LORING
"The nobles ... have nearly ceased either to guide or misguide; ...
the Noble has changed his fighting sword into a court rapier; and
now loyally attends his King as ministering satellite; divides the
spoil, not now by violence and murder, but by soliciting and
finesse.... For the rest, their privileges every way are now much
curtailed.... Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of
dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously.... Nevertheless, one
has still partly a feeling with the lady Maréchale: 'Depend upon
it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality.'
These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could not
have been there."--THOMAS CARLYLE, "The French Revolution."
I
Somewhere in my library at Lake House there is a little volume of essays
entitled "History Re-written." It is a collection of _jeux d'esprit_
exhumed from a dozen reviews by an author whose imagination loved to
annihilate a single historical fact and reconstruct the changed
consequences. There is one picture of the Greeks flying in disorder
before the triumphant Darius on the plain of Marathon, and the
subjection of Europe to an Eastern despotism; another of Julius Cæsar
successfully defending himself against his would-be assassins; a third
of Mahomet dying of starvation during the Hegira. I recall a study of
Luther overwhelming the Vatican in argument, Columbus shipwrecked in
mid-Atlantic, the Regiment of Flanders firing on the Paris mob,
Napoleon leading the Grand Armée to luxurious winter quarters in Moscow.
Sometimes I wonder whether history would have had to be much re-written
if the King of England and the German Emperor had been personally more
cordial from 1901 to 1910; whether, too, destiny could have been cheated
if Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had lived another five years. "C.-B."
laboured for peace, and his honesty was not called in question; there
was always the certainty that democracy the world over would one day
grow strong enough to forbid war; there was always the chance that this
decisive strength would come before a military party could issue its
mobilization orders.
I know I speak in a minority of one: a thousand pens have shown that war
was pre-ordained: yet--I wonder if the writers guess how nearly it was
avoided. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned, there was no one of
equal authority to carry on his work. For a space the unconvinced
preached disarmament to the unbelieving, then impatiently girded
themselves for war. The Japanese Alliance, the French Entente, the
Russian _rapprochement_ were good platform points for a German
scaremonger. If we had continued working for peace and keeping free of
continental engagements, I wonder whether our teaching would have had
time to bear fruit. My uncle Bertrand thought so and, though my
political beliefs are too unstable to matter, he converted me from a
showy Liberal Imperialism to an old-fashioned peaceful insularity. The
change came gradually. My allegiance to the party weakened when Bill
after Bill was contemptuously rejected in the House of Lords, and our
leaders fulminated and declined battle. Thereafter a certain uneasiness
was occasioned by the vagaries of the Foreign Office. Ostensibly our
French Entente was formed to facilitate the settlement of outstanding
questions in North Africa; and, though we were told from the Treasury
Bench that militarily we were still uncommitted, Lobby gossip had a
dozen disquieting theories of new secret engagements. Bertrand used to
get his knuckles rapped for indiscreet questions to the Foreign
Secretary, but rebuffs from mandarins only increased his suspicion that
the whole truth was being withheld from the House of Commons.
Growing distrust of a brilliant and exasperatingly Celestial Ministry
determined the course of my later years in Parliament. O'Rane left
England at the end of 1906, my constituents rejected me in the first
election of 1910; in the intervening time I joined an advanced Radical
group in advocating better international understandings and immediate
war on the House of Lords. They were the three busiest years of my life,
and, when my uncle set his peace organization to work, a day of sixteen
hours was divided equally between Fleet Street, the House, and the
Central Disarmament Committee in Princes Gardens.
Of the outside world I saw even less than in my first session when I was
a loyal party man; and, if there had been no Liberal Bills for Loring to
wreck, I should have lost touch with all my former friends. As it was,
he would ask me with exaggerated fear how much time I gave him to make
peace with his Maker. I would expound the only possible solution of the
House of Lords problem--(there were always six at any given time, all
mutually destructive)--and under the shadow of the guillotine we would
adjourn for dinner and inquire whether anything had been heard of Raney.
It is almost superfluous to say that no letter was ever received from
him, but Summertown cabled laconically at two-month intervals, and
distorted messages reached us from Sally Farwell or Lady Marlyn. It was
agreed that whichever first received news of the wanderers should
immediately communicate with the other, and the formula--"Lord Loring's
compliments, and will you dine with him to-night?"--nine times out of
ten meant that the long-suffering Lady Marlyn had recently been handed a
flimsy sheet with some such words as "All well Raney married to Dowager
Queen of Siam leaving to-day for Java."
When I think of Loring at this time I always recall Burgess's parting
advice on our last day at Melton. Few men who prophesied so freely could
boast of making so few mistakes; he had predicted that there was no
third course beyond a definite career such as the Diplomatic Service and
a dilettante politico-social existence of drift such as Loring now
pursued. It does not lie in my mouth to pass judgement, but I was sorry
to see a man with ten times my ability dabbling in life as negligently
as he did. His whole energy was devoted to recapturing the last
enchantments of the Middle Ages: ecclesiastically, politically and
socially he stood for a vanished order and, when his own generation
declined to jump backward across the centuries, he shrugged his
shoulders in good-humoured contempt and walked his road
alone--obstinate, aloof and correct to the last button of his boot. In
the Lords he led the wildest of the Backwoodsmen groups, in Society he
fluttered with a swarm where all were called by the Christian name and
each took pride in the large number of people he did not know.
Failure is so little honoured that there is something pathetic in the
sight of a man refusing to be modernized. At the same time, though my
instincts are Bohemian, I am glad to think that at least one section of
society refused to be bought up by the invaders who now assailed London
with a handful of bank cheques. These years were the era of Adolf
Erckmann and his retainers; their war-paint and war-cries, their
ruthlessness and ferocity of attack led Loring to dub them "les
Apaches," and for seven or eight years before the outbreak of war there
was truceless fighting between the old order and the new. Before it was
over, Loring was beaten. He kept his own house free of the invaders and
occasionally raided their camp and rescued a prisoner. Summertown, for
example, had been captured for a time and came near to swelling the
number of Peerage and Stage romances. It is to Loring's sole credit that
the indiscretion was scotched. But a few local successes could not be
magnified into a general victory, and by 1914 London lay at the feet of
Erckmann, Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a few other chiefs with their
followers drawn from every quarter of England.
Erckmann's first purchase was Lord Pennington--who indeed was on sale
for anyone who would give him five meals a day, excitement, noise, youth
and not too intellectual conversation. Next came Mrs. Welman, whose
spirit yet lived amid the dusts and draughts and dressing-rooms of that
Avenue Theatre she had forsaken to marry her wealthy paralytic husband.
Thereafter it was simply a question of capillary attraction. The titles
glamoured the stage, the stage fascinated the titles, and Erckmann, if
he did not attract, at least paid for all. It was a motley gathering
with a sadly draggled reputation here and there: you would find one or
two Americans, several Jews, a few Germans and an astonishing number of
young-men-about-town getting rich without undue toil on the wizard
Erckmann's advice. "You wand a good dime, hein?" he would say
invitingly. "You gome with me, my vriend." And they came.
According to their lights, too, they had the best time in the world.
Ever trooping together from limelight to limelight, you would find a row
of them in the stalls for any first night: the Royal Box was always
theirs for a costume ball, and visitors to a regatta would punt half a
mile to see the splendour of their house-boat. Should you enter a
restaurant, their presence would be betrayed by the free-and-easy
relations existing between themselves and the waiters--whom they called
by nicknames: and, were you a recluse, the "Tickler" would portray the
whole horde on Erckmann's lawn at Marlow, or you could sit by your
fireside, the "Catch" open on your knees, envying them their presence in
"Lord Pennington's house-party in Buckinghamshire."
I give them all credit for their powers of organization. A charity ball
in their prehensile hands went with an undoubted swing, and no one who
spent a week-end in their company could reasonably complain of dullness.
I remember that the papers for some months were full of "Ragging in
Country House" cases; there was the mock burglary at Pennington's place,
Erckmann's launch tried to shoot Marlow Weir at three o'clock in the
morning, and the unexplained fire in Mrs. Welman's Surrey cottage burned
one of her maids to death. Some thought that they went perhaps a little
too far in this last escapade, and for a time the Smart Set dropped out
of the public gaze. Then the Dean of St. Pancras, struggling into the
mantle of Savonarola, devoted a course of Advent sermons to
anathematizing them on the curious ground that they were responsible for
a falling birth-rate, and the discussion--with this decanal benediction
on it--became brisk and general.
There were houses in London where I met them, and tables where I supped
with voluble, fluffy little footlight favourites whose accent and choice
of language were notably more literary at the beginning of the meal than
at the end. Dozens of carmined lips used to ask whether I had seen their
"show"; other dozens described their next engagements and the number of
pounds a week they had just refused. I floundered by the hour in
contemporary theatrical history and daringly discussed actor managers by
their Christian names.
Loring had no taste for such adventures. To be an Apache was to be
refused admission to his house. He complained of their vitality and
confessed weakness in repartee when accosted as a "sport" or informed
that he "must have a drink."
"We get at cross-purposes," he sighed, stretching himself to his full,
handsome, six foot three and smoothing his moustache. "The fault's mine,
but there it is. I've arrived fainting at the end of a long journey
because I've not got the buffet manner with barmaids."
As a fellow-member of the "Eclectic," I was on nodding terms with
Erckmann, but to the end he and Loring never met. Perhaps a dozen other
hosts and hostesses ranged themselves on the side of old-fashioned
prudery, including for a time Lady Dainton, who assured me that she did
not know what Society was coming to. I was dining with her one evening
towards the end of 1907 to meet the girl Tom had just engaged himself to
marry.
"I mean I would never dream of letting Sonia know such people, don't you
know?" she told me.
"I share your view," I said, finding time to recall that in the
Daintons' first London Season Sonia had habitually attended the meetings
of the Four-in-hand Club on Erckmann's box seat.
"You wait till I'm married, mother!" said Sonia, who had overheard the
conversation.
"When's the great event coming off?" I asked.
"Oh, not at present," said Lady Dainton rather hurriedly. "I don't want
two weddings in the family at the same time. Besides, Tony's only been
at the Bar a short time. We must wait till his position's a little more
established, don't you know?"
I agreed, as I always agree with Lady Dainton. Yet as I walked home that
night I murmured to myself some hackneyed lines from Robert Burns. If
there was one thing more certain to my mind than another, it was that
the ever-shrewd Anthony Crabtree relied on the Daintons and the
"desperate thing" of marriage to establish his position.
I saw and heard no more of the family until the autumn. One morning in
October Loring rang me up with the news that Summertown was in London,
dining that night at Hale's. I was invited to meet him and found that
eleven months' travel had altogether failed to mature him. A spasmodic,
sandy moustache hinted at increasing age, but in other respects he was
the same freckled, snub-nosed embodiment of irresponsibility as ever.
The same taste for local colour characterized him as when on his return
from America he lisped of candy, cocktails, dollar-bills and the art of
clubbing as practised by the New York police: he was now the completest
Anglo-Indian I have ever met, and his conversation sparkled with sahibs
and white men, the Rains and the Hot Weather, the Hills in general and
half-sacred Simla in particular. Mr. Warren Hastings, looking sourly
down from the wall of Hale's coffee-room, must have seen us as seated at
endless Tiffin--paid by means of Chits--where Saises, Khitmutgars and
Ayahs entered and salaamed, and twenty-one gun salutes boomed faintly in
the distance--as men have politely sat for years round any returned
traveller or student of Kipling's Indian stories.
"What have you done with Raney?" Loring asked as the Odyssey drew to its
close.
"I left him in Paris," was the answer. "We were going on to Spain, but
the guv'nor don't think he's a suitable companion for a simple,
unspoiled lad like me. My own adored mother's choice, too, mark you."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Phew! What didn't?" Summertown leant back with his thumbs thrust
importantly into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I suppose you fellows
don't appreciate it's been touch and go for a European War? Nothing but
the well-known family tact of the Marlyns----"
"Get to the point," Loring ordered him.
Summertown bowed his head to the reproof.
"We came back overland from Vladivostock to Moscow," he said, "and about
that point Raney recollected that his foot was on his native heath and
all that sort of thing. We sprang lightly out of the train, seized our
grips and Baedeckers, and sauntered round Russia and Poland, eventually
bringing up at a spot called Hungary--where, by the way, there's a drink
called Tokay ... All right, but you do spoil a good story, you know.
From Hungary it is, as they say, a mere step to Austria. So we stepped.
Raney's a most astonishing fellow, you know," he explained, in a short
digression. "He's lived in all these places and talks the lingo like a
beastly native. However, to resume my absorbing narrative, the moon
shone out one night and discovered us eating scrambled eggs at a cabaret
called the 'Chat Noir,' which being interpreted is 'Black Cat'----"
"Thank you," I said.
"The fruits of travel," he answered, with a bow. "To us enters, as they
say in the stage directions, a flat-nosed brute who craves the favour of
a match. Raney gave him some chat in Hungarian--which for some dam'
silly reason I could never understand is called Magyar--and in a moment
they were thick as thieves. I didn't know what all the eloquence was
about, but they kept dragging in a chap called Kossuth----"
"I think I've heard the name somewhere," said Loring.
Summertown looked at him with admiration.
"_I_ thought it was one of the filthy waters they give you when you're
doing a cure. Kossuth, yes. If you're one of the heads you pronounce it
Koshoot and spell it Metternich. Well, these lads spat Magyar at each
other and clinked glasses till the band broke down and everybody was
staring at our table. Then an Austrian officer in a dream of a grey
cloak strolled up and made some offensive remark. Of course, in mere
vulgar abuse, dear old Raney's a pretty tidy performer, and they did
'emselves proud. I heard the name O'Rane sandwiched in between the
gutturals, and then the Austrian got home with some pretty phrase. Raney
went white as the proverbial sheet, picked up his glove from the table
and gave that officer the most God Almighty welt across the face that
I've ever seen. There--was--the--_devil_ of a scene. I thought you
exchanged cards about this point and then nipped over the frontier,
leaving the other chap and the seconds and doctors and grave-diggers to
keep the appointment for you. Not a bit of it here! Every cursed
Austrian in that place jumped up, yelling his damnedest; every dog of an
Hungarian did the same. One of the orchestra was a Bohemian, and he
broke his 'cello over an Hungarian's head, and there was an Italian
behind the bar who walked into the Austrians with a cocktail shaker. I
picked up a chair and shouted, 'Vive Kossuth!' never dreaming the poor
chap had been dead for years, and then tables and sofas hurtled through
the air till the police came in and killed anybody who hadn't been
killed already--I'm free to admit I faded away as soon as I'd smashed
the last lamp. I thought Raney'd come, too, but he saw it out and was
duly marched away with his flat-nosed friend through a perfect forest of
drawn swords. It was about one o'clock in the morning, and I didn't
think it was healthy to stay up any longer."
He paused to refresh his parched throat.
"Next day I went round to the Embassy," he continued, "and there I had
the surprise of my life. While I was improving my mind in the East, that
eminently respectable Councillor of Embassy, my father, had been shifted
from Paris and sent to Vienna as Chargé d'Affaires. He was very glad to
see me, of course, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn't help
feeling I should have preferred to carry my little troubles to another
man. I toned my story down a good bit, and after some agitated notes and
interviews Raney was brought up for judgement with an armed escort. Most
of him was in a sling, and the rest just hung down in strips from the
bones. As soon as they started talking I found we'd fairly done it in
the night before. Our flat-nosed Hungarian friend was mixed up with a
Secret Society and pretty consistently shadowed by the police. He and
Raney had fraternized and exchanged cards, and, apparently old O'Rane
wasn't much of a popular favorite in Austria. He and Vive Kossuth had
caused the Government all kinds of vexation which weren't forgotten
though both of them were dead, and when the flat-nosed man drank to
their pious memory and Raney held forth on Hungarian Independence, you
can imagine the Austrian contingent was no end restive.
"The poor old Guv'nor had his work cut out to smooth things down. For
about an hour he buttered 'em all up and apologized to everybody,
swearing that Raney was tight--which was an absolute lie. There was a
fine recommendation to mercy and an allusion to a father's feeling--lump
in the throat, all that sort of thing--and then the Guv'nor closed down.
I hoped it was all over, but the Austrian lads were out for blood--we
had to pay for all the damage, and our friend the officer was trundled
along in a wheeled chair to receive our apologies, and then the Minister
of the Interior, or the Prefect of Police, or some bug like that, popped
into another room with the Guv'nor and dictated terms for the future.
_I_ got off with a caution, but poor old Raney took it in the neck. They
stripped him and measured him and took his finger-prints and
photographed him about a dozen times. And in the afternoon an escort of
soldiers frog's-marched us to the Bavarian frontier and took a tender
farewell, with a plain statement in writing that, if ever Raney put one
toe of either foot on an inch of his Imperial Majesty Franz Josef's
territory from now till the end of time, he'd first of all be shot and
then disembowelled and then confined in a fortress for the rest of his
days. The Guv'nor don't fancy me for the Diplomatic; he says I want
discipline, so the Army's going to try its hand on me." He shrugged his
shoulders tolerantly. "I don't mind, it's all in the day's work, but I'd
have you observe the kind of man my sainted mother sends me abroad with
on the grounds that I should only get up to mischief if I went alone."
Of O'Rane's future movements Summertown could tell us nothing beyond the
fact that he was shortly starting for Mexico, and that letters to his
bank would, in due course, be forwarded.
"I shall write to him to-night," said Loring, as we walked up St.
James's Street. Summertown had heard that roulette was being played
illicitly somewhere in Chelsea and was anxious to check the accuracy of
the report.
"At this hour?" I asked, glancing at my watch. It was past one o'clock.
"I can do it in three lines," he answered. "It's about his friend
Crabtree. Have you heard?"
"I can believe anything of him," I said, as I resigned myself to listen.
"Then you _haven't_ heard. Well, the engagement's off. I met your cousin
Violet at lunch to-day, and she had it from Lady Dainton. No reason
given."
"Either of us can supply it," I said.
Loring made no comment.
"Sonia can do better than that," he said, after we had walked for some
time in silence.
"So, possibly, can Crabtree," I suggested. "In her present state----"
"My dear George, she's still a child," he answered, with some warmth.
"There are children and children." I had neither forgiven nor forgotten
her behaviour to O'Rane for a year or two.
"I don't think the man who marries Sonia is at all to be pitied," Loring
said rather aggressively.
The words may have meant that such a man was to be envied--or equally
that he took the risk with his eyes open. But we were at the corner of
Half Moon Street, and Loring had waved good-night and was walking
towards Curzon Street before I was ready to ask him.
II
I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard
labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return
from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed
into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with
the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard
news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.
Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East
Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has
discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from
Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's
explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane,
he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to
the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar;
later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with
scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and
unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was
leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney
himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the
Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether
without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that
had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I
heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.
In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have
mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the
Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British _entente_. Secret
treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the
Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness,
and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was
joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's
Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a _fainéant_ Duma hardly
availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg
streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to
be drawn into the _entente_, well and good; there could be no need for
so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were
dividing Europe into two groups,--at best for a competition in
armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,--then the men and women
whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble
their rulers were meditating.
In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer
desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war
might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by
Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed
till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my
creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as
then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a _pro rata_
reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national
armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world
with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not
materialize to-day or to-morrow, but--as O'Rane was fond of
saying--slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between
individuals did not come in a night.
Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to
judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall;
perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be--and there is little
doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent
diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the
armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manoeuvres; certainly
a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for the
Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers provided
a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and drudgery, there
was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign; _l'appétit vient en
mangeant_, and to some extent we succumbed to the enthusiasm we tried
to inspire in others.
Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar
movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League,"
floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an
army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every
quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that
would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the
lands of sympathizers and suspects.
The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our
attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for
delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a
few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details,
and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the
draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent
suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including
lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.
I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself
qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper.
We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by
hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a
century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained
journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide--but
never thwart--our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to
conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and
eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine
careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the
position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement
revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on
the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty
pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful,
and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and
the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing
was too great or too small for our attention....
Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to
speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of
men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to
regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the
"Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes
knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the
quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with
excited suggestions.
"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked
World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay--I don't
mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a
paper...."
And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title,
suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay
its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never
to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own
price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this
about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was
discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a
deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the
Watchman about it."
Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest
with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was
promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's
contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was
descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus.
Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving
tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into
the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled
for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be
tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the
Sensations they had effected--the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the
"Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo"
carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as _épatant_
a sensation of universal disarmament--or, for the matter of that,
bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform--but a narrow
Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me
shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or
worse we had to get on without them.
Sir John Woburn himself I never met--and am the first to regret the
loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling
interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably
worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine
was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an
impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no
ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in
contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man
who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as
they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.
The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under
Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening
Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled--Penelope
fashion--the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His
was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a
Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and
an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader,
Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war,
which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his
impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the
voluntary system by day.
"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and
might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give
its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater
for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."
"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in
questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily
commercial.
After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real
Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our
first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a
hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet
with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the
provinces--which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local
colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried
in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a
telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed
the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which
staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no
longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought
me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles--and seemed
pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared
manuscripts.
M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with
lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long,
I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when
Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would
lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the
invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And,
when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some
new _édition de luxe_, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man,
don't you think you could give _me_ some reviewing to do?" Publishers at
one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements
in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head
knowingly and reassured me.
"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy.
He kens well--if you don't--that good reviews never yet sold a bad book,
nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."
The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was
sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda
developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand
could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of
the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and
there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as
his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too
bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his
function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the
Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and
a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.
No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the
Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little
of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled
every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909
Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly,
there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who
did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our
oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided
into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of
Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized
publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone
else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.
The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle,
international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party
group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed
forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came
from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were
bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for
the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of
resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the
capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to
Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor
Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to
lose by war.
Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late
summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues,
what--if anything--the Disarmament League had achieved for all its
pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think
we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African
War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself
and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no
audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and
can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United
States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people
might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we
impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts'
national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army
Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army
of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the
illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building
programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries.
Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government
had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.
Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I
must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the
present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of
some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both
these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand
years of Christian teaching.
But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I
have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse
must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910.
When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours
had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were
engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on
the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be
undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria,
Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the
kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the
United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In
the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental
journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced
them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into
groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with
results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those
unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes
the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of
strenuous goodwill.
The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British
Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing
Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee
of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical
Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free
Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return
visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and
shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the
House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him
company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not
wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to
lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.
It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a
fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me
that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had
seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening
time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and
almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met
in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily
attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I
played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for
the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera,
only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of
foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations.
We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news
to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the
silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction
of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in
very truth be dead.
And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old
covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the
wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.
"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at
the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."
III
"If you tell me the little man's been writing to you," were Loring's
first words, "I'm afraid I shan't believe you."
I helped him to take his coat off and led the way into the dining-room.
"I wouldn't insult your intelligence with such a story," I answered. "It
was infinitely more Raneyesque."
"Well, where is he and what's he doing?"
"Where did he _say_ he was going? What did he _say_ he would do?" I
asked in turn. "My dear Jim, Raney's one of those people whose dreams
come true. He told us he was going to Mexico, and he's gone to Mexico;
he told us he was going to make money, and I gather he's making the
devil of a lot."
"When's he coming home?" Loring asked.
I was about to admit ignorance when an old recollection stirred in my
brain and I completed the history.
"He _told_ me he would dine with me in this room on the first of May
next year. He _will_ dine--at that time--in this place."
Loring helped himself to plovers' eggs and began slowly to remove the
shells.
"The little man's born out of time, you know," he said, with a laugh.
"He belongs to the spacious days of Elizabeth. I'm glad he's in luck.
God knows, if ever a man deserved it, if ever there was poetic justice
for real pluck ..." he left the sentence eloquently unfinished. "Drive
ahead, George."
"In time," I said, "and at a price."
Nearly four years in the House of Commons had made me quite shameless in
the matter of log-rolling. I held Loring to ransom and refused to utter
another word about O'Rane until he had promised to let me descend on
House of Steynes with a party of ten French journalists who were
arriving in England in two months' time and had to be shown every side
of English social life. It was a preposterous request for me to make,
and Loring very properly refused it--not once but several times. Only at
the end of a long and--if I may say so--well chosen dinner, when I
declined even to mention O'Rane's name, did he show a willingness to
compromise.
"Have it your own way!" he exclaimed impatiently. "I shan't be there,
though."
"My dear Jim, unless you're there from start to finish----"
"This is sheer blackmail!" he cried.
"As you will," I answered, folding my arms obstinately.
"You're a dirty dog, George," he answered, with slow scorn. "I suppose I
shall have to promise, though."
Before telling my tale, I had to explain how it had reached me. The
previous evening had been devoted to one of many all-night sittings on
the interminable 1909 Budget. I walked home between five and six o'clock
in the morning, as the returning market-carts rumbled sleepily westward
along Knightsbridge, and belated revellers in vivid dresses and with
tired, white faces flashed by in taxis and private cars. My head was
aching, my lungs seemed charged with the poisoned air of the House, and
I was chilled to the marrow of my bones; cursing a factious Opposition,
I had reached the door of my uncle's house in Princes Gardens and was
fumbling for my latch-key, when I noticed a man sitting on the steps
with his head on his knees and his hands clasped round his legs. He
awoke as I tried to squeeze by him, rubbed his eyes, yawned, gazed round
him, and then scrambled stiffly to his feet.
"Maybe you're Mr. George Oakleigh?" he asked, with an American
intonation almost too strong to be natural. And then, when I bowed in
assent, "Gee, but it's cold waiting. D'ye think I could come in for a
piece? I've been sitting here since ten last night."
My first desire was for a hot bath, my second for bed. Both points were
clearly propounded to the American.
"Guess that'll keep," he answered easily. "I've a message from your
friend David O'Rane." He felt in his pocket and produced a card with the
name "James Morris." and some address that I have forgotten in Mexico
City. On the back was pencilled, "Please give bearer any assistance he
may require. D. O'R."
"What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?" I asked unenthusiastically,
fingering the card and then glancing at my watch.
"A warm room and something to eat," he answered, with a shiver. "My
name's not Morris, by the way, but it'll serve. And I'm not a native of
Mexico, but _that'll_ serve. My folk come from this side of the water,
but they're not proud of me for some reason. By the same token, I shan't
keep you long from your bath. I'm known in Knightsbridge. 'Late to bed
and early to rise, Is the rule for Knightsbridge, _if_ you're wise.' All
right, I'm not jagged."
Mr. Morris's manner was so unprepossessing that nothing but my regard
for O'Rane would have induced me to admit him to the house at this--or
any--hour. In appearance, the man was of medium size with powerful hands
and thin, riding legs. His hair and skin were fair, his eyes grey, and
his features regular though weak. All pretension to good looks,
however, was ruined by his expression, which was an unattractive blend
of cunning and effrontery. His lower lip shot out at the end of a
sentence, as though to conceal the weak line of his chin: deep furrows
from nose to mouth formed themselves into a perpetual sneer; the pale
eyes were half hidden under their insolent, drooping lids. And with it
all there was something pitiful about the man: he was so young, not more
than two and twenty; the recklessness was so crude, the frailty of
character so patent. He seemed like a highly strung child who had been
bullied into obstinacy and violence by an unsympathetic nurse. And that,
I believe, was in fact one part of his history.
"Come in, Mr. Morris," I said, opening the door. "I shall be glad to
hear any news of O'Rane and to do anything I can for a friend of his."
"A name to conjure with, seemingly," said Morris, with a malicious
smile.
"O'Rane's?"
"I reckon so. You'll admit you didn't precisely freeze on to me at first
sight. However, no ill feeling."
"It was an unusual hour for a call," I replied.
"And I looked an unusual sort of a customer, eh? Well, never mind.
What's this? Cheese? I can do with some of that. No whiskey! I don't use
spirits nowadays, not since I met O'Rane."
We sat in silence while he munched bread and cheese, contentedly
glancing round the room at the pictures or, when he thought I was not
looking, letting his eyes rest on me. The curtains were still drawn, and
the yellow light from the chandelier, feeble by contrast with the cold,
diamond clarity of the dawn outside, lent an added element of the
fantastic to our meeting. I lit a cigar, settled wearily into my chair
and told him not to hurry himself.
"Well, start at the beginning," he said at length, "I met him eighteen
months ago in Tomlinson's Saloon, Acacia Avenue, Mexico City. He hadn't
been in the country more than a few days--landed with five thousand
dollars he'd made out Africa way and was looking for likely oil
propositions. I was with the Central Syndicate in those days. No need to
ask why I was in the accursed country at all, or what I was doing. The
Syndicate made me cashier in their innocence of heart, and, though I
wasn't overpaid, their bookkeeping left loopholes for a man of
enterprise. I used those loopholes some. By the time I met O'Rane, the
Syndicate had lent me 4000 dollars--more'n eight hundred pounds--without
knowing it. We weren't in sight of an audit, I'd got months to doctor
the entries, it was roses all the way." Truculently he thrust forward
his lower lip, every inch of him the bragging schoolboy. "Then--I had
ninety minutes' warning--the Syndicate started in for amalgamation with
the Southern Combine, the accountants rolled up for the valuation--and I
thought Mexico City wasn't good for my health."
He paused dramatically, finished his soda water and put down the empty
glass.
"That's when I met O'Rane," he went on. "There wasn't much packing or
leave-taking to get through. I booked express for New Orleans and turned
into Tomlinson's till it was time to get under way for the depot. That's
where they took me--I was a fool to run before evening, it was bound to
arouse suspicion. I'd been talking to O'Rane a matter of half an
hour--oil prospects and such like--when I felt a hand on my shoulder and
a shiver down my spine."
He paused again and helped himself to a cigar.
"To this day I don't know why he did it," he resumed, "but I'd not been
four and twenty hours in my cell when they told me there was a visitor
wanting to speak with me.
"'Tell him I'm only at home on the sixth Friday of the month,' I said.
"_I_ didn't want any durned visitors. He came in, though--leastways he
came to the door and peeked through the grille.
"'Morning,' says he, 'you remember we met in Tomlinson's yesterday. My
name's O'Rane.'
"'I've not got a card,' says I, 'but you'll find full particulars in the
book upstairs.'
"I wasn't out to be civil and I thought he'd taken the hint and
cleared. He was still at the grille, though, next time I looked up.
"'Which college were you?' he asks after a bit--for all the world as if
we were still drinking cocktails in Tomlinson's. College! If he'd asked
my views on Bacon and Shakespeare....
"'What the hell's that to you?' I blazed out.
"'It was Merton or Corpus, but I can't remember which,' he says.
"I didn't say anything to that.
"'I was at the House,' he went on. 'I wanted to see if I couldn't give
you a lift up. What's the amount in dispute?'
"'Four thousand,' I answered and heard him whistle.
"'Pounds?' he asks.
"'No such luck,' I said. 'Dollars.' I mean, to be lagged for that....
"Believe me or not, that man O'Rane sighed with relief.
"'I can manage that,' he said. 'So long.'
"Next morning they let me out. There may have been more surprised men in
Mexico City, but, if there were, I didn't meet 'em. How he squared the
Syndicate and the officials and the whole durned Criminal Code of
Mexico, I don't know. I didn't ask. I had a bath and a shave at his
hotel, then he gave me breakfast, then a cigar, and then we put up our
feet and talked.
"'You'd better quit Mexico City for a piece,' he began.
"I nodded. The same great thought had occurred to me.
"'I'm out for oil,' he went on, 'd'you care to come?'
"'D'you care about having me?' I suggested.
"'I shouldn't have asked you if I didn't,' he says.
"'I'd look for oil in hell for you,' I said.
"We shook on that.
"'We shall rough it some,' he warned me. 'Better hear the terms first.
Item one: I'll never ask you to do a thing I won't do myself.'
"'Done!' I said.
"'Then that's about all,' says he, taking his feet off the table and
looking at his watch. 'Half profits for each, and I'm to say when the
proposition's worked out.'"
Mr. James Morris, as he chose to call himself, late of Merton (or Corpus
Christi) College, Oxford, knocked the ash off his cigar and looked round
the library.
"You've not got such a thing as a large scale map of Mexico, have you?"
he asked. "Well, it doesn't matter. I guess the places would mostly be
only names to you. We started West--Gonsalo way--and we worked some.
Living Springs was our first success, and we let the Southern Combine
have an option on that so as we could buy plant for the St. Esmond
concession, and six months' working of St. Esmond gave us capital to buy
out the Gonsalo Development Syndicate and round off our holding. Since
then we've struck oil at Pica, Melango and Long Valley."
He paused considerately to let the unfamiliar names sink into my memory.
"In eighteen months we've never looked back," he went on, with rising
enthusiasm. "Every dollar we made went back to the business--barring
what we needed to live on, and that was mostly bread, meat and tobacco,
with an occasional new pair of boots or breeches to keep us decent. And
then three months ago we started prospecting in new territory--I can't
tell you where it is, 'cos we're still negotiating. I found the oil, and
O'Rane did the rest. _He_ thinks it's the richest thing we've ever
struck and he's going to collar the proposition. The territory's about
the size of Scotland, and the concession will run to anything between
one and two million dollars."
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scribbled some figures on the
back.
"We're selling our shirts to get it," he told me. "O'Rane never borrows
money, but he's sent me over here to float a company to buy everything
we've found or made in the last year and a half. He couldn't come
himself: the sweepings of God's universe that we call our labour would
be drunk by ten and knifing each other by ten-thirty without him to get
a cinch on 'em. If I bring it off, we shall have enough for the
concession. Maybe it won't pan out as rich as we hope, and then we start
again at the bottom. That's the sort of risk he loves taking.
That's--that's just O'Rane. Maybe he's right, and there's oil enough to
flood Sahara. Put the concession at a million dollars and the average
yield at ten per cent on your capital. A hundred thousand dollars per
annum--gross. Take half of that away for working expenses--fifty
thousand, net. Half profits on that, twenty-five thousand dollars a
year--£5000 for each of us.
"O'Rane says he'll be satisfied with that. When we touch total net
profit of fifty thousand dollars, he'll sell out or turn the proposition
over to a company. Then he'll come back to England and go into
Parliament and cut a dash. And I--well, I'll have to say good-bye to
him, I guess."
He stopped abruptly as though there were much more that he would have
liked to say. We sat smoking in silence for a few moments. Morris's raw,
ill-regulated susceptibilities had made him an easy victim to Raney's
personality: perhaps he was already wondering what to do when the
strange partnership dissolved, and Raney returned alone--perhaps he
recognized his own inability to continue the work single-handed when the
inspiration and driving force were removed: perhaps, as his eyes glanced
out on the silence and desolation of Knightsbridge, he was weighing the
possibility of starting afresh and making a new home for himself in a
Western capital.
For myself, I had no other thought than that I should have liked a man
to speak of me as Morris had spoken of O'Rane. I should have welcomed a
little of his humanity, his singleness of heart and his unshakeable
faith in himself. While he worked in shirt and trousers or ventured his
last hundreds on an admitted scamp or staked everything he had won on
the chance of greater winnings, I was sitting tired and chilled by my
late hours at the House, ruling Morris out from my list of desirable
acquaintances on the ground that I disliked his manner and appearance,
possibly even wondering if he were to be trusted to put down the silver
cigar cutter before he left....
"Is there anything I can do for you, Morris?" I asked with a sudden
shock of penitence at my own insular prejudice.
He noticed that I had dropped the 'Mister' and seemed gratified.
"Guess not, thanks," he answered, yawning and stretching himself. "I've
got the proposition pretty nigh fixed. I'll take any message you like to
send O'Rane. He sent love to everybody and would like to hear from you.
There's not much time or accommodation for writing out there. Our first
camp was two blankets, a packing case and a banjo. When I went down with
fever he gave me ragtime back-numbers and stories from the 'Earthly
Paradise.' The man could make his pile doing memory stunts at a dime
show. God! if I hadn't been so weak I could have laughed some. William
Morris in Central America, in a bell tent bunged up with oil samples and
quinine bottles." He glanced round the room at the shining mahogany
furniture, and his toe tested the thickness of the carpet. "Well,
good-bye," he said. "I'm pleased to have met you."
As he stood with outstretched hand, there was little enough of the
American about him for all his laboured transatlanticisms.
"Are you and he all alone?" I asked.
"God! no. Not now. We've got the off-scourings of every nation and most
of the saloons of Mexico City working for us. They're a dandy lot, but
it's pretty to see O'Rane handling them. If ever you lose your faith in
human nature, come and see him licking half-castes and Gringoes into
shape. They'd string up old man Diaz and make O'Rane president for the
asking. Well, I must be going."
"Look here," I said, as we shook hands again, "you must come and dine
with me----"
He stopped me with a shake of the head.
"Thanks. I don't show up in the West End by day. I spend my mornings
down town--Mincing Lane way--and then I retire up stage. 'Sides, I'm due
to sail on Friday if I can get fixed by then."
I walked with him to the front door and watched him appreciatively
sniffing the early morning air.
"Good old London!" he exclaimed, and then with a return of his former
sneering arrogance, "D'you ever see X----?"
The name he mentioned was borne by a well-known Permanent
Under-Secretary in one of the Government offices. He was a regular
visitor at my uncle's house.
"And his wife?" Morris pursued. "Well, next time you run across her,
just tell her that all's well in the New World. Good-bye."
When I had finished my story, Loring threw away the stump of his cigar
and stretched himself.
"As I told you earlier in the evening," he observed, "the little man has
been born about three centuries too late."
IV
I always regarded Loring as the possessor of one sterling quality.
Selfish he might be, or indolent, or inconsiderate, an old maid in his
fussy little rules of everyday existence and an incurable romantic in
his attitude to the life of the twentieth century. With it all he was a
man of his word. Under blackmail he had pledged himself to entertain my
French journalists, and when the time came for fulfilling the pledge he
smiled welcome on them in the hall of House of Steynes.
Indeed, so admirable was his manner that I retired unreluctantly from
competition. Raney's messenger, the self-styled "James Morris," had
called on me in June; the evangelists of Universal Brotherhood arrived
in July, and for more sweltering weeks than I like to count, mine was
the privilege of giving them tea and speeches on the Terrace, escorting
them in unsuitable clothes to Goodwood and more speeches and
misinforming them on subjects of historical interest in Westminster
Abbey and St. Paul's--a course which afforded them opportunity of
correcting me in further speeches, to the sluggish perplexity of the
vergers.
In August, the hoarse, limp mass of us repaired to Euston and House of
Steynes. Old Lady Loring was, perhaps fortunately, with Amy at
Baden-Baden, though four days can be interminably long even in a
bachelor party. Our host, however, put his heart into the work; with a
grim thoroughness we visited Holyrood and Arthur's Seat, the Highlands
and Islands and dismissed our guests fraternally with the clang of Clyde
hammers resounding in their ears and an obstinate conviction that they
had enjoyed themselves.
"And now," said Loring to my uncle as we walked out of the Waverley
Station, "now for an All-British holiday. You can stay another week,
sir? No women till my mother comes back--I thought that would appeal to
you. You, George? Then the only thing to do is to find a telegraph
office and invite everybody we can think of."
Two days later, by persuasion on our part and perjury on theirs, we had
snatched a dozen men from the same number of protesting hostesses. Tom
Dainton was on his honeymoon--surely the least romantic of its kind for
anyone who knew Tom or could imagine an ox-eyed wife yet more silent
than himself!--but Sam came up to say good-bye before sailing for India
with his regiment, and we had the luck to catch Mayhew on leave from
Budapest. Summertown escaped the vigilance of his Colonel for half the
time, and Arden telegraphed at some expense: "One resents these short
notices but if one can be assured that the Waterloo brandy is not yet
finished one may perhaps sacrifice oneself for one's friends but one
cannot allow ones' acceptance to be taken as establishing a precedent."
The party was a rare antidote for anyone suffering from too much House
of Commons and general propaganda. We bathed and lay about in long
chairs and bathed again and enjoyed the delicious, lazy conversation
wherein the speakers fall half asleep between the drawling sentences,
and nobody makes epigrams or debating points, and nothing matters.
Valentine Arden, exquisite, precious and inscrutable as ever, would
unbend from time to time and speak as though he no longer feared a
charge of enthusiasm. His books were attracting considerable attention
with their sparkle and passionless satire, and his talk left the
impression on my mind that for all his youth the satire was not wholly
cheap effect.
He analysed contemporary literature with the eyes of a man whose
profession is to study technique, emphasizing the essentially derivative
character of modern writing with its sex psychology borrowed from
France, its Pottery School and Dartmoor School imitating Hardy, its
intensive vision applied by the admirers of James. His final judgement
was depressing, for there was nothing new except Wells and Conrad and
little that was good. We were too much obsessed by our environment to
produce or care for great books. Nothing was worth achieving or
describing, unless it were an invitation to dine with royalty or a
treatise on sexual pathology.
The childlike preoccupation of grown men and women in the infinite
littleness of social life was an irresistible mark for the satire of a
man whose deliberate and effective pose was to exaggerate the fastidious
artificiality of his generation. Valentine Arden had a courageous and
altogether scornful soul. I have seen him enter the Ritz, thin and white
as an Aubrey Beardsley pierrot, in a black coat lined with heliotrope
silk. I have watched strong-minded young women humbling themselves
before him because they knew his indifference to their charms, and I
have marked the haughtiest of nervous hostesses exerting themselves to
secure his comfort. In his early days no man of my time was so
successful in getting taken at his own valuation. Later when his
position was assured, half London was civil in the expectation of
appearing in his next book; the other half in hopes of being left out.
Mayhew's riotous fancy was little subdued by twelve months in a foreign
capital devoted to special correspondence by day and the study of
Austro-Hungary's myriad tongues by night. He was hardly less omniscient
than in the old Fleet Street days when he dined with me at the Eclectic
and prefaced preposterous stories with "The Prime Minister said to me in
the Lobby only this afternoon, 'My dear Mayhew, I don't want this to go
any further, but ...'" I remember the late absorption of Bosnia and
Herzegovina left him tolerably sagacious.
"I don't think people in this country realize what a near thing it
was," he said, with a grave shake of the head. "It's a diplomatic
triumph for the old Emperor, but he'd better not try to repeat it.
Russia's got a long memory. At present she's recovering slowly from the
Japanese War and wasn't equal to taking on Austria and Germany at the
same time. Devil of it is, you never know where the thing'll stop.
Russia brings in France, France may bring us in.... It's a great pity
someone can't hold the Balkans under the sea for five minutes."
I have a fairly long memory, and five years later I quoted Mayhew's
words to him. He was honest enough to say that he had forgotten them and
that the two Balkan wars had converted him to my own belief that a
European war was too big a thing for any power to begin.
House of Steynes was an asylum from the House of Commons, but we could
not keep altogether free from politics. No one who remembers the 1909
Session will be surprised. I believe my record for divisions under the
famous Budget was equalled by two men and beaten by three. It was the
great fight of our time. I had been getting a bad name with the Whips,
and observant eyes on the opposite side were already marking me down a
possible renegade. That wicked old wire-puller, the Duchess of Ross, on
ten minutes' acquaintance at a Foreign Office reception invited me to
stay at Herrig Castle to complete the conversion. I would have accepted
in a spirit of adventure had it not been for the Budget; but any man
with one drop of Radical blood in his veins felt, as I did, that
Democracy was fighting for its life.
I shall not revive the old battle that we fought in the House and
refought with Loring. I only allude to it because of the change that
controversy wrought in his life, a change he was already beginning
resignedly to contemplate.
"There is good in all things, even your Budget," he told my uncle
ironically. "One irresponsible, hereditary legislator will be able to
retire with dignity."
"Our whole democratic development for fifty years is based on the
financial monopoly of the Commons," Bertrand answered.
To my mind the saddest effect of political life is the ease with which
even considerable intellects come to live by catch-phrases.
"That's little recommendation in my eyes, sir," Loring answered. "Come!
Come! Let's die fighting! If we let this through--to the tune of the
Land Song--there's nothing you won't be able to pass as a Money Bill.
And there's always the chance that the country may support us."
"And you'd make every future Budget fight for its life like this
one--against an irresponsible House?"