III
I always doubted the wisdom of including O'Rane in a house-party, for the Lake House estate offered little but its snipe-shooting, and he refused to shoot. There was, however, a library, a garden, some purple, green, brown and grey mountain scenery and—for anyone who cared to do so—the mountains themselves to climb. For the most part he paced up and down the terrace at the margin of the lake, gazing dreamily over its mirror-like surface to the tree-clad hills on the other side. In the past twelve months he had lost much of his animation and had become curiously rapt and reflective. The change did not make him an easier guest to entertain. We have known each other these many years now and stayed together in a dozen different houses, yet I never quite get rid of the feeling that he is from another world and another century. Sometimes one or other of us would keep him corporeal company for a while: usually he was alone—thinking out the future. In the last days of July he had taken his First in Greats, and academic Oxford lay at his feet.
"What's the next stage, Raney?" I asked him one evening when we were alone in the garden. "All Souls?"
He shrugged his shoulders, linked arms with me and paced the lowest terrace by the lake's border. It was a night of rare stillness, and the moon was reflected full and unwavering in the black water: behind us, fifty yards up the side of the mountain, blinding squares of yellow light broke up the dark face of the house; a chord was struck, and a girl's voice began to sing with an Irish intonation.
"What a lovely place the world would be if it weren't for the men and women in it!" he exclaimed.
"Even with them it's tolerable," I said.
I was deliciously tired after a long day's tramp; a hot bath, dinner and the placid night set me at peace with all men.
"For you, yes," he answered reflectively.
"And for a number of others," I said.
The voice above me grew low and died away. Someone began to play an air from "La Bohème."
"For anybody without imagination," he murmured. "You've been in the House for nearly a year now, George; d'you think the world's a happier place?"
"I'm afraid there's no such thing as statutory happiness, Raney."
A vision of Baxter-Whittingham floated before my eyes, and an echo of his phrases came back to my ears. O'Rane picked up a handful of gravel, seated himself on the parapet of the terrace and began tossing stones into the lake.
"I'm looking for inspiration, George," he said, after a pause. "Just now I'm at a loose end. I've been through Melton and the House, I've seen about a dozen different kinds of working-class life, and before I came to England I took part in the great primitive struggle for existence. Now, if I like, I suppose I can get a fellowship, go into one of the professions, lead a comfortable life...." His voice rose a tone and quickened into excitement. "George, it won't do. We pretend the world's civilized, and yet every now and again some murderous war breaks out. We've been drinking champagne up there, and there are people dying of starvation. There are people dying of cancer and phthisis—and we haven't stopped it. There are young girls being turned into harlots hourly. Hunger, disease, death and the loss of a soul's purity. It won't do." He sighed, and a shadow of despair came over his dark eyes. "I talked to Jim Loring in the same strain a few weeks ago; he's waiting for the world to come back to a belief in God. Poor old Jim hasn't learned much mediaeval history! I talked to your uncle yesterday: he's a social Darwinian—these scourges are all divinely appointed to keep us from getting degenerate. I talked to you this morning, and you virtually told me five years of Liberal Government would set it all right. They won't! It isn't the law that's wrong, it's the soul of man. You've had workhouses for two-thirds of a century, and people still starve. In half a dozen years we've seen war in South Africa and Manchuria. Men still seduce women; there's cruelty to children and animals that would make you sick if you heard a thousandth part of it; there are blind, hare-lipped babies being born to parents of tainted blood.... It won't do, George."
I seated myself on the parapet beside him and lit a cigarette.
"Will you tell me the remedy, Raney?" I asked.
He looked at me for a moment before answering.
"Would you act upon it if I did?"
"I'd like to hear it first," I said.
"To see how much it inconveniences you." He laughed, and there was a bitterness in the smile on his thin lips that told forth his utter scorn of soul for the makeshift, worldly materialism for which I stood in his eyes. "It'll inconvenience us the devil of a lot, but that's what we're here for. We're supposed to have been educated. We've got to give a lead. The first duty of society is to make existence possible, the second is to make a decent thing of life. Gradually we're getting the first, but we're not in sight of the second." He looked out over the black, unmoving water and shook his head sadly. "We've got no social conscience, we've got no imagination to give us one. Look here, you'd think me a pretty fair swine if I took Sonia away for a week to an hotel, said good-bye at the end of it and packed her home?"
"It's not done," I admitted.
His clenched fist beat excitedly on the flat stone balustrade.
"Tom Dainton's got a flat in Chelsea and a woman living with him. Is that done?"
"I don't do it myself," I said. His information was not new to me: I had even met the girl, once when she was living with Tom, once with his predecessor.
"God in heaven! She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister probably; there was a time when she was clean-minded ... and that brute-beast salves his conscience by telling himself that somebody else corrupted her before he came along! I told him exactly what I thought of him."
I had a fair idea of O'Rane's capacity for invective.
His lips curled till his teeth gleamed white in the moonlight.
"Do you still meet?" I inquired.
"I'd cut him in his own house! It isn't that I set great store by marriage, I'm not in a position to do that. If he wants to be ultra-modern, let him live with her by all means—and introduce her to his people. He'd kill a man who treated his own sister like that.... Imagination! Imagination! That's the basis of the social conscience, George. If Beryl had consumption, you'd sell the shirt off your back to heal her. You'd do pretty well as much for a sister of mine. You'd write a check for a hundred pounds if I recommended a hard case to you. And because you don't hear, because you don't see the poor devils lying under your eyes...."
"Where's the damned thing to stop, Raney? There are people starving the world over."
"Thank God you recognize it! It hurts as much to starve in the Punjab as under the windows of Lake House."
"But I'm not interested in people I've never seen," I said, lighting another cigarette.
"You'd jump overboard to save a drowning man without waiting to be introduced. Human life's sacred, George: the value we attach to it is the one test of civilization I know."
"But how does one start? Take my own case and be as pointed as you like. An Irish landowner, Liberal member of Parliament, comfortable means, unmarried, without any particular desire to leave the world worse than I found it—what am I to do? Frankly, Raney, I've not got the temperament to turn vegetarian or go about in sandals. I'm part of a very conventional, stupid, artificial world; all my relations and friends are in the same galley. My soul's taken root. What am I to do?"
He picked up a second handful of gravel and jerked the stones thoughtfully into the shining water.
"D'you remember the boys in Æsop who did what I'm doing—flinging stones into a lake? It was all in fun, but they hit a frog, and the frog told them what was fun for them was death for him. If you want an everyday test, you can ask yourself over every act you do or refrain from doing whether you're causing pain to a living creature—by word, deed, thought. That's the only standard worth having, and if everyone adopted it.... As they will some day; we're growing slightly more humane...."
We had had a record bag that day: I was in good form and Bertrand could not miss a bird. I mentioned this to O'Rane to recall him to our limitation.
"A hundred years ago you'd have watched two hapless cocks slashing each other to death," he retorted. "People were flogged within an inch of their lives. Witch-hunts were hardly out of fashion. Two thousand years ago malefactors were nailed to wooden crosses and left to die, gladiators were set to fight wild beasts...." His voice trembled with exultant, fierce irony, and his dark eyes blazed in the setting of his white face. "Now we're grown so effete that we almost shudder when some upstanding son of Belgium takes a rhinoceros whip and lashes a Congo native till the smashed ribs burst through his flesh." His voice fell as suddenly as it had risen. "Have you ever set eyes on a new-born babe? It's a wonderful thing, so tiny and so perfect, with its little limbs and organs and the marvellous little nails on its toes and fingers.... I think of that beautiful, soft, warm, living creature cherished and fed to manhood, and then flung to the demons for them to torture. I see it torn in pieces by a shell or eaten up by disease. And in the old days we might have seen it stretched on a rack, or broken joint by joint with the wheel and boot...." The sentence died away in a long shudder that shook his whole body. "Come back to the house, George," he cried, jumping down from the parapet. "I've travelled three thousand miles in the last five seconds, all the way to Greece and back, where the Turks used to put hot irons on the chests of their prisoners just to teach them not to be rebels. Ten years ago! Who says this is not the best of all possible worlds?"
I took his arm and walked up the stone steps that joined the three terraces. There was still a light in the drawing-room, and we found Sonia writing letters and smoking a cigarette. The accomplishment was new and precarious. She started as we came in through the window and hastily closed the blotting-book.
"Oh, it's only you!" she exclaimed with relief as she saw us. "I was simply dying for a cig., and I can't smoke in my room, or mother would smell it through the door." She opened the blotter and extracted a rather battered cigarette "I've been writing to a friend of yours, David," she went on teasingly. "Mr. Anthony Crabtree."
"De gustibus non est disputandum," O'Rane answered with a shrug of the shoulders.
"You must translate, please."
"It amuses you and it doesn't hurt him," I suggested.
"Who? David?" She walked over to O'Rane's chair and sat down on the arm of it, bending over him and running her fingers through his fine, black hair. So Delilah may have wooed Samson to slumber, with the same practised touch, the same absence of amateurishness or spontaneity. "I'm very fond of Tony."
O'Rane looked at her with half-closed eyes.
"How old are you, Sonia?" he asked.
"I think you ought to remember. Twenty. And I'm never going to be any more."
"It's not so very old," he said reflectively.
"It'll be horrid to be twenty-one," she answered, with a pout. "I shall have to pay my own bills—and I'm frightfully in debt. It's such fun, too, to be quite irresponsible. Of course you were born old, David; if I lived to be a hundred I should never catch you up."
"Twenty," he repeated. "No, it's not so very old. In five years' time——"
"My dear, I shall be a quarter of a century old!" she exclaimed.
"You'll be tired of it all by then."
"I shall be dead or married," she answered gloomily.
"Not married. I shall come to you then—you'll have outgrown your present phase and I shall be a rich man. I shall come to you...." He broke off and sat looking up into her eyes.
Sonia drew back her hand and returned his gaze steadily. A smile of mockery flickered for a moment round her lips.
"And then?" she demanded.
"I shall ask you to marry me."
"And if I ...?" she began.
He sat upright and caught her two wrists in his right hand.
"If you say 'no'? You won't; you can't! You'll want me by then, want someone you can depend on. And, if you don't, you'll have to take me just the same. You won't be able to say 'no.'"
His voice had grown low, and he spoke with clear deliberation. I once watched a neurotic woman being put to sleep by a hypnotist. O'Rane's low, determined tone reminded me of the doctor's suggestive insistence. "Now you are going to sleep. You are, oh! so tired. Your eyes are so heavy. So heavy! So sleepy!..." Her voice in answering dropped to the same key.
"You think anyone could make me obey him? Try it, friend David!"
"Five years will make a difference. I haven't given many orders, Sonia, but they've always been obeyed. I haven't done very much—yet, but I've never failed to do what I wanted." Sonia tried to be defiant, but her eyes suddenly fell, and she slipped down from the arm of the chair and moved towards the door.
"Ah! you're an infant prodigy," she observed jauntily. "I must go to bed, though."
"Sonia, come back here!"
O'Rane had not raised his voice, but Sonia paused in her passage across the room. In her place I should have done the same.
"What do you want?" she asked uneasily.
"Come back here."
Like a child being taught its first lesson in obedience, she hesitated, moved forward, paused and came on.
"What d'you want?" she repeated, drumming her fingers nervously on the arm of the chair.
O'Rane smiled.
"You may go to bed now," he answered.
With sudden petulance she stamped her foot.
"David, if you think it's funny to try and make a fool of me ...! You're perfectly odious to-night." I was moving forward to intervene as peacemaker, and Sonia seized the opportunity to shake me by the hand and wish me good-night.
"You needn't pay overmuch attention to Raney," I said.
"Oh, I don't," she answered airily, but her hand as it touched mine was curiously cold.
O'Rane walked over to the writing-table and returned with her letter.
"Now you see," he remarked enigmatically as he gave it her.
"See what?"
"It doesn't make me jealous to be told you're very fond of Crabtree," he answered. "Good night, Sonia."
I closed the door behind her, poured out two whiskies and sodas and filled a pipe.
"You're extraordinarily infantile, Raney," I said.
"It was as well she should know."
"Mind you don't drive her into his arms," I said. "Next time she may accept him."
"Next time?"
For the moment I had forgotten that O'Rane had not been present at Crabtree's discomfiture the previous autumn at House of Steynes. When I remembered I wished I had not introduced the subject.
"Oh! this is getting beyond a joke!" he exclaimed, when I had given him the irreducible minimum of information. "I've a good mind to drop a hint to Lady Dainton."
"My dear fellow, the intimacy is recognized and approved by her. You can't tell her anything she doesn't know."
He picked up his tumbler and sipped thoughtfully.
"I could tell her a number of things," he returned after a pause. "How Crabtree pumped me to find out what they were worth, whether Crowley was their own property and so forth. As cousin to an undischarged bankrupt he conceives himself to be conferring a favour on a family he once described in my hearing to Beaumorris as 'very decent middle-class people.' Fair spoil, in other words, for my Lord Beaumorris and his family. It would be very salutary for Lady Dainton to hear that."
"It will hardly increase your present inconsiderable popularity," I suggested.
He finished his drink and walked with me to the door.
"There's no harm in telling Sonia he's a cad," he insisted.
"If she cares for him, it won't shake her: if she doesn't, it'll make her very angry. I wish to God I hadn't told you, Raney. Promise me at least that you won't choose my house to do it in!"
"Oh, the whole thing may be a mare's nest," he answered easily. "I shan't act till I've something to act on. Have you been invited to Crowley Court this autumn?"
"I've been told to fix my own time," I replied.
"They've got a party on in November. I was thinking of going then if I'm not bear-leading Summertown round the world. Why shouldn't we go together? Brother Crabtree may be there with any luck."
"Brother Crabtree is sure to be there," I answered, as I lighted him to his room and turned back to my own.