As one that for a weary space hath dinedLulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
As one that for a weary space hath dinedLulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
As one that for a weary space hath dinedLulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
As one that for a weary space hath dined
Lulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a dinner unsucceeded by real or assumedintoxication might be "a good dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."
"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint? Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be 'ick."
I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as apremier Manqué. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he went to the Bar, and I"—a little bitterly—"I thought of going to the Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."
When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before," he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish kings before the hapless Norman invasion—utterly wanting in self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed in language of greater splendour than the last.
It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough, nearly brokeO'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "HemadeOxford for me."
Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford for a good many people. His rooms—in Loring's phrase—were like a gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in him."
Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the formula and parodied it.
"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days, Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."
Où sont les neiges d'antan?Within six weeks we were scattered, and in twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've only got six days more?"
"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.
"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read Law or something?"
I shook my head.
"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be just as bad in a year's time."
We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and one.
"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current. "Damn'goodfun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going to do now, George?"
"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.
The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions. Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar—more usually, however, I waited for something to turn up.
"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"
"And bury myself as an extra attaché in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever come back Ishall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result with the maximum of effort."
Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.
"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.
"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"
The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.
"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."
"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.
"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.
"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."
He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place, he broke silence to say:
"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an extraordinary thing—frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than let them hear me; so I hung on—sort of biting on the bullet—till it was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends, you were all my blood and breed—not like in the old Chicago days. And then—oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed such utter fools.... Still, I won through."
"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly gentle.
"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good friend to me."
"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."
"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never, never give in till I die!"
Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a paddle and seated himself on the box.
"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go down?"
"Depends."
"What on?"
"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure, I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they'regoingto do, never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show, something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"
"You've not done badly so far," I put in.
He snorted contemptuously.
"If you've got faith...."
Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.
"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he inquired.
"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."
Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.
"Where do you find his star?—his crazy trustGod knows through what or in what? It's aliveAnd shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
"Where do you find his star?—his crazy trustGod knows through what or in what? It's aliveAnd shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
"Where do you find his star?—his crazy trustGod knows through what or in what? It's aliveAnd shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
"Where do you find his star?—his crazy trust
God knows through what or in what? It's alive
And shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about your tame star, Raney."
O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.
"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough, manual labour's all you're fit for."
"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."
"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'—a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.
Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.
We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men—Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.
The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion—though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty—I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other—till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."
The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.
"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."
"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.
"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."
Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they begged for mercy and sat out.
"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get——I say, Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"
"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen. Not out yet."
"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights. I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."
And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a touring-car drew up outside the digs.,and a slim figure in dust-coat and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an elaborate but still unstable coiffure.
"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and I met her at the stair-head.
"You needn't call meLordLoring even if your hair is up," he answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."
"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"
"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and dress."
I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.
"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."
"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."
I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in—white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable changein her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.
As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,—"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "Solong, with sapphireshereandhere, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."
At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.
"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph—a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.
"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.
"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.
"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a friend of his, aren't you?"
She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men to inspire.
"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she asked.
"Little bits," I said.
"He told me everything," she answered proudly.
"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young——"
"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."
"And I'm sure a good part of the language was—unparliamentary, Miss Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man——"
"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.
"He's a man; he's little—compared with Jim Loring or myself, for example——"
"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"
"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.
"There's nothing he can't do!"
"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.
"It's nothing to what hewilldo. After Oxford he's going to set out to seek his fortune,"—Sonia had dropped into the very language of a fairy-story. "And when he comes back——"
"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.
"Yes."
"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.
She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."
"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.
"I don't care if he did," she answered.
"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."
There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time. The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.
"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.
O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.
"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.
"Is it time? I've been telling George——"
He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.
"What's the good of tellinghim? What's the good of telling anyone?Theydon't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting Lady Amy?"
I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.
"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."
Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.
"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"
"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in defiance.
The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.
"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much more than a boy himself."
"Time will work wonders," I said.
"But will he have anything to marry on?"
"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."
Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.
"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love with him. But——" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."
"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."
"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.
"Yes."
"Or till it's broken off?"
"Raney's not likely to break it off!"
"Shemay. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."
The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than naturally helpless.
"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,Is—not to fancy what were fair in lifeProvided it could be,—but, finding firstWhat may be, then find how to make it fairUp to our means: a very different thing!No abstract intellectual plan of lifeQuite irrespective of life's plainest laws,But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,May lead within a world which (by your leave)Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.Embellish Rome, idealize away,Make Paradise of London if you can,You're welcome, nay, you're wise."Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,Is—not to fancy what were fair in lifeProvided it could be,—but, finding firstWhat may be, then find how to make it fairUp to our means: a very different thing!No abstract intellectual plan of lifeQuite irrespective of life's plainest laws,But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,May lead within a world which (by your leave)Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.Embellish Rome, idealize away,Make Paradise of London if you can,You're welcome, nay, you're wise."Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,Is—not to fancy what were fair in lifeProvided it could be,—but, finding firstWhat may be, then find how to make it fairUp to our means: a very different thing!No abstract intellectual plan of lifeQuite irrespective of life's plainest laws,But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,May lead within a world which (by your leave)Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.Embellish Rome, idealize away,Make Paradise of London if you can,You're welcome, nay, you're wise."Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,
Is—not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,—but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,
May lead within a world which (by your leave)
Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.
Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make Paradise of London if you can,
You're welcome, nay, you're wise."
Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
I left Oxford with a sense of oppressive loneliness.
It was not entirely the sorrow of parting from a place I had for four years loved but too well; it was not altogether the prospect of making a fresh start—I was pleasurably excited by that; the feeling of forlornness arose, I think, from the recognition that the next step would have to be taken alone. I suppose I am shy; certainly I lack initiative. There had hitherto always been someone to keep me in countenance—Loring at my private school, at Melton and, later, at Oxford, and there had always been someone to act as a stimulus. At one time it was Burgess, who laidthe foundation of any knowledge I have gleaned, and made me as temperate, passionless and sterile as I have become—as deeply imbued, perhaps, with the indifference that masquerades as toleration.
At another time I was stirred from philosophic doubt by the fanaticism of O'Rane. The fire he lit burned too brightly to last, but by strange irony as it began to flicker I came under the influence of my guardian Bertrand Oakleigh, a man so disillusioned that in very factiousness of opposition I was driven to fan the dying embers of my young enthusiasms. My intimate acquaintance with him began in the autumn of 1904, some fifteen months after I had come down. In the interval I must admit to a feeling of intellectual homelessness.
The last moments of the Oxford phase came at the end of July after six weeks in Ireland with my mother. I returned to London and picked up Loring, and the two of us presented ourselves for our vivâs. There was little worthy of record in my own case. A fat-faced man in a B.D. hood opened at random the Index and Epitome to the Dictionary of National Biography, turned the leaves, shut the book with a snap and called my name. For perhaps six minutes I drew on my imagination for the early life of the Young Pretender; then in an oily, well-fed voice my examiner remarked, "Thank you. That will do." I disliked the voice, I disliked the man. He is probably a bishop now.
When my own ordeal was over I strolled round the Schools to see how the Greats men were getting on. To my delight I found Loring in the middle of his vivâ—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the vivâ was in progress, for I have no idea when it started. Maradick of Corpus was examining, and everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. The candidate was leaning back with his chair tilted at an angle and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat; so far as a lay man could judge he was making out an effective case against the Pragmatism of William James, of which, by an appropriate coincidence, Maradick was regarded as one of the greatest living exponents. The scornful demolition went on unchecked until Loring introduced some such name as Müsseldorf.
"Who?" interrupted Maradick.
"Müsseldorf. Johan Müsseldorf of Nürnburg. Died about 1830. It's his 'Prolegomena' I'm quoting. He exploded Pragmatism before James was born."
"Exploded? Well, er ... that's as may be. I remember now you mentioned him in one of your papers. He's not very well known in this country."
"I don't know about this country," Loring rejoined. "He's shamefully neglected in this university. Yet he undoubtedly anticipated Schopenhauer on Will. Or if you look at Lincke's 'Note on Berkeley's Subjective Idealism'...."
"Lincke, did you say?" inquired another of the examiners.
The remainder of that vivâ has passed into history, and when I went up to take my M.A. three years later the story was told me of three different people. On the last day of the written work, Loring had expressed dissatisfaction with his papers, and I heard later that when he began his vivâ the examiners regarded him as a hopeless, unsalvageable third. They asked formal questions, and he replied by burlesquing such of their lecture theories as he had picked up at second hand. It was by pure chance that he mentioned Müsseldorf, but the awe of unfamiliarity with which the name was received led him to try experiments with the mass of mid-nineteenth century metaphysics that for two years I had seen him reading in the window-seats of "93D" or reciting of an evening to a restless Siamese kitten.
I arrived in time to see the three examiners taking counsel together, while Loring looked on with the good-natured tolerance of a man who is prepared to give up his whole day in a good cause.
"We think, my colleagues and I," said Maradick at length, "that this discussion had better be continued in another room. Perhaps you will come this way with me? We should like to hear you more fully on this subject, but of course there are other candidates to consider."
I have only Loring's unchecked, picturesque narrative of what took place during the next hour, as I was not surewhether the public was admitted to this private, auricular examination.
"They'll give me a first on that," he predicted, as we walked up the High together. "Bound to! Oh, it was one of our better vivâs! I hauled out every German philosopher I'd ever heard of, and a fair sprinkling that I made up on the spot, carefully adding an outline of their work and pointing out where they differed from our esteemed old friend Lincke. Maradick don't know much about modern German metaphysics, and he knows a dam' sight less about the German language. I quoted long passages to establish my points, and when I couldn't think of any to suit, I just made 'em up! I'd no idea my German was so fluent. If theydon'tgive me a first, I'll expose Maradick for pretending to recognize quotations from two non-existent authors named Frischmann and Reichwald respectively." He led the way to the station with an obvious sense of a good day's work done.
I imagine that every man, before he attains wisdom, endures a part or the whole of a walking tour. O'Rane had propounded the idea in the course of our last term, and his eloquence was sufficient to shake even Loring. On leaving Oxford we repaired to House of Steynes, where Raney was awaiting us with a haversack and ash-plant, and without giving our enthusiasm a chance to cool we struck south with no more destination nor time-limit than was implied in the determination to walk until we quarrelled or grew tired of walking. It is a tribute to our friendship that three weeks later we reached Loring Castle, Chepstow, unsundered and harmonious.
There was, I suppose, too much variety for us to grow weary of each other's society. Marching without map or time-table, we billeted ourselves for the night on any friend we encountered on the way, and when none was available we put up at the first hotel that promised adequate bathing accommodation. Our kit was not immoderate—brushes, razors, sponges and pyjamas. When we needed clean clothes we bought them, and got rid of the old through the parcels post. This last was the only matter of disagreement betweenus, for Loring professed an overwhelming desire to heap unwelcome gifts on the unsuspecting men who chanced to be in the public eye at the moment.
"I've walked clean through these boots," I remember his remarking one night at Windermere, as I yawned through an attack on the current Education Bill in a fiery local organ. "George, d'you think your friend Dr. Clifford would like some capital brown bootings? Or Lord Hugh Cecil?" He seized the paper from my hands and turned the pages thoughtfully. "Eugene Sandow! That does it! Why, it may be his birthday to-morrow for all you know!" And it was only by concerted physical force that we restrained him.
The result of our Schools reached us at Shrewsbury: Loring had got a first and I a second.
"It's one in the eye for dear old Burgess," he remarked, when we congratulated him. "I shall go down to Melton next term and ask for an extra half, just to score him off. And now I reallycantake things easily."
"Why don't you stand for a fellowship?" I asked. I remembered his dread of leaving Oxford and found it in my heart to envy him his chance of living on and off in—say All Souls for another half-dozen years.
"Why in God's name should I?" he demanded. "I've satisfied myself, and anyone else who's interested in the subject, that I've got some ability. Now the only artistic thing is to waste it. There's no distinction in belonging to an effete aristocracy unless people can be induced to think you're being thrown away. I'm going to be a Dreadful Object Lesson."
He leaned back in his chair, yawned and sat with closed eyes until we roused him.
"Seriously, what are you going to do?" O'Rane inquired.
Loring adopted the manner of a Hyde Park orator.
"Live abroad," he said, "and squander the rents that I wring from the necessitous poor. Come back in time to shoot the birds or hunt the foxes that have overrun my tenants' land. Go down to the House once every few years to vote against democratic measures. Marry an actress ofquestionable virtue and die, leaving a son who has only to take the trouble to be born in order to become an hereditary legislator and a permanent obstacle to the People's Will. It'll be very hard work, but someone must do it, or Drury Lane and the Liberal Publication Department would have to close down. That's what's expected of tenth transmitters of foolish faces, isn't it, George?"
"It's the least you can do," I assured him.
"And the most. That's the sad part about it." His face grew reflective and his voice lost its note of banter. "Time was when I hugged delusions and called them ideals. I used to think there was room in the body politic for men who were rich enough and high placed enough to be quite independent of party considerations,—men who could wait and take long views, men without seats to lose or constituents to bother about, men who couldn't be bought because there was nothing big enough to offer them. The enormous majority of M.P.'s go into politics for what they can get out of them—legal jobs, office, local honour and glory—and it gets worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait, these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest shift their leaders may suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."
I suggested that with all its faults our English public life was still ethically the cleanest in the world and was so far from consistently deteriorating that it was still some way above eighteenth-century England. If he found it corrupt it was for him to raise it to his ideal.
"My dear George," he answered, "the ideal perished on the day I discovered Unionists and Radicals both talking of 'big views' and 'the higher patriotism' and at the same time helping themselves out of the public purse. No, no!Suave mari magno.I shall endeavor not to marry the actress of questionable virtue, but I shan't attempt to etherialize politics. They're too dirty, for one thing, and they're too dam' dull for another."
He might have added that they were too uncertain. Intwenty years' tolerably close observation it is the unexpected changes of politics that impress me most—the big Bills that evoke none of the expected opposition, the little Bills that break Ministries, the inflation or sudden pricking of a reputation, the constant shifting and re-arranging of parties. Ten days after Loring's criticism of politics on the score of their dullness, the three of us were at Chepstow waiting for the weather to mend before pushing on to London. The Khaki Parliament does not rank high among periods of consummate human dignity; its birth was overshadowed and embarrassed by the South African War; its early and middle life were given over to Education and Licensing Bills of which I imagine even their authors were not unduly proud. Then without warning came the news that Chamberlain had declared for Mercantilism, Protection, Fair-Trade—whatever name was dug out of the economy primers before the movement was baptized with the name of Tariff Reform.
The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French National Convention.
My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club. The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying, and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism, Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."
I can see now that there was little originality in the book. Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall. Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.
Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and glittering epigram, their logic—and faith in logic, their assurance and perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful: there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social Reform. The Liberal League—most gentlemanly of parties—was captured; its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to their own again.
Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous, Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford mind. I remember my relief some years later inreading "The Break-up of the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized, ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on governmental control and coercion.
Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight—never strong—underwent one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone, because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail: for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled with me as far as Alexandria.
A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon O'Rane gave me the reason.
"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, ofcourse, who else? She had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."
"What's her objection?" I asked.
"Oh, Sonia's too young, and speaking as her mother—my God, I thought that ullage was kept for penny novelettes! The girl of the present day.... Well, the long and the short of it was—I didn't mean to—but I told her Sonia and I were engaged. That gave her something to think about, George."
He strode fiercely across the lawn with his hands clasped Napoleonically behind his back.
"What did she say?" I asked, hurrying to overtake him.
"Wouldn'thearof it, don't you know?" he answered mimickingly. "We were a pair of children, don't you know? I'd behaved scandalously in mentioning such a thing, it was monstrous; what had I got to support her on? It was all her fault for ever letting Sonia go to Oxford, young men were not to be trusted, and after the years she'd known me, don't you know?" He blew a long breath. "She couldn't have said much more if we'd eloped."
"Well, what's going to happen now?"
He flung his hands out in wild gesticulation, and his black eyes were round and hot with angry surprise.
"She declined to recognize the engagement and told me I was to consider it off," he said. "I told her I proposed to marry Sonia. 'Thatis forusto decide!'" He clutched my arm and marched me the length of the lawn. "George, she's getting damnably pompous since they made Dainton a bart. We seemed to have reached a bit of an impasse. 'Idon't recognize even an understanding,' she said, 'and I shall not permit Sonia to do so. If you persist in this—nonsense, my husband and I shall have to consider whether it is advisable for you and Sonia to have any opportunities of meeting, don't you know? If you will take my advice....' Pah! And then she handed it out. I must think of my career, I was a mere boy; you needed to be married to appreciate that marriage was an expensive luxury...."
"You seem to have taken it in the neck, Raney," I said as he choked and grew silent in his disgust.
"Pretty fairly. I'm not to write. I'm honour-bound not to mention the subject to Sonia on pain of having the door shut in my face next time. 'Of course, we shouldn't like that. You're an old friend. Perhaps if you had sisters of your own, don't you know. She started to get patronizing, George, so I asked her to tell me whether she admitted me to the house because I wasfitto be admitted, or out of pity because I hadn't a home of my own and was a bastard——"
At the risk of writing myself down old-fashioned and conventional, I admit there are two or three words that send a shiver through me.
"My dear Raney ...!" I began.
He laid a hand on my arm.
"You can't improve on what she said, old man," he assured me.
"Call a spade 'a spade' by all means," I said, "but not 'a bloody shovel.' Especially with women. They have to pretend to be shocked."
He threw up his head with a mirthless laugh.
"There was devilish little pretence about Lady Dainton. It wasn't a word I ought to have used, and apparently it wasn't a thing I ought to have been. I suppose—she hadn't—heard about it before." He stood silent for many moments. "I asked her whether my presence was still acceptable. Of course she was bound ... did it very nicely, all the same. She said I was as welcome as before last June."
He took out a pipe and began filling it. I have met few men to whom the trite metaphor of "blowing off steam" was so applicable.
"Was that all?" I asked.
"I told her I regarded myself as being still engaged to Sonia." His eyes suddenly blazed and his voice rose. "And that I'd marry her if the whole world was in our way. Children indeed! Does she think there's some fixed age for falling in love?" Again he blew a long breath. "She said she couldn't be responsible for what I chose to fancy about myself, but that I knew her views. There the row ended."
There was a subdued leave-taking that night, and for somedays the gloom spread by Lady Dainton seemed to hang round her house and family. For all my wisdom and superiority in discussing the rash engagement with Amy Loring, I was sorry to see it broken off. Two, three years before I had been as anxious as O'Rane to marry and I do not know that a disappointment hurts less at eighteen than later in life. It is true that there was no pecuniary embarrassment in my case, but at that age I refused to regard it as a serious obstacle in O'Rane's path. If anyone wanted money, he either manœuvred himself into a job or put his shoulders to the wheel and made it. The one course, I then fondly believed, was as delightfully simple as the other. In few words, Lady Dainton was entirely wrong and O'Rane entirely right.
I carried that opinion with me to Cairo and beyond. The days of our passage out were days in which Sonia would come on deck in the morning rather white of face and waterily bright of eye. By night, as we strolled aft and looked out over the creaming wake, I would try to invent little consoling speeches and tell her of men who had amassed fortunes almost in an hour; and she—at sixteen and a half—would gaze across the gulf that separated her from one-and-twenty. On that day she would marry him if she married beggary with him, though beggary was but so much rhetoric on her lips. O'Rane's future, as they had mapped it out together a dozen times, included two things that stood out above the rest—the revival of the title that had died with his father and a fortune wherewith to restore his father's estate. From so determined a republican no less could be expected.
The month I spent in Cairo made me doubtful whether Raney had not met his match in Lady Dainton. Even conceding the practicability of her daughter's generous assumptions, I doubted whether fair time would be granted for their maturing. Lady Dainton's ambition carried her far and fast; she was now, after five years' assiduity, reckoned unhesitatingly as of county family; a like assiduity directed on London would, in another five years, leave no house unstormed. I know no one outside an Oscar Wilde play who talked so persistently of the difference between those who were "inSociety" and the others who were not. I studied her method—and was astonished by its simplicity. She engaged a good suite at Shepheard's, aware beforehand of the class of visitors she was likely to meet there; by perseverance and an agreeable manner she succeeded in getting to know all who—in her own phrase—were "worth knowing"; and with the aid of an undeniable flair for organization she made up other people's minds for them and tirelessly arranged expeditions and parties. (It was curiously like the "Pinkerton's Hebdomadary Picnics" of "The Wrecker.") And on her return to England there started a paper-chase of invitations, beginning, "I hope you are not one of the people who think friendships abroad should be forgotten at home, like some dreadful indiscretion...."
I left Cairo with the feeling that Lady Dainton, were her circumstances ever reduced, would always be worth bed, board and a retaining-fee for a Lunn and Perowne Pleasure Cruise.
I also thought that David O'Rane, undergraduate, must cut an insignificant figure in her dominating eyes.
The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.
After the absence of a year, in which I made my way from London through Africa, India, Australia to South America and back again through the States, Japan, China and Russia, I am free to admit that I sinned frequently and soliloquized interminably to men who neither knew nor wished to hear about the countries I had visited. I was very young at the time, and that must be my excuse. Greater age, and my sufferings at the hands of others, will now restrain my pen and limit me to a single reminiscence.
On my way home in the late summer of 1904 I broke the journey at Paris to stay with Johnny Carstairs, who was now—after a truncated career at Oxford—established as an honorary attaché at the Embassy. I never visit Paris without turning into the Luxembourg to see what Whistlers are on view and this time, as I came out into the Gardens, I saw Draycott. Helooked shabby and unshaven, but not more so than any conscientious English student in the Quartier Latin, and at no time since he exchanged the extreme of foppery for the extreme of Bohemianism had a frayed shirt or porous boots seemed valid reason in his eyes for cutting a friend.
"The reason?" Carstairs echoed, when we met fordéjeunerin the Café d'Harcourt. "I know it, of course, but——"
Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.
"Don't be professional," I said.
"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.
I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on the quayside at Calais—threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was the first of my experience—and the most complete.
After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of aconseille de famille, to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my mother's course for her—the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining and unanswerable question:
"What about you, George?"
As so often with men of weak initiative, the question—with a little judicious delay—was answered for me. Myuncle and former guardian wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed—and accepted her fate. He arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the shooting—there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating notice—Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.
"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner. "What d'you want to do that for?"
"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"
"H'm. You won't make money out ofthatkind of book."
"Then you've read it?" I said.
Bertrand knocked the ash from his cigar and thought out a disparaging answer.
"Oh, I looked at it," he said vaguely. "It's unequal. Some parts worse than others."
"It was written by several people," I explained.
"Which part was your handiwork?"
"Which did you think the worst?" I asked in turn.
My uncle looked at me suspiciously.
"You're not proud of your precious babe," he observed.
"The opportunity would be too irresistible for you if I were."
Then he laughed, and with that laugh was born thefriendship of many years. It was a pity, he felt, that a young man should bury himself in the dreariest house of the dampest county of the damnedst island in the world. Why should I not come to London, see a little of politics and society, 'try it on the dog, so to say'—which by amplification meant testing the principles of "Thursday Essays" on a popular meeting? If, as a good, catholic hater, there was one thing he hated more than another, it was writing letters: why should I not sign on as his secretary? Though untrained, I should learn much, and anyone with enough superfluous energy to rush into print could handle his correspondence before breakfast.
"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.
"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.
"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you know."
So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopædic intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.
Some sides of his character—his disillusionment, independence and far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred—were attributable to early struggles and later disappointments. Afterleaving Trinity College he saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and well-trodden road.
Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr. Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and—I am afraid—a love of mischief-making for its own sake.
His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the Houses of Parliament, he would—by his own standards of justice—be the sole survivor.
Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man. His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly—by some curious irony—ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence he kept to himself.
Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management. His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes "an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis Rœderer per man.
I soon ceased to wonder at my uncle's objection to sending out invitations in his own hand. For luncheon he kept open house, and any man might come to seek or offer advice and continue coming till a more than ordinarily brutal insult convinced him that his presence was no longer welcome; it was at a dinner that his formal entertaining displayed itself. On Mondays we had "these damned official Liberals"—candidates and members; ex-Ministers and leaders of dissentient minorities; ecstatic, white-hot Nonconformist pastors and worried party journalists trying to reconcile the two-and-seventy jarring sects into which Liberalism split after the Chesterfield speech. Bertrand would glower at them, individually and in bulk, but, as the shrill, earnest voices rose and mingled, I could see his eyes travelling from time-server tointransigeant, as though his fingers were on the pulse of the whole unwieldy, centrifugal party. And when he had looked longer than usual at a man, he would wander round the tableand murmur casually, "Stay behind for another cigar when the Bulls of Bashan have gone."
The Thursday dinners and the guests invited to them were marked in his book with a D—which stood for Duty, Dull or Damnable, according to his temper.
"I have to do it, George," he explained, with a half apologetic headshake. "For fifty years I've dined with them, and they must come and dine with me. If I refused to meet 'em ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "All my time would be taken up inventing excuses. Take my tip and dine out on Thursdays. I'll put you up for the Eclectic. Don't miss Saturday, though. The Saturday dinners are sometimes quite amusing."
In ten years I do not believe I missed a single Saturday dinner and for reward I think I have met what Lady Dainton would call "everybody worth meeting" in Bohemian, artistic, un-Social London. Looking round the long table at the authors and musicians, the returned travellers and soldiers on leave from a forgotten fringe of Empire, I was always reminded of a well-attended dinner of the Savage Club. You were invited—not for what you were, but for what you had done or because you could talk; and Bertrand in black tie and short jacket radiated a new urbanity over the gathering. We dined soon after eight and sat talking into the early morning. About midnight a sprinkling of actors and Sunday journalists would drop in for sandwiches, champagne and cigars. If there were vocalists or composers, the piano was dragged in from the morning-room; I used to hear a good deal of poetry recited before or in lieu of publication, and, whenever Carden, the "Wicked World" cartoonist, was with us, he would sit with one leg thrown across the other, his cigar at an acute angle and a spiral of blue smoke curling into his eyes, while he covered the backs of the ménus with caricatures in charcoal. I have a drawer full of them somewhere—Trevor-Grenfell who penetrated the Himalayas by a new pass, Woodman as 'Lord Arthur' in "Eleventh Hour Repentance," Milhanovitch at the piano and a dozen more.
Failing professional talent, my uncle would be called on tomake sport. The only men I know who eclipsed him in memory were Burgess and O'Rane, and he had lived so long in London, hearing and storing the gossip of every hour, that it was almost impossible to find him at fault. That he was a stimulating talker, experimenting in talk and taking risks in conversation, I judge from the eagerness of his guests to get him started, and—to put the same test in other words—by the keen competition to secure invitations for a Saturday dinner. I remember a Thursday night when Loring came and wrestled with Bertrand over the official Catholic attitude towards Modernism. I met him in the street a few weeks later, and he begged me to congratulate him.
"What's happened?" I asked.
"You ought to know," he answered. "It came in your fist. I've been asked for a Saturday."
And Loring was in small things the least enthusiastic of men.
My secretarial duties took no more than an hour or two a day, and at the beginning of 1905 I followed my uncle's advice and put some of my political formulæ to practical test by going down three or four times a week to Wensley Hall Settlement in Shadwell. The impulse came from Baxter-Whittingham, who wrote to remind me of "our pleasant talks at Oxford" and to say that not a man could be spared with the working classes in their present scandalous condition of neglect. Thirty per cent of my generation worked for longer or shorter periods in one or other of the university and college missions: my seniors, laid by the heels in the slumming epidemic of the eighties and nineties, were there before me, and my juniors continued the supposedly good work after my defection. I therefore speak with misgiving and a sense of personal unworthiness in confessing that East End mission work left me singularly and embarrassingly cold. From some lukewarmness of spirit I failed to catch the enthusiasm which made my fellows dedicate their lives to the work and allowed them all to drop it when a dawning practice or the design of matrimony laid more pressing claim to their leisure. Bertrand indeed, indulged a favourite form of disparagement as soonas I made my intention known to him.
"I've been through all that," he told me. "It's all right; you'll outgrow it."
And I outgrew it in some ten weeks. Others have told me they made lasting and unique friendships. Such good fortune did not come my way. I doubted, and still doubt, the possibility of friendship between a Shadwell stevedore and the angular, repellent product of an English public school and university; this is not to put one above the other, but merely to disbelieve the existence of a common intellectual currency. Further, I am too self-conscious to run a Boys' Club or play billiards with the men without a sense of unreality and a fear of being thought patronizing. I question my own moral and social right, moreover, to conduct raids into the houses of Thames watermen and, if anyone seek to justify such mission work as I found in progress at Wensley Hall on the ground that it showed rich and poor how the other lived, it is mere platitude to answer that the poor revealed to me as little of their normal life as I to them of mine. Throughout my time in Shadwell I felt like a bogus curate at an endless choir treat.
And, if in looking back on it all I do not wholly regret the weeks I spent there, it is because of my consciously earnest and religiously hearty fellow-workers in the mission field. Chief of them in 1905 was Baxter-Whittingham, or simply "Baxter," as he was known to all Shadwell but myself, sometimes scholar of Lincoln and a man ten years my senior, who had gone from Oxford to the East End and never returned. It was the fashion at Wensley Hall to regard Whittingham as a Latter-Day Saint (I use the phrase in its unspecialized sense, without reference to the school of Brigham Young); and I am ready to believe that in thirty per cent of his character Whittingham was entirely saintly. Admiring disciples told me how he lived in a single room of a workman's cottage on fifteen shillings a week with a supererogatory fast thrown in on any colourable pretext. The first thirty per cent of him compassionately and whole-heartedly loved the poor. Anothertwenty per cent was given up to an emotionalism bordering on sensuality in ritual, music and art.
And the remaining fifty per cent of Baxter-Whittingham was purearrivisme. He had risen early and cornered the market in poverty; there was no one to equal him on East End Housing Problems, the Drink Question, Sweating and the Minimum Wage. His little "Other Half of London" and "England's Shame" created a considerable sensation and were accepted without criticism. Indeed, who was in a position to criticize the man who knew Shadwell and had lived there ten years? When the disciples prevailed on him to stand in the 1906 election his candidature aroused an interest that spread far beyond the limits of his division. And when he was returned a party was waiting, ready made, in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. Ministers might shake their heads irritably over another Incorruptible, but many a private member felt easier in his mind for the presence of the hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped figure in the loose-fitting, semi-clerical clothes, who seemed to carry England's poor in one pocket and England's conscience in another.