2
If Lady Maitland had invited a full account of my internment and had then scampered away without waiting to hear it, I was not let off so easily by either of my neighbours at dinner. For the first three courses I told my tale to the Duchess of Ross, who spent the second three handing it on to the right, while I turned like an automaton and repeated my recitation to Lady Pentyre. As I might have foreseen, knowing their craving to be ahead of the world with any new thing, I was instantly committed to lunching with both (because each knew so many people who would be simply dying to meet me and hear all about it); and, if I bore my cross with resignation, it was because I knew that I was relieving someone else (he proved to be a submarine commander who had recently been awarded the Victoria Cross)—and that I should be relieved in my turn when a greater novelty presented itself—(after three days an American Lusitania survivor came to my rescue).
I was beginning to get used to the noise and strangeness and to recover from my first bewilderment, when Lady Maitland rustled to her feet, and I was left at the mercy of a political argument carried on between my host and Grayle across my body. So far as I remembered, it concerned the likelihood of compulsory service, and I was only interested to find Grayle, the most lawless man of my acquaintance, pleading for more discipline, while a high-and-dry Tory like Maitland defended Ministers whom he had styled thieves and common sharpers at the time of the 1909 Budget and the Marconi enquiry. I had almost forgotten my poor little host's genius for picking up the hastier opinions and less profound catchwords of the uninformed. George caught my eye and winked, as Maitland thumped the table impressively, tugged at his moustache and talked—with a slightly shocked intonation—of "the brain and sinew of the Government, my dear Grayle." Young Pentyre, as surprise relaxed into boredom, moved next to me and began a rival conversation.
"Who's the patriotic gentleman?" he whispered. "And why's he so excited about the jolly old Government?"
"He's got a bee in his bonnet," George explained, "because he fancies he brought down the old Liberal lot and can't make out why he's not been given a job in the Coalition."
"But who is he?" Pentyre persisted.
As I had known Grayle longer than anyone present, I took it upon myself to answer.
We had first met nearly forty years ago as boys at Eton, soon drawing together in a common recognition, keenly felt and resented, that we were poorer than our fellows. My father had no business to send me there at all, but every male Stornaway always had gone to Eton, whether he could afford it or not. Grayle, the only son of a hard-drinking Gloucestershire squire, who used to beat him unmercifully, was sent to school when he grew strong enough to resist parental castigation, with an idea, I suppose, that others by force of numbers would be able to continue the beatings. We worked our way up the school together, until Grayle was withdrawn in consequence of some trouble with a tradesman's daughter in Slough, and met again at Trinity, when the scandal was half forgotten. There I remained four years and Grayle four weeks. If I ever heard the full story of his subsequent, final, cataclysmic quarrel with his father (they were separated, I know, by the stud-groom and a couple of strappers), I have forgotten the details; the result of the quarrel was that Vincent disappeared, and the next time that I saw him was several years later in New York. I had gone up there from Washington and ran unexpectedly into Grayle's arms on Fifth Avenue; he was accompanied by another Trinity man of my year—Guy Bannerman, a brilliant, shiftless Rabelaisian, whom Grayle with his startling streak of prodigal generosity had taken in hand and was prepared (as he consistently proved) to keep afloat. I remember how one of the loudest voices in the world suddenly silenced the drone of traffic by thundering,
"It's the great anomaly of modern civilisation. What are you going to do with them? Theoretically they're your equal fellow-citizens, but they don't vote, they daren't enter a white man's hotel. I can't remember for the moment whether they're actually increasing in numbers——"
Then I knew, even without sight of the square-faced, bull-necked man with the familiar grey eyes, dusty hair and capacious loose-lipped mouth, that Guy Bannerman had discovered America and was concerned to solve the negro problem. He was on his way to Klondike, where he heard that gold had been found, and he swore me impressively to secrecy.
"Half New York knows about it already," I had to warn him.
"How did they hear?" he roared.
"You've just told them."
The three of us lunched together, and I found that Grayle, too, was bound for the gold-fields. Their methods of approach were notably different, for, while Guy Bannerman informed New York City that any fool could dig for gold and I retorted that every fool would, Grayle was compiling an exhaustive list of everything that a gold-digger could need or be drugged into thinking he needed.
"One wants a pick and shovel, I suppose," Guy ventured, "and—and a pannikin." His conception of gold-digging impressed me as being literary.
"And food, drink, lights, clothes, covering, cooking-gear, medicine——" Grayle struck in ferociously. "No, we're not going to discover the North West Passage, but we're going to make these swine squeal—and the more squeals we knock out of them the better I shall be pleased. Tools, blankets—or rather, sleeping-bags. Tents. Tobacco. Mustn't forget tobacco. Bags for the gold. I suppose, if you've had a good day, you sleep with a revolver under your pillow; and stand drinks all round, which involves the worst obtainable Californian gooseberry. I'm going to supply the outfit, and they're going to dig the gold. Exploit, or be exploited. Care to come in with us, Stornaway? Anything you like to put up, you know...."
He could not persuade me to come and help him exploit, nor could he save Bannerman from being exploited, but the enterprise as he saw and planned it was a giant success even in the history of gold-rushes. I believe Aylmer Lancing supplied the capital; Grayle reached Klondike a week after the rush had begun and only came east when it was starkly not worth his while to be left with a month's stores on his hands; then the insalubrious shanty known as "Grayle's Hotel" was sold by private treaty, the stock-in-trade was put up to auction on a rising market and he returned to square his accounts with Lancing in New York.
However much money he made, I dare swear that he returned with even more experience. For many months many thousands of the world's choicest blackguards had slept between his blankets, worked with his tools, eaten his food and sheltered beneath his roofs. Raving with his Californian gooseberry champagne, a Pittsburg smelter had emptied one of his six-shooters into the scattering head of his partner; Grayle sold the coffin and subsequently a coil of rope. He supplied jewellery and dresses to the women whom he had induced to follow the camp; he peddled concertinas to the musically-minded. Twice the store was looted, after a good day and a full dinner, which the looting party instinctively felt to have been insufficiently full. The first time he convened a public meeting and asked if it was in the common interest to make him close down; the second time he began to pack and only unpacked when the leader had been unobtrusively lynched. As a study in contrasts, Guy Bannerman spent three months carrying the gold south and bringing back stores; then he tired of the only work for which he was fit, pocketed his share of the profits and started digging. The profits were coaxed out of him by a woman whom he set himself to reclaim—without noticeable success—and, whereas the gold began to peter out within a month of Grayle's departure, Bannerman stayed on until his last dollar had passed to the new proprietor of "Grayle's Hotel."
I met both adventurers in Venezuela, which they had to leave before their scheduled time, and again at Colon. Then I returned to England and got myself elected to the House of Commons for the Southdown division of Sussex; I did not see Grayle again until the 1900 election brought him into the House, with Guy Bannerman faithfully running the election and later acting as secretary, shadow, press-cutting agency, collector of statistics, fact-finder and general parliamentary devil. Then he went out to South Africa for the second half of the war.
Having seen the man undisguised in two continents, I have always been a little surprised to find how little he was known here; he can be a very entertaining ruffian, causing the usually censorious to apologise and say "a blackguard, but at least he's not a hypocrite, you know;" on the other hand, through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle-age I seem to look back on a House of Commons which would not have tolerated him; perhaps we are more indulgent nowadays, perhaps no one took the trouble to compile a dossier, perhaps each man felt that his own turn might come next.
Be that as it may, Grayle succeeded in entering a House that neither liked nor trusted him. Fishing in troubled waters for twelve years, he picked up a knowledge of his colleagues, even if he landed no fish; speculation in countries too enterprising to be critical had made him rich enough to pay other people's debts and occasionally to compensate lost honour on behalf of some rising politician with a reputation to preserve, but he never came into the open until the Marconi enquiry, when I discovered by the savagery of his attacks on the Government that he was now a newspaper proprietor. The war gave him his opportunity, and, according to the far from impartial statement of Bertrand Oakleigh, who liked an actionable story for its own sake, Grayle was one of the leaders in organising the Unionist attack on the Liberal Government in 1915.
All this and more I contrived to convey to Pentyre before Grayle had finished his cigar and signified his willingness to come upstairs.
We were hardly inside the drawing-room before he had limped briskly to the sofa where the young bride who had been his neighbour at dinner was seated; she smiled easily, ungratified but obviously conscious of his admiration, and in a moment they were splashing to the waist in vivacious badinage. I sought out my niece and tried to secure ten minutes' quiet discussion of my own affairs.
In one of the first letters to reach me in my internment camp Yolande cautiously prepared me for bad news; on the next page she announced young Deryk Lancing's death; a week later I heard—in my loose-box and amid a smell of straw and whitewash—that the whole estate of some twenty odd millions had passed to me. I had known old Sir Aylmer Lancing, the boy's father, ever since I was transferred from Vienna to Washington, when he was in the fulness of his powers and Deryk was unborn. Indeed, he had hitched me out of the Diplomatic and given me a start with one of his own firms of contractors in South America, and there I had made enough money to retire to affluence when my health broke down in Panama. I had seen him, too, regularly and intimately for fifteen years after his stroke; indeed, I had induced my brother to sell him Ripley Court and I spent so much of my time there that it was sometimes hard to believe that the great, gaunt house had ever changed hands. Deryk I had known since he was a boy of eight or nine, brilliant and precocious, neurotic, impatient and inconsiderate, but winning and lovable with it all and filled with a blaze of promise. He had succeeded to the title and estate less than twelve months before he was killed; he had just become engaged rather romantically to a girl with whom he had long been in love; and it was on the day when he had been shewing her the house which I persuaded him to buy and which was waiting for them both that he had fallen from the roof and been picked up dead and hideously broken....
I looked round the room, through the rich gleam of Lady Maitland's red lacquer, at Grayle, sitting with one leg permanently stiff in front of him, Charles Maitland, already twice wounded, Pentyre in his Guards uniform, waiting to go out, and my eyes came to rest on Yolande's black dress.
"You would have thought the war had done enough damage without any extras of that kind," I said.
"What are you going to do with all the money?" she asked wonderingly.
"I want time to think, Yolande," I said. "I feel a little bit dazed. It's so much the same—and yet so different. I know this room so well, Lady Maitland's the same fat, voluble, outrageous, delightful creature that she always was,—and yet I seemed to have dipped into another world...."
We were still talking of ourselves and the family when a maid entered to say that a Mr. Jellaby wished to speak to Colonel Grayle on the telephone. I smiled in easy triumph as Grayle scrambled to his feet, for I have so often found Mr. Jellaby wishing to speak to me on the telephone, and poor Jellaby with tears in his voice has begged me to help keep a house or stand in readiness for a division or relieve guard after an all-night sitting.
"If there's a division, I shall take you," Grayle threatened in retaliation for my smile, as he leaned down for his stick. "One of these Labour swine making trouble, I expect. We've all got to back the Government as long as it is the Government."
It was a good guess, for he returned a moment later and dragged me to my feet with the announcement that Grimthorpe, the A.S.E. man, was threatening to divide the House unless the Prime Minister gave an assurance that the National Registration Bill would never be made the basis of a system of conscription.
"Infernal nuisance, but we shall have to go," he said. "You've got to start your duties some time, Stornaway, and you may as well keep me company and start them to-night. Only a formality, you know. Half the Cabinet's sworn not to graft conscription on to the Bill, and the other half's sworn it will. Beauty of coalition government!"
More from a desire to see what the House looked like than from any wish to support Grayle, I allowed myself to be taken away. As I shook hands with Lady Maitland, he stumped back to his sofa and roundly told the young bride that he proposed to come and call on her.
"Haven't half finished our conversation," he said in a tone of authority, "so if you'll tell me your address——"
I chose to think that her manner hardened, as though she felt that Grayle was taking her for granted too much.
"I'm hardly ever at home," she answered. "My Belgian refugee work——"
"Free in the evenings," he interrupted jerkily. "My only time for calling."
She hesitated and, as I thought, sank her voice slightly, putting herself on the defensive.
"You'd only be bored, you know," she warned him. "It isn't an ordinary house, and you won't meet ordinary people."
"Coming to see you," Grayle answered.
"You clearly aren't wanted, Grayle," I said, taking him by the arm. "If you insist on dragging me to the House, let's start at once."
He shook free of my hand and turned to her, as though he were delivering an ultimatum.
"You don't want me to come?" he demanded.
"You won't be amused," she answered, this time in unmistakable distress.
"Where do you live?" he asked relentlessly.
"In Westminster." I was rather shocked by the way in which she allowed him to bully her. "A house called 'The Sanctuary,' on the Embankment, just by the Tate Gallery."
He repeated the name as we walked downstairs and whistled unsuccessfully for a taxi. On the steps I told him again that he had been making a nuisance of himself, for she was probably living in some modest boarding-house. Grayle would only murmur irrelevantly that she was a devilish pretty girl, an opinion evidently shared by George Oakleigh and the Maitland boys, who had surrounded her before Grayle was out of the room. I cannot remember that her looks left any impression on me at this meeting.
"'The Sanctuary'," he murmured for the third time, as we set off on foot for the House. "Didn't happen to hear what her name was, did you? Never bother about names myself."
"It would be inartistic," I said.
We walked through Eaton Square in silence and along Buckingham Gate and Birdcage Walk to Parliament Square. As we approached the Palmerston monument, Grayle touched my arm, pointed ahead and quickened his limping pace; an open-air meeting of two soldiers, nine loafers and one woman was being addressed by a shabbily-garbed young man who seemed to be on the worst possible terms with his audience; Grayle, who has the nose of a schoolboy or a terrier for any kind of fight, clearly felt that this, like the war, was too good to miss. What went before, I have, of course, no means of judging, but such fragments of vituperation as reached me suggested the wonder why a man, who cared nothing for his hearers, troubled to harangue an exasperated group, which was quite unconvinced by his reasoning. The speaker kept his temper; his hearers had lost theirs from the outset, I should imagine, and this possibly amused him and justified the effort.
"Go aht and fight yourself," cried one of the soldiers truculently, "before yer snacks at the men that 'ave been out there."
"I should not der-ream of fighting," the lecturer answered with practised and very clear enunciation.
"Precious sight too careful of yer dirty skin!"
The lecturer laughed with maddening calm.
"I value my life," he conceded, "but I happen to be brave enough to value my soul more. I do not choose to be the deluded instrument of Junkers here or elsewhere, and, had anyone thought you worth educating, you would not choose it either. My fine fellow, you were before the war—what? A coal-heaver? But you had no quarrel with the coal-heavers of Germany, until your Junkers told you to fight; you will again have no quarrel when your Junkers tell you to stop fighting. I was a medical student once, I had no quarrel with the medical students of other nations, nor can I make a quarrel when a Junker tells me to hate, to be red and angry—if you could see how red and angry you look now!—to stab and shoot and slash. If I have to kill, let me kill a Junker, who cannot maintain the peace of the world." He sank his voice with artistic pretence of talking to himself. "But I was educated, I have thought, I am not a dog to be whistled to heel or incited to fight other dogs."
In the pause that followed Grayle put his lips to my ear and whispered behind his hand.
"Get those two Tommies away," he begged. "Dust this fellow's jacket for him, but can't do it in uniform with men about."
I gripped his arm firmly and tried to drag him away. The war seemed to have brought all Grayle's latent ferocity to the surface.
"Don't be a fool!" I whispered.
"Not going to let a damned German agent talk sedition in my hearing!" he cried.
Even as he spoke, the decision was taken out of our hands. The soldier, rightly or wrongly described as a coal-heaver, stepped forward and called upon the lecturer to "take that back, will you?" The lecturer smiled, folded his arms and said nothing, quietly waiting for the interruption to subside.
"Take that back!" repeated the soldier, with a new note of menace in his voice, and, when there was no answer, dealt a swinging open-handed blow to the lecturer's face.
His victim staggered, recovered his balance and stood with lips tightly compressed and a print of angry scarlet on his cheek. One of the women had screamed; two of the loafers cried, after deliberation, "Serve him right!"
"When opposed to truth," the lecturer continued, when he had satisfied himself that no second blow was coming, "violence is as ineffectual in the street as on the battlefield. You do not stifle truth by sending a man to Siberia, as I've seen men sent, though you may remove an undesirable prefect of police, as I have seen one removed, sky-high in Kiev, because—well, the truth was not in him. Nor is there truth in you; there can be no truth in dogs who feed on bones flung from the table, dogs who rise up raw from their beating and give their lives to protect their masters."
This time there was no invitation to retract. The same soldier again stepped quickly forward, threw his arm across his chest and flung the full weight of his body into a sweeping backhander. The lecturer was lifted off his feet and carried a yard back, where he struck the railings and fell in an invertebrate mass with one leg curled under him. The onlookers craned forward uneasily, glanced at one another and began to separate in silence, the more quickly when Grayle limped up and confronted the avenging soldier.
"Clear out of this!" he ordered abruptly.
"'E insulted the uniform, sir," came the husky justification compounded of alcohol, fear and regard for Grayle's red band and tabs.
"I know all about that. Clear out and take your friends with you. He's not dead," he added a moment later, when we were alone, contemptuously exploring the body with his toe. "I don't suppose he's even badly hurt. I propose to leave him here and tell one of the Bobbies at the House——"
There was a groan as the toe glided on to an injured part. I asked the man where he was hurt, and at sound of my voice he opened his eyes, looked round for a moment and closed them again. I was as yet far from used to the dim light from the shrouded street-lamps and could only see that he looked a man between twenty and thirty, shockingly thin of body, with fair hair, dark blue eyes and a narrow face with high cheek bones. His air and costume were generally threadbare. More from policy than compassion Grayle relented somewhat.
"I'll mount guard," he said. "Get hold of a Bobby and a stretcher."