"The dirty, greasy dog!" Loring fumed when we met at dinner. And for want of a better description, "The dirty, greasy dog!"
I have never calculated the proportion of independent men outside the Navy, Army, Church and Stage who have neither stood as parliamentary candidates nor worked on behalf of a friend or neighbour. It must be almost negligible, and no useful purpose will be served by a description of my first canvass. It was conventional in every feature—from the underpaid rustics who believed their landlords could somehow see into the walls of a ballot-box to the Big and Little Loaf pamphlets and the Chinese Labour posters which the Liberal Publication Department rained down on me in return for ridiculously few shillings and pence. My speeches were as conventional as the personalities exchanged with the Honourable Trevor Lawless, the sitting member, who invited me to dine, expressed the hope that the election would beconducted as among gentlemen and then uttered statements for which I had to make him apologize on the front page of "The Times."
The canvass lasted nearly a month, and I returned to Princes Gardens and my uncle with a sense that I had more than a sporting chance of carrying the seat. With all a young candidate's assured enthusiasm I gave Bertrand full résumés of all my speeches and underlined the telling points, till a more than usually unconcealed yawn reminded me that he too had addressed mass meetings and conducted door-to-door visitations.
"But where are the Ideals, George?" he demanded after my exposition of "The Case against Tariff Reform." "Where is your Imperial Federation, your Secular Solution, your new Poor Law, your Land Scheme, your Housing Reform? Have you outgrown that phase?"
"I can't say they went down very well," I answered. "The Food Taxes——"
My uncle threw back his head and laughed.
"Democracy! What crimes are committed in thy name!"
"The people aren't educated up to it," I returned unguardedly.
"So you stirred them with largely imaginary accounts of labour conditions on the Rand, you played on their fears of dearer food; and, if they return you, you'll blithely scrap the existing Constitution, interfere with the liberty of the subject in every conceivable way. George, George, you have much to learn of representative government."
The tone of my uncle's criticism nettled me—possibly because I felt it was justified.
"If you wait to get a lead from below," I said, "you'll wait all your life without attempting anything!"
Bertrand shook his head uncomprehendingly.
"This fury for Reform!" he exclaimed. "When you've outgrown the phase, George, you may perhaps recall my words of wisdom. I'm a democrat because I believe the folly of many is better than the corruption of few. Sometimes I ask my constituents to support me in advocating a change,sometimes they press a change on me; and, if I approve or can't argue them out of it, I push it on their behalf. The rest of the time I'm content to see that democracy doesn't lose its privileges. I defend the existing order from Tory attacks. Peace—Economy—and personal liberty to do what you dam' please so long as you don't hinder another man from doing what he dam' pleases. I don't affect the modern craving for legislation; I've still to learn that it's wanted, and if it's wanted you must prove that it suits the genius of the race. And I hold that the English find salvation quickest and best if you leave 'em to 'emselves. Of course, that's unfashionable nowadays. I shall be a bit of a candid friend to our Government when we get back. But you and I are poles apart. With the recognition of the Unions and the extension of the Franchise the active work of radicalism is done."
His easy, Pangloss tone exasperated me.
"And sweated Labour ...?" I began.
"Start your minimum wage, and it may pay a man to scrap low-grade labour and put in machines."
"Are you satisfied with our present haphazard Empire?"
"You're not going to cement it by a tariff or a highfalutin' proclamation," he answered. "When anyonewantscloser union, when it's worth anyone's while, it'll be done.Youwant it. Good. Well, do a little missionizing round the Empire, then; don't go into the House to do it." He took out his cigar-case and threw it over to me. "Smoke one and don't look so dam' dejected, George. I've been in the House the devil of a long time, and every day I go there I'm more and more impressed with the extraordinarylittlethat can be done there. I'm not being discouraging on purpose; I want to save you from a crushing disappointment. Shed a few of your illusions, get rid of the 'Thursday Essays' frame of mind—capital debating-society stuff and precious little more. If you'll remember that the government of men is the hardest thing in the world, that this country is a very old and illogical place, with a half-feudal, half-mercantile aristocracy still in effective occupation, and that the House of Commons is the clumsiest tool a revolutionary ever had to handle, you'll besome way on the road to political sanity. Don't merely think of ideal reforms and get hysterical when you can't bring 'em to birth with the aid of a one-clause Bill: face your difficulties squarely, see the utmost extent to which, with all your courage and perseverance, you can overcome them, and then never rest till you've secured up to that limit. The one way sends you into the Cabinet; the other makes you the hero of a party of three in the Smoking-Room. Needless to say, you think I'm deliberately damping down your enthusiasm?"
"I think you're a bit jaundiced by twenty years of Tory rule," I said.
"Dear boy, I was through the '80 Parliament, and the '86 and the '92. If you want things done, you'd better go to Fleet Street. The House of Commons is being more and more ignored each day. Gladstone started it by his monster meetings; he could speak to six thousand electors instead of six hundred members. And the Press learned the lesson. A group of papers that get into every hand in the country, permeate every brain—that's worth a year of perorations and lobbying. But you'd better come along and see for yourself. There'll be an election in a few months now, so you'd better not waste too much time paying visits. Nobody's any idea what our majority will be like."
Between my first and second campaigns I paid but one visit—a week with the Lorings at House of Steynes. The Daintons were there before me, and Valentine Arden, my cousin Violet, Prendergast of the Foreign Office, Sally Farwell and her mother, Rupert Harley and the inevitable Crabtree arrived the same day. There was good shooting and tolerable golf, and in the evenings and on wet days we used to move the furniture and rugs out of the library and dance to Roger Dainton's heavy-footed working of the pianola. Early in life Loring had appreciated that the success of a house-party depended on compelling his female guests to breakfast in their rooms and allowing everyone to do what he liked for the rest of the day. We talked, shot, danced, played bridge, ate, drank, slept—and devised ingenious and bloodthirsty ways of speeding Crabtree on his way to Banff.
"And if he'd take that Dainton child with him," my cousin exclaimed on the evening of our arrival, "I don't think anybody would miss them. George, what's happened to her? She used to be such a nice little thing."
"She has been insufficiently slapped," I suggested. "I am now a serious student of social conditions; I have spent ten weeks in the East of London and ten months in the West. It is my considered opinion that wife-beating will only be stamped out when women are beaten regularly and severely before they become wives."
Violet's pretty blue eyes glanced across to the far end of the hall where an ill-suppressed tittering rose from behind an oak settle.
"And Mr. Crabtree?" she asked.
"I have seen the dog-fanciers of Shadwell holding his like below the surface of a rain-butt for five minutes at a time. In Crabtree's case I should lengthen the period to avoid risks. Incidentally, what has Sonia been doing?"
She brushed the low-clustering curls from her forehead with an angry little hand.
"Have you ever seen a shop-girl with two men on the pier at Brighton?" she demanded.
"My education was skimped," I had to admit.
"Well, you can make up for it now," she said, as Loring appeared and claimed her for the first dance.
I began making up for it next morning when the Lorings and Violet were at Mass. Refusing to breakfast alone in her room, Sonia raided a silent but amicable bachelor party in the dining-room, engaged it in conversation and inquired its plans for the day. None of us was anxious to shoot on the morrow of our journey, and after considerable deliberation she decided to play golf with Prendergast. They started off at ten, and by one-thirty Prendergast had had his devotion sorely tried.
"I told her to take a jersey," he confided to me in the smoking-room. "She wouldn't. She went out in a north-east wind with a blouse you could see through, and when we got to the links I had to come back and find her a coat.We got on famously till we reached the third tee, then she said she was too hot and I must carry the damned thing because the caddie's hands were dirty. I gave her a stroke a hole and was dormy at the turn; then she must needs say she was tired and insist on coming home. At the club-house she discovered she was hungry and sent me in to forage. I brought her out sandwiches, cake, chocolate, and milk." He checked the list with emphatic fingers. "She looked at them and said they weren't nice and she could hang on till lunch-time. Making a fool of a fellow," he concluded indignantly.
I murmured suitable words of sympathy and imagined that he had now learned his lesson. At luncheon, however, Sonia sat next to him and, with her innocent brown eyes looking into his, asked him to describe his work at the Foreign Office. When we left the table he was enslaved a second time. As the wind had dropped and rain was beginning to fall, she sent him to find a book she had lost; when he returned with it she was too sleepy to read and demanded bridge to keep her awake; no sooner had the table been set and three unwilling players dragged from their slumbers in the smoking-room than she decided the weather had cleared up sufficiently for her to take a walk.
"Anyone coming?" she asked at large.
Loring, Prendergast, Crabtree and I offered our services as escort—in that order and with a certain interval between the third and fourth.
"Well, run along and get ready," she ordered, "or the rain'll begin again. I shall go as I am."
When we returned with overcoats and thick boots she looked uncertainly at her thin shoes and inquired:
"Is it really wet outside? Perhaps I'd better change."
And change she did—every stitch of clothing she possessed, I imagine, for a full half-hour had passed before she descended in shooting-boots, Burberry and short skirt; and by that time tea was ready and the rain had set in for the night. Variations on the same theme were played daily under the eyes of Lady Loring, who was too placid to mind anything that did not affect her beloved Amy or Jim; underthe eyes, too, of Lady Dainton, who, I believe, had hardly issued a command or rebuke to Sonia from the day of her birth. Crabtree and Prendergast openly kissed the rod, Loring good-humouredly regarded such treatment as being all in the day's work of a host; with the women I suppose Violet's criticism was expressive of the general feeling. I frankly derived a certain lazy amusement from watching Sonia playing the oldest game in the world; she seldom bothered me, and, while others ran errands, I was free to spend idle hours in the smoking-room with Valentine Arden, whose sex-philosophy taught him that, if a woman wanted him, she must first come and find him. Each day we elaborated a new and more masterly scheme for recalling Crabtree to town: each day we foundered on the same reef and forced the conversation at dinner in our attempt to discover his address in Lincoln's Inn and the name of his clerk.
It is perhaps humiliating to confess that his dislodgement, when it came, was not at our hands. I recall one afternoon when Prendergast fell from favour; Sonia forswore a walk with him and invited Crabtree to give his opinion of a new brassy she had just received from Edinburgh. They set out immediately after luncheon (in those days Sonia did not smoke and could not understand how it could be necessary to anyone else); at tea-time she returned alone—rather white and subdued—and went straight to her room. Her mother, Lady Loring and Amy visited her in turn and reported that she was over-tired and had lain down with a headache. As we started tea, a telegram arrived for Crabtree, followed by Crabtree himself. Tearing open the envelope, he informed us with fine surprise that his clerk had summoned him back to chambers to advise on an important case; might he have a car, would Lady Loring excuse him ...? Valentine Arden, with an author's small-minded jealousy in matters of copyright, dropped and broke a plate in sheer vexation, though to his credit be it said that the anger was short-lived, and, when Loring himself strolled round to the garage to see that his orders had not been misunderstood, Valentine was filling a petrol tank as enthusiastically as Ihad offered to help in the packing and dispatch of our fellow-guest.
With her taste for good 'entrances,' Sonia appeared as the car turned out of sight down the drive. The headache was gone, and throughout dinner she was almost hilarious, though by the time we had finished our cigars she had retired to bed. Two hours later I met Amy coming out of her room: she beckoned me to a window-seat by the "Mary Queen of Scots" room, and we sat down.
"Thank goodnessthat'sover!" she exclaimed, passing her hand over her eyes.
"Is Sonia upset?" I asked.
Amy shook her head and sighed.
"I can't make out," she answered. "They've—sort of parted friends. I think she's rather glad he proposed—and thoroughly frightened when it came to the point. George, does David fancy he's going to marry her?"
"I believehethinks so."
"I'm not sure that I envy him. But, if he is, he'd better hurry up. Sonia doesn't let much grass grow under her feet. I really rather hope mother won't let her be asked here again."
"But as long as your Prendergasts and Crabtrees spread their faces out to be walked on——" I began.
"Well, don't let her do it here," Amy interrupted. "I don't want to see dear old Jim scalped."
"He's much too lazy," I said.
Amy raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"My dear, you're not very observant."
"I've been watching rather closely," I protested. "He's decently civil——"
"To her, yes. But d'you remember a certain Horse Show week when we were staying with the Hunter-Oakleighs in Dublin, and Jim and Violet——"
"But that's the ancientest of ancient history! Jim was hardly short-coated at the time."
"They kept it up a good while," she answered, with a toss of the head.
"Amy, you're a shameless match-maker. First of all Raney and Sonia, then Jim and Violet——"
"As long as it isn't the other way round, I don't mind. Sonia isn't even a Catholic."
"Neither Jim nor Sonia will marry for years yet," I said. "Peopledon'tnowadays. You have a much better time unmarried; there's an element of uncertainty and interest about you...."
"There's far too much uncertainty," said Amy, with a sigh. "Sometimes I have perfect nightmares about Jim. You see, heisworth a woman's while, and I have a horror that he'll make some hideous mistake and then be too proud to wriggle out of it. However, don't let's meet trouble half-way."
I left House of Steynes two days later and crossed to Ireland. On the writing-table of my library at Lake House I found a picture-postcard representing the Singer Building, with the question, "Any news? Raney." I sent a postcard with an indifferent photograph of the landing-stage at Kingstown, inscribed with the words, "No news. George Oakleigh." Then I said good-bye to the life I had been leading since my return to England. Bertrand wired in October that an election was imminent, and I spent the autumn in an Election fur coat and an Election car, tearing from end to end of my constituency and delivering speeches for which—as Gibbon might have said—the part-author of "Thursday Essays" might afterwards have blushed with shame. I have fought but two elections, and the memory of the cheap pledges and cheaper pleasantries, the misleading handbills and vile posters—distributed impartially by either side—give me no feeling of moral elation.
And in 1906 the contamination seemed the more unwelcome for being superfluous. There was room for high thinking and lofty ideals at a time when the country went mad in its lust to restore Liberalism to power. Heaven knows what programme I could not have put forward so long as it radically reversed the measures and spirit of the Conservative administration!
Or so it seemed in the early weeks of the 1906 Session,when hundreds of new members pressed forward to take the Oath and sign the Roll of Parliament, each one as strong in the confidence of his electors, each one as resolved to bring in a new heaven and a new earth—and each one as innocent of parliamentary forms of procedure as myself.
"Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one of this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views and habits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement, the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinous sources."H. G. Wells, "An Englishman Looks at the World."
"Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one of this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views and habits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement, the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinous sources."
H. G. Wells, "An Englishman Looks at the World."
"England has had her Long Parliament and her Short Parliament. On my soul, George, I don't know that this won't deserve to be called the 'Mad Parliament.'"
The speaker was my uncle, the time a few weeks after the beginning of the 1906 Session, the place a corner-seat below the gangway. We had survived the oratorical flood of the debate on the Address and were settling down to work. The giant Liberal majority, "independent of the Irish," as we used to boast in those days, but discreetly respectful to the disturbingly large Labour contingent, was finding its sea-legs;new members no longer prefaced their exordia with a "Mister Chairman and Gentlemen," and the lies and counter-lies of the Election, the sectional mandates from the electors and the specific pledges to constituents were gradually ceasing to be rehearsed in public. We passed crushing votes of confidence in the Free Trade system, arranged the evacuation of the Rand by the Chinese coolies, ascertained that the parliamentary draughtsmen were wasting no time over our Education and Licensing Bills,—and lay back with a yawn to luxuriate in our own strength, and dream of the new England we were calling into existence.
For a time our work was negative. After twenty years of misrule we had to cleanse the country before we could begin our inspired task, and in those early weeks I voted correctly and spent the rest of my day looking round me and attempting to memorize the new faces. The Treasury Bench needed no learning. I had met some of the Ministers in Princes Gardens and knew the rest by sight, but I gazed at it more than at any other part of the House—in a spirit of hero-worship, I suppose, on being brought into working partnership with men I had idealized for fifteen years.
In ability it was a great Ministry, and after nearly ten years I have much the same feeling for its leading members as before: the same love for 'C.-B.,' most human, diplomatic and forgiving of men; the same reverence for the aloof, austere Sir Edward Grey with his Bunyanesque Saxon speech and aura of Arthurian romance; the same admiration for the boundless intellectual efficiency of Mr. Haldane and Mr. Asquith; and the same delighted uncertainty in watching the volatile, lambent fire of Mr. Lloyd George's genius. In the delicate work of Cabinet-making, the deft fingers of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman hardly slipped, and to a Liberal Leaguer like myself the result was a brilliant compromise. The head and legs, the Prime Minister and the lesser office-holders, were Radicals of the Dispersion; the body was made up of Liberal Imperialists who, by sheer weight of intellect and personal authority, might be expected to control the movements of the extremities.
Yet, when the history of the 1906 Parliament comes to be written, the one thing stranger than the capture of the Cabinet by the Liberal League will be the capture of the Liberal League by the unofficial members. The House was overwhelmingly Radical and Nonconformist: it closed its ears to the wider Imperialism, and in 'Liberal League' saw but 'Whig Party' writ large. The result was hardly fortunate. Rather than surrender principle or power, the Whigs went to work underground, systematically corrupting the Radical majority in the House in the brief intervals of misleading the Radical majority in the Cabinet. Perhaps it was invincible necessity that demanded it, perhaps the Whig section showed the higher statesmanship in committing Democracy to a course it might not have taken without blinkers. I say no more than that it was unfortunate in its effect on the House and precarious as a policy on which life and death depended. Which Ministers knew what they were fighting for or against in the Big-and-Little-Navy struggle? Would the House have yawned so impatiently through the Army debates and the formation of the Expeditionary Force if it had known the Government's continental engagements? Was it safe to assume that a great pacific party would declare war within a few hours of learning the promises made in its name?
It was dangerous, but my purpose is not to arraign Ministers. Their double life is now only of interest to me as explaining in some measure the sterility of that monster majority at which I gazed in exultant wonder during my first session, explaining, too, the failure of that Mad Parliament which looked on life through the rose-tinted sunset haze of a "Back-to-the-Land" campaign and concentrated all political justice within the outer cover of a Plural Voting Bill. By counting heads, we were so powerful—and we did so little for all the Utopias we foreshadowed in our pulsing perorations.
"A Mad Parliament, George," my uncle repeated, "but a devilish funny one. We're made all ready to reverse the Tory measures of the last four or five years. Now, if you watch, you'll see the poor relations coming hat in hand to the mandarins."
I watched for some time, inside the House and out; watched and saw the Nationalists—hardly hat in hand—rejecting the Irish Councils Bill and calling for payment in Home Rule currency. I saw the Labour Party fed first with the Trades Disputes Bill, then with the provision for payment of members; and I saw the Welsh mollified with a promise of Disestablishment. It was to everybody's advantage that the Government should not be wound up till the preference shareholders had been paid, and as the last half-year's interest became due the commercial travellers of the Cabinet started on the road with social reform samples—old age pensions, land taxation, small holdings and insurance. The Radical Ministers were good salesmen and did a roaring trade; the country settled down to a riot of social legislation; the very board of Whig directors caught something of the infectious enthusiasm, and, as it was too late to talk of foreign debenture holders, the least they could do was to increase their outlay to attract new customers.
There was tragi-comedy in the spectacle, for the board and its travellers never worked in harmony, and neither section of supporters was satisfied. There was no attempt at comprehensive, imaginative social reconstruction—nothing but successive sops of clamorous minorities. Of my Thursday Club programme—with its Poor Law and Housing Reforms, its Secular Education and Federal Parliament, above all with its determined attempts to solve the Wage Problem and free the industrial system from the scandal and crime of strikes and lock-outs, not one item was achieved. Not one item had a chance of being achieved when the contest with the Lords was postponed beyond the rejection of the first Liberal Bill. But the debts had not then been paid. Street hoardings still bore tattered remnants of fluttering election posters, the Liberals had been out of office for half a generation, and the Whig foreign policy was barely begun.
So the party shirked the election, its groups scrambled for favours from the Government, and Ministers talked social reform, universal brotherhood and a "naval holiday" to a House they were afraid to take into their confidence. The1906 Parliament might have produced a social programme or a foreign policy with the backing its conditions necessitated. It did neither. No one troubled to educate new members or organize the party. It was chiefly, I think, the number of groups, the strangeness of their visions and their common failure to recognize the impossible in politics, that moved my uncle to speak of the Mad Parliament. I am not so vain as to think the "Thursday Programme" wrote the last word in political science; I do claim, however, that as a piece of co-ordinated, imaginative thinking it treated the State as a whole, not as a bundle of warring sections to be divided and ruled, bribed and silenced. It attempted to bring the machinery of government into line with twentieth-century requirements. It tried to carry out, at leisure and in a spirit of reason, the structural changes that will have to be hurriedly improvised after the war.
By the time I had learned the names and constituencies of two-thirds of the members I had begun to notice how individuals agglomerated in the Smoking-Room and lobbies. The only characteristic common to every group was that it imagined itself the apostle of an exclusive salvation. The "Thursday Party" was reproduced a dozen times over, and, in looking back sadly on the futility of all our empty dreams, I feel that the Whips' Office must be held responsible for wasting the greatest opportunity of reform since the French Revolution. So long as we voted obediently, nothing mattered. We were never welded into a party, never educated politically; and the waste of enthusiasm was hardly less criminal than the waste of talent.
I can speak impersonally in this matter, for no one dreamed of thinking me fit for the most insignificant office—myself least of all; but there was no justification for ignoring great commercial organizers like Barrow, Trentley, Justman and half a dozen more—men whose ability had been proved time and again—and farming out under-secretaryships to fashionable barristers like Turkinson or scions of great houses like Cheely-Wickham. One of the first groups I distinguished was that of the middle-aged successfulbusiness men for whom no use could be found save as units in a division.
Another and a sadder was the largest in the House—the stalwarts, the 'sound party men.' Under present conditions no Government could live without them; they know it, and in that knowledge find two-thirds of their reward. The remainder comes by way of knighthoods—after a year or two of power it was impossible to walk through the lobby without being jostled by knights—occasionally by a Privy Councillorship and always by a sense of personal importance. How they loved to repeat what the Prime Minister had said to them—man to man! How infallible was the Liberal Ministry, whatever its inconsistencies! How treacherous their opponents! The Liberal rank and filer, I suppose, is no more stupid than his counterpart on the other side, but he is as depressing in conversation as might be expected of a man unoriginal in thought and uncritical in mind, whose supreme function is vehemently to propagate the imperfectly grasped ideas of others. I require no more loyal supporter than the Right Honourable Harry Marshall-James or the hundred men who are Marshall-James in everything but name; but I am not likely to find a man more pompous of manner and mediocre of mind.
And he is one of inimitably many, for the Ministry discouraged ability outside the Treasury Bench, finding distant appointments for the men it could not swallow at home. "No Army," as Jellaby, one of the Junior Whips, told me, "can be composed entirely of field-marshals." In his place I should have said the same thing: undoubtedly the same thought was felt, if never expressed, in the Nationalist party, so alien in spirit that I never knew the half of its members' names.
"I've sat opposite or alongside them many years," said my uncle reflectively. "I've seen the hair of so many of them turn gradually whiter. Some of them are elderly men, George; if Home Rule doesn't come in their time.... And there are still people who call them paid agitators; the Sinn Fein party still pretends they're prolonging the agony in order to keep their job. Ye gods! how sick of it all they mustbe! There are men on those benches—barristers and writers—who could have made the world their own. What d'you suppose they wouldn't give now to have their youth back—and their youth's opportunities? You may live to see the tragedy repeated with Labour."
He pointed with his finger to a group of three men high up on a back bench—Dillworth, Champion and Tomlin. I had heard the first two in the debate on the Address, and the last I was to hear many times before I left the House. They represented the Socialist State, and for passion, logic and incorruptibility ran the Nationalists close. As the Session aged, nine-tenths of the new members were unconsciously affected by the moral atmosphere of the House; compromise dulled the fine edge of our convictions, our constant close proximity to the Opposition mellowed our spirit; and a recognition of personal traits, the utterance of feeble, obscure, friendly jokes induced the belief that our worst enemy was fool rather than knave. TheintransigeantSocialists kept their souls untainted by compromise; for them there was no dealing with Liberal or Conservative, and, when Tomlin spoke on Labour questions, you could imagine a Socialist foot-rule in his hand by which every reform was to be measured.
I disapprove the Socialist State he expounded, I dispute his premises and charge him with possessing the same excessive logic which led primitive ascetics to inch-by-inch suicide or drove doctrinaires of the French Revolution to destroy church spires in the interests of Republican equality. But I admire his passion of soul and intensity of vision; I recognize that his group of idealogues at least appreciated that the perfect State presupposes an all-embracing social philosophy.
There are few more moving sights than a preacher without a congregation, or with one that is incapable of understanding. St. Francis of Assisi won warmer response from his birds than Campion or Dillworth from the 1906 Parliament. Their audience numbered too many barristers, and the Bar has never been famous for its imagination or sympathy. Socialism, as offered by Campion and accepted by, say, Robert Plumer,K.C., suggested the form that the Sermon on the Mount might assume in the hands of an efficient parliamentary draughtsman. The Socialists were not slow to appraise their critics, and I sometimes think a great part of the later industrial troubles rose from a belief that laws and agreements were framed by skilled hair-splitters for the confusion of trusting manual workers.
The belief was fostered by the Press and a generous use of the "lawyer-politician" catchword. I have never been associated with the law, but I had opportunities of studying my legal colleagues in bulk, and a sillier phrase never obsessed the mind of a considerable people. Granted that the Bar was of arid, unimaginative temper, granted that it invaded the House for what the House could give it, may not the same charge be brought against seven-tenths of the non-legal members? And pressmen and barristers alone seem to enjoy the faculty of assimilating huge masses of strange matter in short time.
The Bar in Parliament appeared at its worst, not in the Chamber but in the Smoking-Room. I remember my uncle taking me aside after my election and counselling me as though I were a younger brother going to school for the first time. I was to sit tight until I had learned the procedure of the House, and after that—well, any man of average intelligence who wore out his patience and his trousers for ten years would be in the Ministry at the end. I was to put parliament before everything else and shed any idea that I could write novels between divisions, or contribute to the Press, or live with one foot in the House and the other in Mayfair. I was to cultivate the personal touch and read Ronsard for the pleasure of quoting him to Mr. Windham. But first and last and all the while I was to avoid the Smoking-Room.
"It's the grave of young reputations, George," he told me one day when we were seated there in a corner consecrated immemorially to his private use. "You sit and talk about what you're going to do, you discuss your neighbors,—this comes well from me, I know, but I'm an old sinner with a wasted life, and you're still a boy,—you shuffle jobs andappointments everlastingly, and in the meantime Ministers never see you, you learn nothing and you're always a day late for your opportunities. Remember that there's never any warning in the House, George. You'll get a dozen chances of winning your spurs, but only by sitting, sitting, sitting in your place when other people have gone away to dinner. Leave the Smoking-Room alone, my boy."
So for one session I followed his advice. After two hours in the "grave of young reputations" I returned to my corner seat, leaving a knot of barristers to cast lots for the vacant Harleyridge recordership, leaving my uncle, too, to watch the great movement of men. My sense of duty was so shortlived that I may be pardoned for dwelling on it and saying that the Smoking-Room is the most interesting place in the House. A year or two later, when I appreciated the wonderful mandarinesque inaccessibility of the Cabinet and saw how little the private member was wanted anywhere but in the division lobbies, I hurried away to places where at the least a man could smoke and talk.
The change was not ennobling but it gave infinitely more varied food for thought. I watched the social levelling-up of Radicalism and saw stern, unbending Nonconformists honoured and decorated for all the world like Tory supporters of the Establishment. At one time Baxter-Whittingham, looking strangely like a famished undertaker in his loose, half-clerical clothes, had criticized the Government as persistently as Campion or Dillworth; his mind stored with the memory of working-class conditions in Shadwell, his voice throbbing with indignation and pity, he had arraigned a Ministry that wasted days on the Address and hours on the obsolete circumlocutions of "Honourable and gallant members," "Mr. Speaker, I venture to say—and I do not think the most captious critic will contradict me ...," while men starved and women trod the path of shame, while little children went barefoot and verminous.
The silent fortitude of the Treasury Bench under his attacks was a thing to mark and remember. "It amuses him and doesn't hurt us," said my friend Jellaby, the Whip. "Solong as hevotes...." And Baxter-Whittingham never divided the House against the Government. Once when the Feeding of School Children Bill was in Committee he became dangerous: the Treasury Bench was deserted, and he lavished fine irony on the Ministerial passion for reform. Free-lances and others who had entrusted their social consciences to Whittingham, or were nettled by the intolerable aloofness of Ministers, followed in the same strain, and an excited Whip drove me out of the tea-room and bade me hold myself in readiness for trouble.
The following day the smoking-room presented a strange appearance. Seven members of the Cabinet and four lesser Ministers mingled with the common herd—like naughty schoolboys propitiating a ruffled master. They cracked jokes and slapped us on the back, bade us take pot-luck with them, and asked how things were looking in our constituencies. I lunched with a Secretary of State that day and, to redress the balance, kept my promise to dine with Sir Gerald Matley, the Wesleyan potter and Liberal knight. We were given a wonderful dinner, starting with caviar and ending with cigars like office-rulers, which we were urged to pocket, six at a time, to smoke on the way home. Flushed and rebellious, Philip drunk swore to move the adjournment unless he got a promise of warmer support for the School Children Bill. Philip sober was a shade less valiant. Matley and I, alone of that heroic cave, kept to our undertaking, and our fellow-braves avoided the House for a couple of days. The Treasury Bench smiled a little contemptuously as we proceeded to the Orders of the Day, but the lesson was not entirely thrown away. When the Minimum Wage Appeal Board was set up, Baxter-Whittingham (and who more fit?) was appointed Controller at a salary of £1250 a year, and Shadwell and the House of Commons knew him no more.
"Parliament before everything else," my uncle had said. With debates and committees, dinners and intrigues, great Liberal receptions and levees, I had time for nothing else. No schoolboy counted the days to the end of term more eagerly than I did as we came in sight of August.
As the session drew to a close I gave a dinner-party at the House to the Lorings, Daintons, Farwells and one or two more. Truth to tell, I gave many dinners in the early days when it was still a pleasure to leap up between courses for a division. I almost liked to be called away from the "Eclectic" by an urgent telephone summons, and the joy of being saluted by the police in Palace Yard, or asked whether anything was happening in the House, died hard. I was six-and-twenty at the time, and it amused me to be buttonholed by the inveterate log-rollers of the Lobby or pumped by pressmen as I emerged from a secret meeting of intrigue in one of the Committee Rooms.
Loring had dined informally with me on many occasions—to examine the personnel of the Liberal party, he said, and classify those members who had stood for a bet or to improve their practice or acquire copy for their next novel. He became an assiduous attendant in the House of Lords as soon as we had any measures to send there, but in the early days he lived a butterfly life, and one of the conditions of my invitations was that he should give me news of that old world from which I was now cut off. Roger Dainton had lost his seat in the great landslide, and I had seen nothing of the family since the previous autumn. He was one of many, and so much had my uncle filled me with vicarious enthusiasm for political life, that I refused an invitation to Crowley Court in order to enter for the Parliamentary Golf Handicap, wherein Robert Plumer defeated me in the first round in comfortable time to return and argue a case before the Privy Council, while I dawdled on in contemplation of a game I dislike playing and loathe watching.
My dinner opened promisingly, as Lady Dainton was recognized by two Ministers on the way to the Harcourt Room andby a third as we took our seats. Summertown, I recollect, was in disgrace, as he had the previous week bade lasting farewell to his College in consequence of riding a motor-bicycle round the Quad, and half-way up the staircase of one of the Censors at six o'clock in the morning after the Bullingdon Ball. He had, however, won a pair of gloves from Sonia for his trouble. I contrived to separate him from his mother, and he underwent no worse punishment than hearing his future discussed at the top of three penetrating voices. Lady Marlyn assumed the world to be as deaf as herself, and I could see poor Sally Farwell blushing as her mother pierced and overcame the murmur of the surrounding tables. "A regular good-for-nothing scamp, Mr. Oakleigh. I want to send him abroad, but I wouldn't trust him alone. Do you think your nice friend Mr. O'Rane would care about the responsibility again? You know there was dreadful trouble with Jack over an Italian girl in New York."
I hastened to assure her that O'Rane would greedily accept the offer. I would myself have thrown up my seat and escorted Summertown round the world in person rather than have his indiscretions with the Italian girl shouted through the echoing dining-room.
"Has anyone seen anything of O'Rane?" I asked Sonia in the course of dinner.
"He was at Commem.," she answered. "Sam made up a party with Lord Summertown and David and a few more."
"It must have been quite like old times," I said, recalling Sonia's first and my last appearance at a Commemoration Ball.
"We fought like cats," she replied. "Tony Crabtree——"
"You didn't tell mehewas of the party," I interrupted. Possibly there was more in my tone than in the words used.
"Why not?" Sonia asked, her big brown eyes filled with simple wonder. "You surely aren't still thinking of that absurd affair in Scotland?"
"What absurd affair?" I asked.
"You know perfectly well what I mean."
"I didn't know it was a matter of public discussion," I said.
"But it was the sort of thing that might have happened to anyone," she protested. "Of course at first ..." Her little white shoulders raised themselves almost imperceptibly. "But we've been meeting on and off all the season; we couldn't stand and glare, and it was much easier to be friends. We soon made it up, and he's been to stay with us in Hampshire. Well, I got Sam to take him up for Commem., and David must needs fight with him about something.Ididn't mind, I'm not Tony's keeper, but David was so full of righteous indignation that I found him very dull. There was a sort of 'it-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you' reproachful look about him, so that in desperation I just asked him if he didn't love me any more."
"You're utterly soulless, Sonia," I observed, by way of gratifying her.
Her eyes shone with mischievous delight.
"His very words! Men are wonderfully unoriginal. I just leant forward and kissed him on his eyelids—it's all right!" she exclaimed; "he insists that we're morally engaged—and whenever I do that he simply crumples up. It's rude to lookquiteso surprised, George."
"And yet your people are quite respectable," I said thoughtfully.
She shook her head and sighed.
"You've become dreadfully proper and old-fashioned, George," she told me, "since you got into this musty old House. You'realmostas bad as David, without the excuse of caring a snap of the fingers for me. He lectured me and lectured me, but when it was over he wanted to dash away and spend his life in a moorland cottage with me, sins and all."
"That temptation, at least, you had the fortitude to resist," I said.
She wrinkled her nose and pouted. "Me no likee. There are such millions of things I simply can't do without, and David can't give them me, and if he could he wouldn't. He is so serious, poor lamb! And it's always about the wrong things. After all, George, whatdoesmatter in life? It's frightfully serious to be ugly, or grow old, or not to know how to dress—I'm all right there at present, and perhaps Ishan't mind when the time comes and I get all skinny and lined. It'll be frightfully serious if Lady Knightrider doesn't ask me up for the Northern Meeting, or if Daddy doesn't raise my allowance—I told you I was broke, didn't I? Well, I am. In the meantime——" She broke off and hummed two bars of a waltz. "Lifeisgood, George."
"We were discussing Raney," I reminded her.
"Were we? I'd forgotten about him."
"It is an old habit of yours. What part does he play in your tragedy?"
"Tragedy?" she echoed, not altogether displeased at the choice of word.
"It'll be a tragedy before you've played it out," I told her.
She was quite thoughtful for a moment or two, and when she spoke again I could see her discretion obviously declining a challenge that her curiosity longed to take up.
"David's perfectly free to do whatever he likes," she answered, a shade combatively. "I'm not going to decide anything for the present; life's far too much fun, and we've got all eternity before us.He'sin no hurry either."
"I thought he was in treaty for that moorland cottage," I said.
"Oh, that was merely a passing brain-storm. I told him the life I was leading, and he thought it over and decided to let me have my fling—so considerate of him!—and when I'm tired of vanities, if neither of us has found anyone better and either of us has got any money,v'là tout!"
With an exquisite wave of her hand she dismissed the subject and invited me to admire her dress, which was more transparent than most but otherwise not remarkable.
"Why don't you both have the honesty to admit you've made a mistake?" I asked.
"It amuses him," said Sonia tolerantly.
"And you?"
She gazed across the room with her head on one side.
"And you, Sonia?" I repeated.
"I'll tell you some day," she promised, and with that the subject finally dropped.
I wrote that day to Oxford—knowing no other address—to ask O'Rane to stay with me in Ireland. After considerable delay and the dispatch of a reply-paid telegram I received an answer dated from Melton.
"My dear George," it ran—and I preserve it as the only letter I ever received from the world's worst correspondent—"many thanks. Delighted to come. Villiers has gone under temporarily with rheumatic fever, contracted by sitting on wet grass to watch his house being defeated in the Championship; I am knocking the Under Sixth into shape in his absence. I have achieved considerable popularity with the boys, and Burgess would like to keep me in perpetuity. It's not bad fun. Some of the kids who fagged for me in Matheson's are now grown men, about five times the size of me. As I haven't got a degree yet, of course I'm not entitled to wear a gown, and the lads despise me accordingly. Burgess, seen at close quarters as a colleague, is even greater than I thought. I have gathered from him and the common-room some hideous stories of you and Jim. Blackmail will be the prop of my declining years.—Ever yours,"D. O'R."
"My dear George," it ran—and I preserve it as the only letter I ever received from the world's worst correspondent—"many thanks. Delighted to come. Villiers has gone under temporarily with rheumatic fever, contracted by sitting on wet grass to watch his house being defeated in the Championship; I am knocking the Under Sixth into shape in his absence. I have achieved considerable popularity with the boys, and Burgess would like to keep me in perpetuity. It's not bad fun. Some of the kids who fagged for me in Matheson's are now grown men, about five times the size of me. As I haven't got a degree yet, of course I'm not entitled to wear a gown, and the lads despise me accordingly. Burgess, seen at close quarters as a colleague, is even greater than I thought. I have gathered from him and the common-room some hideous stories of you and Jim. Blackmail will be the prop of my declining years.—Ever yours,
"D. O'R."
I had received a conditional promise from the Daintons, and to complete my party I invited the Lorings. Amy accepted, and Jim refused. Looking back at this time I remember that it was not easy to frame an invitation that he would not refuse. It was a weariness going to other people's houses, he told me, eating strange food, not being master of his own time. Assuming that I wanted to see him, why didn't I come to House of Steynes? Smilingly but resolutely he declined to come.
Where his personal comfort was concerned Loring could be wonderfully unadaptable. "I waste a fair portion of my life in the House," he used to argue. "Do let me enjoy the rest of the time in my own way." His mother and sister caught the refrain and abetted him. Indeed, a legend grew up that he was the hardest-worked member of either Houseand could therefore claim indulgences in the off hours when he was not struggling heroically against the latest Radical machination.
The old controversies are dead, but Loring's theory of the House of Lords is of hardier growth. Posing as the reader of Democracy's secret thoughts, he would leave House of Steynes amid rows of bowing flunkeys, motor to the station, where the stationmaster hastened to be obsequious, and step into his reserved carriage. With a great deal of bowing and smiling the guard would lock the door that his lordship might be undisturbed till he reached London. And at Euston a chauffeur and footman would meet him. "Yes, my lord"; "No, my lord"; "Very good, my lord." It would take another four men adequately to open the great doors of Loring House, but in time, and with more assistance where needed, he would be driven down to Westminster, there to display the knowledge of social conditions and public opinion acquired in his journeyings abroad.
So it was when the planets were yet young, so it will be when the earth grows cold, though the man who fled discomfited from Shadwell after ten days should perhaps refrain from criticism.
In what most men count the great things of life, Loring never abused his position; in the small, he became frankly unclubbable. I had known him long enough to laugh at the old-maidish fixed order of incompatibilities that he mistook for a well-regulated life. It was very conservative, very unadaptable, and he had an unanswerable reason for everything. You dined with him at the Elysée because Armand had the finest hand in London for ahomard au tartare—the practice and the tribute continued for years after the great chef had bought himself an hotel in Boston and bade farewell to London. You dined at eight-fifteen because—well, because Loring always dined at eight-fifteen, and food at any other hour was supper or a meat tea. You hurried your dinner so as not to miss the star turn at the "Round House," which was timed for nine-twenty-five, and, when you had seen that, you had to leave—because Loring always left atthat point, in turn because there was never anything worth seeing after ten. You then sat for half an hour—a dreadfully uncomfortable half-hour—at Hale's, where smoking was not allowed (few men smoked in 1630 when Martin Hale opened his tavern in Piccadilly at the fringe of "the town"): it would never have done, he would assure you, to arrive at your next destination before eleven; equally no man on earth could wish to stay later than two a.m.
It was impossible to wean him from his little rules, and the world must follow his lead—or live elsewhere. (Which course was adopted, he hardly cared.) I fought to preserve my prejudices against his—and he beat me. At ten-ten I was left in my stall at the "Round House," and he was half-way to Hale's. And when he decided that he could not and would not meet women at breakfast, I scarcely hoped he would make an exception in favour of Lake House. If my mother and Beryl persisted in breakfasting with their guests—I can see the very shrug of his shoulders as though he had put his objections into words—it was really,reallysimpler for me to meet him in Scotland where there would be no hideous domestic surprises in store for anyone.
So my autumn party in 1906 brought me Amy but not her brother. "Tell George I hope you're all missing me," he wrote to her. I hastened to assure him that with my uncle, O'Rane, the Daintons, the Hunter-Oakleighs from Dublin and four or five more, his absence had not been remarked.
I always doubted the wisdom of including O'Rane in a house-party, for the Lake House estate offered little but its snipe-shooting, and he refused to shoot. There was, however, a library, a garden, some purple, green, brown and grey mountain scenery and—for anyone who cared to do so—the mountains themselves to climb. For the most part he paced up and down the terrace at the margin of the lake, gazing dreamily over its mirror-like surface to the tree-clad hills on the other side. In the past twelve months he had lostmuch of his animation and had become curiously rapt and reflective. The change did not make him an easier guest to entertain. We have known each other these many years now and stayed together in a dozen different houses, yet I never quite get rid of the feeling that he is from another world and another century. Sometimes one or other of us would keep him corporeal company for a while: usually he was alone—thinking out the future. In the last days of July he had taken his First in Greats, and academic Oxford lay at his feet.
"What's the next stage, Raney?" I asked him one evening when we were alone in the garden. "All Souls?"
He shrugged his shoulders, linked arms with me and paced the lowest terrace by the lake's border. It was a night of rare stillness, and the moon was reflected full and unwavering in the black water: behind us, fifty yards up the side of the mountain, blinding squares of yellow light broke up the dark face of the house; a chord was struck, and a girl's voice began to sing with an Irish intonation.
"What a lovely place the world would be if it weren't for the men and women in it!" he exclaimed.
"Even with them it's tolerable," I said.
I was deliciously tired after a long day's tramp; a hot bath, dinner and the placid night set me at peace with all men.
"For you, yes," he answered reflectively.
"And for a number of others," I said.
The voice above me grew low and died away. Someone began to play an air from "La Bohème."
"For anybody without imagination," he murmured. "You've been in the House for nearly a year now, George; d'you think the world's a happier place?"
"I'm afraid there's no such thing as statutory happiness, Raney."
A vision of Baxter-Whittingham floated before my eyes, and an echo of his phrases came back to my ears. O'Rane picked up a handful of gravel, seated himself on the parapet of the terrace and began tossing stones into the lake.
"I'm looking for inspiration, George," he said, after apause. "Just now I'm at a loose end. I've been through Melton and the House, I've seen about a dozen different kinds of working-class life, and before I came to England I took part in the great primitive struggle for existence. Now, if I like, I suppose I can get a fellowship, go into one of the professions, lead a comfortable life...." His voice rose a tone and quickened into excitement. "George, it won'tdo. We pretend the world's civilized, and yet every now and again some murderous war breaks out. We've been drinking champagne up there, and there are people dying of starvation. There are people dying of cancer and phthisis—and we haven't stopped it. There are young girls being turned into harlots hourly. Hunger, disease, death and the loss of a soul's purity. It won't do." He sighed, and a shadow of despair came over his dark eyes. "I talked to Jim Loring in the same strain a few weeks ago; he's waiting for the world to come back to a belief in God. Poor old Jim hasn't learned much mediaeval history! I talked to your uncle yesterday: he's a social Darwinian—these scourges are all divinely appointed to keep us from getting degenerate. I talked to you this morning, and you virtually told me five years of Liberal Government would set it all right. They won't! It isn't the law that's wrong, it's the soul of man. You've had workhouses for two-thirds of a century, and people still starve. In half a dozen years we've seen war in South Africa and Manchuria. Men still seduce women; there's cruelty to children and animals that would make you sick if you heard a thousandth part of it; there are blind, hare-lipped babies being born to parents of tainted blood.... It won't do, George."
I seated myself on the parapet beside him and lit a cigarette.
"Will you tell me the remedy, Raney?" I asked.
He looked at me for a moment before answering.
"Would you act upon it if I did?"
"I'd like to hear it first," I said.
"To see how much it inconveniences you." He laughed, and there was a bitterness in the smile on his thin lips that told forth his utter scorn of soul for the makeshift, worldlymaterialism for which I stood in his eyes. "It'll inconvenience us the devil of a lot, but that's what we're here for. We're supposed to have been educated. We've got to give a lead. The first duty of society is to make existence possible, the second is to make a decent thing of life. Gradually we're getting the first, but we're not in sight of the second." He looked out over the black, unmoving water and shook his head sadly. "We've got no social conscience, we've got no imagination to give us one. Look here, you'd think me a pretty fair swine if I took Sonia away for a week to an hotel, said good-bye at the end of it and packed her home?"
"It's not done," I admitted.
His clenched fist beat excitedly on the flat stone balustrade.
"Tom Dainton's got a flat in Chelsea and a woman living with him. Is that done?"
"I don't do it myself," I said. His information was not new to me: I had even met the girl, once when she was living with Tom, once with his predecessor.
"God in heaven! She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister probably; there was a time when she was clean-minded ... and that brute-beast salves his conscience by telling himself that somebody else corrupted her before he came along! I told him exactly what I thought of him."
I had a fair idea of O'Rane's capacity for invective.
His lips curled till his teeth gleamed white in the moonlight.
"Do you still meet?" I inquired.
"I'd cut him in his own house! It isn't that I set great store by marriage, I'm not in a position to do that. If he wants to be ultra-modern, let him live with her by all means—and introduce her to his people. He'd kill a man who treated his own sister like that.... Imagination! Imagination! That's the basis of the social conscience, George. If Beryl had consumption, you'd sell the shirt off your back to heal her. You'd do pretty well as much for a sister of mine. You'd write a check for a hundred pounds if I recommended a hard case to you. And because you don't hear, because you don't see the poor devils lying under your eyes...."
"Where's the damned thing to stop, Raney? There are people starving the world over."
"Thank God you recognize it! It hurts as much to starve in the Punjab as under the windows of Lake House."
"But I'm not interested in people I've never seen," I said, lighting another cigarette.
"You'd jump overboard to save a drowning man without waiting to be introduced. Human life's sacred, George: the value we attach to it is the one test of civilization I know."
"But how does one start? Take my own case and be as pointed as you like. An Irish landowner, Liberal member of Parliament, comfortable means, unmarried, without any particular desire to leave the world worse than I found it—what am I to do? Frankly, Raney, I've not got the temperament to turn vegetarian or go about in sandals. I'm part of a very conventional, stupid, artificial world; all my relations and friends are in the same galley. My soul's taken root. What am I to do?"
He picked up a second handful of gravel and jerked the stones thoughtfully into the shining water.
"D'you remember the boys in Æsop who did what I'm doing—flinging stones into a lake? It was all in fun, but they hit a frog, and the frog told them what was fun for them was death for him. If you want an everyday test, you can ask yourself over every act you do or refrain from doing whether you're causing pain to a living creature—by word, deed, thought. That's the only standard worth having, and if everyone adopted it.... As they will some day; we're growing slightly more humane...."
We had had a record bag that day: I was in good form and Bertrand could not miss a bird. I mentioned this to O'Rane to recall him to our limitation.
"A hundred years ago you'd have watched two hapless cocks slashing each other to death," he retorted. "People were flogged within an inch of their lives. Witch-hunts were hardly out of fashion. Two thousand years ago malefactors were nailed to wooden crosses and left to die, gladiators were set to fight wild beasts...." His voice trembled withexultant, fierce irony, and his dark eyes blazed in the setting of his white face. "Now we're grown so effete that we almost shudder when some upstanding son of Belgium takes a rhinoceros whip and lashes a Congo native till the smashed ribs burst through his flesh." His voice fell as suddenly as it had risen. "Have you ever set eyes on a new-born babe? It's a wonderful thing, so tiny and so perfect, with its little limbs and organs and the marvellous little nails on its toes and fingers.... I think of that beautiful, soft, warm, living creature cherished and fed to manhood, and then flung to the demons for them to torture. I see it torn in pieces by a shell or eaten up by disease. And in the old days we might have seen it stretched on a rack, or broken joint by joint with the wheel and boot...." The sentence died away in a long shudder that shook his whole body. "Come back to the house, George," he cried, jumping down from the parapet. "I've travelled three thousand miles in the last five seconds, all the way to Greece and back, where the Turks used to put hot irons on the chests of their prisoners just to teach them not to be rebels. Ten years ago! Who says this is not the best of all possible worlds?"
I took his arm and walked up the stone steps that joined the three terraces. There was still a light in the drawing-room, and we found Sonia writing letters and smoking a cigarette. The accomplishment was new and precarious. She started as we came in through the window and hastily closed the blotting-book.
"Oh, it's only you!" she exclaimed with relief as she saw us. "I was simply dying for a cig., and I can't smoke in my room, or mother would smell it through the door." She opened the blotter and extracted a rather battered cigarette "I've been writing to a friend of yours, David," she went on teasingly. "Mr. Anthony Crabtree."
"De gustibus non est disputandum," O'Rane answered with a shrug of the shoulders.
"You must translate, please."
"It amuses you and it doesn't hurt him," I suggested.
"Who? David?" She walked over to O'Rane's chair andsat down on the arm of it, bending over him and running her fingers through his fine, black hair. So Delilah may have wooed Samson to slumber, with the same practised touch, the same absence of amateurishness or spontaneity. "I'm very fond of Tony."
O'Rane looked at her with half-closed eyes.
"How old are you, Sonia?" he asked.
"I think you ought to remember. Twenty. And I'm never going to be any more."
"It's not so very old," he said reflectively.
"It'll be horrid to be twenty-one," she answered, with a pout. "I shall have to pay my own bills—and I'm frightfully in debt. It's such fun, too, to be quite irresponsible. Of course you were born old, David; if I lived to be a hundred I should never catch you up."
"Twenty," he repeated. "No, it's not so very old. In five years' time——"
"My dear, I shall be a quarter of a century old!" she exclaimed.
"You'll be tired of it all by then."
"I shall be dead or married," she answered gloomily.
"Not married. I shall come to you then—you'll have outgrown your present phase and I shall be a rich man. I shall come to you...." He broke off and sat looking up into her eyes.
Sonia drew back her hand and returned his gaze steadily. A smile of mockery flickered for a moment round her lips.
"And then?" she demanded.
"I shall ask you to marry me."
"And if I ...?" she began.
He sat upright and caught her two wrists in his right hand.
"If you say 'no'? You won't; you can't! You'll want me by then, want someone you can depend on. And, if you don't, you'll have to take me just the same. You won't be able to say 'no.'"
His voice had grown low, and he spoke with clear deliberation. I once watched a neurotic woman being put to sleep by a hypnotist. O'Rane's low, determined tonereminded me of the doctor's suggestive insistence. "Now you are going to sleep. You are, oh! so tired. Your eyes are so heavy.Soheavy!Sosleepy!..." Her voice in answering dropped to the same key.
"You thinkanyonecould make me obey him? Try it, friend David!"
"Five years will make a difference. I haven't given many orders, Sonia, but they've always been obeyed. I haven't done very much—yet, but I've never failed to do what I wanted." Sonia tried to be defiant, but her eyes suddenly fell, and she slipped down from the arm of the chair and moved towards the door.
"Ah! you're an infant prodigy," she observed jauntily. "I must go to bed, though."
"Sonia, come back here!"
O'Rane had not raised his voice, but Sonia paused in her passage across the room. In her place I should have done the same.
"What do you want?" she asked uneasily.
"Come back here."
Like a child being taught its first lesson in obedience, she hesitated, moved forward, paused and came on.
"What d'you want?" she repeated, drumming her fingers nervously on the arm of the chair.
O'Rane smiled.
"You may go to bed now," he answered.
With sudden petulance she stamped her foot.
"David, if you think it's funny to try and make a fool of me ...! You're perfectly odious to-night." I was moving forward to intervene as peacemaker, and Sonia seized the opportunity to shake me by the hand and wish me good-night.
"You needn't pay overmuch attention to Raney," I said.
"Oh, I don't," she answered airily, but her hand as it touched mine was curiously cold.
O'Rane walked over to the writing-table and returned with her letter.
"Now you see," he remarked enigmatically as he gave it her.
"See what?"
"It doesn't make me jealous to be told you're very fond of Crabtree," he answered. "Good night, Sonia."
I closed the door behind her, poured out two whiskies and sodas and filled a pipe.
"You're extraordinarily infantile, Raney," I said.
"It was as well she should know."
"Mind you don't drive her into his arms," I said. "Next time she may accept him."
"Next time?"
For the moment I had forgotten that O'Rane had not been present at Crabtree's discomfiture the previous autumn at House of Steynes. When I remembered I wished I had not introduced the subject.
"Oh! this is getting beyond a joke!" he exclaimed, when I had given him the irreducible minimum of information. "I've a good mind to drop a hint to Lady Dainton."
"My dear fellow, the intimacy is recognized and approved by her. You can't tell her anything she doesn't know."
He picked up his tumbler and sipped thoughtfully.
"I could tell her a number of things," he returned after a pause. "How Crabtree pumped me to find out what they were worth, whether Crowley was their own property and so forth. As cousin to an undischarged bankrupt he conceives himself to be conferring a favour on a family he once described in my hearing to Beaumorris as 'very decent middle-class people.' Fair spoil, in other words, for my Lord Beaumorris and his family. It would be very salutary for Lady Dainton to hear that."