II
As the session drew to a close I gave a dinner-party at the House to the Lorings, Daintons, Farwells and one or two more. Truth to tell, I gave many dinners in the early days when it was still a pleasure to leap up between courses for a division. I almost liked to be called away from the "Eclectic" by an urgent telephone summons, and the joy of being saluted by the police in Palace Yard, or asked whether anything was happening in the House, died hard. I was six-and-twenty at the time, and it amused me to be buttonholed by the inveterate log-rollers of the Lobby or pumped by pressmen as I emerged from a secret meeting of intrigue in one of the Committee Rooms.
Loring had dined informally with me on many occasions—to examine the personnel of the Liberal party, he said, and classify those members who had stood for a bet or to improve their practice or acquire copy for their next novel. He became an assiduous attendant in the House of Lords as soon as we had any measures to send there, but in the early days he lived a butterfly life, and one of the conditions of my invitations was that he should give me news of that old world from which I was now cut off. Roger Dainton had lost his seat in the great landslide, and I had seen nothing of the family since the previous autumn. He was one of many, and so much had my uncle filled me with vicarious enthusiasm for political life, that I refused an invitation to Crowley Court in order to enter for the Parliamentary Golf Handicap, wherein Robert Plumer defeated me in the first round in comfortable time to return and argue a case before the Privy Council, while I dawdled on in contemplation of a game I dislike playing and loathe watching.
My dinner opened promisingly, as Lady Dainton was recognized by two Ministers on the way to the Harcourt Room and by a third as we took our seats. Summertown, I recollect, was in disgrace, as he had the previous week bade lasting farewell to his College in consequence of riding a motor-bicycle round the Quad, and half-way up the staircase of one of the Censors at six o'clock in the morning after the Bullingdon Ball. He had, however, won a pair of gloves from Sonia for his trouble. I contrived to separate him from his mother, and he underwent no worse punishment than hearing his future discussed at the top of three penetrating voices. Lady Marlyn assumed the world to be as deaf as herself, and I could see poor Sally Farwell blushing as her mother pierced and overcame the murmur of the surrounding tables. "A regular good-for-nothing scamp, Mr. Oakleigh. I want to send him abroad, but I wouldn't trust him alone. Do you think your nice friend Mr. O'Rane would care about the responsibility again? You know there was dreadful trouble with Jack over an Italian girl in New York."
I hastened to assure her that O'Rane would greedily accept the offer. I would myself have thrown up my seat and escorted Summertown round the world in person rather than have his indiscretions with the Italian girl shouted through the echoing dining-room.
"Has anyone seen anything of O'Rane?" I asked Sonia in the course of dinner.
"He was at Commem.," she answered. "Sam made up a party with Lord Summertown and David and a few more."
"It must have been quite like old times," I said, recalling Sonia's first and my last appearance at a Commemoration Ball.
"We fought like cats," she replied. "Tony Crabtree——"
"You didn't tell me he was of the party," I interrupted. Possibly there was more in my tone than in the words used.
"Why not?" Sonia asked, her big brown eyes filled with simple wonder. "You surely aren't still thinking of that absurd affair in Scotland?"
"What absurd affair?" I asked.
"You know perfectly well what I mean."
"I didn't know it was a matter of public discussion," I said.
"But it was the sort of thing that might have happened to anyone," she protested. "Of course at first ..." Her little white shoulders raised themselves almost imperceptibly. "But we've been meeting on and off all the season; we couldn't stand and glare, and it was much easier to be friends. We soon made it up, and he's been to stay with us in Hampshire. Well, I got Sam to take him up for Commem., and David must needs fight with him about something. I didn't mind, I'm not Tony's keeper, but David was so full of righteous indignation that I found him very dull. There was a sort of 'it-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you' reproachful look about him, so that in desperation I just asked him if he didn't love me any more."
"You're utterly soulless, Sonia," I observed, by way of gratifying her.
Her eyes shone with mischievous delight.
"His very words! Men are wonderfully unoriginal. I just leant forward and kissed him on his eyelids—it's all right!" she exclaimed; "he insists that we're morally engaged—and whenever I do that he simply crumples up. It's rude to look quite so surprised, George."
"And yet your people are quite respectable," I said thoughtfully.
She shook her head and sighed.
"You've become dreadfully proper and old-fashioned, George," she told me, "since you got into this musty old House. You're almost as bad as David, without the excuse of caring a snap of the fingers for me. He lectured me and lectured me, but when it was over he wanted to dash away and spend his life in a moorland cottage with me, sins and all."
"That temptation, at least, you had the fortitude to resist," I said.
She wrinkled her nose and pouted. "Me no likee. There are such millions of things I simply can't do without, and David can't give them me, and if he could he wouldn't. He is so serious, poor lamb! And it's always about the wrong things. After all, George, what does matter in life? It's frightfully serious to be ugly, or grow old, or not to know how to dress—I'm all right there at present, and perhaps I shan't mind when the time comes and I get all skinny and lined. It'll be frightfully serious if Lady Knightrider doesn't ask me up for the Northern Meeting, or if Daddy doesn't raise my allowance—I told you I was broke, didn't I? Well, I am. In the meantime——" She broke off and hummed two bars of a waltz. "Life is good, George."
"We were discussing Raney," I reminded her.
"Were we? I'd forgotten about him."
"It is an old habit of yours. What part does he play in your tragedy?"
"Tragedy?" she echoed, not altogether displeased at the choice of word.
"It'll be a tragedy before you've played it out," I told her.
She was quite thoughtful for a moment or two, and when she spoke again I could see her discretion obviously declining a challenge that her curiosity longed to take up.
"David's perfectly free to do whatever he likes," she answered, a shade combatively. "I'm not going to decide anything for the present; life's far too much fun, and we've got all eternity before us. He's in no hurry either."
"I thought he was in treaty for that moorland cottage," I said.
"Oh, that was merely a passing brain-storm. I told him the life I was leading, and he thought it over and decided to let me have my fling—so considerate of him!—and when I'm tired of vanities, if neither of us has found anyone better and either of us has got any money, v'là tout!"
With an exquisite wave of her hand she dismissed the subject and invited me to admire her dress, which was more transparent than most but otherwise not remarkable.
"Why don't you both have the honesty to admit you've made a mistake?" I asked.
"It amuses him," said Sonia tolerantly.
"And you?"
She gazed across the room with her head on one side.
"And you, Sonia?" I repeated.
"I'll tell you some day," she promised, and with that the subject finally dropped.
I wrote that day to Oxford—knowing no other address—to ask O'Rane to stay with me in Ireland. After considerable delay and the dispatch of a reply-paid telegram I received an answer dated from Melton.
"My dear George," it ran—and I preserve it as the only letter I ever received from the world's worst correspondent—"many thanks. Delighted to come. Villiers has gone under temporarily with rheumatic fever, contracted by sitting on wet grass to watch his house being defeated in the Championship; I am knocking the Under Sixth into shape in his absence. I have achieved considerable popularity with the boys, and Burgess would like to keep me in perpetuity. It's not bad fun. Some of the kids who fagged for me in Matheson's are now grown men, about five times the size of me. As I haven't got a degree yet, of course I'm not entitled to wear a gown, and the lads despise me accordingly. Burgess, seen at close quarters as a colleague, is even greater than I thought. I have gathered from him and the common-room some hideous stories of you and Jim. Blackmail will be the prop of my declining years.—Ever yours,
"D. O'R."
I had received a conditional promise from the Daintons, and to complete my party I invited the Lorings. Amy accepted, and Jim refused. Looking back at this time I remember that it was not easy to frame an invitation that he would not refuse. It was a weariness going to other people's houses, he told me, eating strange food, not being master of his own time. Assuming that I wanted to see him, why didn't I come to House of Steynes? Smilingly but resolutely he declined to come.
Where his personal comfort was concerned Loring could be wonderfully unadaptable. "I waste a fair portion of my life in the House," he used to argue. "Do let me enjoy the rest of the time in my own way." His mother and sister caught the refrain and abetted him. Indeed, a legend grew up that he was the hardest-worked member of either House and could therefore claim indulgences in the off hours when he was not struggling heroically against the latest Radical machination.
The old controversies are dead, but Loring's theory of the House of Lords is of hardier growth. Posing as the reader of Democracy's secret thoughts, he would leave House of Steynes amid rows of bowing flunkeys, motor to the station, where the stationmaster hastened to be obsequious, and step into his reserved carriage. With a great deal of bowing and smiling the guard would lock the door that his lordship might be undisturbed till he reached London. And at Euston a chauffeur and footman would meet him. "Yes, my lord"; "No, my lord"; "Very good, my lord." It would take another four men adequately to open the great doors of Loring House, but in time, and with more assistance where needed, he would be driven down to Westminster, there to display the knowledge of social conditions and public opinion acquired in his journeyings abroad.
So it was when the planets were yet young, so it will be when the earth grows cold, though the man who fled discomfited from Shadwell after ten days should perhaps refrain from criticism.
In what most men count the great things of life, Loring never abused his position; in the small, he became frankly unclubbable. I had known him long enough to laugh at the old-maidish fixed order of incompatibilities that he mistook for a well-regulated life. It was very conservative, very unadaptable, and he had an unanswerable reason for everything. You dined with him at the Elysée because Armand had the finest hand in London for a homard au tartare—the practice and the tribute continued for years after the great chef had bought himself an hotel in Boston and bade farewell to London. You dined at eight-fifteen because—well, because Loring always dined at eight-fifteen, and food at any other hour was supper or a meat tea. You hurried your dinner so as not to miss the star turn at the "Round House," which was timed for nine-twenty-five, and, when you had seen that, you had to leave—because Loring always left at that point, in turn because there was never anything worth seeing after ten. You then sat for half an hour—a dreadfully uncomfortable half-hour—at Hale's, where smoking was not allowed (few men smoked in 1630 when Martin Hale opened his tavern in Piccadilly at the fringe of "the town"): it would never have done, he would assure you, to arrive at your next destination before eleven; equally no man on earth could wish to stay later than two a.m.
It was impossible to wean him from his little rules, and the world must follow his lead—or live elsewhere. (Which course was adopted, he hardly cared.) I fought to preserve my prejudices against his—and he beat me. At ten-ten I was left in my stall at the "Round House," and he was half-way to Hale's. And when he decided that he could not and would not meet women at breakfast, I scarcely hoped he would make an exception in favour of Lake House. If my mother and Beryl persisted in breakfasting with their guests—I can see the very shrug of his shoulders as though he had put his objections into words—it was really, really simpler for me to meet him in Scotland where there would be no hideous domestic surprises in store for anyone.
So my autumn party in 1906 brought me Amy but not her brother. "Tell George I hope you're all missing me," he wrote to her. I hastened to assure him that with my uncle, O'Rane, the Daintons, the Hunter-Oakleighs from Dublin and four or five more, his absence had not been remarked.