III
The autumn and winter of 1913 I divided between Ireland and the Riviera. When I came back to London the following spring, Amy Loring told me that her brother had returned. Ostensibly his yacht had to be fitted with new engines, and while in England he was taking the opportunity of attending to a little business. At the time of our conversation he was at House of Steynes, and, as soon as the tour of inspection was over, there would be nothing to keep him.
"Do see if you can knock some sense into him," Amy begged me despairingly. "It's perfectly ridiculous his wandering about all over the world like this. Mother feels it frightfully."
"What is he like now?" I asked.
She brushed back the curls from her forehead and made a gesture of impatience.
"I don't know. He's horribly ironical. Nothing in life is worth doing, according to him. He smiles politely and sneers politely.... And all the time, you know, I'm sure he's as lonely and melancholy as can be. That engagement was an awful business, George. He was very much in love with her——"
"And she treated him abominably," I said, lighting a cigarette.
"Yes, I think she did," Amy answered deliberately. "It wasn't his fault. Of course, it's not every woman who could marry him, he's—difficile; but the way he behaved to her was perfectly angelic. Now he's lost faith in everything.... Do see if you can't do anything for him; he's bored to the verge of distraction, being by himself all this time."
I promised to do what I could, and on the night of his return to London we dined together. It was the last evening of the Melton holidays, and I had organized a small theatre party for my cousin Laurence,—Violet and Amy were with us,—and, as the ordering of the arrangements was in Laurence's youthful but self-confident hands, we sat in the deafening neighbourhood of a powerful coon band and dined incongruously off unlimited hors d'oeuvres, a Nesselrode ice-pudding and—so far as I can remember—nothing else. Still at his order we drank sparkling Burgundy, variously described by him as a 'pretty tipple' and by Loring as 'warm knife-wash.' We spent the evening in a theatre where we were forbidden to smoke and supped off Strasbourg pie and iced cider-cup in a restaurant where two persistent dancers whirled their bewildering way in and out of the tables.
"A pretty useful evening," said my cousin, as we dispatched him to bed; and I had not the heart to undeceive him.
"Remember me to Burgess, Laurie," said Loring, and turning to Violet, "I wonder if you keep a little brandy in this flat? My digestion is not what it once was."
Life is a tangle of incongruities, and at one o'clock in the morning, in a St. James's Court flat, with Mrs. Hunter-Oakleigh sleeping on one side of us and Laurence on another, we formally welcomed Loring back to London over a supplementary meal of bread, cheese and liqueur brandy. Warming to the work, we summoned O'Rane by telephone from Gray's Inn. It was half-past three, and dawn was lighting up the sky, when Amy broke up the party by demanding to be taken home to bed.
"And now you're back in England, you're going to stay here?" Violet inquired, as she and Loring shook hands.
"I can't get away for a bit," was the answer. "What with this engine——"
"Will you stay long enough to make your apologies?" she asked, looking at him through narrowed lids.
"But what have I done?" he inquired anxiously.
"A halfpenny postcard—any time—just to show you were still alive——"
"But I didn't write to anyone——" he protested.
Violet laughed and turned to the door. In the subdued yellow light her grave beauty was very attractive. Though she smiled still, her eyes were wistful, and I chose to fancy she had not outgrown her old affection so quickly as Loring.
"My dear, I'm not jealous!" she said. "As a mark of friendship, though——"
"Violet, I'm frightfully sorry!" he exclaimed, taking an eager step towards her. "Will that do?"
"Are you going off again?"
"I shall stay as long as there's anything to stay for."
The direct and obvious route from St. James's Court either to Princes Gardens or Gray's Inn is perhaps not by Curzon Street, but it was so long since we had been together that O'Rane and I sat talking in the library of Loring House until there was barely time for a Turkish bath before breakfast. The Yately seat was vacant, and Raney proposed to begin his canvass in two days' time. He was full of rhetoric and indignation on the condition of Ireland and rehearsed his election speeches at some length.
"It's as bad as you like," Loring interrupted, "but it won't come to anything."
"Are you in the Special Reserve?" O'Rane asked suddenly.
"I believe I've got an honorary rank of some kind as a Lord Lieutenant," answered Loring, "but I'm not on the active list. What's the Special Reserve been doing?"
"I hear they received secret preparatory mobilization orders in March," said O'Rane. "It's not supposed to be known, but one of the military attachés told me. This is April. What's it all about?"
"The Government won't mobilize the Regular Army for a row of this kind," said Loring contemptuously.
"Well, what are they doing it for, then?"
But O'Rane's question was unanswered for another four months.
Loring accompanied me to the Turkish Baths, and we lay on adjoining couches sipping coffee and lazily discussing what had taken place during his absence from England. If ever a man was bored and dissatisfied, that man was Loring. A certain pride kept him away from the House of Lords, he had neither the age nor the energy to qualify him for a Governorship and was yet too old and substantial in mind to be amused by a purely social life.
"Old Burgess was right, you know, George," he yawned. "I've had a damned wasted experience. And the Lord knows how it will end. What is there to do?"
"I should spend a few weeks in town," I suggested. "You've probably had enough of your own company."
"God! Yes! Only London, you know.... D'you see much of the Daintons? You can speak quite freely. After all I was engaged to her for nearly a year, and it's been broken off for three."
I finished my coffee rather deliberately and lit a fresh cigarette.
"She has not improved, Jim," I said.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling.
"I used to think.... You know, George, I've got to an age when I ought to marry."
"So has she," I observed, tucking my towels round me and beginning to brush my hair. "I'm coming round to Bertrand's view that an unmarried woman of five-and-twenty is a public danger, particularly when husband-hunting is conducted with its present healthy absence of restraint. The spinster is not so much an object of pity as an offence against nature, and Nature punishes any liberty you take with her. In the old days we had our convents where superfluous women could retire with dignity. That at least whited the outside of the sepulchre. The present London Season is a pathological study. You'll see for yourself."
He rose slowly from the bed and began to get into his clothes.
"I don't think I shall be much in town if I'm going to run into the Daintons everywhere," he answered.
Only three days later I was able to tell him that this last danger had been removed. Bertrand and I had arranged to hear "Parsifal" at Covent Garden, and, as his box was large, he offered a seat to Violet—the one woman of his family whom he treated with paternal kindness. There was still room for another, and I invited Loring to join us. Nothing is more repugnant to my taste than to interfere with the destinies of others, but when Amy petitioned me in person I could not decently refuse.
"He can't tell one note from another," I expostulated, "and the thing starts at five. He'll be reduced to tears."
"If he doesn't want to come, he needn't accept," she answered. "All I ask you to do is to give him the invitation."
"Well, will you invite him—from me?"
"No, I want you to send him a note. The time, and where to meet, and the arrangements for dinner—and who's to be there."
Without further protest I sat down and wrote as I was bid.
"Tell him not to talk through the Good Friday music," I begged.
"I shan't tell him anything," said Amy. "I don't know anything about the plan; it's just a thought that's casually occurred to you——"
"I knew I should have the blame put on me," I answered resignedly.
When the night arrived there was little blame to apportion, and Loring thanked me effusively for my invitation. Between the acts we dined at the Savoy and were returning to our box when I caught sight of Sonia waiting for her party in the hall. Fortunately the others had gone on ahead before our, eyes met.
"I haven't seen you for an age," she began pleasantly, in apparent forgetfulness of a peevish meeting at the 'Cordon Bleu' the previous summer.
"Are you up for the season?" I asked.
"No, I'm going abroad next week. Sir Adolf's getting up a motor tour through France and Italy, ending up at Bayreuth in time for the Festival. Lord Pennington, Mrs. Welman, Sir Adolf, his sister,—the Baroness, you know,—Fatty Webster and me. I'm with Fatty to-night."
"Are your people in town?" I asked, as I prepared to follow my party. Webster is a man I do not go out of my way to meet.
"Father is, but mother's tired of London, so I'm staying with Mrs. Ilkley. She's a model chaperon and all that sort of thing, but she will live out in the Cromwell Road. It's a fearful bore."
"A most respectable quarter," I commented.
"It's a rotten hole when you've got an hour and a half to dine and dress and get back here in," she grumbled. "I didn't try. I just changed in Fatty's flat; that's why he's late. The poor soul's only got one bedroom, so I monopolized it while he was gorging. By the way, that's not necessarily for publication, as they say."
"Why on earth did you tell me?" I asked, with the mild exasperation of a man who resents youthful attempts to shock his sense of propriety.
"I thought you wanted cheering up," Sonia answered airily. "You're so mid-Victorian."
"You're getting too old for this eternal ingénue business, Sonia," I said. "And yet not old enough to avoid coming a very complete cropper. Don't say I didn't warn you?"
When I got back to the box Loring was raking the stalls with his opera-glass. As Sonia and Webster came in, he gave a slight start and sat far back in his chair. No one else noticed the movement, but I had time to scribble, "She is going abroad immediately," on my programme and hand it to him before the lights were lowered. At supper he announced without preface that he proposed to spend at least part of the Season in London.
With the detachment of one who has never taken even social dissipation with the seriousness it deserves, it flatters my sanity to describe the condition of England in these years as essentially neurotic. In retrospect I see stimulus succeeding stimulus, from the Coronation year—when all expected a dull reaction after the gaiety of King Edward's reign—to 1912, when an over-excited world feared a reaction after the Coronation year. This dread of anti-climax caused the carnival of 1912 to be eclipsed in the following spring, and, when Loring invited me to assist him in "one last fling before we settle down," we found that 1914—with its private balls and public masquerades, its Tango Teas and Soupers Dansants, its horseplay and occasional tragedies—was bidding fair to beat the records of its predecessors.
For three and a half months we seemed hardly to be out of our dress-clothes. Valentine Arden, as usual, let his flat and took a suite at the Ritz, from which he descended nightly at the invitation of a seemingly inexhaustible stream of people with sufficient money to spend fifteen hundred pounds on a single night's entertainment. Nightly there came the same horde of pleasure-seekers, some of them girls I had been meeting regularly for ten years, at first sight no nearer to any settled purpose in life. I think it is not altogether the fancy of an ageing and jaundiced eye to see a strain of vulgarity spreading over Society at this time; for, though Erckmann chanced to be abroad, his flashy followers had established their footing and remained behind to prove that money can open every door. Lady Isobel Mayre, daughter of the Minister of Fine Arts, gave them an entrée to Ministerial society; the poverty of Lord Roehampton enabled them to add a Marquess's scalp to their belt, and the old distinction between smartness and respectability broke down. The prohibited dances and fashions of one year struggled to become the next year's vogue. To be inconspicuous was to be démodé.
"The fact is, we're too old to stay the course," Loring said regretfully at supper one morning towards the end of June. "George, let me remind you that you and I are as near thirty-five as makes no odds. Amy, you're thirty. Violet, you're—well, you look about nineteen."
"Add ten to it," Violet suggested.
"We're all too old; we must give it up. You're all coming to Hurlingham with me next week, aren't you? And then we'll ring down the curtain and say good-bye to London."
"One must live somewhere," I said, with an uneasy feeling that his new way of life might involve my spending the greater part of the year in County Kerry.
Loring lit a cigarette and gazed with disfavour round the garish room.
"Either I shall marry," he said, "or else go and live abroad."