"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 theireffect 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—nogood!" he cried. "I told those fools not to fight, I asked them what they were fighting for!Theydidn'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 havedrilled 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 afit 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 theimpressiveness 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 theRing-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 likethat. 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'vegotto 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!"
"I was a baby when my mother diedAnd father died and left me in the street.I starved there, God knows how, a year or twoOn fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and stalks,Refuse and rubbish....But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streetsEight years together, as my fortune was,Watching folk's faces to know who will flingThe 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 catchThe 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 dropHis 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 lessFor admonition from the hunger-pinch."Robert Browning:Fra Lippo Lippi.
"I was a baby when my mother diedAnd father died and left me in the street.I starved there, God knows how, a year or twoOn fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and stalks,Refuse and rubbish....But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streetsEight years together, as my fortune was,Watching folk's faces to know who will flingThe 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 catchThe 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 dropHis 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 lessFor admonition from the hunger-pinch."Robert Browning:Fra Lippo Lippi.
"I was a baby when my mother diedAnd father died and left me in the street.I starved there, God knows how, a year or twoOn fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and stalks,Refuse and rubbish....But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streetsEight years together, as my fortune was,Watching folk's faces to know who will flingThe 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 catchThe 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 dropHis 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 lessFor admonition from the hunger-pinch."Robert Browning:Fra Lippo Lippi.
"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.
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 whowanted 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 nownotallowed 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 hardlybelievesome 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 hadvictimised 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,hewouldn'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 spendmy days serving out clothes to Belgian refugees, or finding them houses and work, or getting up concerts and things to raise money for them, butsomebody'ssure to be at home atsomehour 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."
"Iremembered! 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 thatthatwas 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 mybearings 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 puttogether, 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 applicationwas 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—thatcreaturehas 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 feelIcan 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—tamehim a little. Dear Davidwillpretend that everybody's like everybody else; well, I don't suppose either of us is a snob, Mr. Stornaway, but therearedistinctions, don't you know? We should be called old-fashioned, if wesaidanything, 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 youlike. Iamrather 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.
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 andposeuse."
"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 everynight 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'vepromisedto resign themomentI've paid back the money Iowe," 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 willsay—," 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 aplenipotent 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 wouldhaveto 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.
"ThenDavidsaid," 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 womanever 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 aparty, 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 eveningcommuniquéfrom 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 mesuddenly. "Mrs. O'Rane will be there, and I'll rope in some more people."
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 Fundtableaux. They can't get on without us, can they, Babs darling?" LadyBarbara 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 itdoesend, 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. Ihavegot 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'tyou?" 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 evenratherlove me; and I'm ready to takesucha 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 otherwomen 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'mgoing 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 reallycan'tinvite 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.
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 allher 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 myface. "Has it occurred to you that all this racket isdeliberate, 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'swhat 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 litcigarettes. 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'taskedme 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 hebroughtPeter here andkepthim here and finallylefthim 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 neverhadbeen 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."