II
The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.
After the absence of a year, in which I made my way from London through Africa, India, Australia to South America and back again through the States, Japan, China and Russia, I am free to admit that I sinned frequently and soliloquized interminably to men who neither knew nor wished to hear about the countries I had visited. I was very young at the time, and that must be my excuse. Greater age, and my sufferings at the hands of others, will now restrain my pen and limit me to a single reminiscence.
On my way home in the late summer of 1904 I broke the journey at Paris to stay with Johnny Carstairs, who was now—after a truncated career at Oxford—established as an honorary attaché at the Embassy. I never visit Paris without turning into the Luxembourg to see what Whistlers are on view and this time, as I came out into the Gardens, I saw Draycott. He looked shabby and unshaven, but not more so than any conscientious English student in the Quartier Latin, and at no time since he exchanged the extreme of foppery for the extreme of Bohemianism had a frayed shirt or porous boots seemed valid reason in his eyes for cutting a friend.
"The reason?" Carstairs echoed, when we met for déjeuner in the Café d'Harcourt. "I know it, of course, but——"
Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.
"Don't be professional," I said.
"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.
I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on the quayside at Calais—threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was the first of my experience—and the most complete.
After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of a conseille de famille, to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my mother's course for her—the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining and unanswerable question:
"What about you, George?"
As so often with men of weak initiative, the question—with a little judicious delay—was answered for me. My uncle and former guardian wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed—and accepted her fate. He arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the shooting—there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating notice—Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.
"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner. "What d'you want to do that for?"
"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"
"H'm. You won't make money out of that kind of book."
"Then you've read it?" I said.
Bertrand knocked the ash from his cigar and thought out a disparaging answer.
"Oh, I looked at it," he said vaguely. "It's unequal. Some parts worse than others."
"It was written by several people," I explained.
"Which part was your handiwork?"
"Which did you think the worst?" I asked in turn.
My uncle looked at me suspiciously.
"You're not proud of your precious babe," he observed.
"The opportunity would be too irresistible for you if I were."
Then he laughed, and with that laugh was born the friendship of many years. It was a pity, he felt, that a young man should bury himself in the dreariest house of the dampest county of the damnedst island in the world. Why should I not come to London, see a little of politics and society, 'try it on the dog, so to say'—which by amplification meant testing the principles of "Thursday Essays" on a popular meeting? If, as a good, catholic hater, there was one thing he hated more than another, it was writing letters: why should I not sign on as his secretary? Though untrained, I should learn much, and anyone with enough superfluous energy to rush into print could handle his correspondence before breakfast.
"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.
"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.
"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you know."
So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopædic intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.
Some sides of his character—his disillusionment, independence and far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred—were attributable to early struggles and later disappointments. After leaving Trinity College he saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and well-trodden road.
Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr. Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and—I am afraid—a love of mischief-making for its own sake.
His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the Houses of Parliament, he would—by his own standards of justice—be the sole survivor.
Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man. His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly—by some curious irony—ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence he kept to himself.
Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management. His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes "an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis 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 and murmur casually, "Stay behind for another cigar when the Bulls of Bashan have gone."
The Thursday dinners and the guests invited to them were marked in his book with a D—which stood for Duty, Dull or Damnable, according to his temper.
"I have to do it, George," he explained, with a half apologetic headshake. "For fifty years I've dined with them, and they must come and dine with me. If I refused to meet 'em ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "All my time would be taken up inventing excuses. Take my tip and dine out on Thursdays. I'll put you up for the Eclectic. Don't miss Saturday, though. The Saturday dinners are sometimes quite amusing."
In ten years I do not believe I missed a single Saturday dinner and for reward I think I have met what Lady Dainton would call "everybody worth meeting" in Bohemian, artistic, un-Social London. Looking round the long table at the authors and musicians, the returned travellers and soldiers on leave from a forgotten fringe of Empire, I was always reminded of a well-attended dinner of the Savage Club. You were invited—not for what you were, but for what you had done or because you could talk; and Bertrand in black tie and short jacket radiated a new urbanity over the gathering. We dined soon after eight and sat talking into the early morning. About midnight a sprinkling of actors and Sunday journalists would drop in for sandwiches, champagne and cigars. If there were vocalists or composers, the piano was dragged in from the morning-room; I used to hear a good deal of poetry recited before or in lieu of publication, and, whenever Carden, the "Wicked World" cartoonist, was with us, he would sit with one leg thrown across the other, his cigar at an acute angle and a spiral of blue smoke curling into his eyes, while he covered the backs of the ménus with caricatures in charcoal. I have a drawer full of them somewhere—Trevor-Grenfell who penetrated the Himalayas by a new pass, Woodman as 'Lord Arthur' in "Eleventh Hour Repentance," Milhanovitch at the piano and a dozen more.
Failing professional talent, my uncle would be called on to make sport. The only men I know who eclipsed him in memory were Burgess and O'Rane, and he had lived so long in London, hearing and storing the gossip of every hour, that it was almost impossible to find him at fault. That he was a stimulating talker, experimenting in talk and taking risks in conversation, I judge from the eagerness of his guests to get him started, and—to put the same test in other words—by the keen competition to secure invitations for a Saturday dinner. I remember a Thursday night when Loring came and wrestled with Bertrand over the official Catholic attitude towards Modernism. I met him in the street a few weeks later, and he begged me to congratulate him.
"What's happened?" I asked.
"You ought to know," he answered. "It came in your fist. I've been asked for a Saturday."
And Loring was in small things the least enthusiastic of men.
My secretarial duties took no more than an hour or two a day, and at the beginning of 1905 I followed my uncle's advice and put some of my political formulæ to practical test by going down three or four times a week to Wensley Hall Settlement in Shadwell. The impulse came from Baxter-Whittingham, who wrote to remind me of "our pleasant talks at Oxford" and to say that not a man could be spared with the working classes in their present scandalous condition of neglect. Thirty per cent of my generation worked for longer or shorter periods in one or other of the university and college missions: my seniors, laid by the heels in the slumming epidemic of the eighties and nineties, were there before me, and my juniors continued the supposedly good work after my defection. I therefore speak with misgiving and a sense of personal unworthiness in confessing that East End mission work left me singularly and embarrassingly cold. From some lukewarmness of spirit I failed to catch the enthusiasm which made my fellows dedicate their lives to the work and allowed them all to drop it when a dawning practice or the design of matrimony laid more pressing claim to their leisure. Bertrand indeed, indulged a favourite form of disparagement as soon as I made my intention known to him.
"I've been through all that," he told me. "It's all right; you'll outgrow it."
And I outgrew it in some ten weeks. Others have told me they made lasting and unique friendships. Such good fortune did not come my way. I doubted, and still doubt, the possibility of friendship between a Shadwell stevedore and the angular, repellent product of an English public school and university; this is not to put one above the other, but merely to disbelieve the existence of a common intellectual currency. Further, I am too self-conscious to run a Boys' Club or play billiards with the men without a sense of unreality and a fear of being thought patronizing. I question my own moral and social right, moreover, to conduct raids into the houses of Thames watermen and, if anyone seek to justify such mission work as I found in progress at Wensley Hall on the ground that it showed rich and poor how the other lived, it is mere platitude to answer that the poor revealed to me as little of their normal life as I to them of mine. Throughout my time in Shadwell I felt like a bogus curate at an endless choir treat.
And, if in looking back on it all I do not wholly regret the weeks I spent there, it is because of my consciously earnest and religiously hearty fellow-workers in the mission field. Chief of them in 1905 was Baxter-Whittingham, or simply "Baxter," as he was known to all Shadwell but myself, sometimes scholar of Lincoln and a man ten years my senior, who had gone from Oxford to the East End and never returned. It was the fashion at Wensley Hall to regard Whittingham as a Latter-Day Saint (I use the phrase in its unspecialized sense, without reference to the school of Brigham Young); and I am ready to believe that in thirty per cent of his character Whittingham was entirely saintly. Admiring disciples told me how he lived in a single room of a workman's cottage on fifteen shillings a week with a supererogatory fast thrown in on any colourable pretext. The first thirty per cent of him compassionately and whole-heartedly loved the poor. Another twenty per cent was given up to an emotionalism bordering on sensuality in ritual, music and art.
And the remaining fifty per cent of Baxter-Whittingham was pure arrivisme. He had risen early and cornered the market in poverty; there was no one to equal him on East End Housing Problems, the Drink Question, Sweating and the Minimum Wage. His little "Other Half of London" and "England's Shame" created a considerable sensation and were accepted without criticism. Indeed, who was in a position to criticize the man who knew Shadwell and had lived there ten years? When the disciples prevailed on him to stand in the 1906 election his candidature aroused an interest that spread far beyond the limits of his division. And when he was returned a party was waiting, ready made, in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. Ministers might shake their heads irritably over another Incorruptible, but many a private member felt easier in his mind for the presence of the hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped figure in the loose-fitting, semi-clerical clothes, who seemed to carry England's poor in one pocket and England's conscience in another.
And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,
My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.
I left Wensley Hall at the beginning of the 1905 Season, lured by cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. Early in April I met John Ashwell at a dinner-dance given by the Sinclairs: he casually elicited my name and address, satisfied himself of my bona fides and went to work like an industrious, dapper, well-fed little mole. Within a week strange cards arrived for me without explanation, within a month they had assumed the dimensions of a moderate snowstorm.
"Who is Mr. John Ashwell?" I asked my uncle one morning, throwing over a card bearing his compliments.
"A Society promoter," Bertrand answered. "D'you know Lady Ullswater? Those two have started a registry office for eligible young men." He handed back the card. "Your name's on the books. He sends lists of dancing men to struggling hostesses at so many guineas a dozen. Lady Ullswater brings girls out at a hundred pounds a head, with another fifty pounds if there's a presentation; for three hundred pounds and all expenses—a couple of thousand in all, say—she'll give a ball at the Empire Hotel. 'Lady of Title willing to chaperone young girls of good family. Introductions.' You've seen her advertisements—every spring for the last fifteen years. Ashwell takes a commission on any suitable match he brings off in a girl's first season. Don't cherish too many illusions about London Society, George; anybody can get there who's willing to pay. And unless you're particularly anxious to be married off to someone you don't know, I should advise you to avoid Ashwell. A year or two ago I heard him with my own ears tell a woman that he'd got a man he wanted her daughter to meet—heir to a viscounty and a good deal of money; only an uncle in the way, and he was a bad life. Of course if you feel you're immune, the pander to plutocracy is as amusing to study as anyone else."
Bertrand's description was not of a kind to send me out of my way in search of Ashwell, but in the course of nine years I saw as much of him as I wanted to. Of an artificial society he was, perhaps, the most artificial member.