IV
In what follows I have for authority the account of O'Rane, given hurriedly and with unconcentrated mind, and that of Sonia, acidulated with the bitterness of a pampered woman suddenly exposed to a torrent of unexpected insult. Sonia's conscience, if she have one, must have been disturbed when her deliverance came at the hands of a man whom her greatest adulators could hardly say she had treated well. She was prepared to make acknowledgement. O'Rane, however, gave her no opportunity.
"Come along!" he said, slapping a cane against his leg.
"David ...!" she exclaimed in astonishment at his tone.
His brows contracted and he became very still.
"Look here, Sonia," he said. "Let's clear away romance and come to grips. Possibly you don't know that, if I'd been caught on Austrian territory, I should have been shot——"
"I do. It's just that ..."
"Don't interrupt! There's a war on, and your father's been mobilized, so that I came in his place. From now until we get back to England you will obey whatever orders I choose to give you. First of all, what's the latest game you've been up to?"
Sonia stared at him in amazement. He was lying negligently back in his corner with his feet stretched out on the seat, drawling his words in a tone that a half-caste might use to a dog. She kept her lips tightly shut until he rapped the window menacingly with his knuckles.
"If you talk to me like that, David ..." she began.
He laughed derisively and watched her angry, flushed face until she turned and looked out of the window to avoid his eyes.
No other word was spoken. As the train wound its way in and out of the mountains, afternoon changed to evening, and the low-flung last shaft of sunlight showed her that O'Rane's eyes were closed and his lips smiling. Sonia became suddenly frightened, as though he were laughing at her in his sleep. Turning away, she closed her own eyes, but the stifling August heat parched her mouth and set the skin of her body pricking.
At a wayside station an old woman hobbled to the window with a basket of grapes. Sonia felt in her purse and found it empty. After a moment's uneasy hesitation, she took a bunch with one hand and pointed to O'Rane with the other. The old woman nodded smilingly and tapped him gently on the shoulder. Still smiling he awoke, glanced round and spoke a few words in Italian: Sonia saw the old woman argue for a moment unavailingly, then shrug her shoulders and extend a skinny brown hand for the return of the grapes.
"No, no! They're mine! I want them!" Sonia cried.
The old woman gesticulated violently and touched O'Rane's arm for support against his countrywoman.
"Have you paid for them?" he asked.
Sonia glared at him through a mist of tears, bit her lip and threw the grapes back into the basket. O'Rane felt in his pocket and produced a lira, which he gave to the old woman as the train moved away from the station. She hurried painfully alongside with both hands full of the largest bunches, but he only shook his head and pulled the window up. The carriage was suddenly darkened as they entered a tunnel; on shooting into daylight the other side, he saw that Sonia's face was hidden and her shoulders heaving. O'Rane knocked out his pipe and composed himself for sleep.
Night had fallen before she spoke again.
"You must get me something to eat, David," she said. "I'm simply sick for want of food."
He yawned slightly and filled another pipe.
"I'm starving," she went on hysterically. "I've had nothing since breakfast."
"Nor have I, if it comes to that," he answered, breaking his long silence.
"You may be different," she replied, covering her eyes with her hand. "You forget what I've been through."
"You forget I am still waiting to hear," he answered politely.
Sonia relapsed into silence for a few moments, but the sight of O'Rane lighting his pipe and settling comfortably into his corner was too much for her.
"I must have food," she exclaimed. "I'll tell you, if you'll give me something to eat."
"You'll tell me unconditionally," O'Rane answered lazily.
A wave of passion swept over her. "You brute!" she gasped, springing to her feet. "You utter brute! I'll never tell you as long as I live!" O'Rane took a second match to his pipe, blew it out and threw it under the seat. "You sit there smoking——"
"I'll stop if you like, and we'll run level. I warn you that I can hold out for four days without food and two or three without drink."
The anger passed as suddenly as it had come, and she dropped back on to the seat.
"I think you probably get fainter if you wear your nerves out," he remarked disinterestedly.
"I'd kill you if I could!" she muttered between her teeth.
An hour later he was roused by a slight choking cry and looked up to find Sonia sitting huddled in a heap, with her head fallen forward on her chest and her arms hanging limply to her sides. Pulling out his watch, he looked at her for a few moments, and then observed:
"You must relax all your muscles for a pukka faint, not only the neck and arms." She made no movement. "I used to sham faint on trigonometry afternoons at school," he went on, with a yawn. "Go flop on the floor and make Greenbank himself carry me out. I assure you it's not done like that, Sonia."
The limp arms gradually stiffened, and she looked round with half-opened eyes. "Where am I?"
"Some few hours from Genoa, I should think," he answered cheerfully. "I've not booked beyond Milan, so as to have complete liberty of action."
She closed her eyes and lay back. "You're killing me, David," she moaned.
He took a paper-backed novel out of his pocket and began to read it without troubling to answer.
The capitulation took place four hours later, when the dawn came stealing in at the window and illumined the dusty carriage with its cold grey light. Sonia raised a tear-stained face, and with swollen, parched lips begged for mercy. O'Rane lifted his suitcase from the rack and slowly unlocked it.
"This is unconditional?" he asked.
She nodded.
"You will do as I tell you as long as I find it worth while to give you orders?"
"Don't make me do anything horrid!"
He locked the suitcase and replaced it in the rack. Sonia looked at him for a moment without understanding and then burst into convulsive weeping.
"I can't bear it! I can't bear it any longer!" she sobbed. "You're torturing me! I'll do whatever you want!"
O'Rane smiled and lifted down the case once more.
"I haven't laid a finger on you," he remarked contemptuously. "I haven't spoken a dozen sentences. You've just had eighteen hours without food and eleven in my agreeable company. And you're broken! And you thought to measure wills with me! Have some food—and a drink. It's weak brandy and water. Not too much or your pride'll get the better of you, to say nothing of indigestion."
He handed her bread and a wing of chicken, which she ate ravenously in her fingers; then hard-boiled eggs and a piece of cheese.
"Say 'Thank you,'" he commanded at the end. She murmured something inaudible. "Clearly!" She repeated the words. "That's better. Now I'll start my breakfast, and you shall entertain me by telling the full and true account of your latest scrape. And after that I'll tell you what I'm going to do with you. Fire away."
He began a leisurely, nonchalant meal, but Sonia made no sound.
"I'm waiting," he was prompt to remind her.
She sat with folded arms, bidding him a silent defiance.
"Sonia, I'm not disobeyed—much," he told her very quietly.
Her brave attempt to look unwaveringly into his purposeful black eyes broke down precipitately.
"I'll tell you!" she promised breathlessly, and, as he resumed his breakfast, smiling, "You can see how you like it, you brute!"
I have often thought over the story she told him without ever quite understanding its spirit. There was no longer the old endeavor to shock for the sake of shocking, but something more angry and bitter, as though she were matching his account of the risk he had undergone in reaching her by proving him a fool for his pains. The effect on his mind was shown in his brief, acid comment at the end:
"And men have been ready to spoil their lives for you!"
"I didn't think you'd like it when you got it," she taunted.
O'Rane looked wistfully out of the window.
"And I've dreamed of you in five continents," he murmured half to himself. "Lying out under the stars in Mexico, just whispering your name in very hunger.... Ever since I was a boy at Oxford, and you promised ... you promised...."
"You've waited patiently for your revenge, David."
"You weren't taking risks even then," he retorted. "Toujours le grand jeu. I could always get men to trust me ... put their lives in my hand. They knew I shouldn't let them down, but you could never stand your soul being seen naked...."
She broke in violently on his meditation.
"Why did you ever come here?" she demanded.
"Because I've lived in a world of dreams, Sonia. I've been poor and rich and poor again—that made no difference—but I fancied that one day you would need me——"
"You've insulted me ...!" she interrupted.
He laid his hand gently on her knee.
"If anyone had had the courage ten years ago to tell you what I've told you to-day, instead of spoiling you, petting you, filling your head with the idea that the whole world revolved round you——"
"Yet—you came out here——!" she put in mockingly, brushing his hand disdainfully away.
"There's a war on, Sonia," he answered. "Your old world's been blotted out. You'll find everything changed when you get back, and no niche for you to fill. Everything we value or love will have to be sacrificed, and you've never sacrificed anything but your friends. I came out here because I hoped the war would have sobered you. It might have been the making of you. It might have made a woman of you."
Nine days later they parted at Paddington. From Genoa they had taken an Italian boat to Marseilles, changed to a P. & O. and landed at Plymouth. Lady Dainton was engaged in turning Crowley Court into a hospital, and at Sir Roger's request I met Sonia, gave her a late luncheon, notified the Foreign Office of her return and put her on board a Melton train at Waterloo.
She was communicative with the volubility of an aggrieved woman, and more than one passer-by on the platform looked curiously at her flushed face and indignant brown eyes.
"No, I decline to be mixed up in the quarrel," I told her, when she invited my opinion of O'Rane.
"Then you agree with him?"
"I have no views, Sonia," I said.
"That's nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I've told you what he said, and it's either true or not true." Her voice suddenly softened and became pleading. "George, I'm—I'm not like that."
"I will not discuss you with yourself," I said. "Generally speaking, I don't understand the modern Society girl——"
"And you hate her!" Sonia put in.
I said nothing.
"Why?" she pursued.
"Too much of an arriviste," I hazarded. "Too much on the make, too keen to get there."
She pondered my criticism deliberately.
"You were born there," she observed, as though explaining a distinction I ought to have appreciated.
"My dear Sonia, a bachelor has no social status," I said. "Whether he's received or not depends on the possession of respectable dress-clothes."
"Beryl was born there," she continued, following her own line of thought. "So was Violet, or Amy Loring. If you're the daughter of a successful brewer, packed off to London to get married——"
"This is morbid," I interrupted, looking at my watch to see how much longer we were to be kept waiting.
"That little cur talked as if it were my fault!" she cried in shrill excitement.
I found a note at the Admiralty to say that O'Rane would be grateful for a bed in Princes Gardens as the Gray's Inn rooms had been let. During dinner that night he made no mention of his Austrian expedition and seemed only interested to learn how the war had progressed in his absence. We discussed the changes in the War Office and Cabinet, speculated on the untried Haldane Expeditionary Force and came back eternally to the reputed infallibility of German arms. No man alive at that time will forget his thrill on reading that the massed might of Germany had been brought to a standstill before Liège. The engine of destruction was so perfect that a single pebble might seemingly throw it out of gear, and with the crude optimism of those early days we talked of the Russians hammering at the gates of East Prussia and the possibility of peace by Christmas.
O'Rane, unwontedly taciturn and out of humour, laughed scornfully.
"A five months' war when Germany knows that if she fails she'll sink to the level of Spain? We've got a superhuman job. Every man we can get.... I hope you'll forgive me, sir, I'm treating your house as my own and inviting a few men for a recruiting campaign——"
"Go carefully," urged Bertrand. "I suggested you for an interpretership in France or Russia, whichever they wanted."
"I wonder how long they'll take to make up their minds?" O'Rane asked, with a touch of impatience. "I applied for a commission before I left England. I—I can't wait, sir."
"My dear boy ...!"
"Oh, I know it's very childish, sir," O'Rane answered, with a laugh. "But I'm desperate."
Bertrand, who knew of his financial troubles, raised his eyebrows and said nothing. The next evening we had our informal recruiting committee-meeting and divided the home counties into twelve districts, pledging each member to gather in five hundred recruits within a week. The Government machinery was slow to gather motion, and patriotism and restlessness combined to make of every man an amateur Napoleon. As I looked round my uncle's dining-room, one feature of O'Rane's committee was noticeable as illustrating a simple philosophy he had held in boyhood. On his right sat Sinclair, whose adherence had been won more than fifteen years ago in the matter of a forged copy of Greek Alcaics for the Shelton Prize; on his left I recognized Brent, elected to an All Souls' Fellowship shortly after O'Rane had retired from the contest; at the foot of the table was James Morris of Ennismore Gardens, Mexico City Gaol and elsewhere. The others I had not met before, but their sole common characteristic seemed to be that at some period of their careers David O'Rane had made himself indispensable to them all.
"I want a week of your undivided time," said the Chairman. "Each one will have a district, a car and a doctor. I want each to raise five hundred men, and you'll find it easiest to borrow a system, which Mr. Sinclair can explain to you, of getting hold of the enthusiasts and making each one bring in another, snowball fashion. You're on strong ground if you're in first yourselves. Is there anybody here who won't help me?"
The house—at full strength—went into committee. With what he described as poetic justice and I preferred to call malice, O'Rane gave me the town of Easterly, which is known to history for its anti-Government riots in the South African War and to the Disarmament League for the flattering reception accorded to five years of peace propaganda. As I could only address evening meetings, when my work at the Admiralty was over, Bertrand undertook to canvass the district by day in such time as he could spare from turning Princes Gardens into a hospital.
"How soon do we start, Raney?" I asked, when the committee was dispersed, and we were walking upstairs to bed.
"To-morrow," he answered. "Five hundred multiplied by twelve, six thousand. Most of them will take a bullet in their brain; you can't begin that sort of thing too soon."
"You're in a cheerful mood," I observed.
"If I could get out to-morrow ...! Man, I know the drill from A to Z, I was under fire all through the Balkan Wars ... and your uncle, in the kindness of his heart, talks about interpreterships! My God!"
"He only wanted to preserve your precious young life," I said.
"You damned fool, d'you think I want my life preserved?" he blazed out, with such passion as I had not seen in his face since the first weeks that I knew him at Melton.