Sonia Married

by Stephen McKenna

1

I sailed for America in December, 1915, on perhaps the most difficult mission that I have ever undertaken. It was not expected, of course, that the United States would enter the war against us or upset the diplomatic equilibrium in our favour without provocation and until the result of the elections had been seen. I went, as I have suggested, to counteract the German propaganda, which sought to make all at least equally responsible for the war, and also to remove some part of the bad impression which had been left by our more unbridled journalists and our less imaginative statesmen. The moral approbation of America was too precious an asset to fritter away, and the purchase of material depended on the goodwill of American financiers, the supply of munitions could be stopped as a diplomatic reprisal.

It was perhaps unfortunate that my arrival coincided with an outburst of new interest in the Blockade, ending with the creation of a Blockade Ministry and the appointment of a Blockade Minister. (Harry Merefield used to shake his head over any new interest in the Blockade. "We always say that Germany must be defeated in the field, and I'm apprehensive when the soldiers tell me that they're counting on our starving the brutes out.") I was asked, too, at more than one meeting how the Government of Great Britain reconciled its passionate crusade in defence of small nationalities with its no less passionate refusal to allow the Irish to control their own destinies. The dreary tale of the unchecked Ulster gun-running and the appeal to Germany was rehearsed for my benefit; and my more law-abiding Irish audiences generated considerable heat over the presence of "the rebel Carson" in the Cabinet.

But, if I found the work difficult, it gave me a respite from England, where I felt that I had been watching the machine at too close quarters. Since the day when I helped George Oakleigh to divide the world and secure a lasting peace, our nerves had worn thin; we devoted too much time to seeing that other people went promptly about their duties; and a deadly personal bitterness—embodied for me in Grayle, though I do not single him out for attack—poisoned our confidence in our own leaders. I was glad to feel the icy wind of the Atlantic lashing my face, blowing the cobwebs from my brain and the sour taste from my mouth, as we rounded the last Irish headland.

During the week that I had to myself on board, sailing without lights and zig-zagging out of reach of submarines, I put together the notes for some of my speeches. It was extraordinarily difficult to say anything definite. After eighteen months of hostilities and mid-way through a second winter, there was a confident expectation that the great spring offensive would end the war. The Austrian losses were known to be gigantic, and it was believed that the old emperor was flirting with peace; Germany was starving, and the moral of the German army had notoriously broken. (Our avowedly humorous publications demonstrated that a British soldier had still only to call "Waiter!" or to exhibit a sausage at the end of his bayonet to have a swarm of German prisoners on their knees to him.)

Yet, beneath all our confidence ran a chilling current of doubt. The spring offensive would be launched in Belgium or France, but the clubs and dinner tables, the military correspondents—it was whispered, the Cabinet itself—were divided into "westerners" and "easterners."

"If we could hold up the Huns at Ypres," George had said to me gloomily on my last day in England, "they can hold us up equally well, when the proportion of fighting strength has been reversed. I hoped in the early days of the Dardanelles that we were going to knock away the buttresses and bring down the whole structure of the Central Empires, detach Turkey and Bulgaria, you know, carve a way into the Hungarian plains. Now I'm by no means comfortable...."

George, with many others, was not destined to think of the Dardanelles with an easy mind until news reached the Eclectic Club one day at luncheon that Gallipoli had been miraculously evacuated, and a sigh of relief rose over London, to be followed by a feeling that, though we had escaped once, our luck might desert us at the second tempting. More and more I was hearing the criticism that there were too many amateur strategists in the Cabinet with no one to check the careless inspiration which led them to fling their armies to Sulva Bay or Salonica, while the thinning reserves on the western front impelled the Government inch by reluctant inch to conscription.

And every time that the Blockade bit deeper into the puffy German flesh, every time that the mark exchange fell, every time that the numbers of enemy killed, wounded, missing and prisoners satisfied our military ready-reckoners that the last reserves were under fire and that the inevitable collapse would ring and echo through the world within so many days or weeks, the enemy retaliated with the wriggle of a Japanese wrestler, flung his adversary away and surmounted him. Servia had been overrun by the effete, vanquished Austrians in October, Montenegro followed in January; we had sent troops to Gallipoli, because the western front was impregnable, we had withdrawn them because the eastern front was no less impregnable. Amateur strategy or political intrigue was now mysteriously dissipating more troops in Greece, and I was required later to square the allied landing in Salonica with the allied resistance to the German incursion into Belgium. To say that King Constantine had defaulted on his treaty obligations to Servia was venturesome but inadequate, for the terms of the treaty were unknown; it was common knowledge, on the other hand, that Great Britain had guaranteed the Greek constitution, by which foreign troops might only land at the invitation of king and parliament.

The public temper in England led me to expect one thing, crystallised by Vincent Grayle in a bet that, if we had not broken the German line by September, the Government and the Higher Command would have passed into ineffectual history.

"It's their last chance," were his parting words to me. "After all, you find a leak in your cistern, you get a plumber; if he can't mend it, God's truth, you get another plumber. You're likely to find considerable changes by the time you get back."

I think it was the taste left in my mouth by Vincent Grayle that I was most glad to have blown away by the north-east Atlantic wind.

I landed in New York to find that I had lost one false perspective of the war to acquire another. In the eastern states there was indeed an "American Rights" party, flamingly incensed that the President had not broken off diplomatic relations on the sinking of the "Lusitania," but as unprepared as I had been on my return to England after a year of war for the resolution and effort, the suffering and bereavement, the social upheaval and snapping nerves which I had met. New England, to my pity, talked of participation and still fancied, as we had once done, that it would be someone else's son or brother, someone of academic interest, who would appear day after day in the casualty lists. Yet what else could I expect? As I walked up and down the unfamiliarly lighted streets to see men still employed on work which was being done by women in England, as I met abundance on every hand and heard of war as an intellectual conception in the middle distance, I had only to shut my eyes and imagine that it was a fantastic nightmare of my own.

For three months I spoke and wrote; for three months, as I was flung from end to end of the continent on journeys of incredible length and intolerable discomfort, interviewers boarded my train and invaded my car. The daily news of the war had long been relegated to some corner of a back page, and my interviewers were clamorous as children to be told a story.

I am content to be judged by results; in the south there were men who responded to my eloquence by crossing the border and enlisting in a Canadian regiment, and the War Charities Fund has its record of the subscriptions which I collected. My audiences reacted on me until I am afraid I came to idealise unpardonably. I remember describing to a Boston audience the spontaneous uprising of England as I had found it after a year abroad; I remember, too, returning to my hotel and finding a handful of letters and a batch of month-old papers.... England was agitated by the question whether a married man, who had volunteered for service, should be taken into the army until an unmarried man, who had not so volunteered, had been coerced. It was not an ennobling controversy for one who had been describing crusades....

"It serves the married men right for calling the single men shirkers," George Oakleigh wrote. "Now that they've screwed themselves up to the point of attesting, they're trying to shirk in their turn.... Psychology is revealing itself curiously. Men who despise a Catholic for surrendering the right of private judgement are praying for the Government to order them about and relieve them of the responsibility of making up their own minds.... A thriving trade is being driven in rejection certificates. Your enterprising patriot with some physical defect gets himself duly turned down for the army; he then personates his more robust friends for a suitable fee, attending at their local recruiting offices under their names and pocketing any solatium that may be handed out at such times. It was hardly this spirit which sent Jim Loring and Raney out.... The whole wrangle is a great opportunity for our friend Beresford, but he is at least honest and intelligible; if conscription comes, he'll refuse to serve and the Government can shoot him. He was committed to a war without being consulted and he's not going to die of malaria in Salonica to please a House of Commons which he helped to return five years ago to carry the Parliament Bill."

I feel that I must have addressed my audiences with less conviction after a letter of this kind, yet it was but the occasional snapping of overstrained human nerves. Yolande, I remember, wrote in great concern to tell me that her husband and George—two of the kindest, mildest and most level-headed men I know—had quarrelled and parted in anger. A successful raid into the German lines was magnified into at least a second-class victory; George in a mood of depression minimised it unduly; Felix thereat raked up his opponent's record of eight years before as a champion of disarmament and international peace, charging him with being a pro-German. "I wanted to bang their heads together, uncle darling," my niece confided. "Will you believe it? They weren't on speaking terms for a week, until I made each apologise to the other. So ridiculous!..."

The unrest and dissatisfaction ran through public and private life equally.

"There's a perfect crop of what my young cousin Laurie calls 'stunt-artists' of late," George wrote a week later. "Every third man in the House feels called on to do a 'stunt' of his own. There's a 'Ginger Stunt,' to keep the Government up to the mark, and an 'Air Stunt' to protect us from Zepps, and a 'Civil Liberties Stunt' to resist conscription, and a 'Conscription Stunt' to resist civil liberties, and a 'Press Stunt' to quash the Press Bureau, and a sort of 'Standing Stunt' to quash Northcliffe. Men of imaginative bent are turning their eyes to Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles, ready to start stunts there at the earliest opportunity and on the smallest provocation. Bertrand says that in all his experience he's never known the House so neurotic and out of hand. The cumulative effect is exceedingly bad. Whether the stunts do any good or not I can't say, but they destroy confidence in the Government, depress people at home and at the front, not to mention the allies, and ultimately they'll bring the Government down. Now, with the exception of Grayle, that's what no one wants to do. Asquith's the only man who can hold the country together, but he's so anxious—and rightly—to keep his team working harmoniously and to avoid any possibility of a split anywhere that I don't think he asserts himself enough. A party truce can be overdone, and a good many Liberals are saying that they are always sacrificed to conciliate someone else and never the other way about; as with Ireland—but I've no doubt your Irish-Americans have delicately hinted in the same sense.... By the way, I forgot to mention the 'Stop the War Stunt.' Since last I wrote Beresford has been had up and fined; at least he was ordered to pay the fine, but he refused; so they kept him in prison for a bit, and he hunger-struck and now he's at large again...."

George's next letter made no reference to anything of public interest.

"Do you remember saying that Sonia was a whole-time job for a man?" he began. "She's too much for me; I'm going to retire from the fray. When Raney came home for the Christmas holidays, he and Sonia talked things over—Melton and the House and work of various kinds. Bertrand was dragged in to keep the peace and advise generally, and they reached this amount of agreement: Raney consented to throw up his appointment at the school, provided he found work at least equally remunerative to pay his debts and keep the household going and provided that it was work of some public utility. He wasn't prepared simply to make money, if his services could be of any use to anyone for the war. Well, as you know, almost every kind of public work involves the use of your eyes, and it would have taken him some time to find the right kind of job. In fact, he and Bertrand had not begun to discuss it when Sonia went on to the next question with a very definite statement that, if he was going to live at 'The Sanctuary', she claimed equal rights with him to decide who was invited to the house—in other words (and very reasonably, from her point of view) the house was their home and she might just as well be living in the street as in that menagerie. I confess I sympathise. I knew she wouldn't stand it for more than a very few weeks. You don't know the place as I do, you've probably never seen anyone but Beresford dossing on a sofa, but Raney with the best intentions in the world sometimes turns that place into a casual ward. Sonia stood it at first, because it was a new experience and she's got a passionate enjoyment of life which would carry her through everything. But, when the novelty had worn off, it must have been singularly uncomfortable; even Raney's friends would only smile pityingly, and you may be sure that all the Dainton influence was thrown into the scale against him. I know for a fact that Lady Dainton's done all the mischief she can in the way of sneering, criticising, setting Sonia against Raney. The important new development was that Sonia was beginning to echo her mother. I happened to drop in about this time. I expect you've noticed that moral undressing is always conducted publicly in that house; I heard Raney defend himself by pointing out that Bertrand's house had been turned into a hospital, that Crowley Court was a hospital and that he was not asking Sonia to do anything very different from what Lady Dainton was doing. 'Ever since I came back from the front,' he told her, 'I've been trying to get this war into perspective. Everyone's doing his best to save this country and all that it stands for, but it's got to stand for a good deal more than it did before the war; we owe it to the fellows who have died and the fellows who are dying now and the numberless fellows who've still got to die, we've got to shew that they died for something that we can look at without shame. It'll be a long time before we can be really proud of this country, but we can make a beginning, and the time to begin is when we've stood sweating with fear and remorse with a halter round our necks and the hangman comes to say we've been reprieved.'

"As you know, my uncle's a tough old cynic, but, when Raney talks with that cold, vibrant passion of his, you have to be very tough not to feel at least a little uncomfortable. I've had to stand it ever since we were at Oxford together. Sonia was about as much impressed as if he'd been talking to a brick wall. He wasn't discouraged, but he turned to Bertrand—'You remember when I got back, sir?' (God! I'm not likely to forget the night when we found he was blind!) 'You were in a furnished flat, and I had awful difficulty in finding you, but I came straight to you, and you and George took me in without a murmur.' (I suppose he thought that after sixteen years we were going to refer him to the nearest Rowton House.) 'That was—symbolical, sir,' he went on. 'D'you remember that you came in very late, when I was in bed, and we had a talk? After you'd gone, I got out of bed and lifted up both hands and swore that I'd not give in, that I'd do what I could with what was left. I swore that, as I'd been taken in—not only by you; a hundred other people had done the same,—I'd try very humbly and patiently never to say "no" to anyone else that wanted to be taken in, anyone else that I could help. That's what I'm trying to do now.' Then he stopped and left them to digest it, with the result which you can imagine when two people take up wholly irreconcilable positions. Sonia said that charity should begin at home, that he talked about not being unkind to anyone, but he was being unkind to his own wife—you can imagine the dialogue. Bertrand raised his two hands that night and swore that he'd clear out into quarters of his own, and Sonia's parting words were that she regarded her marriage as at an end, which is a pretty sentiment after five months."

A week later George wrote again on the same subject.

"How you must enjoy the sight of my hand!" he began. "I'm sorry, but I want to blow off steam. The other night I took Raney out to dinner and talked to him for his soul's good. I saw a good deal of the tragi-comedy when Sonia was engaged to Jim Loring and I told Raney that he was courting disaster by the way he was treating her. He was in one of his most smiling, most obstinate moods—steel and india-rubber. He said he couldn't slam his door in the face of anyone who wanted help. 'Very well!' I said; 'keep it open. You say "yes," she says "no," and there's not a square inch of ground for compromise. One of you has to climb down, and you won't?' 'If you like to put it like that,' says Raney, 'I won't.' 'Then make her,' I said. 'She'll do it, if you make her; she won't love you any the less and she'll respect you all the more, if you force her to obey you.' Raney was really upset. 'Old man! you mustn't talk to me about forcing my wife to do things!' My dear Stornaway, that's the kind of imbecile we've got to deal with! I warned him that, if he kept his door open against her will, she would walk out of it.

"God knows, I never wanted to be a Cassandra, but I know that child so well! Two days later Raney bumped into a young officer staggering along Victoria Street in an advanced state of intoxication; Raney just had time to find out that the fellow was due to catch the leave-train at about seven next morning, when his new friend collapsed on the steps of the Army and Navy Stores and settled himself to a comfortable slumber. I don't suppose any of us would have left him there with a fair prospect of being robbed or run in or discovered by the Provost-Marshal, to say nothing of losing the train and perhaps being court-martialled. Raney must needs put him in a cab, take him home and expend time, ingenuity and hard-bought experience in making him sober. It must have been a gruesome night, but the fellow caught his train. It was the last straw for Sonia. The next day she wired from Northamptonshire, asking me to tell Raney that she was staying with the Pentyres. That was a week ago; Raney has asked her—asked, mark you—to come back, and she won't budge. I deliberately cadged an invitation from Pentyre last week-end, we spent Sunday with one scene after another, and her final message on Monday morning was that she would come back when he agreed to do what she asked; otherwise she would be compelled to think that he, too, regarded the marriage as over. I spent most of Monday night storming at Raney, and the present position is that neither will yield an inch and Raney won't exercise his authority.

"You are probably sick and tired of them both by now, but you cannot be anything like as sick or tired as I am...."