"Your wife will leave you," I warned him.
"I've told her--and I believe I told you--that I'd never keep her
against her will."
"My friend, you are making a great fool of yourself."
O'Rane opened the door for me, and we passed into the Cloisters.
"I didn't think we should do any good by discussing it," he said.
3
If I could have persuaded anyone else to carry O'Rane's warning to
Beresford, I would have done so, but old Bertrand and George had crossed
to Ireland for a week's fishing, and, when I called on Mrs. O'Rane in
the hope of catching her for ten minutes in a serious mood, it was my
ill-luck to choose the night before Pentyre went out to the Front. An
impromptu dance was taking its noisy course, and the only satisfaction
which I derived from the visit was my discovery that the estrangement
was not yet common property. Indeed, Mrs. O'Rane was fortunate in that
her behaviour, however outrageous, was judged and condoned by a special
standard. "That's so like darling Sonia," Lady Maitland and her like
would say. I took the trouble to pump young Deganway, whom I personally
dislike, but even his long nose had not scented a scandal. It never
seemed to dawn on Sir Roger and Lady Dainton that anything was amiss;
they both disapproved of O'Rane, they both felt, without taking the
trouble to disguise their feelings, that Sonia had disappointed their
ambitions and was wasting her life; but with a curious timidity or
survival of self-respect Mrs. O'Rane never let her own relations see
that eight months after her marriage she was in effect separated from
her husband.
Failing to transfer my burden to other shoulders, I drove one night to
Sloane Square and ran Beresford to earth in his rooms at the top of a
modest block of service flats. There was no lift, and I was out of
breath and temper by the time that I had climbed eight flights of stairs
and lost myself in an uncharted maze of stone-flagged passages. At last,
with a stitch in my side, I found his name painted on a wall and leaned
helplessly against the door, as I looked for the bell. The door yielded
unexpectedly, and I found myself stumbling into an unlighted passage,
where a phosphorescent rectangle hinted at a second door. Groping for
the handle, I knocked and entered. Beresford was lying in an arm-chair
with the injured leg on a coffin-stool and a reading lamp on a rickety
oriental table behind him. In semi-darkness the room was youthfully
bizarre. There were low cases, filled with paper-labelled books, running
round three walls, a window with a divan under it in the fourth,
Japanese silk hangings above the book-cases and praying mats insecurely
scattered on an over-polished floor. The furniture consisted of a red
lacquer cupboard, chest and clock; in one corner a Buddha smiled from
behind folding doors with placid and baffling benevolence; a discoloured
Moorish lamp hung from the middle of the ceiling with the Hand of
Welcome outstretched to support it; a joss-stick in a porcelain vase on
the mantel-piece smouldered fragrantly.
At the creak of the door's opening, Beresford raised himself abruptly in
his chair and as quickly subsided.
"Oh, it's you," he said.
"I didn't see any bell, so I walked in," I told him. "Are you busy?"
Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the table beside him. There
was neither paper nor book to offer plausible protection.
"I didn't look for this honour," he said with a slight sneer. "I was--as
a matter of fact--thinking out an article,--thing I've got to finish
to-night, you know." I sniffed--disapprovingly, I fear--the close,
rather sickly atmosphere and loosened my coat. "It's a few reflections
on the anniversary of the 'Lusitania,'" he went on, in a tone of
challenge, "pabulum for thoughtful Yanks. Do you want to see me about
anything in particular? I--I've got to get this finished to-night."
His theme gave me my cue, and I furnished him with a digest of my
conversation with O'Rane. He heard me out, impatiently but without
protest.
"I'm sure it's very kind of you both," he said at length, "but I'm
afraid it's no use. We should never have had this war, if a few other
people had done what I'm doing instead of blathering about peace and
disarmament in a sixpenny review, like young Oakleigh, and throwing
everything to the winds the moment war was declared. I appreciate your
coming, all the same----"
He pulled himself upright and limped to the lacquer cupboard, from which
he took out a writing-block and pad. I was ready and anxious to leave as
soon as I had delivered myself of my message, but--petty as it may
seem--I resented his hunting me out of his flat quite so
unceremoniously; hitherto I had perched on the arm of a chair; I now
lowered myself with an obstinacy unbecoming my age into its depths.
"But surely you can see that it's no good trying to separate fighting
dogs when once they've got to work? That's why George brought his paper
to an end. You've got to wait for a decision of some kind."
"We reached a decision when the Germans were checked at the Marne," he
yawned, pulling back his sleeve to consult the watch on his wrist.
"But that's over and done with. Any peace efforts now only have the
effect of weakening our own endurance and making a German victory the
one possible decision."
"But you know as well as I do that there's going to be no military
decision. If they couldn't break through our line, we can't break
through theirs, and I want to stop this hideous slaughter on both sides.
I want to make people see that they must get Wilson or the Pope to
propose terms of arbitration." The pupils of his eyes suddenly dilated.
"And that's what I shall go on saying. I'm not going to be persuaded by
you, I can't be intimidated by the militarists, and I won't share your
responsibility for future bloodshed, I won't join in this criminal
nonsense about crushing Prussian militarism--humiliating Germany until
you've made sure of another war in ten years' time. I think I've told
you what the next war will be like." His voice had risen almost to a
scream; with an effort he controlled himself, snorted disgustedly and
limped to the sofa where I had laid my hat and cane, considerately
picking them up for me.
I moved towards the door. As I did so, my ears caught the sound of a low
whistle, followed in the ensuing silence by a light step and the rustle
of silk clothes from the flagged passage outside the front door. At last
I understood why it had been left open, why the industrious Beresford
was unoccupied on my arrival, why he had given me so many encouragements
to retire. An unexpected sense of male freemasonry made me sorry for
him. There was but the one door to the room, and already the rustle had
passed from the passage outside and was audible in the dark corridor
where I had fumbled for the handle twenty minutes before. Beresford
stared before him with tragic eyes and parted lips; he grasped my wrist
and let it fall again; then the door opened, and I could hear a double
quick intake of breath.
Mrs. O'Rane was standing on the threshold in a black dress with an
ermine coat open at the neck, an artificial pink rose in her hair and a
cluster of them at her waist. One hand in a white glove circled with a
platinum watch-bracelet rested on the finger-plate, and she smiled at
Beresford demurely. The smile grew fixed and then faded when she saw who
bore Beresford company; with unfeigned admiration I saw her collecting
herself and preparing an offensive.
"Are you better?" she asked, coming into the room as though she were
paying an afternoon call. "Good evening, Mr. Stornaway. Peter's not been
at all well, and I promised to come and talk to him. I hope I'm not
interrupting you; I'm rather before my time." She glanced at her watch,
laid her hands on Beresford's shoulders and gently impelled him towards
his chair. "Darling Peter, how often have I told you that you mustn't
stand? Sit down like a good boy, put your foot up and tell me how you
got on with the doctor."
She seated herself on the arm of his chair, waved me to another and
threw open her coat.
"They took the blood-tests," said Beresford, gallantly trying to
imitate her nonchalance. "I'm to lie up and not to work.... At least,
those are the orders."
Bending over him, she touched his forehead with her lips.
"And you're going to obey them," she said.
Beresford shrugged his shoulders sullenly.
"What good will it do?" he demanded.
"It will please me," she answered promptly. "Lady Maitland says that all
I want is love, ten thousand a year and my own way. I don't want you to
die, Peter mine."
He looked at her and turned his head resignedly away.
"I feel sometimes I've not got a great deal to live for," he sighed.
She jumped up with a show of indignation.
"You dare say that, when I've outraged Colonel Grayle by leaving his
party to come and sit with you! Never again, my Peter! If you think so
little of having me here----"
"It would be better for him and more seemly for you to drop this kind of
thing," I suggested.
She looked at me with her head on one side and then swung slowly round
to Beresford.
"I believe he's right, you know, Peter. I come here radiating sunniness,
but I only seem to depress you. Shall I give you up, baby?"
"You think that will make me less depressed?" he asked gloomily.
"I feel I'm a bad habit." Her expression lost its smile and became
charged with abrupt neurotic irritability. "You've had more of my time,
more of my sweetness----"
"Do you think I don't appreciate that?"
"I ought never to have let you fall in love with me. Mr. Stornaway's
quite right. It's all my fault, and the sooner I end it the better.
Good-bye, Peter. It was a mistake, but I'm not ungrateful. When I was
miserable, when I wanted sweetness----"
Beresford jerked himself erect and caught her arm, as she tried to get
up.
"You're not going?" he begged.
"Yes. And I'm never coming back."
"God in Heaven! Sonia! Don't say that!"
For perhaps the fourth time that night I picked up my hat and cane.
However little I might care for Beresford, common humanity ordained that
this kind of game should end.
"This fellow's an invalid," I reminded her. "You're only making him
worse by exciting him. You had better let me see you home. Taxis are few
and far between, and I took the precaution of telling mine to wait."
She turned her little platinum watch to the light and compared it with
the clock on the mantel-piece.
"I can get a train, you know," she told me, losing all her irritability
and becoming matter-of-fact. "And I hate going to bed more than anything
in the world except getting up. When we had a house in Rutland Gate my
first season, Lord John Carstairs who lived next door always used to say
that he knew it was time for breakfast when he heard my taxi bringing me
home after a ball. So nice to feel that one sometimes really does one's
duty to one's neighbour; it justifies the church catechism. He was very
grateful about it and, whenever I lost my latch-key, he used to come
down and help me in through the fan-light. Then there was a dreadful day
when I got stuck on a piece of broken glass--father's bill for
fan-lights was so heavy that we couldn't take a moor that year; he
always thought it was the suffragettes--and Lord John stood below in the
divinest green silk pyjamas and an Austrian military cloak, I lay
half-way through the fan-light, we exhausted every possible topic of
conversation, including the Academy, and at last he proposed to me. I've
never been so angry in my life! If he'd proposed first and talked about
the Academy afterwards, nobody could have minded."
Having prattled herself into a good temper, she paused to take a
cigarette from a gold case at her wrist. I reminded her that we had lost
sight of the particular in the general.
"It is late," I said. "Too late for you to be calling on young
bachelors and far too late to be left unchaperoned."
Her big brown eyes, usually soft and entreating, gave forth a glint of
defiance.
"Dear Mr. Stornaway! If you knew how often I'd been to see Peter----"
"That makes it no better."
"You think I'm not respectable," she exclaimed with the slightest
perceptible toss of the head.
"I've other things to think about. If you want to call on Beresford, you
can call in the day-time; your only reason for choosing an hour of this
kind is that you think there's something rather venturesome and improper
about it. It's this sort of behaviour that led me on a famous occasion
to tell you that you were second-rate."
Possibly acting on a hint from George Oakleigh, I was beginning to share
his experience that Mrs. O'Rane never resented a certain brutal candour
of criticism.
"You do hate me, don't you?" she laughed.
"I have no use for the second-rate."
"And that disposes of me!" She leant down and drew Beresford to her
until his head was pillowed on her bosom. "Baby, you're in love with a
second-rate woman. So are ever so many people more, I'm afraid. It
doesn't speak highly for the first-rate intelligence of men, but then I
take men as I find them."
"Pardon me, you go out to look for them, Mrs. O'Rane," I said.
"It's the same thing."
"Not for a married woman."
We had bantered hitherto without very much malice, but my reminder
seemed to carry a sting.
"I don't regard myself as a married woman," she said very deliberately.
"I cannot remain out of bed to hear stuff of this kind!" I exclaimed.
"Melodrama is only excusable when it is convincing."
"Don't you be too sure that you won't be convinced!" she cried,
springing up and facing me. The ermine coat, drooping half off her arms
and back, fell to the ground and left her bare-shouldered and with
heaving breast. The rose in her hair trembled, and two normally pale
cheeks were lit each with a single spot of burning colour. The weakness
that underlay the softness of her mouth had vanished, and her eyes,
grown angry and hot, had lost their beauty. "Will you come and see me, I
wonder, when I'm living with Peter?" she asked flauntingly.
"I shall not," I answered. "I may say that this kind of talk----"
"But you wouldn't mind seeing him?" she interrupted. "This is all right
in a _man_. David can go off with that woman----"
"Good-night, Mrs. O'Rane," I said, holding out my hand.
Like everyone else, I sometimes feel intuitively when people are
speaking for effect. Mrs. O'Rane spoke purely for effect when she
boasted of the times that she had been to call on Beresford; she was
still speaking for effect when I warned her against being melodramatic,
yet sincerity crept in when she referred to her husband. I hardly knew
whether to be glad or sorry. For her to be jealous of Hilda Merryon
presupposed that she was not so indifferent to O'Rane as she pretended;
even to feign suspicion argued an unbalanced mind.
"Good-night," I repeated, as she stood ostentatiously refusing to take
my hand. "You had better let me see you home, though."
"I'm not coming home. I won't be ordered about! You advise me and find
fault with me and insult me.... Mr. Stornaway, let me tell you this.
You've been--poking your nose into my affairs for some time, so I'm sure
you've a right to know everything. You side with David and think
everything he does is wonderful, perfect, magnificent. Well, I don't. I
know I'm vain; and I'm vain enough to think he's not treating me as I'm
entitled to be treated. He'll be coming home in a fortnight. I wrote to
him to-day and asked him if he wanted to see me. If he does, he can. If
he wants me and not the scourings of the London streets.... If not, if
he doesn't love me enough for that, I shall look for someone who does."
I ended my succession of unsuccessful starts and reached the door. Mrs.
O'Rane strode after me with arms akimbo.
"You don't believe it!" she cried passionately. "You don't think I
dare!"
"My dear young lady, in your present mood you're capable of most
things," I said. "But Beresford and I are going to forget what you've
been saying to-night, and I think you'll be glad to forget it, too."
4
One says rhetorically that one will forget a phrase or an episode, but
my single glimpse of Mrs. O'Rane's temper had frightened forgetfulness
away. I kept on telling myself that it was no business of mine, that my
rule for thirty years had been to let the younger generation take care
of itself untrammelled; yet, when George Oakleigh telephoned to me from
the Admiralty, begging me to cancel other engagements and dine with him,
I had to prepare myself for any kind of bad news.
I could see, when he came into the club, that there was something on his
mind, but we had no opportunity for private conversation during dinner,
as Maurice Maitland attached himself to our table for first-hand news of
the Irish rebellion. I had imagined that George, even with an Irish
estate, an Irish upbringing and an unmixed Irish ancestry, was too much
overlaid with his English associations to feel more than academically on
the Irish aspirations. To see him after a holiday in Ireland, where he
had gone to fish and had never stirred nearer the county Kerry than
Dublin, was to see a hillsman made suddenly mindful of the hills and of
his own infancy. Forgotten fires of racial love and antagonism had been
blown into life. There was no attempt to be judicial; he had arrived too
late for the rebellion (or I dare swear he would have had a hand in it),
he was not concerned with the bloodshed which it had caused; it was the
sight and stories of the repression which made his blood boil and his
voice ring.
"So much for Skeffington!" he cried. "And Casement prosecuted by Smith,
who threatened exactly the same tactics before the war! My God! I wonder
when you English think this will be forgotten! You've seen the
sentences? One woman was carted off to penal servitude for life. 'For
life' one of her friends kept saying. 'But Ireland was free for three
days,' answered the woman. We've a rare palate for phrases in Ireland.
How soon do you imagine that phrase will be forgotten? I'm seeing red at
this moment. For two pins I'd join our young friend Beresford in any
propaganda against this country that he cared to start." Then he caught
sight of Maitland's expression of shocked perplexity. "I mean it,
General. When the Huns pretend to be amazed that the Belgians don't eat
out of their hands, we're righteously disgusted at the hypocrisy of it.
On my honour, you English are every bit as dense or hypocritical with
us."
"But the trouble is over now, surely?" Maitland unwarily asked.
"It will never be over in your lifetime or mine! Redmond made the old
blunder of trusting the English, he promised a united front in Ireland,
when the war broke out, instead of holding the government to ransom. And
the government responded by scrapping the Home Rule Act. You've lost
Ireland, the Nationalist party's dead and damned, henceforth you'll have
a swelling Sinn Fein army held down by English troops--as in Poland, as
in Alsace-Lorraine, as in north Italy before the liberation. And I don't
envy you the job of making things sweet with America."
Dinner was over before our discussion of Ireland, but, when Maitland
left us to return to the War Office, the interruption changed the
current of George's thoughts. I was not sorry, for I had endured two
nights of Irish debate with Grayle, who saw in the rebellion fresh
proof of governmental incompetence and new need for a change in which I
was to assist him.
"I didn't ask you here to listen to me tub-thumping," George began
apologetically, when we were alone. "How lately have you seen anything
of the O'Ranes?"