settled South Africa. We could settle Ireland, if we wanted to; but, of
a hundred men who talk of settlements, ninety-nine will only settle on
their own terms.”
On reaching Fetter Lane, I found my uncle at work on an appeal to the
nation.
“The Foreign Office,” he told me with frozen rage, “wanted to know what
business this was of mine. Perhaps we can shew them.”
While he wrote, I hardened my heart to the unpleasantest duty that had
befallen me since my marriage. After the usual enquiries when I was
coming down to Crawleigh, Barbara let fly such a cloud of reproaches
that I was ashamed to finish her letter. A delicate wife was no doubt a
nuisance; but ought I not to have thought of that before marrying her?
Engrossing as my work was, did I—as a matter of academic interest—rate
it higher than her reiterated request that I should come to her when she
was more ill and miserable than ever in her life before?
I was halfway to the station when my secretary overtook me with an
hysterical telegram: _If you love me destroy letter unread_; and I
should be hard put to say whether telegram or letter was the more
disturbing. Crawleigh and the local doctor assured me that she was
progressing famously; Bertrand urged me to go with a vehemence more
inhibitive than the strongest veto; and, in the end, I lamely begged
Barbara to be patient and promised to come at an hour’s notice if she
really needed me.
“Peace,” I reminded my uncle, “is only another aspect of war. ‘The last
chapter, if you like’ . . .”
“Please God it may be!,” he answered with emotion.
5
And, as we spoke, the last chapter was opening. Though neither of us had
paid much attention to the report that certain political prisoners were
being removed to England, we awoke next day to find that public interest
had been deflected to another part of the battle. As a football match is
suddenly suspended at sound of the referee’s whistle and the players
stand apart to watch one of their number who has been injured, so the
armies in Ireland, the factions in England, the spectators all over the
world now stood apart to watch one man slowly dying. The lord mayor of
Cork, arrested and imprisoned, refused to take food. For a week or two,
while life still ticked loudly, we debated over our dinners whether he
had been rightly condemned, whether the government would let him die of
starvation, whether he and his cause would not be made ridiculous if he
were fed forcibly. Then the contest became more determined: the
government would not yield to a hunger-strike; and Terence McSwiney,
with life ticking now less clearly, would not yield to the government.
It was a question of endurance.
“_Do come here next week-end if you can possibly manage it_,” wrote
Barbara. “_This business about the lord mayor must be decided one way or
the other by then._” . . .
I could give no promise. The papers were at this time recording the days
of the fast and hunting for stories of men who had lived for three,
four, five weeks without food. The ticking became feebler; and, one
press-night, when I sat shuffling an obituary, an appeal and a
face-saving leader on McSwiney’s surrender, we heard that the strike was
over. The report was contradicted before I reached the composing-room. A
week later, as the unwound spring stopped, jerked and stopped again, we
were told that the lord mayor was dead. He was still alive next day,
next week. Sympathy flowed and ebbed. The government was entreated to
spare a game fighter; the public grew angrily unhappy at being made an
accomplice in this slow torture. Then a gust of impatience blew against
such crazy stubbornness; there followed a flash of illumination, and
Dainton, who would have shot McSwiney out of hand two months before,
asked dubiously whether an Ireland of McSwineys would be easy to
“reconquer”.
At length the dying prisoner became an institution. His name was tucked
into inconspicuous corners of the daily papers. There were other claims
on the public attention. At last he died; and we realized that, as the
injured player no longer obstructed the field, the match must go on.
On the day of the funeral procession I received an unexpected call from
O’Rane, white-faced and enigmatic. In all the years I had known him I
doubt if we had talked of Ireland a dozen times; but this day stirred
passions older than any he could remember, and I felt that the taut,
bare-headed figure who gripped my arm was saluting McSwiney’s coffin in
the name of his father, “O’Rane the liberator”. The Irish of London were
present in thousands; but the English watched or followed in tens of
thousands. Some, I well believe, came to salve a restless conscience;
some in homage to a brave man; most to gratify an idle curiosity. The
republican colours fluttered unfamiliarly in English faces; the way was
lined with English police.
“In any other country there would have been a riot,” murmured O’Rane,
when I described the scene.
“There will be all the riots you can use when this is over. . . . You’ve
been lying very low the last few months, Raney.”
“I’ve been thinking. All Lancing’s money . . .”
“And ‘the good of humanity’?”
“Yes. I believe . . . I’ve decided . . . to save humanity . . . from
ever touching it,” he answered slowly.
At the time he would say no more; and we spent the afternoon strolling
along one embankment and back by the other. In the course of our walk,
we had a good view of St. Thomas’ Hospital, if he wished to heal the
sick, and of the Tate Gallery, if he cared to foster the fine arts;
south of the river we walked through streets that were more sordidly
grimed with poverty than any I wish to see again. There were, I pointed
out, inequalities of wealth for a millionaire to adjust.
“But is all this for the good of humanity?,” O’Rane asked, breaking
silence for the first time as we pressed into his house. The side-door
of The Sanctuary was like the out-patients’ entrance to a hospital; his
writing-table was submerged in appeals to his charity. “You can begin by
adjusting the difference between yourself and those people outside.”
There was a sneer in his tone that roused my natural perversity. I
distributed a handful of small change and returned to find him smiling.
“What did you give them?,” he asked.
“About a sovereign. Whether they’re deserving cases . . .”
“They’re more deserving than you, George. And, if I’d given Lancing
money, I should have been handing _you_ a sovereign. That’s my
difficulty. Every time I give to a hospital or a gallery, I’m relieving
prosperous people like you of your responsibilities. If the material
good is outweighed by the spiritual harm . . .” He broke off to stalk up
and down the darkening library with shoulders hunched and head thrust
forward. “There’s still plenty of wealth in the world. Places like the
Turf and Stage stink of it. And, if people want things badly enough,
they’ll pay for them. If London had a smallpox epidemic, we should press
money on our neighbours to get them vaccinated.”
“But, while you’re saving humanity from itself,” I pointed out, “the
money’s increasing automatically.”
“I can find outlets farther afield. You wouldn’t let those people starve
under your eyes; but you’ll let people starve to their hearts’ content
if you can’t see ’em.”
“With a million or two of unemployed here,” I began, “you won’t be
popular.”
“If I could afford to consider my popularity!,” he broke out with a
joyless laugh.
As Sonia was in the country, I brought him to dine with me in Seymour
Street. We gossiped until nearly midnight; and, when I had sent him
home, I settled to my daily duty of opening Barbara’s letters for her.
She had been right, three months before, in calling her correspondence
uninteresting; and, until this night, I had not been troubled with any
doubts which letters to send on and which to destroy.
Now I encountered a problem for which I was unprepared. The first letter
referred to an occasion eighteen months before, when my wife—according
to the writer—had invited him to run away with her.
CHAPTER THREE
AS YOU SOW . . .
“. . . The morrow brought the task.
Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had! . . .
“. . . A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
The pit of infamy: and then again
He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
To ape the magnanimity of love. . . .”
GEORGE MEREDITH: _Modern Love_.
1
I hardly remember when the meaning became clear to me.
I was reading with but half my attention, when I met a reference to
Croxton Hall, followed by familiar names. The letter was badly written,
in pencil, and more than badly arranged. The writer had been ill; he was
so ill at that moment that I could not make out the signature. I
examined the envelope. There a different hand had traced the bold
address; I noticed for the first time that the letter had been forwarded
from the Crawleighs’ house in Berkeley Square; then I saw an American
stamp and understood the faint pencil scratching.
It was from Eric Lane; and he was dying as he wrote.
2
The shock numbed me; and I read again with so little attention that I
had to turn back in the middle. Then a second shock drove the first from
my mind.
Eric was dying: yes, I realized that. He was bidding Barbara farewell;
and, in my first uncaring glance, I had seen so much that I must now see
all. After losing Barbara, he had found little inducement to live; and,
though he had once hoped to marry little Ivy Maitland, John Gaymer had
returned—almost on the eve of the wedding—to establish again his
empire over Ivy’s will. Eric had made his failing lungs an excuse to set
her free:
“_Two years would have cured me; but I wanted her to choose for herself.
And, when she too dropped out of my life, I didn’t try to get well._”
. . .
There followed pages of apology, pages of explanation. Eric’s love for
Barbara was consuming him; and, as the flame died to a pale flicker, he
forgot family, friends and self in desperate prayers for her happiness.
Once more the name of Croxton Hall fell like a black shadow across his
mind. There was an agonized reference to some rebuff that he had
inflicted upon her. Then came the reason for the rebuff.
It was while I was in Ireland that Barbara had gone to the Pentyres.
When the party broke up on the first night—Eric’s apology could not
have been more damningly circumstantial if he had been indicting her—,
she had concealed herself till he came up to bed, then invaded his room,
finally begged him to take her, take her away. Her marriage to me was a
mistake; I should not want to keep her when I realized my mistake; I
loved her enough to forgive her. . . .
I remembered, I now understood her distraught questions whether I should
be broken-hearted if I lost her, whether I was prepared to sacrifice
life, honour, everything to secure her happiness. . . .
In the heartlessness and abandonment of that moment, I knew, as well as
if I had seen her, that Barbara was wholly mad. I recalled the telegram
in which she said that she was missing me; I remembered her loving
welcome, on my return; I heard again her promise that she was going to
make a new start. And then I called up any self-control that remained to
keep me from going mad too. The child that lay buried at Crawleigh was
not Eric’s. His letter told me that; and, when I found myself believing
his letter, I felt that I was still sane. Barbara was innocent of
everything but a whole-hearted will and intention to betray me; and Eric
had saved her from that. After he had repelled her, she was innocent of
everything but calculated hypocrisy, sustained triumphantly for fifteen
months. I could never believe her again.
And what then?
A lust for revenge blinded me; and, though I could hardly hold a pen, I
addressed an envelope to Barbara and thrust Eric’s letter, without
comment, half inside it. Then I thought of him dying in California, by
now perhaps dead. I burned the envelope. As it crinkled and scattered, I
promised Eric’s letter the same fate; then I hesitated for fear that my
lust for magnanimity might prove more deadly than my impulse of revenge.
Was my life, also, to be a calculated hypocrisy?
I paced up and down the room till a clock struck midnight. I had lost
the post, I realized.
Then I looked at the other letters. The first was from Barbara. If I
intended to take a holiday at all this year, would I not come down to
Crawleigh? Thanks to this Irish trouble—how remote it all seemed!—I
had refused all my shooting invitations; but now that the McSwiney
chapter was closed . . .
I knew, unreasoningly, that I could not meet Barbara. Whatever happened
to us later, I must have time to think. I telephoned to O’Rane and asked
him to accompany me on a motoring tour. I believe I told him—I, of all
people!—that he seemed overwrought.
“No holidays for me, old man,” he answered with regret.
“I doubt if you’ll find it a holiday,” I said. “I want to discover what
the great public’s thinking about.” . . .
“I wish I could manage it . . .”
And then my self-control left me:
“Raney, you must!,” I said. “I’m going through the worst time of my
life, something more awful than I thought could ever happen to me. If
you _knew_ . . .”
“You can lend me some pyjamas, I suppose?,” he interrupted in a changed
voice. “I’ll have my gear sent round in the morning. I’m sorry, George.
To the best of my poor ability, you know I’ll see you through to the
grave and beyond.”
3
As I waited in the hall, I drafted a telegram to explain that I was
being called away from London on business. O’Rane arrived in the middle;
and I led him at once to his room. I could not unburden myself yet; and,
as we drove out of London next day, I found it necessary to pretend that
I was enquiring into unemployment.
“Bertrand’s afraid the men will get out of hand,” I explained.
I might have said that in some parts of England the men were already out
of hand. It was at this time that the “Homes for Heroes” campaign was
launched: as the government failed to provide sufficient houses, a
homeless band of Welsh quarrymen seized a public hall and announced that
they would stay there until cottages had been built for them. They were
led by a man, then unknown, named John Griffiths, who followed up his
first success by organizing similar raids on any convenient unoccupied
land. No one was paying much attention at present; as Bertrand said, we
were resigned to unemployment in London, but danger would march
hand-in-hand with winter, when the government declared its
housing-policy and when the official leaders of labour indicated whether
they supported “Griffiths’ landgrabbers.”
“Where are you making for first?,” O’Rane asked.
Until that moment I had not thought of any destination.
“We’re half way between Reading and Hungerford. I don’t know. . . . I’ve
had a bit of a shock; and you’ll find me rather disjointed. . . . God! I
don’t know what I should have done without you!,” I broke out.
O’Rane’s fingers rested for a moment on my arm:
“Old man, you knew I was always at hand if you needed me!” His unseeing
eyes softened; and his voice fell to a whisper:
“_‘I cannot come to you—I am afraid._
_I will not come to you. There, it is said._
_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so:_
_And all the day you tread a lonely road_
_And come at sunset to a dark abode._
_Yet, if so be you are indeed my friend,_
_Then, at the end,_
_There is one road, a road I’ve never gone,_
_And down that road you shall not pass alone;_
_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—’_”
He paused; and I waited for the rime that should complete the couplet:
“How does it go on?”
“_‘And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.’_
It’s . . . Chinese, I was told. Two or three hundred years before
Homer.”
I drove on, staring drowsily ahead of me at the broad, unfolding ribbon
of black road and the monotonous water-meadows on either hand. The
tender warmth of the little poem made me forget for a moment the
bleakness of the Kennet valley in late autumn; and, after a sleepless
night, the rushing wind drugged my brain.
“_Though all night long I lie awake and know_
_That you are lying waking even so.” . . ._
I murmured the lines to keep myself from falling asleep. What had
Barbara’s thoughts been when I lay waking the night before? Suddenly my
sight was dimmed with a curtain of blood; and I stopped the car in twice
its length because I could not see the road before me. If indeed I had
fallen asleep, I had looked for a moment, through this red curtain, on a
sun-washed verandah, where a dying man was gasping for breath.
“_And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—_
_. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died._”
The vision faded before I could make out whether Eric was speaking to
Barbara or listening for her voice.
The unexpected jolt had flung O’Rane out of his seat; and, as he pulled
himself back into place, he could hear me stopping the engine.
“Is anything the matter?,” he asked.
“Eric Lane’s just died.”
“Good God! When?”
“This moment. I . . . pulled up to avoid him,” I answered without
knowing what I was saying. “He’s gone now. Poor devil! Oh, poor devil!”
If I was shaken, O’Rane was in no better case:
“Those lines . . . I had them from him.”
“I know.”
“You’d heard him . . .?”
“I heard him then . . . At least I think . . .” The road was once more
stretching firmly ahead of me to a belt of leafless trees. In the
meadows on either side I saw deliberate cattle splashing up to their
knees in muddy water. “It’s ten to two, Raney. Shall we see if we can
find a place for lunch?”
“That’ll wait. You’re not fit to drive any more at present. . . . You’d
. . . better tell me everything, old man.”
“But I’ve told you! I knew Eric was dead or dying because I had . . . I
saw a letter from him quite recently. My nerves are rather jumpy.” . . .
“It’ll break poor Lady Lane’s heart,” he murmured. “And it’ll be a shock
for Ivy.”
Slipping his arm through mine, O’Rane led me into a field by the
roadside. Though he must have guessed that Eric’s letter had something
to do with my frantic appeal the evening before, I could not speak at
present for fear of breaking down. ‘_Boyish to cry—can’t help it—bad
fever—weak—ill._’ For many moments my head sang with Mr. Jingle’s
clipped phrases. A shock for Ivy? Some one had told me her marriage was
all the failure that Mr. Justice Maitland had predicted. It would have
been better if she had married Eric: she might have kept him alive. It
would have been better if Barbara had married him, better if he had
never left America, best of all if he and she and I had never been
born. . . .
“Babs can’t be ill,” O’Rane murmured as though he were thinking aloud;
“or you wouldn’t be here. Sit down and smoke a cigarette.”
When he returned with the basket, I was able to tell him. I wondered at
the time, I wonder still, whether I did right; but I know that I could
not help it. He let me talk myself out, only asking dispassionately at
the end:
“What are you going to do about it?”
And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay
back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical
infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this
long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a
calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come
back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have
forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to
get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had
sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane.
It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over.
Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not
understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as
the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to
think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too
proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from
her in disgust.
“I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told
O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her
divorce me.” . . .
“She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When
Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and
misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll
turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a
husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you
won’t have long to wait for your divorce.”
Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to
account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had
convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.
“I don’t see much difference,” I said, “between the woman who runs away
with a man and the woman who only stays at home because the man won’t
run away with her.”
“There’s still a difference between the woman who keeps her reputation
and the woman who loses it. When women become reckless . . . It’s a big
responsibility to give them the first push down the slope.”
The short sunlight of late autumn was fading; and I busied myself with
packing our luncheon-basket. As I had not asked for sympathy, I could
not complain if none was offered.
“If I give her the chance of divorcing me,” I said, “I’m not accountable
for anything she does after that.”
There was a long silence. Then O’Rane asked:
“What will you do?”
I had not thought; but, in that moment, I had a vision of the blue
water, the close-packed green woods and the vivid fuchsia hedges of Lake
House.
“Go back to Ireland, I expect.”
I was making enough clatter with plates and knives to convince the least
attentive that my patience was exhausted; but O’Rane lay with his hands
clasped behind his head, frowning a little at his own thoughts and
wholly unmoved by my demonstration.
“Will divorce make for Barbara’s happiness?,” he asked in a maddening
drawl. “You can’t quite wash your hands of a woman you’ve married. You
weren’t content, you see, with somebody of your own mould. Your wife had
to be brilliant, beautiful, romantic, tragic. . . . You married Babs
when you knew she’d been shaken to the depths of her soul by Jack
Waring, when she’d been broken to the bottom of her heart by Eric Lane.”
“I thought she’d had so much romance and tragedy that she’d be glad to
settle down quietly.”
“When she wasn’t in love with you? Has any one settled down quietly
after gambling with death for nearly five years?”
“I’d have forgiven anything if she’d told me!,” I cried, as we went
back.
We must have driven for an hour before he spoke again:
“Well, George, if you want my advice, I should recommend you to burn
Eric’s letter and pretend you’ve never seen it. Then begin again at the
beginning.”
“You imagine I can forget it?,” I asked.
“If you think more of her and less of yourself. The bigger the crime,
the more she must have been tempted: try to understand that instead of
counting up the things a man has a ‘right’ to expect of his wife. Rights
here, rights there! _Every one’s_ thinking too much of his individual
rights, George! Every group of nations, every nation, almost every man
and woman.” . . .
4
After two years I can appreciate O’Rane’s patience better than was
possible at the time. I know now that he was distracted by a civil war
of his own; but I was too much preoccupied to enquire why Sonia and the
children were in Hampshire; I should have been aggrieved if any one else
had presumed to be unhappy.
“I suppose it’s all the same to you where we spend the night?,” I asked,
several hours later, as we paused at a sign-post.
In the gathering dusk I could distinguish nothing but the gloomy
contours of Stonehenge and the sharp, black outline of innumerable
government huts. Then I saw O’Rane prick up his ears at the tramp of
weary feet.
“Anywhere you like,” he answered, as a white-faced army advanced into
the glare of my lamps. “I was in camp here in ’14. It’s a dam’ bad step.
Recruits, I suppose. We should have been given hell if we hadn’t been
smarter than that.”