II
On the morning after Sonia's brief call I went into O'Rane's bedroom while he was dressing and asked him if he would give her a chance of meeting him before he went down to Melton. It was a difficult overture to make, for I knew something of his personal sensitiveness, but he could not indefinitely plead ill-health as a reason for avoiding her, and—at worst—I wished to be furnished with a new excuse.
His brows contracted when I mentioned her name, and I was sorry to have introduced the subject, for though in mind, body and voice he was rapidly recovering strength, I felt he required still to be handled delicately.
"I'm very busy," he told me, "and if I weren't I see no good in meeting her. To-night your uncle's piloting me down to the House——"
"I think you will be doing her a kindness, Raney," I suggested.
"I can't afford it."
"It will cost you nothing."
He lathered his face in silence for a few moments.
"George, I once had Sonia Dainton in the hollow of my hand," he said. "I've done my share of handling crowds and getting my orders carried out, and when we came back from Austria last summer I'd bent her will. You've known me some time, old man, and you know I don't placate Nemesis. I've had a good run for my money and I've not done yet, but Sonia saw me climb from nothing to—well, at least, something. I had money and a position—and by God! I didn't need a Bobby's arm to get across the street! You can tell her that!"
I lit a cigarette and waited for his passion to cool.
"Tell her that, George!" he repeated more quietly.
"If you want to insult her," I said, "you must do it yourself."
"I don't want to meet her!"
"Are you afraid to, Raney?"
"Fear isn't a common fault of mine," he answered.
"Are you afraid to meet her, Raney?" I repeated.
He turned round and faced me, his thin body silhouetted by the sun shining through his pyjamas.
"I've not got the courage to hear people say she married me out of pity for a blind man," he answered through closed teeth, "if that's what you mean."
"I have only asked you to see her for five minutes before you go down to Melton," I reminded him.
He covered his face with his hands and turned away.
"Did your friend on the hospital train tell you that when I was delirious I shouted her name till they heard me the other end of Boulogne? I'm flesh and blood like other people old man; I know my limitations——"
"What shall I tell her?" I asked as I got up to go.
"Anything you like! The flat's yours, you can let in whom you please.... No, I don't want to make your position any harder, but the account's closed. I paid for the fun of bringing her back from Innspruck by telling her what I thought of her. It may have done her good.... She's got no claim on me, and I don't see that I'm bound to meet her."
As we sat down to breakfast I was handed a telegram from Val Arden, asking if I should be lunching at the Club, as he was home on leave. I am growing used to this as to a thousand other developments of war, yet I long found it strange to meet a man driving from Victoria in the mud that had plastered his clothes in the trenches, to see him change into mufti, dine and spend the evening at a music-hall, hurry away to the country for a day's shooting and return to his regiment ninety-six hours after leaving it.
I have met a score of friends enjoying this short reprieve, all in riotous spirits and splendid health, full of confidence for the future and treating war and its ghastly concomitants with the cheerful flippancy that makes our race the despair of other nations. And if these meetings had their macabre side, I hope it was hidden at least from my guests. Yet I should be sorry to count the men who have scrambled back, leave over, into the trenches to be killed almost before their feet touch the ground.
"You must come and help, Raney," I said, after reading the telegram. From hints in Loring's rare letters I gathered—what any but a professional soldier might have guessed—that all men are not equally fitted to shoulder a rifle and that more than six months' route-marching and musketry practice was needed to turn a neurotic novelist into a nerveless fighter. Indeed, there are few professions so modest as the army in its assumption that a few months' drill and a shilling manual will make a soldier. "Pick me up at the Admiralty and we'll go together."
"I must call at the bank first." He paused and crumbled his toast between his fingers. "George, in two words how do I stand?"
Like many questions that have to be answered sooner or later, I should have preferred to answer this later.
"I realized everything," I told him. "You came out square."
He sat in silence, calculating in his head.
"You realized everything?" he said at last. "That's not the whole truth, George. You didn't bring me out square on that."
I pushed away my plate and filled a pipe.
"Jove! I must get down to the Admiralty!" I said. "There was a small balance against you, Raney. One or two people offered to advance it, and as I had your power of attorney——"
"Who were they, George?"
" ... I accepted the money, which was accompanied by a request that their names should not be disclosed. Meet me at one, Raney. Good-bye."
I started to the door, but his troubled expression was so piteous that I did not like leaving him.
"I get paid as a member ..." he murmured to himself. "Burgess will pay me, too ... and I shall get a pension.... It doesn't cost much to live...." Then turning to me imploringly he cried, "George, you must tell me who they were! I must repay them! Old man, you don't want to break my luck?"
With his wonderful black eyes on mine—eyes that I could hardly yet believe were sightless—I was unable to discuss what he was pleased to call his luck.
"The secret's not mine," I said. "But I'll arrange for the repayment."
"Jim Loring was one."
"Perhaps; or again, perhaps not."
My luncheon-party opened uncomfortably, for I had first to warn Arden what fate had overtaken O'Rane and then whisper to Raney that he must exert himself to make the meal cheerful. Valentine greeted me unsmilingly with the words, "They prolong the agony scientifically, don't they?"
"Three months without a scratch isn't bad," said O'Rane.
"But if you're going to be killed in the end?" he asked, spreading out his hands. "I don't mind roughing it, I don't mind responsibility—I'd send a battalion to certain death as blithely as the most incompetent staff officer. I suppose I can stand being killed like other people, but I can't face being wounded and—my God!—I can't stand that infernal, never-ending noise!" He shuddered and was silent for a while. "I'm an exception to the general rule," he went on. "Out there, there's only one religion—you're going to escape and your neighbour's going to be killed. It must be cheering to believe that."
We survived luncheon because O'Rane took hold of the conversation on that word and discussed the new wave of mysticism that was passing over the world. "The ways of God to man" were justified in a hundred different fashions, and from the first week of the war the Book of the Revelation had been more quoted—and perhaps less understood—than at any time since the middle of the seventeenth century. The exegesis of the day contemplated the war as a Divine purge to cleanse Germany of moral perversion and punish Belgium for the Congo atrocities. France was being held to account for a stationary birthrate and the expulsion of the religious orders, and England—faute de mieux—shared the guilt of a Liberal Government which had carried a Welsh Disestablishment Bill.
"Is there anything below the surface, Raney?" I asked. "I see a megalomaniac preaching universal empire for a generation of people who have some show of reason for regarding themselves as invincible. Will the history books endorse that view in a hundred years' time?"
"A hundred—yes. A thousand—no." He shook his head reflectively. "In a thousand years, when the world's a single State, it will be able to criticize and abolish an institution without going to war. There's a survival of the fittest among institutions as well as among animals, and all the non-dynastic wars have been challenges flung to an existing order. The Holy Roman Empire was challenged by Napoleon—and couldn't justify itself. Philip the Second challenged the Reformed Church—unsuccessfully. Alexander the Fifth challenged John Huss—and beat him. Alaric challenged Rome, Hannibal challenged Rome. And Rome justified herself once, but not the second time. It's a non-moral system which let the Inquisition survive four hundred years and slavery as many thousand.
"Lift not your hands to it for help, for it
Rolls impotently on as thou or I."
You've six different civilizations struggling to justify themselves in this war."
My guests walked back with me to the Admiralty, and we parted at the Arch.
"Let me know when you're home again, Val," I said, as we shook hands.
He looked at me absent-mindedly for a moment, then turned on his heel, only pausing to call back over his shoulder, "Good-bye to you both."
O'Rane put his hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear:
"Make Jim Loring state a case to the colonel and get the boy sent back to train recruits at the Base. I've seen fellows go like that before."
I wrote to Loring that night, and received a reply six days later. Valentine had diagnosed his own case better than any of us, and the letter contained the news of his death. "It was instantaneous, I am glad to say," Loring wrote. "But a stray bullet, miles behind the line——! There's an awful perversity about this dreadful business."
After O'Rane left me at the Admiralty I received a message inviting me to join him and my uncle at the House for dinner. I had to decline, as I could not say how soon my work would be over, and I was preparing to dine alone at the flat when Sonia was announced.
"Come and join me," I said, but she hesitated at the door and shook her head.
"I've dined already, but I wanted to say good-bye. You know I've had to leave the hospital?"
"Do come in, Sonia," I said.
"D'you allow dogs in? I've brought Jumbo."
She opened the door to its widest extent and a vast St. Bernard squeezed past her and ambled up to my chair.
"My dear, where did you get him?" I asked. "I understood the mastodon was extinct."
"Darling, don't let him call you names!" she cried, throwing off her cloak and flinging her white arms round the great shaggy neck. "He was Tom's, and I've had him since—you know. Is David in?"
"He's dining at the House," I told her.
She dropped on to her knees and pulled the dog's head on to her lap.
"Come and look at the new collar, George," she said, crumpling his ears with her fingers.
I bent down and read the inscription:
"David O'Rane, Esqre, M.P.,
House of Commons"
"It's the only address I know," she explained. "George, I simply can't bear to think of him going off and living all alone at Melton—in the dark. Just introduce them and—and please, George, don't tell him it comes from me or I know he'll refuse it."
"I'll do my best," I said.
In the distance I heard the grating sound of a latchkey. Sonia scrambled to her feet with terror in her brown eyes.
"George, was that the front door?"
It was barely nine, but before I could speak the door slammed and cautious feet crossed the hall.
"Any dinner left, George?" O'Rane demanded, as he put his head into the room. "The House is up, and your uncle's gone to the Club. I was rather tired, so I thought I'd come here." He paused to sniff. "Onion sauce! Say there's enough for two!"
"Any amount," I answered. "Tell me how you got on."
Sonia nodded to the door and telegraphed me a question with her eyes.
"I'd better tell you——" I began.
"Everyone was as kind as kind could be," he said, pulling in a chair to the table and placing his hat carefully within reach. "Everyone tumbled over everyone else to shake hands with me.... I say, have you started a dog? I thought I touched something warm and soft. It's all right.... Of course, the voices are the very devil at first. Your uncle piloted me in...." He stopped suddenly and faced round to every corner of the room with head thrown back and dilated nostrils. "George, is there anyone here?"
Sonia rose from her chair.
"I am, David."
"I was trying to explain——" I began.
"I didn't think you'd be back so soon," she added.
O'Rane pushed back his chair.
"Why should you apologize?" he asked, with a laugh. "I'm afraid I interrupted you without knowing it."
His hand felt its way along the table until his fingers closed over the brim of his hat.
"Where are you off to, Raney?" I asked.
"I'll slip round to the Club," he answered, as he moved to the door.
Sonia laid her hand on his shoulder.
"I'm really going, David," she said. "The doctor says I've got to be in bed by ten. As I'm here, I must just tell you how pleased I am to hear you're getting on all right. Mother will be very glad to see you any time you can come over from Melton."
"Very kind of her," he murmured conventionally.
Sonia turned and held out her hand to me. The line of her lips was very straight.
"Good-bye, George."
She stretched out her hand to O'Rane, but had to touch his before he understood what she was doing. "I have never thanked you for bringing me back from Innspruck."
O'Rane's face, already hard, seemed to grow tighter in every muscle.
"That was before we came into the war," he said. "I've forgotten everything before that."
"You told me then that I shouldn't be able to help anyone——" she began.
"I apologize, Sonia."
"I'm afraid it was true. I can't carry a tray from one room to another. If, in spite of that, I can be of any assistance to you"—he made an almost imperceptible gesture of impatience, but she went on deliberately,—"If I can help you by body or soul in any way—at any time—in any place——"
"It's sufficiently comprehensive, Sonia."
She dropped on one knee and kissed his gloved hand. I had to put my arm round her as we went into the hall, for her eyes were dim with tears, and her whole body trembled. The St. Bernard followed us to the door and looked reproachfully at her as she bent down and pressed kisses on to his broad forehead.
"You've been the devil of a time," O'Rane said irritably, when I returned.
"I couldn't take her through the hall with the tears running down her cheeks," I answered.
He got up and walked to the fireplace, where he stood resting his head on his hand. He was still there twenty minutes later when my uncle came in from the Club.
"Could George give you any dinner?" asked Bertrand.
"I didn't feel inclined for any, thank you, sir."