II
Though O'Rane gave me no more than a couple of veiled hints, he was at this time in train to be adopted as a Conservative candidate. There was a certain irony in the son of the last Lord O'Rane standing in such an interest, but the House of Commons has little use for non-party men, and he was now more closely connected with the National Service and Navy Leagues than with any Liberal organization.
The irony would have been completer if the swift changes of politics had not delayed his election. It was not till the early spring of 1914 that he took his seat, and his place by this time was on the Ministerial side. The volte-face sounds more abrupt than it really was if it be remembered that he never had more than one object in view at a time. Political gossip in the days of the Agadir incident said that part of the Cabinet was ready for war while another part asserted that our warlike preparations were inadequate. From that moment O'Rane's mind was set on seeing the country put into such training that it would not be found wanting if a similar crisis arose in the future.
When he finally went to the electors of Yateley, the focus of public interest had changed. The surface of diplomacy was unruffled; the Tripoli Campaign and the two Balkan wars had dragged to an end without involving any of the Great Powers, and my uncle's confidence rose from strength to strength at the confirmation of his favourite doctrine that modern war was too vast and complex for a first class power to undertake.
On the other hand, the condition of England was a matter for considerable searching of heart. A spirit of unrest and lawlessness, a neurotic state not to be dissociated from the hectic, long-drawn Carnival that continued from month to month and year to year, may be traced from the summer of the Coronation. It is too early to probe the cause or say how far the staggering ostentation of the wealthy fomented the sullen disaffection of the poor. It is as yet impossible to weigh the merits in any one of the hysterical controversies of the times. Looking back on those four years, I recall the House of Lords dispute and a light reference to blood flowing under Westminster Bridge, railway and coal strikes characterized by equally light breach of agreements, a campaign in favour of female suffrage marked by violence to person and destruction to property, and finally a wrangle over a Home Rule Bill that spread far beyond the walls of Westminster and ended in the raising and training of illegal volunteer armies in Ireland. Such a record in an ostensibly law-abiding country gives matter for reflection. Sometimes I think the cause may be found in the sudden industrial recovery after ten years' depression following the South African War. The new money was spent in so much riotous living, and from end to end there settled on the country a mood of fretful, crapulous irritation. 'An unpopular law? Disregard it!' That seemed the rule of life with a people that had no object but successive pleasure and excitement and was fast becoming a law unto itself.
When, therefore, O'Rane went to Yateley, he went in protest against the action of certain officers at the Curragh, who, holding the King's Commission and with some few years of discipline behind them, let it be known that in the event of certain orders being given they did not propose to obey them. Then, if ever, the country was near revolution; I still recall the astonishment and indignation of Radicalism and Labour. On the single question of Parliamentary control of the Army, O'Rane was returned for a constituency that had almost forgotten the sensation of being represented by anyone but a Conservative.
The reason why two and a half years elapsed between our conversation at the Embassy Ball and his election in 1914 has been a secret in the keeping of a few. I see no object in preserving the mystery any longer. In the summer of 1912 Mayhew came home for his annual leave and dining with us one night in Princes Gardens he mentioned that Budapest gossip was growing excited over the possibility of a disturbance in the Balkans. It was a Bourse rumour, and the Czar of Bulgaria was credited with having operated the markets in such a way that a war of any kind would leave him a considerably richer man. I asked O'Rane for confirmation, and he informed me carelessly that some of his diplomatic friends were expecting trouble.
A few weeks later Mayhew invited me to dine and bring O'Rane. We had a small party in Princes Gardens that night, so I told him to join us and sent a note to Raney's flat. Mayhew duly arrived, but I heard nothing from O'Rane.
"War's quite certain," I was told, when we were left to ourselves. "I'm working to get sent out as correspondent for the 'Wicked World' and I wondered if you or Raney would care to come too. You'll get fine copy for that paper of yours, and as he knows that part of the world and speaks the language——"
"It's a pity he couldn't come to-night," I said. "Frankly, Mayhew, I don't see myself as a war correspondent. I don't know how it's done——"
"Everything must have a beginning," he urged. "I don't either."
"But I've not got the physical strength to go campaigning. I should crack up."
"You'll miss a lot if you don't come. You know, a series of articles for 'Peace' on the 'Horrors of Modern War'...."
It was at that point that my uncle, who had been half-listening to our conversation, dropped into a chair by Mayhew's side.
"A very good idea," he observed. "Don't be idle, George. It'll be a valuable experience."
Between them they bore down my opposition, and, while Mayhew secured my passport and subjected it to innumerable consular visas, Bertrand ordered my kit by telephone and reserved me the unoccupied half of a compartment on the wagon-lits as far as the Bulgarian frontier.
On what followed I prefer not to dwell. We were treated with every mark of courtesy by the Bulgarian General Staff and—locked in an hotel in Sofia with a military guard at the door till the war was over. Mayhew is ordinarily a charming companion, as were no doubt the two or three dozen other war correspondents who shared our fate, but I grew to loathe his presence almost as bitterly as he came to loathe mine. I am told that Sofia is an interesting city, though I had no opportunity of examining it; I am told, too, that our hotel was the best, though I had no standard of comparison whereby to judge it. Happiness came to me for the first time when I mounted the gangway of an Austrian-Lloyd boat at Salonica and coasted unhurriedly round Greece and Dalmatia to Trieste. Our fellow-passengers included specimens of every race in the Levant and one or two outside it. The first night on board a Greek officer wrapped his uniform round a lump of coal and dropped it over the side.
"I can't stand the risk of being recognized," he told me. "You see, we were all forbidden by proclamation to depart from strict neutrality."
"And yet, my dear Raney," I said, as I lit a cigar and walked arm in arm with him along the deck, "you are the man who chastises us for our want of discipline."
"I felt I owed myself a smack at Turkey," he answered, gazing over the sapphire-blue Ægean to the vanishing coastline of Greece. "It must be kept quiet or you'll get me into rather serious trouble."
And from that day to this I have never asked or answered where O'Rane went when he left London in the late summer of 1912 and stayed away till the winter of the following year. It is now too late to harm him by putting the facts on paper.
Mayhew left us at Trieste and went by way of Vienna to Budapest. O'Rane and I returned to England, and two days after our arrival in town I invited him to dine with me. His man told me by telephone that he had sailed that morning for Mexico, and I gathered was trying to realize his property before the smouldering disorder there burst into a flame of civil war. He was absent from England all the summer of 1913, and, when he returned, it was in company of the so-called James Morris, and the Mexican oil venture was at an end. I never learned the terms on which they had sold out, but there was a heavy sacrifice. O'Rane, with characteristic optimism, expressed satisfaction at getting anything at all and sent Morris to Galicia and northern Italy to sink his experience and the proceeds of the sale in fresh oil speculations. In the late autumn they set up a joint establishment in Gray's Inn, selected, after due deliberation, as the place where an American citizen who had broken off diplomatic relations with his family was least likely to be molested.
After the weariness of my imprisonment in Sofia I felt entitled to spend the summer of 1913 in seeking relaxation. With O'Rane and Loring abroad I fell back for companionship on my cousin, Alan Hunter-Oakleigh. He was home from India on leave, and, as nothing would induce him to bury himself in Dublin, the family came over and took a flat in town—to the mortification of his wild young brother Greville, who held the not uncommon view that a man should not belong to the same club as his father or inhabit the same capital as his mother. Violet came protesting, as the conventional delights of the Season were beginning to pall on her, and the only member of the family who extracted profit from the change of home was the youngest brother, Laurence, who could now spend his Leave-out days from Melton in an orgy of dissipation for which one or other of his relations was privileged to pay.
I always count myself an Irishman until fate flings me into the arms of my cousins. Then I grow conscious of respectability, middle age and the solid seriousness of the Anglo-Saxon. A day with one of them was an adventure; a night with more than one almost invariably a catastrophe. For the early weeks of the season I shepherded Alan through half a hundred crowded and entirely blameless British drawing-rooms; we dined in all the approved restaurants and saw the same revue and musical comedy under a score of different names. Then he grew restless.
"This is too much like Government House," he complained of an Ascot Week ball at Bodmin Lodge with Royalty present. "I want a holiday from knee-breeches and twenty-one gun salutes. Low Life, George! Have you no Low Life to show me?"
I referred the question to Summertown, who was wandering about with a cigarette drooping from his lips and an anxious eye on the time.
"Wait just ten minutes," he begged us. "Greville and Fatty Webster have gone off to cut the electric-light wires."
"But why?" I asked.
"To cheer these lads up a bit," he answered, pointing a disgusted finger at the stiff, formal ballroom.
"Then I propose to leave at once," I said, making for the staircase.
"Oh, you'd better stay," he called after me. "Why, for all you know, you may get your pocket picked by a third-class royalty. Not everyone can say that, you know, and some of to-night's lot look proper Welshers. Just as you like, though, and, if you'd really rather go, I'll give you a scrambled egg at the 'Coq d'Or.'"
My cousin brightened visibly at the suggestion, and the three of us drove to a silent, ill-lit street off Soho Square. An impressive commissionaire admitted us to a small oak-panelled hall with a cloakroom on one side and a new mahogany counter on the other. A Visitors' Book lay open, and Summertown gravely inscribed in it the names of J. Boswell, Auchinleck; S. Johnson, Litchfield; and R. B. Sheridan, London. We descended to a glaring white and gold room, as new as everything else, with tables round the wall, a negro orchestra at one end and in the middle an open space for dancing. Replace the negroes with Hungarians, and the room was an exact replica of any cabaret in Budapest or Vienna.
As cicerone, Summertown enjoyed himself. By dint of addressing the waiters as 'Gerald,' the ladies as 'Billy' and demanding 'my usual table,' he secured us kidney omelettes, sweet champagne and the company of two lightly clad and strangely scented young women, whose serious occupation in life was twice daily to shuffle on to the Round House stage by way of a platform through the stalls, to the refrain of "Have you seen my rag-time ra-ags?" A swarthy Creole hovered within call and was urged to complete the party.
"Je suis femme mariée, m'sieur," she sighed, shaking her head.
"That's all right, old thing," Summertown reassured her. "We're all married—more or less—and we're only young once. Waitero! Uno chairo immediato damquick, what what! Well, lads, this is the 'Coq d'Or.' What about it?"
"It is an impressive scene," I replied.
The room was half empty when we arrived, but filled rapidly during the next hour. I observed Sir Adolf Erckmann presiding over a large party and saw numerous rather elderly young men whose lined faces and watchful eyes were familiar to me from music-hall promenades. A handful of professionals executed the Tango and Maxixe with much of the suggestiveness of which those dances are capable, but it was only when the twanging banjos changed to rag-time that the majority of our neighbours sheepishly unbent and put forth an assumption of joie de vivre.
"This is It," cried Summertown, jumping up excitedly with arched back and hunched shoulders. "Come on, Billy!"
In a moment they were locked in each other's arms, swaying slowly and shuffling down the length of the blazing gold and white room. The Creole proposed that she and Alan should follow Summertown's example, and, when he excused himself, made successful overtures to the other Round House lady whom we had been privileged to entertain.
"The metropolis is waking up," commented Alan as he watched the scene.
Elderly women were being navigated by anxious young men, elderly men pranced conscientiously with shrill young girls, whom they seemed to envelop in waves of shirt front and human flesh. Three rather intoxicated boys, with their hats on, gravely linked hands and circled unsteadily to a hiccoughed refrain of 'Nuts in May'; girls danced with girls, and a thin, long-haired man performed a pas seul with the aid of a banjo purloined from a member of the orchestra who had withdrawn in search of refreshment.
"There's been rather a boom in night-clubs lately," I explained. "People were tired of being turned out of the restaurants at half-past twelve."
"Do ladies come here?"
"You see them," I said.
Alan wrinkled his nose and turned his eyes to Sir Adolf Erckmann, who was dancing with a girl of about sixteen. Her little face with its powdered nose and painted lips was squeezed against his chest, one great arm twined round her waist and gripped her body to his own, the other circled her neck and rested ponderously on her left shoulder. Bald and scarlet from collar to scalp, Sir Adolf drooped top-heavily over her head; a cigar extended jauntily from the upper tangles of his beard, and a pair of rimless eyeglasses flapped at the end of their cord against the bare back of his partner.
"And who is our friend who has been through hell with his hat off?" Alan inquired.
I told him.
"They do these things better in Port Said," he observed.
Our evening was not hilariously amusing, and I am afraid Summertown must have caught us yawning and consulting our watches. Certainly he was as prompt with apologies as we with speeches of reassurance, and we reached Oxford Street and a cab rank in so great an odour of amity that Alan and I found ourselves pledged to dine with him and be introduced to every night-club of which he was a member.
And on four several occasions we repeated the desolating experience. By the end of a month I could pose as an authority and recognize the subtile differences that distinguished one from another. At the 'Azalea,' for example, the hall was oblong; at the 'Long Acre' there was a Hungarian orchestra; and the conventional white and gold of the others gave place to white and green at the 'Blue Moon.' For all their variety, however, there came a day when Alan and I decided that we would not eat another kidney omelette, nor drink another glass of sweet champagne, nor watch the gyrations of another free-list chorus girl.
"But you simply must come to the 'Cordon Bleu,'" cried Summertown, when I broke the news as we dined and played shove-ha'penny with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace. In his eyes we figured as two middle-aged converts who were showing a disposition to recant. "It's the cheeriest spot of all; you'll have no end of a time there."
"Why didn't you take us there before?" I asked, with resentful memory of my late endurance.
"The police were expected to raid it," he explained. "It's all right, that's blown over. I'll take you on Tuesday."
Rather than wound his feelings, we passed our word. The 'Cordon Bleu' was the epitome of all the others, and with Erckmann, Lord Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a train of little pink and white girls in short tight skirts, seemed to be weighted with more than a fair share of Apaches. Wearily we seated ourselves at one of the little tables and watched the party swelling. It was eighteen strong when we entered, with nine men who made a business-like supper and nine women who smoked endless cigarettes, talked in penetrating tones and called each other by unflattering nicknames. As a new couple came in, one of the girls jumped up to make way and began to dance. I was too short-sighted to recognize her at first, but, as she came nearer, our eyes met for a moment, and I bowed. Not very skilfully she pretended not to see me, but by ill-luck the music stopped a few minutes later when she was opposite our table.
"Miss Dainton and Fatty Webster of all people!" cried Summertown.
Sonia turned slowly and surveyed the group.
"George! And Captain Hunter-Oakleigh!" she exclaimed, with a fine start of surprise. "And Lord Summertown! I say, you are going it! I thought you were much too heavy for a night-club, George!"
"My cousin wanted to see Low Life," I explained, as I brought up a chair.
"But this isn't low! All the best people come here. Has anybody got a cig.?"
Alan offered her his case, and she leant back with her hands clasped behind her head and her eyes half closed, inhaling the smoke and languidly blowing it out through her nose. For the "Cordon Bleu" her costume was admirably chosen—a tight-fitting dove-grey skirt slashed open to the knee on one side and revealing transparent stockings and satin shoes laced criss-cross up to the shin; the waist was high, and at the waist the dress stopped short, leaving arms and back bare to the shoulder blades; she wore no gloves, and the remains of a grey net scarf protruded from her partner's tail-pocket. Out of the Russian ballet I hardly remember seeing a girl more sparingly attired.
Webster was in his customary condition of silence and sticky heat. I sometimes wonder how a man whose utterance was restricted to four words at a time could have been involved in an action for breach of promise, yet there has never been any doubt that he paid substantial compensation. Apoplectically he grunted "Thanks," when Summertown plied him with champagne, and sat thoughtfully drinking until Sonia expressed a wish to go on dancing. Without having spent an unduly vicious youth I knew by a certain glaze over Webster's eyes that he would be imprudent to undertake such violent exercise. At Sonia's bidding, however, he clutched the table and rose with an effort to his feet. Only when he continued to stand there rocking gently from side to side did she turn a rather scared face to me with the words:
"Fatty's tired. Come and dance, George. It's a waltz; you can manage that."
Lest a worse thing befall her, I threw myself into the breach and waltzed to a couple of unoccupied chairs at the far end of the room.
"Are you going to be a sport, George?" she inquired a little uncertainly as we sat down.
"What exactly does that mean?" I asked.
She looked at me with her head on one side.
"I shan't be popular if you tell mother you've seen me here," she explained.
"But you said all the best people came here," I reminded her. "Where are you supposed to be—officially?"
"Surrey House. I'm going back there in a minute. It was frightfully dull, but we did our best until Mrs. Wemley—it's her ball, you know—had the cheek to come up and say she didn't like to see the one-step done. That put the lid on! These old frumps will be going back to lanciers and barn-dances next. Fatty and I wandered out to smoke a cig. when a taxi drifted providentially by and brought us here."
I got up and looked at my watch.
"And now I'm going to take you back there," I said.
"I must wait till Fatty's sobered down a bit," she answered, looking across the room at her somnolent partner. "If the worst comes to the worst, I can always say that Sir Adolf invited me."
"You're coming now," I said. "It's the price of my silence."
She lay comfortably back in her chair with her legs crossed, swinging one foot.
"Rot! You wouldn't be such a sneak," she began.
"Now, Sonia," I repeated.
She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders and walked up the stairs in silence. I scribbled a note to Alan, put her in a taxi, and drove to Surrey House.
"I suppose you're not in a mood for good advice?" I asked, as we drove along Oxford Street.
"No-p," she answered shortly, and I held my peace. Curiosity, however, got the better of her, and she inquired whether I imagined she was not capable of looking after herself.
"I was wondering whether you appreciated what kind of woman frequents a place like the 'Cordon Bleu'?" I said.
"My dear George, I wasn't born yesterday," she answered.
"But if you dress in the same way, go to the same places, sup with the same men——"
"The difference is that I know where to stop, George."
"That knowledge is not common with your sex. In any case, the people who see you there——"
"Oh, damn public opinion!" she interrupted irritably. "People who know me know I'm all right; people who don't know me don't matter. And that's all."
"And here's Surrey House," I said, as the taxi slowed down. "I haven't been invited, so I won't come in. If I were you, I should avoid men who don't know when they've drunk as much as is good for them."
"Good night, grandpapa!" she answered, as she ran up the steps and disappeared inside the house.