2
I left the grotesque party with the feeling that contrary to all reasonable expectation I had enjoyed myself immoderately. The enthusiasm survived the night, and at breakfast the following day I informed Yolande that I proposed to invite the O'Ranes to dine with us. Here, however, I was met with unforeseen opposition. I have no idea how the antagonism started, but at some period of their careers Yolande had decided that Mrs. O'Rane was of those who "do all the things one doesn't do," while Mrs. O'Rane has been known to dismiss my niece alliteratively as a "prig, prude and poseuse."
"You'll regret it," Yolande told me frankly enough, sagaciously smoothing back a strand of auburn hair from her forehead. "She's very fascinating, but I've an instinct about her, and you'll find she's all superfluity and flashiness. Any number of people have been in love with her, of course, but she'll grate on you. Ask any woman."
One dinner, I felt, could not commit me very deeply, and it was my own house, although I was already debating the desirability of moving into bachelor quarters and giving up my remaining rooms to the Canteen Executive. Yolande, however, was to be spared in spite of me.
Whether Mrs. O'Rane disapproved of her as strongly as she disapproved of Mrs. O'Rane, I am incompetent to say, but I was informed in terms of suitable regret that she was either dining out or having people to dine with her every night of the week; was it possible, on the other hand, for me to come on one of the days when they were at home? I had not yet finished that talk with David about Melton.... The reminder was perhaps inserted as a reason for not inviting Yolande.
I chose my night and, within five minutes of entering the house, I should have confessed, had I been honest with myself, that Yolande was right. An air of tension greeted me, an interrupted controversy was at once resumed, and I found myself required by my hostess to arbitrate in a lovers' quarrel. The cause of dispute was the girl Hilda Merryon, whose career O'Rane had briefly sketched for my benefit; fortunately she was not present at the time, but with O'Rane composed, pacific and unyielding in an arm-chair with his big St. Bernard beside him, Mrs. O'Rane flushed and aggrieved with one foot on the fender and one bare arm shielding her face from the fire, and Vincent Grayle, my fellow guest, directing and perhaps stimulating the controversy, I felt that we had enough disputants.
"I'll put it to Mr. Stornaway!" cried Mrs. O'Rane, as soon as our greetings were over. "Mr. Stornaway, we were only married in July, it's now the end of September, and I don't think David ought to go off and leave me for three months. It isn't necessary, I've asked him not to——"
O'Rane stroked the dog's head reflectively.
"But you've told me you can't get away, Sonia," he said at length. "You've got your Belgian refugee work, you've got a string of engagements and you've got Beresford laid up for months yet. You admitted, too, you'd simply be at a loose end in Melton."
"I should be with you." She tossed her head back until she was looking at him through half-closed eye-lids. "Of course, if you don't want me ..."
"But, darling, your work here ...?"
"Anybody can do that!" Mrs. O'Rane interrupted unguardedly. "That's not the point, though, and you know it isn't. I say you oughtn't to go. It's like setting a race-horse to pull a removal van."
In the pause that followed, I wondered what opportunities for propaganda Lady Dainton had enjoyed since our meeting the week before.
"I've promised to resign the moment I've paid back the money I owe," said O'Rane with emphatic reasonableness.
"The money was given you as a present."
"But I can't take presents of that kind so long as I'm fit to work. Darling Sonia, you don't imagine I want to go away from you for three months, do you? If you can come down without leaving your work here undone——"
"Oh, I should be in the way!" she interrupted with another toss of her head. "You've got your Hilda."
She looked round the room, pointedly inviting us to follow the direction of her eyes and nodding at the tidy arrangement of books, the filing-cabinet, the half-hidden safe and neat library card-catalogue. I could see O'Rane blushing, as I myself began to blush, that such a scene should be enacted before comparative strangers.
"You mustn't say things like that," he remonstrated gently; then, with the lightness of affected inspiration, "We'll put it to Mr. Stornaway, as you suggest! I'm committed, sir, as I think in honour and certainly by an understanding with the Headmaster, to go back to Melton on Thursday. You've met Miss Merryon; I'm taking her with me to act as a sort of secretary. She'll have rooms in the town and will lend me the use of her eyes in the evenings;—I was frightfully handicapped last term and had to take advantage of the boys' good-nature. I know it's an unusual arrangement, but the circumstances are unusual. I got Dr. Burgess's approval——"
"Did you tell him anything about her past?" Mrs. O'Rane broke in, tapping a gold slipper with scarlet heel against the fender.
O'Rane smiled dreamily.
"I'm chiefly concerned with her future," he answered. Something in the voice and smile told me that he was spiritually as far removed from his wife as the mad from the sane.
There was a long pause which Grayle broke by shrugging his shoulders, sighing, shaking his head at Mrs. O'Rane with an expression of rueful sympathy and finally opening his cigarette-case with a muttered request for permission to smoke.
"Of course, the world will say—," he began.
O'Rane laughed to himself.
"I don't know that I've ever paid much attention to what the world says. But Mr. Stornaway is going to arbitrate."
I looked at one disputant after another. Mrs. O'Rane's expression can best be described as mulish; O'Rane was smiling, debonair and yet, I felt,—it was the first time that I had felt it—unshakable. What part Grayle was playing I could not determine; if he had been invited to arbitrate before my arrival, he had not been successful, and I wished that he would leave me to compose the quarrel uninterrupted.
"If you've promised yourself to Dr. Burgess," I told O'Rane after consideration, "you can't disappoint him at forty-eight hours' notice. It's out of the question. You tell me that he approves of your taking Miss Merryon?"
"He'd do anything for me," O'Rane answered easily.
"Even so, if I may put it bluntly, it's an imprudent thing to do. Surely the simplest and most natural solution, as well as the pleasantest for both, is for Mrs. O'Rane to accompany you. If you want work found for Miss Merryon, that ought not to be difficult in these times; I'll pay any money for a competent shorthand-writer in my own office."
Neither O'Rane nor his wife offered any criticism, but Grayle considerately supplied the reason which both were hiding.
"That was discussed, I think," he said, "but I gather Mrs. O'Rane has her hands pretty full with work here."
"But you said anyone could do that," I reminded her. "And, as long as Bertrand's here, there'll be some one to look after Beresford."
In addition to Bertrand there were two maids and a plenipotent housekeeper, for Mrs. O'Rane liked to boast of her domestic incompetence. Mine was the obvious solution, and I could see that she recognised it. There was a suppressed yawn—and a gain of three seconds.
"If I died, some one would have to do my work," she admitted, "or, it wouldn't be done.... But, Mr. Stornaway, David's a member of Parliament, his whole future is in the House; isn't it ridiculous for him to waste his time teaching a pack of schoolboys?"
As she shifted her ground, I felt that my work was done.
"I haven't got much future of any kind," I said, "but I'm a begging-letter writer in the morning and a second-class clerk in a government office the rest of the day. These are not normal times, Mrs. O'Rane, and he can't leave his chief stranded at the last moment without anyone to take his place. When he comes back at Christmas, there'll be an opportunity for reconsideration."
O'Rane said nothing, and I was disappointed. I felt that, as he had got his own way, it would have been diplomatic and perhaps convincing to pretend that he was consenting to a compromise. Mrs. O'Rane looked at him out of the corner of one eye and pouted openly.
"We might just as well not be married, if you don't want me," she said.
"Come, come! Mrs. O'Rane!" I cried.
I am afraid that the mild protest only inflamed her.
"Well, he doesn't! The other night we were talking about marriage. Peter Beresford says that any man who loves a woman may do anything to win her; it doesn't make any difference whether she's married or not——"
O'Rane leaned forward and resumed his stroking of the dog's head.
"Perhaps it makes a difference to the woman," he suggested.
"Then David said," she went on, regardless of this interruption, "that men and women weren't justified in spoiling each other's lives by clinging on when one was tired of the other."
Every word was purposefully clear, and at the end she paused invitingly. O'Rane sprang up with a ring of laughter and held out his arms to receive her.
"Sweetheart!"
She made no movement until he had come a pace nearer, then she stepped unrespondingly aside. O'Rane's hands met on the marble of the mantelpiece.
"I—missed you," he said with a little breathless laugh.
I could not turn to see Grayle's face, but I was rigid with horror that such a trick should be played on a blind man. Gradually what she had done dawned on Mrs. O'Rane, and she threw her arms convulsively round her husband's neck.
"God forgive me!" she whispered. "Oh, my darling, I'm mad! I don't know what I've been saying!"
I turned to Grayle and asked him for a cigarette. A moment later I heard a car stopping at the door, and Beresford was helped into the house after his drive.
From time to time throughout the meal (whenever, perhaps, Mrs. O'Rane was trying to make amends), my mind went back to the scene. The O'Ranes' outlook and temperament were so dissimilar that I could see no common ground between them. The outsider never knows why any two people marry and is content to believe in the existence of an affinity hidden from his view. These two were both so full of vitality, both so good-looking, and, above all, both so young that I tried hard to resist a feeling of melancholy and to persuade myself that I had been an inadvertent eavesdropper at the oldest and most trumpery quarrel in the world rather than the witness of an inevitable breach. The long windows on either side of the room were warmly curtained in flame-coloured silk; the two fires glowed comfortingly on to their half-circles of chairs and sofas. Mrs. O'Rane, who could make a story out of nothing, poured out an endless stream of anecdotes against herself. When dinner was over and we left the dais for a distant view of high-hung chandeliers reflected softly in the gleaming surface of the long refectory table, I could not but be reminded of the Grail scene in "Parsifal."
The discordant note, the one persistently discordant note, was struck by Beresford. Alien in mind from the rest of us, he neither forgave nor forgot the contemptuous toe which had once searched his body for signs of breakage; and after dinner he withdrew to a far divan and spent the evening conversing in whispers with Mrs. O'Rane, who sat by him on a footstool, while he played with her long amber necklace. The rest of us reverted to a wholly undergraduate disputation, led by O'Rane on the theme of my own unexpected fortune and developed by me into a disquisition on education and the art of healing, though every question and view was put forward in the hope of making my host expound his own philosophy.
"You can't get efficiency without organisation," Grayle insisted as we laid the lessons of the war to heart. "Nothing can hold together without discipline. Look at Germany."
For myself, I have always regarded German organisation as the over-advertised co-ordination of the largest number of second-rate intelligences, but the criticism was taken from me by Beresford, who interrupted his own conversation to inform the room at large that it was one thing to teach a man how to shoot and quite another to be sure that he did not end up by shooting his own officers. Mrs. O'Rane held up one finger and pursed her lips, only to let them break a moment later into a smile.
"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind—with Government sanction—to some one weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organisation Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me."
Whether he was speaking seriously or in paradox, he had struck a note of idealism which jarred on Grayle, who threw away his cigar half-smoked.
"If we don't learn our lesson out of this war, we don't deserve to win it," he answered, reaching for his stick.
"But what is the lesson?" O'Rane asked, more of himself than of us. "Do you men find that you think best at night?" he went on reflectively. "There's less distraction ... and I'm always thinking at night now. I would say that every man who comes out of this war alive is a reprieved man and that we don't deserve to win it unless we learn that the only crime in all the world is cruelty.... If we can't affect others, we can at least affect ourselves. It's no use waiting for an act of parliament to make you humane; if you're prepared to jump into the river to save a child from drowning, you must be prepared to jump through a window to save it from starving." He shook his head and turned to me. "But how you're going to teach that, sir, even with your million a year to endow schools.... The Church has had Peter's keys for nearly two thousand years, but how many of us would literally pick a man out of the street, turn on the hot water for him, lend him a razor and a rig-out, keep him in funds till his ship comes home...." As he paused, I looked beyond him to the sofa where Beresford lay idly fingering Mrs. O'Rane's amber beads. "Of course it's all figurative and the gorgeous imagery of the East and that sort of thing, but I don't know how any man could remain a professing Christian for two minutes if he didn't believe that Christ would bathe the feet of the first tramp on the road. That's far more important to the human race than the Crucifixion. But then Christ was always poor, and you can't begin to be charitable until you've known what it means to be poor." His voice sank and grew silent. "I'm boring you, Grayle!" he exclaimed penitently, as a boot creaked on the polished floor.
"I must be getting home," was the answer, following hot-foot on an ill-suppressed yawn. "Boring me, indeed? Enjoyed it all immensely." He got up and walked towards Mrs. O'Rane, to whom he bade an elaborate good-bye, while I followed slowly behind, wondering how such a woman ever came to marry such a man. "I shan't see you this side of Christmas, I suppose?"
She looked up a little negligently without releasing Beresford's hand.
"But I thought I was dining with you on Friday?"
"I understood you were going to Melton."
Mrs. O'Rane's expression became blank.
"I must think about this," she said. "Yes. I don't know how long it'll take me to tidy up things here.... Oh, I shall certainly be in London on Friday. David darling, you understand that I can't possibly get away at a moment's notice—any more than you can."
Her husband nodded.
"Come whenever it suits you," he said, as he walked on ahead to open the door for us.
Grayle lingered behind for a moment in the middle of the room.
"You mustn't stay on my account," he said to Mrs. O'Rane. "It won't be a party, you know."
There was a moment's silence; then she laughed provocatively and gave a mischievous, sideways glance at Beresford, which only Grayle and I saw.
"Jealous?" I heard.
"Not a bit. I shouldn't like you to come, though, if you were simply going to be bored."
"Oh, if you'd rather I didn't come, I won't."
I passed into the street and out of earshot. As I shook hands with O'Rane, Grayle joined us, and we walked towards the House on the look-out for a taxi. He was silent at first and then started to discuss the evening communiqué from the Front. I could not help wondering whether he, too, in middle-aged company under the penetrating chill of an autumn mist realised that it was beneath his dignity to be flirting with O'Rane's young wife and doubly ridiculous to be taking it seriously and devoting an evening's ill-humour to the enterprise.
"Do you care about dining on Friday?" he asked me suddenly. "Mrs. O'Rane will be there, and I'll rope in some more people."