BERTRAND OAKLEIGH
"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,
Is--not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,--but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,
May lead within a world which (by your leave)
Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.
Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make Paradise of London if you can,
You're welcome, nay, you're wise."
ROBERT BROWNING, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."
I
I left Oxford with a sense of oppressive loneliness.
It was not entirely the sorrow of parting from a place I had for four
years loved but too well; it was not altogether the prospect of making a
fresh start--I was pleasurably excited by that; the feeling of
forlornness arose, I think, from the recognition that the next step
would have to be taken alone. I suppose I am shy; certainly I lack
initiative. There had hitherto always been someone to keep me in
countenance--Loring at my private school, at Melton and, later, at
Oxford, and there had always been someone to act as a stimulus. At one
time it was Burgess, who laid the foundation of any knowledge I have
gleaned, and made me as temperate, passionless and sterile as I have
become--as deeply imbued, perhaps, with the indifference that
masquerades as toleration.
At another time I was stirred from philosophic doubt by the fanaticism
of O'Rane. The fire he lit burned too brightly to last, but by strange
irony as it began to flicker I came under the influence of my guardian
Bertrand Oakleigh, a man so disillusioned that in very factiousness of
opposition I was driven to fan the dying embers of my young enthusiasms.
My intimate acquaintance with him began in the autumn of 1904, some
fifteen months after I had come down. In the interval I must admit to a
feeling of intellectual homelessness.
The last moments of the Oxford phase came at the end of July after six
weeks in Ireland with my mother. I returned to London and picked up
Loring, and the two of us presented ourselves for our vivâs. There was
little worthy of record in my own case. A fat-faced man in a B.D. hood
opened at random the Index and Epitome to the Dictionary of National
Biography, turned the leaves, shut the book with a snap and called my
name. For perhaps six minutes I drew on my imagination for the early
life of the Young Pretender; then in an oily, well-fed voice my examiner
remarked, "Thank you. That will do." I disliked the voice, I disliked
the man. He is probably a bishop now.
When my own ordeal was over I strolled round the Schools to see how the
Greats men were getting on. To my delight I found Loring in the middle
of his vivâ--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the vivâ was in
progress, for I have no idea when it started. Maradick of Corpus was
examining, and everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. The candidate was
leaning back with his chair tilted at an angle and his thumbs in the
armholes of his waistcoat; so far as a lay man could judge he was making
out an effective case against the Pragmatism of William James, of which,
by an appropriate coincidence, Maradick was regarded as one of the
greatest living exponents. The scornful demolition went on unchecked
until Loring introduced some such name as Müsseldorf.
"Who?" interrupted Maradick.
"Müsseldorf. Johan Müsseldorf of Nürnburg. Died about 1830. It's his
'Prolegomena' I'm quoting. He exploded Pragmatism before James was
born."
"Exploded? Well, er ... that's as may be. I remember now you mentioned
him in one of your papers. He's not very well known in this country."
"I don't know about this country," Loring rejoined. "He's shamefully
neglected in this university. Yet he undoubtedly anticipated
Schopenhauer on Will. Or if you look at Lincke's 'Note on Berkeley's
Subjective Idealism'...."
"Lincke, did you say?" inquired another of the examiners.
The remainder of that vivâ has passed into history, and when I went up
to take my M.A. three years later the story was told me of three
different people. On the last day of the written work, Loring had
expressed dissatisfaction with his papers, and I heard later that when
he began his vivâ the examiners regarded him as a hopeless,
unsalvageable third. They asked formal questions, and he replied by
burlesquing such of their lecture theories as he had picked up at second
hand. It was by pure chance that he mentioned Müsseldorf, but the awe of
unfamiliarity with which the name was received led him to try
experiments with the mass of mid-nineteenth century metaphysics that for
two years I had seen him reading in the window-seats of "93D" or
reciting of an evening to a restless Siamese kitten.
I arrived in time to see the three examiners taking counsel together,
while Loring looked on with the good-natured tolerance of a man who is
prepared to give up his whole day in a good cause.
"We think, my colleagues and I," said Maradick at length, "that this
discussion had better be continued in another room. Perhaps you will
come this way with me? We should like to hear you more fully on this
subject, but of course there are other candidates to consider."
I have only Loring's unchecked, picturesque narrative of what took place
during the next hour, as I was not sure whether the public was admitted
to this private, auricular examination.
"They'll give me a first on that," he predicted, as we walked up the
High together. "Bound to! Oh, it was one of our better vivâs! I hauled
out every German philosopher I'd ever heard of, and a fair sprinkling
that I made up on the spot, carefully adding an outline of their work
and pointing out where they differed from our esteemed old friend
Lincke. Maradick don't know much about modern German metaphysics, and he
knows a dam' sight less about the German language. I quoted long
passages to establish my points, and when I couldn't think of any to
suit, I just made 'em up! I'd no idea my German was so fluent. If they
_don't_ give me a first, I'll expose Maradick for pretending to
recognize quotations from two non-existent authors named Frischmann and
Reichwald respectively." He led the way to the station with an obvious
sense of a good day's work done.
I imagine that every man, before he attains wisdom, endures a part or
the whole of a walking tour. O'Rane had propounded the idea in the
course of our last term, and his eloquence was sufficient to shake even
Loring. On leaving Oxford we repaired to House of Steynes, where Raney
was awaiting us with a haversack and ash-plant, and without giving our
enthusiasm a chance to cool we struck south with no more destination nor
time-limit than was implied in the determination to walk until we
quarrelled or grew tired of walking. It is a tribute to our friendship
that three weeks later we reached Loring Castle, Chepstow, unsundered
and harmonious.
There was, I suppose, too much variety for us to grow weary of each
other's society. Marching without map or time-table, we billeted
ourselves for the night on any friend we encountered on the way, and
when none was available we put up at the first hotel that promised
adequate bathing accommodation. Our kit was not immoderate--brushes,
razors, sponges and pyjamas. When we needed clean clothes we bought
them, and got rid of the old through the parcels post. This last was the
only matter of disagreement between us, for Loring professed an
overwhelming desire to heap unwelcome gifts on the unsuspecting men who
chanced to be in the public eye at the moment.
"I've walked clean through these boots," I remember his remarking one
night at Windermere, as I yawned through an attack on the current
Education Bill in a fiery local organ. "George, d'you think your friend
Dr. Clifford would like some capital brown bootings? Or Lord Hugh
Cecil?" He seized the paper from my hands and turned the pages
thoughtfully. "Eugene Sandow! That does it! Why, it may be his birthday
to-morrow for all you know!" And it was only by concerted physical force
that we restrained him.
The result of our Schools reached us at Shrewsbury: Loring had got a
first and I a second.
"It's one in the eye for dear old Burgess," he remarked, when we
congratulated him. "I shall go down to Melton next term and ask for an
extra half, just to score him off. And now I really _can_ take things
easily."
"Why don't you stand for a fellowship?" I asked. I remembered his dread
of leaving Oxford and found it in my heart to envy him his chance of
living on and off in--say All Souls for another half-dozen years.
"Why in God's name should I?" he demanded. "I've satisfied myself, and
anyone else who's interested in the subject, that I've got some ability.
Now the only artistic thing is to waste it. There's no distinction in
belonging to an effete aristocracy unless people can be induced to think
you're being thrown away. I'm going to be a Dreadful Object Lesson."
He leaned back in his chair, yawned and sat with closed eyes until we
roused him.
"Seriously, what are you going to do?" O'Rane inquired.
Loring adopted the manner of a Hyde Park orator.
"Live abroad," he said, "and squander the rents that I wring from the
necessitous poor. Come back in time to shoot the birds or hunt the foxes
that have overrun my tenants' land. Go down to the House once every few
years to vote against democratic measures. Marry an actress of
questionable virtue and die, leaving a son who has only to take the
trouble to be born in order to become an hereditary legislator and a
permanent obstacle to the People's Will. It'll be very hard work, but
someone must do it, or Drury Lane and the Liberal Publication Department
would have to close down. That's what's expected of tenth transmitters
of foolish faces, isn't it, George?"
"It's the least you can do," I assured him.
"And the most. That's the sad part about it." His face grew reflective
and his voice lost its note of banter. "Time was when I hugged delusions
and called them ideals. I used to think there was room in the body
politic for men who were rich enough and high placed enough to be quite
independent of party considerations,--men who could wait and take long
views, men without seats to lose or constituents to bother about, men
who couldn't be bought because there was nothing big enough to offer
them. The enormous majority of M.P.'s go into politics for what they can
get out of them--legal jobs, office, local honour and glory--and it gets
worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait,
these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore
they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest shift their leaders may
suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."
I suggested that with all its faults our English public life was still
ethically the cleanest in the world and was so far from consistently
deteriorating that it was still some way above eighteenth-century
England. If he found it corrupt it was for him to raise it to his ideal.
"My dear George," he answered, "the ideal perished on the day I
discovered Unionists and Radicals both talking of 'big views' and 'the
higher patriotism' and at the same time helping themselves out of the
public purse. No, no! _Suave mari magno._ I shall endeavor not to marry
the actress of questionable virtue, but I shan't attempt to etherialize
politics. They're too dirty, for one thing, and they're too dam' dull
for another."
He might have added that they were too uncertain. In twenty years'
tolerably close observation it is the unexpected changes of politics
that impress me most--the big Bills that evoke none of the expected
opposition, the little Bills that break Ministries, the inflation or
sudden pricking of a reputation, the constant shifting and re-arranging
of parties. Ten days after Loring's criticism of politics on the score
of their dullness, the three of us were at Chepstow waiting for the
weather to mend before pushing on to London. The Khaki Parliament does
not rank high among periods of consummate human dignity; its birth was
overshadowed and embarrassed by the South African War; its early and
middle life were given over to Education and Licensing Bills of which I
imagine even their authors were not unduly proud. Then without warning
came the news that Chamberlain had declared for Mercantilism,
Protection, Fair-Trade--whatever name was dug out of the economy primers
before the movement was baptized with the name of Tariff Reform.
The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a
battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the
Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search
of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it
seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted
by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political
interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for
Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French
National Convention.
My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the
Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the
Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden
constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took
rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club.
The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying,
and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A
comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism,
Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."
I can see now that there was little originality in the book.
Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round
about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than
anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers
headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall.
Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were
not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching
as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared
for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.
Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and
glittering epigram, their logic--and faith in logic, their assurance and
perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We
Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next
ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the
Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly
respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain
stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical
statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our
manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful:
there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and
Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social
Reform. The Liberal League--most gentlemanly of parties--was captured;
its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push
other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to
their own again.
Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous,
Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new
heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found
it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery
of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for
every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for
legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford
mind. I remember my relief some years later in reading "The Break-up of
the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the
industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized,
ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I
had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who
demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who
inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the
unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the
Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived
mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a
disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on
governmental control and coercion.
Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its
publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight--never strong--underwent
one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I
wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make
special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone,
because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and
leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man
will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail:
for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned....
A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better
company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled
with me as far as Alexandria.
A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join
them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his
brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the
same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an
embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed
and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon
O'Rane gave me the reason.
"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other
introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, of course, who else? She
had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."
"What's her objection?" I asked.
"Oh, Sonia's too young, and speaking as her mother--my God, I thought
that ullage was kept for penny novelettes! The girl of the present
day.... Well, the long and the short of it was--I didn't mean to--but I
told her Sonia and I were engaged. That gave her something to think
about, George."
He strode fiercely across the lawn with his hands clasped Napoleonically
behind his back.
"What did she say?" I asked, hurrying to overtake him.
"Wouldn't _hear_ of it, don't you know?" he answered mimickingly. "We
were a pair of children, don't you know? I'd behaved scandalously in
mentioning such a thing, it was monstrous; what had I got to support her
on? It was all her fault for ever letting Sonia go to Oxford, young men
were not to be trusted, and after the years she'd known me, don't you
know?" He blew a long breath. "She couldn't have said much more if we'd
eloped."
"Well, what's going to happen now?"
He flung his hands out in wild gesticulation, and his black eyes were
round and hot with angry surprise.
"She declined to recognize the engagement and told me I was to consider
it off," he said. "I told her I proposed to marry Sonia. '_That_ is for
_us_ to decide!'" He clutched my arm and marched me the length of the
lawn. "George, she's getting damnably pompous since they made Dainton a
bart. We seemed to have reached a bit of an impasse. '_I_ don't
recognize even an understanding,' she said, 'and I shall not permit
Sonia to do so. If you persist in this--nonsense, my husband and I shall
have to consider whether it is advisable for you and Sonia to have any
opportunities of meeting, don't you know? If you will take my
advice....' Pah! And then she handed it out. I must think of my career,
I was a mere boy; you needed to be married to appreciate that marriage
was an expensive luxury...."
"You seem to have taken it in the neck, Raney," I said as he choked and
grew silent in his disgust.
"Pretty fairly. I'm not to write. I'm honour-bound not to mention the
subject to Sonia on pain of having the door shut in my face next time.
'Of course, we shouldn't like that. You're an old friend. Perhaps if you
had sisters of your own, don't you know. She started to get patronizing,
George, so I asked her to tell me whether she admitted me to the house
because I was _fit_ to be admitted, or out of pity because I hadn't a
home of my own and was a bastard----"
At the risk of writing myself down old-fashioned and conventional, I
admit there are two or three words that send a shiver through me.
"My dear Raney ...!" I began.
He laid a hand on my arm.
"You can't improve on what she said, old man," he assured me.
"Call a spade 'a spade' by all means," I said, "but not 'a bloody
shovel.' Especially with women. They have to pretend to be shocked."
He threw up his head with a mirthless laugh.
"There was devilish little pretence about Lady Dainton. It wasn't a word
I ought to have used, and apparently it wasn't a thing I ought to have
been. I suppose--she hadn't--heard about it before." He stood silent for
many moments. "I asked her whether my presence was still acceptable. Of
course she was bound ... did it very nicely, all the same. She said I
was as welcome as before last June."
He took out a pipe and began filling it. I have met few men to whom the
trite metaphor of "blowing off steam" was so applicable.
"Was that all?" I asked.
"I told her I regarded myself as being still engaged to Sonia." His eyes
suddenly blazed and his voice rose. "And that I'd marry her if the whole
world was in our way. Children indeed! Does she think there's some fixed
age for falling in love?" Again he blew a long breath. "She said she
couldn't be responsible for what I chose to fancy about myself, but that
I knew her views. There the row ended."
There was a subdued leave-taking that night, and for some days the
gloom spread by Lady Dainton seemed to hang round her house and family.
For all my wisdom and superiority in discussing the rash engagement with
Amy Loring, I was sorry to see it broken off. Two, three years before I
had been as anxious as O'Rane to marry and I do not know that a
disappointment hurts less at eighteen than later in life. It is true
that there was no pecuniary embarrassment in my case, but at that age I
refused to regard it as a serious obstacle in O'Rane's path. If anyone
wanted money, he either manoeuvred himself into a job or put his
shoulders to the wheel and made it. The one course, I then fondly
believed, was as delightfully simple as the other. In few words, Lady
Dainton was entirely wrong and O'Rane entirely right.
I carried that opinion with me to Cairo and beyond. The days of our
passage out were days in which Sonia would come on deck in the morning
rather white of face and waterily bright of eye. By night, as we
strolled aft and looked out over the creaming wake, I would try to
invent little consoling speeches and tell her of men who had amassed
fortunes almost in an hour; and she--at sixteen and a half--would gaze
across the gulf that separated her from one-and-twenty. On that day she
would marry him if she married beggary with him, though beggary was but
so much rhetoric on her lips. O'Rane's future, as they had mapped it out
together a dozen times, included two things that stood out above the
rest--the revival of the title that had died with his father and a
fortune wherewith to restore his father's estate. From so determined a
republican no less could be expected.
The month I spent in Cairo made me doubtful whether Raney had not met
his match in Lady Dainton. Even conceding the practicability of her
daughter's generous assumptions, I doubted whether fair time would be
granted for their maturing. Lady Dainton's ambition carried her far and
fast; she was now, after five years' assiduity, reckoned unhesitatingly
as of county family; a like assiduity directed on London would, in
another five years, leave no house unstormed. I know no one outside an
Oscar Wilde play who talked so persistently of the difference between
those who were "in Society" and the others who were not. I studied her
method--and was astonished by its simplicity. She engaged a good suite
at Shepheard's, aware beforehand of the class of visitors she was likely
to meet there; by perseverance and an agreeable manner she succeeded in
getting to know all who--in her own phrase--were "worth knowing"; and
with the aid of an undeniable flair for organization she made up other
people's minds for them and tirelessly arranged expeditions and parties.
(It was curiously like the "Pinkerton's Hebdomadary Picnics" of "The
Wrecker.") And on her return to England there started a paper-chase of
invitations, beginning, "I hope you are not one of the people who think
friendships abroad should be forgotten at home, like some dreadful
indiscretion...."
I left Cairo with the feeling that Lady Dainton, were her circumstances
ever reduced, would always be worth bed, board and a retaining-fee for a
Lunn and Perowne Pleasure Cruise.
I also thought that David O'Rane, undergraduate, must cut an
insignificant figure in her dominating eyes.
II
The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could
travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.
After the absence of a year, in which I made my way from London through
Africa, India, Australia to South America and back again through the
States, Japan, China and Russia, I am free to admit that I sinned
frequently and soliloquized interminably to men who neither knew nor
wished to hear about the countries I had visited. I was very young at
the time, and that must be my excuse. Greater age, and my sufferings at
the hands of others, will now restrain my pen and limit me to a single
reminiscence.
On my way home in the late summer of 1904 I broke the journey at Paris
to stay with Johnny Carstairs, who was now--after a truncated career at
Oxford--established as an honorary attaché at the Embassy. I never visit
Paris without turning into the Luxembourg to see what Whistlers are on
view and this time, as I came out into the Gardens, I saw Draycott. He
looked shabby and unshaven, but not more so than any conscientious
English student in the Quartier Latin, and at no time since he exchanged
the extreme of foppery for the extreme of Bohemianism had a frayed shirt
or porous boots seemed valid reason in his eyes for cutting a friend.
"The reason?" Carstairs echoed, when we met for _déjeuner_ in the Café
d'Harcourt. "I know it, of course, but----"
Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.
"Don't be professional," I said.
"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country
for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the
gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.
I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the
number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on
Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on
the quayside at Calais--threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten
in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and
need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half
a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week
until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was
the first of my experience--and the most complete.
After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my
mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of a
_conseille de famille_, to decide what we were going to do and where we
were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my
mother's course for her--the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the
spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a
placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two
months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining
and unanswerable question:
"What about you, George?"
As so often with men of weak initiative, the question--with a little
judicious delay--was answered for me. My uncle and former guardian
wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for
an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My
mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing
manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed--and accepted her fate. He
arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days
left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the
shooting--there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating
notice--Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed
questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her
room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but
his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with
methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the
whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to
lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the
greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on
English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went
to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.
"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner.
"What d'you want to do that for?"
"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"
"H'm. You won't make money out of _that_ kind of book."
"Then you've read it?" I said.
Bertrand knocked the ash from his cigar and thought out a disparaging
answer.
"Oh, I looked at it," he said vaguely. "It's unequal. Some parts worse
than others."
"It was written by several people," I explained.
"Which part was your handiwork?"
"Which did you think the worst?" I asked in turn.
My uncle looked at me suspiciously.
"You're not proud of your precious babe," he observed.
"The opportunity would be too irresistible for you if I were."
Then he laughed, and with that laugh was born the friendship of many
years. It was a pity, he felt, that a young man should bury himself in
the dreariest house of the dampest county of the damnedst island in the
world. Why should I not come to London, see a little of politics and
society, 'try it on the dog, so to say'--which by amplification meant
testing the principles of "Thursday Essays" on a popular meeting? If, as
a good, catholic hater, there was one thing he hated more than another,
it was writing letters: why should I not sign on as his secretary?
Though untrained, I should learn much, and anyone with enough
superfluous energy to rush into print could handle his correspondence
before breakfast.
"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the
proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard
something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not
unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.
"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.
"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an
afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you
know."
So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King
Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and
character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of
seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive
brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of
rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and
had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My
father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my
shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew
were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his
boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopædic
intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was
to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.
Some sides of his character--his disillusionment, independence and
far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred--were attributable to early
struggles and later disappointments. After leaving Trinity College he
saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in
getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet
Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a
since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he
saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a
rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or
later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became
respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and
well-trodden road.
Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the
gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the
magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after
the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the
Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr.
Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence
remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and
critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with
a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and--I am
afraid--a love of mischief-making for its own sake.
His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too
numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man
who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I
should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily
communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in
time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see
the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand
depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and
humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his
antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those
who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation
could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the
Houses of Parliament, he would--by his own standards of justice--be the
sole survivor.
Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man.
His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens
was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good
enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly--by some
curious irony--ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say
that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in
the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence
he kept to himself.
Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land
Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies
asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very
highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management.
His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes
"an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the
Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at
the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the
flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the
rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis Roederer per man.
I soon ceased to wonder at my uncle's objection to sending out
invitations in his own hand. For luncheon he kept open house, and any
man might come to seek or offer advice and continue coming till a more
than ordinarily brutal insult convinced him that his presence was no
longer welcome; it was at a dinner that his formal entertaining
displayed itself. On Mondays we had "these damned official
Liberals"--candidates and members; ex-Ministers and leaders of
dissentient minorities; ecstatic, white-hot Nonconformist pastors and
worried party journalists trying to reconcile the two-and-seventy
jarring sects into which Liberalism split after the Chesterfield speech.
Bertrand would glower at them, individually and in bulk, but, as the
shrill, earnest voices rose and mingled, I could see his eyes travelling
from time-server to _intransigeant_, as though his fingers were on the
pulse of the whole unwieldy, centrifugal party. And when he had looked
longer than usual at a man, he would wander round the table and murmur
casually, "Stay behind for another cigar when the Bulls of Bashan have
gone."
The Thursday dinners and the guests invited to them were marked in his
book with a D--which stood for Duty, Dull or Damnable, according to his
temper.
"I have to do it, George," he explained, with a half apologetic
headshake. "For fifty years I've dined with them, and they must come and
dine with me. If I refused to meet 'em ..." He shrugged his shoulders.
"All my time would be taken up inventing excuses. Take my tip and dine
out on Thursdays. I'll put you up for the Eclectic. Don't miss Saturday,
though. The Saturday dinners are sometimes quite amusing."
In ten years I do not believe I missed a single Saturday dinner and for
reward I think I have met what Lady Dainton would call "everybody worth
meeting" in Bohemian, artistic, un-Social London. Looking round the long
table at the authors and musicians, the returned travellers and soldiers
on leave from a forgotten fringe of Empire, I was always reminded of a
well-attended dinner of the Savage Club. You were invited--not for what
you were, but for what you had done or because you could talk; and
Bertrand in black tie and short jacket radiated a new urbanity over the
gathering. We dined soon after eight and sat talking into the early
morning. About midnight a sprinkling of actors and Sunday journalists
would drop in for sandwiches, champagne and cigars. If there were
vocalists or composers, the piano was dragged in from the morning-room;
I used to hear a good deal of poetry recited before or in lieu of
publication, and, whenever Carden, the "Wicked World" cartoonist, was
with us, he would sit with one leg thrown across the other, his cigar at
an acute angle and a spiral of blue smoke curling into his eyes, while
he covered the backs of the ménus with caricatures in charcoal. I have a
drawer full of them somewhere--Trevor-Grenfell who penetrated the
Himalayas by a new pass, Woodman as 'Lord Arthur' in "Eleventh Hour
Repentance," Milhanovitch at the piano and a dozen more.
Failing professional talent, my uncle would be called on to make sport.
The only men I know who eclipsed him in memory were Burgess and O'Rane,
and he had lived so long in London, hearing and storing the gossip of
every hour, that it was almost impossible to find him at fault. That he
was a stimulating talker, experimenting in talk and taking risks in
conversation, I judge from the eagerness of his guests to get him
started, and--to put the same test in other words--by the keen
competition to secure invitations for a Saturday dinner. I remember a
Thursday night when Loring came and wrestled with Bertrand over the
official Catholic attitude towards Modernism. I met him in the street a
few weeks later, and he begged me to congratulate him.
"What's happened?" I asked.
"You ought to know," he answered. "It came in your fist. I've been asked
for a Saturday."
And Loring was in small things the least enthusiastic of men.
My secretarial duties took no more than an hour or two a day, and at the
beginning of 1905 I followed my uncle's advice and put some of my
political formulæ to practical test by going down three or four times a
week to Wensley Hall Settlement in Shadwell. The impulse came from
Baxter-Whittingham, who wrote to remind me of "our pleasant talks at
Oxford" and to say that not a man could be spared with the working
classes in their present scandalous condition of neglect. Thirty per
cent of my generation worked for longer or shorter periods in one or
other of the university and college missions: my seniors, laid by the
heels in the slumming epidemic of the eighties and nineties, were there
before me, and my juniors continued the supposedly good work after my
defection. I therefore speak with misgiving and a sense of personal
unworthiness in confessing that East End mission work left me singularly
and embarrassingly cold. From some lukewarmness of spirit I failed to
catch the enthusiasm which made my fellows dedicate their lives to the
work and allowed them all to drop it when a dawning practice or the
design of matrimony laid more pressing claim to their leisure. Bertrand
indeed, indulged a favourite form of disparagement as soon as I made my
intention known to him.
"I've been through all that," he told me. "It's all right; you'll
outgrow it."
And I outgrew it in some ten weeks. Others have told me they made
lasting and unique friendships. Such good fortune did not come my way. I
doubted, and still doubt, the possibility of friendship between a
Shadwell stevedore and the angular, repellent product of an English
public school and university; this is not to put one above the other,
but merely to disbelieve the existence of a common intellectual
currency. Further, I am too self-conscious to run a Boys' Club or play
billiards with the men without a sense of unreality and a fear of being
thought patronizing. I question my own moral and social right, moreover,
to conduct raids into the houses of Thames watermen and, if anyone seek
to justify such mission work as I found in progress at Wensley Hall on
the ground that it showed rich and poor how the other lived, it is mere
platitude to answer that the poor revealed to me as little of their
normal life as I to them of mine. Throughout my time in Shadwell I felt
like a bogus curate at an endless choir treat.
And, if in looking back on it all I do not wholly regret the weeks I
spent there, it is because of my consciously earnest and religiously
hearty fellow-workers in the mission field. Chief of them in 1905 was
Baxter-Whittingham, or simply "Baxter," as he was known to all Shadwell
but myself, sometimes scholar of Lincoln and a man ten years my senior,
who had gone from Oxford to the East End and never returned. It was the
fashion at Wensley Hall to regard Whittingham as a Latter-Day Saint (I
use the phrase in its unspecialized sense, without reference to the
school of Brigham Young); and I am ready to believe that in thirty per
cent of his character Whittingham was entirely saintly. Admiring
disciples told me how he lived in a single room of a workman's cottage
on fifteen shillings a week with a supererogatory fast thrown in on any
colourable pretext. The first thirty per cent of him compassionately and
whole-heartedly loved the poor. Another twenty per cent was given up to
an emotionalism bordering on sensuality in ritual, music and art.
And the remaining fifty per cent of Baxter-Whittingham was pure
_arrivisme_. He had risen early and cornered the market in poverty;
there was no one to equal him on East End Housing Problems, the Drink
Question, Sweating and the Minimum Wage. His little "Other Half of
London" and "England's Shame" created a considerable sensation and were
accepted without criticism. Indeed, who was in a position to criticize
the man who knew Shadwell and had lived there ten years? When the
disciples prevailed on him to stand in the 1906 election his candidature
aroused an interest that spread far beyond the limits of his division.
And when he was returned a party was waiting, ready made, in the
smoking-room of the House of Commons. Ministers might shake their heads
irritably over another Incorruptible, but many a private member felt
easier in his mind for the presence of the hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped
figure in the loose-fitting, semi-clerical clothes, who seemed to carry
England's poor in one pocket and England's conscience in another.
And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,
My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
I left Wensley Hall at the beginning of the 1905 Season, lured by cares
of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. Early in April I met John
Ashwell at a dinner-dance given by the Sinclairs: he casually elicited
my name and address, satisfied himself of my _bona fides_ and went to
work like an industrious, dapper, well-fed little mole. Within a week
strange cards arrived for me without explanation, within a month they
had assumed the dimensions of a moderate snowstorm.
"Who _is_ Mr. John Ashwell?" I asked my uncle one morning, throwing over
a card bearing his compliments.
"A Society promoter," Bertrand answered. "D'you know Lady Ullswater?
Those two have started a registry office for eligible young men." He
handed back the card. "Your name's on the books. He sends lists of
dancing men to struggling hostesses at so many guineas a dozen. Lady
Ullswater brings girls out at a hundred pounds a head, with another
fifty pounds if there's a presentation; for three hundred pounds and all
expenses--a couple of thousand in all, say--she'll give a ball at the
Empire Hotel. 'Lady of Title willing to chaperone young girls of good
family. Introductions.' _You_'ve seen her advertisements--every spring
for the last fifteen years. Ashwell takes a commission on any suitable
match he brings off in a girl's first season. Don't cherish too many
illusions about London Society, George; anybody can get there who's
willing to pay. And unless you're particularly anxious to be married off
to someone you don't know, I should advise you to avoid Ashwell. A year
or two ago I heard him with my own ears tell a woman that he'd got a man
he wanted her daughter to meet--heir to a viscounty and a good deal of
money; only an uncle in the way, and _he_ was a bad life. Of course if
you feel you're immune, the pander to plutocracy is as amusing to study
as anyone else."
Bertrand's description was not of a kind to send me out of my way in
search of Ashwell, but in the course of nine years I saw as much of him
as I wanted to. Of an artificial society he was, perhaps, the most
artificial member.
III
Failing to learn much of working class conditions at first hand, I
decided to reform them from the distant security of Westminster.
It was a few weeks after my apostasy from the Wensley Hall Settlement
that I asked my uncle what steps he advised me to take in order to get
myself elected to the House of Commons. "Thursday Essays" seemed to have
committed me to a political career, and faithful reading of the party
press had put my mind in a fine ferment over the immorality of the
Unionist handling of Education, Licensing and Indentured Labour.
Moreover, like most of those who had learned their political economy
from Mill, I was intellectually offended that the dead heresy of
Protection should be dragged from the grave it shared with Bi-metallism
and galvanized into life. And I suffered all the fierce irritation of
the impatient idealist at sight of a lethargic Government slumbering in
office and barring the path of hurrying academic reformers. I felt that
much must be swept away and much more built up. I had nailed on the
public doors my theses of Federation, Land Reform, Franchise Adjustment,
Single-Chamber Government and the rest. The offer of the Viceroyalty of
India would not have kept me from the House.
"Want to stand?" Bertrand echoed. "My dear boy, you'll outgrow that
phase."
"But the hopeless chaos!" I protested. "We've become an Imperial people,
an industrial nation, and we're still trying to run with an obsolete
machine."
"And--you--think--you--can--alter--it?" Paper and ink can never
reproduce the cold scorn of his voice.
"I can have a dam' good try," I answered, with assurance.
Bertrand went to his writing-table and scribbled a note.
"Take this to Abingdon Street," he said, handing it to me. "You'll find
you're more than welcome these hard times. I should go there on foot,"
he added gloomily--"along Knightsbridge and through the Park, where you
can see the trees and hear the birds singing. London has its charms in
the season, George. And you're a dancing man, aren't you?"
I admitted the charge.
"You'll soon outgrow _that_," he hastened to add, as though repentant of
having found one good thing in life. "Well, _chacun à son goût_. But
you'd find, if you came to the Gallery once or twice...."
"Is there any phase in life I _shan't_ outgrow, Bertrand?" I asked.
He selected a cigar, pinched it, lit it and blew a cloud of smoke.
"No," he answered at length.
"And what happens at the end of it all?"
"You die."
"Well, what keeps _you_ going? What phase are you in?"
He stared out of the window at the stream of hansoms and omnibuses
rolling in a double line east and west.
"The great spectacle of life," he replied, with a wave of the hand. "You
see it rather well from the House or the Club. That reminds me, I'd
better put your name down. Come and lunch there to-day, and I'll show
you the place. Yes, the great movement of men. I'm not tired of that
yet. But you've got ideals, you're going to do things, you aren't
content to sit and watch--and that's why I'm warning you against the
House. There you'll only find jobs and disappointed men and backbiting
and a spirit of compromise. However, you wouldn't believe me though I
rose from the dead to tell you; a man has to find these things out for
himself. You'd better tell the Whips who you are."
I walked down to the Central Office reflecting that Bertrand, to judge
by his tone, had perhaps not yet quite escaped the phase of idealism.
His forecast of my reception was accurate enough. There were seats to
fight in borough and county, north and south, east and west. I could
have my choice, and with a year-book open on my knee I made comparative
tables of the majorities against me. In the course of the interview
there was diplomatic skirmishing on both sides as the Central Office
reconnoitered to find out how much I was prepared to put down, and I
tried to ascertain how far the Party Funds would help me. In
consideration of a sum I was not willing to furnish, I could have the
reversion of a safe seat in a mining area; at the other end of the
scale, the Whips would pay all expenses if I would consent to break my
shins on the five thousand Unionist majority in South St. Vincent's.
Eventually, I undertook to pay my own expenses and fight the Cranborne
division of Wiltshire, where there was a hostile majority of one
thousand eight hundred. Then I jumped into a hansom and joined my uncle
for luncheon at the Eclectic Club.
"The charm of this place," exclaimed Bertrand as he led me up the great
staircase, "is that once you're a member you can be sure of meeting most
of the men you want to and all the ones you don't. It's not political,
so you find scallywags of all types. That's why it's called the
Eclectic."
The great, grimy, eighteenth-century building--Hamilton's finest work, I
always think--is too well known to need description, and anyone who has
driven down Pall Mall or up St. James's Street is familiar with the line
of bow-windows overlooking Marlborough House, and the row of choleric
members who stare disgustedly at the street on wet days and revile the
English climate. Within a few months I was privileged to take my place
among them, and Bertrand spent an industrious week introducing me to the
rules, conventions and personalities of the Club.
It was a rare opportunity for his favorite pastime of drawing
indictments against professions. At one end of the dining-room he showed
me a disillusioned close corporation of invertebrate Civil Servants,
counting the days till they could abandon their judicious sterility and
retire on a pension; at another, the corner where members of the Bar
lunched hurriedly and discussed appointments. There was an embrasure
traditionally reserved for peers and invariably raided by shy new
members, and an elastic table by the fireplace where parliamentarians
gathered to refight the battles of the House. The sharp division and
mutual jealousy of the coteries reminded me strongly of Oxford, and, as
election was in the hands of the whole Club, every ballot had the
gambling excitement of a snap-division. If the Civil Servants supported
a candidate too warmly, the Bar would rally, blackball in hand; the
parliamentarians, on the other hand, held that a club was one thing and
an almshouse for permanent officials quite another. And they voted in
accordance with this reasoned conviction.
The ideal candidate was, of course, the unknown man with the unplaced
backers; he might, indeed, be attacked on the rustic principle that the
function of strangers is to have half-bricks heaved at them; or he might
creep in unscathed, to the lasting mortification of men who would
afterwards have liked to blackball him. Not once or twice have I heard
the question, "How did _he_ get in? I suppose I didn't know about him
at the time, or I'd have pilled him like a shot."
"Is Adolf Erckmann a member?" I asked my uncle in a surprised whisper as
we came upon a stumpy, bearded, scarlet-faced man breathing stertorously
through thick lips and resting on the end of a sofa the reddest and most
naked head it has ever been my fate to see.
"I don't think any Club is really complete without him," was Bertrand's
guarded answer. "He represents so much."
In the last ten years Erckmann has come to represent considerably more
than in 1905: his social development in those days had hardly begun, and
outside the City his name was still comparatively unfamiliar. There, if
you were a banker, you knew Erckmann Brothers of Frankfort, London and
New York; in the Rubber Market you met Erckmann Irmaos of Para; and if
you touched the South American chemical trade, it was long odds you
bought from Erckmann Hermanos of Valparaiso. Moreover, it was difficult
to deal in English real estate, South African diamonds, Norwegian timber
or Alaskan furs without rubbing shoulders with Erckmann or the retinue
of younger sons who picked up the tips and aspirates he let fall and in
return allowed themselves to be seen dining with him or yawning through
the exquisite musical parties he gave in Westbourne Terrace.
With his ceaseless activity and Midas touch he must have been worth a
cool million even in 1905 when he was no more than forty and had been
divorced but once. His wealth thereafter increased by geometrical
progression, and slackening his attendance on business he turned his
talents to society. The knighthood came in the Coronation Honours of
1911, the baronetcy two years later. There he stuck, for the second
divorce brought him more notoriety than credit: the freeborn electors of
Grindlesham, perhaps through inability to understand his speech,
accepted his largess but rejected his candidature--twice in 1910 and
once in the by-election of 1913; and just when the opening of the
Cripples' Institute brought his name high again in the list of
Government creditors the war broke out, and Sir Adolf--with all his
raffish, lesser theatrical entourage--stumbled helplessly backward into
his social underworld. He will, of course, re-emerge after the war, for
his type is old as Ninevah or Tyre: Petronius wrote of the feast he gave
under Nero, and Alcibiades probably dined with him before mutilating the
Hermæ.
For want of a better landmark, Loring used sometimes to refer to our
early years in London as "the days before one met Erckmann," and anyone
who saw how he and his rowdy little circle dominated such houses as they
entered will be grateful for the definition.
The summer of 1905, my first season, was undisturbed by him, though for
two and a half months I danced, on an average, in eight houses a week.
It may be that the future will find us too sober and too poor to revive
the glories and excesses of those days, and in that case I am glad I
grasped my opportunities while they lay within reach. As Bertrand
predicted, I was to outgrow the phase, but, ere disillusion came with
weariness, the life of those summer months was a long, unbroken dream.
Now the men are mostly dead, the women widowed: the great houses are
closed, the orchestras disbanded and bankrupt.
Yet for a moment at a time they still live. A hansom once more jingles
through some Square to a striped awning and length of red carpet.
Throwing the door open, Loring and I descend with our coats over our
arms, press through the throng of interested idlers, give up our hats,
pocket a ticket, pull on our gloves and warily squeeze our way past the
couples on the stairs. I have forgotten half their names, but the faces
are still familiar, and the little jargon of the ball-room shouted from
the door to the whirling dancers. "You free any time? Missing two?
Right! Many thanks. I suppose you're booked for supper? Well, sup with
me--early and often." An odd bar of a forgotten waltz is enough to call
the whole scene into life--the blues and whites and pinks of the
dresses, the line of prim, weary chaperons round the walls, the lazy,
stereotyped chatter, the drowsy scent of flowers, and the wonderful size
and softness of the girls' tired eyes as daylight broke coldly into the
yellow, stifling rooms.
There was a happy-go-lucky _cameraderie_ about it all. An invitation
once accepted left you a marked man. "Are you going to the Quentins' on
Friday? Well, come with us! We've got one or two people dining first....
Eight-thirty. I don't know whether you got my name.... Oh, that was
rather clever of you! I never listen myself. You'll find the address in
the Red Book, and I'll push you along and introduce you to mother when
she comes up from supper. Have you been selected for the Fortescues'
next week? Then we shall meet there...."
And so from April to May, from May to June. I could stand late hours and
ball champagne in those days, the whole of my world was treading the
same round, and at twenty-four it was the rarest fun imaginable. Ten
years later finds the ardour damped, but I should like to hear "The
Choristers" played once more, I should like to dance again with Amy
Loring, to see her brushing back the dark curl that always broke loose
over her forehead, to talk again our tremendous trivialities. And I
would give much to hear--say--Lady Pebbleridge's butler thundering out
the names at Carteret Lodge--and to see the men stepping forward in
response....
It was at the Pebbleridges' ball that I met the Daintons again. The
house was small and the crowd was large. I had half decided to go on to
the Marlores' in hopes of finding more room there when I discovered Lady
Dainton and Sonia, pressed into a corner and pretending to enjoy
themselves. Lady Pebbleridge had invited them as she invited all her
Hampshire neighbours, but they were still strangers to London and knew
no one. I acquired merit by finding the girl some partners, giving Lady
Dainton an early supper and, when the room cleared, dancing with Sonia
and trying to remove the bad impression which her first London ball had
left on her. She had come on from the second Court and was looking far
too attractive to be left standing in a corner; moreover, ever since our
passage to Egypt the winter before, I had enlisted under her colours
against her mother and felt it incumbent on me to provide such
consolation as lay in my power.
Beyond the statement that she had not seen nor heard from O'Rane in
eighteen months, I gleaned little information in the course of my second
supper on the subject of her chequered romance. At third-hand she
learned that Raney's vacations were spent in studying English Industrial
conditions; he had put in time as an unskilled worker on the Clyde, as
an extra harvest-hand in Wiltshire, and finally--though I never learned
in what capacity--as a miner in the coal-fields of Nottinghamshire. What
his purpose was, neither Sonia nor I pretended to guess; I judged from
her tone that she was aggrieved at his experimenting in manual labour
when by merely expressing the desire he could have secured an invitation
to Crowley Court.
"Does your mother...." I began tentatively.
Sonia shrugged her pretty, white shoulders.
"She says he can come and stay with us if he wants to," she told me. "It
looks as if he doesn't want to."
"I'm fairly sure that's not the reason," I said. "But he's a wild,
eccentric creature--as you'll find when you're married to him."
Sonia drew on her gloves and picked up her fan.
"If I ever am," she said despondently.
I lit a cigarette and adopted a sage, mature tone.
"As soon as you two have got anything to marry on," I assured her, "your
people will recognize the engagement."
"We're not even engaged any more. Mother told him.... As if I were a
child!" She broke off, pushed her chair back and began to walk towards
the door of the supper-room.
"Go on," I said as I followed her.
"Mother told him he'd--he'd behaved improperly in putting such ideas
into my head. Putting such ideas! Mother _won't_ see I've grown up. And
then David got very angry and told her I might consider myself free of
the engagement or not, just as I pleased. And he would never mention
the subject till I did. George, I'm thoroughly depressed and, if I talk
to you any longer, I shall say undutiful things."
A few weeks later I prevailed on Bertrand to invite the Daintons to
dinner. He had met Lady Dainton on the Committee of the War Fund--an
organization for the benefit of men permanently injured in the
Transvaal; he had also taken an active dislike to her as he did to all
bustling, capable women. She had joined the Committee one day and
captured it the next. The meetings were held at the house which Sir
Roger had taken for the season in Rutland Gate, and within a week there
was an imposing programme of concerts, bazaars and charity performances.
It is bare justice to Lady Dainton, who initiated and controlled the
organization in its smallest detail, to say that the revenue of the Fund
doubled in the six months following her accession to the Committee. I am
not sure, however, that this was any recommendation in my uncle's eyes.
"_He's_ a bore, and _she's_ a snob," he declared. "Don't we know enough
such without gratuitously adding to the number?"
"I am asking solely on the girl's account," I said.
"My _dear_ George!"
The unaffected mistrust of his expression set me laughing.
"You needn't be anxious," I told him. "They're new-comers to London----"
"And want to nobble the place!" he growled. "_I_ know the type, George.
Climbing, climbing.... They're beer, aren't they. I dislike brewers."
"I don't suppose they'll ask you to buy any."
"More honest of them if they did. A brewer's bad, but a brewer who's
ashamed of his brewing...."
"Are you going to invite them or are you not?" I interrupted.
Bertrand sighed like a furnace.
"Make it one of our Dull Evenings," he begged resignedly. "_Really_
dull; wipe off all old scores. You can ask Ashwell, and Lady Ullswater,
she'll be very helpful to them, and--oh, I'll leave it in your hands.
Give me somebody tolerable on either side."
The dinner took place some weeks later in the early part of May and for
a Thursday, and a designedly Dull Evening, was quite bearable. I took in
Sonia and had Sally Farwell on my left; her mother, Lady Marlyn, went in
with my uncle. I have forgotten how the others sorted themselves out,
but conversation was maintained at an even flow, and no one seemed in an
undue hurry to leave. And to Bertrand or any one trained by him to look
dispassionately on at "the great movement of life," there was a quarter
scene from the Human Comedy being played round his own table. The actors
steadied to their pose as the butler cried their names. I observed that
the Daintons had wasted no time since we met at Carteret Lodge: they
were blasés and overdriven with the wearing life of Society.
"I've _said_ I'd give a ball," sighed Lady Dainton. "Really ... dreadful
fatigue, don't you know?"
And Lady Ullswater sidled up, shaking her wonderful head of perennially
chestnut hair.
"Not if you go the right way about it, dear Lady Dainton. Of course,
it's rather presumptuous of _me_ to advise _you_, but...."
And in front of me, through me and over my head at dinner, Sonia and
Sally Farwell bandied impressive names. With both of them it was the
first Season, and each seemed to aim at showing the other--and me--the
important figure she had succeeded in cutting. Sir Roger, always shy and
more than ever out of his element, postured as the bluff Tory Squire who
hated London and all its works. John Ashwell, who was the son of a
highly respected North-country solicitor before he took to peddling
names of eligible bachelors, shook his head over the plebeian admixture
of society, illustrated by an account of that day's luncheon with the
dowager Duchess of Flint. Even poor Lady Marlyn, who was stone-deaf,
caught the infection of play-acting and pretended to hear and appreciate
the dialect stories of the American attaché on her right.
I sometimes think life would be simpler and more sincere if we had an
official "Who's Who" with our incomes, their source, our professions or
public positions, our parents and other relatives, not excluding those
who lived abroad, with the reason for their retirement. My uncle
himself, who told the story of his proffered knighthood a thought too
freely, would have been called the son of a middle-class farmer--but for
the fact that Ireland boasts no middle class. My own estate owed its
existence to the old penal laws against Catholics: less polished
generations used to say it was acquired by apostasy from God and theft
of a brother's birthright. I do not dispute the charge and am gradually
restoring the stolen property in exchange for adequate compensation
under the latest Land Purchase Scheme. If the facts were recorded in a
form accessible to the public, there would have been added piquancy
attaching to my "Justice for Ireland" speeches a few months later. But
the mystery, romance and make-believe of social intercourse would have
departed. And our one public virtue would drop out of play, for we
should no longer indulge the kindliness of respecting our neighbours'
susceptibilities.
As it was I had the ill-luck to offend Sonia. Despite the weariness she
inspired in me with what the republican O'Rane would have called
"upper-ten-shop," it was unintentional. I have always kept up a
curiously frank, rather cynical and entirely honour-among-thieves
friendship with her: we know each other to the marrow, and, while in
ignorance of any quality other than common egotism that should attract
anyone of her temperament to anyone of mine, I have never ceased to
admire her on purely physical grounds. I am still content to sit as I
sat beside her that evening, gazing at the heavy coils of her brown
hair, the red, moist lips, the brown, rather wistful eyes and the
singularly beautiful arms and shoulders gleaming white through the
transparency of her sleeves. I can understand any man falling in love
with her; I can understand any man wanting to live his whole life with
her--for a month.
Offence came by Tony Crabtree. Ascertaining that I knew him, she
invited my opinion, and with the sense of stumbling unexpectedly on a
too rare opportunity, I told her all that I knew and much that I
thought.