IV
The first news I received on reaching Princes Gardens was that my uncle was unwell and wished to see me at once.
"No, sir, I can't tell you no more than that," said Filson tearfully, and I judged that to serve Bertrand had been a task of difficulty during the past five days.
I found my uncle seated in his bedroom with a rug over his knees, conspicuously doing nothing. Little threads of blood discoloured the whites of his eyes, and he seemed curiously shrunken and old. He looked at me in silence for a few moments after I had shut the door, then remarked carelessly:
"I thought it would last my time, George."
"If we live to the end of it we shall have seen the last war," I answered.
He snorted derisively.
"Till next time! As long as you let children point loaded pistols...."
He broke off and sat staring before him.
"Filson told me you'd been seedy," I said.
"Oh, if you talk to a fool like Filson!" my uncle exclaimed. "I went down to the House yesterday...." He paused and murmured to himself, as though unconscious of my presence. "We couldn't help ourselves, you know. I don't see what else we could have done.... I was down there, George, and walked home thinking it all over and, when I got in, I tumbled down in the hall. Good God! if a man mayn't fall about in his own hall ...! Filson was rather surprised, but I'm perfectly all right." He kicked away the rug and drew himself shakily erect. "Seventy-nine, George, but I must live a bit longer—till the Kaiser's been strangled in the bowels of the Crown Prince.... By all that's holy, if I were fifty years younger!"
There was something pathetically terrible in his disillusionment and anger with all things created. As he stood with clenched fists trembling above his head, I saw his body sway and sprang forward to catch him.
"You must take things a bit easy, Bertrand," I said.
"When you're my age ..." he began. "Bah, you never will be, your lot dies off like so many flies. Another five years will see you out, and on my soul I think you're to be envied. I've lived long enough to see everything I cared for shattered. We've got war at our doors, and, before it's been going on six weeks, mark my words! personal liberty will be at an end, you'll be under a military despotism, the freedom of the Press.... By the way, I sent some neutrality lunatics to see you on Sunday."
"I'm afraid I didn't give them much satisfaction," I said. "Look here, Bertrand, about this paper——"
"What paper?"
"'Peace.'"
"There's no such paper. Don't stare, George; you look as if you were only half awake. 'Peace,' indeed ...! Why, my God! I've at least outgrown that phase. I telephoned to M'Clellan to bring me the electros for the headings and I went through the damned mocking things with a hammer!" He paused to breathe heavily, with one hand pressed to his side. "I think I'd rather be alone for the present, old boy," he went on, with sudden gentleness. "You go off and amuse yourself at the Club, you're too young to be in the same room as my thoughts. If you've got your securities pass-book, you might do worse than jot down what you think your income's likely to be the next few years. Don't be too optimistic about it, you can run a pencil through three-quarters of your investments abroad. I've given everybody notice here, to be on the safe side; and you'll be well advised to overhaul your expenditure."
I was half-way through my dressing when Mayhew telephoned to invite me to dinner at the Penmen's Club. He had lived night and day at the "Wicked World" office since leaving Chepstow, quarrelling, arguing and bribing to get leave to go abroad.
"And now I'm at a loose end," he told me, as we stood in the hall waiting for O'Rane and Loring. "The Press Combine is going to work all it knows to get Kitchener put into the War Office, and from what I remember of Omdurman and South Africa, war correspondents aren't at a premium with him. It's so hard to get out of this damned country at present, or I should be half-way to St. Petersburg by now."
I told him of my uncle's decision to discontinue "Peace," and he whistled regretfully.
"Poor old Fleet Street!" he exclaimed. "There's a bad time coming for the parasites. The 'Wicked World' has sacked half its men, including me, and the chief proposes to write the paper himself."
"That's a bit stiff," I said.
"And it's not as though I were a new-comer," he continued aggrievedly, "or hadn't brought off one or two fair-sized scoops in the last few years. Hallo, here's Raney!"
Loring arrived a few moments later, and we went into dinner. I had to remind myself that three out of the four of us had travelled up from Chepstow the same morning and that, for all the transitions of the day, war had not yet been declared and Germany had till midnight to frame a reply to our ultimatum.
"Never let it be said that the British race is not adaptable," Loring remarked, when I told him of my intended descent on the Admiralty. "I've spent my afternoon trying to get a commission."
"Any luck?"
"They said I was too old, so I'm to have a staff appointment. Raney and Val Arden will shortly be seen swanking about as Second Lieutenants of the Coldstream Guards. Youth will be served! What the devil does a staff captain have to do?"
"Or a Civil Servant?" I asked.
"Oh, you're all right; you just turn up at twelve and go out to lunch till three. I've been really busy to-day. I've offered House of Steynes and the places at Chepstow and Market Harborough to the War Office as hospitals. Mamma will run one, Amy another and Violet the third——"
"Hospitals?" I murmured.
In the South African War the wounded had died or been nursed back to life thousands of miles from England. It required an effort of imagination to visualize men like Tom Dainton or Summertown, whole and hale one day, under fire forty-eight hours later and perhaps back in England by the end of the week, crawling north from Southampton or Portsmouth by hospital train, broken and maimed for life. Perhaps all our imaginations were working on the same lines, for after a pause Loring changed the subject by asking where O'Rane had spent his time.
"City," was the short answer.
"Things pretty bad?" I asked.
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," he replied. "I'm fairly sorry for my own firm, but Heaven help anyone with much money out that he wants to get back quickly. They talk of closing the Stock Exchange and declaring a moratorium."
"The Club was a sad sight at lunch-time," I said. "Everybody talking about moving into a smaller house or giving up his car——"
Mayhew threw back his head and laughed.
"The one good thing I've heard to-day!" he cried. "Do you men know an objectionable fat youth named Webster? He came to the 'Wicked World' office this morning and tried to stick us with a long, tearful account of his escape from Germany. Apparently he had no end of a time getting away, and the Germans commandeered a brand new Rolls-Royce and kicked him over the frontier on foot."
"And I had half-made up my mind to take a cure at Nauheim," I said reflectively.
"You're well out of it," said Mayhew. "We had a curious story in the office to-day from Switzerland—rather a sinister business if it's true. A party of Americans—father, mother and two daughters—were motoring through Germany when the state of war was declared. They were held up, arrested and deprived of their car. A few hours later the parents were released and sent under escort to the frontier in a carriage with the blinds down. The girls have never been seen again."
It was the first of many similar stories, and I have no idea how much truth it contained. None of us yet appreciated the lengths to which 'civilized warfare' could be carried, but one of the things that change little throughout the centuries is the position of women in the midst of armed troops.
The active life of the Penmen's Club was from six till eight and again from one till three in the morning. By the time we had finished dinner the coffee-room was deserted, and I suggested an adjournment to the Eclectic to await midnight and the answer of the German Government. Time was no object, and we walked slowly down Fleet Street and the Strand. Opposite Romano's a piano organ was grinding out its appointed six tunes, and a ring of urchins held hands and danced up and down the gutter singing:
"Dixie! All abo-o-oard for Dixie!"
"Damn that song!" Loring exclaimed irritably.
By Charing Cross we halted to let the traffic pour out of the station yard, and I felt myself touched on the shoulder.
"Surely George Oakleigh? You don't remember me?"
I looked at a shabby, thin man with bearded face and restless eyes. Then we shook hands, and I whispered to Loring over my shoulder to take the others on to the Club and await me.
"That was Jim Loring, wasn't it?" asked the shabby man eagerly.
"Yes, and the other two were Mayhew and O'Rane; they were some years junior to us, of course. Quite like the old days in Matheson's, Draycott?"
He nodded and glanced bemusedly at the glaring lights of the Strand and the thundering stream of traffic.
"I've not seen you since I cut you in the Luxembourg Gardens a dozen years ago," he said.
"I doubt if I've been in Paris six times since then," I answered.
"And I've not been in England at all. I'm—I'm liable to arrest, you know, but they made a clearance of us from Boulogne. We were a sorry crew, Oakleigh."
"What are you going to do now?" I asked. "I'll see you through as far as I can."
My hand was moving to my pocket, but he stopped me with a gesture.
"I don't want money, old chap."
"You look as if you wanted a square meal, Draycott."
He laughed with a bitterness in which there was little pride.
"And a bath. And some new clothes. I shall get 'em all in a few days."
"What are you going to do?" I repeated. "If I may advise you, you've been out of this country long enough for Scotland Yard to regard you leniently. If you go to them frankly——"
He shook his head decisively.
"I've no doubt they'd let me stay here if I behaved myself, but it's no good. I can't get back to my old position, there are too many people who remember me. I should never have stopped Jim Loring as I stopped you. No, I'm going vaguely into the Midlands, to some recruiting office——"
"They won't take you," I interrupted. "You're my age, you're thirty-five."
"I'm twenty-nine for the purposes of the Army," he answered. "And, if that's too old, I'm twenty-seven. I shall take this beard off, of course. But, look here, I'm keeping you——"
"I want to see you again, Draycott," I said, as we shook hands.
"Better not. And don't tell those other men. It was just a—a whim. We were always rather pals at Melton, you know...."
Nearly a year later Corporal Draycott of the Midland Light Infantry was recommended for a Distinguished Conduct Medal, but before the dispatch reached England he was dead of dysentery in the plague pit of Gallipoli.
When I reached the Club it was to find the same new spirit of gregariousness that I had noticed at luncheon, but in an intensified degree. The old antipathies were forgotten, and from the crowded hall to the echoing gallery stretched a living chain of eager, garrulous men. I passed from one to another under a hail of questions, as my own great-grandfather may have done a century before when 'the town' gathered beneath that same roof to await news of Leipzig.
Loring had taken refuge in the deserted card-room, and we had been sitting there raking over the old possibilities for half an hour when the door opened and Sir Roger Dainton entered in uniform.
"I've been looking for you all the evening, George," he exclaimed. "I—look here, I want your uncle to do me a favour. I've been to his house, but they told me he was seedy. I can't get any news of Sonia."
O'Rane sat upright in his chair, scattering a cloud of flaky cigar-ash over his trousers. His face was hidden as he leant forward to brush it away, but I wondered whether he was recalling with me Mayhew's story of the missing American girls.
"But I thought she was home," I said. "Webster's back, and I was talking to Erckmann here after lunch."
"She stayed behind," Dainton told me. "It's a long rigmarole, and I'll go into it later. I've been to the Foreign Office and simply couldn't get past the door. I was thinking that as your uncle rather had the ear of the Ministry.... You see, I'm mobilized, so I can't do much myself. Sonia's been wiring all over the place—Bayreuth, Munich, Heaven knows where, giving a different address each time. Where she is at present, I haven't the faintest idea."
I knew that neither Bertrand nor I could help him, but for very civility I had to offer him the chance of seeing my uncle. O'Rane followed me downstairs and helped me into my coat, observing dispassionately:
"This is a fool's errand, George."
"I don't need to be told that, Raney," I answered.
"I'm staying the night with Jim," he went on. "You might come and report progress on your way to the Admiralty. As early as you like. We've no time to lose."
"What do you propose to do?" I inquired, as we hurried into the hall.
He laughed at the question.
"Well, we can't very well leave Sonia in Germany, can we?" he asked. "At least, I can't. Early to-morrow, mind. Good night, old man."