to go
out to America ostensibly to raise money for the War Charities Fund, in
reality to carry on a campaign of propaganda; my knowledge of country
and people would be invaluable and our relations had reached a point
where we could no longer afford to do nothing. Would I think over the
proposal?

"If this Press agitation goes _on_ ..." he began grimly and lapsed into
eloquent silence.

I must confess that I have never been able to understand what function
Ministers proposed that the Press should fulfil; they set up a Bureau to
control the supply of news and occasionally to restrain editorial
comment, but their interest seemed to die when once the War Office had
secured that direct military information was not to be disclosed and
that discussions and attacks should not take place round the head of
this or that commander. Valiantly they feared nothing, despondently they
hoped for nothing from a somewhat despised organisation which, despite
their contempt, believed in its own power and was capable daily of
placing the same view before every man and woman in the country until a
vague but obstinate conviction arose that "there must be something in
it." The Press with a little diplomatic flattery, might have become the
handmaid of the Government; with promptitude and vigour it could have
been emasculated to the semblance of an official bulletin. Instead,
Ministers treated it like an intrusive wasp, slapping at it with
ineffectual petulance, ducking their heads and running away when it was
angered, until Sir John Woburn and half a dozen of his fellows were left
to suggest, condemn, support and attack, to push favourite ministers and
policies, to be inspired by those same ministers and to indulge in
superficial criticism and the promulgation of half-truths which were
harder to overtake and refute than a substantial, well-defined lie.
Though never a Minister, I am afraid that I must accept my share of
responsibility, for, when the House of Commons abrogated its duty of
criticism, reform or remedy became possible only by a Press campaign.

"I don't give Woburn credit for excessive modesty," said Merefield, "but
it never occurs to him that his vile rags can have any effect abroad.
Yet, if you say a thing often enough, it gets repeated. The French and
the Russians are now beginning to ask what England's doing, what the
Navy's thinking about, and why we don't do more.... Wolff's Bureau
itself couldn't have a greater success than Woburn in making the French
believe that we're sacrificing them to preserve our own trade. We've
given America about as much ragging as she'll stand, and I want you to
sweeten things. You do know the country."

I know enough of America to feel that she has always suffered, as
Ireland suffers, from the characteristically English belief that because
two people speak a similar language they must have an identic soul and
that the Americans are a homogeneous Saxon race, estranged indeed from
an equally homogeneous parent stock by a certain insolent independence
imparted by General Washington to his turbulent followers, but Saxon in
orientation and sympathy, essentially sound at heart. When Merefield
asked me to go out, I knew that he could have found others better
qualified for the work, but at least I was a man who never expected to
find unanimity on the issues of European peace and war in New England,
purest in Saxon blood and tradition, sensitive to every European
repercussion and receptive of every thought-wave borne across the
Atlantic; in the Southern States, with their political concentration on
the negro within their gates and the Mexican without; in the North-West,
watchful of Canadian encroachments; in the Far West, with its eyes set
on a Japanese peril; in the Middle West, where the farmer of Illinois
and Iowa lives and dies without coming nearer than at a thousand miles'
distance to Pacific or Atlantic; in scattered, unassimilated lumps of
disaffected Ireland or duly prepared Germany.

"They're getting tired of hearing what 'America' ought to do," Merefield
continued. "People here won't see that there is no American people yet,
hardly an American idea, only the vaguest groping after an American
ideal. They've been snapping and snarling at Wilson over Belgium, over
the 'Lusitania', over his notes--as if he had a mixed population of a
hundred and ten millions in his _pocket_! I want you to explain that
it's only our fun. After all, they've got their own Woburns; they'll
understand."

My American friends were too numerous to allow of my accepting
Merefield's facile diagnosis and treatment. I knew then, as I had
confirmed later, that the commonest feeling in the American mind was a
quiet but affronted indignation at British ingratitude. Of the
organisations, the funds and charities, the work of humanity and succour
that had begun in America from the first day of war, not a word was said
in our press or speeches; over the hardships and inconveniences involved
by our blockade, over the sense of grievance occasioned by our
censorship of mails and cables, no sympathy was expressed or felt. When
Russia was dependent on American munitions, when English credit in
America was the hope and salvation of allied finance, we could find no
more gracious form of acknowledgement than a sneer at a so-called proud
nation which let its sons and daughters drown without protest and
shirked the sacrifices of war in order to steal trade, to sell the means
of destruction to others and to increase the ever-mounting accumulation
of wealth. I am too old and cosmopolitan to have any right to be
surprised, yet I always am in fact surprised by my countrymen's abysmal
want of imagination and international courtesy. I approached my mission
with the most unfeigned reluctance.

Merefield left me to think over his suggestion undisturbed, and before
saying good-night I told him that, if he would give me a few weeks to
order my affairs, I would gladly go for as long a time as the Foreign
Office chose to keep me. Yolande and her husband had attended to my
domestic requirements so admirably during my absence in Austria that I
had no hesitation in entrusting them to her again and in surrendering
the rest of my house for use as an office. My departmental work was
gradually transferred to other shoulders, though at one moment I feared
that the department itself was going to be extinguished. After
dissipating numberless troops on secondary operations in every corner of
the world except the western front, the Government found itself short of
reinforcements for the great offensive which was to break the German
line in the spring of 1916. The flow of volunteers was drying up, and I
heard much excited gossip about an immediate measure of conscription.
Grayle, I remembered, was very active and tried to commit me to an
organised attack on the Government; as, however, even he admitted that
no one but the Prime Minister could carry a compulsory service bill, I
told him that he must be content with anything he could get. My
department, or the younger section of it, was saved by a comic-opera
compromise whereby volunteers were encouraged to enlist on pain of being
conscribed, if they held back. To introduce a democratic note and make
the figures imposing, all my youngsters were invited to attest; to
ensure that the official machine continued in being, it was arranged
that no government servant should be called to the colours without the
leave of his departmental head. So, after a week's flutter, I was at
liberty to go.

There was no secret about the fact of my mission, and Bertrand Oakleigh
arranged a little dinner at the House to wish me good-speed. I walked
back with him to his rooms at "The Sanctuary" and looked into the
library to see if there was anyone about. George was asleep on a sofa,
but otherwise the room was deserted.

"I'm waiting to see Sonia," he yawned, as I came in.

"With any luck she's out at a dance and won't be back till about four.
I've induced Beresford to clear out, but I don't want her to be
frightened or wonder where he is."

He broke off to yawn again. I asked him how he had contrived the
eviction, and the yawn shortened into a smile.

"I didn't put it on the ground that he was falling in love with Sonia,"
he said, "because I suppose he knows that; I just told him that--a
comment had been made.... D'you know, after that dinner, dear Lady
Maitland called on me at ten next morning at the Admiralty, telling me
to use my influence? And I may say that when Lady Maitland tells me to
do a thing I do it. Well, Beresford is in the pulpy state where he'd cut
his throat if he could protect Sonia's reputation in any way, little
knowing the evergreen hardiness of that same reputation, and he went off
to his own flat. Sonia will probably be very indignant with me this
evening, but she's made her Peter much too lamb-like to be seriously
interested in him any longer. Anyway, if she isn't indignant with me for
one thing, she'll be indignant for another. And I seem to survive it
comfortably. So _that_ danger's over, though as a matter of fact there
never was any danger...." He filled a pipe and lurched wearily round the
room in search of matches. "The only danger for Sonia is from a man
who'll bully her," he drawled. "When she was engaged to Jim Loring, he
behaved like an extra lady's maid; she might still be blowing hot and
cold with Raney, if he hadn't shewn her very definitely who had the
stronger will. It was at the very beginning of the war, and he was quite
ruthless.... Last time he saw her, poor old Raney...."

"You know them both pretty well, don't you?" I asked.

"Yes. And the next question is, why did they marry? I can't answer that.
They were in love, but that's more a reason than an excuse.... Yes,
I've known 'em both for years. And for years I've tried to restrain
Sonia's destiny when I saw it going to her head. Oh, by the way,
Beresford's by no means my only success. I don't know whether Grayle's a
friend of yours, but I dislike him--always did, when I was in the House
with him--and the other day I thought it was time to interfere; you
couldn't stir a yard without running into them. This time I didn't
bother about approaching the man--that would have been too great a waste
of time,--but I talked to Sonia until she promised never to have Grayle
inside the house again and never to meet him of malice aforethought.
Which you will admit is a fairly comprehensive victory."

He looked at his watch and walked impatiently to the writing-table.

"Mrs. O'Rane seems to be a whole-time job," I commented.

"She's all that," he grunted. "Mark you, I'm fond of her in spite of
herself.... But I'm fonder of Raney, and the pair of them seem steering
for disaster.... I don't know. I may be all wrong. I'm a bachelor and
I've never had to humour a woman.... Here, I've finished this. I'll walk
with you as far as the club."

As I latched the door behind me, I asked what he thought of the life
which O'Rane had decreed for "The Sanctuary." He smiled before
answering.

"If you'd known Raney as long as I have, it would be just the thing
you'd expect of him--all taken _au grand sérieux_, too, of course. As
for Sonia, she'd consent to sleep in a doss-house, if she were doing it
for the first time--a new experience, you know. She was prepared to put
up with anything, I fancy, to get away from home and have a house of her
own; and she'd have cheerfully accepted half a room in a workman's
cottage when she married Raney. After four or five months of it, I
should think it's beginning to pall; the caravanserai life wouldn't suit
her for twenty-four hours in the day, she likes it for an hour after
dinner--for more new experiences. I think, I _think_ you'll find Raney
will have to drop it.... But I don't know.... There are five things that
are too hard for me, and the way of a maid with a man is the hardest of
them all."




CHAPTER THREE

SONIA O'RANE

     "Vanity induces men, more than reason, to act against inclination."
                        THE DUKE DE LA ROCHEFOUCALD: _Maxims_.


1

I sailed for America in December, 1915, on perhaps the most difficult
mission that I have ever undertaken. It was not expected, of course,
that the United States would enter the war against us or upset the
diplomatic equilibrium in our favour without provocation and until the
result of the elections had been seen. I went, as I have suggested, to
counteract the German propaganda, which sought to make all at least
equally responsible for the war, and also to remove some part of the bad
impression which had been left by our more unbridled journalists and our
less imaginative statesmen. The moral approbation of America was too
precious an asset to fritter away, and the purchase of material depended
on the goodwill of American financiers, the supply of munitions could be
stopped as a diplomatic reprisal.

It was perhaps unfortunate that my arrival coincided with an outburst of
new interest in the Blockade, ending with the creation of a Blockade
Ministry and the appointment of a Blockade Minister. (Harry Merefield
used to shake his head over any new interest in the Blockade. "_We_
always say that Germany must be defeated in the field, and I'm
apprehensive when the soldiers tell me that they're counting on our
starving the brutes out.") I was asked, too, at more than one meeting
how the Government of Great Britain reconciled its passionate crusade in
defence of small nationalities with its no less passionate refusal to
allow the Irish to control their own destinies. The dreary tale of the
unchecked Ulster gun-running and the appeal to Germany was rehearsed for
my benefit; and my more law-abiding Irish audiences generated
considerable heat over the presence of "the rebel Carson" in the
Cabinet.

But, if I found the work difficult, it gave me a respite from England,
where I felt that I had been watching the machine at too close quarters.
Since the day when I helped George Oakleigh to divide the world and
secure a lasting peace, our nerves had worn thin; we devoted too much
time to seeing that other people went promptly about their duties; and a
deadly personal bitterness--embodied for me in Grayle, though I do not
single him out for attack--poisoned our confidence in our own leaders. I
was glad to feel the icy wind of the Atlantic lashing my face, blowing
the cobwebs from my brain and the sour taste from my mouth, as we
rounded the last Irish headland.

During the week that I had to myself on board, sailing without lights
and zig-zagging out of reach of submarines, I put together the notes for
some of my speeches. It was extraordinarily difficult to say anything
definite. After eighteen months of hostilities and mid-way through a
second winter, there was a confident expectation that the great spring
offensive would end the war. The Austrian losses were known to be
gigantic, and it was believed that the old emperor was flirting with
peace; Germany was starving, and the moral of the German army had
notoriously broken. (Our avowedly humorous publications demonstrated
that a British soldier had still only to call "Waiter!" or to exhibit a
sausage at the end of his bayonet to have a swarm of German prisoners on
their knees to him.)

Yet, beneath all our confidence ran a chilling current of doubt. The
spring offensive would be launched in Belgium or France, but the clubs
and dinner tables, the military correspondents--it was whispered, the
Cabinet itself--were divided into "westerners" and "easterners."

"If _we_ could hold up the Huns at Ypres," George had said to me
gloomily on my last day in England, "_they_ can hold us up equally well,
when the proportion of fighting strength has been reversed. I hoped in
the early days of the Dardanelles that we were going to knock away the
buttresses and bring down the whole structure of the Central Empires,
detach Turkey and Bulgaria, you know, carve a way into the Hungarian
plains. Now I'm by no means comfortable...."

George, with many others, was not destined to think of the Dardanelles
with an easy mind until news reached the Eclectic Club one day at
luncheon that Gallipoli had been miraculously evacuated, and a sigh of
relief rose over London, to be followed by a feeling that, though we had
escaped once, our luck might desert us at the second tempting. More and
more I was hearing the criticism that there were too many amateur
strategists in the Cabinet with no one to check the careless inspiration
which led them to fling their armies to Sulva Bay or Salonica, while the
thinning reserves on the western front impelled the Government inch by
reluctant inch to conscription.

And every time that the Blockade bit deeper into the puffy German flesh,
every time that the mark exchange fell, every time that the numbers of
enemy killed, wounded, missing and prisoners satisfied our military
ready-reckoners that the last reserves were under fire and that the
inevitable collapse would ring and echo through the world within so many
days or weeks, the enemy retaliated with the wriggle of a Japanese
wrestler, flung his adversary away and surmounted him. Servia had been
overrun by the effete, vanquished Austrians in October, Montenegro
followed in January; we had sent troops to Gallipoli, because the
western front was impregnable, we had withdrawn them because the eastern
front was no less impregnable. Amateur strategy or political intrigue
was now mysteriously dissipating more troops in Greece, and I was
required later to square the allied landing in Salonica with the allied
resistance to the German incursion into Belgium. To say that King
Constantine had defaulted on his treaty obligations to Servia was
venturesome but inadequate, for the terms of the treaty were unknown; it
was common knowledge, on the other hand, that Great Britain had
guaranteed the Greek constitution, by which foreign troops might only
land at the invitation of king and parliament.

The public temper in England led me to expect one thing, crystallised by
Vincent Grayle in a bet that, if we had not broken the German line by
September, the Government and the Higher Command would have passed into
ineffectual history.

"It's their last chance," were his parting words to me. "After all, you
find a leak in your cistern, you get a plumber; if he can't mend it,
God's truth, you get another plumber. You're likely to find considerable
changes by the time you get back."

I think it was the taste left in my mouth by Vincent Grayle that I was
most glad to have blown away by the north-east Atlantic wind.

I landed in New York to find that I had lost one false perspective of
the war to acquire another. In the eastern states there was indeed an
"American Rights" party, flamingly incensed that the President had not
broken off diplomatic relations on the sinking of the "Lusitania," but
as unprepared as I had been on my return to England after a year of war
for the resolution and effort, the suffering and bereavement, the social
upheaval and snapping nerves which I had met. New England, to my pity,
talked of participation and still fancied, as we had once done, that it
would be someone else's son or brother, someone of academic interest,
who would appear day after day in the casualty lists. Yet what else
could I expect? As I walked up and down the unfamiliarly lighted streets
to see men still employed on work which was being done by women in
England, as I met abundance on every hand and heard of war as an
intellectual conception in the middle distance, I had only to shut my
eyes and imagine that it was a fantastic nightmare of my own.

For three months I spoke and wrote; for three months, as I was flung
from end to end of the continent on journeys of incredible length and
intolerable discomfort, interviewers boarded my train and invaded my
car. The daily news of the war had long been relegated to some corner of
a back page, and my interviewers were clamorous as children to be told a
story.

I am content to be judged by results; in the south there were men who
responded to my eloquence by crossing the border and enlisting in a
Canadian regiment, and the War Charities Fund has its record of the
subscriptions which I collected. My audiences reacted on me until I am
afraid I came to idealise unpardonably. I remember describing to a
Boston audience the spontaneous uprising of England as I had found it
after a year abroad; I remember, too, returning to my hotel and finding
a handful of letters and a batch of month-old papers.... England was
agitated by the question whether a married man, who had volunteered for
service, should be taken into the army until an unmarried man, who had
not so volunteered, had been coerced. It was not an ennobling
controversy for one who had been describing crusades....

"It serves the married men right for calling the single men shirkers,"
George Oakleigh wrote. "Now that they've screwed themselves up to the
point of attesting, they're trying to shirk in their turn.... Psychology
is revealing itself curiously. Men who despise a Catholic for
surrendering the right of private judgement are praying for the
Government to order them about and relieve them of the responsibility of
making up their own minds.... A thriving trade is being driven in
rejection certificates. Your enterprising patriot with some physical
defect gets himself duly turned down for the army; he then personates
his more robust friends for a suitable fee, attending at their local
recruiting offices under their names and pocketing any solatium that may
be handed out at such times. It was hardly this spirit which sent Jim
Loring and Raney out.... The whole wrangle is a great opportunity for
our friend Beresford, but he is at least honest and intelligible; if
conscription comes, he'll refuse to serve and the Government can shoot
him. He was committed to a war without being consulted and he's not
going to die of malaria in Salonica to please a House of Commons which
he helped to return five years ago to carry the Parliament Bill."

I feel that I must have addressed my audiences with less conviction
after a letter of this kind, yet it was but the occasional snapping of
overstrained human nerves. Yolande, I remember, wrote in great concern
to tell me that her husband and George--two of the kindest, mildest and
most level-headed men I know--had quarrelled and parted in anger. A
successful raid into the German lines was magnified into at least a
second-class victory; George in a mood of depression minimised it
unduly; Felix thereat raked up his opponent's record of eight years
before as a champion of disarmament and international peace, charging
him with being a pro-German. "I wanted to bang their heads together,
uncle darling," my niece confided. "Will you believe it? They weren't on
speaking terms for a week, until I made each apologise to the other. So
ridiculous!..."

The unrest and dissatisfaction ran through public and private life
equally.

"There's a perfect crop of what my young cousin Laurie calls
'stunt-artists' of late," George wrote a week later. "Every third man in
the House feels called on to do a 'stunt' of his own. There's a 'Ginger
Stunt,' to keep the Government up to the mark, and an 'Air Stunt' to
protect us from Zepps, and a 'Civil Liberties Stunt' to resist
conscription, and a 'Conscription Stunt' to resist civil liberties, and
a 'Press Stunt' to quash the Press Bureau, and a sort of 'Standing
Stunt' to quash Northcliffe. Men of imaginative bent are turning their
eyes to Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles, ready to start stunts there at
the earliest opportunity and on the smallest provocation. Bertrand says
that in all his experience he's never known the House so neurotic and
out of hand. The cumulative effect is exceedingly bad. Whether the
stunts do any good or not I can't say, but they destroy confidence in
the Government, depress people at home and at the front, not to mention
the allies, and ultimately they'll bring the Government down. Now, with
the exception of Grayle, that's what no one wants to do. Asquith's the
only man who can hold the country together, but he's so anxious--and
rightly--to keep his team working harmoniously and to avoid any
possibility of a split anywhere that I don't think he asserts himself
enough. A party truce can be overdone, and a good many Liberals are
saying that they are always sacrificed to conciliate someone else and
never the other way about; as with Ireland--but I've no doubt your
Irish-Americans have delicately hinted in the same sense.... By the way,
I forgot to mention the 'Stop the War Stunt.' Since last I wrote
Beresford has been had up and fined; at least he was ordered to pay the
fine, but he refused; so they kept him in prison for a bit, and he
hunger-struck and now he's at large again...."

George's next letter made no reference to anything of public interest.

"Do you remember saying that Sonia was a whole-time job for a man?" he
began. "She's too much for me; I'm going to retire from the fray. When
Raney came home for the Christmas holidays, he and Sonia talked things
over--Melton and the House and work of various kinds. Bertrand was
dragged in to keep the peace and advise generally, and they reached this
amount of agreement: Raney consented to throw up his appointment at the
school, provided he found work at least equally remunerative to pay his
debts and keep the household going and provided that it was work of some
public utility. He wasn't prepared simply to make money, if his services
could be of any use to anyone for the war. Well, as you know, almost
every kind of public work involves the use of your eyes, and it would
have taken him some time to find the right kind of job. In fact, he and
Bertrand had not begun to discuss it when Sonia went on to the next
question with a very definite statement that, if he was going to live at
'The Sanctuary', she claimed equal rights with him to decide who was
invited to the house--in other words (and very reasonably, from her
point of view) the house was their home and she might just as well be
living in the street as in that menagerie. I confess I sympathise. I
_knew_ she wouldn't stand it for more than a very few weeks. You don't
know the place as I do, you've probably never seen anyone but Beresford
dossing on a sofa, but Raney with the best intentions in the world
sometimes turns that place into a casual ward. Sonia stood it at first,
because it was a new experience and she's got a passionate enjoyment of
life which would carry her through everything. But, when the novelty had
worn off, it must have been singularly uncomfortable; even Raney's
friends would only smile pityingly, and you may be sure that all the
Dainton influence was thrown into the scale against him. I know for a
fact that Lady Dainton's done all the mischief she can in the way of
sneering, criticising, setting Sonia against Raney. The important new
development was that Sonia was beginning to echo her mother. I happened
to drop in about this time. I expect you've noticed that moral
undressing is always conducted publicly in that house; I heard Raney
defend himself by pointing out that Bertrand's house had been turned
into a hospital, that Crowley Court was a hospital and that he was not
asking Sonia to do anything very different from what Lady Dainton was
doing. 'Ever since I came back from the front,' he told her, 'I've been
trying to get this war into perspective. Everyone's doing his best to
save this country and all that it stands for, but it's got to stand for
a good deal more than it did before the war; we owe it to the fellows
who have died and the fellows who are dying now and the numberless
fellows who've still got to die, we've got to shew that they died for
something that we can look at without shame. It'll be a long time before
we can be really proud of this country, but we can make a beginning, and
the time to begin is when we've stood sweating with fear and remorse
with a halter round our necks and the hangman comes to say we've been
reprieved.'

"As you know, my uncle's a tough old cynic, but, when Raney talks with
that cold, vibrant passion of his, you have to be very tough not to feel
at least a little uncomfortable. I've had to stand it ever since we were
at Oxford together. Sonia was about as much impressed as if he'd been
talking to a brick wall. He wasn't discouraged, but he turned to
Bertrand--'You remember when I got back, sir?' (God! I'm not likely to
forget the night when we found he was blind!) 'You were in a furnished
flat, and I had awful difficulty in finding you, but I came straight to
you, and you and George took me in without a murmur.' (I suppose he
thought that after sixteen years we were going to refer him to the
nearest Rowton House.) 'That was--symbolical, sir,' he went on. 'D'you
remember that you came in very late, when I was in bed, and we had a
talk? After you'd gone, I got out of bed and lifted up both hands and
swore that I'd not give in, that I'd do what I could with what was left.
I swore that, as I'd been taken in--not only by you; a hundred other
people had done the same,--I'd try very humbly and patiently never to
say "no" to anyone else that wanted to be taken in, anyone else that I
could help. That's what I'm trying to do now.' Then he stopped and left
them to digest it, with the result which you can imagine when two people
take up wholly irreconcilable positions. Sonia said that charity should
begin at home, that he talked about not being unkind to anyone, but he
was being unkind to his own wife--you can imagine the dialogue. Bertrand
raised _his_ two hands that night and swore that he'd clear out into
quarters of his own, and Sonia's parting words were that she regarded
her marriage as at an end, which is a pretty sentiment after five
months."

A week later George wrote again on the same subject.

"How you must enjoy the sight of my hand!" he began. "I'm sorry, but I
want to blow off steam. The other night I took Raney out to dinner and
talked to him for his soul's good. I saw a good deal of the tragi-comedy
when Sonia was engaged to Jim Loring and I told Raney that he was
courting disaster by the way he was treating her. He was in one of his
most smiling, most obstinate moods--steel and india-rubber. He said he
couldn't slam his door in the face of anyone who wanted help. 'Very
well!' I said; 'keep it open. You say "yes," she says "no," and there's
not a square inch of ground for compromise. One of you has to climb
down, and you won't?' 'If you like to put it like that,' says Raney, 'I
won't.' 'Then make _her_,' I said. 'She'll do it, if you make her; she
won't love you any the less and she'll respect you all the more, if you
force her to obey you.' Raney was really upset. 'Old man! you mustn't
talk to me about _forcing_ my wife to do things!' My dear Stornaway,
that's the kind of imbecile we've got to deal with! I warned him that,
if he kept his door open against her will, she would walk out of it.

"God knows, I never wanted to be a Cassandra, but I know that child so
well! Two days later Raney bumped into a young officer staggering along
Victoria Street in an advanced state of intoxication; Raney just had
time to find out that the fellow was due to catch the leave-train at
about seven next morning, when his new friend collapsed on the steps of
the Army and Navy Stores and settled himself to a comfortable slumber. I
don't suppose any of us would have left him there with a fair prospect
of being robbed or run in or discovered by the Provost-Marshal, to say
nothing of losing the train and perhaps being court-martialled. Raney
must needs put him in a cab, take him home and expend time, ingenuity
and hard-bought experience in making him sober. It must have been a
gruesome night, but the fellow caught his train. It was the last straw
for Sonia. The next day she wired from Northamptonshire, asking me to
tell Raney that she was staying with the Pentyres. That was a week ago;
Raney has asked her--_asked_, mark you--to come back, and she won't
budge. I deliberately cadged an invitation from Pentyre last week-end,
we spent Sunday with one scene after another, and her final message on
Monday morning was that she would come back when he agreed to do what
she asked; otherwise she would be compelled to think that he, too,
regarded the marriage as over. I spent most of Monday night storming at
Raney, and the present position is that neither will yield an inch and
Raney won't exercise his authority.

"You are probably sick and tired of them both by now, but you cannot be
anything like as sick or tired as I am...."


2

This was the last letter which I received before my return to England in
the spring of 1916. The country, when I landed, reminded me strongly of
a theatre before a first night; everyone was waiting for the full
deployment of the new armies, everyone expected the summer campaign to
be the supreme test; by now, too, almost everyone had son or brother
under arms waiting in the line or rehearsing his share in the coming
offensive. The tension produced a nervous irritability which manifested
itself, so far as the House of Commons was concerned, in a mutinous
demand for enlightenment, and one of my earliest duties was to be
present, with fine parade of mystery and importance, at the first secret
session of the war. The one unvarying rule which I have been able to
frame for the House of Commons is that it never fulfils expectations.
Though the Press Gallery was conscientiously cleared, we were given
neither fact nor figure that was not already in the possession of any
well-informed journalist; twenty-four hours later the speeches were
common property in every club, and the one thing new was the change in
psychology. The show of blind loyalty to the Government had broken down
until the Government itself felt that something must be tried to restore
confidence. I found that a man of Bertrand's temperamental independence
was using Grayle's currency of speech.

"Much good it's done!" he growled, as we left the House together. "It's
no use pointing to the number of men you've raised or the output of
shells. The country's outgrown the phase of being content with good
endeavours, it wants _results_, it's in the mood to say, 'You haven't
beaten the Germans, and, if you don't do it pretty quickly, someone must
be found who will.' Stroll home with me, if you've nothing better to
do."

"You're in your old quarters still?" I asked.

Bertrand laughed and then sighed.

"When David asked me to come here, I accepted on an impulse," he
confessed. "It was a phase of the early enthusiasm; I felt we'd got no
business to go on living so extravagantly, when the boys out there were
going through Hell's agonies and every penny was wanted to carry on this
war and to reduce the load of human suffering. I suppose this dog's too
old to be taught new tricks. If you find me staying on now, it's only to
keep the peace." He stopped to re-light his cigar, and, as he sheltered
the match with his hands, I saw that his heavy, powerful face was morose
and dissatisfied. "I've got a considerable love for David. He was a fool
to marry the girl, of course, but a man doesn't marry or keep a mistress
because it's _wise_, but because he wants to, because he can't help
himself.... When she married him, I thought that the war had sobered her
down, but these _soupers fraternels_ have made her restive, and she's
reverted to type. I'm standing by to break up tête-à-têtes and prevent
her doing anything irrevocable before they've patched up their present
quarrel and agreed on some possible way of life. If he weren't blind,
she'd have left him three months ago. You know they've not met since
Christmas?"

"Where are they?" I asked.

"Oh, she's here--with the usual tame cats to carry her off to lunch and
dinner. She came back the day after David returned to Melton.... You can
see it's a pleasant house to live in!... Before the war I sat on a
committee with her mother. Do you remember a phase when young men tried
to grow side-whiskers? Well, the drawing-room was always full of these
hairy youths, immaculately dressed and simpering round her with boxes of
sweets and flowers, which she very graciously accepted. Since the war
these fellows have shaved and got into uniform, but it's the same old
gang. I used to think nobody was injured; she liked racketing about at
restaurants and theatres, they were puffed up to be with her. The only
man I drew the line at was Grayle; he's much heavier metal." Bertrand
paused to laugh with his old cynical relish. "I'm deuced old, but I've
still got a very retentive memory, and everybody's always told me
things. Well, I went through the mental rag-bag, I talked to a few
people, I made a few enquiries--particularly on the American chapter of
his life--and the next time we met I became biographical at his expense.
George tried and failed. Friend Grayle hasn't been here since. I tell
you, I was getting sick of the business. She'd give a dinner party at
eight, and Grayle would be here at half-past seven to talk to her alone,
and, by Gad! she'd be dressed and ready for him. I don't know whether
they thought I was blind _and_ deaf.... And it was the same when she
dined at his house. I used to hear her coquetting and threatening to be
late, if he wasn't 'good'--ugh!--and he'd swear he wouldn't admit her,
if she wasn't in time. It was all such poor stuff! I shouldn't have
minded so much, if there'd been any red blood in it, but she was
obviously just keeping her hand in; that woman would make sheep's eyes
at the Shakespeare monument in Leicester Square sooner than nothing....
So I spiked friend Grayle's guns, and she's had to content herself with
Beresford. He's pretty harmless, but the devil of it is that she's ready
to go wrong with any man, when she loses control of her temper. If she
weren't restrained by her husband's blindness ... Good night. I'm going
straight to my room."

As I had come to the door, I thought that I could do no harm by going in
to see who was about. I found Beresford sitting up on a sofa with a
block of paper on his lap. He looked exceedingly ill and perhaps not
best pleased to see me.

"You're back again, then?" I said. "How's the knee?"

"I'm only waiting till Sonia comes in," he answered. "My knee's much
the same as it's been all along, very much the same as it always will
be. The doctors are going to give me blood-tests or something. Of
course, I didn't do it much good when I was in prison; the doctor there
was badly scared. He used to examine me each day to see how much longer
I could hold out without food, and I used to see him looking grave every
time he came to the knee, until I'm prepared to bet he told the
authorities he wouldn't take the responsibility of keeping me there any
longer. Then they let me out." His grey lips curled into a withering
sneer. "God! the authorities in this country _deserve_ to lose their
precious war! D'you think that in Germany they'd allow me to write the
pamphlets I do here? D'you think, if they decided not to shoot me,
they'd let me out of prison because they were afraid to force food down
my throat? The blessed innocents here said I might go, if I promised to
drop my propaganda; they brought in a pen and paper. Well, I'd been
without water for four days, and my throat and mouth were so swollen
that I couldn't speak. I couldn't write very elegantly, either, but I
collected enough strength to scrawl 'I'll see you in Hell first.' And
then, if you please, I was let out. And now I'm improving the occasion."

He collected a number of loose sheets and pinned them together.

"As long as you think it does any good," I said, "the Archangel Gabriel
wouldn't be able to stop you."

"You don't think it's a good thing to keep people from slaughtering one
another? Dear man, d'you appreciate that, if Kitchener and Grey were in
Potsdam at this moment with the unconditional surrender of Germany in
their pocket, they couldn't get anything to compensate our present
losses? There's imbecile talk about security and a 'war-to-end-war,' but
you won't _have_ war when people understand what it's like. That's what
I'm trying to shew them."

He threw himself back on the sofa and began reading what he had written.
I got up to leave, only pausing to give him a message for Mrs. O'Rane.
As I closed the door behind me, a taxi stopped at the corner twenty
yards from "The Sanctuary" and a man in uniform stepped out and
stretched one hand to somebody inside, holding the door open with the
other. His size alone, without the familiar mane of yellow hair,
identified him for me as Grayle; a moment later Mrs. O'Rane emerged and
stood by him under the street lamp at the corner. Bertrand might keep
Grayle as far away as the end of the street, but I felt that he had
boasted prematurely.

"You'll come in?" I heard Mrs. O'Rane say, as her companion hesitated by
the taxi.

"Not to-night, thanks. It's rather late."

I caught a light ripple of laughter.

"You're not getting suddenly anxious about my reputation, are you?" she
asked. "You _used_ to _like_ coming in and talking to me; and you know
how I hate going to bed. Of course, if you don't want to----"

Grayle opened his case and took out a cigarette.

"That cuts _no_ ice, Sonia," he said. "Good-night and thank you for
coming. I shall see you to-morrow."

"I don't think I shall come."

"Oh, yes, you will."

"If you're so afraid of being compromised----"

"You are coming to-morrow."

She was silent; and, if it had been day-light, I would have staked my
life that she was pouting suitably.

"You _used_ to say that to-morrow was a very long way off," she remarked
irrelevantly.

Grayle's voice became authoritative.

"You are coming to-morrow, Sonia."

No doubt it was the old small change of flirtation which had exasperated
Bertrand, and I had already been made to hear more than I relished.
Stepping into the circle of dim light, I bade her good evening and asked
Grayle if he had finished with his taxi.

"Hul-_lo_! I didn't know you were back in England!" she cried. "Have you
been calling? I wish I'd known. You've got to come back now."

"I looked in for a moment," I said. "Now I must get home, though."

"I'll give you a lift," Grayle volunteered.

Mrs. O'Rane looked from one to the other of us, and her eyes and mouth
hardened in an expression of pique.

"My society seems rather at a discount to-night," she observed.

"You'll find Beresford waiting for you," I said. "I've been talking to
him, but I've got to get home now."

She turned to Grayle, and I will swear that she was watching to see if
Beresford's name was a challenge.

"I must get home, too," was all that he would say. "I shall see you
to-morrow."

"Oh, I meant to tell you. I can't come to-morrow," she answered with
easy gravity, as though I had not heard every syllable of her earlier
conversation. "Well, if you won't come in, I'll say good-night. Thanks
for a most delightful evening."

Grayle and I drove in silence for half of the way. Then he asked me
abruptly how I had got on in America.

For some weeks I continued to attend to my own work uninterrupted by the
O'Ranes, but towards the end of the Easter term I had to make my way to
Melton for the Governors' meeting. A note from O'Rane invited me to call
before going back to London, and at the end of our business I invaded
his rooms to find him seated, as ever, cross-legged on the floor with
his head thrown back, lips parted and eyes seemingly fixed on the
ceiling or on something beyond it. The room was crowded with what I can
only call a cluster of boys sprawling on chairs and tables or
precariously perched with linked arms on the broad mantel-piece. Some
were conventionally dressed, some were in flannels, some in uniform; the
majority, however, preferred a motley of khaki breeches, puttees and
vivid blazers. It was the end of a field day, and a few of O'Rane's
friends had dropped in to talk with him. After some moments it occurred
to the boy nearest the door to ask if I wished to speak to Mr. O'Rane,
and on that, to my regret, the seminar dissolved.

As the last boy clattered into the Cloisters, O'Rane felt for a box of
cigarettes and asked me how I had got on in America.

"George told me you were back," he said. "Have you been round to our
place?"

"I went round there almost immediately," I told him. "I say, O'Rane----"

Perhaps he guessed what was coming, for I was not allowed to finish my
sentence.

"Was Beresford there?" he asked.

I hesitated for what I should have thought was an imperceptible moment;
and O'Rane repeated his question.

"As a matter of fact he was," I said.

"Ah! I wish I'd known that before.... Oh, _now_ I see why you
hesitated!" He gave a buoyant laugh. "I can assure you that Beresford
doesn't make me in the least jealous or in the least apprehensive. I'd
trust him pretty well as far as I'd trust Sonia; our outlook's so
similar, we've got so much in common. Well, the authorities have got
their eyes on him, and he'll find himself arrested again, if he isn't
careful. And he's only alienating possible sympathisers with the stuff
he's writing now. Did you read him on the typhus outbreak at
Wittenburg?"

He jumped up and brought me a copy of "The Watchman" from his
writing-table. Beresford's article made me very angry. A few days
earlier my nephew Felix, dining with me at the Hyde Park Hotel, where I
had now taken up my residence, had given me a sickening account of the
epidemic in the prisoners' camp; a fuller and yet more sickening account
had appeared in the Press, and from end to end of the country there
burst a storm of indignation stronger than anything since the outcry
against the atrocities in Belgium. At this moment and from this text
Beresford, who saw red at the news of the mildest cruelty to man or
animal, preached a cynical, superior sermon to prove that, if misguided
fools went to war, this was the kind of thing they must expect. The
object of war was to kill, and the only reason why the Germans did not
massacre their prisoners was that on balance their own losses might be
greater. But in scientific warfare it was unjustifiable to expect German
doctors and nurses to risk their lives for the sake of preserving the
enemy's. The English might; the English habitually boasted of picking up
survivors after a naval engagement, but it was not war.

"God knows _I'm_ not in love with war," said O'Rane, as I flung the
paper away, "but an article like that infuriates just the decent-minded
people he's appealing to. Well, bad taste is not an indictable offence,
but I had a hint dropped this week-end that made me think that Beresford
had better go warily. We had a man dining in Common Room on Sunday whose
job in life is to advise on people like him and the stuff they turn out.
We got on to the Wittenburg article, and it came out that I knew the
author. Well, there was nothing much the matter with that branch of
Intelligence Service; they knew all about Beresford, but they didn't
want to give him a free advertisement and make a martyr of him, so they
tried to get hold of him under the Military Service Act and stop his
mouth that way. He was ordered to join up on a certain day, so he wrote
a polite letter to say that he disapproved of war and did not propose to
fight. When the day came, he was well and duly put in charge of a guard
and marched off to the recruiting office to be presented to the a

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46096