intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been
something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her
news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that
hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane
liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were
good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road
dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic
vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved
endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently
alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and
feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and
lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a
sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a
great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable
drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in
the reality of his dreams were Sonia and--the dreamer.
We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to
let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at
Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down
Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of
Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole
and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one
shoulder like a military overcoat.
"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands.
"A reed shaken by the wind?"
"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.
He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with
his silky white hair.
"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.
"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.
Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back
again to me.
"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his
life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did
not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound
of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the
isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had
finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."
Sonia and I squeezed our way in among two or three hundred parents who
had profited by proximity to the Head to inquire how 'Bernard' had fared
that term; the giant intellect of Burgess we left to discover unaided
who 'Bernard' might be. We listened to the Prize Compositions, the
Honours of the year, and the removes of the term. Then Sonia's hand
slipped through my arm, and her brown eyes suddenly softened. The prizes
were being distributed, and we watched and listened until I, at any
rate, grew sore-handed and weary of hearing O'Rane's name called out. I
began, too, to pity the fags who would have to stagger across Great
Court under the growing burden of that calf-bound, gilt-edged pile. He
himself went through the ceremony in a dispirited, listless fashion, his
thoughts running forward to the moment when he would have to reverse the
birch and hand it back to Burgess, while the new captain slipped into
his seat and read prayers over his body.
"_In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._ I should like all boys
who are leaving this term to say good-bye to me in my house. _Ire
licet._"
The school poured out into Great Court and formed up in a double line.
O'Rane was cheered from School Steps to the Head's house, as no one to
my knowledge had been cheered since Pelham gave up his house and retired
after forty-three years. The Leaving Books were handed out,--still "Men
and Women" as in my day,--the last hand-shakes exchanged. Outside the
library windows the school was waiting for O'Rane's reappearance.
"Be not overmuch puffed up with pride, laddie," said Burgess, when they
were alone. "Boy is a creature of simple faith and easy enthusiasm.
True, in thine youth thou wast clept 'Spitfire' and 'The Vengeful
Celt'----"
"Sir ...?"
Burgess waved away the interruption. "Did I not tell thee of the
Unsleeping Eye? Laddie, I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows
of this life, yet it may be that the counsel of age may profit a young
man. Yet not with thee. To thee I say not, 'Do this' or 'Do that'; there
is nought thou canst not do, laddie--thou also art among the prophets."
He held out his hand abruptly, and O'Rane took it.
"Sir, I want to thank you ..." he began.
"For that I forbade thee not when thou didst crave admittance?"
"A thousand things beside that, sir. Everything ..."
"The fatherless child is in God's keeping, laddie," said Burgess gently,
disengaging his hand. "And thy father and I were young men together.
Thou didst know this thing?"
"Yes, sir."
"Yet thou namedst it not?"
O'Rane hesitated and then burst out with a touch of his old universal
defiance.
"I wanted to make you take me on my merits, sir."
"Hard is the way of him who would presume to offer help to David
O'Rane!" Burgess answered, with a shake of the head.
"But I'd won through _so_ far, sir; I wanted to see how much longer----"
"I blame thee not, laddie. Well, thou hast endured to the end and hast
brought new honour to my kingdom. Counsel I withhold from thee: truly
the Lord will provide. Fare thee well, David O'Rane."
On our way back to Crowley Court I put Raney outside, in case he
preferred the company of his own thoughts for the present. He sat for a
few moments with his chin on his chest, but as the car left the town he
engaged the chauffeur in earnest conversation, and as we slowed down in
front of the house he jumped out and came to the door with the words,
"Simpson damns electricity and steam. He swears by oil. Well, if cars
are going to knock out horses and you need petrol to drive your cars,
there's going to be a tremendous demand for oil in the near future. I
want to get in before the rush, I'm going to study oil----"
"You're a soulless Wall Street punter," I said.
Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist
eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history,
and--characteristically enough--he was ready to fling the whole blazing
vigour of his vitality into the next.
"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.
"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.
Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the
first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we
were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers
and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly
canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the other.
Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out
disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's
argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own
satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had
taken place.
"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last
round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing
knocked into us."
O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As
the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he
caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.
"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand!
From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted
stiffening.' My God!"
"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.
"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could
put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't
read the foreign papers."
Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when
Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten
days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the
continental Press.
"D'you _still_ do that?" I asked.
"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold
of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George.
They--simply--_hate_--us--abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us
as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and
we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."
"Who _wants_ to attack us?" I asked.
"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia,
as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of
the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people
talking like that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."
He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a
savage twist of his heel.
"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a
damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"
"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we
mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other
power."
My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had
been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a
year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress
from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by
profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews
which it conjured up.
"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want
another."
"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to
war."
"I doubt it," I said. "The temptation's too great. The first day I was
given an air-gun--this is many years ago, Raney--I winged a harmless,
necessary milch cow. The alpha and omega of British policy should be to
have a navy so efficient that no one can attack us and an army so
inefficient that we daren't attack anyone else. If you aim at all-round
efficiency, you'll probably have the rest of Europe on your back and
you'll certainly go bankrupt."
He was preparing an explosive retort when one of the drawing-room
windows opened, and Sonia came toward us.
"Bedtime?" I asked, as she held out her hand.
"Rot, isn't it?" she answered, wrinkling her nose. "I shall be sixteen
next birthday, too."
"When _I_ was your age ..." O'Rane began improvingly.
"I used to thrash you two or three times a month," I put in.
Sonia looked at him wonderingly.
"Is that true, David?" she demanded.
He nodded his head.
"You beast, George!" Sonia burst out with a concentrated venom that
abashed me.
O'Rane glanced in momentary surprise at the rigid indignant little
figure with the clenched fists and bitten lip. Then he caught her up in
his arms.
"Bambina, you're the only person in the whole world who loves me. George
couldn't help himself, though; I was out for trouble. And I could have
knocked him down and broken every bone in his body if I'd wanted
to--just as I could now. Only he was right and I was wrong. Kiss me
good-night, sweetheart."
He lowered her gently till her feet touched the ground, but sudden
shyness had come over her, and she would only hold out a hand.
"Clearly I'm in the way," I said, as I moved towards the house.
"I'm coming too," Sonia called out. "No, David, you're grown up now."
He snorted indignantly.
"That's a rotten reason. Are you never going to kiss me again? This
year?" She shook her head. "Next year? Some time?"
"Some time. Perhaps."
She ran into the house, and O'Rane and I took one more turn along the
terrace before following her.
"Grown up!" he exclaimed, after a moment's silence.
"That's still rankling?" I asked.
"No, I was just thinking. I fancy I was pretty well grown up before we
ever met, George."
"As much as you ever will be," I suggested.
"As much as I ever want to be, old son. It's been like an extraordinary
dream, you know, these last four years. Everything topsy-turvy.... I was
years and years older than you and Jim when you used to thrash me.... If
you can imagine yourself coming to a place like Melton after knocking
about all round the world, living from hand to mouth.... The holidays
were the time I really worked. Do you remember when you and Jim found me
at the Empire Hotel? You've never mentioned it from that day to this.
_I_'m not ashamed of it and, though you two had your eyes bulging out of
your head, I don't suppose with all your conventionality you think the
worse of me for it. Anyway I don't care a damn if you do." He paused and
lit a cigarette. "I'm going to have a holiday now, George. Idle about
till October. And then in the holidays--vacations, you call 'em, don't
you?--I shall get hold of soft, genteel jobs--private tutor to
aristocratic imbeciles----"
"And then?"
He yawned luxuriantly.
"And then I shall settle down to earn a great deal of money. I'm never
going through the old mill again, George. And when I've earned it I
shall buy a villa at Naples and rot there. Are you going into the
drawing-room? I don't think I shall, it's such a grand night out here. I
want to think over this amazing country of yours, where a man can drop
from the skies--I was junior steward on a 'Three Funnel' liner just
before--drop down, find his feet, find people to employ him and weigh
him out scholarships.... George, so far as I can make out, after four
years here, there's not a damn thing you don't fling open to the veriest
dago and pay him handsome to take the job. 'Ejectum litore, egentem
excepi....' No, that's a bad omen." He spun round and smote me on the
shoulder. "I owe a lot to this rotten country and I shall owe a lot more
before I'm through with it. Now I'm going to take charge of the piano
and sing songs to you...."
It was O'Rane who went into the drawing-room, and I who stayed outside
in enjoyment of the night. Roger Dainton took the opportunity of a quiet
stroll and a few moments' conversation. While in London he had been
sounded in the matter of a baronetcy. I believed him when he protested
that his troop of yeomanry had been raised without any thought of what
honours or decorations he might draw from the lucky tub after the war. I
almost believed him when he said he thought of accepting the offer
because it would gratify his wife. And I felt a certain wonder and pity
that in his curiously unfriended state, half-way between two social
spheres, he should come for advice to a man less than half his own age.
V
"LODGINGS FOR THE OCTOBER TERM"
Square cards inscribed with that device had offered me welcome for three
years, and in the last term of my third year Loring and I settled
seriously to the task of finding a new home against the day when we
should be flung, time-expired, from our loved quarters in Tom.
'Seriously' in spirit if not in method, for we chartered a
coach-and-four, invited a dozen men to breakfast and set out from
Canterbury Gate with luncheon-baskets sufficient to feed a company.
Proceeding impressively up King Edward Street we doubled back into St.
Ebbs in search of what Loring called "working-class tenements for
virtuous Radicals." Failing to find anything that suited us, we returned
by Brewer Street and inspected Micklem Hall, but there was a garden
attached, and we should have been constrained to walk a beagle-puppy.
Leaving the last question open, I dispossessed Loring of the box-seat
and drove for the next half-hour, because he had laid me five to three
that there was no such college as Wadham, and seven to two that if there
were I could not find it.
I remember we lunched a mile or two north of Woodstock because Crabtree
of Magdalen, who had as usual invited himself and assumed direction of
our movements, insisted that our last year must be undisturbed. In the
late evening we returned triumphantly to Oxford and collided with a tram
at the bottom of the Turl. A languid voice from the first-floor window
of 93D High Street inquired if we needed anything.
"Lodgings for the October and two succeeding terms," Loring called back.
"These aren't bad digs," answered the voice, and Crabtree was left to
sort out the Corporation tram while Loring and I inspected the house
opposite.
"They've got the makings of very decent quarters," he admitted
handsomely. "Decoration vile," he added in an aside, "but then, what
d'you expect of a B.N.C. man?" A furtive creature with obliquity of
vision ushered us in. "We must get rid of him, George. Find out whether
he is the landlord or a B.N.C. don or merely our young friend's male
parent."
I ascertained that the man of repellent aspect was the landlord.
"I suppose we must take your ghastly digs," said Loring between a yawn
and a sigh.
The following October we moved in and gave a housewarming--with the town
band engaged to play waltzes outside while we dined. It was a bachelor
dinner, but Grayes of Trinity and Henderson and Billings of the House
chartered rooms at the "Dumb Bell," and came over in Empire gowns,
chestnut wigs, cloaks and cigarettes. We danced until the band went home
to bed and then led our guests round to inspect and praise our
decorations and observe the absence of Pringle, the landlord, who had
been exiled to a cottage on Boar's Hill.
"Best bedroom, second-best bedroom," Loring explained. "Spare bedrooms
also ran. Bathroom. All that messuage. Lounge. Kitchen. Usual offices.
Hot and cold. Electric lights and bells. Gent's eligible town
residence."
It was eligible in every way, with window-seats overlooking the High
from which we could watch passers-by surreptitiously trying to pick up
the half-crown that Loring from time to time glued to the pavement. The
house had been repainted inside and out, there were new carpets and
furniture, a grand piano in one room and two Siamese kittens in every
other. Old Lady Loring used to complain of dust when she came to visit
us, but her son assured her that this was but a concession to my
democratic spirit. We were certainly comfortable. As Loring observed the
first night, "Now we've every excuse for neglecting our work."
He was reading Greats; I, History. We both expected seconds, hoped for
firsts and told our friends thirds. What our tutors thought, I have no
idea. Loring never consulted his unduly.
"I pay the College eight pounds a term tuition fees," he reasoned. "I'll
make it twice that if they'll leave me alone. I want to think. Your
society alone, George, is an Undenominational Education."
So he breakfasted at nine, cut lectures till one, lunched at the Club
and hacked twenty miles in the afternoon. From tea till dinner he would
wander round Oxford buying prints and large-paper editions; after dinner
he would take a kitten on his knee and read German metaphysics aloud to
it with a wealth of feeling in his voice. At eleven we would pay one or
two calls or sit talking till a late hour.
It was Andrew Lang, I believe, who said that the reason why there were
no good books on Oxford life was because they were all written by women
who had spent one day in--Cambridge. I sometimes fancy that Oxford
reformers are really Oxford novelists off duty. We went through the
transition from boyhood to man's estate in some of this world's
loveliest surroundings. Does it matter what we read or when we read it?
A time had to come when each of us had the choice of working uncompelled
or not working at all; we could not be given lines and detention all our
life, and at Oxford I worked hard. So did Loring, for all his outward
pose of idleness. We read seven hours a day for two-thirds of the
vacation and were not wholly unoccupied even during term.
Looking back on it all I can find no period of mental development to
compare with my last year at Oxford. It was no small thing to read a
thousand years of history, however superficially. I began to touch
general principles, to discard cherished preconceptions, and little by
little to hammer out a philosophy of my own. In political science and
economy Loring's school overlapped mine to some extent, and in the
rambling 'School shop' we talked lay the germ of the Thursday Club.
Every week of term and for a year or two after I came down, some ten of
us would meet and dine together. There was a "book of the week"--too
long or dull for all to read--which one would undertake to digest and
expound. "Saint Simon's Memoirs," the "Contrat Social," the "Paston
Letters" were among the works we had served up to us minced and
réchauffé.
Later on, when Loring had dropped out, we became more purely political.
Carmichael brought us in touch with socialist writers, and a week-end
visit from Baxter Whittingham of Lincoln and Shadwell was responsible
for my brief taste of working-class conditions some years later. I
cannot hope that everyone nowadays looks at "Thursday Essays," which we
published in 1904 as a statement of Young Oxford Liberalism, but, though
it had little effect on the outside world, it consolidated its authors.
Seddon of Corpus, who wrote on "Unemployment," is now in the Insurance
Commission; Terry of Lincoln, the author of "Small Holdings," was
private secretary to the President of the Board of Agriculture; Ainger,
Mansfield, Gregory and I, who spread ourselves on "Public Economy,"
"Federation and the National Ideal," "The Tendrils of Socialism," and
"The Irish Question Once More," all found our way into the House at the
time of the 1906 Election.
Loring, too, matured on lines of his own. It would perhaps be truer to
say that he developed that dual personality of which the germs had been
existent at Melton. He was a cynic and idealist,--no uncommon union,--a
pessimist and a practical reformer, honestly believing that the world
was gradually deteriorating, that to cleanse the corruption was beyond
man's powers, and yet that it was worth his own while to run the lost
race to a finish.
I always fancy I can trace three phases through which he passed, three
sources of inspiration. At school his taste for the romantic and
picturesque found satisfaction in the Church of which he was a member:
Eternal Rome captured his imagination, and, while I aspired to a vague
universal brotherhood, he hoped and believed that Temporal Power would
some day be once more oecumenical and that the warring world would in
time find peace in a new age of faith. Oxford and the society of his
fellow Catholics broke into the dream. Doctrinally he was unsettled by
the philosophy he read for 'Greats' and the fabric and organization of
his Church brought disillusionment when he saw them at close quarters.
Old Lord Loring had made the house in Curzon Street a centre for English
Catholicism. I remember balls and bazaars, receptions and
committee-meetings without end, Catholic marquesses were rare, they had
to work hard; they were also valuable as giving social respectability to
a persecuted Church. An inconspicuous, undistinguished peer assumed
rather an exalted position in a small religious communion where everyone
knew everyone else. I imagine more people spoke of 'dear Lord Loring'
than would have been the case had his religion been, say, that of the
Established Church. His son felt and expressed extreme repugnance for
the position he was expected to fill. The Catholic Church _in partibus
infidelium_ was not a trading company, and he declined to have his name
published on the prospectus to inspire confidence among doubting
subscribers.
On ceasing to be a Catholic in anything but name, he had a second bout
of mediaevalism, and dreamed, as Disraeli dreamed in the 'Young England'
days, of a re-vitalized, ascendant aristocracy. The reality of the dream
passed quickly; it is questionable how much faith Disraeli himself put
into his vision, though anything was possible while the political
revolution of the first Reform Bill was still seething. It is doubtful
if Loring ever considered his idealized aristocracy of philosopher-kings
otherwise than with a sentimental, unhistorical regret. And when he
abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated either by the spiritual
influence of his Church or the temporal influence of his order, I think
he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated at all. Life thereafter
became a private, personal matter; he preserved a fastidious sense of
what was incumbent on him to do and a pride in not being false to his
own standards. What happened to the world outside his gates was an
irrelevance with which, in his growing detachment and surface cynicism,
he declined to interest himself.
It was at Oxford that he passed from the first to the second of his
three phases. We were none of us more than a few months distant from the
untravelled world of men's work--sub-consciously we were all striving
after a self-expression that should leave its mark on that work. Heaven
be thanked! not one of us dreamed how ineffective our personalities were
to prove, how unromantic our humdrum work, how meagre our hard-bought
results! In the twelve years that passed between these last terms and
the outbreak of a war that at least brought spaciousness back to human
life, I can think of only one of my friends who failed to become in
greater or less degree commonplace. That was O'Rane, and his store of
the romantic could never quite be exhausted. He was too fearless of
soul. A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and
conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To
defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not
infrequently saves his soul.
O'Rane came up in my last year as one of a mixed draft from Melton.
Mayhew and Sam Dainton we knew, but the others were little more than
names to us. Dutifully Loring and I gave a couple of Sunday breakfasts
and sighed when our guest left us for a walk round the Parks before
luncheon. The meals were as difficult as they were long, for the
freshmen were shy, and we had outgrown our taste for early morning
banquets. When conversation was fanned into life, we found it sadly
juvenile. Were we not fourth-year men, a thought jaded, and with
difficulty interested in anecdotes of a scout's eccentricities or
descriptions of unsuccessful flight from proctors? When the last guest
pocketed his half-guinea straight-grained pipe (which we had been forced
to admire) and clattered down the stairs to walk a dejected terrier of
mixed ancestry through Oxford, Loring shook his head despairingly.
"We were _not_ like that, George," he asserted.
"We were rather a good year, of course," I agreed.
He emptied a succession of ash trays, thoughtfully replaced the cushions
on the sofas and straightened the antimacassars.
"Twelve of them, weren't there?" he asked. "And they'll all invite us
back, every jack man of them."
"And we shall have to go, too," I also sighed, "and make sport for them,
after waiting half an hour in a room full of unknown while our host
hurriedly splashes himself next door and apologizes for having forgotten
all about the invitation.
"_We_ never did that!"
"Once," I said.
We called on O'Rane the first night of term, and compelled him to dine
with us the second. I had not forgotten a slight disappointment of my
own early days. One of my best friends at Melton had been Jerry Pinsent:
we shared the omnibus-study in Matheson's and stayed with each other in
the holidays. I fully expected that, as a second-year man, he would take
me by the hand and guide my feet among the pitfalls of
etiquette--largely the imagination of a self-conscious freshman--with
which I understood Oxford to be set. Pinsent was affable, even kindly.
He offered me a seat in his mess and introduced me to his friends. Alas!
it was not enough. I found it indecent that he should have surrounded
himself so completely and so speedily. I was immoderately jealous of his
friends' free-and-easy Christian-name habit, and as two of them were
Blues (Pinsent himself was a fine oar until he broke his wrist in a
bicycling accident) I decided very unworthily that he was a snob and a
faithless friend. With equal self-consciousness I determined that O'Rane
should never charge me with aloofness or want of cordiality.
We invited no one to meet him. There would be time for that later, and
in any case he was likely to be known all over Oxford before the term
was out.
"He shall stand on his hind-legs and do his tricks for us alone," said
Loring, who pretended to laugh at O'Rane in order to conceal an
admiration not far removed from affection. "The wild beast that has been
fed into domesticity."
There was little enough of the wild beast about O'Rane in the year of
grace 1902. The starved look had gone out of his face, and his eyes were
no longer those of a hunted animal at bay. We leant out of the window
to squirt soda-water on to him as he came down the High with light,
swinging step and an engaging devil-may-care swagger. He walked
bareheaded, and the fine, black hair--ornately parted and brushed for
the occasion--blew into disorder as the autumn wind swept down the
street with a scent of fallen leaves and a hint of the dying year.
"You know, Raney, you'd have made an extraordinarily beautiful girl,"
said Loring reflectively as they met.
"If the Almighty'd known the Marquess Loring had any feeling in the
matter----" O'Rane began.
"Poets would have immortalized your eyes," Loring pursued with a yawn,
"Painters would have died in despair of representing their shadowy,
unfathomable depths----" He raised his hand and waved it rhythmically.
"'Their shadowy, unfathomable depths,' you can't keep from blank verse!
Have a cigarette, little stranger. Being an alleged man, you're a bit
undersized and effeminate."
O'Rane caught Loring by one wrist and with a single movement brought him
to his knees.
"Effeminate?" he demanded.
Loring attempted to reconcile dignity with a kneeling position.
"Oh, you've got a certain vulgar strength," he admitted, "like most
modern girls. But you've got the hands and feet of a professional
beauty. Of course you may not have stopped growing yet."
"I'm five feet nine! I admit I've not much _fat_ on me!"
Honour was satisfied, and I separated the combatants. For his height
Loring was very well proportioned, but he hated an imputation of fatness
almost as much as O'Rane hated being teased about his slightness of body
or smallness of bone. He certainly made up into a very beautiful woman
when the O.U.D.S. played "Henry V" and he took the part of Katherine.
The intention had been to follow the practice of years and invite a
professional actress from London; O'Rane's performance, however, was too
good to be set aside. I have a photograph of the company with Raney
seated in the middle. With his small, sensitive mouth and white teeth,
his clean-cut nose and long-lashed, large black eyes, he makes a very
attractive girl.
"This is a wonderful place," he said, as we sat down to dinner. "I've
been sight-seeing to-day."
"Anything worth seeing?" asked Loring, whose substantially accurate
boast it was that he had never been within the walls of a strange
college.
We found that O'Rane had been prompt and thorough, ranging from the
"Light of the World" in Keble Chapel to the scene of Amy Robsart's
death, and from the gardens of Worcester to Addison's Walk. He talked of
Grinling Gibbons' carving with a facility I envied when it was my fate
to conduct my mother and sister round Oxford.
"Wonderful place," he repeated. "Choked up with the débris of
mediaevalism. Atmosphere rather worse than a tropical swamp. Last refuge
of dead enthusiasms and hotbed of sprouting affectations."
He jerked out the criticism and turned his attention to the soup.
"You're very disturbing, Raney," I said. "For four years you knocked
Melton inside out; can't you leave Oxford alone? I'm rather fond of it."
"So am I--already. I'm fond of any place that picks a man up and sets
him on his legs. I'm fond of England as you two can never be."
"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned, Raney."
"If to be grateful is to be old-fashioned." He leant back and gazed at
the ceiling. "I think it's a workable philosophy. There are people who
can do things I can't do, and there are people who can't do the things I
can. It's a long scale--strong, less strong, weak, more weak. If every
man helped the man below him.... You fellows would say I'm
superstitious. I dare say. If you're the one man to come out of an
earthquake alive, you start believing in a special providence.... I've
been helped a bit--and I've once or twice helped another man. Whenever I
could, in fact. And from the depths of my soul I believe if I said 'no'
when I was asked...." He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence
unfinished.
"Well, go on!" It was Loring who spoke, not without interest. "What
would happen?"
"I should be damned out of hand. I don't mean a bolt from heaven, but I
... I should never be able to do anything again. I should be hamstrung."
"Black superstition," was Loring's comment.
"Not a bit of it! There's a fear of subjective damnation far more
vigorous than the outer darkness and worm-that-dies-not nonsense."
"You're on too high a plane for dinner," said Loring. "You should
cultivate the pleonectic side of life. I've had two roes on toast, and
I'm going to have a third."
VI
Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early
in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute
'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a
day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at
dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The
cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an
attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said--what was true enough--that
life under such conditions was not worth living; we added--what was less
true--that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.
Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice
a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which--as we were out of
College--other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been
infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still
happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who--so
far as I could see--were living solely for pleasure.
In Oxford during springtime, with the chestnuts, lilac and laburnum
blazing into colour, it is nothing short of sacrilege to read Select
Charters and Documents of Constitutional History. As the evenings
lengthened we used to find alfresco coffee-parties being held in a
corner of Peck. I made the acquaintance of Summertown, an irrepressible
freckled, red-haired little Etonian, the permanent thorn in the side of
his father, Lord Marlyn, who was at this time Councillor of Embassy in
Paris. It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the
Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed.
O'Rane would be found at the piano,--or on top of it with a guitar
across his knees,--and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker
chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the
window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early
stars shining down from the darkening sky.
I had predicted that Raney's personality would impress itself upon
Oxford, though I never underestimated the difficulty in a place so given
over to particularism and fierce local jealousies. At this time the only
men who had a reputation outside their own colleges were perhaps six in
number: Blair of Trinity, who walked round Oxford of an afternoon with a
hawk on his wrist; "Pongo" Jerrold, who kept pedigree bloodhounds;
Granville, the President of the O.U.D.S.; Johnny Carstairs, who removed
the minute hand from the post office clock in St. Aldate's every night
of the Michaelmas term; and perhaps two more, of whom O'Rane was one. As
so often, the world knew him for his accidents and overlooked his
essence. He was quoted as a Union speaker of wild gesticulation and
frenzied Celtic eloquence; as a pamphleteer and lampoonist who could
seemingly write impromptu verse on any subject, in all metres and most
languages; as the author of ninety-five per cent of "The Critic," a
short-lived weekly started by Mayhew, who, I am convinced, would
establish morning, evening, monthly and quarterly periodicals the day
after being washed up on the beach of a desert island.
Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and
irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the
comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality.
With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could
show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the
table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street
on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the
arrangement of a dinner, as he was then--as always--sublimely
indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know
was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and
pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were
short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed
'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be
found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member
of Senior Common Room.
"_Sacre nom de chien!_" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one
night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and
spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog
collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the
Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh
breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in
Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete,
Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office
clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an
undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! _A bas les snobs!_" He
seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of
Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic
scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a
History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. _Conspuez les
accapareurs!_" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through
the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of
a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced.
"Come and sing to 'em, George!
As one that for a weary space hath dined
Lulled by the voice of disappointed dons...."
He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be
greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a
dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed intoxication might be "a good
dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."
"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint?
Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be
'ick."
I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened
to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had
broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been
the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as a
_premier Manqué_. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all
began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first
in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed
together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he
went to the Bar, and I"--a little bitterly--"I thought of going to the
Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever
since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."
When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the
shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his
cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring
will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before,"
he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in
a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at
the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and
from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish
kings before the hapless Norman invasion--utterly wanting in
self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed
in language of greater splendour than the last.
It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and
shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were
yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully
two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the
Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see
leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough,
nearly broke O'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was
three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his
life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "He _made_ Oxford for me."
Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford
for a good many people. His rooms--in Loring's phrase--were like a
gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always
pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he
would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and
not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in
him."
Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the
formula and parodied it.
"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over
here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's
not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's
the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit
elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly
organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've
nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any
attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days,
Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her
in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would
begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."
_Où sont les neiges d'antan?_ Within six weeks we were scattered, and in
twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of
living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most
loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and
when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only
one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy
smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've
only got six days more?"
"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.
"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read
Law or something?"
I shook my head.
"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be
just as bad in a year's time."
We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use
of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of
the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the
allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a
triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools
and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of
valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of
innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited
O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and
one.
"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis
and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current.
"Damn' _good_ fun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going
to do now, George?"
"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.
The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal
labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have
secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my
superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions.
Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I
thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar--more usually, however,
I waited for something to turn up.
"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"
"And bury myself as an extra attaché in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not
if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall
have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever
come back I shall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise
I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in
everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result
with the maximum of effort."
Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.
"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.
"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"
The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.
"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as
there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour
reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."
"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.
"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.
"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."
He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of
Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place,
he broke silence to say:
"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I
was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows
were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an
extraordinary thing--frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than
let them hear me; so I hung on--sort of biting on the bullet--till it
was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't
think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends,
you were all my blood and breed--not like in the old Chicago days. And
then--oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed
such utter fools.... Still, I won through."
"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly
gentle.
"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good
friend to me."
"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."
"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never,
never give in till I die!"
Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a
paddle and seated himself on the box.
"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go
down?"
"Depends."
"What on?"
"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished
here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to
marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure,
I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real
good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask
me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned
unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they're _going_ to do,
never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show,
something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"
"You've not done badly so far," I put in.
He snorted contemptuously.
"If you've got faith...."
Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.
"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he
inquired.
"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My
faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."
Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.
"Where do you find his star?--his crazy trust
God knows through what or in what? It's alive
And shines and leads him, and that's all we want."
The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about
your tame star, Raney."
O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.
"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough,
manual labour's all you're fit for."
"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."
"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket,"
Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket.
It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a
monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'--a memorial
of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that
O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.
VII
Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back
to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter
better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society
spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the
Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one
girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown
chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping,
lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.
We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out
were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or
family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance.
There were five men--Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself,
balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and
my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance
chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form
an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had
injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused;
his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge
of Amy Loring.
The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious
defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never
met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first
Commem. On that occasion--though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen
or twenty--I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the
way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to
remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather
carefully avoided each other--till by degrees we felt we could safely
become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me
short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has
married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when
he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."
The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first
ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us
Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be
unable to join us.
"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd
better cry off."
"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.
"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."
Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our
difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they
risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they
begged for mercy and sat out.
"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get----I say,
Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"
"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen.
Not out yet."
"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights.
I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a
round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."
And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of
acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a
touring-car drew up outside the digs., and a slim figure in dust-coat
and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an
elaborate but still unstable coiffure.
"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and
I met her at the stair-head.
"You needn't call me _Lord_ Loring even if your hair is up," he
answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."
"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"
"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce
you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and
dress."
I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the
dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had
been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful
to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations,
lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady
Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the
party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had
appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me
glancing at my watch and took me aside.
"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take
little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour
fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down;
Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a
fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."
"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for
years."
I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when
the door opened, and Sonia came in--white from her little satin slippers
to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure
she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and
beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her,
twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change in her
appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered
Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself
into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney
saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such
remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.
As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion
there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much
fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who
had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where
traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,--"I
say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan
touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but
otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night."
Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the
disappearance of a brooch. "_So_ long, with sapphires _here_ and _here_,
and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it
for anything."
At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury
and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present
an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I
entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening
light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met
me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly
compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.
"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves
comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a
table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three
Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no
pictures, and only one photograph--a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a
canoe on the river at Crowley Court.
"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.
"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.
"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a
friend of his, aren't you?"
She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men
to inspire.
"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she
asked.
"Little bits," I said.
"He told me everything," she answered proudly.
"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young----"
"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."
"And I'm sure a good part of the language was--unparliamentary, Miss
Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man----"
"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.
"He's a man; he's little--compared with Jim Loring or myself, for
example----"
"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"
"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.
"There's nothing he can't do!"
"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.
"It's nothing to what he _will_ do. After Oxford he's going to set out
to seek his fortune,"--Sonia had dropped into the very language of a
fairy-story. "And when he comes back----"
"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.
"Yes."
"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.
She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a
piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."
"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.
"I don't care if he did," she answered.
"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."
There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time.
The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.
"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.
O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.
"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.
"Is it time? I've been telling George----"
He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.
"What's the good of telling _him_? What's the good of telling anyone?
_They_ don't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you
know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting
Lady Amy?"
I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.
"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees
ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell
Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."
Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.
"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"
"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in
defiance.
The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.
"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much
more than a boy himself."
"Time will work wonders," I said.
"But will he have anything to marry on?"
"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a
half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."
Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.
"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think
he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love
with him. But----" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young
to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her
hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."
"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose
Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."
"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.
"Yes."
"Or till it's broken off?"
"Raney's not likely to break it off!"
"_She_ may. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."
The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to
the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of
itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than
naturally helpless.