V
During the first half of the 1905 Season I saw the Daintons three times: after their ball it is hardly an exaggeration to say we met daily. Our new feverish intimacy was not entirely of my seeking, and I am free to admit that Lady Dainton's capable energy left me then, as it leaves me now, with a feeling of scared bewilderment, while the measure of Sonia's success in subjugating London came rapidly to be the measure of my dislike for her. When, however, my uncle fell a victim to internal gout and departed for Marienbad at the end of June, he left me a house, a box at Covent Garden, a voluminous correspondence and the financial welfare of the War Fund to engage my spare time. This last spelt Lady Dainton and afternoon meetings in Rutland Gate. I nerved myself to face the inevitable and wire an invitation to O'Rane to stay with me when term was over.
He kept me company till Goodwood, and one of our first acts was to dine with the Daintons. I say it in no ungracious spirit, but at this time it was hardly possible not to dine with the Daintons. Turn up the files of the "Morning Post" and you will read some four or five times a week that a very successful ball had been given the previous evening by Mrs. X., "who looked charming in an Empire gown of ivory silk brocade," that among those present were the "Duchess of This, the Countess of That, Lady Dainton and Miss Dainton," and that dinners were given before the ball by "the Duchess of Here, the Countess of There and Lady Dainton." Lord Loring and other well-known dancing men are reported to have looked in during the evening.
Sometimes I feel my life has been embittered by the failure of the "Morning Post" to distinguish me by name; not until I entered the House was I segregated from the herd of "well-known dancing men," and this was more a compliment to the parliament of a great, free people than to myself, for by that time I had bidden almost complete farewell to Claridge's and the Ritz, the Empire Hotel and those ill-constructed tombs in Grosvenor Place that were tenanted, upholstered and beflowered for a night between two eternities of desolation.
By that time, too, the Daintons had scaled an eminence where I could hardly hope to follow them. The "Tickler" and the "Catch" were never wearied of publishing full-length, whole-page photographs of "Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., the popular member for the Melton Division of Hampshire," and Lady Dainton, "who is organizing a sale of work on behalf of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption." If a hospital matinée took place, Miss Sonia Dainton sold programmes; a theatrical garden-party, and she managed a stall; a mission bazaar, and she pinned in fading buttonholes at half a crown a time. And punctually the "Tickler" or "Catch" would depict her at work with her fellows—Lady Hermione Prideaux, all teeth and hat, on one side; and Miss Betty Marsden, the light comedy star from the Avenue Theatre, on the other. And when the last Vesuvius victim had been clothed in crewel work and London had emptied, the indefatigable camera-man would take wing to the country and photograph "Lady Dainton and her daughter at their beautiful Hampshire seat."
Sonia repaid the trouble as well as Lady Hamilton or La Giaconda. And I think if hard work by itself is to be rewarded, Lady Dainton got no more than her deserts. Ex pede Herculem, and I judge her day by the hour she spared for the War Fund. The Committee Meeting was taken comfortably and unhurriedly in her stride. She was at the time a dignitary of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Primrose League Dame, a Visitor to half a dozen girls' schools, the president of several nursing and Needlework Guilds and—I believe—a vice-president of every Girls' Club, Rescue Home, Purity League and Association of Decayed Gentlewomen in the kingdom. Lady Dainton was one of those women who accumulated arduous and unpaid offices as dukes collected directorships in the golden days of the company-promoting 'nineties. What is more, she worked hard at all of them. When I think of her hurrying from Committee to Prizegiving, and from Prizegiving to Sale of Work, I almost cease to regard woman as man's physical inferior, though I may still wonder how far the world's general welfare would have been retarded had she remained at home with her feet on a sofa and a novel in her lap.
I certainly think Sonia would have lived happier if she had never set foot in London. Her personal success went to her head, and it took ten years of three lives and a war at the end to sober her and restore some sense of perspective. "You can give corn to thoroughbreds," my uncle would begin—and then I usually changed the subject. A woman, in Bertrand's Oriental eyes, was the plaything of so much sexual passion, irresponsible and unsafe until she was veiled and married, and even then perverse and unbalanced.
"To a man, sex is an incident," he would say; "to a woman, it's everything in this world and the next. You are too full of idealism, George. You pretend man's perfectible, that woman's got a capacity for disinterested self-sacrifice. You'll outgrow that phase, my boy; you'll find that with all our inventions and discoveries and religions and philosophies and civilization and culture, we're devilish little way removed from the beasts. That young woman—I mention no names if it's a sore point with you—may turn into an admirable mother, but as an unsatisfied beast of prey.... My dear boy, it's not her fault, and you and your friends have contributed to make her what she is."
Contributed, perhaps. But, if not her fault, neither was it ours, but the fault of Society and human nature, the action and reaction of the sexes. As the year drew to its close I was too deeply immersed in politics to watch the social comedy, but in the summer and autumn there was little else to do. For five months I observed the psychological development of a girl who was physically attractive—and nothing more: not gifted, not clever, not accomplished, of no spiritual grandeur—a dainty, brilliant, social butterfly. Sonia was no more than that: I doubt if she ever will be more. Yet men are so constituted that it was enough to assure her triumph.
O'Rane and I observed in company. He was pledged to bear-lead young Summertown through the United States in August and September, and till that time I prevailed on him to leave the industrial conditions of England alone. The emptiness of our life must, I fear, have galled him, and, looking back on it all, I made a mistake in bringing him in view of Sonia and her gaudy fellow-butterflies. Technically they met as old friends without a claim on one another, each free to repent in any given way of their rash early engagement. In practice the liberty was one-sided: the greater Sonia's emancipation, the more critical he became; and Sonia, who was no fonder of criticism than any good-looking girl in her first season, grew first restless, then resentful and finally rebellious. When I said good-bye to Raney at Euston, I felt he was not leaving a day too soon; and this is not to blame him, but to underline the impossible position he and Sonia had taken up.
Before he left I recall a series of indecisive skirmishes. There was, for example, the Covent Garden engagement, in which I was routed. With a misguided idea of friendliness and in an attempt to separate Crabtree and Sonia before the whole of London had coupled their names, I placed my uncle's box at the Daintons' disposal, and, whenever we found an opera we liked, Lady Dainton, Sonia, Raney and I used to dine together either in Princes Gardens or Rutland Gate and drive down together to Covent Garden. O'Rane was a musician; I had an untutored love of music; Lady Dainton, I fancy, felt it was the right thing to do, and Sonia was too overwrought and overexcited to mind what the invitation was so long as she could accept it. Roger Dainton, who rimed 'Lied' with 'Slide,' professed zeal for the House of Commons on such occasions, and on reflection I admire him for his frank Philistinism. With Sonia chattering unconcernedly through "Tristan," and with her mother leaning out to bow to her social acquisitions until I expected every moment to have to clutch her by the heels, the way of the Wagnerian was strait and thorny. But then, as Sonia said, "You come to Covent Garden to see people."
It was in seeing and being seen that we courted disaster. One night, as I was ordering coffee in the lounge, Crabtree attached himself to our party and accompanied us to our box. The next night I found him dining at Rutland Gate, and he asked me—before the soup plates were removed—whether I could squeeze him into a corner; he was prepared, if necessary to stand. And no sooner had he secured a programme than he exclaimed:
'"Il Trovatore!' I love that! To-morrow night, too, by Jove——"
"Well, why...." Sonia began and looked at me.
"You'd better roll along here, Crabtree," I said.
He brought a heavy hand crashing on to my knee.
"Stout fellow!" he cried. "What about dinner? Will you come to me, or shall I come to you, or—or what?"
"Oh, you'd better all dine with us," suggested Lady Dainton, tactfully, as he hesitated to fill in particulars of his invitation.
"Raney and I have got some men dining with us at the Club, I'm afraid," I improvised. And as we walked home I remarked, "We are beaten, my son."
"What a city to loot London is!" O'Rane murmured. The criticism, if not original, was at least true. I called it to mind whenever I found Crabtree feeding himself at his friends' expense, or Sonia accepting invitations from people she disliked rather than drop for an instant out of the race.
"I imagine we're becoming Americanized, Raney," I said one afternoon a few weeks later when he and I called on the Daintons to say good-bye before leaving London.
"The girls are," he answered. "They think men exist for the sole purpose of buying 'em sweets, taking them to theatres, running errands for them. Just listen." He crossed the room and drew up a chair by Sonia. "What have you been doing lately, Bambina?"
Sonia wrinkled her brow in sudden petulance.
"I wish you'd drop that silly name, David," she said.
"What have you been doing, Sonia?" he asked.
"Oh, heavens! What haven't I? Mr. Erckmann took me to a meet of the Four-in-Hand Club yesterday. I dined with Lord Summertown at the Berkeley. We went on to the Vaudeville, had supper at the Savoy, and then—and then—oh yes, we danced with Hardrodt, the soda-water king. Why weren't you there, George?"
"Frankly, I haven't much use for Hardrodt," I said. "The only time I met him I thought he was a bit of an outsider."
Sonia spread out her hands with a movement of deprecation.
"But Society lives by its outsiders."
"A man oughtn't to get tight in other people's houses," I persisted.
"Well, it was his own house last night."
"Did he keep sober?" I asked.
"Well, there are sober men and sober men," she answered. "'Not drunk, but having drink taken.'"
O'Rane looked at her gravely for a moment, then he asked:
"Why d'you allow yourself to be seen in a house like that?"
"What's the harm?" Sonia demanded gaily. "He did us awfully well."
"You admit he's an outsider, yet you accept his hospitality...."
"Oh, you little Oxford boys with your logic!" Sonia laughed. "Have a choc.? They're Lord Summertown's farewell present. You'll take care of him in America, won't you, David? He's such a love, I should never forgive you if you lost him. What are you going to do out there?"
At the sound of his own name Summertown joined us.
"I'm going to learn American," he assured us. "Say, this is my fi'ist visit to the U-nited States. Gee! I reckon this is a bully place. Pleased to meet you, Miss Dainton. I say, Raney, what's the proper answer to that?"
"No mere European has ever discovered. Get it in first and then clear out while they're still feeling for their guns."
"You're a fat lot of use," Summertown retorted. "Here I'm going out to improve my mind. What's a 'cinch'? And this rotten American War of Independence I'm always up against—when'll it be over? I want to be a pukka Yank."
"You'll be more esteemed as you are," O'Rane answered. "Better let me do the talking."
"Oh, you'll only be taken for an Irish immigrant," returned Summertown.
There he was wide of the mark. There is a story that O'Rane, in shovel hat and clerical collar, bearded the night porter of his own college at two in the morning and gained permission to call on one of the chaplains in Meadow Buildings. I have seen him successfully assume an alien nationality in Montmartre, Seville and Leghorn; while the first draft of American Rhodes scholars, scattered though they be to the ends of the earth, may recall the inaugural address delivered in hearing of the scandalized Cæsars by an alleged attaché of the United States Embassy.
They may remember a slight, passionate figure with black hair and arresting eyes who urged them in the name of their great Republic to resist all interference with their liberty on the part of the University authorities and to lynch any black men they found lurking around Balliol or St. John's. Robert Hawke, of Texas and Hertford, six feet five and proportionately broad, may not yet have forgotten the night when the imposture was discovered; he alone may be able to explain why, after pursuing Raney down Holywell with a loaded revolver and running him to earth in Hell Passage, he tamely consented to breakfast next morning with the man he had sworn to slay. The Rhodes scholars were a fair mark for O'Rane whenever he had an outbreak. Creevey, of Melbourne and Trinity, still preserves the peremptory note that bade him call next morning on the Junior Proctor, Mr. D. O'Rane, though the House Mission has probably long ere this expended the five-shilling fine for non-attendance at the first University Sermon of the term. To add one digression to another, I have never understood how O'Rane survived four years at Oxford without being sent down.
The Covent Garden skirmish was my affair, and after summary defeat I retired into private life. O'Rane's moral lecture was no more successful than my diplomacy: the Americanization of women went on unchecked—if indeed the American girl be as Raney saw her, a social prostitute who would sell herself to the highest bidder and give as little as possible in return; I privately believe the breed to be indigenous to the wealthier strata of English society. He failed and retired to the other side of the Atlantic. Between the two skirmishes came the intervention of Loring House.
I was taking pot-luck there one night when Lady Amy asked me in an undertone how Raney's engagement was progressing. I told her all I knew, and she broke a significant silence by observing:
"Oh, I just wanted to know."
It was not all she wanted to know, and I ventured to tell her so.
"Well, Sonia really is behaving rather extraordinarily," she went on. "I wonder her mother...."
"Lady Dainton accompanies her everywhere," I pointed out.
"Yes, either she doesn't see or she doesn't care."
"Probably she thinks there's no harm in it."
Lady Amy shook her head.
"This is my fourth season, George."
"And their first. I submit that they don't know how many people sit round the walls of a ballroom inventing scandal."
"Well, someone ought to tell her. You're a friend of the family."
"Not if I know it, Amy!" I said. "This is not a man's job."
"I'd do it myself, if I knew how to start."
"You've only to tell her there's safety in numbers," I suggested.
It is to be presumed my advice was followed quite literally, for the next time I dined at Rutland Gate the party had doubled in size, and no one got enough to drink. Sonia very dutifully granted dances to all the male guests and, so far as I could see, impartially encouraged all to make love to her. Certainly she discussed the possibility of platonic friendship with me at 10.45, when I had hardly finished my dinner; and four hours later, when Valentine Arden was changing his second buttonhole, I observed the expression of weariness that settled onto his passionless, immobile features when rash newcomers sought to shake his precocious celibacy.
"When does a girl get over the awkward age?" he demanded.
"At death," I hazarded, and he left me in disgust, because he clearly wanted to tell me the answer himself.
Thus to some extent Amy Loring succeeded where Raney and I had failed, but her ultimate defeat was more humiliating than ours. After the last War Fund meeting of the season I went up stairs to find a cup of tea and say good-bye to Sonia before starting out on my autumn campaign among the electors of Wiltshire. Crabtree was with her, and in a jaded, end-of-season spirit they were discussing future arrangements and enumerating the houses they "had to" visit.
"When are you going to House of Steynes, George?" Sonia asked.
I gave her the date, and we found we were invited for the same week.
"You're not selected, are you, Tony?" she asked Crabtree.
"Well, I don't quite know how I'm fixed," he answered, without committing himself. "I'm due with the Fordyces for the Twelfth, and from there...."
He worked out a chain of houses running from the south-west to the north-east of Scotland. House of Steynes, of course, lay across his path; the only question was whether he could fit in....
"By Jove, yes!" he exclaimed, with an air of one making an unexpected discovery. "A blank week! I've a very good mind to ask old Loring if he can give me a bed! It's a rotten business staying at an hotel, and if you're all going to be there...."
He finished his tea and drove to Curzon Street. Loring was at home, the case for charity was presented, and Crabtree carried the day. In an age of artificial politeness no other result was possible; House of Steynes could accommodate half a regiment, and there had never been a breach or the opportunity of a breach.
"The dirty, greasy dog!" Loring fumed when we met at dinner. And for want of a better description, "The dirty, greasy dog!"