And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,
My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
I left Wensley Hall at the beginning of the 1905 Season, lured by cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. Early in April I met John Ashwell at a dinner-dance given by the Sinclairs: he casually elicited my name and address, satisfied himself of mybona fidesand went to work like an industrious, dapper, well-fed little mole. Within a week strange cards arrived for me without explanation, within a month they had assumed the dimensions of a moderate snowstorm.
"WhoisMr. John Ashwell?" I asked my uncle one morning, throwing over a card bearing his compliments.
"A Society promoter," Bertrand answered. "D'you know Lady Ullswater? Those two have started a registry office for eligible young men." He handed back the card. "Your name's on the books. He sends lists of dancing men tostruggling hostesses at so many guineas a dozen. Lady Ullswater brings girls out at a hundred pounds a head, with another fifty pounds if there's a presentation; for three hundred pounds and all expenses—a couple of thousand in all, say—she'll give a ball at the Empire Hotel. 'Lady of Title willing to chaperone young girls of good family. Introductions.'You've seen her advertisements—every spring for the last fifteen years. Ashwell takes a commission on any suitable match he brings off in a girl's first season. Don't cherish too many illusions about London Society, George; anybody can get there who's willing to pay. And unless you're particularly anxious to be married off to someone you don't know, I should advise you to avoid Ashwell. A year or two ago I heard him with my own ears tell a woman that he'd got a man he wanted her daughter to meet—heir to a viscounty and a good deal of money; only an uncle in the way, andhewas a bad life. Of course if you feel you're immune, the pander to plutocracy is as amusing to study as anyone else."
Bertrand's description was not of a kind to send me out of my way in search of Ashwell, but in the course of nine years I saw as much of him as I wanted to. Of an artificial society he was, perhaps, the most artificial member.
Failing to learn much of working class conditions at first hand, I decided to reform them from the distant security of Westminster.
It was a few weeks after my apostasy from the Wensley Hall Settlement that I asked my uncle what steps he advised me to take in order to get myself elected to the House of Commons. "Thursday Essays" seemed to have committed me to a political career, and faithful reading of the party press had put my mind in a fine ferment over the immorality of the Unionist handling of Education, Licensing and Indentured Labour. Moreover, like most of those who had learned theirpolitical economy from Mill, I was intellectually offended that the dead heresy of Protection should be dragged from the grave it shared with Bi-metallism and galvanized into life. And I suffered all the fierce irritation of the impatient idealist at sight of a lethargic Government slumbering in office and barring the path of hurrying academic reformers. I felt that much must be swept away and much more built up. I had nailed on the public doors my theses of Federation, Land Reform, Franchise Adjustment, Single-Chamber Government and the rest. The offer of the Viceroyalty of India would not have kept me from the House.
"Want to stand?" Bertrand echoed. "My dear boy, you'll outgrow that phase."
"But the hopeless chaos!" I protested. "We've become an Imperial people, an industrial nation, and we're still trying to run with an obsolete machine."
"And—you—think—you—can—alter—it?" Paper and ink can never reproduce the cold scorn of his voice.
"I can have a dam' good try," I answered, with assurance.
Bertrand went to his writing-table and scribbled a note.
"Take this to Abingdon Street," he said, handing it to me. "You'll find you're more than welcome these hard times. I should go there on foot," he added gloomily—"along Knightsbridge and through the Park, where you can see the trees and hear the birds singing. London has its charms in the season, George. And you're a dancing man, aren't you?"
I admitted the charge.
"You'll soon outgrowthat," he hastened to add, as though repentant of having found one good thing in life. "Well,chacun à son goût. But you'd find, if you came to the Gallery once or twice...."
"Is there any phase in life Ishan'toutgrow, Bertrand?" I asked.
He selected a cigar, pinched it, lit it and blew a cloud of smoke.
"No," he answered at length.
"And what happens at the end of it all?"
"You die."
"Well, what keepsyougoing? What phase are you in?"
He stared out of the window at the stream of hansoms and omnibuses rolling in a double line east and west.
"The great spectacle of life," he replied, with a wave of the hand. "You see it rather well from the House or the Club. That reminds me, I'd better put your name down. Come and lunch there to-day, and I'll show you the place. Yes, the great movement of men. I'm not tired of that yet. But you've got ideals, you're going to do things, you aren't content to sit and watch—and that's why I'm warning you against the House. There you'll only find jobs and disappointed men and backbiting and a spirit of compromise. However, you wouldn't believe me though I rose from the dead to tell you; a man has to find these things out for himself. You'd better tell the Whips who you are."
I walked down to the Central Office reflecting that Bertrand, to judge by his tone, had perhaps not yet quite escaped the phase of idealism.
His forecast of my reception was accurate enough. There were seats to fight in borough and county, north and south, east and west. I could have my choice, and with a year-book open on my knee I made comparative tables of the majorities against me. In the course of the interview there was diplomatic skirmishing on both sides as the Central Office reconnoitered to find out how much I was prepared to put down, and I tried to ascertain how far the Party Funds would help me. In consideration of a sum I was not willing to furnish, I could have the reversion of a safe seat in a mining area; at the other end of the scale, the Whips would pay all expenses if I would consent to break my shins on the five thousand Unionist majority in South St. Vincent's. Eventually, I undertook to pay my own expenses and fight the Cranborne division of Wiltshire, where there was a hostile majority of one thousand eight hundred. Then I jumped into a hansom and joined my uncle for luncheon at the Eclectic Club.
"The charm of this place," exclaimed Bertrand as he led me up the great staircase, "is that once you're a member you can be sure of meeting most of the men you want to and allthe ones you don't. It's not political, so you find scallywags of all types. That's why it's called the Eclectic."
The great, grimy, eighteenth-century building—Hamilton's finest work, I always think—is too well known to need description, and anyone who has driven down Pall Mall or up St. James's Street is familiar with the line of bow-windows overlooking Marlborough House, and the row of choleric members who stare disgustedly at the street on wet days and revile the English climate. Within a few months I was privileged to take my place among them, and Bertrand spent an industrious week introducing me to the rules, conventions and personalities of the Club.
It was a rare opportunity for his favorite pastime of drawing indictments against professions. At one end of the dining-room he showed me a disillusioned close corporation of invertebrate Civil Servants, counting the days till they could abandon their judicious sterility and retire on a pension; at another, the corner where members of the Bar lunched hurriedly and discussed appointments. There was an embrasure traditionally reserved for peers and invariably raided by shy new members, and an elastic table by the fireplace where parliamentarians gathered to refight the battles of the House. The sharp division and mutual jealousy of the coteries reminded me strongly of Oxford, and, as election was in the hands of the whole Club, every ballot had the gambling excitement of a snap-division. If the Civil Servants supported a candidate too warmly, the Bar would rally, blackball in hand; the parliamentarians, on the other hand, held that a club was one thing and an almshouse for permanent officials quite another. And they voted in accordance with this reasoned conviction.
The ideal candidate was, of course, the unknown man with the unplaced backers; he might, indeed, be attacked on the rustic principle that the function of strangers is to have half-bricks heaved at them; or he might creep in unscathed, to the lasting mortification of men who would afterwards have liked to blackball him. Not once or twice have I heard the question, "How didheget in? I suppose Ididn't know about him at the time, or I'd have pilled him like a shot."
"Is Adolf Erckmann a member?" I asked my uncle in a surprised whisper as we came upon a stumpy, bearded, scarlet-faced man breathing stertorously through thick lips and resting on the end of a sofa the reddest and most naked head it has ever been my fate to see.
"I don't think any Club is really complete without him," was Bertrand's guarded answer. "He represents so much."
In the last ten years Erckmann has come to represent considerably more than in 1905: his social development in those days had hardly begun, and outside the City his name was still comparatively unfamiliar. There, if you were a banker, you knew Erckmann Brothers of Frankfort, London and New York; in the Rubber Market you met Erckmann Irmaos of Para; and if you touched the South American chemical trade, it was long odds you bought from Erckmann Hermanos of Valparaiso. Moreover, it was difficult to deal in English real estate, South African diamonds, Norwegian timber or Alaskan furs without rubbing shoulders with Erckmann or the retinue of younger sons who picked up the tips and aspirates he let fall and in return allowed themselves to be seen dining with him or yawning through the exquisite musical parties he gave in Westbourne Terrace.
With his ceaseless activity and Midas touch he must have been worth a cool million even in 1905 when he was no more than forty and had been divorced but once. His wealth thereafter increased by geometrical progression, and slackening his attendance on business he turned his talents to society. The knighthood came in the Coronation Honours of 1911, the baronetcy two years later. There he stuck, for the second divorce brought him more notoriety than credit: the freeborn electors of Grindlesham, perhaps through inability to understand his speech, accepted his largess but rejected his candidature—twice in 1910 and once in the by-election of 1913; and just when the opening of the Cripples' Institute brought his name high again in the list of Government creditors the war broke out, and Sir Adolf—with all his raffish, lessertheatrical entourage—stumbled helplessly backward into his social underworld. He will, of course, re-emerge after the war, for his type is old as Ninevah or Tyre: Petronius wrote of the feast he gave under Nero, and Alcibiades probably dined with him before mutilating the Hermæ.
For want of a better landmark, Loring used sometimes to refer to our early years in London as "the days before one met Erckmann," and anyone who saw how he and his rowdy little circle dominated such houses as they entered will be grateful for the definition.
The summer of 1905, my first season, was undisturbed by him, though for two and a half months I danced, on an average, in eight houses a week. It may be that the future will find us too sober and too poor to revive the glories and excesses of those days, and in that case I am glad I grasped my opportunities while they lay within reach. As Bertrand predicted, I was to outgrow the phase, but, ere disillusion came with weariness, the life of those summer months was a long, unbroken dream. Now the men are mostly dead, the women widowed: the great houses are closed, the orchestras disbanded and bankrupt.
Yet for a moment at a time they still live. A hansom once more jingles through some Square to a striped awning and length of red carpet. Throwing the door open, Loring and I descend with our coats over our arms, press through the throng of interested idlers, give up our hats, pocket a ticket, pull on our gloves and warily squeeze our way past the couples on the stairs. I have forgotten half their names, but the faces are still familiar, and the little jargon of the ball-room shouted from the door to the whirling dancers. "You free any time? Missing two? Right! Many thanks. I suppose you're booked for supper? Well, sup with me—early and often." An odd bar of a forgotten waltz is enough to call the whole scene into life—the blues and whites and pinks of the dresses, the line of prim, weary chaperons round the walls, the lazy, stereotyped chatter, the drowsy scent of flowers, and the wonderful size and softness of thegirls' tired eyes as daylight broke coldly into the yellow, stifling rooms.
There was a happy-go-luckycameraderieabout it all. An invitation once accepted left you a marked man. "Are you going to the Quentins' on Friday? Well, come with us! We've got one or two people dining first.... Eight-thirty. I don't know whether you got my name.... Oh, that was rather clever of you! I never listen myself. You'll find the address in the Red Book, and I'll push you along and introduce you to mother when she comes up from supper. Have you been selected for the Fortescues' next week? Then we shall meet there...."
And so from April to May, from May to June. I could stand late hours and ball champagne in those days, the whole of my world was treading the same round, and at twenty-four it was the rarest fun imaginable. Ten years later finds the ardour damped, but I should like to hear "The Choristers" played once more, I should like to dance again with Amy Loring, to see her brushing back the dark curl that always broke loose over her forehead, to talk again our tremendous trivialities. And I would give much to hear—say—Lady Pebbleridge's butler thundering out the names at Carteret Lodge—and to see the men stepping forward in response....
It was at the Pebbleridges' ball that I met the Daintons again. The house was small and the crowd was large. I had half decided to go on to the Marlores' in hopes of finding more room there when I discovered Lady Dainton and Sonia, pressed into a corner and pretending to enjoy themselves. Lady Pebbleridge had invited them as she invited all her Hampshire neighbours, but they were still strangers to London and knew no one. I acquired merit by finding the girl some partners, giving Lady Dainton an early supper and, when the room cleared, dancing with Sonia and trying to remove the bad impression which her first London ball had left on her. She had come on from the second Court and was looking far too attractive to be left standing in a corner; moreover, ever since our passage to Egypt the winter before, I hadenlisted under her colours against her mother and felt it incumbent on me to provide such consolation as lay in my power.
Beyond the statement that she had not seen nor heard from O'Rane in eighteen months, I gleaned little information in the course of my second supper on the subject of her chequered romance. At third-hand she learned that Raney's vacations were spent in studying English Industrial conditions; he had put in time as an unskilled worker on the Clyde, as an extra harvest-hand in Wiltshire, and finally—though I never learned in what capacity—as a miner in the coal-fields of Nottinghamshire. What his purpose was, neither Sonia nor I pretended to guess; I judged from her tone that she was aggrieved at his experimenting in manual labour when by merely expressing the desire he could have secured an invitation to Crowley Court.
"Does your mother...." I began tentatively.
Sonia shrugged her pretty, white shoulders.
"She says he can come and stay with us if he wants to," she told me. "It looks as if he doesn't want to."
"I'm fairly sure that's not the reason," I said. "But he's a wild, eccentric creature—as you'll find when you're married to him."
Sonia drew on her gloves and picked up her fan.
"If I ever am," she said despondently.
I lit a cigarette and adopted a sage, mature tone.
"As soon as you two have got anything to marry on," I assured her, "your people will recognize the engagement."
"We're not even engaged any more. Mother told him.... As if I were a child!" She broke off, pushed her chair back and began to walk towards the door of the supper-room.
"Go on," I said as I followed her.
"Mother told him he'd—he'd behaved improperly in putting such ideas into my head. Putting such ideas! Motherwon'tsee I've grown up. And then David got very angry and told her I might consider myself free of the engagement or not, just as I pleased. And he would never mention thesubject till I did. George, I'm thoroughly depressed and, if I talk to you any longer, I shall say undutiful things."
A few weeks later I prevailed on Bertrand to invite the Daintons to dinner. He had met Lady Dainton on the Committee of the War Fund—an organization for the benefit of men permanently injured in the Transvaal; he had also taken an active dislike to her as he did to all bustling, capable women. She had joined the Committee one day and captured it the next. The meetings were held at the house which Sir Roger had taken for the season in Rutland Gate, and within a week there was an imposing programme of concerts, bazaars and charity performances. It is bare justice to Lady Dainton, who initiated and controlled the organization in its smallest detail, to say that the revenue of the Fund doubled in the six months following her accession to the Committee. I am not sure, however, that this was any recommendation in my uncle's eyes.
"He'sa bore, andshe'sa snob," he declared. "Don't we know enough such without gratuitously adding to the number?"
"I am asking solely on the girl's account," I said.
"MydearGeorge!"
The unaffected mistrust of his expression set me laughing.
"You needn't be anxious," I told him. "They're new-comers to London——"
"And want to nobble the place!" he growled. "Iknow the type, George. Climbing, climbing.... They're beer, aren't they. I dislike brewers."
"I don't suppose they'll ask you to buy any."
"More honest of them if they did. A brewer's bad, but a brewer who's ashamed of his brewing...."
"Are you going to invite them or are you not?" I interrupted.
Bertrand sighed like a furnace.
"Make it one of our Dull Evenings," he begged resignedly. "Reallydull; wipe off all old scores. You can ask Ashwell, and Lady Ullswater, she'll be very helpful to them, and—oh, I'llleave it in your hands. Give me somebody tolerable on either side."
The dinner took place some weeks later in the early part of May and for a Thursday, and a designedly Dull Evening, was quite bearable. I took in Sonia and had Sally Farwell on my left; her mother, Lady Marlyn, went in with my uncle. I have forgotten how the others sorted themselves out, but conversation was maintained at an even flow, and no one seemed in an undue hurry to leave. And to Bertrand or any one trained by him to look dispassionately on at "the great movement of life," there was a quarter scene from the Human Comedy being played round his own table. The actors steadied to their pose as the butler cried their names. I observed that the Daintons had wasted no time since we met at Carteret Lodge: they were blasés and overdriven with the wearing life of Society.
"I'vesaidI'd give a ball," sighed Lady Dainton. "Really ... dreadful fatigue, don't you know?"
And Lady Ullswater sidled up, shaking her wonderful head of perennially chestnut hair.
"Not if you go the right way about it, dear Lady Dainton. Of course, it's rather presumptuous ofmeto adviseyou, but...."
And in front of me, through me and over my head at dinner, Sonia and Sally Farwell bandied impressive names. With both of them it was the first Season, and each seemed to aim at showing the other—and me—the important figure she had succeeded in cutting. Sir Roger, always shy and more than ever out of his element, postured as the bluff Tory Squire who hated London and all its works. John Ashwell, who was the son of a highly respected North-country solicitor before he took to peddling names of eligible bachelors, shook his head over the plebeian admixture of society, illustrated by an account of that day's luncheon with the dowager Duchess of Flint. Even poor Lady Marlyn, who was stone-deaf, caught the infection of play-acting and pretended to hear and appreciate the dialect stories of the American attaché on her right.
I sometimes think life would be simpler and more sincere if we had an official "Who's Who" with our incomes, their source, our professions or public positions, our parents and other relatives, not excluding those who lived abroad, with the reason for their retirement. My uncle himself, who told the story of his proffered knighthood a thought too freely, would have been called the son of a middle-class farmer—but for the fact that Ireland boasts no middle class. My own estate owed its existence to the old penal laws against Catholics: less polished generations used to say it was acquired by apostasy from God and theft of a brother's birthright. I do not dispute the charge and am gradually restoring the stolen property in exchange for adequate compensation under the latest Land Purchase Scheme. If the facts were recorded in a form accessible to the public, there would have been added piquancy attaching to my "Justice for Ireland" speeches a few months later. But the mystery, romance and make-believe of social intercourse would have departed. And our one public virtue would drop out of play, for we should no longer indulge the kindliness of respecting our neighbours' susceptibilities.
As it was I had the ill-luck to offend Sonia. Despite the weariness she inspired in me with what the republican O'Rane would have called "upper-ten-shop," it was unintentional. I have always kept up a curiously frank, rather cynical and entirely honour-among-thieves friendship with her: we know each other to the marrow, and, while in ignorance of any quality other than common egotism that should attract anyone of her temperament to anyone of mine, I have never ceased to admire her on purely physical grounds. I am still content to sit as I sat beside her that evening, gazing at the heavy coils of her brown hair, the red, moist lips, the brown, rather wistful eyes and the singularly beautiful arms and shoulders gleaming white through the transparency of her sleeves. I can understand any man falling in love with her; I can understand any man wanting to live his whole life with her—for a month.
Offence came by Tony Crabtree. Ascertaining that Iknew him, she invited my opinion, and with the sense of stumbling unexpectedly on a too rare opportunity, I told her all that I knew and much that I thought.
"He's a great friend of ours," she cut in disconcertingly when I paused for breath.
"He's abadman, Sonia," I repeated.
"He's the best fun out," she insisted; "you don't know him."
"You know him well?"
"He dines with us about once a week; he's taking an awful lot of trouble over our ball. I wanted you to dine and meet him."
"I'lldinewith pleasure——"
"I shall ask him too. He's always inquiring after you. I thought you were rather friends at Oxford."
"We never exchanged an angry word," I said. "I don't like him all the same, though."
Yet, when I dined in Rutland Gate the following week, Crabtree was there. The household indeed revolved round him, and the majesty of Lady Dainton was subjugated by the majesty of Crabtree. I was to meet him on and off for the next ten years: on one or two occasions there was unwelcome intimacy in our relations, and, though we have now drifted apart, I still see and wonder at his faculty of success. At Oxford he was primarily the man who cadged invitations, directed other people's parties and exploited a heartiness of manner and a certain social position in the university for what they were worth in cash or its equivalents. "A man always and everywhere on the make," was Loring's definition after meeting him on the Bullingdon. As a log-roller and picker-up of unconsidered meals, he had no equal, and his activity was characterized by the most frugal spirit. Though he dined with us three or four times, we never entered his rooms in Magdalen or Long Wall, and his mode of life was to live on a social aspirant for eight weeks and then propose the spoiled Egyptian for membership of the Club. The following term saw him billeted on a new victim. It was an arrangement that suited all parties save, perhaps, the Bullingdon.
I fancy he had considerably outlived his popularity by the time he went down, and in anyone else's hands the system would have gone to pieces in a year. My excuse for this digression must be a desire to emphasize the sufficiency of his brazenness andempressementof manner to put his critics out of countenance. I can see him now, with his big loose-limbed frame, his smooth face, and black hair carefully parted in the middle—dining at someone else's expense and constituting himself the life and soul of the party. In tearing spirits, yet never losing control of himself; drinking freely, but never drunk; open, but never candid; careless, but never off his guard—he was a disconcertingly cold and calculating man, clever and technically honest, though I would trust him no further than I could see him. After coming down he went to the Bar and pushed his way into a fair practice; several years later he married a widow rather older than himself, and, as his first public act was to appear as Conservative candidate in one of the Glasgow divisions, I infer that his wife had money. Immediately after the outbreak of war I found him hurrying through the Horse Guards in a staff captain's uniform. Though doubtful of his ability to "tell at sight a chassepot rifle from a javelin," I was in no way surprised.
His career is still young, and he has hardly aged at all since the night when I met him at dinner in Rutland Gate. I have no idea how long he had been known to the family, but it was pretty to see him slap Sir Roger on the back, to hear him call Sonia by her Christian name or address his host as "Dainton." He was prolific of suggestions for the forthcoming ball, drawn largely from experience of what was done by "my cousin Lord Beaumorris" at some period, I imagine, before that nobleman's second and latest bankruptcy.
By the end of the evening my dislike of him was no less, but it was diluted with a certain envious admiration.
Social amenities make a petty thing of life, and from the loftiness of a time when our souls are supposed to be enlargedby war I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London. My uncle, who was ashamed of betraying enthusiasm, took mischievous delight in employing a low scale of values, and at five-and-twenty I fancied that to be cynical was to be mature. I trace a curious inability to distinguish the essentials of existence, and had anyone used such a phrase at that time I am sure I should have demanded rhetorically, "Whatarethe essentials?"
Thus, Lady Dainton's first ball for Sonia was of little enough moment for men associated τοὑ εὑ ζἡν ἑνεχα, [Greek: tou eu zên enecha], and, in my eyes, the greatest of its many surprises was that I induced Bertrand to accompany me and stay out of his bed till after four. There was no merit in my own attendance. Sonia invited me verbally, her mother by means of a card eight inches by six; a week before the night panic descended on the family; they requisitioned their friends' lists, and I received three more cards with three sets of compliments, while on the day itself I was told by telephone that if I knew of one or two additional men I was to bring them punctually. So Bertrand, whose study of the great movement of men had never led him within the Empire Hotel, found himself incontinently deprived of his second cigar and packed into a cab on the stroke of ten-fifteen.
From the moment of our arrival I could prophesy success. Lady Dainton, I know, secured anticipatory and retaliatory invitations for Sonia; Lady Ullswater, who helped her to receive, reckoned up numbers and all they represented in her obscure finances; Ashwell wandered through the long rooms with an air of modest proprietorship, telling marchionesses of the balls he had left and duchesses of the balls he was going to. All the men obtained food, several of the girls obtained partners; and Dainton, who appeared five several persevering times in the supper-room, had the gratification of meeting at least one appreciative guest who observed, in the intervals of filling a capacious cigarette-case, "Dunno the merchant who's runnin' the show, but he does you pretty well, what?"
At ten-thirty the ball's fate lay still on the knees of the gods, but by eleven the rush had set in. I could see Sonia's face brightening, her eyes lighting up like the eyes of a political agent as he shepherds his stalwarts to the poll. Tall and short, dark and fair, stout and lean, they surged forward in an endless black and white stream, as desirable a set of young men as the combined talents of Ashwell and Lady Ullswater could bring together.
"She's launched!" said Bertrand, after an hour of the scene, and we walked upstairs in search of a cigar. By the buffet we found Dainton standing alone and drinking a surreptitious glass of champagne.
"Who does he remind you of?" my uncle asked me as we gained the lounge, and when I hesitated—"Don't you remember your Du Maurier?"
And then, of course, there leapt before my eyes the picture of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's husband at one of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's parties: a jaded but unprotesting figure, leaning against the wall and dully blinking at his lady's social captures; heavy-eyed, drooping-jawed, with bulging shirt-front and necktie askew. One hand stifles a yawn, the other guardedly conceals the watch at which he is glancing with furtive resignation. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, meanwhile, is rising from triumph to social triumph; he is paying the bill—and wondering wherein lies the fascination of it all.
As it was too crowded to dance and too early to sup, we took a couple of arm-chairs and ordered coffee. Overheated defaulters joined us from time to time, and Crabtree favoured us with his presence long enough to inquire: (i) how much I thought this touch was costing the old boy, (ii) what he would cut up for, (iii) what sort of place Crowley Court was, and (iv) whether I thought "The Trade" was likely to buck up at all.
"Who is your objectionable fat friend?" Bertrand asked when we were alone again.
"Objectionable—yes. Fat—yes. But no friend," I answered. "His name is Crabtree, and you are the only man in London whom he has not yet told that he is related to theintermittently bankrupt and always disreputable Lord Beaumorris."
"And he's running after this Dainton girl?"
"It's healthy exercise," I said, "and he hasn't run very far as yet."
"Well, well!" He sighed. "Marriage is a race in which the bookmaker invariably bolts with the money."
"What you want is some supper," I said.
"No, I want to watch the people a bit more. Who's the Greek god who just went by?"
"The man who waved?"
"Yes. Face all eyes."
"That was David O'Rane," I said.
My uncle made me repeat the name and then sat silently smoking for fully ten minutes. I thought he was falling asleep, but he suddenly roused himself to ask:
"What O'Rane is he?" and, when I had given a short account of my dealings with him for the last seven years, "Why the devil didn't you tell me you knew him?"
"I never imagined you'd even heard of his existence," I answered in some surprise.
"I hadn't. That's just it. George, I should like to meet the boy. No, no! Not now. When he's disengaged. He'll only think me an old bore, but I'm curious.... He's a very beautiful creature."
"And quite mad," I said. "If you won't accept my kind invitation to supper, I shall go down to find someone who will."
An hour later, with the consciousness that I had done nothing to justify my presence in the hotel, I sought out Sonia. A double line of claimants was closing in round one of the square, white pillars and towering over the shoulders of the rest I caught sight of Crabtree's sleek, black head. While Sonia stood breathless with excitement and bright-eyed with sheer joy of existence, he warded off the crowd like a policeman regulating traffic.
"Now then, Sonia, what about it?" I asked.
"Next but five," she called back, while Crabtree waved a large hand and boomed:
"Move along there, young feller, don't make a crowd!"
"The next is ours, isn't it, Miss Dainton?" inquired a decorous little voice from under my elbow.
"Time you were in bed, young 'un," Crabtree retorted menacingly.
O'Rane wormed his way past me and presented himself. In a moment's hush I heard the sharp tap of the leader's baton; for the last time Crabtree roared his wearisome "Move along there, please," and, as the music began, Sonia glided out on his arm into the middle of the room, barely turning to cry over her shoulder, "Come back later!"
"My duty's done, Raney," I said. "Come upstairs."
"I shall stay here a bit," he answered, following Sonia round the room with his eyes.
"Please yourself. You can't smoke here, and there's some old Green Chartreuse upstairs."
"Damn Green Chartreuse!" he returned.
"You shouldn't say that even in joke," I told him, as I started to elbow my way back to my old corner.
Bertrand I found was at supper, and our retreat had been invaded by a score of men who by rights ought to have been dancing. They were chiefly Tom's gladiatorial friends from Oriel, now scattering to various units of the Army—Penfold to the 17th Lancers, Moray to the Irish Guards and Kent to the Rifle Brigade. Of the others I knew Prendergast of Melton and New College, who was now a clerk in the Foreign Office and a purveyor of cheap mystery, and we were soon joined by Sinclair and Mayhew. Both were combining business with pleasure, for the former was playing for Yorkshire against the M. C. C. at Lord's, and the latter had hurried townwards to negotiate a position on the staff of "The Wicked World" as soon as his last Oxford term was over. Stragglers came and went, but our numbers remained steady and the group was completed by the arrival of Loring.
"This will never do!" he exclaimed. "Why aren't you chasing the hours with flying feet? Why aren't you letting joy be unconfined and all that sort of thing? Chartreuse? Ican hardly believe it! Of course, if you insist.... Sinks, go and dance!"
"I've been cut," Sinclair returned contentedly.
"Faint heart never won fair lady. You said Chartreuse, didn't you? I like to make quite sure. You been cut too, George?"
"We've all been cut," I said.
Loring looked round and pointed an accusing finger at an immaculate, pale, fair-haired youth with sensational waistcoat buttons and a white gardenia. I knew him by sight, as the illustrated papers were always publishing his photographs in country-house groups, and the reviews alternated between describing his novels as "impossibly brilliant" and "brilliantly impossible."
"No woman born of woman has ever cut Valentine Arden," he said.
"One had three partners," Arden replied with dreamy detachment. "One could not do justice to them all. 'Solomon in all his wisdom ...' and they had hot red faces. He retired into himself and sat lost in contemplation of a smoke-ring till it wavered and burst.
"You're a contemptible lot," said Loring with scorn. "No more idea of duty ... oh, my Lord! here's Raney! Go and dance, you little beast!"
"I've been cut," O'Rane protested with an air of originality. "If you're so keen on duty...." He pointed to the tray of liqueur glasses. "And it'ssofattening. Go and work it off, Jim."
Loring shook his head.
"I'm going home. I sat in that filthy House all the afternoon, dined with my uncle, whose port would disgrace a preaching friar, let alone a cardinal. I then attended a political crush, turned up here, talked to my host, gave my hostess supper, had two dances with my hostess's daughter...."
"You were favored," O'Rane observed.
"I was irresistible. So would any one have been after so much 1900 Perrier Jouet.... However, that's neither herenor there. I enjoyed those two dances, because I was the means of dislodging one Crabtree and seeing him packed off to feed dowagers."
"There's some value in a title yet," I said. "I tried and failed."
"How much of the Perrier Jouet ...? Half a bottle? No man, not even George Oakleigh, was irresistible on a beggarly half-bottle. I think I shall go to bed now; you're dull dogs; I'm doing all the talking. Anyone walk as far as Curzon Street? Good night, everybody."
His departure was the signal for a general break-up, and a moment later O'Rane and I were alone. He was silent and out of humour, and I did not need to be told that his efforts to dance with Sonia had been fruitless. I mentioned casually that my uncle wanted to meet him and suggested he should dine with us before going back to Oxford. This, he told me, was impossible: he was up to his eyes in work and had already wasted more time than he could afford.
"Your Schools aren't for a year," I pointed out.
"No, but I only work during term. In the vac. I see life."
I recalled what Sonia had told me on the subject.
"What's it all for?" I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. "You must dosomething."
"Yes, but—messing about at the bottom of a mine? It would be cleaner for you and more amusing for me if you came and stayed with me in Ireland."
"Or with the Daintons in Hampshire. There's quite a run on me. Sonia's frightfully offended because I haven't been near Crowley Court for a year and a half."
Than O'Rane no man was harder to convince that he could ever be in the wrong.
"When people are engaged ..." I began.
Almost fiercely he cut me short.
"And the engagement laughed at, and you threatened with the door and blackguarded for taking advantage of a girl's youth.... And your letters held up; I was forgetting that. God! George, if you'd the pride of a cur ...!" He stoppedabruptly, stretched his hand out for the cigarettes and lit one. "I went to Dainton," he continued more calmly, "and asked if he'd let me marry Sonia on a thousand a year—it was like bargaining with a Persian Jew over the price of a camel. He wouldn't commit himself. I told him I'd have the money two years after coming down from Oxford, and he stroked his fat cheeks and told me I didn't know the difficulties of making money.... Difficulties! As though Almighty God hadn't shot 'em down all round us so that we shall have something in life to overcome! And that from a man who inherited a brewery and let it down till he's glad to sell it at two-thirds the valuation of twenty years ago! Yes, the Daintons are washing their hands of—commerce. I told him—all this was in Sonia's presence—that I'd be judged by my own vain boastings. I'd come up in three years' time to show him if I'd made good, and if she'd wait.... Or if she wouldn't.... I left her a free hand...."
"It was only fair," I put in.
"To me, yes."
"Toher."
"Tome, George. There's not much merit in being faithful to a promise. But when you're not bound in any way, when it's just a matter of your own pride.... Sonia must show if she can make good three years hence. If we both come up true—well, there you are."
He threw his cigarette away, yawned, and sank lower into the chair.
"When did all this happen?" I asked.
"Oh, a year ago. More. It was just after the row."
"Well, what's the trouble to-night?"
O'Rane's eyes, always an interesting study in rapid emotion, became charged with sudden anger.
"She thinks I've cooled off because I don't write," he said. "George, I'm flesh and blood, I can't write—not letters that Lady Dainton would pass—to a girl I want to be my wife."
"Why don't you go and see her occasionally?" I suggested.
"I've got other work."
"I bet you don't get fat on what you earn carting hay in Wiltshire."
"I don't do it for the money. I want to know the lives these fellows are leading. Man's entitled to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' and there are moments when I begin to doubt if every man the wide world over is getting what I claim he's entitled to. I didn't thinkIwas when I was a kid of fourteen. I don't think sweated labourers, prostitutes, incurables, children with tainted blood—I don't thinkthey're getting all they're entitled to. The average Armenian, the natives of the Belgian Congo—I'm not easy in my mind about them, George. But before I die—my God!" He turned suddenly as a hand came to rest on his shoulder, and a voice behind him remarked:
"You're young to be talking of death, Mr. O'Rane."
"Let me introduce you to my uncle, Raney," I said.
He sprang to attention with the same click of the heels I had observed in Burgess's library some seven years before. As their hands met, Bertrand searched the lean, animated face and looked steadily into the expressive, defiant black eyes.
"I understand you are the late Lord O'Rane's son?" Raney drew himself up to the last inch of his height, for all the world like a rock-python waiting to strike. "Your father was a close personal friend of mine," Bertrand went on; "I am very proud to meet his son."
I set the words down as they were spoken; and, to read, there is little enough in them. Yet, when I heard them uttered, I still recall that my eyes began to smart. Bertrand's manner—half-sneering, half-openly brutal—had taken on a new courtliness towards a boy fifty years his junior. I do not regard myself as a man of undue sensibility: the change of tone was not created by my imagination. O'Rane lowered his eyes, bowed and murmured:
"Thank you, sir."
I have never seen a quicker or completer conquest. Gradually we relaxed our self-consciousness. I brought Bertrand a chair and gave him a cigar to smoke.
"Until two hours ago," he told O'Rane, "I knew no moreof your existence than, I expect, you knew of mine."
"Oh, I'd heard a lot about you, sir," Raney answered.
"Lies from George?"
"No, sir. True talk from my father. My first term at Melton I turned you up in 'Whitaker.'"
"The 'London Directory' would have done as well," said Bertrand.
"Is it too late for me to call?"
"By no means. Were you too proud to come before?"
"Too superstitious, sir."
Bertrand leant forward and laid his hand on O'Rane's knee.
"George was talking about you to-night," he said. "I could have offered a helping hand, perhaps."
"Perhaps that was what I was afraid of, sir."
My uncle looked at him with amusement.
"You are—an independent young man," he said.
"I believe in Destiny," said O'Rane, with an answering smile.
"What on earth has that to do with it?" asked Bertrand.
"I wasn't going to lie down and die as long as there was preordained work to do. Destinymeantme to win through."
"She didn't help you much," I said.
"I'm not so sure. I dropped down once on the sidewalk in Chicago, and a woman took me in and nursed me round. Nursed me by day and—earned her living by night. When I went to pay her back and say good-bye before I sailed, she was dead. Just two months in all. And if ever a woman's soul fluttered straight to heaven——"
"What are your plans for the future?" Bertrand interrupted prosaically. He, too, seemingly found O'Rane's intensity of feeling and speech a little disconcerting at first.
Raney woke suddenly from his reverie.
"I'm going back to Oxford to-morrow, sir."
"And after to-morrow?"
"I've got my Schools next year."
"I think George said you'd taken one first. What do you expect in your finals?"
"Commercially, there's no point in an honour school unless you take a first. After that, I have money to make. After that...."
He broke off and shrugged his shoulders.
"It will be Destiny's turn," I suggested.
O'Rane turned to me with a good-humored smile.
"I suppose it's all a wild welter of words to you, George?" he asked.
"No more than any other hypothesis unsupported by evidence," I said. "Your preordained mission...."
"Isn't there one form of work you can do better than all others? Haven't you one supreme aptitude? Form an alliance between aptitude and opportunity...."
"And you get a man of Destiny," I said.
"I leave you the honour of the phrase."
Bertrand glanced at his watch and pushed his chair hurriedly back.
"A quarter to four!" he exclaimed. "I must get home. George, I want you to arrange for David—excuse me, it was your father's name, too—for David to come and dine with us. A Saturday, of course. I hope you will come, David. I'll charge you for your dinner, if you like; and I think you owe me one evening after seven years."
"I'll come any time you ask me, sir."
"I'll leave you in George's hands. By the way, mysticism is too fine and rare a thing to rationalize for youthful sceptics. You will no more make your creed intelligible to George than you will teach me to play chess without a board. Good night, my boy."
"Good night, sir. I—I wish I hadn't waited so long."
"Perhaps it was preordained for the strengthening of your faith," my uncle answered, with a smile.
O'Rane and I returned to the ballroom to take leave of Lady Dainton. Barely six couples remained, and at the end of each dance one or two white, exasperated mothers darted forward, whispering angrily, "Youmustcome now, dear." Even Crabtree had gone, and Sonia was breathlessly battling with her partner, Summertown, to win the even sovereign hehad ventured with the leader of the band on a test of endurance. The band eventually won by doubling its pace, whereupon Summertown claimed a foul and stood in the middle of the room shouting, "Ob-jeck-shun!" till Roger Dainton silenced him with an offer of bones and beer.
"Good night, Sonia, and many thanks," I said. "It was the star turn of the season."
"Good night, Bambina," said O'Rane. "See you again some day."
"Good night, dear one," she answered casually; and then, with a show of contrition, "I'm sorry we didn't have that one together."
"So am I, but it can't be helped now."
"There were suchcrowdsof people Ihadto dance with," she explained.
O'Rane shook hands and came away with me. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that the explanation was in the nature of an anticlimax.
During the first half of the 1905 Season I saw the Daintons three times: after their ball it is hardly an exaggeration to say we met daily. Our new feverish intimacy was not entirely of my seeking, and I am free to admit that Lady Dainton's capable energy left me then, as it leaves me now, with a feeling of scared bewilderment, while the measure of Sonia's success in subjugating London came rapidly to be the measure of my dislike for her. When, however, my uncle fell a victim to internal gout and departed for Marienbad at the end of June, he left me a house, a box at Covent Garden, a voluminous correspondence and the financial welfare of the War Fund to engage my spare time. This last spelt Lady Dainton and afternoon meetings in Rutland Gate. I nerved myself to face the inevitable and wire an invitation to O'Rane to stay with me when term was over.
He kept me company till Goodwood, and one of our firstacts was to dine with the Daintons. I say it in no ungracious spirit, but at this time it was hardly possible not to dine with the Daintons. Turn up the files of the "Morning Post" and you will read some four or five times a week that a very successful ball had been given the previous evening by Mrs. X., "who looked charming in an Empire gown of ivory silk brocade," that among those present were the "Duchess of This, the Countess of That, Lady Dainton and Miss Dainton," and that dinners were given before the ball by "the Duchess of Here, the Countess of There and Lady Dainton." Lord Loring and other well-known dancing men are reported to have looked in during the evening.
Sometimes I feel my life has been embittered by the failure of the "Morning Post" to distinguish me by name; not until I entered the House was I segregated from the herd of "well-known dancing men," and this was more a compliment to the parliament of a great, free people than to myself, for by that time I had bidden almost complete farewell to Claridge's and the Ritz, the Empire Hotel and those ill-constructed tombs in Grosvenor Place that were tenanted, upholstered and beflowered for a night between two eternities of desolation.
By that time, too, the Daintons had scaled an eminence where I could hardly hope to follow them. The "Tickler" and the "Catch" were never wearied of publishing full-length, whole-page photographs of "Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., the popular member for the Melton Division of Hampshire," and Lady Dainton, "who is organizing a sale of work on behalf of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption." If a hospitalmatinéetook place, Miss Sonia Dainton sold programmes; a theatrical garden-party, and she managed a stall; a mission bazaar, and she pinned in fading buttonholes at half a crown a time. And punctually the "Tickler" or "Catch" would depict her at work with her fellows—Lady Hermione Prideaux, all teeth and hat, on one side; and Miss Betty Marsden, the light comedy star from the Avenue Theatre, on the other. And when the last Vesuvius victim had been clothed in crewel work and London had emptied, the indefatigable camera-manwould take wing to the country and photograph "Lady Dainton and her daughter at their beautiful Hampshire seat."
Sonia repaid the trouble as well as Lady Hamilton or La Giaconda. And I think if hard work by itself is to be rewarded, Lady Dainton got no more than her deserts.Ex pede Herculem, and I judge her day by the hour she spared for the War Fund. The Committee Meeting was taken comfortably and unhurriedly in her stride. She was at the time a dignitary of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Primrose League Dame, a Visitor to half a dozen girls' schools, the president of several nursing and Needlework Guilds and—I believe—a vice-president of every Girls' Club, Rescue Home, Purity League and Association of Decayed Gentlewomen in the kingdom. Lady Dainton was one of those women who accumulated arduous and unpaid offices as dukes collected directorships in the golden days of the company-promoting 'nineties. What is more, she worked hard at all of them. When I think of her hurrying from Committee to Prizegiving, and from Prizegiving to Sale of Work, I almost cease to regard woman as man's physical inferior, though I may still wonder how far the world's general welfare would have been retarded had she remained at home with her feet on a sofa and a novel in her lap.
I certainly think Sonia would have lived happier if she had never set foot in London. Her personal success went to her head, and it took ten years of three lives and a war at the end to sober her and restore some sense of perspective. "You can give corn tothoroughbreds," my uncle would begin—and then I usually changed the subject. A woman, in Bertrand's Oriental eyes, was the plaything of so much sexual passion, irresponsible and unsafe until she was veiled and married, and even then perverse and unbalanced.
"To a man, sex is an incident," he would say; "to a woman, it's everything in this world and the next. You are too full of idealism, George. You pretend man's perfectible, that woman's got a capacity for disinterested self-sacrifice. You'll outgrow that phase, my boy; you'll find that with all our inventions and discoveries and religions and philosophiesand civilization and culture, we're devilish little way removed from the beasts. That young woman—I mention no names if it's a sore point with you—may turn into an admirable mother, but as an unsatisfied beast of prey.... My dear boy, it's not herfault, and you and your friends have contributed to make her what she is."
Contributed, perhaps. But, if not her fault, neither was it ours, but the fault of Society and human nature, the action and reaction of the sexes. As the year drew to its close I was too deeply immersed in politics to watch the social comedy, but in the summer and autumn there was little else to do. For five months I observed the psychological development of a girl who was physically attractive—and nothing more: not gifted, not clever, not accomplished, of no spiritual grandeur—a dainty, brilliant, social butterfly. Sonia was no more than that: I doubt if she ever will be more. Yet men are so constituted that it was enough to assure her triumph.
O'Rane and I observed in company. He was pledged to bear-lead young Summertown through the United States in August and September, and till that time I prevailed on him to leave the industrial conditions of England alone. The emptiness of our life must, I fear, have galled him, and, looking back on it all, I made a mistake in bringing him in view of Sonia and her gaudy fellow-butterflies. Technically they met as old friends without a claim on one another, each free to repent in any given way of their rash early engagement. In practice the liberty was one-sided: the greater Sonia's emancipation, the more critical he became; and Sonia, who was no fonder of criticism than any good-looking girl in her first season, grew first restless, then resentful and finally rebellious. When I said good-bye to Raney at Euston, I felt he was not leaving a day too soon; and this is not to blame him, but to underline the impossible position he and Sonia had taken up.
Before he left I recall a series of indecisive skirmishes. There was, for example, the Covent Garden engagement, in which I was routed. With a misguided idea of friendliness and in an attempt to separate Crabtree and Sonia before thewhole of London had coupled their names, I placed my uncle's box at the Daintons' disposal, and, whenever we found an opera we liked, Lady Dainton, Sonia, Raney and I used to dine together either in Princes Gardens or Rutland Gate and drive down together to Covent Garden. O'Rane was a musician; I had an untutored love of music; Lady Dainton, I fancy, felt it was the right thing to do, and Sonia was too overwrought and overexcited to mind what the invitation was so long as she could accept it. Roger Dainton, who rimed 'Lied' with 'Slide,' professed zeal for the House of Commons on such occasions, and on reflection I admire him for his frank Philistinism. With Sonia chattering unconcernedly through "Tristan," and with her mother leaning out to bow to her social acquisitions until I expected every moment to have to clutch her by the heels, the way of the Wagnerian was strait and thorny. But then, as Sonia said, "You come to Covent Garden toseepeople."
It was in seeing and being seen that we courted disaster. One night, as I was ordering coffee in the lounge, Crabtree attached himself to our party and accompanied us to our box. The next night I found him dining at Rutland Gate, and he asked me—before the soup plates were removed—whether I could squeeze him into a corner; he was prepared, if necessary to stand. And no sooner had he secured a programme than he exclaimed:
'"Il Trovatore!' I love that! To-morrow night, too, by Jove——"
"Well, why...." Sonia began and looked at me.
"You'd better roll along here, Crabtree," I said.
He brought a heavy hand crashing on to my knee.
"Stout fellow!" he cried. "What about dinner? Will you come to me, or shall I come to you, or—or what?"
"Oh, you'd better all dine with us," suggested Lady Dainton, tactfully, as he hesitated to fill in particulars of his invitation.
"Raney and I have got some men dining with us at the Club, I'm afraid," I improvised. And as we walked home I remarked, "We are beaten, my son."
"What a city to loot London is!" O'Rane murmured. The criticism, if not original, was at least true. I called it to mind whenever I found Crabtree feeding himself at his friends' expense, or Sonia accepting invitations from people she disliked rather than drop for an instant out of the race.
"I imagine we're becoming Americanized, Raney," I said one afternoon a few weeks later when he and I called on the Daintons to say good-bye before leaving London.
"The girls are," he answered. "They think men exist for the sole purpose of buying 'em sweets, taking them to theatres, running errands for them. Just listen." He crossed the room and drew up a chair by Sonia. "What have you been doing lately, Bambina?"
Sonia wrinkled her brow in sudden petulance.
"I wish you'd drop that silly name, David," she said.
"What have you been doing, Sonia?" he asked.
"Oh, heavens! What haven't I? Mr. Erckmann took me to a meet of the Four-in-Hand Club yesterday. I dined with Lord Summertown at the Berkeley. We went on to the Vaudeville, had supper at the Savoy, and then—and then—oh yes, we danced with Hardrodt, the soda-water king. Why weren't you there, George?"
"Frankly, I haven't much use for Hardrodt," I said. "The only time I met him I thought he was a bit of an outsider."
Sonia spread out her hands with a movement of deprecation.
"But Society lives by its outsiders."
"A man oughtn't to get tight in other people's houses," I persisted.
"Well, it was his own house last night."
"Did he keep sober?" I asked.
"Well, there are sober men and sober men," she answered. "'Not drunk, but having drink taken.'"
O'Rane looked at her gravely for a moment, then he asked:
"Why d'you allow yourself to be seen in a house like that?"
"What's the harm?" Sonia demanded gaily. "He did us awfully well."
"You admit he's an outsider, yet you accept his hospitality...."
"Oh, you little Oxford boys with your logic!" Sonia laughed. "Have a choc.? They're Lord Summertown's farewell present. You'll take care of him in America, won't you, David? He's such a love, I should never forgive you if you lost him. What are you going to do out there?"
At the sound of his own name Summertown joined us.
"I'm going to learn American," he assured us. "Say, this is my fi'ist visit to the U-nited States. Gee! I reckon this is a bully place. Pleasedtomeet you, Miss Dainton. I say, Raney, what's the proper answer to that?"
"No mere European has ever discovered. Get it in first and then clear out while they're still feeling for their guns."
"You're a fat lot of use," Summertown retorted. "Here I'm going out to improve my mind. What's a 'cinch'? And this rotten American War of Independence I'm always up against—when'll it be over? I want to be a pukka Yank."
"You'll be more esteemed as you are," O'Rane answered. "Better let me do the talking."
"Oh, you'll only be taken for an Irish immigrant," returned Summertown.
There he was wide of the mark. There is a story that O'Rane, in shovel hat and clerical collar, bearded the night porter of his own college at two in the morning and gained permission to call on one of the chaplains in Meadow Buildings. I have seen him successfully assume an alien nationality in Montmartre, Seville and Leghorn; while the first draft of American Rhodes scholars, scattered though they be to the ends of the earth, may recall the inaugural address delivered in hearing of the scandalized Cæsars by an alleged attaché of the United States Embassy.
They may remember a slight, passionate figure with black hair and arresting eyes who urged them in the name of their great Republic to resist all interference with their liberty on the part of the University authorities and to lynch any black men they found lurking around Balliol or St. John's. Robert Hawke, of Texas and Hertford, six feet five andproportionately broad, may not yet have forgotten the night when the imposture was discovered; he alone may be able to explain why, after pursuing Raney down Holywell with a loaded revolver and running him to earth in Hell Passage, he tamely consented to breakfast next morning with the man he had sworn to slay. The Rhodes scholars were a fair mark for O'Rane whenever he had an outbreak. Creevey, of Melbourne and Trinity, still preserves the peremptory note that bade him call next morning on the Junior Proctor, Mr. D. O'Rane, though the House Mission has probably long ere this expended the five-shilling fine for non-attendance at the first University Sermon of the term. To add one digression to another, I have never understood how O'Rane survived four years at Oxford without being sent down.
The Covent Garden skirmish was my affair, and after summary defeat I retired into private life. O'Rane's moral lecture was no more successful than my diplomacy: the Americanization of women went on unchecked—if indeed the American girl be as Raney saw her, a social prostitute who would sell herself to the highest bidder and give as little as possible in return; I privately believe the breed to be indigenous to the wealthier strata of English society. He failed and retired to the other side of the Atlantic. Between the two skirmishes came the intervention of Loring House.
I was taking pot-luck there one night when Lady Amy asked me in an undertone how Raney's engagement was progressing. I told her all I knew, and she broke a significant silence by observing:
"Oh, I just wanted to know."
It wasnotall she wanted to know, and I ventured to tell her so.
"Well, Sonia really is behaving rather extraordinarily," she went on. "I wonder her mother...."
"Lady Dainton accompanies her everywhere," I pointed out.
"Yes, either she doesn't see or she doesn't care."
"Probably she thinks there's no harm in it."
Lady Amy shook her head.
"This is my fourth season, George."
"And their first. I submit that they don't know how many people sit round the walls of a ballroom inventing scandal."
"Well, someone ought to tell her. You're a friend of the family."
"Not if I know it, Amy!" I said. "This is not a man's job."
"I'd do it myself, if I knew how to start."
"You've only to tell her there's safety in numbers," I suggested.
It is to be presumed my advice was followed quite literally, for the next time I dined at Rutland Gate the party had doubled in size, and no one got enough to drink. Sonia very dutifully granted dances to all the male guests and, so far as I could see, impartially encouraged all to make love to her. Certainly she discussed the possibility of platonic friendship with me at 10.45, when I had hardly finished my dinner; and four hours later, when Valentine Arden was changing his second buttonhole, I observed the expression of weariness that settled onto his passionless, immobile features when rash newcomers sought to shake his precocious celibacy.
"When does a girl get over the awkward age?" he demanded.
"At death," I hazarded, and he left me in disgust, because he clearly wanted to tell me the answer himself.
Thus to some extent Amy Loring succeeded where Raney and I had failed, but her ultimate defeat was more humiliating than ours. After the last War Fund meeting of the season I went up stairs to find a cup of tea and say good-bye to Sonia before starting out on my autumn campaign among the electors of Wiltshire. Crabtree was with her, and in a jaded, end-of-season spirit they were discussing future arrangements and enumerating the houses they "had to" visit.
"When are you going to House of Steynes, George?" Sonia asked.
I gave her the date, and we found we were invited for the same week.
"You're not selected, are you, Tony?" she asked Crabtree.
"Well, I don't quite know how I'm fixed," he answered, without committing himself. "I'm due with the Fordyces for the Twelfth, and from there...."
He worked out a chain of houses running from the south-west to the north-east of Scotland. House of Steynes, of course, lay across his path; the only question was whether he could fit in....
"By Jove, yes!" he exclaimed, with an air of one making an unexpected discovery. "A blank week! I've a very good mind to ask old Loring if he can give me a bed! It's a rotten business staying at an hotel, and if you're all going to be there...."
He finished his tea and drove to Curzon Street. Loring was at home, the case for charity was presented, and Crabtree carried the day. In an age of artificial politeness no other result was possible; House of Steynes could accommodate half a regiment, and there had never been a breach or the opportunity of a breach.