1
After twelve months in an Austrian internment camp, the roar and
movement, the familiar smell and glare of London streets were
stupefying.
I had arrived in Vienna a week before the mobilisation order was issued;
my mission was to secure the services of certain physicians and surgeons
for a new hospital which I had in contemplation, and, though I was
conscious of unwonted restlessness, though my young friends in the
Chancery were kept working late, the recent ultimatum to Servia could
never, I felt, involve England in war. So time went by, the hotels
emptied, but I preferred to trust my own judgement and went on trusting
it until war had been declared. I knew Vienna so well, I had lived there
so long and made so many friends from my earliest days at the Embassy
that I am afraid I continued to trust my judgement and to back my luck
even after I had become technically scheduled as an enemy alien; and,
when the reluctant authorities more in sorrow than anger placed me under
surveillance, we all felt that a mistake had been made and that I should
have only to ask for my release to obtain it. Was I not well over the
most extravagant military age? Was I not physically unfit to bear arms?
Could I not at any time have left Vienna with the Embassy Staff?
I was to find from August, 1914, until July, 1915, that the aspirations
of the Litany for the well-being of prisoners and captives were
neutralised by the reluctance of constituted authority to disturb the
_status quo_. I was secure in my loose-box on a race-course five miles
from Vienna; wire entanglements discouraged my comings and goings,
arc-lamps laid me bare to the vigilance of the sentries; what good
purpose could be served by setting me at large? My brother made the one
appearance of his life in the House of Lords to raise me as an issue and
to urge the exchange of civilian prisoners; memorials were presented to
the Foreign Office; I am sorry to say that in the first convulsion of
war I and my few thousand fellow prisoners did not matter.
I was interned for a twelvemonth. And, writing now in the third year of
the war, I doubt whether I shall ever make good the knowledge which was
then withheld from me. The newspapers were censored or inspired for
purposes of propaganda; my colourless letters from England were enriched
by half-page smears of indelible black. Between ignorance of what they
might say and what I might receive, my correspondents confined
themselves to business discussions and bald family history. My brother
wrote of his son Archie's death in the retreat from Mons; my niece
Yolande Manisty told me that she and her husband had moved into my house
in Pont Street and were attending to my affairs as best they might. A
further letter brought me the shocking news of Deryk Lancing's death on
the eve of war, with consequences to myself which I required many weeks
to digest.... After that there were guarded and bewildered little notes
from Felix Manisty, who is a greater archaeologist than man of affairs;
there were voluminous technical enquiries from Hatherly, my solicitor, a
weekly budget from Yolande and sporadic outbursts from friends who had
heard of my internment and felt constrained to write one letter to cheer
my loneliness.
In July, after a year of false starts, an exchange of prisoners was
finally arranged; in the last week of the month I returned deviously
through Switzerland and France, landed in a most unrecognisable England,
reported myself at an equally unrecognisable Foreign Office and then
stood, much as I had stood forty years earlier with a crowd of other shy
new boys at Eton, wondering what I was expected to do next. In the roar
and movement, the smell and glare of London streets, I had ceased to
have any property. The people were different, there was an incredible
number of soldiers about. And everyone seemed to have been getting on
very satisfactorily without me....
I remember walking a few steps towards the House of Commons, but I did
not know whether the House was sitting; I turned back to Trafalgar
Square with some idea of taking a train to Hampstead and visiting my
office, but I had abandoned it for twelve months. If I called on
Hatherly in Lincoln's Inn Fields, I should be told that he was at Ripley
Court; if I went home, I should find that Yolande and Felix were both
out.... It was salutary, I am sure, to find the measure of my
importance, but it left me very lonely, I felt for some reason that not
only was I not wanted but that I had no right to be there. England
seemed to have been taken over as a going concern by a new management,
which was in a great hurry....
I passed through the Admiralty Arch and looked round me. New Zealanders
and Australians, bronzed and big-boned in summer khaki, South Africans,
with their hats pinched to a point, were strolling up and down the
Strand, in twos and threes, gravely smoking cigarettes; a slow-speaking
Canadian enquired of me the way to Westminster Abbey; in St. James' Park
two brakes passed me filled with Indian troops, turbaned, silent and
undemonstrative. I remember that certain German prints had described the
British Army as a menagerie....
Through the Arch, I could see a stream of motor omnibuses hurrying into
Trafalgar Square and displaying long posters in a red and white
streak--"LORD KITCHENER WANTS YOU," "LEND YOUR STRONG RIGHT ARM"--on the
Horse Guards' Parade recruits were waiting their turn by the long wooden
sheds at the Downing Street end; the finished soldier came swinging down
the Processional Avenue to the music of a drum and fife band, watched a
little wistfully by a knot of men in service caps, blue jackets, loose
red ties and grey trousers, sometimes pinned emptily at ankle, knee or
hip. Standing on the kerb, a girl of twenty in deep mourning completed
scene and sequence.
I was still gaping like a yokel, when I heard my name called and found
my hand wrung by an officer in unfamiliar naval uniform; and, though we
had sat and voted side by side during his short term in the House,
though I had shot with him a dozen times at his place in Ireland, I had
to look twice before I recognised him as George Oakleigh. We stood
shaking hands, laughing, talking both at once and shaking hands again
until he suggested that I should come into his room at the Admiralty for
a cigarette and a talk. George, whom I had known as a dilettante
journalist and political wire-puller, explained parenthetically that he
had for a year been one of innumerable auxiliary civil servants; I did
not need to be told that he was tired, overworked and vaguely, sullenly
bitter.
"Fancy people going out and trying to slaughter one another on a day
like this!" he cried, looking with pink-lidded eyes at the sparse trees
and scanty shade amid the white flood of sunshine.
"Well, you'd go out, if you had the chance," I said.
"And hate it like Hell all the time!" he murmured reflectively, as he
mechanically took a salute. "I've seen enough people in the casualty
lists to realise that war is a dangerous occupation, Stornaway; and I've
met enough fellows home on leave.... You know Jim Loring's gone, by the
way?" His teeth grated together. "This--this is the very thing that my
uncle Bertrand and I spent half-a-dozen years trying to avert! Well, I
must be getting back to work. If this war's done nothing else, at least
it's cured me of the conventional,
twelve-to-three-with-two-hours-off-for-luncheon view of Government
offices. With me it's nine-thirty to eight, six days' holiday in twelve
months and about one week-end in three."
As I would not come into his office and waste his time there, we wasted
it for a few moments more by the Cook monument. George tried to give me
my bearings, interrupting himself to ask jerkily, "I suppose you've
heard that Jack Summertown's dead? He was knocked out at the same time
as your nephew. And Val Arden?..."
I had an additional tragedy in which Oakleigh did not share, for we were
almost within sight of the house which poor Deryk Lancing had so proudly
adorned: on such another day he had taken me over it, room by room; I
had heard that he died on the very evening that war was declared, yet I
suppose he only anticipated what would have come to anyone of his age in
six months' time.
"I suppose you can't imagine what all this looks like to a man who's
seeing it for the first time," I said. "All this drilling and training.
How many of these fellows will come back, d'you suppose? And what are we
going to get in return?"
He smiled wistfully.
"A lasting peace, I hope. It can never happen again, you know."
"I never thought it could happen this time," I said.
"Well, this is going to prove that war is a failure. Perhaps we needed
the proof.... You'll find that after the war people will begin to do
what we--you and Bertrand and I and a thousand more--tried to make them
do before--remove the incentive to war and the means of making war.
There must be a general disarmament, the military machine must be
broken. You'll find that Germany will be a confederated republic within
twelve months--we can never make peace while there's a Hohenzollern at
large. You know, Stornaway, this war's given us the opportunity of
healing the sore places of Europe, and there's only one way to do it;
when the peace conference begins to sit, it has got to divide the world
according to nationalities. Belgium and France will have to be cleaned
up first of all, and after that we must let the world go as it wants to
go. Alsace-Lorraine will return to France; you'll find north and south
Germany separating; Poland must be reconstituted; Italy will get back
the Trentino and Trieste, though, of course, that leaves Austria without
a port.... But you'll find Austria-Hungary splitting into a thousand
pieces as soon as you apply the principle of nationality. I'm not sure
about Constantinople, but I'm inclined to give it to Russia.... It's
worth some sacrifice to clean up the international anomalies of the
world and to make an end of war."
"It's going to be a big business, George, and a long business," was all
that I would say.
"We're in sight of doing it," he asserted. "The moment we get within
range of Constantinople, Turkey goes out of the war; she's on her last
legs now. Then with Russia bursting in on the southeast and Italy
pressing up from the south, Austria will be the next to go. People who
know tell me she's on the verge of starvation. Then next spring we shall
be bringing off a big offensive on the west. We're so frightfully
handicapped now by lack of shells." He paused and looked at his watch.
"By Jove, I must fly!" he exclaimed. "When shall I see you again? I'm
dining with the Maurice Maitlands to-night and I happen to know that the
Manistys are going to be there. Why don't you invite yourself? You're a
lion, you know; and Connie Maitland will never forgive you, if anyone
else catches hold of you first."
Leaving him to hurry into the Admiralty, I went slowly on foot to Pont
Street. England was an armed camp and munition factory, London a
gigantic General Headquarters. And George, with his rimless eye-glasses
enthusiastically askew and a normally pale face ecstatically flushed,
was throwing corps here and divisions there, dividing the map of the
world by the test of nationality.... I felt giddy.
There was no one at home, when I reached Pont Street, and I explored the
havoc of war as it had invaded the house of a man to whom personal
comfort means much. My butler, footman and chauffeur had enlisted, my
car was wearing itself out in the service of an elderly general; the
ground-floor gave office-room to a railway canteen organisation
administered by my niece, and the rest of the house, when not allocated
to herself or her husband, provided temporary accommodation for derelict
officers and nurses. Never have I felt less wanted.
"But, darling uncle, there's so little that we _can_ do!" Yolande
exclaimed, trying to combine apology and self-defence. "I feel that if
we don't pinch and scrape and slave.... And everyone's in the same
boat.... I bought one black frock when Archie was killed, and I'm not
going to buy another stitch till the war's over. I don't dine out once a
month; and _then_ I don't usually have time to dress."
She was looking a little thin and white-faced; for some reason the
auburn hair which I loved had been cropped short, but she was undaunted
and self-reliant, one of a hundred thousand women to whom the war was
bringing that opportunity for service for which they had so long pined.
The emergence of my nephew Felix from a War Office car completed the
sense of revolution and unreality. That least military of archaeologists
was now arrayed in a staff captain's uniform, which accorded ill with
his glasses and bald head, for duty behind a string of letters and a
telephone extension at the War Office.
"You'll get used to it in time," Yolande laughed, as we set out on foot
for Eaton Place.
My sense of not being wanted certainly evaporated in the warmth of Lady
Maitland's greeting. One of her sons was home on leave from the Front,
and the familiar, red-lacquer drawing-room was filling with a party of
twenty-four, each of whom was acclaimed at a distance, introduced,
epitomised and enlisted for charity or intrigue before he had fairly
crossed the threshold.
"Yolande! My dear, I got your note and I've put off the committee till
Friday," she cried, when our turn came and my niece surrendered to a
resonant kiss on either cheek. "And dear Captain Manisty--there was
something I wanted to see you about.... It'll come back to me. _And_ Mr.
Stornaway!" She surveyed me for a moment with her handsome square head
on one side, then turned to a little group behind her. "My dears, we all
thought he was dead! Mr. Stornaway, I want you all to myself, you're
going to tell me all about your terrible hardships and, before you're a
day older, you're going on my Prisoners of War Relief Committee." She
turned again to explain me to the room. "This is Mr. Stornaway who's
been interned in Austria all this time. He's going to tell us all about
it.... Mr. Stornaway, it's a scandal, we can't get the Government to
act. Now here's Mr. Deganway--you know him?--he's in the Foreign Office
and he tells me that the question of the prisoners----"
She broke off to welcome two new arrivals with a surprised cry of "Lord
Pentyre! And my dear Sir Harry Mordaunt!" as though she had not invited
them. I shook hands with Maitland and was trying to see whom else I
knew, when she returned and remorselessly introduced me to Vincent
Grayle, with whom I have sat in the House for a dozen years. He was
leaning on a stick, and I learned in a galloping exchange of biography
that he had had one knee shattered in the Antwerp expedition and was now
at the War Office, "cleaning up the mess made by the professional
soldiers."
"But what were you doing out there at all?" I asked, clinging to him for
a moment before Lady Maitland could present me to anyone else. We had
been contemporaries, if not friends, at Eton and Trinity, which meant
that he was past fifty.
"Much too good a war to miss!" he answered with a laugh, hobbling away
to be introduced to a young bride in half-mourning who had already
collected two young Maitlands, Pentyre, Deganway and George Oakleigh.
"I expect you find everything a bit changed," said Maitland earnestly,
glancing at his own uniform and speaking as though the war were a secret
in which he was doubtfully initiating me.
"Grayle's much the same," I answered, looking enviously after the viking
figure with the blue eyes, pink and white cheeks and corn-coloured hair.
There was a moment's silence, as my hostess mentally called the roll and
I strolled away before her husband was ready with another platitude.
"Eleanor Ross is _always_ late!" she complained. "Well, you haven't
altered much, Mr. Stornaway."
Nor had she, I answered. The war seemed only to have turned her tireless
energy into new channels. Whereas she had once called for the heads of
Nationalists, strike leaders and, indeed, anyone with whom she chanced
to be in temporary disagreement, she would now, I gathered, be content
with the public execution of the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald
and Sir Ian Hamilton. She seemed the motive power of as many committees
as ever; her house was the meeting-place of as many incongruities as
before, and she was prepared to yoke the meanest of us to one or other
of her charities.
"We must have a talk about the Prisoners," she said, with one eye on the
door. "The Government will do _nothing_, but what do you expect?"
Lowering her voice, she confided that three Ministers, of whom I knew
one to be a bachelor, were married to German wives, while a fourth was
discovered to have arms stacked in his cellar and a wireless
installation on his roof. She told me, further, that we had had enough
of these lawyer-politicians, that the country needed a Man, because the
young shirkers that you met in the street were stealing the work of
those who had patriotically enlisted; the Press, she went on to say, was
a public danger (only exceeded in imbecile virus by the Press Bureau)
and it was high time that in the matter of war we sat at the feet of
Germany. She barely had time to weaken her last effect by declaring the
German military machine, for all its forty years' perfection, to be the
greatest imposture in history, before the Duchess of Ross was announced.
"Odious painted creature. And always late!" Lady Maitland whispered to
me, as she hurried forward with both hands outstretched.
"You look giddy," Yolande murmured.
"And what do you think of England after a year of war?" Eleanor Ross
cried over her shoulder, as we went down to dinner.
2
If Lady Maitland had invited a full account of my internment and had
then scampered away without waiting to hear it, I was not let off so
easily by either of my neighbours at dinner. For the first three courses
I told my tale to the Duchess of Ross, who spent the second three
handing it on to the right, while I turned like an automaton and
repeated my recitation to Lady Pentyre. As I might have foreseen,
knowing their craving to be ahead of the world with any new thing, I was
instantly committed to lunching with both (because each knew so many
people who would be simply dying to meet me and hear all about it); and,
if I bore my cross with resignation, it was because I knew that I was
relieving someone else (he proved to be a submarine commander who had
recently been awarded the Victoria Cross)--and that I should be relieved
in my turn when a greater novelty presented itself--(after three days an
American _Lusitania_ survivor came to my rescue).
I was beginning to get used to the noise and strangeness and to recover
from my first bewilderment, when Lady Maitland rustled to her feet, and
I was left at the mercy of a political argument carried on between my
host and Grayle across my body. So far as I remembered, it concerned the
likelihood of compulsory service, and I was only interested to find
Grayle, the most lawless man of my acquaintance, pleading for more
discipline, while a high-and-dry Tory like Maitland defended Ministers
whom he had styled thieves and common sharpers at the time of the 1909
Budget and the Marconi enquiry. I had almost forgotten my poor little
host's genius for picking up the hastier opinions and less profound
catchwords of the uninformed. George caught my eye and winked, as
Maitland thumped the table impressively, tugged at his moustache and
talked--with a slightly shocked intonation--of "the brain and sinew of
the Government, my dear Grayle." Young Pentyre, as surprise relaxed into
boredom, moved next to me and began a rival conversation.
"Who's the patriotic gentleman?" he whispered. "And why's he so excited
about the jolly old Government?"
"He's got a bee in his bonnet," George explained, "because he fancies he
brought down the old Liberal lot and can't make out why he's not been
given a job in the Coalition."
"But who is he?" Pentyre persisted.
As I had known Grayle longer than anyone present, I took it upon myself
to answer.
We had first met nearly forty years ago as boys at Eton, soon drawing
together in a common recognition, keenly felt and resented, that we were
poorer than our fellows. My father had no business to send me there at
all, but every male Stornaway always had gone to Eton, whether he could
afford it or not. Grayle, the only son of a hard-drinking
Gloucestershire squire, who used to beat him unmercifully, was sent to
school when he grew strong enough to resist parental castigation, with
an idea, I suppose, that others by force of numbers would be able to
continue the beatings. We worked our way up the school together, until
Grayle was withdrawn in consequence of some trouble with a tradesman's
daughter in Slough, and met again at Trinity, when the scandal was half
forgotten. There I remained four years and Grayle four weeks. If I ever
heard the full story of his subsequent, final, cataclysmic quarrel with
his father (they were separated, I know, by the stud-groom and a couple
of strappers), I have forgotten the details; the result of the quarrel
was that Vincent disappeared, and the next time that I saw him was
several years later in New York. I had gone up there from Washington and
ran unexpectedly into Grayle's arms on Fifth Avenue; he was accompanied
by another Trinity man of my year--Guy Bannerman, a brilliant, shiftless
Rabelaisian, whom Grayle with his startling streak of prodigal
generosity had taken in hand and was prepared (as he consistently
proved) to keep afloat. I remember how one of the loudest voices in the
world suddenly silenced the drone of traffic by thundering,
"It's the great anomaly of modern civilisation. What are you going to do
with them? Theoretically they're your equal fellow-citizens, but they
don't vote, they daren't enter a white man's hotel. I can't remember for
the moment whether they're actually increasing in numbers----"
Then I knew, even without sight of the square-faced, bull-necked man
with the familiar grey eyes, dusty hair and capacious loose-lipped
mouth, that Guy Bannerman had discovered America and was concerned to
solve the negro problem. He was on his way to Klondike, where he heard
that gold had been found, and he swore me impressively to secrecy.
"Half New York knows about it already," I had to warn him.
"How did they hear?" he roared.
"You've just told them."
The three of us lunched together, and I found that Grayle, too, was
bound for the gold-fields. Their methods of approach were notably
different, for, while Guy Bannerman informed New York City that any
fool could dig for gold and I retorted that every fool would, Grayle was
compiling an exhaustive list of everything that a gold-digger could need
or be drugged into thinking he needed.
"One wants a pick and shovel, I suppose," Guy ventured, "and--and a
pannikin." His conception of gold-digging impressed me as being
literary.
"And food, drink, lights, clothes, covering, cooking-gear, medicine----"
Grayle struck in ferociously. "No, we're not going to discover the North
West Passage, but we're going to make these swine squeal--and the more
squeals we knock out of them the better I shall be pleased. Tools,
blankets--or rather, sleeping-bags. Tents. Tobacco. Mustn't forget
tobacco. Bags for the gold. I suppose, if you've had a good day, you
sleep with a revolver under your pillow; and stand drinks all round,
which involves the worst obtainable Californian gooseberry. I'm going to
supply the outfit, and they're going to dig the gold. Exploit, or be
exploited. Care to come in with us, Stornaway? Anything you like to put
up, you know...."
He could not persuade me to come and help him exploit, nor could he save
Bannerman from being exploited, but the enterprise as he saw and planned
it was a giant success even in the history of gold-rushes. I believe
Aylmer Lancing supplied the capital; Grayle reached Klondike a week
after the rush had begun and only came east when it was starkly not
worth his while to be left with a month's stores on his hands; then the
insalubrious shanty known as "Grayle's Hotel" was sold by private
treaty, the stock-in-trade was put up to auction on a rising market and
he returned to square his accounts with Lancing in New York.
However much money he made, I dare swear that he returned with even more
experience. For many months many thousands of the world's choicest
blackguards had slept between his blankets, worked with his tools, eaten
his food and sheltered beneath his roofs. Raving with his Californian
gooseberry champagne, a Pittsburg smelter had emptied one of his
six-shooters into the scattering head of his partner; Grayle sold the
coffin and subsequently a coil of rope. He supplied jewellery and
dresses to the women whom he had induced to follow the camp; he peddled
concertinas to the musically-minded. Twice the store was looted, after a
good day and a full dinner, which the looting party instinctively felt
to have been insufficiently full. The first time he convened a public
meeting and asked if it was in the common interest to make him close
down; the second time he began to pack and only unpacked when the leader
had been unobtrusively lynched. As a study in contrasts, Guy Bannerman
spent three months carrying the gold south and bringing back stores;
then he tired of the only work for which he was fit, pocketed his share
of the profits and started digging. The profits were coaxed out of him
by a woman whom he set himself to reclaim--without noticeable
success--and, whereas the gold began to peter out within a month of
Grayle's departure, Bannerman stayed on until his last dollar had passed
to the new proprietor of "Grayle's Hotel."
I met both adventurers in Venezuela, which they had to leave before
their scheduled time, and again at Colon. Then I returned to England and
got myself elected to the House of Commons for the Southdown division of
Sussex; I did not see Grayle again until the 1900 election brought him
into the House, with Guy Bannerman faithfully running the election and
later acting as secretary, shadow, press-cutting agency, collector of
statistics, fact-finder and general parliamentary devil. Then he went
out to South Africa for the second half of the war.
Having seen the man undisguised in two continents, I have always been a
little surprised to find how little he was known here; he can be a very
entertaining ruffian, causing the usually censorious to apologise and
say "a blackguard, but at least he's not a hypocrite, you know;" on the
other hand, through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle-age I seem to
look back on a House of Commons which would not have tolerated him;
perhaps we are more indulgent nowadays, perhaps no one took the trouble
to compile a dossier, perhaps each man felt that his own turn might
come next.
Be that as it may, Grayle succeeded in entering a House that neither
liked nor trusted him. Fishing in troubled waters for twelve years, he
picked up a knowledge of his colleagues, even if he landed no fish;
speculation in countries too enterprising to be critical had made him
rich enough to pay other people's debts and occasionally to compensate
lost honour on behalf of some rising politician with a reputation to
preserve, but he never came into the open until the Marconi enquiry,
when I discovered by the savagery of his attacks on the Government that
he was now a newspaper proprietor. The war gave him his opportunity,
and, according to the far from impartial statement of Bertrand Oakleigh,
who liked an actionable story for its own sake, Grayle was one of the
leaders in organising the Unionist attack on the Liberal Government in
1915.
All this and more I contrived to convey to Pentyre before Grayle had
finished his cigar and signified his willingness to come upstairs.
We were hardly inside the drawing-room before he had limped briskly to
the sofa where the young bride who had been his neighbour at dinner was
seated; she smiled easily, ungratified but obviously conscious of his
admiration, and in a moment they were splashing to the waist in
vivacious badinage. I sought out my niece and tried to secure ten
minutes' quiet discussion of my own affairs.
In one of the first letters to reach me in my internment camp Yolande
cautiously prepared me for bad news; on the next page she announced
young Deryk Lancing's death; a week later I heard--in my loose-box and
amid a smell of straw and whitewash--that the whole estate of some
twenty odd millions had passed to me. I had known old Sir Aylmer
Lancing, the boy's father, ever since I was transferred from Vienna to
Washington, when he was in the fulness of his powers and Deryk was
unborn. Indeed, he had hitched me out of the Diplomatic and given me a
start with one of his own firms of contractors in South America, and
there I had made enough money to retire to affluence when my health
broke down in Panama. I had seen him, too, regularly and intimately for
fifteen years after his stroke; indeed, I had induced my brother to sell
him Ripley Court and I spent so much of my time there that it was
sometimes hard to believe that the great, gaunt house had ever changed
hands. Deryk I had known since he was a boy of eight or nine, brilliant
and precocious, neurotic, impatient and inconsiderate, but winning and
lovable with it all and filled with a blaze of promise. He had succeeded
to the title and estate less than twelve months before he was killed; he
had just become engaged rather romantically to a girl with whom he had
long been in love; and it was on the day when he had been shewing her
the house which I persuaded him to buy and which was waiting for them
both that he had fallen from the roof and been picked up dead and
hideously broken....
I looked round the room, through the rich gleam of Lady Maitland's red
lacquer, at Grayle, sitting with one leg permanently stiff in front of
him, Charles Maitland, already twice wounded, Pentyre in his Guards
uniform, waiting to go out, and my eyes came to rest on Yolande's black
dress.
"You would have thought the war had done enough damage without any
extras of that kind," I said.
"What are you going to do with all the money?" she asked wonderingly.
"I want time to think, Yolande," I said. "I feel a little bit dazed.
It's so much the same--and yet so different. I know this room so well,
Lady Maitland's the same fat, voluble, outrageous, delightful creature
that she always was,--and yet I seemed to have dipped into another
world...."
We were still talking of ourselves and the family when a maid entered to
say that a Mr. Jellaby wished to speak to Colonel Grayle on the
telephone. I smiled in easy triumph as Grayle scrambled to his feet, for
I have so often found Mr. Jellaby wishing to speak to me on the
telephone, and poor Jellaby with tears in his voice has begged me to
help keep a house or stand in readiness for a division or relieve guard
after an all-night sitting.
"If there's a division, I shall take you," Grayle threatened in
retaliation for my smile, as he leaned down for his stick. "One of these
Labour swine making trouble, I expect. We've all got to back the
Government as long as it is the Government."
It was a good guess, for he returned a moment later and dragged me to my
feet with the announcement that Grimthorpe, the A.S.E. man, was
threatening to divide the House unless the Prime Minister gave an
assurance that the National Registration Bill would never be made the
basis of a system of conscription.
"Infernal nuisance, but we shall have to go," he said. "You've got to
start your duties some time, Stornaway, and you may as well keep me
company and start them to-night. Only a formality, you know. Half the
Cabinet's sworn not to graft conscription on to the Bill, and the other
half's sworn it will. Beauty of coalition government!"
More from a desire to see what the House looked like than from any wish
to support Grayle, I allowed myself to be taken away. As I shook hands
with Lady Maitland, he stumped back to his sofa and roundly told the
young bride that he proposed to come and call on her.
"Haven't half finished our conversation," he said in a tone of
authority, "so if you'll tell me your address----"
I chose to think that her manner hardened, as though she felt that
Grayle was taking her for granted too much.
"I'm hardly ever at home," she answered. "My Belgian refugee work----"
"Free in the evenings," he interrupted jerkily. "_My_ only time for
calling."
She hesitated and, as I thought, sank her voice slightly, putting
herself on the defensive.
"You'd only be bored, you know," she warned him. "It isn't an ordinary
house, and you won't meet ordinary people."
"Coming to see _you_," Grayle answered.
"You clearly aren't wanted, Grayle," I said, taking him by the arm. "If
you insist on dragging me to the House, let's start at once."
He shook free of my hand and turned to her, as though he were delivering
an ultimatum.
"You don't want me to come?" he demanded.
"You won't be amused," she answered, this time in unmistakable distress.
"Where do you live?" he asked relentlessly.
"In Westminster." I was rather shocked by the way in which she allowed
him to bully her. "A house called 'The Sanctuary,' on the Embankment,
just by the Tate Gallery."
He repeated the name as we walked downstairs and whistled unsuccessfully
for a taxi. On the steps I told him again that he had been making a
nuisance of himself, for she was probably living in some modest
boarding-house. Grayle would only murmur irrelevantly that she was a
devilish pretty girl, an opinion evidently shared by George Oakleigh and
the Maitland boys, who had surrounded her before Grayle was out of the
room. I cannot remember that her looks left any impression on me at this
meeting.
"'The Sanctuary'," he murmured for the third time, as we set off on foot
for the House. "Didn't happen to hear what her name was, did you? Never
bother about names myself."
"It would be inartistic," I said.
We walked through Eaton Square in silence and along Buckingham Gate and
Birdcage Walk to Parliament Square. As we approached the Palmerston
monument, Grayle touched my arm, pointed ahead and quickened his limping
pace; an open-air meeting of two soldiers, nine loafers and one woman
was being addressed by a shabbily-garbed young man who seemed to be on
the worst possible terms with his audience; Grayle, who has the nose of
a schoolboy or a terrier for any kind of fight, clearly felt that this,
like the war, was too good to miss. What went before, I have, of course,
no means of judging, but such fragments of vituperation as reached me
suggested the wonder why a man, who cared nothing for his hearers,
troubled to harangue an exasperated group, which was quite unconvinced
by his reasoning. The speaker kept his temper; his hearers had lost
theirs from the outset, I should imagine, and this possibly amused him
and justified the effort.
"Go aht and fight yourself," cried one of the soldiers truculently,
"before yer snacks at the men that 'ave been out there."
"I should not der-ream of fighting," the lecturer answered with
practised and very clear enunciation.
"Precious sight too careful of yer dirty skin!"
The lecturer laughed with maddening calm.
"I value my life," he conceded, "but I happen to be brave enough to
value my soul more. I do not choose to be the deluded instrument of
Junkers here or elsewhere, and, had anyone thought you worth educating,
you would not choose it either. My fine fellow, you were before the
war--what? A coal-heaver? But you had no quarrel with the coal-heavers
of Germany, until your Junkers told you to fight; you will again have no
quarrel when your Junkers tell you to stop fighting. I was a medical
student once, I had no quarrel with the medical students of other
nations, nor can I make a quarrel when a Junker tells me to hate, to be
red and angry--if you could see how red and angry you look now!--to stab
and shoot and slash. If I have to kill, let me kill a Junker, who cannot
maintain the peace of the world." He sank his voice with artistic
pretence of talking to himself. "But I was educated, I have thought, I
am not a dog to be whistled to heel or incited to fight other dogs."
In the pause that followed Grayle put his lips to my ear and whispered
behind his hand.
"Get those two Tommies away," he begged. "Dust this fellow's jacket for
him, but can't do it in uniform with men about."
I gripped his arm firmly and tried to drag him away. The war seemed to
have brought all Grayle's latent ferocity to the surface.
"Don't be a fool!" I whispered.
"Not going to let a damned German agent talk sedition in my hearing!" he
cried.
Even as he spoke, the decision was taken out of our hands. The soldier,
rightly or wrongly described as a coal-heaver, stepped forward and
called upon the lecturer to "take that back, will you?" The lecturer
smiled, folded his arms and said nothing, quietly waiting for the
interruption to subside.
"Take that back!" repeated the soldier, with a new note of menace in his
voice, and, when there was no answer, dealt a swinging open-handed blow
to the lecturer's face.
His victim staggered, recovered his balance and stood with lips tightly
compressed and a print of angry scarlet on his cheek. One of the women
had screamed; two of the loafers cried, after deliberation, "Serve him
right!"
"When opposed to truth," the lecturer continued, when he had satisfied
himself that no second blow was coming, "violence is as ineffectual in
the street as on the battlefield. You do not stifle truth by sending a
man to Siberia, as I've seen men sent, though you may remove an
undesirable prefect of police, as I have _seen_ one removed, sky-high in
Kiev, because--well, the truth was not in him. Nor is there truth in
you; there can be no truth in dogs who feed on bones flung from the
table, dogs who rise up raw from their beating and give their lives to
protect their masters."
This time there was no invitation to retract. The same soldier again
stepped quickly forward, threw his arm across his chest and flung the
full weight of his body into a sweeping backhander. The lecturer was
lifted off his feet and carried a yard back, where he struck the
railings and fell in an invertebrate mass with one leg curled under him.
The onlookers craned forward uneasily, glanced at one another and began
to separate in silence, the more quickly when Grayle limped up and
confronted the avenging soldier.
"Clear out of this!" he ordered abruptly.
"'E insulted the uniform, sir," came the husky justification compounded
of alcohol, fear and regard for Grayle's red band and tabs.
"I know all about that. Clear out and take your friends with you. He's
not dead," he added a moment later, when we were alone, contemptuously
exploring the body with his toe. "I don't suppose he's even badly hurt.
I propose to leave him here and tell one of the Bobbies at the
House----"
There was a groan as the toe glided on to an injured part. I asked the
man where he was hurt, and at sound of my voice he opened his eyes,
looked round for a moment and closed them again. I was as yet far from
used to the dim light from the shrouded street-lamps and could only see
that he looked a man between twenty and thirty, shockingly thin of body,
with fair hair, dark blue eyes and a narrow face with high cheek bones.
His air and costume were generally threadbare. More from policy than
compassion Grayle relented somewhat.
"I'll mount guard," he said. "Get hold of a Bobby and a stretcher."
3
To be involved, however innocently, in a street brawl is considerably
more characteristic of Vincent Grayle than of myself. I think that he
should have discontinued the habit at least when he reached the age of
fifty, but I know well that he only regretted his late arrival.
"They keep a stretcher at the House, don't they?" he asked, as he bared
his crop of yellow hair to the wind and lit a cigarette in preparation
for his vigil by the recumbent agitator. "If not, telephone Cannon Row."
I was starting on my way when I collided with a young man who had joined
us unperceived. He was in evening dress with an overcoat across his arm
and a sombre-eyed Saint Bernard at his side.
"Someone hurt?" he enquired, after waving away my apologies. "I thought
I heard the word 'stretcher.'"
"It was only a street row," Grayle explained callously. "This fellow
thought fit to address an anti-recruiting meeting, and his points
weren't very well taken."
The young man wrinkled his forehead, laughed and, after a moment's
thought, slipped his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat.
"Didn't Doctor Johnson say that every man had the right to express his
opinion and that everyone else had the right to knock him down for it?"
he drawled. Then abruptly, "Are you Colonel Grayle, by any chance?"
"I am," Grayle answered with a look of surprise.
"I thought I recognised your voice. I collect voices and I heard you
last week when the National Registration Bill was in Committee. Do you
think it's possible to arrive at a taxi? I live quite near here and I
can take the patient home for treatment."
"But why the deuce should _you_ bother about him?" Grayle asked.
The boy smiled to himself and shrugged his shoulders.
"If we cast him off to a hospital, there'll be all sorts of silly
questions," he explained. "And I'm a bit of an Ishmaelite myself. What's
the extent of the damage?"
The injured man opened his eyes again and reduced his huddled limbs to
some sort of order, not without occasional twinges of pain. He seemed
nothing but skin and loose bones and might well have fainted from
exhaustion rather than injury.
"My left leg's done for," he announced.
The stranger nodded sympathetically.
"Can anyone see a taxi?" he asked. "They've simply disappeared from the
streets of London, like Sam Weller's dead donkeys and postboys. Well,
you men help him up and give him a hoist on to my shoulders. I'm only a
step from here."
At a guess the sprawling figure was some inches taller and at least as
heavy as the new-comer, but my suggestion that we should wait for a taxi
or send for a stretcher was disregarded.
"Perhaps I'm stronger than I look," he told me; to the injured man he
said, "Clasp your hands round my neck; I'll try not to shake you, but it
may come a bit painful. And one of you men look after the steering so
that I don't tumble off the kerb or get run over. The house is just by
the Tate Gallery--a big sort of barn with a lamp over the door--it's
called 'The Sanctuary.'"
Grayle started violently and looked at me, but I had appointed myself
steersman and was heading for Millbank in the wake of the sombre-eyed
Saint Bernard. The young man's looks belied his strength, for he walked
fast enough for Grayle to have difficulty in keeping pace, and, as he
walked, he told us that the expected division was a false alarm and that
the House was up. I hurried along by his side, feeling more and more
that the whole evening had passed in a dream and that I should wake up
to find myself back in my internment camp. The noise and excitement had
tired me into somnolence; the darkened streets added to my feeling of
unreality. The dog with a cane and hat in his jaws, one young man with
another young man sprawling on his shoulders, Grayle panting on one side
and myself guiding the unconvincing procession on the other made up a
picture whose reality I myself doubted more than once.
And the house, when we reached it, was a large brick-and-timber
warehouse, once the property of a wharfinger, before the Embankment was
built, and quite unlike anything that I had expected,--though in keeping
with everything that night. I stood waiting for instructions, for there
was a modern annexe, with a second floor. I learned afterwards that
Whaley, the Pre-Raphaelite, had used the place as a studio.
"It's only about half furnished at present," our young friend informed
us, "and I expect you'll find it very untidy. We've not been married a
month yet. The house was a wedding-present."
I had guessed him to be the husband of the young bride whom we had met
at dinner and could understand why his wife was unprepared for visitors.
"We won't come in," I said, as we stopped under a wrought-iron lamp by a
heavy oak door painted in white gothic characters with the name of the
house.
"Oh, you must!" he cried. "I may want help. You just push the door--it
isn't locked--and, if there's no light on, you'll find the switches to
the right. Don't turn it on, though, till the door's shut, or someone
will run me in for signalling to German aircraft."
Grayle at least seemed to need no second invitation, and, when our host
said that he might want help, I did not see my way to refuse the first.
I confess, too, that I was amused and curious; the boy was attractive,
with mobile face, dark hair and big, black eyes; I liked his quick smile
and rather mischievous laugh, above all, I respected his good-nature in
picking up a total stranger, who, so far as one can justify private acts
of violence, had been most justifiably punished.
We passed through the hall into a lofty room with long windows far up
the walls above ten feet of oak panelling, rough-cut beams melting into
the shadows of the roof and a block-floor half-covered with rugs. On a
dais to our right as we entered stood a long refectory table between two
rows of heavily carved Spanish oak chairs; at the far end was a grand
piano; low book-cases ran round the walls, there were three or four big
oil-paintings above the panelling, and arranged in half-circles round
the two fires were luxuriously large sofas and arm-chairs. I was a
little reminded of a college hall, when I looked at the severe table on
this dais, the black-beamed roof and panelled walls; I thought of the
perfect club smoking room, when I tried one of the chairs; and the whole
room, as I surveyed its warm, bright emptiness from the doorway
suggested a stage scene at the rise of the curtain.
"It's rather jolly, isn't it?" said my host, when I expressed my
admiration. "The bedrooms are all in the new part, but, when we're not
asleep, we shall feed and work and live here. Personally I never want
more than one room and, if this one isn't big enough, I should like to
know what is. I'm sorry my wife isn't in, she could shew you round so
much better; but she's dining out to-night."
He settled the injured man in comfort on a long sofa and went to a
telephone by the piano. While he waited for his call, we were invited to
help ourselves from a side-table on the dais, where a generous choice of
cake, sandwiches, fruit, cold meat, cheese and drinks of many kinds
awaited us. He hoped that we should find something to our taste; people
were apt to drop in at all hours, he assured us, so it was as well to
have something handy. I poured myself out a brandy and soda and accepted
one of his cigars. My young friend took for granted much that is not
usually taken for granted, but I tried to harmonise with his mood and
succeeded better, I think, than Grayle, who walked slowly about the
room, staring at the furniture and pictures, but not committing himself
to criticism. My cigar was hardly alight when the flame-coloured silk
curtain over the door was drawn aside and a girl came in, looked round
at us incuriously and cut herself a slice of cake. As she prepared to
eat it, she caught sight of the figure on the sofa and walked quickly up
to our host, who murmured something and shook his head. Five minutes
later the doctor arrived, and, while he began his examination, I
announced that I must go home.
"My wife will be back any minute now," our host pleaded, putting a
repeater to his ear. "Are you sure you won't stay?"
"Let us come again in day-light," I said. "I'm really rather tired now.
I've been travelling a lot lately."
He bowed with smiling courtesy.
"I won't keep you, but please come whenever you feel inclined to. You
just push the door, as I explained----"
"Don't you ever lock it?" asked Grayle, breaking silence for the first
time since we had set out from Parliament Square.
The young man's black eyes smiled wonderingly.
"Why should I?" he asked.
"Prevent things being stolen," Grayle answered.
"Nobody's stolen anything yet,--and we've been here a week! But, if
anybody _did_ steal, it would probably mean that he wanted it more than
we did."
"What's your _objection_ to locking it?" Grayle pursued.
The boy stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying backwards and
forwards from heel to toe and smiling mischievously, with his luminous
black eyes upon our faces.
"It seems so inhospitable!" he laughed, "and I love symbols."
"But who d'you keep it open for?" I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Your friend, the doctor, his patient, that lady who came in a moment
ago. You, if you will come again."
"I shall certainly come again," I said, as we shook hands.
Walking along Millbank, Grayle broke into an unexpected laugh.
"I thought I'd met most kinds of lunacy," he remarked. "Fellow said he
was in the House, didn't he? I must look him up in the directory
to-morrow and see what their name is. 'The Sanctuary.' I suppose that's
a symbol, too."
4
A reputation for honesty is often embarrassing; when coupled with
efficiency, it is always disastrous. For five-and-twenty years I have
reeled under the name of a "good business man," and this has exposed me
to attack by every impulsive woman and woolly-headed man who has wanted
something done without quite knowing how to do it, who has wished money
collected without quite knowing how to set about it, who has dragged his
committee and himself knee-deep into the mire of stagnant insolvency
without knowing whether to go on or to struggle back. Then someone has
said, "We must co-opt Mr. Raymond Stornaway."
As the reputation has long ceased to be an honour and is now only a
nuisance, I propose to affect no false modesty about it. Before the war
I was always being made a governor of some new school or hospital, and
my success is to be measured by the fact that I almost invariably got my
own way in committee--(if I was not voted into the chair at once, I
overwhelmed the chairman until he yielded place)--and as invariably I
raised the funds which I had been appointed to find. Perhaps I hoped
that, as everyone had comfortably survived my absence for a year, I
should be allowed a respite, but on the morrow of this Arabian Night of
mine I was to discover that London contained as many voluble,
sympathetic and unpractical women as ever, all convinced that they had
only to form a committee of their friends, dispense with book-keeping,
insert their photographs in the illustrated papers and stretch out both
hands to a man who knew a man who had a friend on one of the daily
papers.
Lady Maitland rustled in, grey-haired and majestic, as I was finishing
breakfast the first morning; the Duchess of Ross starved me into
submission before she would let me go down to luncheon; and by night I
was duly included in the Committees of the Belgian Relief Fund, the
Emergency Hospital Fund and the Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The
following day Mountstuart of the Treasury wheedled me into the Deputy
Commissionership of the War Charities Control Department, and I found
myself after an interval of thirty years once more a Government servant,
charged to see that the amateur enthusiasm of Eleanor Ross and her
friends did not defraud the public too flagrantly and that a reasonable
proportion of the money collected was in fact paid over to the objects
for which it had been raised.
Throughout August and the first half of September I set myself to learn
my new duties, spending the morning in the St. James' Street Committee
rooms and the afternoon at the Eaton Hotel, where my Department had been
installed in a faded coffee-room enlivened by a sardonic portrait of
Lord Beaconsfield in Garter robes and made business-like by rickety
trestle tables, paste pots and letter trays, internecine telephones and
japanned deed-boxes earmarked as His Majesty's property by a white crown
and "G.R." It took me several bashful days to grow acclimatised to the
epicene life of the office, but I discovered in time and with relief
that the expensive young women with the Johnsonian capacity for
conversation and tea were every whit as much frightened of me as I of
them. The men afforded material for my insatiable interest in my fellow
creatures; we had a few journalists, a stockbroker or two, several
college tutors, an elderly miscellany which had retired some years
before and was returning to active service for the duration of the war,
two or three men rejected or invalided out of the army and three or four
whose reason for not being in the army was not so obvious--a gathering
which was partly patriotic, wholly impecunious and very different from
the collection of unfledged naked intelligences which were distributed
through the public offices of other days by the Civil Service
Commissioners.
When I had subdued Lady Pentyre in the morning and ploughed through the
familiar files in the afternoon, I devoted the evening to private
business. A year's accumulation of letters made a considerable pile,
which was not reduced by the kindly friends who thought it necessary to
congratulate me on my return; nor was my leisure increased by those
others who invited me to lunch or dinner with a persistency that brooked
no refusal. In time, however, I had read myself abreast of the
periodical literature produced by the hospitals and schools; in time,
too, I began to tackle the Lancing inheritance and paid formal visits to
Ripley Court and the house in Pall Mall to see that they were
satisfactory to the War Office. So long as the war continued, I was not
likely to be faced by poor Deryk Lancing's inability to dispose of the
income of the Trust.
A month slipped imperceptibly away before I had got rid of the arrears
of work and felt justified in taking on extra burdens. Then I paid my
first visit to the House of Commons and tried in one evening to get the
temper of a House which I had left toiling acrimoniously in 1914 with
the third presentation of the Home Rule Bill. The Front Benches were
pleasantly mingled in late-found amity, there was a solid, unquestioning
Ministerial majority, but in place of an official opposition I found a
curious collection of cliques not wholly satisfied with all the heroic
remedies of the Government and fearful that criticism might be construed
as factiousness. I was to find later that, with the abdication of the
House of Commons, all control of administration fell gradually into the
hands of the Press.
The Smoking Room, which--like the rest of London--moved in a regular
cycle of elation and depression, optimism and despair, was in deep gloom
my first night. The recruiting-figures were shrinking daily, we could
look for no help from America and what Lady Maitland called "that Man
Wilson's 'too proud to fight' nonsense." Warsaw had just fallen, and
Russian Poland lay at the mercy of the enemy; earlier in the week, too,
we had experienced our first Zeppelin raid and, while it was easy to
count the casualties and demonstrate the 700,000 to 1 odds against any
one of us being killed, we felt that something remained to be done and
that these birds of death, however exciting to watch, should not be
allowed to fly to and fro at will, hover their destructive hour and
depart unscathed.
As I can do nothing with criticism which is afraid to materialise into
action, I decided to leave the House early and, being at a loose end, to
pay my promised call at "The Sanctuary." The fact that I had let a month
go by without discovering my host's name disturbed me little in a house
where so much was taken for granted, and I boldly pushed open the door,
as I had been bidden, and looked into the long, warm room. By firelight
it seemed empty at first; then I heard voices and saw the disabled
agitator sitting on a sofa with his leg up, talking to the girl whom I
had seen on my last visit. As I hesitated by the door, she jumped up
and made me welcome.
"Leg not right yet, then?" I said, as I joined them by the sofa. "By the
way, my name's Raymond Stornaway."
"Mine's Hilda Merryon," said the girl at once.
I had not had much opportunity of observing her before, but I saw now
that she was young and slight, with black hair and very pale, regular
features. She had in her manner, too, something scornful which I found
immediately antagonistic.
"Oh, I shall be here for weeks," said the young agitator, "if they'll
keep me. We're tuberculous as a family, and the knee will probably turn
out tuberculous. I'm Peter Beresford."
My niece Yolande, who buys all modern poetry that she can find, tells me
that I ought to have been certainly the wiser and perhaps the more
impressed by this information; and, if I had spent the last year in
England instead of abroad, I might very well have read of Beresford's
escapades with the police. Various people have from time to time
contributed fragments of his biography. I believe that he started as the
dreamy and eccentric son of a Lincolnshire family and that on leaving
school he had betaken himself to Moscow on a self-conscious literary
holiday. Once there, he refused to come back. The sombre, intoxicating
magic of Dostoevski had drawn him, Russia laid her spell upon him; and,
when funds from home were cut off, he starved and feasted, worked and
slumbered for two years, until the woman with whom he was living forsook
him. A violent reaction sent him to Cambridge, a strangely experienced
and natively rebellious freshman, for he had written poetry and
abandoned it, read medicine and abandoned it, mixed in revolutionary
society and drifted under a haunting police surveillance which only
relaxed when powerful friends urged his reluctant steps homeward.
"No more public meetings for the present, then," I said.
Anyone may call the words fatuous, but they were harmless and not
ill-natured. I quote them because of their effect in lashing Beresford
to a passion only describable as insane. I have never met anyone who
knew him as a boy, I cannot say whether he was naturally neurotic or
whether too early acquaintance with oppression had warped his mind, but
I saw a good deal of him between this night and our last meeting and I
have consistently felt from the moment of this encounter that he was
separated from certifiable madness by a hair's breadth. He had all the
suspicion, the sudden fury, the courage and the obstinacy of fanaticism,
the whole streaked with morbidity. We talked long that night, and every
chapter of his Russian Odyssey ended with the refrain "Alone of the
beasts man delights in torturing his fellows;" yet, when he described a
meeting in Petersburg being broken up by a charge of Cossacks, I could
have sworn that there was gloating in his tale of casualties, as with a
man who will pay money to stare at physical deformity. Against this, his
hatred of oppression was rooted in a poet's love of beauty. His quarrel
with society in peace was that it made man a soul-stunted slave and the
countryside an industrial ash-heap, in war that it made him a
disembowelled and screaming reproach of the Maker who fashioned him in
His image. Beresford had a sense of colour, form and sound which a man
will never know unless he be born with it. Again and again it came out
in his descriptions. And then I remember his making a sarcastic and
grotesquely ineffectual speech to a knot of drunken loafers.
"Do you feel that the sort of thing you were saying the other night does
much good?" I persisted, as he glared at me, breathing quickly.
His sudden blaze of anger seemed to dab two spots of scarlet on his
shining, prominent cheek-bones.
"For you--_no_ good!" he cried. "I told those fools not to fight, I
asked them what they were fighting for! _They_ didn't know. How should
they? But you know. Keep the dogs fighting one another, and they won't
turn on you. But when your troops come back, the troops that you have
drilled and taught to shoot, when they ask why their companions were
killed----"
The girl relaxed the scornful attitude of aloofness, which she had
preserved throughout the evening, to touch his arm warningly; he coughed
and went back to his cigarette.
I laughed at him, partly because it was good for him and partly to help
me keep my own temper.
"That stuff didn't go down the other night, and it won't go down with
me. You've been talking quite sensibly so far----" He bowed ironically.
"You can't make war without killing people, and there would have been no
peace or safety, if we'd stood out. Of course, if you want to see this
country or Russia treated as Belgium has been treated----"
He snorted contemptuously and told me, as an eye-witness, that the
Belgian atrocities could at their worst always be matched by the Russian
atrocities in East Prussia. ("Alone of the beasts man delights in
torturing his fellows.") But why strain at the gnat and swallow the
camel? The major atrocity was war; and, the greater the war, the greater
the atrocity. "The English were not too humane in South Africa. No. And
South Africa was child's play, it didn't matter who won. You were less
humane still in putting down the Indian Mutiny, where you were fighting
for our lives. Germany is fighting for her life, she must fight how she
can. A screen of women and children before the advancing armies? One
husbands one's troops. The Zeppelin attacks? One always likes to
undermine civilian moral, to make the whimperers at home yelp for peace
on one's own terms--(and are not you high-minded English warring on
civilians--women and children, too--by blockading Germany?). This is a
war of nations with all the nations' human and material resources poured
into the scale. If you want to fight, fight to win! Sink your hospital
ships! They will have to be replaced, and fewer troops, less food, less
ammunition will be carried in consequence."
He threw himself back exhausted and gave way to a fit of coughing which
threatened to tear him in pieces. I looked at my watch and got up to go.
"You should have preached this before the war," I suggested.
"It will be before the next war," he gasped. "And war there will be! I'm
sick of this 'war-to-end-war' claptrap! That's been thought in every
war, it was thought when Europe was leagued against Napoleon, as it is
now leagued against the Kaiser! There will be war until the fools I
addressed that night, those dogs who fight for the masters that betray
them, turn and tear their masters limb from limb. Yes. If they don't do
that before the world is ripe for another vintage, if they wait till
present memories have faded and another generation of old men sits in
power to send young men to their death----"
His pity again became merged in imaginative blood-lust until he seemed
to revel in the horror of his own description. Science was to be applied
without mercy or discrimination. When the maximum of destruction had
been effected in the field, the war would be carried behind the lines to
those who made its continuance possible. There would be no quarter for
prisoners, who might escape, nor for the wounded, who might recover and
fight again. The nurses and doctors who dragged the wounded back to life
and patched them into the semblance of men were making new soldiers; it
was not convenient that the enemy should be presented with new soldiers,
so the war must be continued against these nurses and doctors. And
against the countrymen, who raised food for the troops, and the
artificers, who supplied them with arms, and the women, who came to take
men's places on the farm and in the workshop, and the old men, who lent
money to buy more guns and shells, and the young boys, who day by day
drew nearer to the age when they, too, would be soldiers, and the last
woman in the country, who, if she did nothing else, could bear a child
to the last man....
Beresford's voice rose until it broke, and his words poured out more and
more quickly. The fellow had the impressiveness which is born of
conviction, and the girl by his side no longer attempted to restrain
him, but a sound unheard by me stopped him abruptly, and he glanced over
his shoulder with quick apprehension, as the door opened and closed. It
was not the glance that I associate with an easy conscience, and I was
suddenly sorry for the man. A moment later the hunted look left his
face, as the flame-coloured curtain was drawn aside, and my host
appeared in sight. There was the same whimsical smile in his big, black
eyes that I had seen when we met before--mischievous, kindly, and
baffling. He threw his hat into a chair and gave his cane to the Saint
Bernard to carry; as he came into the room I was struck by the lightness
and grace of his movements. The atmosphere cleared of its electricity.
"Only a small party to-night," he murmured.
The girl on the sofa looked up quickly.
"I'm here," she said, "and Mr. Beresford and----" She hesitated and
blushed to find that she had forgotten my name.
"Raymond Stornaway," I supplemented. "You said I might come again."
He turned and grasped my hand.
"I've heard our friend George Oakleigh speak about you!" he cried. "I
didn't know, the other night, that it was you. Haven't you just been
released from Austria? My wife said something.... They're a funny
people, the Austrians; there's no pleasing them. Now, when they get hold
of you, they simply won't let you go, but the last time I was in the
country--officially--they escorted me over the frontier and hinted that
they'd put a bullet in me, if I ever came back. And all because of a
regrettable little disturbance in Vienna, when an Austrian officer said
things about my father and myself which I thought--and think still--a
gentleman does not say."
As I looked at the animated, thin face, I was trying hard to remember
where I had seen it before. At the mention of Vienna I saw again an
open-fronted café on the Ring-Strasse with white-aproned waiters
bustling, gesticulating and shouting round a swaying mass of combatants;
in the heart of the struggle I saw a thin-faced, black-haired boy
fighting like a tiger; one arm hung limp and helpless by his side or
flapped horribly with the movements of his body, and his face was
streaming with blood. I saw his companion bring down the lamp with a
blow from a chair, I remember how infinitely more alarming and
suggestive the cries, the groans and general tumult of the fight became
in the darkness. It was no affair of mine, however, and I was far down
the Ring-Strasse when the police cut their way into the mêlée with drawn
swords.
"I was in the café at the time," I told him. "You were there with Jack
Summertown. I'm surprised that either of you got out alive."
"You were there?" he echoed with a burst of boyish laughter. "It was a
great night! I've still got some of the marks! I wondered who you
were.... Of course, we've got scores of friends in common. You know
Bertrand Oakleigh in the House? Well, he lives here. The place in
Princes Gardens is being used as a hospital, so George has a room at his
Club and the old man stays with us. He gave us the house--he's always
been astonishingly generous to me--but of course I couldn't accept it
like _that_. I only let him give it to me on condition that I was
allowed to share it with others. Perhaps now my symbolism----"
He broke off with a laugh and asked whether the others had looked after
me well.
"I'm sorry my wife's not here," he said. "Let me see, she wasn't in the
last time, either; the fact is, Colonel Grayle telephoned to say that
he'd been given a box for some theatre and would we dine with him and go
on? I'd already promised to dine at the House and I don't go to the play
much, anyway, but she thought she'd like to go, and she hasn't come in
yet. To-night you've _got_ to wait."
It was half-past eleven, and I held out my watch to him, shaking my
head.
"Look at the time," I said.
He took out the repeater that I had seen before and set it striking.
"I set mine by Big Ben this evening," I told him.
"Ah, but I can't see it. I--haven't the use of my eyes, you know. If you
feel you must go, I will only remind you that the door will be open next
time. I've got any amount to talk to you about, and my wife will be most
frightfully sorry to have missed you again. I rather gathered that you
and Grayle and she had been dining in the same house that night, but you
were at different ends of the table, and she didn't hear your name."
"I don't yet know yours," I said.
"David O'Rane," he answered. "There's no particular reason why you
should, unless George has ever talked to you about me. Now, will you
swear--on your honour--that you'll come again? And it must be before I
go away. Good-night!"