answered. “Does Saltash play on Ll-G. or does Ll-G. play on Saltash?
You’ll know better to-night when you’ve seen the new stage with the new
men on it. Your modern prime minister doesn’t waste his time with
duchesses at Ross House or with dukes at the Carlton. He has suave young
secretaries to feed the press; he has rich friends to provide him
personally with the sinews of war. He has his publicity agent. And, if
he’s wise, he has a chain of intermediaries running through the country,
somebody always knowing somebody who knows somebody else, so that he can
draw any one into his net at a moment’s notice.” As we crossed Waterloo
Place, Bertrand glanced contemptuously at Mr. Gladstone’s old house in
Carlton House Terrace. “There’d be no end to the buzzing if Ll-G. spent
a week-end with Sir John Woburn: he _must_ be trying to collar the Press
combine! But if my Lord Lingfield entertains a few actresses and a
jockey or two and a prize-fighter and if Woburn happens to come along
. . .? That’s how politics are manufactured nowadays; and the Turf and
Stage is the sort of place to see them manufacturing.”
5
Such a preparation was almost inevitably a preparation for
disappointment; but the unexpected end of my first evening at the Turf
and Stage left me no time to define my expectations nor judge whether
they had been fulfilled. As Barbara had a headache, I entered the
resplendent club-room off Hanover Square under Sonia’s protection; and,
for all the scars that the last five years had left, I could have
fancied for a moment that we were back in 1914 when the “Cottage
Cabaret” and “Blue Moon” were tentatively opening their doors. I
observed the same mirrored walls and plush sofas, the same small tables
surrounding the same polished floor, the same high gallery and beaming,
southern band. From the atmosphere I inhaled the same desolating
quality, only to be rendered by the desolating name of “smartness”.
I found no hint, however, that my rigidly standardized neighbours were
powers behind thrones. Apart from a passion for dancing that grew ever
more feverish as youth receded, they were severely domesticated. Men
brought their wives to supper, I was told, their sisters to dinner and
their mothers to luncheon; I should not have been surprised to hear of a
nursery upstairs or to see Gaspard, the incomparable manager, devising
quiet games with the children in their parents’ absence. Most of the men
that night were young and exceedingly prosperous financiers; the rest,
exemplified by Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh and Johnnie Gaymer, had at least
the appearance of prosperity. Born to rule, they had all done well in
the war; they were doing well in the peace; and their women dominated
the situation as shrewdly, as calmly and as confidently as the men. Some
trick of memory sent my thoughts back to the “Duchess of Richmond” ball
at Loring Castle on the eve of the war. I remembered standing in the
hall with Puggy Mayhew, watching the lithe girls and hard-trained men
mounting the stairs with their magnificently English self-possession;
and, though Mayhew filled a grave in Mesopotamia, I could hear again his
tone of startled discovery as he murmured: “There’s nothing to touch
them in any country _I_ know.” . . .
I had been invited to meet a girl who aspired to that career of
mendicancy and private blackmail which is known to women with a friend
in Fleet Street as “freelance journalism”; and, while O’Rane waited in
the hall for the rest of his party, Sonia led me downstairs for a
cocktail.
“I have a standing invitation from Gaspard to come here at his expense,”
she confided. “He considers me rather a draw. And, as Lorrimer is always
good for a dress if I’ll wear it in public, I can usually kill two
guests with one free dinner. If Johnnie Gaymer would only give me one of
his firm’s cars to be seen driving about in, David would get a perfectly
good wife below cost.”
As we descended to a more intimate room, with smaller tables half hidden
by plates of oysters, I suggested that the assistant-almoner of the
Lancing millions could afford to buy his wife a car.
“Then you don’t know David,” she rejoined with a touch of petulance.
“He’s working himself to death; but, if any one tries to pay him for
what he does, he thinks it’s charity. Let’s talk of something else.
You’ve not met this Maitland child? She’s very pretty and very silly, I
should think. Just what I was at her age . . . or at my own, I suppose
you’d say if I gave you a chance. Finished? Then let’s go up,” she
continued with the restlessness that characterized the age or at least
the women of it whom I met that night.
One and all, they sat down and jumped up again like marionettes that
would collapse if their wires slackened; they looked at one page of a
paper and then tossed it away; they clamoured for cigarettes and laid
them aside. Finding that her other guests were not yet arrived, Sonia
hurried into the dining-room, snatched a youth unknown to me from his
protesting party and danced with him till a voice, peevish with hunger,
cried: “Bertie, you little beast, come back and order dinner.” She then
attached herself precariously to another party, stole some one else’s
portion of caviare and rejoined us in the hall with her booty.
O’Rane, I thought, was looking ill and overworked.
“Stornaway’s gone down with pneumonia,” he explained; “so I’ve had all
his work to do. It’s a bigger thing than I contemplated. I wonder . . .
I wonder very much . . .”
“Whether you can carry out the schemes we discussed at Cannes?,” I
asked.
“No! Whether we’ve any place in our present civilization for these
colossal fortunes . . . Ah, that’s Ivy’s voice. Come and be introduced.”
I have never known for certain who constituted our party that night.
Four of us met in the hall; but we mislaid Sonia as we went to our
table; and John Gaymer invited himself to join us until his own friends
arrived. Between the dances, some twenty to forty people surged into our
corner; during them, I was usually left with one compassionate
neighbour. As in a dream, I talked to O’Rane with grave absorption about
shell-shock treatment; then I listened as Sam Dainton was convinced
against his will that he had spent the previous night in the hall of his
hotel, because he could not remember his bedroom number nor his name;
then Sonia plunged me in a morass of domestic finance, demanding how any
one could keep herself, her husband and child on the pittance which
David allowed her.
“And now I’m going to have another,” she added, as the saxophone uttered
a warning bleat.
“Dance?,” I asked.
“No, baby, of course. . . . Do knock some sense into David’s head. . . .
Good-bye-ee.”
As she slipped away, I found myself alone with a pretty little dark-eyed
girl, precocious and unbalanced, whom I remembered with difficulty as
Ivy Maitland; and for another five minutes we talked gravely of work and
life and careers for women. Ivy must have been younger by several years
than any other woman in the club; and in that setting she seemed a human
note of interrogation, scored by the present on the threshold of the
future. She also seemed sadly out of place. Her friends were too old for
her, most of them were married, some were living apart from their wives
and others were not living far enough apart from the wives of other men.
At the end of five minutes, forgetting her concern for a career, she
darted off to dance with John Gaymer; and her place was taken by Sam
Dainton, lately returned from Paris and full of gossip about the
conference. The unruffled Gaspard conjured one more chair to our
ever-lengthening table; and a basket of plover’s eggs for Sam appeared
simultaneously with O’Rane’s chicken and my savoury, while heated
revellers lolled over chair-backs with coffee and cigarettes. A warning
of indigestion assailed me as I changed my place for the fourth time;
intellectual dyspepsia had prostrated me from the moment when these
five-minute conversational turns began.
“You look a bit out of the picture, old son,” Sam told me candidly.
“I’m a spectator,” I said. “My uncle feels that I should study the great
movement of men.” . . .
“Paris is the spot for that,” he chuckled, with his mouth full. “They
call it a peace conference, but I should say it was a full-dress parade
for the next war.” . . .
He broke off as Sonia danced up with shining eyes to whisper her
discovery that one of our neighbours had married a second husband in the
premature belief that the first had been killed. By the time she had
done, Sam had finished his plover’s eggs and was in the thick of a
discussion with my cousin Laurie, which was to enrich them both if they
could only find an out-of-work capitalist to launch them. Ivy concluded
an audible disagreement with Gaymer, who I thought was more sodden than
his wont, and dragged me headlong into a conversation that seemed to
begin as startling indecency and cooled to the temperate obscurity of
psychoanalysis.
“You should read Freud,” she told me. “Psychoanalysis explains
everything. You _are_ behind the times.”
From the little knowledge which I had been compelled to acquire in the
hope of understanding the novels and plays of the period, I should have
said that psychoanalysis defiled more than it explained; but I was
chiefly interested to distinguish this night as the first on which the
old reticences between men and women were torn away.
“Not bored, I hope?,” murmured a voice at my elbow, as Ivy flitted away
for the second time.
I turned to see O’Rane sitting huddled with fatigue.
“Bewildered, rather. This . . . this is the generation you’re
undertaking to educate,” I said.
“You must expect some kind of reaction.”
“It’s been going on for six months now. . . . However, I’m more
concerned with the shepherds than with the sheep.”
It was only as the theatres emptied that I appreciated my uncle’s
sardonic wisdom in sending me to study “the great movement of men” in
the Turf and Stage. The government was then represented by Lord
Lingfield, who danced—for exercise rather than pleasure—with Miss Maud
Valance, of the Pall Mall Theatre, and by the Right Honourable Wilmot
Dean, who refrained from dancing on the principle that a man must learn
to walk before he can run and must be in a condition to stand before he
can dance. What weight Mr. Dean and Lord Lingfield contributed to
cabinet councils I am too ignorant to guess; at the Turf and Stage they
demonstrated that ministers, in spite of a nonconformist head, were not
killjoys; and those who did not get many chances of hailing convivial
privy councillors by their Christian names took the opportunity when it
came.
“It’s about twenty-one years since Gladstone died,” I murmured to
O’Rane. “It’s ‘new men, new manners’, with a vengeance.”
In strident conversation with Wilmot Dean, I could hear ‘Blob’ Wister
roaring the latest of his political creeds. For three months he had won
consequence by purchasing in succession the _People’s Tribune_, the _St.
Stephen’s Times_ and the _Daily Echo_. No one knew whence the money had
been collected; no one that I ever met could tell me whence Wister
himself sprang. He burst upon London like Sir Philip Saltash, like
Wilmot Dean, like a third of the new men inside the government and on
its outskirts, in response to the prime minister’s known desire for
business talent. I was still watching the unsteady antics of Lingfield,
when Sir Philip Saltash himself rose with a well-remembered lurch and
bore down on us with the customary unlighted cigar swinging like a
semaphore from the one side of his mouth to the other.
“Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less
careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer:
“You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game
as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in
the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years
later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what
I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury
and Pitt and all that lot.”
“I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.
“They wouldn’t be in a state to come here! Old Pitt was a rare one for
the booze. People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse
days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the
aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh
attorney: ‘Oh, how _vulgar_!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old
Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round
with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel
stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on
the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield.
“The war opened up a place in the sun for people who hadn’t been brought
up to your kid-glove ideas of public life.”
The whispering group was joined by Sir Rupert Foreditch, whose chief
claim on his country’s gratitude is that he sacrificed the dilatory
chance of promotion on the staff in order to race home after Neuve
Chapelle and offer himself for a place in the first coalition. It was by
an accident of geography rather than through any lack of zeal that
others were before him; but he and the group that broke the first
war-administration have the comfort of knowing that all decisions at the
Dardanelles were postponed till an embarrassed government could decide
which of their willing swords must be declined.
“Would you say,” I asked, “that there was a touch of the adventurer
about some of them?”
“A man,” enunciated Saltash, “is only an adventurer till he arrives;
then he’s a pioneer. Nobody minds new men when they’re like Asquith.
Nobody minds rich men when they’re like Derby.” . . .
“For one reason, because the Stanleys don’t drift from one country to
another, seeing which they can turn to their own greatest profit.”
Saltash shook his head incredulously:
“Don’t try to pull any stake-in-the-country stuff on me. That’s well
enough for your father-in-law. I sat next to old Crawleigh at a city
dinner last week; and he didn’t know what to make of things. I did. And
I told him. ‘The aristocracy,’ I said, ‘has been swamped by the
middle-classes. Well, if the aristocracy couldn’t keep its end up
against men like Chamberlain and Asquith and Lloyd-George, it was best
out of the way.’ D’you mind if I bring Foreditch over here? He’s just
back from Germany; and I want to know how the land lies there.”
I could not repel such a man at a time when my sole function in the Turf
and Stage was to study the new leaders in our political life. When I
first met Sir Rupert at Oxford, he was an unbending radical; but the
1906 election brought into the world more radical mouths than there was
bread to feed, and, when I took my seat, Foreditch was spaciously
enthroned in the wastes of opposition. As a hired assassin, his tale of
Budget Leaguers’ scalps won him the deputy-leadership of the Die-Hards
when the Parliament Bill came to be fought; and, in the Home Rule
controversy, he preached rebellion in Ulster with a gusto not exceeded
by Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith. An incautious
declaration that the kaiser could be trusted to save Ulster from a false
Hanoverian, as William of Orange had saved her from a perfidious Stuart,
kept Foreditch from reaping the reward of his shell-intrigue in 1916;
but, if he missed cabinet rank, he achieved a greater position as the
unofficial plenipotentiary who was always being sent, with the easy
informality introduced by a ‘business’ government, to make overtures and
arrange deals. His ambition, I think, was to play the part of Colonel
House to Mr. Lloyd-George’s President Wilson: in the last years of the
war he was always vanishing mysteriously to Stockholm or Berne; and, two
years after this date, I heard that he was visiting, in disguise, the
leaders of all the parties in Ireland.
“The present condition of Germany . . .,” he began; but, before I could
hear what it was, an unknown woman bustled up to our table and began to
make notes for an article which informed the world two days later (1)
that anybody who was anybody would be found dining at the Turf and
Stage, (2) that “Lucile”—as she confided to her “darling Betty”—had
seen good-looking Bobbie Pentyre dancing with Lady Clackmannan’s girl,
(3) that Lady Barbara Oakleigh—“Babs Neave, as we must still think of
her”—had been at the table next to “Lucile’s” and (4) that her husband
would certainly stand again for parliament when opportunity offered. In
its slangy pertness and familiarity, the style was the woman; and, as
accuracy was less important to the _Daily Picture_ than snappy diction
or a knowing air of intimacy, it would have been idle to correct her
statements or to reprove her manners. No doubt she had a livelihood to
earn; and those who create a demand have to bear as heavy a
responsibility as those who furnish the supply. When I had recovered
from my first exasperation, I felt that the loud-voiced lady was less to
blame than “Blob” Wister, who owned the paper for which she wrote, and
the two million readers (the circulation of the _Daily Picture_ was
certified by an impeccable firm of chartered accountants) who liked to
think of Miss Murchison as “Lady Clackmannan’s girl” and of Lord Pentyre
as “Bobbie”. Those who had no chance of seeing for themselves whether he
was good-looking must have been grateful to “Lucile” for lifting a
corner of the curtain from the world of beauty, rank and fashion.
“Another section of the public you propose to educate,” I told O’Rane.
“And you,” he retorted. “You heard what Sam Dainton said about the state
of Paris. Everybody hating everybody else.” . . .
I looked round to make sure that we were not being overheard. Lucien de
Grammont, I knew, was somewhere in the room; but I fancied that he was
avoiding me.
“That’s only these damned French,” I said. “Instead of thanking us for
pulling them out of the mire, they think _they_ won the war
single-handed and our job is just to foot the bill. Hang it all, Raney,
we spent more money and provided more ammunition than any one else; we
raised about five million men; we stayed on to clear the Germans out of
France when it was all we could do to keep the French in the war at all;
and, when our papers were gushing about the splendid unity, the French
government was making us pay rent for the trenches our men occupied to
defend their miserable country. They’re the meanest hounds on earth.
During the war, one couldn’t say these things . . .”
“Does one do much good by saying them now? The Americans bring pretty
much the same charge against us. You’ve an organization, George, and you
should make it your business to fight the hatred-epidemic.” . . .
He broke off, as the bland Gaspard presented himself at our table with
the announcement that a lady was waiting outside. When I read Yolande
Manisty’s name, I guessed that Raymond Stornaway was worse; when I met
her, I knew—without being told—that he was dead. As I came back to the
blaze and blare of the dining-room, I felt that this was my first
contact with reality that night. The financiers and wire-pullers and
propagandists, the glittering _corps de ballet_, the punctual scribe who
chronicled their movements, all belonged to a world of masquerade. I
cannot say what lesson Bertrand had sent me there to learn; the lesson
which I carried away was a doubt—the first since 1914—of victory.
I drove O’Rane to his house in Westminster and left him to think over
Yolande Manisty’s message. By the terms of her uncle’s will, he had—for
better or for worse—inherited unconditionally an estate of more than
twenty million pounds.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE RED ACCOUNT
_Countess of Montesquiou_:
So much for the Congress!
Only a few blank nobodies remain,
And they seem terror-stricken. . . . Blackly end
Such fair festivities. The red god War
Stalks Europe’s plains anew!
THOMAS HARDY: _The Dynasts._
1
Those who had never before heard of Sir Aylmer Lancing or of Deryk are
no more likely than I am to forget the excitement of the week that
followed Raymond Stornaway’s death. That it lasted no more than a week
was due to the number of competing claims on the public attention; but,
between the Bloomsbury cocaine-prosecution and the Dawlish murder, half
the papers were calling O’Rane’s heritage “romantic” and the other half
“sensational”, while the conversation at every dinner-party that I
attended came by divers ways to the unanimous conclusion that Sonia
would now spend twelve hundred thousand pounds a year on feeding her
friends. Before she had recovered from her first shock, I observed that
she was considering bigger houses in other parts of London; on the
morrow, when I dined—for the last time, as I vowed to myself—in
Rutland Gate, Lady Dainton told me that she had never entertained any
idea of selling Crowley Court; and, when I visited O’Rane to enquire if
he needed help, he shewed me a pile, waist-high, of begging letters.
2
It was my first visit to the offices of the Lancing Trust; and I retain
the memory of a vast, wind-swept barn on the edge of Hampstead Heath,
with an old red-brick cottage and pent-houses of tarred wood attached.
There were a great many box-files, a gigantic set of loose-leaf ledgers,
a fair-sized reference library and a large number of typewriters. On one
wall I recognized the map which Aylmer Lancing used to keep in his study
to remind him of the stages by which his grip had spread over the
earth’s surface. In all other respects, the building might have belonged
to a poor-law relieving-officer; and Sonia, who obviously expected to
find a double row of bankers smoking long cigars at a gleaming mahogany
table, was no less obviously disappointed.
“I came to see if I could help you in any way,” I told O’Rane, who had
rather frightened me the night before by his air of physical exhaustion.
We found him now with one of his secretaries in Raymond Stornaway’s
private office, fidgeting with the will. I learned that the money was to
be spent “for the good of humanity”; and in the construction of that
clause he had already received so much contradictory advice that he had
closed his office to chance callers.
“I didn’t expect Stornaway to die so soon,” was all he would say when I
asked him his plans.
“I doubt if time will make your problem any easier,” I answered, as I
joined Sonia in front of the tattered wall-map.
There, from the centre of what Lancing had bought as a burnt-out
town-site, the Lancing influence spread in extending circles. A name and
date in faded ink marked the advance of his railroads, the acquisition
of his forests and mines, the linking of lake to ocean for the
transportation of his grain. Dotted lines, leading to vague infinity,
shewed where Lancing had splashed out of the union into the Atlantic,
the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.
“You must move to a decent office,” Sonia put in. “And we can’t go on at
The Sanctuary if you want to entertain properly. People will expect us
to live up to our position, you know.”
O’Rane smiled grimly as he ushered us compellingly to the door.
“Whether that’s for the good of humanity . . .,” he murmured.
After this single meeting I resolved not to break in on his
contemplation until I was invited. Very soon my attention was to be
claimed by troubles of my own, for I was not satisfied with the state of
Barbara’s mind or body; I, too, wanted to think; and, though I treated
O’Rane to an unsolicited misgiving whenever I remembered his new estate,
I will not pretend that I thought of him much after the feverish seven
days in which every one I met said: “You’ve heard about it, of course?
That’s the sort of thing that _would_ happen to Sonia. What d’you
suppose they’ll do with it?” . . .