I
I left Oxford with a sense of oppressive loneliness.
It was not entirely the sorrow of parting from a place I had for four years loved but too well; it was not altogether the prospect of making a fresh start—I was pleasurably excited by that; the feeling of forlornness arose, I think, from the recognition that the next step would have to be taken alone. I suppose I am shy; certainly I lack initiative. There had hitherto always been someone to keep me in countenance—Loring at my private school, at Melton and, later, at Oxford, and there had always been someone to act as a stimulus. At one time it was Burgess, who laid the foundation of any knowledge I have gleaned, and made me as temperate, passionless and sterile as I have become—as deeply imbued, perhaps, with the indifference that masquerades as toleration.
At another time I was stirred from philosophic doubt by the fanaticism of O'Rane. The fire he lit burned too brightly to last, but by strange irony as it began to flicker I came under the influence of my guardian Bertrand Oakleigh, a man so disillusioned that in very factiousness of opposition I was driven to fan the dying embers of my young enthusiasms. My intimate acquaintance with him began in the autumn of 1904, some fifteen months after I had come down. In the interval I must admit to a feeling of intellectual homelessness.
The last moments of the Oxford phase came at the end of July after six weeks in Ireland with my mother. I returned to London and picked up Loring, and the two of us presented ourselves for our vivâs. There was little worthy of record in my own case. A fat-faced man in a B.D. hood opened at random the Index and Epitome to the Dictionary of National Biography, turned the leaves, shut the book with a snap and called my name. For perhaps six minutes I drew on my imagination for the early life of the Young Pretender; then in an oily, well-fed voice my examiner remarked, "Thank you. That will do." I disliked the voice, I disliked the man. He is probably a bishop now.
When my own ordeal was over I strolled round the Schools to see how the Greats men were getting on. To my delight I found Loring in the middle of his vivâ—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the vivâ was in progress, for I have no idea when it started. Maradick of Corpus was examining, and everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. The candidate was leaning back with his chair tilted at an angle and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat; so far as a lay man could judge he was making out an effective case against the Pragmatism of William James, of which, by an appropriate coincidence, Maradick was regarded as one of the greatest living exponents. The scornful demolition went on unchecked until Loring introduced some such name as Müsseldorf.
"Who?" interrupted Maradick.
"Müsseldorf. Johan Müsseldorf of Nürnburg. Died about 1830. It's his 'Prolegomena' I'm quoting. He exploded Pragmatism before James was born."
"Exploded? Well, er ... that's as may be. I remember now you mentioned him in one of your papers. He's not very well known in this country."
"I don't know about this country," Loring rejoined. "He's shamefully neglected in this university. Yet he undoubtedly anticipated Schopenhauer on Will. Or if you look at Lincke's 'Note on Berkeley's Subjective Idealism'...."
"Lincke, did you say?" inquired another of the examiners.
The remainder of that vivâ has passed into history, and when I went up to take my M.A. three years later the story was told me of three different people. On the last day of the written work, Loring had expressed dissatisfaction with his papers, and I heard later that when he began his vivâ the examiners regarded him as a hopeless, unsalvageable third. They asked formal questions, and he replied by burlesquing such of their lecture theories as he had picked up at second hand. It was by pure chance that he mentioned Müsseldorf, but the awe of unfamiliarity with which the name was received led him to try experiments with the mass of mid-nineteenth century metaphysics that for two years I had seen him reading in the window-seats of "93D" or reciting of an evening to a restless Siamese kitten.
I arrived in time to see the three examiners taking counsel together, while Loring looked on with the good-natured tolerance of a man who is prepared to give up his whole day in a good cause.
"We think, my colleagues and I," said Maradick at length, "that this discussion had better be continued in another room. Perhaps you will come this way with me? We should like to hear you more fully on this subject, but of course there are other candidates to consider."
I have only Loring's unchecked, picturesque narrative of what took place during the next hour, as I was not sure whether the public was admitted to this private, auricular examination.
"They'll give me a first on that," he predicted, as we walked up the High together. "Bound to! Oh, it was one of our better vivâs! I hauled out every German philosopher I'd ever heard of, and a fair sprinkling that I made up on the spot, carefully adding an outline of their work and pointing out where they differed from our esteemed old friend Lincke. Maradick don't know much about modern German metaphysics, and he knows a dam' sight less about the German language. I quoted long passages to establish my points, and when I couldn't think of any to suit, I just made 'em up! I'd no idea my German was so fluent. If they don't give me a first, I'll expose Maradick for pretending to recognize quotations from two non-existent authors named Frischmann and Reichwald respectively." He led the way to the station with an obvious sense of a good day's work done.
I imagine that every man, before he attains wisdom, endures a part or the whole of a walking tour. O'Rane had propounded the idea in the course of our last term, and his eloquence was sufficient to shake even Loring. On leaving Oxford we repaired to House of Steynes, where Raney was awaiting us with a haversack and ash-plant, and without giving our enthusiasm a chance to cool we struck south with no more destination nor time-limit than was implied in the determination to walk until we quarrelled or grew tired of walking. It is a tribute to our friendship that three weeks later we reached Loring Castle, Chepstow, unsundered and harmonious.
There was, I suppose, too much variety for us to grow weary of each other's society. Marching without map or time-table, we billeted ourselves for the night on any friend we encountered on the way, and when none was available we put up at the first hotel that promised adequate bathing accommodation. Our kit was not immoderate—brushes, razors, sponges and pyjamas. When we needed clean clothes we bought them, and got rid of the old through the parcels post. This last was the only matter of disagreement between us, for Loring professed an overwhelming desire to heap unwelcome gifts on the unsuspecting men who chanced to be in the public eye at the moment.
"I've walked clean through these boots," I remember his remarking one night at Windermere, as I yawned through an attack on the current Education Bill in a fiery local organ. "George, d'you think your friend Dr. Clifford would like some capital brown bootings? Or Lord Hugh Cecil?" He seized the paper from my hands and turned the pages thoughtfully. "Eugene Sandow! That does it! Why, it may be his birthday to-morrow for all you know!" And it was only by concerted physical force that we restrained him.
The result of our Schools reached us at Shrewsbury: Loring had got a first and I a second.
"It's one in the eye for dear old Burgess," he remarked, when we congratulated him. "I shall go down to Melton next term and ask for an extra half, just to score him off. And now I really can take things easily."
"Why don't you stand for a fellowship?" I asked. I remembered his dread of leaving Oxford and found it in my heart to envy him his chance of living on and off in—say All Souls for another half-dozen years.
"Why in God's name should I?" he demanded. "I've satisfied myself, and anyone else who's interested in the subject, that I've got some ability. Now the only artistic thing is to waste it. There's no distinction in belonging to an effete aristocracy unless people can be induced to think you're being thrown away. I'm going to be a Dreadful Object Lesson."
He leaned back in his chair, yawned and sat with closed eyes until we roused him.
"Seriously, what are you going to do?" O'Rane inquired.
Loring adopted the manner of a Hyde Park orator.
"Live abroad," he said, "and squander the rents that I wring from the necessitous poor. Come back in time to shoot the birds or hunt the foxes that have overrun my tenants' land. Go down to the House once every few years to vote against democratic measures. Marry an actress of questionable virtue and die, leaving a son who has only to take the trouble to be born in order to become an hereditary legislator and a permanent obstacle to the People's Will. It'll be very hard work, but someone must do it, or Drury Lane and the Liberal Publication Department would have to close down. That's what's expected of tenth transmitters of foolish faces, isn't it, George?"
"It's the least you can do," I assured him.
"And the most. That's the sad part about it." His face grew reflective and his voice lost its note of banter. "Time was when I hugged delusions and called them ideals. I used to think there was room in the body politic for men who were rich enough and high placed enough to be quite independent of party considerations,—men who could wait and take long views, men without seats to lose or constituents to bother about, men who couldn't be bought because there was nothing big enough to offer them. The enormous majority of M.P.'s go into politics for what they can get out of them—legal jobs, office, local honour and glory—and it gets worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait, these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest shift their leaders may suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."
I suggested that with all its faults our English public life was still ethically the cleanest in the world and was so far from consistently deteriorating that it was still some way above eighteenth-century England. If he found it corrupt it was for him to raise it to his ideal.
"My dear George," he answered, "the ideal perished on the day I discovered Unionists and Radicals both talking of 'big views' and 'the higher patriotism' and at the same time helping themselves out of the public purse. No, no! Suave mari magno. I shall endeavor not to marry the actress of questionable virtue, but I shan't attempt to etherialize politics. They're too dirty, for one thing, and they're too dam' dull for another."
He might have added that they were too uncertain. In twenty years' tolerably close observation it is the unexpected changes of politics that impress me most—the big Bills that evoke none of the expected opposition, the little Bills that break Ministries, the inflation or sudden pricking of a reputation, the constant shifting and re-arranging of parties. Ten days after Loring's criticism of politics on the score of their dullness, the three of us were at Chepstow waiting for the weather to mend before pushing on to London. The Khaki Parliament does not rank high among periods of consummate human dignity; its birth was overshadowed and embarrassed by the South African War; its early and middle life were given over to Education and Licensing Bills of which I imagine even their authors were not unduly proud. Then without warning came the news that Chamberlain had declared for Mercantilism, Protection, Fair-Trade—whatever name was dug out of the economy primers before the movement was baptized with the name of Tariff Reform.
The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French National Convention.
My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club. The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying, and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism, Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."
I can see now that there was little originality in the book. Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall. Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.
Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and glittering epigram, their logic—and faith in logic, their assurance and perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful: there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social Reform. The Liberal League—most gentlemanly of parties—was captured; its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to their own again.
Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous, Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford mind. I remember my relief some years later in reading "The Break-up of the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized, ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on governmental control and coercion.
Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight—never strong—underwent one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone, because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail: for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled with me as far as Alexandria.
A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon O'Rane gave me the reason.
"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, of course, who else? She had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."
"What's her objection?" I asked.
"Oh, Sonia's too young, and speaking as her mother—my God, I thought that ullage was kept for penny novelettes! The girl of the present day.... Well, the long and the short of it was—I didn't mean to—but I told her Sonia and I were engaged. That gave her something to think about, George."
He strode fiercely across the lawn with his hands clasped Napoleonically behind his back.
"What did she say?" I asked, hurrying to overtake him.
"Wouldn't hear of it, don't you know?" he answered mimickingly. "We were a pair of children, don't you know? I'd behaved scandalously in mentioning such a thing, it was monstrous; what had I got to support her on? It was all her fault for ever letting Sonia go to Oxford, young men were not to be trusted, and after the years she'd known me, don't you know?" He blew a long breath. "She couldn't have said much more if we'd eloped."
"Well, what's going to happen now?"
He flung his hands out in wild gesticulation, and his black eyes were round and hot with angry surprise.
"She declined to recognize the engagement and told me I was to consider it off," he said. "I told her I proposed to marry Sonia. 'That is for us to decide!'" He clutched my arm and marched me the length of the lawn. "George, she's getting damnably pompous since they made Dainton a bart. We seemed to have reached a bit of an impasse. 'I don't recognize even an understanding,' she said, 'and I shall not permit Sonia to do so. If you persist in this—nonsense, my husband and I shall have to consider whether it is advisable for you and Sonia to have any opportunities of meeting, don't you know? If you will take my advice....' Pah! And then she handed it out. I must think of my career, I was a mere boy; you needed to be married to appreciate that marriage was an expensive luxury...."
"You seem to have taken it in the neck, Raney," I said as he choked and grew silent in his disgust.
"Pretty fairly. I'm not to write. I'm honour-bound not to mention the subject to Sonia on pain of having the door shut in my face next time. 'Of course, we shouldn't like that. You're an old friend. Perhaps if you had sisters of your own, don't you know. She started to get patronizing, George, so I asked her to tell me whether she admitted me to the house because I was fit to be admitted, or out of pity because I hadn't a home of my own and was a bastard——"
At the risk of writing myself down old-fashioned and conventional, I admit there are two or three words that send a shiver through me.
"My dear Raney ...!" I began.
He laid a hand on my arm.
"You can't improve on what she said, old man," he assured me.
"Call a spade 'a spade' by all means," I said, "but not 'a bloody shovel.' Especially with women. They have to pretend to be shocked."
He threw up his head with a mirthless laugh.
"There was devilish little pretence about Lady Dainton. It wasn't a word I ought to have used, and apparently it wasn't a thing I ought to have been. I suppose—she hadn't—heard about it before." He stood silent for many moments. "I asked her whether my presence was still acceptable. Of course she was bound ... did it very nicely, all the same. She said I was as welcome as before last June."
He took out a pipe and began filling it. I have met few men to whom the trite metaphor of "blowing off steam" was so applicable.
"Was that all?" I asked.
"I told her I regarded myself as being still engaged to Sonia." His eyes suddenly blazed and his voice rose. "And that I'd marry her if the whole world was in our way. Children indeed! Does she think there's some fixed age for falling in love?" Again he blew a long breath. "She said she couldn't be responsible for what I chose to fancy about myself, but that I knew her views. There the row ended."
There was a subdued leave-taking that night, and for some days the gloom spread by Lady Dainton seemed to hang round her house and family. For all my wisdom and superiority in discussing the rash engagement with Amy Loring, I was sorry to see it broken off. Two, three years before I had been as anxious as O'Rane to marry and I do not know that a disappointment hurts less at eighteen than later in life. It is true that there was no pecuniary embarrassment in my case, but at that age I refused to regard it as a serious obstacle in O'Rane's path. If anyone wanted money, he either 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 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.