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SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

STEPHEN McKENNA

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BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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COPYRIGHT, 1917,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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TO
A VERY GALLANT LADY

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SONIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

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SONIA

At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic. When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. At his death, three months ago, I understand that his notes on the precursors of Charlemagne were almost as complete as he desired. "It is so difficult to know where to start, Mr. Oakleigh," he used to say, as I picked my steps through the litter of notebooks that cumbered his tables, chairs and floor.

Magnis componere parva. I am sensible of a like difficulty in attempting to sketch for the benefit of an eight-weeks-old godson the outlines of a world that was clattering into ruins during the twelve months anterior to his birth. Even were I desirous of writing a social history of England for the last thirty years, I should be placing myself in competition with[Pg 12] men more able and better equipped than I am to describe the politics, the diplomacy, the economics, the art and the social habits of the past generation. It is wiser to attempt nothing so comprehensive, but to limit myself to those facets of English life which I have been compelled—nolens volens—to study. Others will come after me to tell the story in its entirety; the utmost I attempt to record is circumscribed, personal reminiscence.

If, therefore, this book ever find favour in the eyes for which it was written, it will be because I have set narrow limits to my task and confined myself resolutely to those limits. For thirty years I have lived among what the world has agreed loosely to call "the Governing Classes." The title may already be obsolescent; sentence of proscription may, as I write, have been passed on those who bear it. At the lowest computation those classes will soon have changed beyond recognition in personnel, function, power and philosophy. This book may then perhaps have something of historical value in portraying a group of men and women who were at the same time my personal friends and representative of those Governing Classes in politics, journalism, commerce and society. I have drawn them as I saw them, without attempting to select or label predominant types. And if there be blank spaces on my canvas, it is to be remembered that I only set out to paint that social group with which I happened to be brought in contact.

Charles Templeton's difficulty in determining his initial date is in smaller degree my difficulty. I could give long introductory accounts of David O'Rane's wanderings before he reached England, or of Jim Loring's boyhood in Scotland, or the early phases of the Dainton fortunes. To do so, however, would involve a sacrifice of the unities of time and place; and when the work was done I should be left with the feeling that it would have been better done at first hand by O'Rane himself, or Lady Loring, or Sir Roger Dainton. It is equally difficult to know where the final line is to be drawn. Nearly a year has already passed since the events recorded in the last chapter, yet that same chapter brings no sort of finality to the career of O'Rane, and, should another hand care to use[Pg 13] them, the materials for another volume are rapidly accumulating.

I place my first chapter in the late summer of 1898, my last in August 1915. Neither date has been arbitrarily chosen.

In 1898 the month of September found me a guest of Roger Dainton at Crowley Court in the County of Hampshire.

In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.

Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black, gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his appearance.

The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library, admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more arid than "The Sportsman,"[Pg 14] "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia, aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the rule was never relaxed.

In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on Mrs. Dainton's right hand—a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,—or indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"—imperturbable, dreamy, detached and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the rest of the microcosm—his parents and masters included—found him as enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There is nothing he cannot or will do"—as Villiers, the master of the Under Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.

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At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me—a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant—a taciturn boy with a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.

The one member of the family not present was Sonia, the only daughter, who, in consideration of her eleventh birthday, had been allowed to stay up till a quarter to eight, but no later. I suppose the child got her looks from her mother, though by this time Mrs. Dainton was verging on stoutness, with a mottled skin and hair beginning to seem dry and lustreless. Sonia, with her velvety brown eyes, her white skin and her dark hair certainly owed nothing to her father, who was one of the most commonplace men I have ever met, whether in mind or appearance. Of medium height, with a weatherbeaten face and mouse-coloured hair, he was growing fleshy—with that uneven distribution of flesh that assails so many men of his age-and suggesting to an observer that eating and exercise were now moving in inverse ratio. I liked him then—as I like him still—but in looking back over seventeen years I find my regard mingled with a certain pathos; he was so ineffectual, so immature and of so uncritical a mind: above all, he was so grateful to anyone who would be polite to him in his own house.

The Entrance Examination at Melton took place the day before term, and in the afternoon Mrs. Dainton suggested that some of us should drive over to the school, inquire how Sam had fared and bring him back to Crowley Court for dinner.[Pg 16] As the others were playing tennis, Sonia and I climbed into the high four-wheeled dogcart and were slowly driven by her father up the five-mile hill that separated us from the town.

Melton is one of those places that never change. In a hundred years' time I have no doubt it will present the same appearance of warm, grey, placid beauty as on that September afternoon, when we emerged from the Forest to find the school standing out against the setting sun like a group of temples on a modern Acropolis. Leaving the dogcart at the "Raven," we covered the last half mile on foot, and, while Dainton called on the Head, I took Sonia to Big Gateway and led her on a tour of inspection round the school. After seventeen years and for all its familiarity I can recall the beauty of the scene in its unwonted holiday desolation. Standing in the Gateway with our faces to the north, we had College to our right and the Head's house to our left; on the eastern, western and northern sides of the Great Court lay the nine boarding-houses, and through the middle of Matheson's, in line with Big Gateway, ran the Norman tunnel leading to Cloisters, Chapel and Great School.

It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk, and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.

Leaving Matheson's we strolled through Cloisters, and I pointed out the bachelor masters' quarters on one side and on the other the famous "Fighting Green," in which no fights had[Pg 17] taken place within human memory. We put our heads inside Chapel, crossed into Great School and walked its length to the dais where stood Ockley's Chair, Bishop Adam's Birch Table and the carved seats of the Monitorial Council running in a half-circle like the places of the priests in the Theatre of Dionysus. I was still descanting on the dignity of that same Council, of which I had lately become a member, when a bell rang faintly in the distance, and we had to retrace our steps to meet the Entrance Examination candidates, who were pouring out of School Library and scattering in search of their anxious parents or guardians.

Sam Dainton headed the stream of inky-fingered twelve-year-olds, only pausing in his precipitant course down School Steps to roll his examination paper into a hard ball and thrust it inside the collar of a smaller, unknown and—so far as I could see—entirely inoffensive fellow-candidate.

"How did you get on?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, I dunno," Sam answered modestly; and then to me, "I say, Oakleigh, who were Abana and Pharpar?"

I made some discreet reference to the rivers of Damascus.

"Golly!" he moaned, with a face of woe. "I said they were the jewels in the breastplate of the High Priest. Never mind. Can't be helped. The chap in front of me said they were Eli's two sons, but that's rot, 'cos they were Gog and Magog. I got that right. Did you come over alone?"

"Your father's here," I said. "He's bribing Burgess not to read your papers. We'd better get back to Big Gateway."

We were half-way across Great Court when one of the Head's library windows opened, and Burgess, with his quaint, mannered courtesy, asked permission to have a word with me if I could spare him the time. I entered what was then, and probably is still, the untidiest room in England. Since the death of his wife ten years before, Burgess had ruled, or been ruled, with the aid of a capable housekeeper whose tenure of office depended on her undertaking never to touch a book or paper in the gloomy, low-ceilinged library. From that bargain she can never have departed. Overflowing the shelves and tables, piled up in the embrasures of the windows, littered[Pg 18] carelessly in fireplace or wastepaper basket, lay ten years' accumulation of reports, complaints, presentation copies, text-books, magazines and daily papers.

"Some day it must all be swept and garnished, laddie," he would say when the last of twelve unsmokable pipes had disappeared behind the coal box. "But I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world.... Never take to smoking, laddie; it's a vile, unclean practice." And pending the day when the Augean stable was to be cleansed, he would walk down to Grantham's, the big Melton bookseller, cram the pockets of his cassock with new books, pick his way slowly back to the school, reading as rapidly as his tobacco-stained forefinger could hack the pages, and drop the newest acquisition in the handiest corner of the dusty, dim library.

"Laddie, there is a stranger within our gates, seeking admittance. He will not be denied."

Burgess's meaning was seldom to be grasped in his first or second sentence. I waited while he fumbled for a pipe in the pocket of the old silk cassock, without which none of us had ever seen him. By 1898, at the age of five-and-fifty, his physical appearance had run through the gamut of its changes and become fixed. When last we met, seventeen years later, his body was no more thin or bent, his face no more cadaverous, his brown eyes no more melancholy, his voice no more tired and his long white hair no whit less thick than on that September afternoon. And thus he will remain till a puff of wind stronger than the generality blows away the ascetic, wasted frame, and the gentle, sing-song voice is heard no more.

"Where is the divinity that doth hedge a king about?" he demanded of Dainton, or me, or the world at large. "I sat in this, my Holy Place, when a serving-man told me that one stood without and would have speech with me. I bade him begone. 'He insists,' said my serving-man." Burgess sighed and gently shrugged his shoulders. "The sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. I bade him enter, and there came to me a lad no bigger than a man's hand. 'Thy name and business, laddie?' I asked. He told me he was known to men as[Pg 19] 'David O'Rane,' a wanderer for the first time setting foot in the Promised Land. His speech was the speech of men in far places, who go down to the sea in ships and behold the wonders of the Lord. Shortly he bade me 'See here,' and stated that he proposed to come to my old school anyway, and that was the way he regarded the proposition."

"An American, sir?" I asked.

"An Irishman from thine own Isle of Unrest, laddie," Burgess answered. "Journeying from Dan to Beersheba, and pricking through America on his way."

He paused, and Dainton asked what had happened next.

"He is fifteen years of age—a year too old by the rules. My Shibboleths were demanded of the young men at nine-thirty this morning; by the rules he is half a day too late. Rules, the laddie told me, were for ordinary men at ordinary times. 'I, at least,' I said, 'am an ordinary man.' And he smiled and held his peace. 'Who will rid me of this proud scholar?' I asked, and he answered not a word. I threw him books, and he translated them—Homer and Thucydides and the dark places of Theocritus. 'Thou art too old, laddie,' I told him, 'for me to take thee in.' He walked to the door and I asked him whither he went. 'To a decent school,' he made answer. 'No decent school will take Melton's rejections,' I told him. 'Then let them share Melton's shame,' he rejoined. I bade him tarry and tell me of his wanderings. He sits within."

Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more matches.

"Are you admitting him, sir?" I asked.

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"

Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned to address me.

"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just[Pg 20] man, I would place him in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag—like Dainton minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules. He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed secretly with thee, laddie, and, when thou goest hence to thine own place, lo! it will be forgotten as a dream that is past."

I bowed in acquiescence.

"Forget not this one thing," he added. "He is a stranger within our gates, having neither kith nor kin. Much will he teach us; somewhat, maybe, can we teach him. Make his path smooth, laddie."

"I'll do my best, sir," I promised. "Where's he going to be till term begins?"

"The Lord will provide," answered Burgess absently. It was his invariable formula when at a loss for a more suitable reply.

Dainton rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Look here, Dr. Burgess," he suggested. "Why shouldn't I take charge of him for a night and a day?"

Burgess eyed him thoughtfully.

"A night and a day are twenty-four hours," he said.

"We shall be nine to one," answered Dainton reassuringly.

"You have not seen him yet."

Burgess rose from his chair and rang the bell. A moment later the door opened, and O'Rane entered the library. He was a boy of medium height with black hair parted in the middle, after the American fashion, unusually large black eyes and bronzed face and hands. Though the black eyes sometimes lost their dreaminess and became charged with sudden passion, though the sunken cheeks and sharply outlined bones of the face gave him something of a starving animal's desperation, the reality was considerably less formidable than I had imagined from Burgess's description. In manner he was a curious mixture of the old and new. On being introduced, he drew himself up and clicked his heels, and in speaking he[Pg 21] showed a tendency to gesticulate; then without warning his voice would take on a Western drawl, and unexpected transatlanticisms would crop up in his speech.

On learning Dainton's proposal he bowed and accepted with a guarded politeness. We made our way into Great Court, found Sonia and Sam, and set out for the "Raven." On reaching home I mentioned to Loring that we had a new boy requiring a certain amount of special consideration; we span a coin, and Loring took O'Rane for a fag, while Sam was allotted to me. The stranger within our gates said little that night or next morning, though all of us tried, one after another, to engage him in conversation. The ways of the house seemed unfamiliar to him, and he wandered round thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets, rather ostentatiously avoiding any advances.

The next evening, after an early dinner, the racing omnibus was brought round to the door. Tom Dainton, looking like a prize-fighter with his bony, red face and vast double-breasted overcoat, clambered on to the box-seat; Loring, recumbent in an arm-chair till the last possible moment, dragged his sleepy, long body upright and climbed, with a drowsy protest, to Tom's side; Sutcliffe, with his shock of red hair bared to the night and his spectacles gleaming in the light of the lamps, hurried the immaculate and aesthetic Draycott into place and scrambled up behind him. Sam, overcome with sudden timidity and a sense that the familiar was fading past recall, kissed his mother and mounted shyly, indicating a vacant seat for O'Rane. I stayed behind to check the luggage, unearth the coach-horn and wave good-bye, then leapt on the back step and gave the signal for departure.

As we started down the drive at a canter, our hosts stood silhouetted against the lights of the hall. Dainton removed one hand from the torn pocket of the old shooting-jacket and waved farewell; Mrs. Dainton bowed majestically; Sonia, bare-legged and sandalled, with a gold bracelet round one ankle and the face of a Sistine Madonna, raised both hands to her lips and blew a cloud of tempestuous kisses.

Loring turned encouragingly to Sam.

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"My lad, I wouldn't be in your shoes for a thousand pounds this coming year."

Sam smiled without conviction.

"The tumbril passed rapidly down the Rue St. Honoré," Loring went on, "amid the jeers of the populace. This day's victims included the younger Dainton and the emigré O'Rane. Both preserved an attitude of stoical indifference till they came in sight of the Place de la Revolution, when Dainton broke down and wept piteously...."

"I didn't," said Sam indignantly.

Loring laughed to himself.

"Cheer up, Sambo," he said. "You're not really to be pitied. O'Rane's going to be my fag."

"Poor brute," said Draycott.

"Who? O'Rane or me?"

"O'Rane, of course."

Loring smiled round the company, turned in his seat and composed himself for slumber. O'Rane looked with interest and a shade of defiance from one face to another.

The first few days of the school year were always a busy time for the seniors. Matheson, a mild-eyed mathematician in Holy Orders, with a family defying even his powers of enumeration, observed the wholesome principle of leaving the monitors to take care of his house—a task which, I can say after six years' experience, one generation after another performed with efficiency, justice and a sense of responsibility. His official duties, so far as we could see, were confined to carving the joints at luncheon, giving leave-out, wandering in a transient, embarrassed fashion round Hall when the monitors were taking prep., and scrawling his endorsement of his colleagues' scurrility and invective at the foot of the monthly reports.

When not in form nor engaged in one or other of these[Pg 23] functions, he retired to a faded study and struggled with the weekly acrostic in "Vanity Fair." Once each season, when the Cup Team had successfully challenged all comers for possession of the shield, Matheson would emerge dazedly from the half-light, summon the house to a supper in Hall, and after a prodigal distribution of steak-and-kidney pie, ham, tongue, cold fowl, brawn, jelly, meringues, jam roll, lemonade and diluted claret-cup, hold forth with shining eyes and throbbing voice on the glories of British Sport and the umbilical connection between the playing fields of Eton and the battle of Waterloo. It was always a tour-de-force of simple-minded sincerity; he spoke as one whose heart was stirred to its depths by the growing glories of his house. And we cheered encouragingly and thought the better of him for it.

There was little opportunity of making O'Rane's path smooth in the early days. At Loring's orders and in accordance with the immemorial "Substance and Shadow" institution, O'Rane was set at the feet of a senior fag, by name Mayhew, with instructions to learn all that was to be learned during his days of sanctuary. For a fortnight no master could send him to Detention School nor give him lines; he could dodge every practice game on Little End, wear button boots, break bounds, refuse to fag, cut roll-call, or talk in prep. with complete physical impunity. At the end of the second week he had theoretically tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Ignorance of rules could no longer be pleaded in extenuation of their breach, and justice went untempered by mercy, save in that no boy could be thrashed twice in ten days without written authorization from his housemaster or the Head.

On the last evening of grace I was seated in Loring's study after prep. when Mayhew came in with the cocoa saucepan and cups.

"Does O'Rane know the rules now?" Loring asked. "I haven't seen him on Little End so far."

"I think I've told him everything," Mayhew answered.

"Has he got his footer change yet?"

Mayhew hesitated in some embarrassment.

"He hadn't the last time I talked to him about it."

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"He must look sharp," said Loring. "Four times next week, or—he knows the penalty."

Mayhew nodded, and the subject was dropped for a week. Then I was summoned to a Monitors' Meeting. Loring, as ever, lay full length on the floor in front of his fire, Tom Dainton sprawled in the arm-chair, little Draycott swung his legs in their carefully creased trousers from one corner of the table, and I occupied the only vacant seat in the window.

"About this fellow O'Rane," yawned Loring from the hearthrug. "He's cut Little End all this week, so I propose to have him up and inquire the reason. If none's forthcoming, he must die the death. All agreed?"

He dragged himself to his feet, picked his cane from the wastepaper basket and dealt two echoing blows to the lower panels of the door. The studies in Matheson's were in a line, opening out of the long Hall where the juniors lived and worked and ragged and had their lockers. Two kicks on a study door meant that the monitor inside required a fag, and it was the business of the junior in Hall at that moment—"lag of Hall," as he was called—to eliminate time and space in answering the summons. Two blows of a cane indicated a potential execution. A sudden silence descended on Hall; two light feet jumped over a form, there was a hurried knocking, and a breathless, scared junior thrust his head in at the door.

"Send O'Rane here."

Through the hushed Hall a sigh of relief went up from the forty odd boys who were not O'Rane. The name was shouted by one after another, like the summons of a witness in Court. "O'Rane! O'Rane! Spitfire, you're wanted! What's it for, Spitfire? Hurry up, they're muck sick if you keep 'em waiting!" Mayhew's voice sympathetically murmured, "Bad luck, old man!" Then there came a second knock at the door.

Loring stood with his back to the fire, bending his cane into an arc round one knee.

"Have you been down to Little End this week?" he asked.

"No."

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"You know you have to go four times a week?"

"Yes."

"Have you leave off from Matheson?"

"No."

"Do you wish to appeal?"

Within living memory no boy in Matheson's had ever exercised his right of appeal—a tribute, I hope, to the substantial justice of succeeding generations of monitors. O'Rane looked round at the four of us with a mixture of sullenness and timidity in his expressive black eyes.

"Guess I'm up against some blamed rule?" he hazarded.

Loring nodded.

"Then there's mighty little use in plaguing old man Matheson."

Loring threw his cane over to Draycott, the captain of football. "Clear Hall," he said to O'Rane.

On receipt of the order there was a scuffling of feet as forty boys jumped up from tables, forms and window-seats. "Clear Hall" was taken up as the marching refrain, and, as the monitors filed in by one door, the last stragglers hurried out by the other, and eighty critical, experienced ears were expectantly strained to appraise the artistry of Draycott's execution. Loring, who was equally averse from thrashing a boy or being present when another carried out the sentence, crossed the room and gazed out of the window.

It was soon over. O'Rane hurried out of Hall, breathing quickly and with rather a flushed face. As he opened the door, interested voices chorused, "Bad luck, Spitfire!" "Who did it?" "I say, you got it pretty tight, Spitfire!" "Was it Draycott? He's not bad for a beginner." We filed back to the study; the date, offence and victim's name were entered in the Black Book and initialled by Draycott, and we dispersed to our own quarters.

A week later Loring ambled into my study with the remark that O'Rane had still failed to put in an appearance on Little End.

"I don't know what's the matter with him," he said. "If he thinks by just being obstinate...." He left the sentence[Pg 26] unfinished. All his life Loring had the makings of a martinet, and when roused from his constitutional lethargy could himself be as obstinate as most people. "He's laying up trouble for his little self when the week's out, if he isn't careful."

"What sort of a fag is he?" I asked.

"Oh, not bad. Always looks as if he'd like to throw the boots at my head instead of taking 'em to the boot-room. That's just his fun, though—the playful way of the vengeful Celt. The only thing I care about is that he takes them there."

"I expect he'll shake down in time," I said.

Loring shrugged his shoulders and yawned. "He's pretty generally barred in Hall. Never speaks to anyone, and, if anyone speaks to him, it usually ends in a scrap. He's got the temper of the very devil. The best thing that could happen to him would be if twenty of them sat on his head and ragged him scientifically, just to show him he's not God Almighty's elder brother, even if he did get into the Under Sixth straight away."

The end of the week showed no improvement, and O'Rane was once more had up and thrashed. A fortnight later the procedure was faithfully repeated. It was a Saturday night, and when execution had been done, I stayed behind in Loring's study after Draycott and Dainton had left us. There was no prep., and the juniors were reading, fighting, singing, and roasting chestnuts till prayer-time.

"You know I'm about sick of this," remarked Loring, meditatively stirring the fire with the richly carved leg of a chair purloined from Draycott's study.

"O'Rane?" I asked.

"Yes; Dainton pretty well cut him in two to-night. It's like hitting a girl."

"He's a tough little beast," I remarked for want of something better to say.

"He's a pig-headed little devil," Loring rejoined irritably. "What does he think he gains by it? Does he imagine we shall get tired of it in time?"

"Don't ask me," I said.

He rolled over on one side and banged the door with the[Pg 27] chair-leg. "Send O'Rane here," he said, when a fag answered the summons, and to me as the door closed, "I propose to ask him."

O'Rane, when he appeared, looked white and tired, but there was a sullen, smouldering fire in his dark eyes, and his under-lip was thrust truculently forward. Silently he put the saucepan on the fire, produced cocoa and a cake from one of the cupboards and set about opening a fresh tin of condensed milk.

"Is there anything else you want?" he asked, when the task was finished.

"Yes; I should like a moment's conversation with you. Take the arm-chair."

Silently the order was obeyed. As I looked at the thin wrists and ankles, the slight frame made the slighter by the loose American-cut trousers, I appreciated the justice of Loring's remark about 'hitting a girl.'

"What have I done now?" he asked wearily.

Loring propped his back against the wall.

"Look here, young man, does it amuse you to be thrashed once in ten days?"

O'Rane's eyes burned with defiance.

"Guess I can hold out as long as you."

"That wasn't my question," said Loring. "Does it ...?"

"D'you think it amuses anyone to be thrashed by Dainton?"

"No. And it doesn't amuse Dainton to thrash you, or the rest of us to have to look on. I don't know whether you think you'll tire us out. If you do, it's only fair to warn you that as long as I am head of this house I propose to see that the rules are obeyed."

O'Rane rose from his chair as though the interview were ending.

"Guess I've stuck out worse than this in my time," he observed.

Loring waved him back to his chair. "What's the difficulty?" he demanded. "Why won't you play footer like everybody else?"

O'Rane snorted contemptuously.

[Pg 28]

"I came here to be educated, not to kick a dime ball about."

We were in the days prior to "Stalky and Co."; "The Islanders" lay in the womb of time; never before had I heard public-school sport criticized, at any rate inside a public school. Loring expounded the approved defence of games: their benefit to health, the fostering of a communal spirit, good temper in defeat, moderation in triumph. For a man who had abandoned Big Side on the day when attendance there ceased to be compulsory for him, the exposition was astonishingly eloquent.

"Guess I didn't come here for that," was all O'Rane would answer.

"Afraid you'll find it's one of the incidentals," Loring rejoined. "I've been through it, Oakleigh's been through it, we've all been through it. It's part of the discipline of the place—like fagging. You don't refuse to do that."

"I'd cleaned a saucepan or two before I came here. 'Sides, that doesn't take time like footling away an afternoon on Little End."

Loring sat with his chin on his knees, perpending his next words. I took occasion to ask how O'Rane spent his precious afternoons.

"In the library mostly. Sometimes in the town hall. Old man Burgess gave me leave."

"What in the name of fortune d'you find to do there?" I asked.

"It's the only place hereabouts where they keep continental papers. I've got some leeway to make up."

We sat in silence till the saucepan boiled, and Loring started handing round the cocoa.

"Then we're to have a repetition of this business every ten days till you get into the Sixth? Tell me—frankly—are you enjoying yourself here?"

"Reckon I didn't come here to enjoy myself."

Loring sighed impatiently.

"Do, for the Lord's sake, stick to the question," he said.

O'Rane's lips curled in a sneer that was almost audible before he spoke.

"I'm having a real bully time in a nickle-plated public[Pg 29] school with the English aristocracy crawling round like ants on a side-walk." The words poured out in a single breath. "Guess I can't help enjoying myself."

"D'you get on well with the other fellows?"

"Would you get on well in the middle of a flock of sheep?"

Loring shook his head with a gesture of despair.

"You know, you're not giving yourself a fair chance," he told him. "What's the point of going through life with your hand against every man?"

"And every man's hand against me."

"I dare say. Whose fault is it, you silly ass?"

O'Rane laughed ironically.

"Mine without a doubt."

Loring tried a fresh cast.

"How d'you get on with Villiers?" he asked.

"Like oil and water. He sees fit to make fun of me before the form—says I can't talk English because I say 'grass' and not 'grarse' like the sheep. If I can't talk English, I can't—but I can talk to him in Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Gaelic and Magyar. Then he reports me to the Head."

I did my best not to laugh, but his palpable sense of injustice was sufficiently sincere to be ludicrous.

"I now understand why you go by the name of Spitfire," Loring remarked.

"The dago that first called me that has a broken thumb to remember it by."

At this moment the prayer-bell began to ring, and O'Rane jumped up from his chair. As I strolled in to prayers, Loring called down grievous curses on the race to which O'Rane and I belonged.

"What are we going to do with him, George?" he demanded. "This is mere cruelty to children."

The answer came after call-over. O'Rane passed us at the foot of the stairs on his way to Middle Dormitory. There was the ghost of a smile on his lips as he bade us good-night.

"Good-night, O'Rane," I responded.

"We shall meet in ten days' time."

[Pg 30]

Loring linked arms with me and entered Draycott's study.

"The fellow's mad, you know," he decided.

To give O'Rane his due, for nine days out of ten—or, in less diplomatic language, between thrashings—he caused us singularly little trouble. When Loring, who as a Catholic was excused Early Chapel, hurried through Hall on his way to Mass at St. Peter's, he would find O'Rane recumbent on a form in front of the fire, peacefully reading till first Roll Call. In the afternoon, when I came back from a walk, he would have changed his position, and I could be sure of finding him curled up in a window-seat with the line of his thin shoulder-blades clearly showing through his coat. As a fag Loring reported him efficient, punctual and tolerably obliging, though their conversation seldom matured into anything more than question and answer. The modus vivendi was uncomfortable, but no compromise seemed possible without a surrender of principle.

I believe Matheson descended from Olympus on one occasion and told O'Rane that such slackness in an Under-Sixth-form boy was a deplorable example to the other juniors. The irresistible reply was, of course, that leisure could be purchased at a price, and, as no one else seemed anxious to come into avoidable conflict with authority, the example could hardly be called effectively corrupting. Matheson rubbed his chin and retired to think it over; O'Rane returned, sardonically smiling, to his book.

With the rest of Hall his relations at this time were frankly hostile. Mayhew, who was too good-natured and buoyant ever to have an enemy, and Sam Dainton, whose salt he had eaten, were able to preserve a show of intimacy; between them they induced him to discontinue parting his hair in the middle, and on one Leave-out Day to walk over for[Pg 31] luncheon at Crowley Court. Almost everyone else regarded him with dislike tempered by a certain discreet fear. Conversations were conducted for his benefit in approved American dialect; knots of boys, too numerous for one man to tackle, gathered round and poured opprobrium on him when he cut the first round of the Cup Ties. Beyond possibility of doubt he was shown that the one unforgivable sin was "Side," and that he was prone to commit that sin not infrequently. More, he transgressed in unfamiliar ways. It was no ordinary question of wearing exceptional clothes, adopting a lordliness of speech, or cultivating an impressement of manner; he frankly snubbed the Hall veterans like Sinclair, who was in the Team, professed contemptuous indifference to the prestige or welfare of the house, and on at least one occasion strolled unconcernedly into the Head's library after Sunday Chapel, thereby ranking himself with the highest in the land. Theoretically Burgess was at home on Sunday evenings to anyone who cared to drop in for a talk; in practice the Sixth, and the Sixth only, conceived themselves capable of appreciating him or worthy of the privilege.

I had no idea that one boy could disgruntle a house so completely. Had his fellows been content to leave him entirely alone, their path and his would have been appreciably smoother; passive disapprobation, however, is a sterile policy for a boy to adopt, and the outspoken asides and collective imitations continued until O'Rane put himself beyond the pale of civilization by his quarrel with Sinclair.

The material for a breach had been accumulating for some time. Sinclair, an old "Colour" and the head of the previous season's bowling averages, represented tradition and the established order. He was a thick-set, bull-necked and slightly bandy-legged boy of sixteen with a complete inability to learn anything that had ever found its way into a book. For five terms he had resisted every effort of his form-master, Bracebridge, to lever him out of the Remove and on the eve of superannuation was still ranking as a junior, the object of veneration to new boys, of sympathy to those who were promoted over his head and of inarticulate [Pg 32]dissatisfaction to himself. Something was wrong with a system that left him in Hall—the school slow bowler, still technically liable to be fagged. Something was wrong, and more was required to set it right than the veneration of new boys. And then there came a new boy who boasted he had never seen cricket played and never wanted to; who cut football practice and absented himself from Cup Ties; whose lashing tongue and the blasphemous resources of a dozen languages made short work of exhortations and protests and who seemingly came to Melton with no other object than a desire to revile every institution of public-school life. It was beneath Sinclair's dignity to hover on O'Rane's flank and whistle "Yankee Doodle," but he made himself the rallying point for all sane arbiters of good taste, and indulged in immeasurable silent disapproval.

One Saturday night I was having cocoa in Draycott's study—an æsthetic room with grey paper and a large number of Meissonier artist's-proofs. For bravado—or because Matheson seldom visited a monitor's study—one shelf of his bookcase was filled with the "Yellow Book," another with Ibsen's plays, and a third with the poetry of Swinburne. My host, chiefly memorable to me in those days by reason of his violet silk socks, was dispensing hospitality, when Loring drifted sleepily in and demanded to partake of the feast.

"You must bring your own cup or have a dirty one," said Draycott, inspecting his cupboard shelves.

"Bang on the door and get one washed," Loring recommended, throwing himself on to the rug in front of the fire.

"It's no good. All the fags are over in Matheson's side, getting Leave Out for Wednesday."

"Well, bang and go on banging. They must come back some time."

Draycott kicked the door and waited. The only fags in Hall at the time were Sinclair, whose leave had been stopped for the rest of the term, and O'Rane, who was going over to Crowley Court. Sam Dainton had undertaken to get leave for both. The law and custom of the constitution were thrown into conflict, for, while custom decreed that a "school[Pg 33] Colour" was never fagged, in the eyes of the law Sinclair was technically "lag of Hall."

"Fag wanted," Sinclair murmured, hardly looking up from his imposition.

O'Rane, who had entered for the Shelton Greek verse prize and was engaged in making his fair copy, glanced casually round the room.

"I'm not lag," he observed.

At the sound of voices Draycott repeated his summons.

"I'm blowed if I go," said Sinclair. Then, as O'Rane sat bent over his copy of verses, "Go on, will you?"

O'Rane read the lines aloud, dipped his pen in the ink and began writing.

"Of course, if you want me to make you...." said Sinclair menacingly.

There was a moment's pause, both boys rose from their seats, Sinclair took a step forward, they closed. What immediately followed is not clear, but, when Draycott indignantly flung his door open and advanced into Hall, he found Sinclair sprawling on the floor and gasping out, "You're breaking my arm, damn you!" while O'Rane sat on the small of his back and twisted his arm every time the words "Damn you!" passed his lips.

"Are you lag, Sinclair?" Draycott asked, artistically dispassionate. "Take this cup down and wash it."

Sinclair rose and obeyed; O'Rane returned to his interrupted copy of verses, and that same evening after prayers both were thrashed for the comprehensive offense of "ragging."

"I hope they make it hot for that young swine," Loring remarked, as he flung his cane into the corner. Many years had gone by since a member of the Team had been thrashed,[Pg 34] but the case could not be overlooked. Feeling ran high in the studies, and a good deal higher in Hall. We could hear the Democracy working itself into a frenzy of indignation and sympathy, and the lights in Middle Dormitory had not been turned out for more than five minutes when Loring's prayer began to be answered.

We had adjourned to Tom Dainton's Spartan study—two uninhabitable chairs and a pair of boxing-gloves—and were still discussing the enormity of O'Rane's offence when a sound of scuffling made itself heard above. Then there came a thud, renewed scuffling, two more thuds, some angry voices, a fourth thud, a sharp cry—and sudden silence.

Loring leapt to his feet with anxiety in his grey eyes.

"Hope to God they haven't killed him!" he exclaimed.

We bounded up the stairs to Middle Dormitory. As our footsteps rang out on the stone floor of the passage, bare feet pattered over bare boards, and a dozen spring-mattresses creaked uneasily as their tenants leapt back into bed.

"What's all this row about?" Loring demanded, as he flung open the door.

The moonlight, flooding in through the uncurtained windows, showed us fifteen boys in bed, driven thither by an instinct older and stronger than chivalry; the sixteenth stood with his head bent over a basin, blood flowing freely from a cut on his forehead.

Loring picked his way through a jungle of scattered clothes and overturned chairs.

"What's happened, Palmer?" he asked.

"I knocked my head against the chest of drawers," was the strictly truthful answer. "It's only a scratch."

"Ragging, I suppose? Why were you out of bed after Lights Out?"

Palmer preserved a discreet silence.

"Anybody else been out of bed?" Loring demanded of the twilit room.

"Say, Loring, I guess this is my funeral," drawled O'Rane in answer. "I opened up his durned head for him."

"I was in it too," said Sinclair.

[Pg 35]

"So was I."

"So was I."

Loring turned to Palmer. "Put on a dressing-gown and go down to the matron's room. You other fellows—anyone who's been out of bed, put on his trousers and come down to my study. O'Rane and Sinclair, you stay where you are."

On the wholesale execution that followed there is no need to dwell. Castigation in bulk, for some obscure reason, was always known as a 'Regatta' at Melton, and, as Regattas went, this was celebrated on a lavish scale.

"Now I suppose I shall have to show that little beast up to Matheson," said Loring, when all was over. "And I hope Matheson'll give it to him tight. Life's not safe in the same house with him."

There was a knock at the door, and one of our late victims entered in tweed trousers, felt slippers, and pyjama jacket. The bitterness of death was past, and he smiled cheerfully.

"I say, Loring, you know, it wasn't altogether O'Rane's fault. I started it."

Loring looked at the speaker with cold surprise.

"So far as I remember, you've been dealt with."

"Yes, but I didn't want to get him into a row with Matheson. We were about ten to one."

"You seem to have come off second-best," suggested Draycott.

"I know. He's got some filthy Japanese trick. He'd take on half the school as soon as look at them. Palmer doesn't want a row on his account."

Loring meditated with his hands in his pockets. "Well, you go off to bed now, Venables," he said. "And when you get there, stay there. Good night."

There the matter ended for a time. After first Roll Call next day, Palmer embarked on a long and patient explanation of his bandaged head. He had been walking quietly down the middle of the dormitory when he caught his foot in the cord of someone else's dressing-gown. Pitching forward and [Pg 36]trying to recover his balance.... Matheson shook an uncomprehending head and hurried away to Chapel.

Public opinion in Hall rose tempestuously within measurable distance of assassination point.

The morrow of the Regatta was a Sunday. I spent the morning dutifully writing to my mother in Ireland and in the afternoon suggested to Loring that if he wished to preserve his figure he had better come for a walk with me. The bait was taken. He had a horror of becoming fat, and, though in fact no heavier than was to be expected of a man with his frame, could usually be roused from his Sunday occupation of pasting book-plates into large-paper éditions-de-luxe by a hint that his weight was rising visibly.

We crossed Great Court, span a coin at Big Gateway and chose the Forest road in the direction of Crowley. As bounds—for all but monitors—ended at the far side of the cricket ground, we anticipated an uninterrupted walk. It was a mild afternoon for the end of October, and we went at an easy pace through the town and into the half-mile belt of trees that screened Melton from the south-west wind and marked the beginning of the long hill which sloped down and down past Crowley Court and Bishop's Cross to Southampton. Mr. Gladstone had died in the May of that year, and Loring, fresh from some hasty, ill-written memoir, was full of the dream once dreamt by the youthful Gladstone in the shadow of St. Peter's, that the world might one day see again the union of all Christian Churches. The traditional and picturesque had captured his imagination as they were to capture it throughout life. He re-created the dream with rare enthusiasm until we were brought to a standstill on the farther fringe of Swanley Forest.

Anyone who is familiar with the neighbourhood of Melton knows that the Southampton road takes a sharp turn to the right at the second milestone on leaving the Forest. We had[Pg 37] pushed our way through the fallen leaves and rounded the bend, when I noticed a figure seated on the milestone. The back was turned to us, and the head was bowed as though in sleep.

Loring paused to inhale the sweet, heavy air of the pine woods.

"Humpty Dumpty will have a great fall," he remarked, "if he goes to sleep on milestones."

"It's somebody from the school," I said.

On the ground by the side of the stone lay a straw hat such as—for no conceivable reason—we were compelled to wear in all weathers. Loring moved forward and then stopped suddenly.

"Oh, my Lord!" he exclaimed. "As if we hadn't thrashed the fellow till we were tired of it!"

I took a second look. The back was bowed till the shoulder-blades stood out in two sharp points, the chin rested on the knees and two thin hands were clasped round two thinner ankles. The attitude was unmistakable, even if I had not recognized the silky black hair floating back from the forehead as the wind blew softly inland from the sea. We walked on and stopped beside him; his eyes were gazing far out over the distant Channel, and he failed to observe our approach.

"A good view," said Loring.

"She's a Royal Mail boat. Lisbon, Gib., Teneriffe, B.A., Rio." I could hardly see the ship, but a wreathing spiral of smoke, mingling with the low clouds, gave me her position. "There's been a home-bound Orient, and two P. and O.'s, and a D.O.A., oh, and one British India. Two a minute, and steaming, steaming to the uttermost parts of the earth."

He spoke in a dreamy, sing-song voice, and his soul was five thousand miles from Melton.

"Is this a usual pitch of yours?" Loring asked.

"It is. When a man wants to think and be alone with no one but his own self by.... There's days you can smell the sea, and days when the air's so clean and clear you could put out your hand and touch one of the little ships...." His voice sank almost to a whisper, " ... to show the love you[Pg 38] have for her, and the lonely, cold sea she's ploughing up into white foam."

Loring looked at me in amazement and shook his head helplessly. To him, who had at that time never set foot in Ireland, the soft and unexpected Irish intonation of O'Rane's voice conveyed nothing; he was as yet unacquainted with the Celtic luxuriance of misery.

"O'Rane!" I said.

His head turned slowly, and, as his eyes met ours, their expression was transformed. Dreaminess and melancholy rushed out of him as his spirit returned from afar; in less than a second he was English again—with occasional lapses into the cadence and phraseology of America.

"Guess I'm up against another of your everlasting rules, Loring," he said.

"The rules aren't mine," Loring returned pleasantly. "I found 'em here—five years ago. I only have to see they're kept."

"And, if I try to break them, you'll try to break me? Do you think you'll succeed?" he demanded defiantly.

Loring laughed, and by the narrowing of O'Rane's eyes I could see he did not relish laughter at his own expense.

"I've never given the matter a thought."

"In ten—in eight days' time you'll thrash me for walking two miles through Swanley Forest?"

"No—for breaking bounds. If I do thrash you. Frankly, I'm getting rather sick of it. Probably you are too. I'm going to suggest that you should accompany Oakleigh and me back to school; you're not breaking bounds if you're with us."

O'Rane looked at him for a moment, and his lip curled.

"Mediaevalism tempered by Jesuitism."

Loring smiled good-humouredly. "Not very gracious, is it? And we probably shan't agree over Jesuits."

O'Rane, to his credit, blushed.

"I apologize. I forgot you were a...."

Loring waved away the apology.

"That's all right," he said. "But why come to the oldest[Pg 39] school in England if you object to mediaevalism? Possibly you weren't consulted, but, as you are here, why not take the place as you find it, or else clear out?"

O'Rane's grip tightened on his ankles.

"I shall stay here till I'm ready for Oxford and I shall stay at Oxford till I've got everything this country can give me. Guess I've knocked about a bit in my time and somehow I was always on the underneath side. Greasy Levantines, Chinese storekeepers, American-German-Jews. I'm a bit tired of it. I want to get on top. I've seen Englishmen in most parts of the world—mostly on top—I'm going to join 'em, and get some of my own back grinding other people's faces."

Loring looked at his watch.

"If you don't want to be late for Chapel, it's time we started back. Look here, grinding other people's faces is a laudable ambition so far as it goes, but it's rather remote. How old are you? Fifteen? Well, you've got another three years here, and you can spend 'em in one of two ways. We can go on thrashing you this term at the rate of once in ten days; then you'll get into the Sixth, there won't be many rules to break, and, if you break 'em, Burgess'll sack you. That apart, you can go on living your present life, without a friend in the school, taking no share in the school, no use to man or beast. Or, on the other hand, you can make the best of a bad job and live on decent terms with your neighbours. I make no suggestion. I only ask if there's any particular point in regarding everyone as your natural enemy?"

We walked for a hundred yards or so in silence. Then O'Rane said:

"It doesn't occur to you that every man is the natural enemy of every other man?"

Loring flicked a stone out of the road with the point of his stick.

"Because it isn't true," he said.

"When there are two men and only food for one? You'd fight me to the death for that one loaf."

[Pg 40]

"In practice, yes. Theoretically, I should halve it with you. That's the sort of public-school idea."

"And it doesn't square with the practice. I'm out for the loaves before someone else gets them."

"Always assuming he isn't stronger than you," said Loring.

"Then I'll try and make myself stronger than him."

"And the end of the world will come when the strongest man has starved everyone else. A happy world, O'Rane, a happy end to it, and a glorious use of physical strength."

"That's been the world's rule so far."

"Utter bunkum!" Loring stopped and faced his antagonist. We had reached the cricket ground and the beginning of bounds, so that O'Rane no longer needed a convoy. "For the first years of your life you were so weak that it took one woman to feed you and another to put your clothes on so that you shouldn't die of exposure. On your theory there wouldn't be a woman left alive, far less a child. You must find some other answer to the riddle of existence. You can't do much with all-round hate and promiscuous throat-cutting."

"If someone takes a knife to me, I'll try to get in first blow," O'Rane persisted obstinately.

"Well, that's a slight improvement on knifing at sight. The next discovery for you to make is that your neighbours don't all want to trample on you."

O'Rane's eyes fired with sudden, vengeful passion.

"Guess you were born on top, Loring."

"Yes, I've had a very easy time." He swung his stick thoughtfully and looked up the hill at the school buildings aglow in the light of the setting sun. "But it hasn't made me want to walk on other people's faces. You see, one day the positions might be reversed, so why make enemies? Besides, there's enough misery in the world without adding to it unnecessarily. If I had any energy to spare, I might even try to reduce it. Overhaul your philosophy a bit, O'Rane." A child, bowling a hoop, ran down the road and narrowly avoided treading on my toes. Loring pressed the[Pg 41] incident into service. "On your showing, Oakleigh ought to have brained that kid, instead of which he moved politely out of the way. The strong yielding to the weak. Think it over, and you'll find life isn't a bit clear cut. It's full of inconsistencies and oppositions and compromises; we do things for the most illogical reasons. Well, you're back in bounds, and, if you like to stay, you can, and, if you prefer to go on by yourself, we shan't be offended. You're going on? All right; good-bye."

As O'Rane strode away in the twilight I complimented Loring on his discourse.

"The heavy father," he muttered. "And a fat lot of good it's done. You know, that fellow's three parts mad. What were his people thinking about, sending him here?"

"I don't think he's got any," I said.

Loring linked arms with me, and we returned to the school without the exchange of a word. As we entered Big Gateway, he observed:

"He must have been pretty well hammered by someone to get into this state."

And half-way across Great Court I heard him murmur:

"Lonely little devil."

Three days later came the second Leave-out Day of term. Loring and I had been invited over to Crowley Court, and after Roll Call we changed our clothes and assembled outside Burgess's house to await the racing omnibus that Dainton was bringing to meet us.

"Are we all here?" Tom asked, as his father came in sight, walking the horses slowly up the hill.

"O'Rane's not coming," Sam answered. "He hasn't finished his 'Shelton' yet."

"All aboard then."

We drove away through the Forest belt, made a large luncheon at Crowley Court, spent the afternoon engaged in a sanguinary ratting expedition round Dainton's farm buildings and returned to Melton in time for house prayers. When[Pg 42] we left in the morning, Sinclair and O'Rane had been seated at opposite ends of Hall, employed respectively on overdue impositions and a prize copy of verses. On our way back we passed them walking arm in arm up the hill to Big Gateway and found them, later in the evening, sharing the same form in front of the fire and talking in apparent peace.

"The age of miracles is not yet past," I said to Loring, as I went in to prayers.

"O'Rane told me they'd made it up," he answered, "when he came in to take my boots down."

A term or two later I heard the story of the reconciliation. As the last of us left the house for Leave Out, O'Rane picked up his papers, flung them into his locker and crossed to Sinclair's end of Hall.

"May I speak to you a moment?" he asked.

"It's a free country," was the uncompromising answer.

"Well, I guess there's a certain amount of unfriendliness between us. Is there any use in keeping it up?"

Sinclair looked at him in some surprise, then returned to his writing.

O'Rane sat down on the table, and Sinclair ostentatiously gathered up his books and retired to a window-seat where there was only room for one. "I'm quite happy as I am," he said.

"See here," said O'Rane, without attempting to follow him, "it's going to be a bit awkward if we live three years in the same house without speaking."

"Don't worry about me," Sinclair answered, without looking up. "I shan't be here three years."

"Well, two, if you're so blamed particular."

"Or two either. They'll fire me out at the end of this term."

O'Rane jumped down from the table and walked to the window with his hands in his pockets.

"What the deuce for?" he demanded.

"Super-ed of course, you fool."

Softly whistling, O'Rane picked up the first half-finished imposition.

[Pg 43]

"Won't you get your remove?" he asked.

"Not an earthly. I can't do their dam' stuff."

"You can do this thing: A train going forty miles an hour...."

Sinclair flamed with sudden anger.

"Oh, do, for God's sake, go away and leave me in peace," he cried. "I dare say it's all very easy for people like you...."

"But I'll show you how to do it."

"I don't want to be shown. If I've been shown once I've been shown a million times. It's no good! Bracebridge says, 'D'you follow that?' and I say, 'Yes,' and all the time I've not the foggiest conception what he's driving at."

Taking the pen from the other's hand O'Rane wrote down three lines of figures and handed Sinclair the answer.

"And what good d'you think that is?"

"I just think that this is a poorish way of spending a Leave-out Day," O'Rane answered. "If you finish the things off...."

"It's all right, my leave's stopped."

O'Rane propped Sinclair's book against the window-ledge and began writing. Outside the sun was shining in the deserted Great Court, and a southerly breeze caught up the fallen creeper leaves and blew them with a dry rustle across the grey flagstones.

"That's no reason for wasting all day over muck of this kind," he remarked. "One pipe letting water into a cistern at the rate of ten gallons a minute, and another pipe letting it out.... If you make up your mind to get a remove, guess nothing'll stop you. That's the way I regard the proposition. If you make up your mind to do any dam' thing in this world.... Turn up the answers and see if I've got it right. Our old friend the clock: when will the hands next be at right angles? Echo answers 'When?' I wonder if anybody finds the slightest use for all this bilge when once he's quit school. Turn up the answers. He's fixed. How many more have you got to do?"

"Four."

[Pg 44]

"Anything else?"

"An abstract of three chapters of Div." Sinclair had almost forgotten the quarrel and the enormity of O'Rane's "Side," and was looking with surprised admiration at the quickly moving pen.

"We'll do that this afternoon. I'll give tongue, and you can write it down. See here, surely if you can make old man Bracebridge give you—or us—decent marks every day for prep...."

"That won't help in the exams."

O'Rane worked three more problems in silence; then he said:

"We must fix the exams. somehow. I don't see it yet, but it can be done. We'll circumvent Bracebridge. And the answer is one ton, three hundredweights, no quarters, eleven pounds, twelve ounces." He threw down his pen and rose with a yawn. "Come for a walk; it's only eleven."

Sinclair felt that some expression of thanks was due from him. It was not easy to frame it, and he was still half-consciously resentful of O'Rane's unasked interference.

"Aren't you taking Leave?" he growled.

"No."

"I thought you were going home with young Dainton."

"I cried off."

A ray of light struggled fitfully through the clouds of Sinclair's brain.

"Did you stay here just to ass about with this filth?" he demanded, rather red in the face, pointing contemptuously to the pile of impositions.

"Well, as I was doing nothing...."

"Rot! Did you or did you not?"

"Yes; I did."

Sinclair meditated in an embarrassed silence; then he held out his hand.

"You know, Spitfire, you're not half such a swine as I thought," he admitted handsomely.

"Go and get your hat," O'Rane ordered. "I'll wait for you on Little End."

[Pg 45]

They walked in Swanley Forest till luncheon, returned to Matheson's for a hurried meal, and set out again along the favourite, forbidden Southampton road. As we returned from Crowley Court, we passed them between the cricket ground and Big Gateway, trudging with arms linked, tired and happy. At the porter's lodge O'Rane darted aside to inspect the notice-board.

"I wanted to see when the Shelton's had to be sent in," he explained.

"Are you going in for it?"

"I don't know. They've got to reach Burgess to-morrow. Come back to Matheson's and finish the Div."

In the still deserted Hall Sinclair sat, pen in hand, while O'Rane rapidly turned the pages of an Old Testament history and dictated an irreligious abstract. As each sheet was finished, it was blotted and placed on one side. Once O'Rane exhibited some modest sleight of hand. Sinclair had written his name at the top of a fresh piece of paper, and before anything could be added O'Rane begged him to poke the fire. On his return to the table the sheet had disappeared.

Late that night, when Leave was over, and Hall resounded with the voices of elegant young men in brown boots, coloured waistcoats and other unacademic costume, O'Rane descended with inkpot and pen to the changing-room. Seating himself on an upturned boot-basket, he produced from one pocket the foolscap sheet with Sinclair's name at the head, from another an incredibly neat fair-copy of a set of Greek Alcaics. Working quickly and in a bad light he produced a far from tidy version, with sloping lines, sprawling characters and not infrequent blots. As the prayer-bell began to ring he endorsed an envelope with the words, "Shelton Greek Verse Prize: The Rev. A. A. Burgess, Litt.D.," and dropped it into the house letter-box.

A week later the results were announced in Great School. We were assembled for prayers when Burgess walked down between the rows of chairs, mounted the dais and paused by the Birch Table. In his hand was the Honour Book, in which were entered the names of all prize-winners together with the[Pg 46] subject set and the winning composition. Leaving the book on the table, he unslung his gown from his shoulder, pulled it over his cassock and sank into the great carved chair of Ockley in the middle of the Monitorial Council, facing the school.

Sutcliffe, the captain, seated on his right, inquired if the Shelton Compositions had been judged.

Burgess answered. "Thou art not the man, laddie."

"Is it Loring?" I asked from the other side.

"The prize has not gone to my illustrious Sixth."

"O'Rane," Loring murmured, looking down the school.

"Neither to the less illustrious Under Sixth," said Burgess. He arose and strode to the Birch Table. "The result of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize is as follows: First, Sinclair. Proxime accesserunt Sutcliffe and Loring. There were twenty-three entries. I believe this is the first time the prize has been won by a member of the Remove. Sinclair will stay behind after prayers."

He stalked back to his seat, and the school, after a moment's perplexed hesitation, broke into tumultuous applause. As the name was given out I heard a whispered, "Who? Sinclair? Rot!" Yet there was no one else of that name in the school. Bracebridge spun round in his chair to gaze at his astonishing pupil, and I could see Sinclair, scarlet of face, half-rising from his seat, when Burgess threw his cassock on to the floor and intoned the "Oremus."

There was little reverence in that day's prayers. As monitor of the week I knelt in front of the Birch Table and out of the corner of my eye could see the Fourth patting Sinclair surreptitiously on the back and the Shell turning round with admiring grimaces. Burgess alone seemed unsurprised. "In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti," he intoned as I finished reading prayers. "Ire licet," he[Pg 47] called out, as I returned to his side. The lower forms filed out, till the whole of Great School below the dais was empty, and Sinclair stood blushing by the Birch Table. Burgess opened the Honour Book and ran quickly through the back pages for two years.

"This is the first school prize thou hast won, laddie?" he demanded. "Let it not be the last. Come hither, and on the tablets of thy mind record these my words. Here thou writest thy name, and here the date, and here the English and here thy polished Greek. In a fair, round hand, laddie."

He closed the book with a snap and struggled out of his gown.

"I'm ... I'm afraid there's a mistake, sir," Sinclair stammered.

"It is as thou sayest. A proparoxyton in the third line where an oxyton should have been. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life, but it may be thou wilt live to see a murrain upon the land, destroying the Scribes of Oxford and the Pharisees of Cambridge, and on that day the last Greek accent will be flung headlong into the Pit. Till that day come, thou shalt continue to pay thy tithe of mint and dill and cummin to the monks of Alexandria."

Sinclair stared at him in piteous bewilderment.

"But I never wrote those lines, sir," he protested.

"Small were thine honour, laddie, if thou hadst." He glanced at the topmost of the pile of compositions. "Of the making of blots there is no end. Wherefore I said, 'in thy fairest, roundest hand.'"

He rose to his feet and walked down school, while the rest of us followed a few paces behind. Sinclair made one last attempt.

"Sir, I don't know what an Alcaic is!"

Burgess laid a hand on his shoulder.

"When the sun of yestere'en sank to rest, laddie, I sat in judgement on these verses. And when he rose in the east this morning, lo! I laboured still at my task. Peradventure thou didst write them in thy sleep. Peradventure as in the book of 'Trilby'—nay, laddie, start not! it is no play of[Pg 48] Sophocles. But why vex the soul with idle questionings? Should thy feet bear thee to the Common Room, laddie, I pray thee ask Mr. Bracebridge to commune with me in my house. Mine eyes are dim, yet I descry a young man by the steps of the Temple. Thou sayest it is the young O'Rane? Bid him to me, an he be not taken up with higher thoughts. Good night, laddies!"

With an answering 'good night' we dispersed to our houses and left him to walk across Great Court with O'Rane.

"In the third line, laddie," I heard him beginning, "a proparoxyton where an oxyton should have been."

O'Rane looked up, unabashed, but with generous admiration.

"Didn't I make it oxyton, sir?" he asked.

"Thou didst not. And wherefore didst thou counterfeit the image and superscription of Sinclair?"

O'Rane hesitated discreetly, but, as Burgess too was silent, he elected to embark on a candid explanation.

"He wrote his name, sir, and then I bagged the paper...."

"'Bagged,' laddie? What strange tongue is this?"

"Stole, sir. I stole the paper and wrote the verses underneath. He doesn't know anything about it."

"Yet wherefore?"

O'Rane shrugged his shoulders.

"It seemed such rot—so hard on him, sir, to be super-ed just because he can't get his remove."

Burgess smoothed his beard and looked at O'Rane with tired, expressionless eyes.

"But the marks for the Shelton Prize are not taken into account in awarding removes," he said.

"No, sir, but you yourself said he was the first fellow to win the prize out of the Remove. It'll be jolly hard to super him after that."

They had crossed Great Court and were standing at the door of the Head's house.

"And thine own day of reckoning, David O'Rane? Whereof shall that be?"

O'Rane made no answer for some moments; then in a[Pg 49] tone from which he strove in vain to banish the note of disappointment:

"I've lost the prize, sir, anyway."

"Thou wilt yet be young when the season returns to us again. But thou hast made of me a mockery and a scorn in the market-place. An thou trip a second time, this place will know thee no more. Good-night, laddie."

"Good-night, sir, and thank you, sir." He lingered for a moment. "Sir...."

"Go thy ways in peace, David O'Rane."

"Sir, how did you know it was I?"

"Me, laddie, me. For thirty lean years have I wrestled with the tyranny of Miles Coverdale. Laddie, I am old and broken, but whensoever thou hast stripes laid upon thee for contumacy, whensoever thou breakest bounds or breakest heads, whensoever thou blasphemest in Pentecostal tongues, be assured that the Unsleeping Eye watcheth thee. And now Mr. Bracebridge would have speech of me."

O'Rane turned away, and Burgess addressed the newcomer.

"I'm starting an Army Class this term," he said. "I shall take Sinclair from your form."

"I didn't know he was thinking of the Army," answered Bracebridge.

Burgess fitted his latch-key into the door.

"The Lord will provide," he observed mournfully.

The episode of the Shelton Greek Verse Prize marked a turning-point in O'Rane's early career at Melton and revealed to me for the first time his resourcefulness and concentrated determination no less than his innate and unconscious love of the dramatic. The story was all over the house that evening and was to spread throughout the school next day. Ishmael found himself of a sudden venerated and courted, and to do him justice he was far too young and human to remain uninfluenced. "Spitfire" dropped into desuetude as a nickname and was replaced by "Raney"; there were no more concerted "raggings" or resultant cut heads,[Pg 50] and the former eccentricities of an outsider became the caprices of a hero. In a night and a morning O'Rane became a political leader.

The change was effected with little or no sacrifice of principle. He still came up for judgement before us once every ten days and was formally and efficiently chastised until the end of term, when he received his remove into the Sixth. The flow of his criticism was unchecked, but no longer so bitterly resented. With a little assistance from Sinclair and Mayhew, his social qualities were brought into play: we would hear his voice leading an unlawful sing-song in Middle Dormitory, occasionally he contributed to Mayhew's manuscript "Junior Mathesonian," and an echo of wild stories came to us with all the violence and bloodshed of the late Græco-Turkish War, to be followed by anecdotes of life in the Straits Settlements and Bret Harte tales of the Farther West. No one believed a half of what he said, but the stories—as stories—were good. His personality developed and lent weight to his opinions and criticism; he grew gradually more mellow, less alien in speech and habit of mind. His face became less thin, and the practice of promiscuous expectoration left him.

I was to have ocular proof of his new ascendancy before the end of the term. The evening of the last Saturday I was condemned to spend in Hall. There was a high, three-panelled board over the fireplace, carved with the names of monitors and members of either Eleven, and, as I was at that time credited with some facility in the use of a chisel, the unanimous vote of my fellows entrusted me with the arduous task of bringing the jealously guarded record up to date. Planting a chair in the fireplace, to the enduring mortification of a chestnut-roasting party, I settled to my work. The fags gradually resumed their interrupted occupations, and in the intervals of hammering I caught fragments of triangular conversation.

"I say, Raney," Palmer began, "is it true you're coming to watch the Cup Tie on Tuesday?"

O'Rane, seated for purposes of his own on the top of the[Pg 51] lockers, six feet up the side of the wall, grunted and went on reading.

"It isn't compulsory, you know," Palmer went on. "You won't be thrashed if you don't."

"Silence, canaille," O'Rane murmured.

"I suppose you know the way to Little End? Across the court and under the arch.... I'll show you, if you like. The Matheson colours are blue and white. The game's quite easy to follow. There are two goals...."

O'Rane yawned indolently, closed his book and threw it at the speaker.

"See here, sonny, you'll rupture yourself if you do too much funny-dog. I'm just coming to your dime-show to watch you beach-combers doing your stunt. And when it's all over I want you to start in and tell me what good you think you've done."

One or two voices raised themselves improvingly in defence of sport, the tradition of fair play, working for one's side and not for one's self, physical fitness and the like—much as Loring had done a few weeks earlier.

"You bat-eared lot!" was O'Rane's withering commentary.

"Everyone knows you're an unpatriotic hog," observed Venables.

"'Cos I don't kick a filthy bit of skin about in the slime? You lousy, over-fed lap-dog, a fat lot you know about patriotism! See here, Venables, what use d'you think you are? Can you ride? No. Can you shoot? No. Can you row? Can you swim? Can you save yourself a God-Almighty thrashing any time I care to foul my hands on you?"

"If you fought fair...." Venables began indignantly.

"I fight with my two hands same as you. 'Course, if you fool round with your everlasting Queensberry Rules, don't be surprised if I hitch you out of your pants and break an arm or two. And, meantime, you sit and hand out gaff about patriotism and the fine man you're growing into by playing football. All the time you know you'd be turned up and smacked if you didn't, and you don't cotton on to that. I've a good mind to take you in hand, Venables."

[Pg 52]

Mayhew, who was struggling with the current number of his paper, laid his pen down and addressed the meeting.

"Proposed that O'Rane do now shut his face," he suggested.

"Seconded!" cried Sinclair, who was lying on his back in the middle window-seat, drinking cocoa through a length of rubber tubing stolen from the laboratory.

O'Rane smiled and drummed his heels against the echoing locker doors.

"Sinks, come here!" he commanded.

There was no movement on Sinclair's part.

"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart, peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy life be labour and sorrow."

Unprotesting and under the eyes of Hall, Sinclair rolled off the window-seat and ambled round to O'Rane's corner.

"What's the row?" he demanded.

"I'm going to make a man of Venables—make men of them all," was the reply.

There was a whispered consultation, and I caught "Mud-Crushers"—contemptuous appellation of a despised Cadet Corps. "No, I'm blowed if I do," Sinclair flung up to the figure on the lockers. "I will if you will," whispered O'Rane. A moment's hesitation followed. "It'll be rather a rag," Sinclair admitted.

"We'll start on Palmer," O'Rane pronounced. "He's the biggest. Hither, Palmer."

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Palmer, still with a cross of sticking-plaster on his forehead, look up from his book.

"Go to——," he began valiantly enough, and then anticlimactically as he caught sight of me, "What d'you want?"

"Thee, laddie. Sinks and I are old men, broken with the teares and sorrows of this life. If you don't come, I don't[Pg 53] mind telling you you'll get kidney-punch in Dormitory to-night. That's better. I'm joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. Sinks is joining too. He didn't want to, but I threatened him with kidney-punch."

"More fool him," returned Palmer, preparing to go back to his book.

"Half a sec.," cried Sinclair, with a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Raney and I are joining the Mud-Crushers on Monday. If you don't join too, and recruit Cottrell, you'll get kidney-punch from us both."

Palmer looked his persecutors up and down. He was no coward and would have left enduring marks on Sinclair, but of O'Rane's disabling, Japanese methods no one had yet made beginning or end.

"But what's the good of my mucking about in a filthy uniform?" he demanded. "I'm going to be a land agent."

"Decide. Don't argue," ordered O'Rane. "Think how useful a little rifle practice will be when you're invited to murder hapless driven birds."

"But it's all rot...."

O'Rane waved him away. "If you will arrange to be in bed at 9.45 to-night, Sinks and I will give ourselves the pleasure of waiting on you."

Palmer hesitated a moment longer.

"Oh, anything for a quiet life," he exclaimed.

"Now go and recruit Venables," said O'Rane. "Sinks and I are old men, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. We should hate to be dragged into a vulgar brawl, but you may use our names as a guarantee of good faith. I saw a man killed with a kidney-punch out in Kobe once."

The recruiting was going briskly forward when I gathered up my mallet and chisel, picked the chair out of the fireplace and returned to my study. Early in life O'Rane had learned three lessons in collective psychology: a sense of humour is a strong ally; fifty sheep follow when one has butted a gap in a hedge; and the basis of democracy is that all men are entitled to see that their neighbours suffer equally with themselves.

[Pg 54]

After Third Hour on Monday a batch of forty-three recruits (the Corps was unfashionable in Matheson's) presented themselves at the door of the Armoury graded according to height. I was passing through Cloisters with Tom Dainton, and we heard Sinclair's voice leading the marching song:

The words aptly described the internal relationships of the Press Gang. The smallest fag marched under the suspicious eye of one slightly larger than himself, the slightly larger was in turn under the surveillance of a fag yet larger. There was an eleventh-hour flicker of mutiny, promptly extinguished.

"I'm hanged if I can see the fun of this," cried Venables, flinging down the pen.

Sinclair, Palmer and Cottrell had already signed and were with difficulty restrained from tearing the would-be deserter limb from limb.

"It's the damnedest silly rot I was ever mixed up with," he grumbled, as he signed his name viciously in the Recruits' Book. "Nobody but a congenital idiot like Raney——Here, Carlisle, come and sign, curse you!"

Two days later, term came to an end. My mother and sister were in Cairo, and as I did not fancy spending Christmas by myself in the wilds of the County Kerry, I had accepted Loring's invitation to stay with him in London. We were almost the last to shake little Matheson's hand and leave the house, for Loring never cared what train he took, so long as he was not hurried. He was now lying contentedly back in his arm-chair, divested of his responsibilities as Head of the house and appreciatively tasting the first savour of the holidays. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and O'Rane had just finished packing the last box of books.

"Is there anything more?" he asked, stretching his back and brushing the dust from his clothes.

"I think not, thanks. You're not a bad fag, young man. I'm quite sorry you've got into the Sixth."

[Pg 55]

"No more of our ten-day meetings," said O'Rane.

Loring half-closed his eyes.

"Believe me or not," he said, "I always regarded those meetings as a blot on our otherwise delectable friendship. Are you going home for the holidays, Spitfire?"

"I haven't got a home," O'Rane answered, with a sudden return of his old sullenness.

Loring opened his eyes and bowed apologetically.

"Sorry. I didn't know. No offence meant. What are you going to do with yourself?"

"Oh, I shall find something to do."

"Would it amuse you to stay with me any part of the time? Oakleigh's coming, in case you feel you can't stand me alone. I'll take you to a Christmas pantomime as a reward for being a good little fag."

"It's awfully kind of you, Loring." O'Rane hesitated and grew very red. "I don't think I shall have time, though."

"Not for one night, even? Loring House, Curzon Street, will find me all the holidays."

"I'm afraid I shall be working."

"Bunkum! You've not got any work to do."

"I have."

"What kind?"

The old expression of defiance battling with prolonged persecution came into O'Rane's black eyes. "If you must know," he said, "I came here with enough money for one term and I must raise some more. It's awfully kind of you, though. Good-bye. I hope you'll have a pleasant time. Good-bye, Oakleigh."

As the door closed behind him, Loring turned to me with a rueful shake of the head.

"I seem to have a genius for putting my foot into it with him," he observed.

"It couldn't be helped," I said. "He's a mysterious little animal."

Loring sat staring into the fire. At length he roused himself with the question:

"But what's he going to do with his little self? I rather[Pg 56] feel as if I'd been what he'd call a 'God-Almighty brute' to him this term. I'd no idea he was ... I wonder if the Guv'nor can do anything for him."

"I shouldn't dare," I said.

Loring stretched himself and looked for his coat and hat.

"Come along if we're going to catch the 4.10," he said. "I say, what a cheerful prospect for the little beast to look forward to, if he has to do this every holiday."

We were a small party at Loring House that Christmas. The Marquess divided his time between London and Monmouthshire according to the weather and the possibility of hunting; Lady Loring departed to San Remo with the New Year; and Lady Amy arrived spasmodically for a night and a day between visits to school friends, sometimes alone, but once with my cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, with whom at this time Loring was unblushingly in love. For the most part we had the great house to ourselves for such times as we could spare to be at home. And the arrangement suited all parties. Though devoted to his mother and sister, I always fancied there was a perplexed misunderstanding between Jim and his father. I do not suggest a want of affection, but their minds were cast in different moulds, and I sometimes wonder if the Marquess, with his zest for pleasure and society, ever found common ground with his serious, detached and incurably romantic son. Be that as it may, we had no time to get bored with our own society. Loring's passion for the theatre dated from early years, and if we went once we went five times a week for the period of the holidays. The day was not hard to get through, as we ran breakfast and luncheon into one, rode in the Park on fine afternoons and returned in time to drink a cup of tea, dress, and dine out at one or other of Loring's favourite eating-houses. Lady Amy accompanied us when she was in town,—a tall, grey-eyed, dark-haired girl of sixteen she was then, wonderfully like her good-looking brother in speech, appearance and manner,—but as a rule the two of us roamed London by ourselves.

Taken all in all, they were very pleasant holidays, though in the last seventeen years I have forgotten nine-tenths of[Pg 57] what we did or where we went. Our New Year's Eve party, however, lingers in my memory. Lord Loring took us all to supper at the Empire Hotel. It was the first time I had been there, and from our place overlooking the river we commanded the room. To this day I can recall something of the crowded, brilliantly lit scene; the little tables with their pink-shaded lights, the red uniforms of the orchestra, the waiters in their knee-breeches and silk stockings, the white shoulders of the women and the shimmer of their diamonds. Party followed party, till it seemed as if the great room could never contain them, and in the entrance-hall beyond the stairs we could see fresh parties arriving, more ermine cloaks being shed, new ranks of men settling their waistcoats and straightening their ties as they approached with an air of well-bred, bored indifference, bowing to friends here and there and working slowly forward in search of their tables.

"Not a bad sight, is it?" said Lord Loring. "They stage-manage the thing very fairly well. If only our waiter would unbend to take our orders." He looked round and caught sight of the manager with a plan of the restaurant in his hand, allotting tables and ushering parties through the narrow gangways.

"I'll catch hold of this fellow," said Jim, rising up and intercepting the manager. There was a moment's conversation, punctuated by deprecatory play of the hands and apologetic shrugging of the shoulders. "He says our man will be here in a minute. A wild Grand Duke has just arrived here from Russia and lost his suite on the way. Apparently our waiter is the only man who speaks the lingo."

Lord Loring accepted the situation and began to describe the arrangements for marking the arrival of midnight. On the first stroke of twelve all lights were to be put out; as the last died away there would be a peal of bells, limelight would be thrown on the entrance-hall, and a sledge drawn by dogs would make its appearance with a child on board to symbolize the advent of the New Year.... He interrupted his account to give the order for supper to our waiter who had at last arrived.

[Pg 58]

"Then link hands for 'Auld Lang Syne,'" added Lady Loring.

At that moment I received a disconcerting kick and looked up to find Jim gazing at the end of the table where his father was seated. I followed the direction of his eyes, saw the waiter raise his head and take the wine-list, and as he did so I caught a glimpse of his face.

In a claret-coloured livery coat, black knee-breeches and white stockings stood David O'Rane. Our eyes met, but he gave no sign of recognition and a moment later he had hurried away with an obsequious "Very good, my lord."

As we waited for our coats an hour or two later, Jim whispered, "I'm going to tell the Guv'nor. It's hardly decent, you know. A Meltonian assing about like that. The Guv'nor must get him out of it." He turned to his father. "I say, dad, did you particularly notice our waiter?"

"Yes. Rather a capable youngster, I thought."

"Well, he's ... he's...." Jim stammered unwontedly and seemed suddenly to repent his purpose.

"What about him?" asked Lord Loring.

"Oh, nothing. He comes from Melton, that's all."

"From the 'Raven'?"

"No, another place farther up the hill," Jim answered vaguely.

"Funny you should meet him here," observed Lord Loring, as he lit a cigar.

And with those words the subject was dropped.

[Pg 59]

τἡν τε γἁρ πολιν χοινἡν παρἑχομεν, χαἱ οὑχ ἑστιν ὁτε ξενηλασἱαις ἁπεἱργομἑν τινα ἡ μαθἡματος ἡ θεἁματος, ὁ μἡ χρυφθἑν ἁν τις τὡν πολεμἱων ἱδὡν ὡφεληθεἱη, πιστεὑοντες οὑ ταἱς παρασχευαἱς τὁ πλἑον χαἱ ἁπἁταις ἡ τὡ ἁφ ἡμὡν αὑτὡν ἑς τἁ ἑργα εὑψὑχψ χαἱ ἑν ταἱς παιδεἱαις οἱ μἑν ἑπιπὁνω ἁσχἡσει εὑθὑς νἑοι ὁντες τὁ ἁνδρεἱον μετἑρχονται, ἡμεἱς δἑ ἁνειμἑνως διαιτὡμενοι οὑδἑν ἡσσον ἑπἱ τοὑς ἱσοπαλεἱς χινδὑνους χωροὑμεν.—THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.

[Greek: tên te gar polin koinên parechomen, kai ouk estin hote xenêlasiais apeirgomen tina ê mathêmatos ê theamatos, ho mê kryphthen an tis tôn polemiôn idôn ôphelêtheiê, pisteuontes ou tais paraskeuais to pleon kai apatais ê tô aph' hêmôn autôn es ta erga eupsychô kai en tais paideiais hoi men epiponô askêsei euthys neoi ontes to andreion meterchontai, hêmeis de aneimenôs diaitômenoi ouden hêsson epi tous isopaleis kindynous chôroumen.]—THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.

After the tempestuous months consequent on O'Rane's arrival at Melton, the two succeeding terms were a time of slumber and peace. The omnibus study next to Prayer Room became vacant at Christmas, and on our return at the end of January we found Mayhew, Sinclair and O'Rane in possession. We found also an ominous hand-printing-press clamped on to the window-sill, and from this injudicious outcome of an uncle's Christmas largess Mayhew set himself to produce a weekly sheet rivalling "The Times" in authority, the "Spectator" in elegance, and the "Junius Letters" in pointedness of criticism and personality.

Before the term was a month old the Editor had sunk to the thankless and unclean position of compositor, while O'Rane, with his natural taste for ascendancy, poured forth an [Pg 60]effervescent stream of leaders, lampoons, parodies, dialogues, stories and poems. It was not easy for anyone of less dominant personality to get his voice heard or his pen's product read during the periods of O'Rane's midsummer madness. At such times he seemed to lose every restraint of sobriety and in a riot of high spirits would be found organizing stupendous practical jokes or subjecting the very stones of Great Court to satirical tirades in facile impromptu verse. Throughout life his vitality was amazing, and from time to time at school and Oxford it seemed as though he must break out or choke.

Thanks to the printing-press, Mayhew found the circulation of the "Junior Mathesonian" rising with each issue. I have a complete set somewhere, and to read again the ebullitions of O'Rane's untiring pen is to see again the wild, black-eyed, lean-faced, Villonesque figure of the author. He was always at enmity with someone, and the last word in each altercation is usually to be found in his weekly "Dialogues of the Damned," in which the enemy of the moment is depicted explaining to the Devil his presence in hell.

Beresford, Second Master, headed the list. As a disciplinarian who had six several times failed to secure a headmastership elsewhere, he was a formidable authority on the rules and traditions of the school and knew to a nicety exactly where Burgess's loose grip and casual methods were lowering the prestige of Melton. Without in any way opposing the existing policy of letting the Sixth run the school, Beresford gladly conceded that the Sixth should at least set an example. This, he held, was not done when one member roamed dreamily along the Southampton road and engaged in conversation with the varied, disreputable, semi-seafaring tramps who begged their way through Melton to London and on whose account the great road was put out of bounds for all juniors. Burgess declined to limit bounds farther, but supported his colleague to the extent of a few words with O'Rane—a course that strengthened Beresford's conviction that Melton was going to the dogs and sowed plentiful resentment in the breast of O'Rane.

I see no purpose in following up in detail the quarrel with[Pg 61] Greenwood (Dialogue III) over the Promenade Concert and the unexplained wrecking of No. 1 Music Room; nor with Ponsonby (Dialogue VII-) over the Freedom of the Press. The "J.M.," smudgily printed by Mayhew and ornately illustrated by Draycott, was certainly not intended to enter the shabby, panelled Common Room over Big Gateway. The internecine animosity of the great, however, is sometimes more marked than their discretion, and Hanson, who had not spoken to Grimshaw since their whist quarrel five years earlier, allowed himself to be seen in one of the bursting Common Room arm-chairs with his feet in the fender and his trousers scorching, engaged in delighted perusal of the Grimshaw Dialogue. Inasmuch as Grimshaw favoured the boys of his own house against all comers, he was unpopular, and the Grimshaw number of the "J.M." was received with grateful appreciation by all his colleagues, with the exception of Beresford, who had suffered in silence from an earlier week's attack. Succeeding issues were received with slightly less favour, as the minority of victims grew in number. With the appearance of "J.M. VII," Ponsonby decided to refer the case to Burgess and with the support of six actual fellow-sufferers and a dozen awaiting their turn, he constituted himself a deputation. The Head was sympathetic but not helpful. The paper, he pointed out, was issued only to subscribers and seemingly contained nothing of the blasphemous or obscene.

"If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness," said Burgess, "reason would that I should bear with you."

"I don't feel that any boy—let alone a Sixth-form boy—should be allowed to circulate studied insults to the Staff," rejoined Ponsonby.

"If it be a question of words and names," Burgess advised, "look ye to it."

"O'Rane's in the Sixth," Ponsonby objected. "Unless he's degraded from Sixth-form rank, what am I to do?"

Burgess affected to think deeply.

"The Lord will provide," he said.

The "Dialogues of the Damned" are an incomplete series, arrested in mid-course at No. VII; the "J.M.," however, had[Pg 62] a life of more than two years and only died when O'Rane, as captain of the school, had to edit the official "Meltonian."

A remove into the Sixth at Melton marked an epoch in most lives. There was, and is, only one Burgess in the scholastic system, and until you met him five hours a day for six days a week you could form no estimate of the range of his knowledge. Every school has its Under Sixth, its Villiers and its mixed assembly of brilliant boys awaiting their remove, mediocre boys who have come to stay and dull boys charitably piloted and tugged into the haven of rest because their housemasters do not care to make monitors of boys in the Fifth. In my time the lot of Villiers was not to be envied, for the dullards slept, the mediocre ragged, and the scholars had to do their best to snatch instruction from the ruins of Babel, assisted by a man whose boast would never have been that he was a ruler of men or an inspired teacher and whose blood almost audibly rushed to his head as he strove to maintain discipline.

Thirty years before Villiers had taken a first in Mods., and though the fine edge of his mind had lost its keenness, he held to the Mods. tradition that the Classics should be read in bulk. That, indeed, is the best thing I remember about the man or his system. We scampered through the "Odyssey," "Æneid," and plays of Sophocles at a great rate and with no attention to detail. Pure scholarship, if it ever came, was to come later, and in the meantime Villiers saved succeeding generations from the reproach levelled against a classical education—that the fruit of many years' plodding is to be measured by the assimilation of one book of Horace's Odes or a single play by Euripides. Villiers left us, and we left Villiers, with more than a smattering of great literature.

In the Sixth we read as much or as little as we pleased. Most of us had a scholarship in view, and the degree of our unpreparedness was the degree of attention with which we confined ourselves to the text. Beyond that minimum the rule was to sit and encourage Burgess to talk. Sometimes he would forget a book and, for want of fixed work, open a Lexicon and choose a word at random. He would give us[Pg 63] the childhood and old age of that word, its parents and uttermost collaterals; and from a single word he would treat of ethnology as revealed by language and comparative civilization as measured by the limits of a vocabulary. And from comparative civilization to the institutions and faiths on which a society is built up—the religion and magic that shroud the dark days of the human mind.

Even to a temperamental iconoclast such as O'Rane, I fancy Burgess came as a revelation. At the term's end he showed me a manuscript book entitled "Notes on Theophrastus." To do Burgess justice we had read three pages in thirteen weeks; the rest of the book was consecrated to obiter dicta: "The Trade Routes of Turkestan"; "Lost Processes in Stained Glass"; "The Origin of Playing Cards"; "The Margin of Error in Modern Field Artillery"; "The Institution of Arbitrage"; "The Minaret as a Feature in Architecture"; "Surgery in Mediæval China"—and a score of other subjects. Theophrastus bored us, and we decided to take him as read. The decision once adopted, there was no difficulty in keeping Burgess away from the text.

On reflection I think that O'Rane may, in his turn, have been a revelation to Burgess as much as to the rest of the form. If omniscience were the order of the day, O'Rane seems to have decided to be omniscient. It was a fixed principle with him never to bring books into form. Burgess would look wearily round and say, "O'Rane, wilt thou read from 'Protinus Aeneas celeri certare sagitta,' laddie?" And Raney, with his hands clasped behind his back and eyes gazing across to the big open fire, would recite thirty, fifty or a hundred lines as Burgess might decide, in a voice that would cause him to be taken untrained on any stage. In part it was a studied pose, in part I believe he never forgot anything he had twice read. And his memory was minutely accurate. I recall a disputation on one of Bentley's emendations of Horace; neither Burgess nor O'Rane had a book, but each was prepared to go to the stake for his own version. Sutcliffe was eventually dispatched to School Library, and a reference to the text showed that Burgess was wrong.

[Pg 64]

"Where were you before you came here?" Loring asked that evening, when O'Rane and I were sitting in his study after prayers.

"Guess I was in most places," O'Rane answered from the depths of the arm-chair and a book.

"Where were you educated, fathead? And don't 'guess,' it's a vile Americanism."

Loring affected great precision of speech.

"I—fancy—I—received—instruction—from—numerous—persons—in—a—var-i-ety—of—places." And then with a sudden blaze of light in his big eyes:

My God! 'honoured of them all!'" He stopped suddenly.

"The next time you break out, you'll get the cocoa-saucepan at your head," I warned him. "Now answer Jim's question."

O'Rane sat staring at the fire until Loring threw a wastepaper basket at him.

"If you start scrapping——" he began. "Oh, what was your dam' silly question? Dear man, I was born in Prague, and, as I never stayed six months in the same country till I came to England, you can see my education was a bit of mixed grill. Father ..." he hesitated; it was the first time I had heard him mention any relation, " ... father used to teach me a bit himself. And once or twice I had a tutor. And for the most part he used to lay on a local priest. That's why I can hardly understand the way you chaps pronounce Latin and Greek. And then the Great Interregnum, the Wanderjahre...."

"Most of your life's been that," I commented.

"Ah, I did this stunt alone—before I came here. After the war."

"The Greek War?" Loring asked.

"Surely. They killed my father, did the Turks. And when I'd buried him there was nothing much to wait for.[Pg 65] He'd given every last penny to the Greeks, so I cleared out and came to England by way of Japan and the States and a few other places. It was all valuable experience," he added, with a concentrated bitterness that made my blood run cold. When O'Rane spoke in that tone, I could imagine him primed and anxious for murder.

he went on. "'Delight of battle'! Oh, my God! These poets and modern war!"

"Did you see anything of it?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I was a kid of thirteen. I saw the—results ... when they brought my father back to the Piræus."

Loring had been lying on his back with his hands locked under his head. He roused himself now to turn on one side and face O'Rane.

"Was your father Lord O'Rane?" he asked.

Raney's face grew hard and defiant.

"He was."

Loring nodded. "When he was killed the Guv'nor noticed the name. I rather think your property marches with some of ours. You're County Longford, aren't you?"

"The property is. I, Lord Chepstow, am what you would doubtless call a bastard."

Loring sprang to his feet.

"Raney, you damned little swine——!"

"It's true!" O'Rane answered, jumping up and facing him.

"It's not true that I would ...!"

"Oh, perhaps not. But I've been called it—and by lineal descendants of the Unrepentant Thief, too. You've got nickel-plated manners, of course."

"If you were worth a curse, you'd apologize," said Loring, hotly.

O'Rane reflected.

"What for?" he demanded. "I'm not ashamed of my father, Loring."

[Pg 66]

"You'd be a pretty fair louse if you were. Don't make me lose my temper again, you little beast."

O'Rane held out his hand with a curious, embarrassed smile.

"Sorry, Loring. Is that good enough?"

"We can rub along on that."

Some years later my guardian, Bertrand Oakleigh, appeased my curiosity on the subject of the O'Rane fortunes. "The Liberator," after a crowded boyhood of agitation and intrigue, became so deeply implicated in certain acts of Fenianism that he had to leave Ireland in disguise and live abroad for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wandered from one capital to another, preaching insurrection and being disowned by the Government of his own country. When the Foreign Office papers of the period are made public, his name will be found forming the subject of heated diplomatic dispatches. As a neutral his conduct was far from correct in the Polish rising of '63 and the Balkan trouble of '76. When he lived as the guest of the exiled Louis Kossuth, pressure was brought to bear by the secret police, and he moved north into Switzerland. There he met Mrs. Raynter, one of the famous three beautiful Taverton sisters. The influence of Lord O'Rane's personality was not confined to political audiences: she lived with him for three years, and died in giving birth to a son. When Lord O'Rane himself succumbed to wounds received in the Græco-Turkish War, he was only in the fifties. The measure of his power and sway is to be found less in any positive achievement than in the terror he inspired in the less stable Governments of Europe from Russia to Spain.

Winter softened into spring, and spring lengthened into the summer that was to be my last at Melton. The few remaining months are engraved deeply on my memory as though I lived an intenser life to capture the last shreds of heritage that the school held out to me. As in a sudden mellowing I[Pg 67] found myself on terms of unexpected friendliness with people I had previously disliked or despised. Beresford—lank disciplinarian—invited me to dine in College, and revealed himself unwontedly human and well-informed on Rudyard Kipling; Ponsonby, whom I had lightly written of as a pretentious ass, proved on better acquaintance to be a man of self-paralysing shyness who lived in almost physical dread of his form; Grimshaw, most stolid of men in official life, shone without warning as a raconteur and mimic of his colleagues. I dined or breakfasted with them all, not excluding little Matheson with his unwieldy tribe of children, and we talked unbroken "shop" and disinterred old scandals and parted with a sentimental, "You'll be sorry to leave Melton?" "Very sorry, sir."

The vanity of eighteen is long dead, and I can recall with amusement that I had serious misgivings for the school's future after I should have left. For five years and more it had been all my world. I remembered the veneration with which, as a fag, I had gazed on the gladiators of the Eleven and the Witan of the Sixth—gazed and flushed with self-consciousness and shy gratification when one of them ordered me to carry his books across Great Court. In time I too had made my way into the Sixth; there was at first nothing very wonderful or dignified about the position, but by no immoderate stretch of imagination I could fancy myself venerated as I had venerated the heroes of five years before. And without doubt I looked proudly on my work in the Monitorial Council: we had been strict but not harsh, reserved but not aloof, reformers but not iconoclasts—statesmen to a man. At every point we seemed superior to our immediate predecessors, and the only bitterness in our cup was brought by the reflection that this Golden Age would so soon pass away. It was inconceivable that youngsters like Marlowe, Clayton or Dennis could fill our shoes. They were boys. I remember that Loring and I took Clayton on one side and revealed some few of the secrets of our successful rule; I remember, too, how extraordinarily Clayton resented our patronage....

The recorded history of the last two terms is meagre, but I recollect that O'Rane came twice into conflict with authority[Pg 68] before we parted. The first time was an unhappy occasion when the May-Day celebrations of the Melton carpet-makers coincided with one of his periodical outbursts. A plethoric meeting of somnolent workmen was being somewhat furtively held in the more somnolent market square; moist, earnest speakers declaimed under a hot sun to a listless audience. When Dainton and I passed through the square, oratory was getting worsted, and the meeting was summoning resolution to spend the rest of the warm May afternoon in sleep. Then O'Rane appeared galvanically from the West. And soon afterwards from the East, with dragging steps and eyes glued to his book, came Burgess in cap and cassock, his pockets swollen with the books he had bought in Grantham's.

That night O'Rane spent forty-five minutes in the Head's house—an unusual time for anything but sentence of expulsion. Loring and I were walking up and down Great Court with our watches in our hands, prepared to intercede with speeches of incredible eloquence if the worst came to the worst. Through the bright, unblinded library windows we could see Raney pleading; the back of Burgess's white head was visible above his chair, motionless, and seemingly inexorable.

"What's happened?"

The door had opened slowly and shut with a clang. O'Rane was walking towards us with a white face that belied his jaunty step.

"It's not to occur again." The anticlimax was an unintentional trick of phrasing. "Well, it won't. I can't work that lay a second time. D'you know he sacked me within five seconds of my entering the room? I—had—to—fight—for—very—life." He breathed hard, linked arms and marched us off for a walk around the Cloisters.

"Drive ahead," said Loring.

"'Laddie, thy portion is with the malefactors. Get thee gone, and walk henceforth in outer darkness.' I say, the old man's formidable when he's angry. I said nothing, and he waved me to the door. I didn't move. 'Get thee gone, laddie,' he thundered, 'and let not the sun of to-morrow rise to find thee in this place.' I asked him what I'd done; he sort of [Pg 69]suggested that I really knew all the time. I told him my version." O'Rane stopped and drew back a step with arms outstretched. "I told him I'd found that sweet May-Day meeting with potbellied whimperers gassing over an Eight Hour Day and drinking enough beer to drown 'emselves in. The May-Days I know were the ones where the mob broke up half Turin and were shot down by the soldiery: they were men with something to fight for—and ready to fight for it. These sodden voter vermin! If they'd organize with their cursed votes—if they'd fight—if they'd do anything—if they were in earnest——! My God, your English Labour!" His utterance quickened and his voice grew animated to the point of passion. "I told these scabrous dogs to put their lousy shoulders to the wheel. God knows what I didn't call 'em, but they were too sodden to mind, and I found I was speaking in French half the time. Then they got an idea I'd come over from Paris to champion them, and they cheered no end. So I taught 'em the 'Marseillaise,' and half-way through the second verse Burgess drifted into view. I told him in his library as I'm telling you here...."

"I hope to the Lord you didn't!" Loring interjected.

"I told him every last word." The Cloisters echoed with his excitement. "You bat-ears, you don't understand! He did!"

"What did he say?" I asked.

O'Rane hesitated. "He hinted that I wasn't accountable for my actions."

I burst out laughing. The words were so obviously inadequate.

"That's a curious reason for not sacking you," was Loring's comment.

O'Rane's black eyes, seemingly fixed on a gargoyle over Chapel door, were gazing into infinity.

"He said it was the Call of the Blood. And I—I—I just said nothing." His voice sank to a whisper. "I hardly understood."

The vision was for his eyes alone, and to us, uncomprehending, the rapt expression of his face and tense poise of the body was curiously disconcerting. Awkwardly self-conscious, Loring stepped forward and thrust his arm through O'Rane's.

[Pg 70]

"Pull yourself together, my son," he said.

O'Rane shook free of his arm. "You don't understand! But he did. He knew it all. There was one crossed to France in the Revolution, and him they guillotined because he was too powerful. And two died for Greece, and one went fighting for the North and the slaves. And one died by the wayside as the king's troops entered Rome. And one tended lepers in a South Pacific island." He strode up to Loring and stared him defiantly in the face. "And some day men will follow me as they never followed one of the others!"

"Come to earth, you lunatic," said Loring; and I was grateful to him for the chill banality of the words.

O'Rane turned disgustedly on his heel.

"You wouldn't understand if you lived to be a thousand," he flung back over his shoulder.

"Come back!" Loring called. "There's nothing to get shirty about."

"You've the soul of a flunkey!"

"All right; so much the worse for me."

"And anyone who's not got your own servants' half spirit you call a lunatic!"

Loring sat down on the stone seat that ran round the inner wall of Cloisters and beckoned to O'Rane to join him.

"Come and cool down a bit, Raney," he urged. "And for the Lord's sake don't make such a row or you'll bring Linden and Smollet out of their rooms."

"You've got a bourgeoise mind, Loring," said O'Rane reflectively.

"Agreed, but don't shout," Loring returned imperturbably. "I want you to tell me—quite quietly—how you prove your nobility of soul by running the risk of getting sacked for the sake of making an idiotic speech to a mob of workmen who didn't particularly want to hear you? You tell me I shall never understand, but do at least tell me what I've missed."

"A soul," O'Rane answered simply.

"It's like trying to argue with a woman," said Loring in despair.

The prayer-bell began to ring in the distance, and we made[Pg 71] our way out of the Cloisters and across Great Court. O'Rane, at the last moment, decided to stay behind, and we left him curled up on the stone seat, his thin, clean features white in the moonlight and his great deep-set eyes gazing abstractedly across Fighting Green. He was back in Matheson's for Roll Call and sauntered into my study with his hands in his pockets and a straw in his mouth. The flame of emotion had burnt itself out, and he seemed cold, tired, and a little melancholy.

"Humble apologies and all that sort of thing," he began, holding out his hand to Loring.

"You haven't told us why you did it?" I reminded him.

He wrinkled his brow and shook his head in perplexity.

"Didn't seem as if I could help it. 'Man was born free and is everywhere in chains.' I've been through a bit—trying to get enough to feed and clothe myself—and it was hell. And sometimes it all comes back to me and I want to blow the whole world up.... And sometimes I dream what a glorious thing we could make of life, even for the men who sweep the chimneys and mend the sewers.... To-day...." He shrugged his shoulders. "I'd forgotten the everlasting Press. After the kings, the nobles; after the nobles, the people; and after the people, the Press. So Burgess says. And Melton's not strong enough to stand the racket if every beach-comber with a halfpenny in his pocket can read that a Melton boy led the 'Marseillaise' in Market Square."

"Quite right, too. It gives the school a dam' bad name."

"Oh, I agree—now," he answered limply. "He told me to choose my punishment."

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I said, 'You aren't sacking me then, sir?' He said, 'Sacking, laddie? What strange tongue is this?' And then I knew I was all right. Clayton'll be captain next year. He'd have made me, otherwise. Can't be helped. And I guess I got Melton in my vest pocket most ways. Good-night, bat-ears. I'm going to bed."

As the door closed behind him Loring sighed to himself.

"If he isn't sacked for this, he'll be sacked for something else," he predicted. "I hope it won't be till I'm gone, because[Pg 72] he refreshes me. D'you remember his first term?"

"He's extraordinarily popular now," I said.

"He's the most fearless little beast I ever met. And there's such a glorious uncertainty about him. One moment he's your long-lost brother, the next he's slanging you like a pickpocket in about six languages, the next he's apologizing and shaking hands. I suppose he'll be captain the year after next. It'll be an eventful time for the school."

O'Rane's other conflict with authority was less impassioned and on a smaller scale. He had absented himself from Chapel for the better part of the term, and Burgess one day inquired the reason.

"I don't believe all the stuff they hand out there, sir."

"Have I asked thee to believe it, laddie?" demanded Burgess, who had almost ceased to expect polished diction from O'Rane.

"Well, sir, if I pretend to believe it...."

"Have I asked thee to pretend, laddie?"

"But if I go, sir, people naturally assume...."

"And how long has David O'Rane given ear to the vain repetitions of the Synagogue and Market-place?"

For the moment Raney experienced some difficulty in finding an answer. Then he said:

"I'll go if you want me to, sir."

"Laddie, thou art of an age to determine this for thyself. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. Peradventure the wisdom and truth that were taught me while I hanged yet upon my mother's breast no longer charm the ears of the younger men. Peradventure

Herein thou must walk thine own road, laddie.

An thou thinkest thou canst learn aught from the life of the man Christ Jesus, laddie, thy time will not be lost."

Thereafter O'Rane attended Chapel with assiduity until the breaking-up service on the last day.

For weeks we had been saying good-bye to Melton, dismantling our studies, packing our books, seeking our porters and groundmen to press upon them our last tip. The final morning saw us seated betimes at Leaving Breakfast—a quaint Saturnalia whereat all discipline departed and every junior in Hall was compelled to read a rimed criticism of the departing monitors. I recall that Tom Dainton, who had almost single-handed won the Cricket Shield and established Matheson's in a tenth year of unbroken tenure, received a rousing send-off; Loring and I were let down lightly, while Draycott was pointedly informed that his hair was unduly long and his clothes an eyesore.

We were allowed no reply to the chastening criticism, but acerbity was forgotten when we joined hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne" with one foot on the table. For five years to my certain knowledge the long table had collapsed annually under the unwonted strain; to break at least one leg was now part of the accepted ritual, and, though Matheson had spent money and thought on a cunning scheme of underpinning, by dint of concerted rocking and a sword-dance executed by Dainton, we wrung a groan from the ill-used board and doubled all four legs into the attitude of a kneeling camel before the bell sounded for first Roll Call.

My last Chapel was Loring's first. Catholic or no he felt the service was not to be missed. We sat side by side, and determined there should be none of the foolish weakness exhibited by other generations of leaving monitors. Yet as the organ started to play the last hymn, he failed to rise, and, as[Pg 74] voices all around me began to sing, "Lead, Kindly Light," I found I could not join in.

From Chapel we went to Big School for our last Roll Call. The prize compositions of the year were read aloud, and the scholarship results at Oxford and Cambridge announced. There followed a long distribution of gilt-edged, calf-bound books; three malefactors were led to Bishop Adam's Birch Table and flicked publicly across the back of the hand; there remained but one thing more.

"School Monitors!" Burgess called out.

All ten of us lined up facing the Council with our backs to the school. The birch was handed to Sutcliffe, who reversed it restored it to Burgess and returned—divested of authority—to Second Monitor's seat. The ritual was repeated with the other nine, and Burgess called up the new monitors. To each of them the birch was handed and by each returned. Then Clayton, the Captain-Elect, rose from Sutcliffe's old seat, advanced to the edge of the dais, knelt down in front of the Birch Table, facing the school, and read the old Latin prayers that—despite their taint of popery—Queen Elizabeth had authorized us to continue, always provided we dropped the monkish pronunciation.

The last scene was laid in Burgess's library, where each of us was presented with a copy of Browning's "Men and Women."

"Peradventure ye have heard his words upon my lips ere now," he said. "Laddie, these partings like me not. I am an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world, yet it may be that in this transitory life an old man's counsel may avail you in the dark places of the earth. Come to me, laddies, if ye judge not an old man's arm to be too weak to help you. At this time and in this place will I say but this: Sutcliffe, thou wilt consume thy days weighing the jots and tittles of learning. Therein is thine heart buried, and I do not gainsay thee. Dainton, thou shalt be known in Judah as a mighty man of valour. Thou art ceasing to be a child and must put away childish things. Hearken no more to the voice of children playing in the market-place; gird thee for battle to be[Pg 75] a soldier of the Lord. Oakleigh, thine heart melteth away and becometh water all too easily. Thou hast riches and learning, but little singleness of purpose. Not for thee the dust of the arena—thou art too prone to hesitate and weigh thy doubt. Best canst thou serve thy neighbour by girding on the harness of others; thou hast friends and kinsmen in the first places of the Synagogue: succour them."

He looked at Loring and paused. "Laddie, I could have made of thee a scholar, but thou wouldst not. Thou canst be a statesman, but thou wilt not. The illusion of a great position surrounds thee, and thou art content to gather in thy vessels of gold and silver, thine ivory and peacocks, thy choice books and paintings. Anon thou wilt awaken and question thyself, saying, 'Wherefore have I lived?' Ere that day come I counsel thee to journey to a far country on an embassage from thy soveran lord. I charge thee to scorn the delights of Babylon lest, in the empty show of Kingship, the vanity of gorgeous apparel, the uttering of words in thy Council of Elders, thou conceive that thy duty to God and to thy neighbour hath been fulfilled. Laddies, an old man's blessing goeth with you."

And thus we were taught and fitted to be rulers of men.

As the London train steamed away from Melton Station, Loring leant out of the carriage window for a last sight of the school buildings clustering white in the July sunshine on the crest of the hill. Secretly I believe we were both feeling what a strange place Melton would be without us.

"Six years, old son!" he observed, drawing his head in. "Dam' good years they were, too. Wonder how long it'll be before you Radicals abolish places like this."

"There are lots of other things I'd abolish first," I said. It was a mental convention with Loring to regard me as a jaundiced, fanatical Marat, and with the argumentativeness of youth I played up to his lead.

"What good has Melton done?" he challenged.

[Pg 76]

At one time my faith in public schools was such that I generously pitied anyone who had struggled to manhood in outer darkness. Infirmity of judgement or approaching middle age make it daily harder for me to divide the institutions of the world into the Absolutely Good or the Utterly Bad. It is probably wise to raise up a class of men who shall be educated and not technically instructed—wide horizons and an infinite capacity for learning constitute an aim sufficiently exalted. That was the aim of Melton, and we were well educated within narrow limits that excluded modern history, economics, English literature, science and modern languages. We never strove to be practical and had a pathetic belief in the validity of pure scholarship as an equipment for life.

I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy, subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is adequate—conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her public schools.

The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of co-ordination and discipline—as other nations may perhaps learn those same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought up to the public-school standard of conduct.

No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class, will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness and its pragmatical efficiency. I never[Pg 77] 'sneaked' though the price of silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor, though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff, though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other, and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the challenge.

There is no Radicalism in schools—I had no business to use the word. After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles, "but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on."

In moments of uncritical pride I judge the tree by its fruit. It is the public school men, grumbling at their work, who—shall we say?—govern the Indian Empire, with resentment of praise from others and no thoughts of praising themselves. Versatile, light-hearted and infinitely resourceful if cholera sweep the land, they will step from one dead man's shoes to another's and leave a village to govern a province. Haggard and drawn with long weeks of eighteen-hour days, they will yet find time to mistrust the man who is not of their race or speech or school and growl at him who offends by his clothes[Pg 78] or enthusiasm or aspirates. And the Indian Empire goes afresh to perdition with every new fall in the rupee or change in the colour of the Government minute paper. In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his fellows will come out on strike.

"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.

In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. At eighteen everything seemed so easy: the world was blind but not selfish—except for the high and dry Tories who were to be quietly put out of the way if they proved obdurate; everyone else would yield to reason—and my eloquence.

The favourite vision was a crowded meeting swayed to laughter or tears or passion by my words—a memory of Mr. Gladstone's last public speech on the Armenian atrocities. At other times when my Irish fluency had been too rudely interrupted, I pictured myself as heir to Parnell's heritage of masterful silence. Cold, inflexible, contemptuous—I had seen him in Dublin when I was a boy of seven, and externals counted for so much that will-power seemed a matter of compressed lips and folded arms. I was but eighteen, and my Radicalism a matter of inheritance rather than conviction. It took years of painful disillusionment to discover how much fanaticism is required to shake the resolution of others; and years more to find how completely I was lacking in it. One morning, when I had attempted to catch the Speaker's eye some fourteen times in the course of an all-night sitting, I walked out of the House and spent the day asleep in a Turkish bath; on waking I recalled Burgess's words, "Not for thee the dust of the arena, laddie." The superman vision was at last dispelled.

"Well, I had a dam' good time there," I said to Loring, by way of closing the Melton debate.

[Pg 79]

In common with many others Loring drew pleadings against Radicalism which would have delighted a lawyer. To begin with, there were no such people as Radicals—he at any rate had never met them. The professed Radicals of his acquaintance were a handful of mere agitators, misleading a too credulous electorate that was not yet fit to exercise the franchise; morally the Radical party was negligible because its sole ambition was, by sheer force of numbers, to take away anything anybody had got—he for one would never acquiesce in confiscation merely because a majority voted it. Then in our arguments I would confront him with the Will of the People—for some strange reason only capable of interpretation by Radicals. The phrase had a curious hypnotic effect on us both, for he would invariably retaliate with the statement that the sole custodians of the People's Will were to be found in the House of Lords. And infallibly we would both lose our tempers over the first Home Rule Bill.

"At heart you're quite sound," he was good enough to say on this occasion.

On reaching London we drove to Loring House, where I spent the night before crossing to Ireland. A month later we met for Horse Show week. Loring stayed with me, and we went to Dublin together to join the Hunter-Oakleighs, who were cousins of mine and at this time head of the Catholic branch of the family. Half-way through September I put in a week at House of Steynes, and was not surprised to find that Loring had included my cousin Violet in the party. In the first week of October we returned to London, picked up Draycott, who had spent a stifling summer, loose-tied and low-collared, in the Quarter Latin, and descended upon Oxford to order the decoration of our rooms.

Draycott had been banished to Old Library, to his present disgust and subsequent reconciliation, and allotted a gloomy first-floor set which for the next three years was the scene of "Planchette" séances and roulette parties. Loring and I had been given one of the coveted double suites in Tom, and for the length of an afternoon we condemned furniture and carpets, issued orders to a deferential, tired upholsterer, and [Pg 80]finally emerged into the autumn sunlight of the Quad with a feeling of modest triumph that there would be few rooms in Oxford to compare with ours.

On the following Friday we made our first informal appearance.

Writing after sixteen years that have been neither unvaried nor uneventful, I find that Oxford lingers in my memory as an adventure never before experienced even in my first days at Melton, never afterwards repeated even when I lived first in London, or fought my Wiltshire elections, or entered the House. I like to fill a fresh pipe and lean back in my chair, conjuring up a thousand little personal scenes—of no importance in the world to anyone but myself: my first Sunday luncheon, when I was the guest of Jerry Westermark, and if the rest of the company were third-year men like him, entitled to an arm-chair by the fire in Junior Common Room. The first luncheon I myself gave half-way through the term, my anxiety not to leave out even one of my new friends, and my anger with Crabtree of Magdalen who invited himself at the last moment and filled me with eleventh-hour fears that the food would run short. My first "Grind," where I pocketed ten pounds by backing Loring, who won the race at the price of a broken collar-bone. My first Commem. when I lost my heart to Amy Loring. My first appearance in the schools and my confounding ad hoc knowledge of St. Paul's journey. My first....

It is always the first impression that seems to endure longest, but there were friendships I made and lost wherein I can fix no date. Tom Dainton, over the way at Oriel, dropped out of my circle some time or other; we nodded on meeting at the Club, and each would invite the other's assistance in entertaining his relations, but a day came when I felt unworthy of Tom's earnest and muscular Blues. And I have no doubt he shook a puzzled head over the "footlers" with whom I had cast in my lot. Equally there came a day when I found myself using a man's Christian name for the first time, and the last piece of ice drifted out to sea.

I like to recreate the atmosphere of eager activity, of new-won freedom and approaching maturity. Six years at Melton[Pg 81] had been a time of bells and chapels, first schools and roll-calls, compulsory games and "Lights Out"; at Oxford I was a man, with liberty in moderation to cut lectures and private hours, go to bed when I liked, organize a banquet and participate from time to time in wholesale destruction of property, no man saying me nay. The differences were great enough to mask the resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new House Standard with more than Meltonian observance of taboo rules and caste distinctions. We wore no College colours, we dressed for the theatre, and the "Rowing Push" were at pains not to know the "Footlers" who beagled or hunted. But we were all unconscious and in deadly earnest, whether we testified to our abhorrence to Balliol, or walked up Headington Hill and back by Mesopotamia discussing the abolition of private property or lounged in chairs round a piled-up fire talking and smoking—and, for variety, smoking and talking.

Not unless I die and be born again shall I a second time know the joy of living in a city of three thousand men, all of them my soul's friends—save such as came from other colleges or the despised quarters of my own.

"Oakum, come and talk to me!"

I can still hear the voice echoing through the morning silence of Peck, still see a foreshortened face, chin on hands, and white teeth gripping a straight-grained pipe.

"Hallo, Geoffrey! D'you think I could get one of your windows?"

"Better not try!"

There is a pause in the dialogue while I kick up a handful of small stones and leap nimbly away from the siphon which Geoffrey Hale has just stolen from Rawbones, his neighbor across the landing, and shattered in a thousand pieces not three feet from where I stand. A stone rises.

"Poor shooting!" from Geoffrey.

My next aim is better, and there is the sharp musical note of broken glass. Thirty heads projecting over thirty flower-boxes chant in chorus, "Porter-r-r! Mr. Oakleigh!" while I abandon dignity and hasten to the nearest staircase, to the end[Pg 82] that one broken window may be distributed throughout the College and charged to "General Damage Account." Rawbones will bear the undivided charges of his siphon.

In the early months of the war I had occasion to spend a few hours in Oxford. The colleges were filled with soldiers and the Schools had been turned into a hospital, while Belgian refugees looked unfamiliarly down from the choicest rooms in St. Aldates or the High. It was the Oxford of a nightmare, but, though I saw no more than a dozen undergraduates throughout the city, there was hardly college or shop or house that did not hold the spirit of a man I had known. Ghostly, muffled rowing men still ran through the Meadows in the gathering dusk of a winter afternoon; ghostly scholars on bicycles, with tattered gowns wrapped round their necks and square notebooks clutched precariously under their arms, shot tinkling under the very wheels of the sempiternal horse-trams; ghostly hunting men, mud-splashed and weary, cracked conscientious whips in the middle of the Quad. At six-and-thirty the elasticity and abandon are gone, but I would give much to shout one more conversation from one drawing-room window to another, to spend an hour pouring hot sealing-wax into the keyhole of a neighbor's oak, to deck a life-size Apollo Belvedere in cap and gown and deposit him in Draycott's bed. The power and daring have left me, but I thank Heaven that the wish remains.

On the first day Loring and I advanced silently and with sudden shyness through Tom Gate. The knots of men in lodge or street were embarrassingly preoccupied and indifferent to us. Never had I imagined that the great personalities of a public school could count for so little. "The Earl of Chepstow; Mr. G. Oakleigh," picked out in white on a black ground, reminded us reassuringly that we too had a stake in the College, but for an hour we were well content to arrange our books and experiment with the ordering of our furniture, deliberately shrinking from an appearance in public until the time came for us to present ourselves to the Dean. In Hall, and on our way to be admitted by the Vice-Chancellor, we fell in with other Meltonians and offered the effusive [Pg 83]friendship of loneliness to men perhaps previously ignored. Here and there I met someone I had not seen since private-school days. Once the alliance was formed under stress of agglomeration, we spent the remainder of the afternoon in a serried mass inspecting each other's rooms, ordering wine, tobacco and bedroom ware in the town and at tea-time valorously venturing into the Junior Common Room.

Within the next two days Loring and I received a number of cards, unceremoniously doled out by a messenger in short-sighted communion with a manuscript list of all freshmen worth knowing, as compiled by an informal committee of second and third year men. A number of Athletic Secretaries wrung from us promises of conditional allegiance which we were too timorous to withhold, and our respective tutors propounded what lectures and private hours we were to attend. Within a week we had returned many of the calls, ceremoniously and in person, returning a second and third time if our host were not at home; breakfast invitations began to be bandied about, and the Clubs in search of new members examined our eligibility.

As the one Liberal in a room full of silent Imperialists who consumed surprising quantities of dessert and paid no attention to the debate beyond applauding perfunctorily at the end of each oration, I remember impassionately haranguing the "Twenty Club" on the unreasonableness of Chamberlain's attitude towards President Kruger. At the "Mermaids," where the consumption of food and drink was even greater, I read the part of "Charles Surface"; nay, more, in a burst of enthusiasm I perpetrated a paper on "Irish Music" for the Essay Club, in those days a despised and persecuted church not infrequently screwed up in the catacombs of Meadow Buildings and left to support life on coffee, walnut cake, pure reason and some astonishingly rich Lowland dialects. Liberalism burned flickeringly in the autumn of '99, and the University Liberal clubs contended with flattering rivalry for my unresisting and largely uninterested body.

The term was still young when Loring was elected a members of the Loders, and soon afterwards he joined the[Pg 84] Bullingdon. As he now dined at the Club table in Hall, I gathered Draycott and Mowbray, a Wykehamist named Finck-Boynton and two Etonians, Bertie Grainger and Mark Seton, and founded a mess next to the Guest Table, whence we could throw bread at almost any friend in Hall. There we sat and criticized the kitchen, the High Table and our neighbors, decided a hundred knotty points of conduct and elaborated a pose which should mark us out as men of originality, fearlessness and distinction without any of the distressing immaturity of mind betrayed by our fellow-freshmen.

In looking back on the early days I find something very ingenuous and engaging in our delusion of originality. Whether we ragged the rooms of the meek, hysterical Ainsworth (who was alleged to hold private prayer-meetings and intercede by name for the souls of lost undergraduates), whether we serenaded Greatorex, the mathematical tutor, on the night he had a Colonial Bishop staying with him, whether we established an informal breakfast club at the Clarendon because we could get no hot food in College on Sundays, we were soberly and seriously convinced that earlier generations had never thought of doing such things before. For three years I watched with mild exasperation three successive drafts of amazingly juvenile men clumsily aping the achievements of us, their seniors.

New prejudices grew to a rank birth, but one or two old convictions came to be shaken. I no longer looked on Eton as a forcing-house of ineffective snobbery, nor on Winchester as the home of well-bred, uniform inertia; I ceased to say that while one Carthusian was occasionally tolerable, more than one would dominate and scatter the most varied society; gradually I found that something might be said even for men who had never been to a public school. Loring shook his head in puzzled and not entirely affected disapproval of my social adventures and, though punctiliously courteous to my guests, would not infrequently condemn them categorically as "stumers" when they were gone.

Yet on reflection I learned more of men and books from a reserved and aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch[Pg 85] graduates than from many a more decorative sect in the first-floor rooms of Canterbury. McBain, a threadbare Aberdonian, would drift in on a Sunday night, when Loring was away dining with the Loders, and we would sit till the small hours talking of Renan and a non-miraculous Christianity. Frazar, who was taking the Modern Language School, would lie back sipping whisky and filling the grate with half-smoked cigarettes as he talked of life at the Sorbonne and the wonderful appreciation of modern French poetry that he would one day publish. Carmichael, an embittered, one-idea revolutionary, would throw Marx at my head and give fierce descriptions of his Board-school struggles before a scholarship set him free to peddle his brains in the market on equal terms with his fellows. At Melton we seemed all drawn from one class, brought up in the same channels of thought, given the same books to read.

When educational reformers fill "The Times" with their screeds, I am tempted to wonder whether it much matters what a man be taught so long as he meet enough men who have been taught something else. I worked hard at Oxford and did tolerably well in the Schools: perhaps they taught me how to learn, but the gaps in my knowledge when I came down make me look on the curriculum as "a chaos upheld by Providence." And then I think of three thousand men from a hundred schools and a thousand homes, flung behind the enchanted, crumbling walls to bring their theories, ethics, enthusiasms and limitations into the common stock; and at such times I wonder what better schooling a Royal Commission could secure for the plastic imagination of nineteen.

For all our poses Oxford gave us a taste of that world in which most of us were to pass our lives—an obsolete, artificial, inadequate world if you will, but the one wherein we had to find social and administrative salvation. We felt the heavy democratic control of public opinion when the notoriety-hunting Glynne was ducked in Mercury for giving luncheons in his rooms to the too-well-known Gracie (I never discovered her surname) from the florists in the Broad; we saw something of the ideal Equality of Opportunity when[Pg 86] Carmichael went from a scholarship to a fellowship and then to a provincial Professorship of Economics and ultimately to an exalted position in, I think, the Board of Education; by the College cliques and fashions, the social mistrust and jealousies, the canons and taboos, we were in some sort forearmed against the absurdities, the unworthiness and irreconcilabilities that awaited us outside Oxford.

A fruitful lesson of my first term was furnished by the Duke of Flint. He was a freshman, an Etonian, a "Gourmet" and a member of the Bullingdon. Any week in which he was drunk less than five times was no ordinary week; any story that could be repeated in decent company was not from his hiccoughing lips. Without question the most unmitigated degenerate I have ever met, the sole excuse to be made for him was that by inheritance his blood was sufficiently tainted to infect a dozen generations. Yet I cannot think it was in a spirit of commiseration that Oxford took the little ruffian to its bosom, inviting him to its luncheons and electing him to its clubs; there was something at once shamefaced and defiant in the way his friends proclaimed—without challenge—that he was "not at all a bad fellow, really; rather fun, in fact." From the night when he staggered down the High in the purple dress coat of the "Gourmets," breaking the shop windows with his bare hand and I bound him up and put him to bed, to the day not many weeks ago when he died of general paralysis, I watched his social career with interest.

We none of us had much time for introspection in those eager, early days. I was swearing rapid friendships, eating aldermanic banquets and conscientiously flitting from one to another of my new clubs with the zeal of a neophyte and the greed of a man who knows that after the dull, inadequate dinner of Hall an unlimited dessert awaits him. Loring and I had refused to compete for the Melton close scholarships, as the money was not essential to us, and we could now idle for a twelvemonth over Pass Mods. and leave three serious years for our final schools. A minimum of lectures satisfied our tutors, and the rest of the time we could argue and read[Pg 87] and smoke eternally new and expensive mixtures, which we backed against all comers and changed perhaps thrice in a term.

Once I came near my sole acquaintance with martyrdom. It was in the early weeks of the South African War, when to be a pro-Boer was not healthy. The wholeness of my skin and the peace of our rooms were due in equal measure to the fact that I had many friends and that those who knew me not agreed with Loring that I could not really mean what I said. My fellow-rebel Manders, who knew no one and only left his garret in Meadows to bicycle hotly round outlying Oxfordshire villages preaching sedition, was incontinently divested of his trousers and hurled into Mercury.

"These damned farmers!" Loring exclaimed, as he returned to our rooms, leaving Manders to retrieve his spectacles and wade inshore. "They've got to be taught a lesson."

"It'll cost you a hundred million pounds," I answered. "God knows how many men. And all because the said farmers claim the right to keep their own territory to themselves."

"A hundred million pounds!" he snorted.

"That's what Labouchere said the other night in the House," I retorted, with an undergraduate's faith in the figures and opinions of others.

"Oh, of course, if you believe a man like that! A man who frankly doesn't believe in the Empire. A Little Englander ..."

"I shouldn't be surprised if he was right," I said.

"Just for a few pounds you'd rather like to see us beaten," he cried. To this hour I recall with amazement the passions aroused by that war.

"I'm not in favour of a war against a free people conducted on behalf of Illicit Diamond Buyers. Besides the few pounds there are men's lives—and a little question of right and wrong."

"You ought to support your country right or wrong."

"I beg to differ," I said, and we carried the discussion heatedly back to Majuba and the question whether or no[Pg 88] Mr. Gladstone's body should be exhumed and hung in chains.

The war was to come very near home before many weeks had passed. After Black Friday, Roger Dainton raised a troop of horse and took them out; Tom Dainton was given a university commission and followed a few weeks later. In the Easter term "The Earl of Chepstow" was painted out and "The Marquess Loring" substituted. The "damned farmers" had added a very pleasant, easy-going, undistinguished man to the lengthening list of casualties.

To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately—as it seemed—we were busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.

One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some [Pg 89]realization of the gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.

The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted, and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death. Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us. After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.

At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men, who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent, returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old party" would be invited, we[Pg 90] accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us, and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.

I remember—though it is a petty enough thing to recall—rather resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked—a set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality—Turkish coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan maté, Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless apéritif unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that the plaster casts were hidden.

Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption. He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life, relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office before they were restored to their family.

On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me.[Pg 91] In the absence of her husband she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.

"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."

So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.

As soon as I promised to drive over to the school, Sonia announced her intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in the reality of his dreams were Sonia and—the dreamer.

[Pg 92]

We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one shoulder like a military overcoat.

"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands. "A reed shaken by the wind?"

"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.

He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with his silky white hair.

"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.

"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.

Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back again to me.

"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."

Sonia and I squeezed our way in among two or three hundred parents who had profited by proximity to the Head to inquire how 'Bernard' had fared that term; the giant intellect of Burgess we left to discover unaided who 'Bernard' might be. We listened to the Prize Compositions, the Honours of the year, and the removes of the term. Then Sonia's hand slipped through my arm, and her brown eyes suddenly softened. The prizes were being distributed, and we watched and listened until I, at any rate, grew sore-handed and weary of hearing O'Rane's name called out. I began, too, to pity the fags who would have to stagger across Great Court under the growing burden of that calf-bound, [Pg 93]gilt-edged pile. He himself went through the ceremony in a dispirited, listless fashion, his thoughts running forward to the moment when he would have to reverse the birch and hand it back to Burgess, while the new captain slipped into his seat and read prayers over his body.

"In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. I should like all boys who are leaving this term to say good-bye to me in my house. Ire licet."

The school poured out into Great Court and formed up in a double line. O'Rane was cheered from School Steps to the Head's house, as no one to my knowledge had been cheered since Pelham gave up his house and retired after forty-three years. The Leaving Books were handed out,—still "Men and Women" as in my day,—the last hand-shakes exchanged. Outside the library windows the school was waiting for O'Rane's reappearance.

"Be not overmuch puffed up with pride, laddie," said Burgess, when they were alone. "Boy is a creature of simple faith and easy enthusiasm. True, in thine youth thou wast clept 'Spitfire' and 'The Vengeful Celt'——"

"Sir ...?"

Burgess waved away the interruption. "Did I not tell thee of the Unsleeping Eye? Laddie, I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this life, yet it may be that the counsel of age may profit a young man. Yet not with thee. To thee I say not, 'Do this' or 'Do that'; there is nought thou canst not do, laddie—thou also art among the prophets." He held out his hand abruptly, and O'Rane took it.

"Sir, I want to thank you ..." he began.

"For that I forbade thee not when thou didst crave admittance?"

"A thousand things beside that, sir. Everything ..."

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping, laddie," said Burgess gently, disengaging his hand. "And thy father and I were young men together. Thou didst know this thing?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yet thou namedst it not?"

[Pg 94]

O'Rane hesitated and then burst out with a touch of his old universal defiance.

"I wanted to make you take me on my merits, sir."

"Hard is the way of him who would presume to offer help to David O'Rane!" Burgess answered, with a shake of the head.

"But I'd won through so far, sir; I wanted to see how much longer——"

"I blame thee not, laddie. Well, thou hast endured to the end and hast brought new honour to my kingdom. Counsel I withhold from thee: truly the Lord will provide. Fare thee well, David O'Rane."

On our way back to Crowley Court I put Raney outside, in case he preferred the company of his own thoughts for the present. He sat for a few moments with his chin on his chest, but as the car left the town he engaged the chauffeur in earnest conversation, and as we slowed down in front of the house he jumped out and came to the door with the words, "Simpson damns electricity and steam. He swears by oil. Well, if cars are going to knock out horses and you need petrol to drive your cars, there's going to be a tremendous demand for oil in the near future. I want to get in before the rush, I'm going to study oil——"

"You're a soulless Wall Street punter," I said.

Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history, and—characteristically enough—he was ready to fling the whole blazing vigour of his vitality into the next.

"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.

"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.

Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the[Pg 95] other. Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had taken place.

"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing knocked into us."

O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.

"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand! From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted stiffening.' My God!"

"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.

"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't read the foreign papers."

Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the continental Press.

"D'you still do that?" I asked.

"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George. They—simply—hate—us—abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."

"Who wants to attack us?" I asked.

"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia, as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people talking like[Pg 96] that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."

He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a savage twist of his heel.

"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"

"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other power."

My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews which it conjured up.

"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want another."

"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to war."

"I doubt it," I said. "The temptation's too great. The first day I was given an air-gun—this is many years ago, Raney—I winged a harmless, necessary milch cow. The alpha and omega of British policy should be to have a navy so efficient that no one can attack us and an army so inefficient that we daren't attack anyone else. If you aim at all-round efficiency, you'll probably have the rest of Europe on your back and you'll certainly go bankrupt."

He was preparing an explosive retort when one of the drawing-room windows opened, and Sonia came toward us.

"Bedtime?" I asked, as she held out her hand.

"Rot, isn't it?" she answered, wrinkling her nose. "I shall be sixteen next birthday, too."

"When I was your age ..." O'Rane began improvingly.

"I used to thrash you two or three times a month," I put in.

Sonia looked at him wonderingly.

"Is that true, David?" she demanded.

He nodded his head.

[Pg 97]

"You beast, George!" Sonia burst out with a concentrated venom that abashed me.

O'Rane glanced in momentary surprise at the rigid indignant little figure with the clenched fists and bitten lip. Then he caught her up in his arms.

"Bambina, you're the only person in the whole world who loves me. George couldn't help himself, though; I was out for trouble. And I could have knocked him down and broken every bone in his body if I'd wanted to—just as I could now. Only he was right and I was wrong. Kiss me good-night, sweetheart."

He lowered her gently till her feet touched the ground, but sudden shyness had come over her, and she would only hold out a hand.

"Clearly I'm in the way," I said, as I moved towards the house.

"I'm coming too," Sonia called out. "No, David, you're grown up now."

He snorted indignantly.

"That's a rotten reason. Are you never going to kiss me again? This year?" She shook her head. "Next year? Some time?"

"Some time. Perhaps."

She ran into the house, and O'Rane and I took one more turn along the terrace before following her.

"Grown up!" he exclaimed, after a moment's silence.

"That's still rankling?" I asked.

"No, I was just thinking. I fancy I was pretty well grown up before we ever met, George."

"As much as you ever will be," I suggested.

"As much as I ever want to be, old son. It's been like an extraordinary dream, you know, these last four years. Everything topsy-turvy.... I was years and years older than you and Jim when you used to thrash me.... If you can imagine yourself coming to a place like Melton after knocking about all round the world, living from hand to mouth.... The holidays were the time I really worked. Do you remember when you and Jim found me at the Empire[Pg 98] Hotel? You've never mentioned it from that day to this. I'm not ashamed of it and, though you two had your eyes bulging out of your head, I don't suppose with all your conventionality you think the worse of me for it. Anyway I don't care a damn if you do." He paused and lit a cigarette. "I'm going to have a holiday now, George. Idle about till October. And then in the holidays—vacations, you call 'em, don't you?—I shall get hold of soft, genteel jobs—private tutor to aristocratic imbeciles——"

"And then?"

He yawned luxuriantly.

"And then I shall settle down to earn a great deal of money. I'm never going through the old mill again, George. And when I've earned it I shall buy a villa at Naples and rot there. Are you going into the drawing-room? I don't think I shall, it's such a grand night out here. I want to think over this amazing country of yours, where a man can drop from the skies—I was junior steward on a 'Three Funnel' liner just before—drop down, find his feet, find people to employ him and weigh him out scholarships.... George, so far as I can make out, after four years here, there's not a damn thing you don't fling open to the veriest dago and pay him handsome to take the job. 'Ejectum litore, egentem excepi....' No, that's a bad omen." He spun round and smote me on the shoulder. "I owe a lot to this rotten country and I shall owe a lot more before I'm through with it. Now I'm going to take charge of the piano and sing songs to you...."

It was O'Rane who went into the drawing-room, and I who stayed outside in enjoyment of the night. Roger Dainton took the opportunity of a quiet stroll and a few moments' conversation. While in London he had been sounded in the matter of a baronetcy. I believed him when he protested that his troop of yeomanry had been raised without any thought of what honours or decorations he might draw from the lucky tub after the war. I almost believed him when he said he thought of accepting the offer because it would gratify his wife. And I felt a certain wonder and pity that[Pg 99] in his curiously unfriended state, half-way between two social spheres, he should come for advice to a man less than half his own age.

"Lodgings for the October Term"

Square cards inscribed with that device had offered me welcome for three years, and in the last term of my third year Loring and I settled seriously to the task of finding a new home against the day when we should be flung, time-expired, from our loved quarters in Tom. 'Seriously' in spirit if not in method, for we chartered a coach-and-four, invited a dozen men to breakfast and set out from Canterbury Gate with luncheon-baskets sufficient to feed a company. Proceeding impressively up King Edward Street we doubled back into St. Ebbs in search of what Loring called "working-class tenements for virtuous Radicals." Failing to find anything that suited us, we returned by Brewer Street and inspected Micklem Hall, but there was a garden attached, and we should have been constrained to walk a beagle-puppy. Leaving the last question open, I dispossessed Loring of the box-seat and drove for the next half-hour, because he had laid me five to three that there was no such college as Wadham, and seven to two that if there were I could not find it.

I remember we lunched a mile or two north of Woodstock because Crabtree of Magdalen, who had as usual invited himself and assumed direction of our movements, insisted that our last year must be undisturbed. In the late evening we returned triumphantly to Oxford and collided with a tram at the bottom of the Turl. A languid voice from the first-floor window of 93D High Street inquired if we needed anything.

"Lodgings for the October and two succeeding terms," Loring called back.

"These aren't bad digs," answered the voice, and Crabtree was left to sort out the Corporation tram while Loring and I[Pg 100] inspected the house opposite.

"They've got the makings of very decent quarters," he admitted handsomely. "Decoration vile," he added in an aside, "but then, what d'you expect of a B.N.C. man?" A furtive creature with obliquity of vision ushered us in. "We must get rid of him, George. Find out whether he is the landlord or a B.N.C. don or merely our young friend's male parent."

I ascertained that the man of repellent aspect was the landlord.

"I suppose we must take your ghastly digs," said Loring between a yawn and a sigh.

The following October we moved in and gave a housewarming—with the town band engaged to play waltzes outside while we dined. It was a bachelor dinner, but Grayes of Trinity and Henderson and Billings of the House chartered rooms at the "Dumb Bell," and came over in Empire gowns, chestnut wigs, cloaks and cigarettes. We danced until the band went home to bed and then led our guests round to inspect and praise our decorations and observe the absence of Pringle, the landlord, who had been exiled to a cottage on Boar's Hill.

"Best bedroom, second-best bedroom," Loring explained. "Spare bedrooms also ran. Bathroom. All that messuage. Lounge. Kitchen. Usual offices. Hot and cold. Electric lights and bells. Gent's eligible town residence."

It was eligible in every way, with window-seats overlooking the High from which we could watch passers-by surreptitiously trying to pick up the half-crown that Loring from time to time glued to the pavement. The house had been repainted inside and out, there were new carpets and furniture, a grand piano in one room and two Siamese kittens in every other. Old Lady Loring used to complain of dust when she came to visit us, but her son assured her that this was but a concession to my democratic spirit. We were certainly comfortable. As Loring observed the first night, "Now we've every excuse for neglecting our work."

He was reading Greats; I, History. We both expected[Pg 101] seconds, hoped for firsts and told our friends thirds. What our tutors thought, I have no idea. Loring never consulted his unduly.

"I pay the College eight pounds a term tuition fees," he reasoned. "I'll make it twice that if they'll leave me alone. I want to think. Your society alone, George, is an Undenominational Education."

So he breakfasted at nine, cut lectures till one, lunched at the Club and hacked twenty miles in the afternoon. From tea till dinner he would wander round Oxford buying prints and large-paper editions; after dinner he would take a kitten on his knee and read German metaphysics aloud to it with a wealth of feeling in his voice. At eleven we would pay one or two calls or sit talking till a late hour.

It was Andrew Lang, I believe, who said that the reason why there were no good books on Oxford life was because they were all written by women who had spent one day in—Cambridge. I sometimes fancy that Oxford reformers are really Oxford novelists off duty. We went through the transition from boyhood to man's estate in some of this world's loveliest surroundings. Does it matter what we read or when we read it? A time had to come when each of us had the choice of working uncompelled or not working at all; we could not be given lines and detention all our life, and at Oxford I worked hard. So did Loring, for all his outward pose of idleness. We read seven hours a day for two-thirds of the vacation and were not wholly unoccupied even during term.

Looking back on it all I can find no period of mental development to compare with my last year at Oxford. It was no small thing to read a thousand years of history, however superficially. I began to touch general principles, to discard cherished preconceptions, and little by little to hammer out a philosophy of my own. In political science and economy Loring's school overlapped mine to some extent, and in the rambling 'School shop' we talked lay the germ of the Thursday Club. Every week of term and for a year or two after I came down, some ten of us would meet and dine together. There was a "book of the week"—too long or[Pg 102] dull for all to read—which one would undertake to digest and expound. "Saint Simon's Memoirs," the "Contrat Social," the "Paston Letters" were among the works we had served up to us minced and réchauffé.

Later on, when Loring had dropped out, we became more purely political. Carmichael brought us in touch with socialist writers, and a week-end visit from Baxter Whittingham of Lincoln and Shadwell was responsible for my brief taste of working-class conditions some years later. I cannot hope that everyone nowadays looks at "Thursday Essays," which we published in 1904 as a statement of Young Oxford Liberalism, but, though it had little effect on the outside world, it consolidated its authors. Seddon of Corpus, who wrote on "Unemployment," is now in the Insurance Commission; Terry of Lincoln, the author of "Small Holdings," was private secretary to the President of the Board of Agriculture; Ainger, Mansfield, Gregory and I, who spread ourselves on "Public Economy," "Federation and the National Ideal," "The Tendrils of Socialism," and "The Irish Question Once More," all found our way into the House at the time of the 1906 Election.

Loring, too, matured on lines of his own. It would perhaps be truer to say that he developed that dual personality of which the germs had been existent at Melton. He was a cynic and idealist,—no uncommon union,—a pessimist and a practical reformer, honestly believing that the world was gradually deteriorating, that to cleanse the corruption was beyond man's powers, and yet that it was worth his own while to run the lost race to a finish.

I always fancy I can trace three phases through which he passed, three sources of inspiration. At school his taste for the romantic and picturesque found satisfaction in the Church of which he was a member: Eternal Rome captured his imagination, and, while I aspired to a vague universal brotherhood, he hoped and believed that Temporal Power would some day be once more œcumenical and that the warring world would in time find peace in a new age of faith. Oxford and the society of his fellow Catholics broke into the[Pg 103] dream. Doctrinally he was unsettled by the philosophy he read for 'Greats' and the fabric and organization of his Church brought disillusionment when he saw them at close quarters. Old Lord Loring had made the house in Curzon Street a centre for English Catholicism. I remember balls and bazaars, receptions and committee-meetings without end, Catholic marquesses were rare, they had to work hard; they were also valuable as giving social respectability to a persecuted Church. An inconspicuous, undistinguished peer assumed rather an exalted position in a small religious communion where everyone knew everyone else. I imagine more people spoke of 'dear Lord Loring' than would have been the case had his religion been, say, that of the Established Church. His son felt and expressed extreme repugnance for the position he was expected to fill. The Catholic Church in partibus infidelium was not a trading company, and he declined to have his name published on the prospectus to inspire confidence among doubting subscribers.

On ceasing to be a Catholic in anything but name, he had a second bout of mediaevalism, and dreamed, as Disraeli dreamed in the 'Young England' days, of a re-vitalized, ascendant aristocracy. The reality of the dream passed quickly; it is questionable how much faith Disraeli himself put into his vision, though anything was possible while the political revolution of the first Reform Bill was still seething. It is doubtful if Loring ever considered his idealized aristocracy of philosopher-kings otherwise than with a sentimental, unhistorical regret. And when he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated either by the spiritual influence of his Church or the temporal influence of his order, I think he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated at all. Life thereafter became a private, personal matter; he preserved a fastidious sense of what was incumbent on him to do and a pride in not being false to his own standards. What happened to the world outside his gates was an irrelevance with which, in his growing detachment and surface cynicism, he declined to interest himself.

It was at Oxford that he passed from the first to the[Pg 104] second of his three phases. We were none of us more than a few months distant from the untravelled world of men's work—sub-consciously we were all striving after a self-expression that should leave its mark on that work. Heaven be thanked! not one of us dreamed how ineffective our personalities were to prove, how unromantic our humdrum work, how meagre our hard-bought results! In the twelve years that passed between these last terms and the outbreak of a war that at least brought spaciousness back to human life, I can think of only one of my friends who failed to become in greater or less degree commonplace. That was O'Rane, and his store of the romantic could never quite be exhausted. He was too fearless of soul. A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not infrequently saves his soul.

O'Rane came up in my last year as one of a mixed draft from Melton. Mayhew and Sam Dainton we knew, but the others were little more than names to us. Dutifully Loring and I gave a couple of Sunday breakfasts and sighed when our guest left us for a walk round the Parks before luncheon. The meals were as difficult as they were long, for the freshmen were shy, and we had outgrown our taste for early morning banquets. When conversation was fanned into life, we found it sadly juvenile. Were we not fourth-year men, a thought jaded, and with difficulty interested in anecdotes of a scout's eccentricities or descriptions of unsuccessful flight from proctors? When the last guest pocketed his half-guinea straight-grained pipe (which we had been forced to admire) and clattered down the stairs to walk a dejected terrier of mixed ancestry through Oxford, Loring shook his head despairingly.

"We were not like that, George," he asserted.

"We were rather a good year, of course," I agreed.

He emptied a succession of ash trays, thoughtfully replaced the cushions on the sofas and straightened the antimacassars.

[Pg 105]

"Twelve of them, weren't there?" he asked. "And they'll all invite us back, every jack man of them."

"And we shall have to go, too," I also sighed, "and make sport for them, after waiting half an hour in a room full of unknown while our host hurriedly splashes himself next door and apologizes for having forgotten all about the invitation.

"We never did that!"

"Once," I said.

We called on O'Rane the first night of term, and compelled him to dine with us the second. I had not forgotten a slight disappointment of my own early days. One of my best friends at Melton had been Jerry Pinsent: we shared the omnibus-study in Matheson's and stayed with each other in the holidays. I fully expected that, as a second-year man, he would take me by the hand and guide my feet among the pitfalls of etiquette—largely the imagination of a self-conscious freshman—with which I understood Oxford to be set. Pinsent was affable, even kindly. He offered me a seat in his mess and introduced me to his friends. Alas! it was not enough. I found it indecent that he should have surrounded himself so completely and so speedily. I was immoderately jealous of his friends' free-and-easy Christian-name habit, and as two of them were Blues (Pinsent himself was a fine oar until he broke his wrist in a bicycling accident) I decided very unworthily that he was a snob and a faithless friend. With equal self-consciousness I determined that O'Rane should never charge me with aloofness or want of cordiality.

We invited no one to meet him. There would be time for that later, and in any case he was likely to be known all over Oxford before the term was out.

"He shall stand on his hind-legs and do his tricks for us alone," said Loring, who pretended to laugh at O'Rane in order to conceal an admiration not far removed from affection. "The wild beast that has been fed into domesticity."

There was little enough of the wild beast about O'Rane in the year of grace 1902. The starved look had gone out of his face, and his eyes were no longer those of a hunted animal[Pg 106] at bay. We leant out of the window to squirt soda-water on to him as he came down the High with light, swinging step and an engaging devil-may-care swagger. He walked bareheaded, and the fine, black hair—ornately parted and brushed for the occasion—blew into disorder as the autumn wind swept down the street with a scent of fallen leaves and a hint of the dying year.

"You know, Raney, you'd have made an extraordinarily beautiful girl," said Loring reflectively as they met.

"If the Almighty'd known the Marquess Loring had any feeling in the matter——" O'Rane began.

"Poets would have immortalized your eyes," Loring pursued with a yawn, "Painters would have died in despair of representing their shadowy, unfathomable depths——" He raised his hand and waved it rhythmically. "'Their shadowy, unfathomable depths,' you can't keep from blank verse! Have a cigarette, little stranger. Being an alleged man, you're a bit undersized and effeminate."

O'Rane caught Loring by one wrist and with a single movement brought him to his knees.

"Effeminate?" he demanded.

Loring attempted to reconcile dignity with a kneeling position.

"Oh, you've got a certain vulgar strength," he admitted, "like most modern girls. But you've got the hands and feet of a professional beauty. Of course you may not have stopped growing yet."

"I'm five feet nine! I admit I've not much fat on me!"

Honour was satisfied, and I separated the combatants. For his height Loring was very well proportioned, but he hated an imputation of fatness almost as much as O'Rane hated being teased about his slightness of body or smallness of bone. He certainly made up into a very beautiful woman when the O.U.D.S. played "Henry V" and he took the part of Katherine. The intention had been to follow the practice of years and invite a professional actress from London; O'Rane's performance, however, was too good to be set aside. I have a photograph of the company with Raney seated in the[Pg 107] middle. With his small, sensitive mouth and white teeth, his clean-cut nose and long-lashed, large black eyes, he makes a very attractive girl.

"This is a wonderful place," he said, as we sat down to dinner. "I've been sight-seeing to-day."

"Anything worth seeing?" asked Loring, whose substantially accurate boast it was that he had never been within the walls of a strange college.

We found that O'Rane had been prompt and thorough, ranging from the "Light of the World" in Keble Chapel to the scene of Amy Robsart's death, and from the gardens of Worcester to Addison's Walk. He talked of Grinling Gibbons' carving with a facility I envied when it was my fate to conduct my mother and sister round Oxford.

"Wonderful place," he repeated. "Choked up with the débris of mediaevalism. Atmosphere rather worse than a tropical swamp. Last refuge of dead enthusiasms and hotbed of sprouting affectations."

He jerked out the criticism and turned his attention to the soup.

"You're very disturbing, Raney," I said. "For four years you knocked Melton inside out; can't you leave Oxford alone? I'm rather fond of it."

"So am I—already. I'm fond of any place that picks a man up and sets him on his legs. I'm fond of England as you two can never be."

"You're extraordinarily old-fashioned, Raney."

"If to be grateful is to be old-fashioned." He leant back and gazed at the ceiling. "I think it's a workable philosophy. There are people who can do things I can't do, and there are people who can't do the things I can. It's a long scale—strong, less strong, weak, more weak. If every man helped the man below him.... You fellows would say I'm superstitious. I dare say. If you're the one man to come out of an earthquake alive, you start believing in a special providence.... I've been helped a bit—and I've once or twice helped another man. Whenever I could, in fact. And from the depths of my soul I believe if I said 'no'[Pg 108] when I was asked...." He shrugged his shoulders and left the sentence unfinished.

"Well, go on!" It was Loring who spoke, not without interest. "What would happen?"

"I should be damned out of hand. I don't mean a bolt from heaven, but I ... I should never be able to do anything again. I should be hamstrung."

"Black superstition," was Loring's comment.

"Not a bit of it! There's a fear of subjective damnation far more vigorous than the outer darkness and worm-that-dies-not nonsense."

"You're on too high a plane for dinner," said Loring. "You should cultivate the pleonectic side of life. I've had two roes on toast, and I'm going to have a third."

Never have I known time pass so quickly as during that last year. Early in the Michaelmas term both Loring and I developed acute 'Schools-panic'; we barred ourselves inside '93D' and read ten hours a day, planning retreats in Cornwall for the vac., when we were to rise at dawn, bathe in the sea and work in four shifts of four hours each. The cottage was almost taken when a revulsion of feeling led us to adopt an attitude of melancholy fatalism. We said—what was true enough—that life under such conditions was not worth living; we added—what was less true—that we did not care whether we got firsts or fourths.

Gradually the door of '93D' was unbarred. We dined in Hall once or twice a week and attended clubs to eat dessert for which—as we were out of College—other people paid. The men of our year had by this time been infected with our own morbid state of conscience, but there were still happy second-year men without a care in the world, and freshmen who—so far as I could see—were living solely for pleasure.

In Oxford during springtime, with the chestnuts, lilac and laburnum blazing into colour, it is nothing short of sacrilege to read Select Charters and Documents of Constitutional History. As the evenings lengthened we used to find[Pg 109] alfresco coffee-parties being held in a corner of Peck. I made the acquaintance of Summertown, an irrepressible freckled, red-haired little Etonian, the permanent thorn in the side of his father, Lord Marlyn, who was at this time Councillor of Embassy in Paris. It was his practice to drag a table, chairs and piano into the Quad and dispense coffee and iced champagne cup to all who passed. O'Rane would be found at the piano,—or on top of it with a guitar across his knees,—and the rest of us would lie back in long wicker chairs, gazing dreamily up at the scarlet and white flowers in the window-boxes, the flaky, grey-black walls, and far above them the early stars shining down from the darkening sky.

I had predicted that Raney's personality would impress itself upon Oxford, though I never underestimated the difficulty in a place so given over to particularism and fierce local jealousies. At this time the only men who had a reputation outside their own colleges were perhaps six in number: Blair of Trinity, who walked round Oxford of an afternoon with a hawk on his wrist; "Pongo" Jerrold, who kept pedigree bloodhounds; Granville, the President of the O.U.D.S.; Johnny Carstairs, who removed the minute hand from the post office clock in St. Aldate's every night of the Michaelmas term; and perhaps two more, of whom O'Rane was one. As so often, the world knew him for his accidents and overlooked his essence. He was quoted as a Union speaker of wild gesticulation and frenzied Celtic eloquence; as a pamphleteer and lampoonist who could seemingly write impromptu verse on any subject, in all metres and most languages; as the author of ninety-five per cent of "The Critic," a short-lived weekly started by Mayhew, who, I am convinced, would establish morning, evening, monthly and quarterly periodicals the day after being washed up on the beach of a desert island.

Inside the College he was chiefly famed for turbulence, invective and irreverence. "Lord, he hath a devil," is supposed to have been the comment of one Censor: he certainly had more than one man's vitality. With his faculty of omnipresence, he was known to all, though he could show little hospitality and was averse from appearing too often at the[Pg 110] table of others. Indeed we could only get him round to 93D High Street on presentation of an ultimatum, and it was useless to trouble over the arrangement of a dinner, as he was then—as always—sublimely indifferent to all he ate and drank. The only hunger he seemed to know was the hunger for self-expression, and he gratified it with tongue and pen in his work, his friendships and his animosities. These last were short-lived, but as violent as if he were still the unreclaimed 'vengeful Celt' of schooldays, and, as at Melton, he was usually to be found carrying on a shower-and-sunshine quarrel with one or other member of Senior Common Room.

"Sacre nom de chien!" he roared to heaven as we crossed Tom Quad one night after dining at the High Table. "They are children and snobs and spiteful old women! Little Templeton, your loathly tutor, wears a dog collar and expounds the Gospel of Jesus Christ, first of the Sansculottes, who regarded not the face of a man." He drew a fresh breath and gripped me by the lapels of my coat. "The beast drowned me in Upper Ten shop the livelong night. 'E'm effreed E'm a little leete, Mister O'Reene. Lard Jarn Carstairs' affection for the perst office clerck makes it herd to be punctual.' Then anecdotes of Rosebery as an undergraduate and the everlasting Blenheim Ball! A bas les snobs!" He seized a stone and flung it madly at the window of the Professor of Pastoral Theology. "And they all worked off horrid little academic scores on some poor devil at Queen's who had the hardihood to publish a History of War and trespass on their vile preserves. Conspuez les accapareurs!" His voice rose with a vibrant, silver ring, and through the archway from Peck came a roar of welcome with bilious imitations of a view-hallo. "Summertown must be giving a coffee-binge," he announced. "Come and sing to 'em, George!

He broke from me and joined the coffee-party at a hand-gallop, to be greeted by the solicitous inquiries of a generation which held that a dinner unsucceeded by real or assumed[Pg 111] intoxication might be "a good dinner enough, to be sure, but ... not a dinner to ask a man to."

"What sort of a blind was it, Raney?" asked one. "Where's Flint? Paralytic, I suppose? Don't run about on a full stomach or you'll be 'ick."

I had good opportunity of studying "disappointed dons" when I happened to spend a week-end in Oxford a short time after Campbell-Bannerman had broken down and resigned. Without exception everyone I met who had been the new Prime Minister's contemporary at Balliol regarded himself as a premier Manqué. "I remember when I was up with Asquith ..." they all began. "Asquith and I came up together," one man told me. "We got first in Mods. the same term, sat next each other in the Schools, were viva'ed together and took our firsts in Greats together. Then, of course, he went to the Bar, and I"—a little bitterly—"I thought of going to the Bar, too, but they offered me this fellowship, and I've been here ever since lecturing on the Republic of Plato."

When once O'Rane was at the piano I did not trouble my head with the shortcomings of the Senior Common Room. Flinging away the end of his cigar he struck a chord. "If that fat, bourgeoise-looking fellow Loring will get me my guitar, I'll sing something you've never heard before," he said; and when the guitar was brought, "I heard a girl singing it in a fishing-boat on the Gulf of Corinth." He sang in modern Greek, and at the end broke into a fiery declamation of "The Isles of Greece," and from that passed on to wild, unpolished folk-songs and tales of Irish kings before the hapless Norman invasion—utterly wanting in self-consciousness, and hanging tale to the heels of tale, each arrayed in language of greater splendour than the last.

It is thirteen years since I heard him, but the thrilling voice and shining black eyes are as fresh to my memory as though it were yesterday. Of the silent, lazy half-circle in the wicker chairs, fully two-thirds have fallen in the war; of the rest, Travers has gone to the Treasury, Simson and Gates are in orders, and Carnaby, whom I still see leaning against the piano and still shaking with his little dry cough, nearly broke[Pg 112] O'Rane's heart by dying of phthisis before he was three-and-twenty. I met him in Mentone during the last weeks of his life. "Give little Raney my love," he panted. "He made Oxford for me."

Sometimes I think O'Rane with his invincible sociability 'made' Oxford for a good many people. His rooms—in Loring's phrase—were like a gathering of the Aborigines Protection Society, and he was always pressing us to meet his new discoveries. "D'you know Blackwell?" he would ask. "Lives in Meadows, rather a clever fellow. He's a bit shy and not much to look at, but there's ... there's ... there's good stuff in him."

Loring invariably declined such invitations, but he picked up the formula and parodied it.

"Raney!" he would call from the window-seat of the digs. "Come over here, little man. There's a fellow down here I want you to meet. He's not much to look at, but there's ... there's good stuff in him. That's the merchant, accumulating cigarette ends out of the gutter. He's a bit elderly, and he's come down in the world rather, but in a properly organized Democratic Brotherhood.... You undersized little beast, you've nearly killed my best Siamese! Come here, Christabel, and don't pay any attention to the off-scourings of the Irish bogs. One of these days, Kitty, we'll save up our pennies and buy a dwarf wild-ass and keep her in a cage and call her Raney." And at that, of course, O'Rane would begin the process of what he called "taking the lid off hell."

Où sont les neiges d'antan? Within six weeks we were scattered, and in twice six years I never recaptured that "first fine careless rapture" of living hourly in company with Loring and O'Rane, the two men whom I most loved in the world. The date of the final schools drew on apace, and when they were past we underwent limpness and reaction for a day. Only one day, for as we sat down to dinner Loring said with a forced, uneasy smile that only half-hid his emotion, "George, d'you appreciate we've only got six days more?"

[Pg 113]

"Don't talk about it!" I exclaimed.

"Six days. H'm. I say, why shouldn't we stay up another year and read Law or something?"

I shook my head.

"All our year's going down and the digs. are taken. 'Sides, it'll be just as bad in a year's time."

We faced our fate, only determining to alleviate it by making good use of the last moments. The House was giving a ball and, as I was one of the stewards, I can say that we treated ourselves generously in the allotment of tickets. Lady Loring was to chaperon our party, and by a triumph of organization we found beds for all at '93D.' Between Schools and Commem. there were a thousand things to do, from the arrangement of valedictory dinners to the return of borrowed volumes and the sale of innumerable text-books. By our last Sunday all was clear, and we invited O'Rane to punt us as far up the Cher as he could get between ten and one.

"It's not been bad fun," Loring observed, as we glided out of the Isis and O'Rane began to struggle with a muddy bottom and an adverse current. "Damn' good fun, in fact," he added with emphasis. "What are you going to do now, George?"

"I've not the foggiest conception," I said.

The Congested Districts Board was relieving me of land and personal labour in Ireland, but, as it paid me probably more than I should have secured in the open market, there seemed little point in my superfluously trying to earn a livelihood in any of the professions. Sometimes I thought of improving my mind by a year's travel, sometimes I thought of occupying time by reading for the Bar—more usually, however, I waited for something to turn up.

"What about you?" I asked. "Are you going to take Burgess's advice?"

"And bury myself as an extra attaché in some god-forsaken Embassy? Not if I know it! I might have, before the Guv'nor died. As it is, I shall have a certain amount of property to manage and if you Radicals ever come back I[Pg 114] shall go down and wreck your rotten Bills a bit. Otherwise I propose to live the life of beautiful uselessness. In punting, as in everything else, our little man seems to effect the minimum of result with the maximum of effort."

Raney drew his pole out of the water and splashed us generously.

"Hogs!" he observed dispassionately.

"Go on punting, you little beast, and don't mess my flannels!"

The pole was dropped back and the punt moved slowly forward.

"Yes," said O'Rane, "it's very sad, but you're both hogs. As long as there's a full trough for you to bury your snouts in.... Faugh! the sour reek of the pig-bucket hangs about the bristles of your chaps."

"I'm glad I used to thrash you at school," I said.

"What good d'you imagine it did?" he flung back.

"None at all, but I don't get the opportunity now."

He punted in silence under Magdalen Bridge and along the side of Addison's Walk. When we had shot under the bridge by the bathing-place, he broke silence to say:

"I wouldn't go through that first term again for something! My God, I was miserable! Up in dormitory I used to wait till the other fellows were asleep and then bury my head in the clothes and cry. It was an extraordinary thing—frightfully artificial. I'd have died rather than let them hear me; so I hung on—sort of biting on the bullet—till it was quite safe, and, when they were sound asleep, out it came. I don't think I've ever been so lonely before or since. I wanted to be friends, you were all my blood and breed—not like in the old Chicago days. And then—oh, I don't know, everything I did was wrong, and you all seemed such utter fools.... Still, I won through."

"And you bear no malice?" asked Loring. His voice had grown suddenly gentle.

"On your account?" O'Rane laughed. "Jim, you've been an awful good friend to me."

[Pg 115]

"Most of your troubles are your dam' silly fault, you know."

"Yes, I suppose they are. And always will be. And I'll never, never, never give in till I die!"

Stooping down he ran the pole through its leather loops, picked up a paddle and seated himself on the box.

"What are you going to do, little man?" Loring asked, "when you go down?"

"Depends."

"What on?"

"The state of the world," Raney answered. "As soon as I've finished here, I've got money to make, and when I've done that, I'm going to marry a beautiful wife. And then ... and then ... I'm not quite sure, I've only seen the surface of this country. Folk here have been real good to me; I'd like to do something in return. I.... No, Jim, don't ask me to tell you. Now and again I see visions, but you're so damned unenthusiastic.... And people who talk about what they're going to do, never seem to do anything at all. Wait till I've got something to show, something better than a 'maximum of effort and a minimum of result....'"

"You've not done badly so far," I put in.

He snorted contemptuously.

"If you've got faith...."

Loring settled himself more comfortably on the cushions.

"Didn't you once have a turn-up with Burgess on that same subject?" he inquired.

"That was the lunatic faith of believing things you can't prove! My faith is that a man can do anything he's the will to do."

Loring clasped his hands lazily behind his head.

The lines quoted, he yawned and began to fill a pipe. "Tell me about your tame star, Raney."

[Pg 116]

O'Rane drew in to the bank, shipped his paddle and stepped ashore.

"Give me a hand in getting her over the rollers," he said. "Rough, manual labour's all you're fit for."

"I'd much sooner stay here and be wafted over by an act of faith."

"I'll give you three seconds and then I shall take the luncheon-basket," Raney answered, pulling a gold turnip-watch out of his trouser pocket. It was the first but not the last time that I saw it. On the back was a monogram which could with some difficulty be read as 'L. K.'—a memorial of Kossuth. I fancy it was the one piece of personal property that O'Rane carried from the old world to the new.

Our party for Commem. had all the elements of failure. I have been back to Oxford three or four times since 1903, and they ordered this matter better than in my day. The go-as-you-please spirit of London society spread quickly, and from the account of my young cousins, the Hunter-Oakleigh boys, I gather that of late years a man would invite one girl to place herself under the shadowy protection of an unknown chaperon and spend three agreeable days and nights dancing, supping, lunching and basking on the river in his sole company.

We were less enterprising and more dutiful. Any sisters who had come out were invited, and where sisters ran short we fell back on cousins or family friends so well known as to retain no suggestion of romance. There were five men—Loring, Dainton, Summertown, O'Rane and myself, balanced by Lady Loring, Lady Amy, a Miss Cressfield, Sally Farwell and my cousin Violet. It was understood that Loring would want to dance chiefly with my cousin, and that Dainton and Miss Cressfield would form an incomparable alliance of stolidity and silence; Summertown, who had injured his knee playing polo, volunteered to keep Lady Loring amused; his sister, Lady Sally, was allotted to O'Rane; and I was to take charge of Amy Loring.

[Pg 117]

The arrangement looked well enough on paper, but I foresaw serious defects in the working. For one thing, O'Rane and his victim had never met; for another, I had seen nothing of Amy Loring since my first Commem. On that occasion—though, Heaven forgive me! I was but nineteen or twenty—I had fallen deeply in love with her, and was preparing the way for a declaration when she deliberately dropped some remark to remind me of the difference in our religions. After that we rather carefully avoided each other—till by degrees we felt we could safely become friends again. I suppose it is now fifteen years since she cut me short and spared me some part of the disappointment; neither of us has married. The secret was our own, and Loring was innocent of irony when he said, "You and Amy know each other by now, you'll get on all right."

The most serious menace to our party came on the morning of the first ball. Tom Dainton rushed up from his digs. in Oriel Street to tell us Miss Cressfield had taken to her bed with an internal chill and would be unable to join us.

"Awful bore!" he growled in his deep voice. "Spoils the numbers. I'd better cry off."

"Can't you get someone in her place?" I asked.

"At this time of day? It wouldn't be civil."

Loring took me into a corner and suggested one or two names. Our difficulty was that Tom usually trampled his partners under foot if they risked dancing with him and petrified them with his silence if they begged for mercy and sat out.

"Amy's good for half-hour spells of cricket shop if he can get——I say, Tom, why don't you ask Sonia up?"

"Mater wouldn't let her come," he boomed in reply. "She's only sixteen. Not out yet."

"'Out' be damned!" I said. "She can glue her hair up for two nights. I'll see she gets partners. You can try it anyway; we'll send a round-robin wire to Lady Dainton."

And the wire was sent, signed by the five of us. An answering wire of acceptance was delivered at luncheon, and in the late afternoon a touring-car drew up outside the digs.,[Pg 118] and a slim figure in dust-coat and motor-veil ran lightly up the stairs with a steadying hand to an elaborate but still unstable coiffure.

"Lord Loring, it's perfectly ripping of you!" Sonia exclaimed, as he and I met her at the stair-head.

"You needn't call me Lord Loring even if your hair is up," he answered, as they shook hands. "It was 'Loring' when last we met."

"Oh, we were all children then! How do you do, Mr. Oakleigh?"

"Call me that again and I let your hair down!" I said. "Let me introduce you to Lady Loring and the rest of the party. Then you'll have to go and dress."

I hurried through the introductions, inspected the table in the dining-room and sought that corner of Loring's bedroom to which I had been banished for the following three nights. There was a wonderful to-do with opening and shutting doors, whisperings and exhortations, lendings and borrowings, all conducted through the medium of Lady Loring's ubiquitous maid. The hour of dinner was reached before the party began to assemble, and long past before the last laggard had appeared. Lady Loring, white-haired, plump and unruffled, caught me glancing at my watch and took me aside.

"George, my dear, forgive an old busybody and tell me who is to take little Miss Dainton in." I consulted my list and found that the honour fell to Summertown. "The poor child's so nervous she daren't come down; Amy's trying to comfort her. First ball, you know. Thinks she looks a fright, you know. If you can give her a little confidence ..."

"I'll send O'Rane in with her," I said. "They've known each other for years."

I called him up and was explaining the new arrangement of places when the door opened, and Sonia came in—white from her little satin slippers to the band of silk ribbon round her hair. For all her maturing figure she scarce looked her boasted sixteen years: the oval Madonna face and beseeching brown eyes were still those of a child. When last I saw her, twelve years later, there was hardly an appreciable change[Pg 119] in her appearance. "George, my dear, she looks like a baby angel," whispered Lady Loring, as I gave her my arm. The rest of the party sorted itself into pairs and followed us. "Bambina, you're divine!" I heard Raney saying, by way of inspiring confidence. Unlike the majority of such remarks, this one was free of exaggeration.

As a rule one ball is very much like another, though on this occasion there were one or two differences. As a steward I displayed much fruitless activity, and covered miles in search of some heartless A who had told a tearful Miss B to meet him "just inside the door," where traffic was most congested. Anxious friends gripped my arm with an,—"I say, old man, I'm one short. D'you feel like doing the Good Samaritan touch? She's a friend of my sister's, goes over at the knee a bit, but otherwise all right. I don't want to be stuck with her the whole night." Dowagers petitioned me to have the windows shut, or confided the disappearance of a brooch. "So long, with sapphires here and here, and the pin a little bent. I've had it for years and wouldn't lose it for anything."

At the end of half an hour I retired to Summertown's rooms in Canterbury and changed my first collar. It was unnecessary, but I wished to present an appearance of strenuousness. The music of the lancers began as I entered Tom Quad, and pairs of figures, garish or sombre in the evening light, hastened their leisurely pace along the broad terrace. Sonia met me by appointment at the door of the cathedral, and I was reluctantly compelled to pilot her to O'Rane's garret in Peck.

"I just wanted to see it," she told me, as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the most Spartan room in Oxford. Two wicker chairs, a table without a cloth, a rickety sideboard and a bookcase with three Reading Room books were all the furniture; there were no ornaments, no pictures, and only one photograph—a signed snapshot of Sonia paddling a canoe on the river at Crowley Court.

"It was very tactful of him to put the photograph out," I said.

[Pg 120]

"Doesn't he always ...?" Sonia began, and then blushed.

"Always, Sonia," I answered. "I was only teasing you. You're rather a friend of his, aren't you?"

She nodded, and in her eyes there was adoration such as is given few men to inspire.

"Has he ever told you about the time before he came to England?" she asked.

"Little bits," I said.

"He told me everything," she answered proudly.

"I'm sure it wasn't all fit for the young——"

"I'm not young, Mr. Oakleigh."

"And I'm sure a good part of the language was—unparliamentary, Miss Dainton. However, that by the way. He's a good little man——"

"You are patronizing!" she interrupted.

"He's a man; he's little—compared with Jim Loring or myself, for example——"

"He's worth more than you and Loring put together!"

"Speaking for myself, I agree," I said.

"There's nothing he can't do!"

"He's done pretty well so far," I conceded, and lit a cigarette.

"It's nothing to what he will do. After Oxford he's going to set out to seek his fortune,"—Sonia had dropped into the very language of a fairy-story. "And when he comes back——"

"You'll marry him," I said at a venture.

"Yes."

"When was all this fixed up?" I asked.

She held out her left hand to me; the third finger was encircled with a piece of blue ribbon. "To-night."

"He bagged that off the cheese-straws at dinner," I said.

"I don't care if he did," she answered.

"It'll wash off in the bath to-morrow morning."

There was a sound of feet ascending the stairs three steps at a time. The door was flung open, and O'Rane burst into the room.

"I shall keep it as long as I live," Sonia declared.

[Pg 121]

O'Rane pointed an accusing finger at her.

"Bambina, what d'you mean by cutting me?" he demanded.

"Is it time? I've been telling George——"

He threw his arms round her, bent down and kissed her on the lips.

"What's the good of telling him? What's the good of telling anyone? They don't understand. Nobody but you and me.... George, I suppose you know that in addition to being frightfully in the way, you're cutting Lady Amy?"

I threw away my cigarette and made for the door.

"In the words of my tutor, the estimable Mr. Templeton," I said, "Thees ees erl vary irraygular, Meester O'Reene. I think I shall go and tell Lady Loring, Sonia, and leave her to break it to your parents."

Sonia clasped her hands in supplication.

"Dear George, don't be mean! It's an absolute secret!"

"You can tell it to the Devil himself for all I care!" cried O'Rane in defiance.

The only person to whom, in fact, I told the news was Amy Loring.

"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Sonia's only a child. He's not much more than a boy himself."

"Time will work wonders," I said.

"But will he have anything to marry on?"

"He's never had a shilling to call his own since he was thirteen and a half. It's just the sort of thing he would do."

Lady Amy shook her head, unconvinced.

"It isn't fair on her. I know David, I'm awfully fond of him; I think he's really brave, and I should quite expect any girl to fall in love with him. But——" she shook her head again. "I mean, they're too young to know what they're talking about; this is the first time she's had her hair up. If I were Lady Dainton, I should give her a good talking to."

"But it's a dead and utter secret," I reminded her. "I don't suppose Lady Dainton will hear anything about it till it's all over."

[Pg 122]

"Till they're married?" she asked in dismay.

"Yes."

"Or till it's broken off?"

"Raney's not likely to break it off!"

"She may. You must remember he's about the only man she's ever met."

The band struck up the opening bars of a new waltz, and we returned to the ballroom, leaving the subject of our conversation to take care of itself. Contact with O'Rane always made me fatalistic and more than naturally helpless.

[Pg 123]

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[Pg 124] 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.

[Pg 125]

"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[Pg 126] 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[Pg 127] 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 [Pg 128]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[Pg 129] 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."

[Pg 130]

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[Pg 131] 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[Pg 132] 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.

[Pg 133]

"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[Pg 134] 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 manœuvred 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[Pg 135] 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.

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[Pg 136] 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[Pg 137] 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 [Pg 138]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[Pg 139] 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.

[Pg 140]

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 Rœderer 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[Pg 141] 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[Pg 142] 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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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.

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[Pg 145] 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.

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[Pg 146] 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."

[Pg 147]

"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[Pg 148] 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[Pg 149] 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 [Pg 150]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[Pg 151] 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[Pg 152] 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[Pg 153] 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[Pg 154] 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.

[Pg 155]

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[Pg 156] 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.

"He's a great friend of ours," she cut in disconcertingly when I paused for breath.

"He's a bad man, Sonia," I repeated.

"He's the best fun out," she insisted; "you don't know him."

"You know him well?"

"He dines with us about once a week; he's taking an awful lot of trouble over our ball. I wanted you to dine and meet him."

"I'll dine with pleasure——"

"I shall ask him too. He's always inquiring after you. I thought you were rather friends at Oxford."

"We never exchanged an angry word," I said. "I don't like him all the same, though."

Yet, when I dined in Rutland Gate the following week, Crabtree was there. The household indeed revolved round him, and the majesty of Lady Dainton was subjugated by the majesty of Crabtree. I was to meet him on and off for the next ten years: on one or two occasions there was unwelcome intimacy in our relations, and, though we have now drifted apart, I still see and wonder at his faculty of success. At Oxford he was primarily the man who cadged invitations, directed other people's parties and exploited a heartiness of manner and a certain social position in the university for what they were worth in cash or its equivalents. "A man always and everywhere on the make," was Loring's definition after meeting him on the Bullingdon. As a log-roller and picker-up of unconsidered meals, he had no equal, and his activity was characterized by the most frugal spirit. Though he dined with us three or four times, we never entered his rooms in Magdalen or Long Wall, and his mode of life was to live on a social aspirant for eight weeks and then propose the spoiled Egyptian for membership of the Club. The following term saw him billeted on a new victim. It was an arrangement that suited all parties save, perhaps, the Bullingdon.

[Pg 157]

I fancy he had considerably outlived his popularity by the time he went down, and in anyone else's hands the system would have gone to pieces in a year. My excuse for this digression must be a desire to emphasize the sufficiency of his brazenness and empressement of manner to put his critics out of countenance. I can see him now, with his big loose-limbed frame, his smooth face, and black hair carefully parted in the middle—dining at someone else's expense and constituting himself the life and soul of the party. In tearing spirits, yet never losing control of himself; drinking freely, but never drunk; open, but never candid; careless, but never off his guard—he was a disconcertingly cold and calculating man, clever and technically honest, though I would trust him no further than I could see him. After coming down he went to the Bar and pushed his way into a fair practice; several years later he married a widow rather older than himself, and, as his first public act was to appear as Conservative candidate in one of the Glasgow divisions, I infer that his wife had money. Immediately after the outbreak of war I found him hurrying through the Horse Guards in a staff captain's uniform. Though doubtful of his ability to "tell at sight a chassepot rifle from a javelin," I was in no way surprised.

His career is still young, and he has hardly aged at all since the night when I met him at dinner in Rutland Gate. I have no idea how long he had been known to the family, but it was pretty to see him slap Sir Roger on the back, to hear him call Sonia by her Christian name or address his host as "Dainton." He was prolific of suggestions for the forthcoming ball, drawn largely from experience of what was done by "my cousin Lord Beaumorris" at some period, I imagine, before that nobleman's second and latest bankruptcy.

By the end of the evening my dislike of him was no less, but it was diluted with a certain envious admiration.

Social amenities make a petty thing of life, and from the loftiness of a time when our souls are supposed to be enlarged[Pg 158] by war I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London. My uncle, who was ashamed of betraying enthusiasm, took mischievous delight in employing a low scale of values, and at five-and-twenty I fancied that to be cynical was to be mature. I trace a curious inability to distinguish the essentials of existence, and had anyone used such a phrase at that time I am sure I should have demanded rhetorically, "What are the essentials?"

Thus, Lady Dainton's first ball for Sonia was of little enough moment for men associated τοὑ εὑ ζἡν ἑνεχα, [Greek: tou eu zên enecha], and, in my eyes, the greatest of its many surprises was that I induced Bertrand to accompany me and stay out of his bed till after four. There was no merit in my own attendance. Sonia invited me verbally, her mother by means of a card eight inches by six; a week before the night panic descended on the family; they requisitioned their friends' lists, and I received three more cards with three sets of compliments, while on the day itself I was told by telephone that if I knew of one or two additional men I was to bring them punctually. So Bertrand, whose study of the great movement of men had never led him within the Empire Hotel, found himself incontinently deprived of his second cigar and packed into a cab on the stroke of ten-fifteen.

From the moment of our arrival I could prophesy success. Lady Dainton, I know, secured anticipatory and retaliatory invitations for Sonia; Lady Ullswater, who helped her to receive, reckoned up numbers and all they represented in her obscure finances; Ashwell wandered through the long rooms with an air of modest proprietorship, telling marchionesses of the balls he had left and duchesses of the balls he was going to. All the men obtained food, several of the girls obtained partners; and Dainton, who appeared five several persevering times in the supper-room, had the gratification of meeting at least one appreciative guest who observed, in the intervals of filling a capacious cigarette-case, "Dunno the merchant who's runnin' the show, but he does you pretty well, what?"

[Pg 159]

At ten-thirty the ball's fate lay still on the knees of the gods, but by eleven the rush had set in. I could see Sonia's face brightening, her eyes lighting up like the eyes of a political agent as he shepherds his stalwarts to the poll. Tall and short, dark and fair, stout and lean, they surged forward in an endless black and white stream, as desirable a set of young men as the combined talents of Ashwell and Lady Ullswater could bring together.

"She's launched!" said Bertrand, after an hour of the scene, and we walked upstairs in search of a cigar. By the buffet we found Dainton standing alone and drinking a surreptitious glass of champagne.

"Who does he remind you of?" my uncle asked me as we gained the lounge, and when I hesitated—"Don't you remember your Du Maurier?"

And then, of course, there leapt before my eyes the picture of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's husband at one of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's parties: a jaded but unprotesting figure, leaning against the wall and dully blinking at his lady's social captures; heavy-eyed, drooping-jawed, with bulging shirt-front and necktie askew. One hand stifles a yawn, the other guardedly conceals the watch at which he is glancing with furtive resignation. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, meanwhile, is rising from triumph to social triumph; he is paying the bill—and wondering wherein lies the fascination of it all.

As it was too crowded to dance and too early to sup, we took a couple of arm-chairs and ordered coffee. Overheated defaulters joined us from time to time, and Crabtree favoured us with his presence long enough to inquire: (i) how much I thought this touch was costing the old boy, (ii) what he would cut up for, (iii) what sort of place Crowley Court was, and (iv) whether I thought "The Trade" was likely to buck up at all.

"Who is your objectionable fat friend?" Bertrand asked when we were alone again.

"Objectionable—yes. Fat—yes. But no friend," I answered. "His name is Crabtree, and you are the only man in London whom he has not yet told that he is related to the[Pg 160] intermittently bankrupt and always disreputable Lord Beaumorris."

"And he's running after this Dainton girl?"

"It's healthy exercise," I said, "and he hasn't run very far as yet."

"Well, well!" He sighed. "Marriage is a race in which the bookmaker invariably bolts with the money."

"What you want is some supper," I said.

"No, I want to watch the people a bit more. Who's the Greek god who just went by?"

"The man who waved?"

"Yes. Face all eyes."

"That was David O'Rane," I said.

My uncle made me repeat the name and then sat silently smoking for fully ten minutes. I thought he was falling asleep, but he suddenly roused himself to ask:

"What O'Rane is he?" and, when I had given a short account of my dealings with him for the last seven years, "Why the devil didn't you tell me you knew him?"

"I never imagined you'd even heard of his existence," I answered in some surprise.

"I hadn't. That's just it. George, I should like to meet the boy. No, no! Not now. When he's disengaged. He'll only think me an old bore, but I'm curious.... He's a very beautiful creature."

"And quite mad," I said. "If you won't accept my kind invitation to supper, I shall go down to find someone who will."

An hour later, with the consciousness that I had done nothing to justify my presence in the hotel, I sought out Sonia. A double line of claimants was closing in round one of the square, white pillars and towering over the shoulders of the rest I caught sight of Crabtree's sleek, black head. While Sonia stood breathless with excitement and bright-eyed with sheer joy of existence, he warded off the crowd like a policeman regulating traffic.

"Now then, Sonia, what about it?" I asked.

"Next but five," she called back, while Crabtree waved a large hand and boomed:

[Pg 161]

"Move along there, young feller, don't make a crowd!"

"The next is ours, isn't it, Miss Dainton?" inquired a decorous little voice from under my elbow.

"Time you were in bed, young 'un," Crabtree retorted menacingly.

O'Rane wormed his way past me and presented himself. In a moment's hush I heard the sharp tap of the leader's baton; for the last time Crabtree roared his wearisome "Move along there, please," and, as the music began, Sonia glided out on his arm into the middle of the room, barely turning to cry over her shoulder, "Come back later!"

"My duty's done, Raney," I said. "Come upstairs."

"I shall stay here a bit," he answered, following Sonia round the room with his eyes.

"Please yourself. You can't smoke here, and there's some old Green Chartreuse upstairs."

"Damn Green Chartreuse!" he returned.

"You shouldn't say that even in joke," I told him, as I started to elbow my way back to my old corner.

Bertrand I found was at supper, and our retreat had been invaded by a score of men who by rights ought to have been dancing. They were chiefly Tom's gladiatorial friends from Oriel, now scattering to various units of the Army—Penfold to the 17th Lancers, Moray to the Irish Guards and Kent to the Rifle Brigade. Of the others I knew Prendergast of Melton and New College, who was now a clerk in the Foreign Office and a purveyor of cheap mystery, and we were soon joined by Sinclair and Mayhew. Both were combining business with pleasure, for the former was playing for Yorkshire against the M. C. C. at Lord's, and the latter had hurried townwards to negotiate a position on the staff of "The Wicked World" as soon as his last Oxford term was over. Stragglers came and went, but our numbers remained steady and the group was completed by the arrival of Loring.

"This will never do!" he exclaimed. "Why aren't you chasing the hours with flying feet? Why aren't you letting joy be unconfined and all that sort of thing? Chartreuse? I[Pg 162] can hardly believe it! Of course, if you insist.... Sinks, go and dance!"

"I've been cut," Sinclair returned contentedly.

"Faint heart never won fair lady. You said Chartreuse, didn't you? I like to make quite sure. You been cut too, George?"

"We've all been cut," I said.

Loring looked round and pointed an accusing finger at an immaculate, pale, fair-haired youth with sensational waistcoat buttons and a white gardenia. I knew him by sight, as the illustrated papers were always publishing his photographs in country-house groups, and the reviews alternated between describing his novels as "impossibly brilliant" and "brilliantly impossible."

"No woman born of woman has ever cut Valentine Arden," he said.

"One had three partners," Arden replied with dreamy detachment. "One could not do justice to them all. 'Solomon in all his wisdom ...' and they had hot red faces. He retired into himself and sat lost in contemplation of a smoke-ring till it wavered and burst.

"You're a contemptible lot," said Loring with scorn. "No more idea of duty ... oh, my Lord! here's Raney! Go and dance, you little beast!"

"I've been cut," O'Rane protested with an air of originality. "If you're so keen on duty...." He pointed to the tray of liqueur glasses. "And it's so fattening. Go and work it off, Jim."

Loring shook his head.

"I'm going home. I sat in that filthy House all the afternoon, dined with my uncle, whose port would disgrace a preaching friar, let alone a cardinal. I then attended a political crush, turned up here, talked to my host, gave my hostess supper, had two dances with my hostess's daughter...."

"You were favored," O'Rane observed.

"I was irresistible. So would any one have been after so much 1900 Perrier Jouet.... However, that's neither here[Pg 163] nor there. I enjoyed those two dances, because I was the means of dislodging one Crabtree and seeing him packed off to feed dowagers."

"There's some value in a title yet," I said. "I tried and failed."

"How much of the Perrier Jouet ...? Half a bottle? No man, not even George Oakleigh, was irresistible on a beggarly half-bottle. I think I shall go to bed now; you're dull dogs; I'm doing all the talking. Anyone walk as far as Curzon Street? Good night, everybody."

His departure was the signal for a general break-up, and a moment later O'Rane and I were alone. He was silent and out of humour, and I did not need to be told that his efforts to dance with Sonia had been fruitless. I mentioned casually that my uncle wanted to meet him and suggested he should dine with us before going back to Oxford. This, he told me, was impossible: he was up to his eyes in work and had already wasted more time than he could afford.

"Your Schools aren't for a year," I pointed out.

"No, but I only work during term. In the vac. I see life."

I recalled what Sonia had told me on the subject.

"What's it all for?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do something."

"Yes, but—messing about at the bottom of a mine? It would be cleaner for you and more amusing for me if you came and stayed with me in Ireland."

"Or with the Daintons in Hampshire. There's quite a run on me. Sonia's frightfully offended because I haven't been near Crowley Court for a year and a half."

Than O'Rane no man was harder to convince that he could ever be in the wrong.

"When people are engaged ..." I began.

Almost fiercely he cut me short.

"And the engagement laughed at, and you threatened with the door and blackguarded for taking advantage of a girl's youth.... And your letters held up; I was forgetting that. God! George, if you'd the pride of a cur ...!" He stopped[Pg 164] abruptly, stretched his hand out for the cigarettes and lit one. "I went to Dainton," he continued more calmly, "and asked if he'd let me marry Sonia on a thousand a year—it was like bargaining with a Persian Jew over the price of a camel. He wouldn't commit himself. I told him I'd have the money two years after coming down from Oxford, and he stroked his fat cheeks and told me I didn't know the difficulties of making money.... Difficulties! As though Almighty God hadn't shot 'em down all round us so that we shall have something in life to overcome! And that from a man who inherited a brewery and let it down till he's glad to sell it at two-thirds the valuation of twenty years ago! Yes, the Daintons are washing their hands of—commerce. I told him—all this was in Sonia's presence—that I'd be judged by my own vain boastings. I'd come up in three years' time to show him if I'd made good, and if she'd wait.... Or if she wouldn't.... I left her a free hand...."

"It was only fair," I put in.

"To me, yes."

"To her."

"To me, George. There's not much merit in being faithful to a promise. But when you're not bound in any way, when it's just a matter of your own pride.... Sonia must show if she can make good three years hence. If we both come up true—well, there you are."

He threw his cigarette away, yawned, and sank lower into the chair.

"When did all this happen?" I asked.

"Oh, a year ago. More. It was just after the row."

"Well, what's the trouble to-night?"

O'Rane's eyes, always an interesting study in rapid emotion, became charged with sudden anger.

"She thinks I've cooled off because I don't write," he said. "George, I'm flesh and blood, I can't write—not letters that Lady Dainton would pass—to a girl I want to be my wife."

"Why don't you go and see her occasionally?" I suggested.

"I've got other work."

[Pg 165]

"I bet you don't get fat on what you earn carting hay in Wiltshire."

"I don't do it for the money. I want to know the lives these fellows are leading. Man's entitled to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' and there are moments when I begin to doubt if every man the wide world over is getting what I claim he's entitled to. I didn't think I was when I was a kid of fourteen. I don't think sweated labourers, prostitutes, incurables, children with tainted blood—I don't think they're getting all they're entitled to. The average Armenian, the natives of the Belgian Congo—I'm not easy in my mind about them, George. But before I die—my God!" He turned suddenly as a hand came to rest on his shoulder, and a voice behind him remarked:

"You're young to be talking of death, Mr. O'Rane."

"Let me introduce you to my uncle, Raney," I said.

He sprang to attention with the same click of the heels I had observed in Burgess's library some seven years before. As their hands met, Bertrand searched the lean, animated face and looked steadily into the expressive, defiant black eyes.

"I understand you are the late Lord O'Rane's son?" Raney drew himself up to the last inch of his height, for all the world like a rock-python waiting to strike. "Your father was a close personal friend of mine," Bertrand went on; "I am very proud to meet his son."

I set the words down as they were spoken; and, to read, there is little enough in them. Yet, when I heard them uttered, I still recall that my eyes began to smart. Bertrand's manner—half-sneering, half-openly brutal—had taken on a new courtliness towards a boy fifty years his junior. I do not regard myself as a man of undue sensibility: the change of tone was not created by my imagination. O'Rane lowered his eyes, bowed and murmured:

"Thank you, sir."

I have never seen a quicker or completer conquest. Gradually we relaxed our self-consciousness. I brought Bertrand a chair and gave him a cigar to smoke.

"Until two hours ago," he told O'Rane, "I knew no more[Pg 166] of your existence than, I expect, you knew of mine."

"Oh, I'd heard a lot about you, sir," Raney answered.

"Lies from George?"

"No, sir. True talk from my father. My first term at Melton I turned you up in 'Whitaker.'"

"The 'London Directory' would have done as well," said Bertrand.

"Is it too late for me to call?"

"By no means. Were you too proud to come before?"

"Too superstitious, sir."

Bertrand leant forward and laid his hand on O'Rane's knee.

"George was talking about you to-night," he said. "I could have offered a helping hand, perhaps."

"Perhaps that was what I was afraid of, sir."

My uncle looked at him with amusement.

"You are—an independent young man," he said.

"I believe in Destiny," said O'Rane, with an answering smile.

"What on earth has that to do with it?" asked Bertrand.

"I wasn't going to lie down and die as long as there was preordained work to do. Destiny meant me to win through."

"She didn't help you much," I said.

"I'm not so sure. I dropped down once on the sidewalk in Chicago, and a woman took me in and nursed me round. Nursed me by day and—earned her living by night. When I went to pay her back and say good-bye before I sailed, she was dead. Just two months in all. And if ever a woman's soul fluttered straight to heaven——"

"What are your plans for the future?" Bertrand interrupted prosaically. He, too, seemingly found O'Rane's intensity of feeling and speech a little disconcerting at first.

Raney woke suddenly from his reverie.

"I'm going back to Oxford to-morrow, sir."

"And after to-morrow?"

"I've got my Schools next year."

"I think George said you'd taken one first. What do you expect in your finals?"

[Pg 167]

"Commercially, there's no point in an honour school unless you take a first. After that, I have money to make. After that...."

He broke off and shrugged his shoulders.

"It will be Destiny's turn," I suggested.

O'Rane turned to me with a good-humored smile.

"I suppose it's all a wild welter of words to you, George?" he asked.

"No more than any other hypothesis unsupported by evidence," I said. "Your preordained mission...."

"Isn't there one form of work you can do better than all others? Haven't you one supreme aptitude? Form an alliance between aptitude and opportunity...."

"And you get a man of Destiny," I said.

"I leave you the honour of the phrase."

Bertrand glanced at his watch and pushed his chair hurriedly back.

"A quarter to four!" he exclaimed. "I must get home. George, I want you to arrange for David—excuse me, it was your father's name, too—for David to come and dine with us. A Saturday, of course. I hope you will come, David. I'll charge you for your dinner, if you like; and I think you owe me one evening after seven years."

"I'll come any time you ask me, sir."

"I'll leave you in George's hands. By the way, mysticism is too fine and rare a thing to rationalize for youthful sceptics. You will no more make your creed intelligible to George than you will teach me to play chess without a board. Good night, my boy."

"Good night, sir. I—I wish I hadn't waited so long."

"Perhaps it was preordained for the strengthening of your faith," my uncle answered, with a smile.

O'Rane and I returned to the ballroom to take leave of Lady Dainton. Barely six couples remained, and at the end of each dance one or two white, exasperated mothers darted forward, whispering angrily, "You must come now, dear." Even Crabtree had gone, and Sonia was breathlessly battling with her partner, Summertown, to win the even sovereign he[Pg 168] had ventured with the leader of the band on a test of endurance. The band eventually won by doubling its pace, whereupon Summertown claimed a foul and stood in the middle of the room shouting, "Ob-jeck-shun!" till Roger Dainton silenced him with an offer of bones and beer.

"Good night, Sonia, and many thanks," I said. "It was the star turn of the season."

"Good night, Bambina," said O'Rane. "See you again some day."

"Good night, dear one," she answered casually; and then, with a show of contrition, "I'm sorry we didn't have that one together."

"So am I, but it can't be helped now."

"There were such crowds of people I had to dance with," she explained.

O'Rane shook hands and came away with me. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that the explanation was in the nature of an anticlimax.

During the first half of the 1905 Season I saw the Daintons three times: after their ball it is hardly an exaggeration to say we met daily. Our new feverish intimacy was not entirely of my seeking, and I am free to admit that Lady Dainton's capable energy left me then, as it leaves me now, with a feeling of scared bewilderment, while the measure of Sonia's success in subjugating London came rapidly to be the measure of my dislike for her. When, however, my uncle fell a victim to internal gout and departed for Marienbad at the end of June, he left me a house, a box at Covent Garden, a voluminous correspondence and the financial welfare of the War Fund to engage my spare time. This last spelt Lady Dainton and afternoon meetings in Rutland Gate. I nerved myself to face the inevitable and wire an invitation to O'Rane to stay with me when term was over.

He kept me company till Goodwood, and one of our first[Pg 169] acts was to dine with the Daintons. I say it in no ungracious spirit, but at this time it was hardly possible not to dine with the Daintons. Turn up the files of the "Morning Post" and you will read some four or five times a week that a very successful ball had been given the previous evening by Mrs. X., "who looked charming in an Empire gown of ivory silk brocade," that among those present were the "Duchess of This, the Countess of That, Lady Dainton and Miss Dainton," and that dinners were given before the ball by "the Duchess of Here, the Countess of There and Lady Dainton." Lord Loring and other well-known dancing men are reported to have looked in during the evening.

Sometimes I feel my life has been embittered by the failure of the "Morning Post" to distinguish me by name; not until I entered the House was I segregated from the herd of "well-known dancing men," and this was more a compliment to the parliament of a great, free people than to myself, for by that time I had bidden almost complete farewell to Claridge's and the Ritz, the Empire Hotel and those ill-constructed tombs in Grosvenor Place that were tenanted, upholstered and beflowered for a night between two eternities of desolation.

By that time, too, the Daintons had scaled an eminence where I could hardly hope to follow them. The "Tickler" and the "Catch" were never wearied of publishing full-length, whole-page photographs of "Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., the popular member for the Melton Division of Hampshire," and Lady Dainton, "who is organizing a sale of work on behalf of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption." If a hospital matinée took place, Miss Sonia Dainton sold programmes; a theatrical garden-party, and she managed a stall; a mission bazaar, and she pinned in fading buttonholes at half a crown a time. And punctually the "Tickler" or "Catch" would depict her at work with her fellows—Lady Hermione Prideaux, all teeth and hat, on one side; and Miss Betty Marsden, the light comedy star from the Avenue Theatre, on the other. And when the last Vesuvius victim had been clothed in crewel work and London had emptied, the indefatigable camera-man[Pg 170] would take wing to the country and photograph "Lady Dainton and her daughter at their beautiful Hampshire seat."

Sonia repaid the trouble as well as Lady Hamilton or La Giaconda. And I think if hard work by itself is to be rewarded, Lady Dainton got no more than her deserts. Ex pede Herculem, and I judge her day by the hour she spared for the War Fund. The Committee Meeting was taken comfortably and unhurriedly in her stride. She was at the time a dignitary of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Primrose League Dame, a Visitor to half a dozen girls' schools, the president of several nursing and Needlework Guilds and—I believe—a vice-president of every Girls' Club, Rescue Home, Purity League and Association of Decayed Gentlewomen in the kingdom. Lady Dainton was one of those women who accumulated arduous and unpaid offices as dukes collected directorships in the golden days of the company-promoting 'nineties. What is more, she worked hard at all of them. When I think of her hurrying from Committee to Prizegiving, and from Prizegiving to Sale of Work, I almost cease to regard woman as man's physical inferior, though I may still wonder how far the world's general welfare would have been retarded had she remained at home with her feet on a sofa and a novel in her lap.

I certainly think Sonia would have lived happier if she had never set foot in London. Her personal success went to her head, and it took ten years of three lives and a war at the end to sober her and restore some sense of perspective. "You can give corn to thoroughbreds," my uncle would begin—and then I usually changed the subject. A woman, in Bertrand's Oriental eyes, was the plaything of so much sexual passion, irresponsible and unsafe until she was veiled and married, and even then perverse and unbalanced.

"To a man, sex is an incident," he would say; "to a woman, it's everything in this world and the next. You are too full of idealism, George. You pretend man's perfectible, that woman's got a capacity for disinterested self-sacrifice. You'll outgrow that phase, my boy; you'll find that with all our inventions and discoveries and religions and philosophies[Pg 171] and civilization and culture, we're devilish little way removed from the beasts. That young woman—I mention no names if it's a sore point with you—may turn into an admirable mother, but as an unsatisfied beast of prey.... My dear boy, it's not her fault, and you and your friends have contributed to make her what she is."

Contributed, perhaps. But, if not her fault, neither was it ours, but the fault of Society and human nature, the action and reaction of the sexes. As the year drew to its close I was too deeply immersed in politics to watch the social comedy, but in the summer and autumn there was little else to do. For five months I observed the psychological development of a girl who was physically attractive—and nothing more: not gifted, not clever, not accomplished, of no spiritual grandeur—a dainty, brilliant, social butterfly. Sonia was no more than that: I doubt if she ever will be more. Yet men are so constituted that it was enough to assure her triumph.

O'Rane and I observed in company. He was pledged to bear-lead young Summertown through the United States in August and September, and till that time I prevailed on him to leave the industrial conditions of England alone. The emptiness of our life must, I fear, have galled him, and, looking back on it all, I made a mistake in bringing him in view of Sonia and her gaudy fellow-butterflies. Technically they met as old friends without a claim on one another, each free to repent in any given way of their rash early engagement. In practice the liberty was one-sided: the greater Sonia's emancipation, the more critical he became; and Sonia, who was no fonder of criticism than any good-looking girl in her first season, grew first restless, then resentful and finally rebellious. When I said good-bye to Raney at Euston, I felt he was not leaving a day too soon; and this is not to blame him, but to underline the impossible position he and Sonia had taken up.

Before he left I recall a series of indecisive skirmishes. There was, for example, the Covent Garden engagement, in which I was routed. With a misguided idea of friendliness and in an attempt to separate Crabtree and Sonia before the[Pg 172] whole of London had coupled their names, I placed my uncle's box at the Daintons' disposal, and, whenever we found an opera we liked, Lady Dainton, Sonia, Raney and I used to dine together either in Princes Gardens or Rutland Gate and drive down together to Covent Garden. O'Rane was a musician; I had an untutored love of music; Lady Dainton, I fancy, felt it was the right thing to do, and Sonia was too overwrought and overexcited to mind what the invitation was so long as she could accept it. Roger Dainton, who rimed 'Lied' with 'Slide,' professed zeal for the House of Commons on such occasions, and on reflection I admire him for his frank Philistinism. With Sonia chattering unconcernedly through "Tristan," and with her mother leaning out to bow to her social acquisitions until I expected every moment to have to clutch her by the heels, the way of the Wagnerian was strait and thorny. But then, as Sonia said, "You come to Covent Garden to see people."

It was in seeing and being seen that we courted disaster. One night, as I was ordering coffee in the lounge, Crabtree attached himself to our party and accompanied us to our box. The next night I found him dining at Rutland Gate, and he asked me—before the soup plates were removed—whether I could squeeze him into a corner; he was prepared, if necessary to stand. And no sooner had he secured a programme than he exclaimed:

'"Il Trovatore!' I love that! To-morrow night, too, by Jove——"

"Well, why...." Sonia began and looked at me.

"You'd better roll along here, Crabtree," I said.

He brought a heavy hand crashing on to my knee.

"Stout fellow!" he cried. "What about dinner? Will you come to me, or shall I come to you, or—or what?"

"Oh, you'd better all dine with us," suggested Lady Dainton, tactfully, as he hesitated to fill in particulars of his invitation.

"Raney and I have got some men dining with us at the Club, I'm afraid," I improvised. And as we walked home I remarked, "We are beaten, my son."

[Pg 173]

"What a city to loot London is!" O'Rane murmured. The criticism, if not original, was at least true. I called it to mind whenever I found Crabtree feeding himself at his friends' expense, or Sonia accepting invitations from people she disliked rather than drop for an instant out of the race.

"I imagine we're becoming Americanized, Raney," I said one afternoon a few weeks later when he and I called on the Daintons to say good-bye before leaving London.

"The girls are," he answered. "They think men exist for the sole purpose of buying 'em sweets, taking them to theatres, running errands for them. Just listen." He crossed the room and drew up a chair by Sonia. "What have you been doing lately, Bambina?"

Sonia wrinkled her brow in sudden petulance.

"I wish you'd drop that silly name, David," she said.

"What have you been doing, Sonia?" he asked.

"Oh, heavens! What haven't I? Mr. Erckmann took me to a meet of the Four-in-Hand Club yesterday. I dined with Lord Summertown at the Berkeley. We went on to the Vaudeville, had supper at the Savoy, and then—and then—oh yes, we danced with Hardrodt, the soda-water king. Why weren't you there, George?"

"Frankly, I haven't much use for Hardrodt," I said. "The only time I met him I thought he was a bit of an outsider."

Sonia spread out her hands with a movement of deprecation.

"But Society lives by its outsiders."

"A man oughtn't to get tight in other people's houses," I persisted.

"Well, it was his own house last night."

"Did he keep sober?" I asked.

"Well, there are sober men and sober men," she answered. "'Not drunk, but having drink taken.'"

O'Rane looked at her gravely for a moment, then he asked:

"Why d'you allow yourself to be seen in a house like that?"

"What's the harm?" Sonia demanded gaily. "He did us awfully well."

[Pg 174]

"You admit he's an outsider, yet you accept his hospitality...."

"Oh, you little Oxford boys with your logic!" Sonia laughed. "Have a choc.? They're Lord Summertown's farewell present. You'll take care of him in America, won't you, David? He's such a love, I should never forgive you if you lost him. What are you going to do out there?"

At the sound of his own name Summertown joined us.

"I'm going to learn American," he assured us. "Say, this is my fi'ist visit to the U-nited States. Gee! I reckon this is a bully place. Pleased to meet you, Miss Dainton. I say, Raney, what's the proper answer to that?"

"No mere European has ever discovered. Get it in first and then clear out while they're still feeling for their guns."

"You're a fat lot of use," Summertown retorted. "Here I'm going out to improve my mind. What's a 'cinch'? And this rotten American War of Independence I'm always up against—when'll it be over? I want to be a pukka Yank."

"You'll be more esteemed as you are," O'Rane answered. "Better let me do the talking."

"Oh, you'll only be taken for an Irish immigrant," returned Summertown.

There he was wide of the mark. There is a story that O'Rane, in shovel hat and clerical collar, bearded the night porter of his own college at two in the morning and gained permission to call on one of the chaplains in Meadow Buildings. I have seen him successfully assume an alien nationality in Montmartre, Seville and Leghorn; while the first draft of American Rhodes scholars, scattered though they be to the ends of the earth, may recall the inaugural address delivered in hearing of the scandalized Cæsars by an alleged attaché of the United States Embassy.

They may remember a slight, passionate figure with black hair and arresting eyes who urged them in the name of their great Republic to resist all interference with their liberty on the part of the University authorities and to lynch any black men they found lurking around Balliol or St. John's. Robert Hawke, of Texas and Hertford, six feet five and[Pg 175] proportionately broad, may not yet have forgotten the night when the imposture was discovered; he alone may be able to explain why, after pursuing Raney down Holywell with a loaded revolver and running him to earth in Hell Passage, he tamely consented to breakfast next morning with the man he had sworn to slay. The Rhodes scholars were a fair mark for O'Rane whenever he had an outbreak. Creevey, of Melbourne and Trinity, still preserves the peremptory note that bade him call next morning on the Junior Proctor, Mr. D. O'Rane, though the House Mission has probably long ere this expended the five-shilling fine for non-attendance at the first University Sermon of the term. To add one digression to another, I have never understood how O'Rane survived four years at Oxford without being sent down.

The Covent Garden skirmish was my affair, and after summary defeat I retired into private life. O'Rane's moral lecture was no more successful than my diplomacy: the Americanization of women went on unchecked—if indeed the American girl be as Raney saw her, a social prostitute who would sell herself to the highest bidder and give as little as possible in return; I privately believe the breed to be indigenous to the wealthier strata of English society. He failed and retired to the other side of the Atlantic. Between the two skirmishes came the intervention of Loring House.

I was taking pot-luck there one night when Lady Amy asked me in an undertone how Raney's engagement was progressing. I told her all I knew, and she broke a significant silence by observing:

"Oh, I just wanted to know."

It was not all she wanted to know, and I ventured to tell her so.

"Well, Sonia really is behaving rather extraordinarily," she went on. "I wonder her mother...."

"Lady Dainton accompanies her everywhere," I pointed out.

"Yes, either she doesn't see or she doesn't care."

"Probably she thinks there's no harm in it."

Lady Amy shook her head.

[Pg 176]

"This is my fourth season, George."

"And their first. I submit that they don't know how many people sit round the walls of a ballroom inventing scandal."

"Well, someone ought to tell her. You're a friend of the family."

"Not if I know it, Amy!" I said. "This is not a man's job."

"I'd do it myself, if I knew how to start."

"You've only to tell her there's safety in numbers," I suggested.

It is to be presumed my advice was followed quite literally, for the next time I dined at Rutland Gate the party had doubled in size, and no one got enough to drink. Sonia very dutifully granted dances to all the male guests and, so far as I could see, impartially encouraged all to make love to her. Certainly she discussed the possibility of platonic friendship with me at 10.45, when I had hardly finished my dinner; and four hours later, when Valentine Arden was changing his second buttonhole, I observed the expression of weariness that settled onto his passionless, immobile features when rash newcomers sought to shake his precocious celibacy.

"When does a girl get over the awkward age?" he demanded.

"At death," I hazarded, and he left me in disgust, because he clearly wanted to tell me the answer himself.

Thus to some extent Amy Loring succeeded where Raney and I had failed, but her ultimate defeat was more humiliating than ours. After the last War Fund meeting of the season I went up stairs to find a cup of tea and say good-bye to Sonia before starting out on my autumn campaign among the electors of Wiltshire. Crabtree was with her, and in a jaded, end-of-season spirit they were discussing future arrangements and enumerating the houses they "had to" visit.