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The Sensationalists: I
LADY LILITH
by
STEPHEN McKENNA
* * * * * *
BY STEPHEN McKENNA
THE SENSATIONALISTS
PART ONE: LADY LILITH
PARTS TWO AND THREE: _In preparation_
SONIA MARRIED
SONIA
MIDAS AND SON
NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE
THE SIXTH SENSE
SHEILA INTERVENES
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
* * * * * *
LADY LILITH
by
STEPHEN McKENNA
Author of "Sheila Intervenes," "Midas and Son," "Sonia," "Sonia
Married," "Ninety-Six Hours' Leave," etc.
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
George H. Doran Company
Copyright, 1920,
By George H. Doran Company
Printed in the United States of America
TO MY MOTHER
AND
THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX 9
II THE COMING OF LILITH 34
III THE SPIRIT OF PAN 58
IV APHRODITE DEMI-MONDAINE 79
V NOBODY'S FAULT 107
VI THE SHADOW LINE 124
VII A MATTER OF DUTY 141
VIII A MATTER OF PLEASURE 161
IX THE JUDGEMENT OF SOLOMON 177
X VINDICATION 198
XI THE LAUREL AND THE ROSE 217
XII AN ERROR OF JUDGEMENT 230
XIII A NOTE OF INTERROGATION 257
XIV THE ANSWER OF THE ORACLE 277
XV PRELUDE TO ROMANCE 294
LADY LILITH
"I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal
youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I
deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation ... I
grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased
me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day
makes or unmakes character...."
OSCAR WILDE: _De Profundis_.
LADY LILITH
CHAPTER ONE
THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX
"Conceive of your life as an unfinished biography, and try to
discover the next chapter and the end."
J. A. SPENDER: "THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT."
"Within ten years five of us will be married and five will be dead,"
cried O'Rane, writing rapidly. "(Every one of us will have made such a
fool of himself that it's _wishing_ himself dead he'll be.) One will
have had to cut the country. One will have lost all his money. As you
seem to like jam with your powder, I've said that one--and not
more--will achieve fame--by the mercy of God; one--and not more--will
make great money."
The prophecy, delivered with apparent sincerity in the mellow atmosphere
of dinner to a score of men between the optimistic ages of twenty and
twenty-five, was, on the face of it, discouraging. He who achieved fame
and he who amassed a fortune were condemned, with the rest, to pass
through the contemplation of suicide or, at least, the prayerful
expectation of death. And the moment for the forecast was undoubtedly
ill-chosen. Seventeen of the twenty members of the Phoenix had spent the
last week wrestling with examiners in their final schools; O'Rane spoke
with the subconscious triumph of one who was not bidding farewell to
Oxford for another year; and, if a vote had been taken, nine-tenths of
his friends would have accorded him the scant portion of worldly
success with which Providence in his grudging prophecy would crown their
ambitions.
"Dry up, Raney," growled Jack Waring. "It's all very well for you----"
"It's a twenty-to-one chance I'm giving you," O'Rane pointed out. "You
might bring off the double event. And get a wife thrown in. It would be
no fun, if we all leaped to the top. 'When everybody's somebody, then no
one's anybody.'"
Waring jumped up and turned to the president.
"I have to report Mr. O'Rane for singing at dinner, sir. A good,
thumping fine, Sinks," he added.
Jack Summertown intercepted the ruling.
"On a point of order, sir; was that singing? If it was--oh, my Lord!"
Sinclair rose majestically from the presidential chair and turned his
eyes from one disputant to the other.
"The accused is acquitted, but he's not to do it again," he ruled
diplomatically. "I have to censure Lord Summertown for addressing the
Chair without rising."
Ten suspended conversations were resumed, as he sat down; and Waring
reverted to his own gloomy thoughts. Unaccustomed to look more than a
day ahead, he was only beginning to recognize that in twenty-four hours
he would have gone down from Oxford for the last time and that within
four months he would have to begin reading for the bar. He had
interrupted his dressing an hour before to stare out of the window,
sprawling on the sill and dangling a collar and tie with idle hand.
Outside, the setting sun of a late June day filled the Broad with sleepy
warmth and dyed the crumbling stone of the Sheldonian rose-red. In the
middle of the road two cabmen slumbered on their boxes, pillowing their
heads on their arms and leaving their horses to munch contentedly from
frayed nosebags and to twitch an ear or flick a tail at too persistent
flies. Rare groups of sight-seers approached the deserted gates of
Trinity and Balliol, sought inspiration from guide-books and vanished
diffidently from view. Oxford belonged to the ages; and for the first
twenty-fifth part of the twentieth century Waring had fancied that it
belonged to him. A hansom, overfilled by an American and her two
daughters, jingled lazily from Holywell; the driver exhibited a contempt
for Oxford no less profound than for America and waved his whip from
side to side in rough time with the scornful scraps of information which
he drawled through the trap.
"Ol' Clar'nd'n Buildin'. Bodleian be'ind it. Trin'ty. Balliol."
Three heads nodded and turned mechanically from right to left. The
driver paused for new instructions, and an anxious voice from inside
exclaimed:
"Gracious! it's a quarter of seven! Say, how many blocks are we from the
depot?"
The high nasal intonation seemed to shiver the warm repose of the
afternoon, and in another moment the Broad was echoing with life. A
stream of bicycles poured down Parks Road; blazers of every colour
flashed into sight and disappeared; men bareheaded and men in panamas,
men with tennis racquets and men with dogs, men in flannels and men in
tweeds, a few, even, still in white ties and coats of subfusc hue,
parading the bondage of the Examination Schools, all hurried back to
make ready for Hall. Oxford still belonged to them. At the gates of the
colleges, deserted a moment since, the heirs of all the undergraduate
ages assembled in careless disregard of their heritage; the last
bicycles were tumbled into place; the last rainbow blazers and
hat-ribbons vanished from sight; pipes were replaced in pockets, and
necks bared from the dingy embrace of tattered gowns.
With a glance at the watch on his dressing-table, Jack Waring twisted
himself to catch the reflection of his bottle-green dress-coat. It was
the envied livery of the Phoenix Club, which--consistently with its
name--died and came to life again once a year. At the end of every
summer term not more than one survivor remained; the following
Michaelmas the new president proposed and elected his own friends,
choosing one junior to carry on the life and traditions of the club at
the year's end. The institution had ensured for nearly two university
generations and was the one constructive effort of Lord Loring's life at
Oxford. With the grave self-absorption of nineteen he had demanded a
club to which none but his own friends had access and of which he could
nominate himself president and ordain the rules as he went on. He had
long wanted a pretext, he explained in his inaugural address, for
wearing a bottle-green dress-coat with brass buttons and white silk
facings; and his position as founder of the club would give him an
excuse for revisiting Oxford at the end of his lawful term.
A faint frown of regret and perplexity hovered over Jack Waring's plump
and cheerful face, as he resumed his dressing. He had no fault to find
with Oxford, where he had done more than most men and all that could be
expected of any man. A case full of silver cups testified to his success
in college and university Grinds; he had been Master of the Drag and a
member of the Bullingdon; less than three days before he had shewn his
versatility by proceeding, without the ostentation of an Honour School,
to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Colonel Waring had urged him to enjoy
himself, and the four years had passed very satisfactorily.
"Eric!"
"Hullo! Are you ready?"
The door was kicked open, and Eric Lane sauntered in and inspected his
own clothes by the revealing light of the afternoon sun. He also was
frowning, for the sense of departure was heavy upon him too, and the
papers that day had not been to his liking.
"Our final dissipation!" cried Jack, seizing him by the arm and
clattering down the narrow staircase into the Turl. "I say, Eric, I
don't half like the idea of not coming up next term; I was just
beginning to find my way about this place. There you see Lincoln. Here
we have Jaggers. I've never been inside Jaggers. Shall we make up a
party and go to-morrow?"
A knot of Jesus men glared with the dumb fury which the small nations of
the world feel towards the Great Powers. A sing-song Welsh voice
commented devastatingly on the vanity of bottle-green dress-coats and
their wearers.
"I can't go after _that_," murmured Jack with dignity. "Never imagined
they understood English. Ought I to go back and apologize?" He stopped
short in front of a haberdasher's shop and nodded gravely at the
seductive window. Club colours and college colours contended and clashed
with giant brown and yellow silk handkerchiefs adorned with white
bulldogs. "We might buy them a peace-offering."
"I always wonder why you're not more disliked than you are," mused Eric.
"People only dislike me until I've given them time to see that I'm right
and they're wrong," explained Jack complacently. "I was very unpopular
at New College my first term. They wanted me to row--just because I'd
rowed at Eton. You can't row _and_ hunt. I never did any of the things
they wanted; the people here are such sheep. Did I ever tell you that
the rowing push came to rag my rooms just because I chose to dress for
Hall? They said it was 'side.' Unfortunately, their spokesman was drunk,
so I had to ask him to leave. It's such bad form to drink more than you
can carry. Now any number of men dress for Hall. Sheep, just sheep. I
think the reason you and I get on so well together is that you don't try
to lead my life for me."
"Oh, I'm used to you," Eric interrupted. "Ever since I can remember,
you've sat still and let every one else revolve round you. Your people,
Agnes, me----"
Jack smiled at his reflection in the window. Though his
self-satisfaction annoyed women and older men, no one could remain
impatient with him for long. He was always too good-tempered to provide
sport and too sure of himself to mind criticism. The man who is content
to do nothing starts, too, with an advantage over the man who not only
wants something done but would like it done in his own way. In childhood
the threat that he would not be taken to a party unless he behaved
himself well had only once been used against Jack; his mother found
afterwards that he had genuinely enjoyed himself more at home; and ever
since he had won his own way by studied inertia.
"You're so efficient!" he explained. "I should never have got through my
schools but for you. And you pack so well. By the way, you've looked out
the trains for to-morrow, haven't you? And arranged with Agnes for a
cart to meet me? I hate writing letters.... Shall we dig together in
London? If you'll find some decent rooms and a man to look after
us--Agnes will help you choose the furniture--and if you'll make
everything shipshape and comfortable, I'm hanged if I don't come and
live with you! There!"
Eric held out his hand with affected emotion.
"That's uncommon good of you! I thought you'd want me to choose some one
to live with me in your place."
"I wish you'd find somebody to go to the bar in my place," murmured Jack
with a momentary return of his earlier gloom. "Can't _you_? The exams
are quite easy for a man of your powerful intellect, and you only have
to eat a few dinners and get called. _I_ should live at Lashmar as the
simple, old English country gentleman.... Hullo! we're late! You'll see
about paying the fine, won't you?"
They crossed the High to a chorus of welcome flung at them from a
first-floor window over a pastry-cook's shop. Two sleek heads protruded
over the cushions in one tier, with three more, less lovingly cemented,
in the background.
"Hurry up, Spurs," shouted the president.
The name, applied jointly and severally to the two men, had passed
through ingenious refinements before reaching its present brief clarity.
If Waring's Christian name was Jack, his inseparable companion Lane must
be Jill; if Jack's surname was Waring, Eric's must be Gillow; the home
of the furnishing trade, if not of Waring and Gillow, was Tottenham
Court Road, which readily suggested Tottenham Hotspurs. An unexplained
intellectual craving was at length satisfied when the pair were renamed
"the Spurs."
After their first term no one shewed the psychological curiosity to
wonder why so incongruous a couple lived together. Though neighbours in
Hampshire, they were from different schools and of different colleges;
the shrewd but consummately indolent Master of the Drag was the arbiter
of taste for sporting, ultra-conservative Oxford--already a personality
and almost a tradition; the fine-drawn scholar of Trinity was a recluse,
a dreamer and a rebel, with ambition corroding the fabric of a too frail
constitution. Outside the Phoenix they had few friends in common, for
Eric's disputatious poets grew silent under the breezy onslaught of a
more robust generation; Jack's intellectual hunger was satisfied by
Surtees, the text-books for his schools, the _Sportsman_ and _Morning
Post_; while Eric, who had divided the first ten years of his life
between his father's library at Lashmar Mill-House and a verandah at
Broadstairs, had read quickly, brooded deeply and taken up an attitude,
sometimes precocious but always clearly defined, towards problems which
as yet did not exist for Jack. On one side, the friendship was founded
on a worship of opposites; Eric never forgot that he had gone friendless
through six years at school because he was forbidden by his doctor to
play games. On the other, Jack found devotion a convenience; he
respected Eric's brains and needed some one to relieve him of minor
exertions and to make up his mind for him. Accordingly, though all the
fourth-year men in the University would have been honoured to live with
him, it was to Eric that he drawled, "By the way, have you arranged to
dig with any one next term? Well, do go and find some decent quarters,
there's a good fellow."
"Hullo! No fine to pay after all!" cried Jack, as he burst into the club
dining-room and compared the number of covers with the members of the
Phoenix already assembled. "Who's coming, Mr. President?"
"O'Rane and Deganway haven't turned up yet," answered Sinclair. "I've
just had a wire from Loring to say that he's motoring down with Oakleigh
and they'll probably be late. Summertown and Pentyre you can hear. It's
their idea of music," he added, as a free fight broke out over the piano
in the adjoining room.
Jack studied the _menu_, inspected the wine on the side-board and
elbowed himself a place in the kneeling row at the open window. An
interrupted conversation struggled back to plans for the Long Vacation
and discussion of the schools. Sinclair, a stocky, simple-minded
sportsman, now pitifully embarrassed by his presidential duties, had
been chosen to play at Lord's for the University and for the Gentlemen;
after that he would tour with the Authentics till the end of the season;
and, until the following season, he would interest himself in the
management of his father's mines in Yorkshire. Knightrider and
Framlingham were destined for the army; Deganway and Pentyre were due to
cram for the Foreign Office; Draycott proposed to study art in Paris;
and Mayhew had forced his way into Fleet Street and the offices of the
"Wicked World." It was a wide dispersal; and all felt that they were
changing a life of proved comfort for something unknown and presumably
less easy.
"What are you doing, Spurs?" Sinclair asked Eric.
"I'm not quite sure. My people want me to try for the Civil Service. I
want to have a shot at journalism. You can't _do_ anything in the Civil
Service."
"Who _wants_ to do anything?" retorted Waring from his window-seat.
"Late as usual, Raney.... I only want money and decent holidays....
Sounds of a car, furiously driven. You'll have to fine 'em double, Mr.
President, if it's Jim and George; once for being late and once for not
coming in club dress. It is! Two dozen of fizz from each!"
He withdrew his head from the window as the car came to a standstill. A
moment later Loring entered apologetically in morning dress, fingering
his moustache and smiling with pleasure at the volley of welcome; George
Oakleigh followed, peering with approval at the familiar beams and dingy
panels of the low-ceilinged room; while O'Rane strode across the passage
and brought the free fight to an end by putting the heads of the
disputants into chancery, the president rapped the table and tried to
allot the places.
"Gentlemen! The toast of the Phoenix will be drunk in silence," he
proclaimed, as every one obstinately seated himself next to his greatest
friend.
Sinclair waited until the sherry was served and then rose to his feet.
Of the twenty members present only O'Rane was staying up another year:
in obedience to ritual he remained seated in the vice-president's chair.
"The Phoenix is dead," announced the president.
"The Phoenix will rise again," answered the vice-president with awful
gravity. Then, as the others sat down, he added reflectively, "'Wonder
where we shall all be in ten years' time? 'Wonder what we shall be
doing? 'Wonder how many of us will be dead?"
"You can always depend on Raney for an irresistible little note of
cheerfulness," commented Loring, as he pulled in his chair and looked
round to see who was present.
It was then that O'Rane flung his prophecy at the head of the club.
"Bah! You know as much about life as a Sunday School teacher!" he
retorted contemptuously, banging his hand on a bell. "Where's the
betting-book? And give me a pen, somebody. Let you mark my words. 'Mr.
David O'Rane bets the Marquess Loring ten sovereigns that within ten
years of this date five out of the twenty members present to-night will
be married. A further ten sovereigns that five will be dead----'"
"Always the optimist," murmured Oakleigh from Loring's side.
"I'll bet that every one of us will have made such a fool of himself
that it's _wishing_ himself dead he'll be.... A further ten sovereigns
that one at least will have had to cut the country. A further ten that
one at least will have lost all his money.... I'm only dealing in
averages. Ten years, I said; that's not much for any positive
achievement, but I'll bet a further ten pounds that one--and not more
than one--will have achieved what an independent tribunal considers
fame. A further ten pounds that one of us will make great money----"
"That's sixty pounds," interposed Sinclair warningly.
"But I shan't have to pay it," answered O'Rane, writing rapidly. He read
out a summary of the wager and passed the book for Loring to sign.
"Besides, I'm going to be the one who makes all the money. I hope you
won't be one of the five who die, Jim; or I shall have to claim against
your estate and all. Which of us will achieve fame in ten years?
Draycott as an Academician? I don't see it. Spurs as a judge? 'Don't
see it either. The Gander as an ambassador? The other Spurs?" He looked
round the table and went on quickly; half-unconsciously he had decided
that Eric Lane would be the first of the five to die. "I should mark
down Sinks as the first to marry; there's an appealing domesticity about
him. And we shall _all_ make colossal fools of ourselves; don't forget
that! Folly's the great leveller. Jim, I think you'd better give a
dinner once a year to the survivors just to see how we're getting on."
"If I don't die or cut the country," Loring assented.
O'Rane snapped the clasp of the betting-book and tossed it on a chair
behind him.
"You're far too healthy and respectable," he grunted, concentrating his
attention on the cooling soup. "Besides, I'm reserving that for
Summertown. You know he's been sent down for good and all?"
"A man cuts the country because of the disreputability of others,"
answered Loring. "By the way, I'm not going to be fined for being late,
Mr. President, because I had a good reason. Also, the founder of a club
is never fined."
"Let's hear the reason," suggested the president.
"I've been taking the chair at a family council." Loring looked round
the table until he located his cousin Knightrider. "You ought to have
been there, Victor. I don't want to wash my dirty linen in public, but
Victor and I have a young cousin of twelve," he explained, "who's driven
her father out of one continent and is on the point of driving him out
of another. Crawleigh's a most dignified and worthy viceroy, and he's my
own uncle, and I wouldn't say a word against him; but a fellow on his
staff told me that he'd no more control over that child than over the
man in the moon. She does whatever she pleases; Government House is
turned upside down, and, if any one tries to coerce her, she just runs
away. They've pursued her across Canada and they've pursued her across
India. Now she's been sent home. The family council was convened to
decide what was to be done with her. All the uncles and aunts and
cousins met together; and I need hardly tell you that we got stuck with
her. So, if I disappear suddenly, you'll know that my young cousin has
been too much for me. If that isn't a good reason for being late, I
don't know what is."
The president adroitly reserved judgement on a fine which he knew would
never be paid, and the conversation reverted to the former grim
discussion of the schools and vague plans for the future. Eric Lane felt
out of sympathy with his surroundings, for he alone lacked money and
influence and a ready-made niche. In ten years' time Deganway would be
progressing gently and comfortably in the Diplomatic; Summertown and
Pentyre, who were avowedly waiting for their fathers to die, would
either still be waiting or would have already succeeded; Framlingham and
Knightrider would be swallowed by the army, even Jack Waring would make
a career for himself at the bar or elsewhere, because men with his
backing were not allowed to fail. George Oakleigh would be in the House,
probably an under-secretary; Loring, with his position and an income
which fluctuated between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty
thousand a year in accordance with the yield of certain mines, might be
anywhere.
"What are _you_ going to do, when you go down?" Eric asked O'Rane.
"I haven't the least idea. That's where the fun comes in," O'Rane
answered buoyantly.
"Starting behind scratch?"
"Yes, that gives you an incentive. I wonder which of us will get to the
top first."
"I wonder how one starts."
"Oh, you'll write. I've never had any doubt of that. That rot I was
talking about averages wasn't _all_ rot; we ought to turn out one
genius, and you're going to do something very big. I declare to my soul
I'm not ragging! I've seen the things you wrote for _Cap and Bells_,
I've heard you talk and I can see you're on a different plane from the
rest of us. I could probably beat you at pure scholarship, but you've a
literary sense which I should never attain in a life-time. Do _you_ care
for a bet with me?"
Eric shook his head; but he felt the need of encouragement, and O'Rane
was more serious than he usually condescended to be.
"I won't rob you, Raney."
"Robbery be blowed! You won't bet against your destiny. In ten years'
time you'll have beaten the whole of our generation, starting behind
scratch. And, God's my witness, I'd sooner have that than be born with a
title and a million pounds a minute like Jim. Hullo, they're off! Jim,
may I take wine with you?"
He raised his glass and was quickly followed by Oakleigh and Summertown.
Loring flushed a little at the compliment of being chosen first. In
order of popularity O'Rane followed as a close second, with Waring
third. Pentyre, Summertown and Deganway toasted one another; Oakleigh
was honoured as an afterthought by half the table. There was a moment's
silence, as the glasses were recharged, and Jack Waring leaned forward
with a smile.
"Eric? Best of luck."
"Best of luck, Jack."
Their eyes met, and both smiled. Then the interrupted dinner went on.
Oakleigh was detected, reported and fined for smoking without
permission; Pentyre was deprived of port wine for allowing the decanter
to stand at his elbow. A vote was taken, and Draycott was censured for
wearing a pleated shirt. Less constitutionally, Deganway was stretched
on the floor and deprived of his eye-glass amid falsetto protests. Then
the loving-cup went round, and all stood to drink the health of the king
and of fox-hunting, the president and vice-president, absent members
and "our glorious founder." Sinclair presented a seven-branch
candlestick to the collection of club plate; and Loring proposed and
carried a unanimous vote of thanks.
"And now a little Gilbert and Sullivan from Raney," ordained the
president, as the last speech came to an end and he led the way into the
next room.
Prising open a box of cigars, he sniffed it with the suspicion of
inexperience and proffered it diffidently to Oakleigh. O'Rane slid on to
the music-stool, while Deganway and Waring, Summertown and Eric sprawled
over the top of the piano with pipes doggedly gripped between their
teeth and with their chins resting on their arms, demanding of the
musician that he should give them "something with a chorus." Pentyre
withdrew to an armchair and fell asleep; the others formed themselves
into a circle round Loring and tried to talk against the music.
"_Long years ago, fourteen, may be,
When but a tiny babe of four,
Another babe played with me,
My elder by a year or more.
A little child of beauty rare,
With marvellous eyes and wondrous hair,
Who, in my child-eyes, seemed to me
All that a little child should be.
Ah, how we loved, that child and I,
How pure our baby joy!
How true our love--and, by-the-by_,
HE _was a little boy_!"
Waring, as "Angela" struck in with a deep, reproachful bass:
"_Ah, old, old tale of Cupid's touch!
I thought as much--I thought as much!_
_He_ WAS _a little boy_"
"Patience" justified herself shyly.
"_Pray don't misconstrue what I say--
Remember, pray--remember, pray,
He was a_ LITTLE _boy_"
O'Rane gave the "Wandering Minstrel" as a solo, followed by "A Pair of
Sparkling Eyes" and "Is Life a Boon?"
Loring turned approvingly to George Oakleigh.
"Raney's got a ripping voice," he said. "And he's in good form to-night.
All the same, we must be getting back, George, if you want to be in
London early to-morrow morning. It's very pleasant to see all these boys
again. Sad, too, very sad; the young lions with all their troubles
before them."
"I suppose this _is_ absolutely the end," sighed Sinclair. "Shall I see
you at Lord's, Jim?"
As the party began to break up, a chill of collective wistfulness
descended upon it, too strong for even O'Rane to dispel.
"Yes, if you don't want me to watch the play. But I'll _look_
intelligent."
It was still so early when the straggling escort convoyed Oakleigh and
Loring into the safety of their hotel that an hour was agreeably spent
by each in accompanying every one else home. Jack and Eric reached the
Broad, only to turn back and take Deganway to Grove Street, and from
Grove Street they all proceeded by Boar Lane to St. Aldates. Here O'Rane
protested that he could not go to bed until he had disposed of Sinclair
in comfort. At a quarter to twelve the whole party, intact and a little
bored, found itself on Magdalen Bridge; Jack and Eric broke away at a
run up Long Wall, and the others, led by O'Rane, traversed the High for
the fourth time that night.
The familiar rooms at the corner of the Turl were bare and disordered
with the signs of coming departure. The undulating floor of the
sitting-room was littered with paper and straw, with cases of books and
half-filled crates of pictures; on a dusting-sheet in one corner was
gathered a miscellany of broken pipes and perished pouches, tattered
note-books and sprung rackets, torn photographs, old shoes and a
policeman's helmet. Overflowing trunks and yawning Gladstone bags
projected from the bedrooms on to the narrow, gas-lit landing.
"Nice, comfortable quarters," observed Jack, as he looked for somewhere
to sit. "It was quite a good evening, you know. The part I liked best
was when it was all over. Oxford looks quite decent at night."
Eric had been trained to economy of enthusiasm in talking to Jack, who
would not have understood him if he had said that the Meadows on a May
morning or the Bodleian from All Souls, or the Trinity limes in leaf or
a pack of low, grey clouds racing across the sky behind Magdalen Tower
made him drunk with the consciousness of physical beauty. And he
wondered what he could ever have said to betray to O'Rane his secret
yearning for self-expression.
"Our last night in Oxford," he murmured.
"Oh, I think I shall come up occasionally and dine with the lads."
Eric said nothing; but the sense of incongruity with his surroundings
still oppressed him, and he privately resolved that he would not revisit
Oxford until he had done something to put himself at least on the level
of his friends, perhaps above them. That night he lulled himself to
sleep with a vision in which he burst on the world as a new Byron and
took London by storm in a night. Comely heads turned and whispered his
name, as he strode down Bond Street; the windows were full of his
photograph; when he entered a room there was a hush of reverence for the
new novelist, the rising playwright, the last wit and latest fashion.
All his day-dreams led him to the stage. There, after twisting the house
to laughter and tears, he would nonchalantly allow himself to be called
before the curtain; after three gossamer epigrams, he would retire with
a perfunctory bow. And there would follow supper on the stage for George
Oakleigh, who was only a subordinate minister, and Loring, who was only
governor of a colony, and Jack, who was only a successful barrister, and
Knightrider, who was only a subaltern in the Guards, and Summertown, who
was only a third secretary on leave from a distant legation, and
Pentyre, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had
_done_ nothing.... The vision was so stimulating that he resolved to
conjure it up again whenever he felt depressed.
They were roused in the morning by the cheerful and insistent voices of
a cavalcade which reined in under Jack's windows for the last
opportunity of wishing him good-bye.... Unembarrassed by spectators, he
made a leisurely toilet and refused to be intimidated by Eric's
prophecies that they would lose their train. "There is sure to be
another," he pointed out, as he finished brushing his short,
mouse-coloured hair and satisfied himself that he was smoothly shaved.
Undergraduate Oxford was all too careless of its appearance, and Jack
secretly believed that slovenliness in clothes was the visible sign of
depravity in morals. Colonel Waring had said so, basing himself on his
experience in the army. Jack respected his father's judgement, because
it so often coincided with his own.
He appeared in time to see Eric distributing the last tips and counting
the luggage as it was piled on top of the cabs. Waving good-bye to their
landlord and surrounded by their escort, they drove with self-conscious
solemnity to the station, cut a passage through the jungle of dogs and
cricket bags on the platform and bribed a porter to find an empty
first-class carriage and to lock the door after them. While Jack
possessed himself of the papers, Eric watched the familiar landmarks
fading one by one from view as the train steamed out of Oxford: Tom
Tower and the Cathedral spire, the reservoir and gasworks, the Abingdon
Road and Boar's Hill. The whistle of the engine as it entered Culham
sounded like the last chord in an operatic score. Oxford was over. He
remembered his shyness in first approaching it four years earlier and
wondered whether he would as quickly overcome the sense of loneliness
which filled his mind at the thought of working in London.
"When do your bar lectures start?" he asked with a drawl which attempted
to emulate his companion's easy carelessness.
Jack tossed aside the _Sportsman_ and yawned with lazy contentment.
"I haven't the least idea," he answered.
"I was thinking about rooms. I'm going up almost at once for a month on
trial with the _London News_. You've got no preferences?"
"I'd trust your taste and judgement anywhere."
Eric laughed a little impatiently.
"You--are--the--laziest--brute--I've ever come across. Are you going to
behave like this at the bar?"
Jack put up his feet and closed his eyes.
"It's not half a bad idea," he mused. "I believe, if I let it be known
that I didn't want briefs, the solicitors would form up at the early
door out of sheer perversity. Everything comes to him who doesn't much
care whether it comes or not. You see, as soon as you want anything, you
increase the demand and raise the price against yourself; it's a great
thing to have studied political economy. If I ever marry it will be some
one who's madly in love with me and whom I can just tolerate. If you're
fool enough to try it the other way round, you're simply selling
yourself into slavery.... As a matter of fact, I'm not lazy at all, but
I refuse to fuss about unimportant things. I had all this business out
with the guv'nor two years ago; I'd got to do something for a living,
and he had all sorts of gold-lace jobs in contemplation--clerk in the
House of Lords, agent to my uncle at Penley, private secretary to this
man and that. I said it wasn't good enough. If I couldn't go into the
army like him, I'd go somewhere where I could make money. We haven't any
particular influence in the city, so I chose the bar; and I've every
intention of making money there. _That's_ important. But I can't wear
myself out looking for digs when I've a kind friend to do it for me. And
I never try to do more than one thing at a time. During the next few
weeks I shall stay with several very pleasant people. Lady Knightrider's
invited me to Raglan as usual; and I'm going to Croxton with the
Pentyres; and to House of Steynes with Jim Loring; and to Ireland with
George Oakleigh. I wish you'd come, too; I've got such a good
country-house manor, I should like you to see it."
"I've got to work."
"So have I--every bit as much as you," Jack answered aggressively. "But
I never believe in meeting trouble half-way." His voice became drowsy,
and he composed himself for sleep. "Wake me, when we get to Reading."
Such philosophic detachment was a birthright, not to be bought or
borrowed; and Eric looked with a mixture of amusement and envy at his
slumbering friend. Some time in the autumn the bar term would begin,
there would be lectures and examinations, Jack would be called; later he
would pay a hundred pounds to an overworked junior for the privilege of
sitting in a pupil-room and confusing his head with such papers as he
was allowed to see; he would find chambers of his own and choose a
circuit and open it. And get together a practice--or fail. In the
meantime he slept with the sun shining on his face, trimly brushed and
shaved, smiling, rosy and round-cheeked as a plough-boy.
Eric could not so casually leave the future to look after itself; and he
was preparing, with a highly-strung man's dread of altercation, for a
conflict with his family. Dr. Lane's suggestions were purely
scholastic--a fellowship, if possible; failing that, a position on the
staff of one of the great public schools. Either would give him security
and a chance of earning money at once. There must be other things, of
course, but a philologist lived too much out of the world to give
practical advice.... Mrs. Lane favoured the Civil Service; but Eric,
from the editorial chair of _Cap and Bells_, had lately made journalism
the fabric of his day-dreams. During his last term the editor of the
_London News_ came to Oxford as guest of honour at a dinner of the
Sherbrooke Club; with eye professionally skinned for rising talent, he
had been first amused and then impressed by his young host; there
followed a vague proposal of an article, and Eric had been careful to
thrust his foot into the yielding doorway of the paper until a month's
trial was suggested.
A red-brick wilderness of villas warned him that they were running into
Reading. He prodded Jack awake, collected his luggage from the rack and
changed into the Basingstoke train. At Winchester a dog-cart, driven by
a stiff, military groom, and a pony trap, with an eight-year-old child
and her governess, awaited them. The luggage appeared unhurriedly and
was separated and stowed out of sight. Jack edged away after a shy
greeting to Sybil Lane, and a moment later they were heading through the
town for the Melton and Lashmar road.
"Roll round some time and discuss those digs," Eric shouted, as the
pony-trap turned from the high-crowned Melton road and jolted into the
twilight of unreclaimed woodland whose youngest trees were old and
firm-rooted before the New Forest had begun to show the first green of
its leaves.
"No, you come to me," Jack called back. "It's shorter for you, because
you walk so much faster."
As the low lines of the Mill-House came in sight, Mrs. Lane rose from
her chair by the studded front door, closed her book and waved a
handkerchief in welcome. For the first time in his life Eric felt that
this was no longer his home. Lashmar and Oxford belonged to a youth
wherein he was not required to look for a career or to trouble about
money and ambition. Within a week he would be occupying chambers of his
own and earning his own living.
"Well, dear Eric, I'm very glad to see you again. You're looking thin,"
said his mother.
"I'm all right, thanks. How are you, mother? Is the guv'nor working?"
asked Eric.
The need for action was strong upon him, and he had to explain once and
for all that he aimed at something more than security and a chance of
earning money at once.
"He's indoors."
Eric ducked his head and entered the long, low house. It was dark after
the glowing June sunlight outside, chillingly cold, too; from the back
of the house came the gentle murmur of the Bort with an unchanging drone
of falling water and a regular double creak from the mill-wheel, like
the slow cadence of a grandfather's clock. Through the open French
windows of the dining-room he sniffed the stream's familiar scent of
decay, half-smothered by the coarse reek of a blazing patch of
marigolds. Lashmar Mill-House was, for Eric, a place where ambition was
brought to die.
Without waiting to be disturbed, Dr. Lane rattled open the door of the
library and appeared in his shirt-sleeves, fleshless, tall and stooping,
with the gentle, brown eyes, black hair and aquiline nose which he had
handed down to Eric. An unkempt brown moustache drooped drearily on
either side of a long corncob pipe-stem, and his bony hands fidgetted
with an untanned strap round his waist.
"I want to have a talk with you," said Eric to his parents. "I'm
starting work next week with the _London News_. Jack and I are going to
live together."
Mrs. Lane nursed a well-founded suspicion that Jack preyed on her son's
scant vitality, but she shrank from confessing jealousy of his friend.
"Let's have a day or two to think things over," she proposed.
"Journalism is very wearing."
"But everything's arranged," Eric answered.
And next morning he rose from breakfast and started through the Forest
to Red Roofs and the task of pinning Jack down to the joint
establishment in London. Every step on the familiar road was a gesture
of farewell. There was a recognized point in the two-mile walk where
even the smoke of the Mill-House chimneys was invisible; another point
where he had to jump from stone to stone across a furlong of marsh; and
another where the forest thinned imperceptibly and vanished. Over the
tops of the last trees appeared a row of small-bricked Tudor chimneys,
dusty-grey in the sunshine; then the deep red tiles of the gabled roofs;
then the house itself, three-quarters covered in creeper that swung in
the breeze and veiled the narrow windows with a curtain of tangled
green. It was the perfect frame, Eric thought, for a perfect picture of
country toryism; a social analyst could not look at the house without
peopling it in imagination with the cadet branch of a rankly
conservative family--conventional, godly, sporting, military and, by a
freak, unexpectedly evangelical--in a word, with such a family as the
Warings. The colonel was returning home from an early gallop; he reined
in his horse and walked beside Eric to the gate of the stable-yard,
erect and dapper, with a dictatorial voice and a hint of ill-temper in
his bearing, his face weather-beaten and the white of his eyes faintly
tinged with yellow.
"Hullo! How are you? How's your father? How's the _magnum opus_?" he
asked, as he dismounted and walked towards the house. The three
questions never varied, and the colonel derived immense private
amusement from the thought that Dr. Lane had given thirty years of his
life to an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. "Jack tells me you're going to be a
journalist. Dog's life, I've always heard."
"I hope it won't be only journalism," said Eric, who was sensitive
enough to be daunted by the misgiving which his proposed career excited
first in his parents and now in an unbiased outsider. "I hope to do some
rather more original work as well."
"Original? That's bad! Seven-act tragedies and five-volume novels."
Colonel Waring had evolved the belief that young men could be coaxed out
of their natural shyness by well-timed jocosity. "You must excuse me,
I'm going to have my bath. You'll find every one in the smoking-room, I
expect."
Eric escaped with relief and ran Jack to earth in the faded dining-room,
where he was finishing a late breakfast. His sister ministered to his
wants, keeping the food warm in a chafing-dish, plying him with coffee
and fetching him clean plates. Mrs. Waring, plump, idle and
self-indulgent, was fondly overhauling her son's wardrobe when Eric
entered the room.
"Dear Jack, you can't go to Lady Knightrider's until you've ordered
yourself some new shirts. These are a disgrace," she protested.
Jack nodded without looking up from his paper.
"I know. I was waiting till I got home so that Agnes could write to my
man. I always forget his name. Hullo, Eric! You're bursting with energy
this morning. Have some capital kidneys and bacon?"
"I came to talk about where we are going to live," Eric explained,
shaking hands with Mrs. Waring.
"But I thought I'd left that to you? Why don't you and Agnes arrange
something?" Jack filled a pipe and strolled towards the open window.
"The guv'nor seems to have got me elected to the County Club; he rather
favours my trying to get a bedroom there."
Eric felt a twinge of dismay. It was only natural that a club should
have been found for Jack, as everything else was found; but Eric could
not afford to let him slip away. Perhaps the suggestion was only a
diplomatic hint that, if he were troubled further, he would follow the
line of least resistance.
"Oh, no! You're coming with me. If you've no preferences, Agnes and I
will go straight ahead."
He motioned to the girl, and they went out into the garden together.
Agnes Waring, in company with her mother, had been brought up to believe
that Jack was the one person in the house who mattered; though
intellectually head and shoulder his superior, she had been kept at home
from the day when Colonel Waring demonstrated incontrovertibly that he
could not afford to send her to Newnham if Jack was to be given an
adequate allowance at Oxford. Once isolated at home, she had nothing to
do but to run errands for her father and brother. At her suggestion it
was now arranged that Eric should look for rooms in the Temple.
Two days later he wrote that he had discovered an ideal set of chambers
in Pump Court, and for a week they worked to get it in order for Jack's
arrival in October. On the last afternoon Agnes looked on her completed
handiwork and sighed with satisfaction and envy.
"If you're not comfortable, you ought to be," she declared. "Men are
lucky creatures. I wish I could change places with you, Eric."
"So that you could wait on Jack?"
"I should like that, of course.... I hope Jack does well at the bar. You
will make him work, won't you?"
Eric shrugged his shoulders and looked into the silent little court.
"Can any one make him do anything he doesn't want to? I wonder whether
he was wise to choose the bar. I wonder whether I was wise to choose
journalism, whether any of us.... We had a very cheerful dinner on our
last night at Oxford. There were about twenty of us, and one man bet
that in ten years' time five of us would be dead and a certain number
bankrupt. A certain number more would have to cut the country. So far as
I remember only one was to make anything of a success. Not an
encouraging forecast."
"A very cynical forecast," Agnes distinguished.
"Will he win his bet?"
"Oh, a man of character can make anything of his life," she answered
with a glance of fleeting interest and affection which he did not see.
Eric recalled the extraordinarily young faces at the last dinner of the
Phoenix. Their outlook was frivolous and their talk trivial. He was
already feeling older in ten days.
"Do you get more than one man of character in twenty?" he asked.
CHAPTER TWO
THE COMING OF LILITH
"What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional
monarch?... I don't believe he may even eat or drink what he likes
best: a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a
remonstrance from the Privy Council."
BERNARD SHAW: "AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST."
The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After
nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar
examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of
indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating
round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though
it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with
as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he
remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed
without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom
penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.
Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with
Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms
which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled
into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns
in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure;
Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army--the life of a public
danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist,
complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same
authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless
nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian
name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.
Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time
or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances.
Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of
"good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was
aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the
old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and
gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he
now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and
steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of
judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and
smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin
deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his
coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister
to dances.