3
Ever since his return from South Africa, Grayle had occupied a small old house in Milford Square, with a bleak, discouraged garden bounded at the far end by a private garage. I always wondered how he confined himself in so small a space, for his turbulent flaxen head seemed to scrape every ceiling and it was impossible for anyone to pass him on the stairs or in the doorway or corridor. When Guy Bannerman was required at the last moment, as now, to fill an unexpected gap, his loose-knit, centrifugal body seemed to take up every cubic foot of space not already appropriated to Grayle's use. But as a rule Guy was not allowed to leave the big work-room over the garage where he covered himself and his clothes in three different shades of ink and industriously "got up" his master's subjects and wrote his master's speeches, while Grayle himself devoted his talents to cultivating personal relationships, or, as his enemies would say, to intriguing, from a superstition that, if he ever let slip a conspiracy, it might not return to him again.
The party was small, the dinner perfectly cooked and served. This, at least, I had learned to expect from Grayle.
Mrs. O'Rane was on one side of me, and I asked how soon she was going to Melton, as I had shortly to attend my first meeting of the governing body. To my surprise I heard that she was not going at present.
"You see, there's my Belgian work," she explained, "and Peter can't walk yet, and I can't very well leave Mr. Oakleigh to the care of the servants. Besides I've got an awful lot of other things to do." She nodded across the table at Lady Barbara Neave. "Mr. Lane's written a duologue, and Babs and I are acting in it at the Regency. And I've got a stall at the Albert Hall in November, and I'm sure to be wanted for the Imperial Hospital Fund tableaux. They can't get on without us, can they, Babs darling?" Lady Barbara jerked her fair head quickly and returned to her conversation with young Lane. "David was quite right, too; I should be at a loose end at Melton."
Her reasons flowed easily, but they were not consistent with her earlier attitude.
"I thought you'd fixed it up the other night," I said.
"No. We had another talk after you'd gone. It's only three months, and, if he really wants me—" She broke off, leaving me to surmise that she was engaging in a trial of strength with her husband. "This is quite a pre-war dinner, isn't it? I love dining with Colonel Grayle; he's one of the few people who hasn't got the war on the brain. I do get so tired of war-talk, war-economies, war-work. I wish the thing would end, but Colonel Grayle says it will never end while the present government's in power; and Peter says there'll be a revolution when it does end, so it's a cheerful look-out either way. Don't you think Peter's improved since he fell in love with me?" She turned to look down the table with the rapid movement of an animal, and the lamps seemed to strike sparks of gold from her closely coiled brown hair. "It takes people different ways; Colonel Grayle will hardly speak to me to-night, just because I invited him to dinner and then forgot all about it."
"Mrs. O'Rane," I said, "may I tell you that you talk a great deal of nonsense?"
She darted a glance at me and then opened her eyes very wide, drawing down the corners of her mouth.
"Ah, you're hating me now! And I thought you were surrendering to my well-known charm. I have got an incredible amount of charm, haven't I?"
"We were talking about Melton," I reminded her.
"George—our friend George Oakleigh, I mean; he's known me all my life—," she went on, imperturbably munching salted almonds, "George says that, as part of his education, every man ought to marry me for just one month."
"Actually you've been married two and a half, haven't you?" I enquired. "Perhaps you haven't arrived at the full inwardness of George's criticism."
She pouted like a child under reproof.
"I suppose you both mean something horrid." Her eyes lit up mischievously. "I must tell George I've found an ally for him. He's always rather loved me, but he says quite definitely that he never wanted to marry me even for a week. He's always telling me so; that's why we're such friends. I'm afraid you'll never even rather love me; and I'm ready to take such a lot of trouble with you."
Mrs. O'Rane's voice is faultlessly clear; I noticed a lull in the conversation and discovered that she and I were performing a duologue for the diversion of our fellow-guests and the exasperation of our host.
"Has George told you that you think about yourself too much?" I asked, as a self-conscious murmur rose once more around us.
"Oh, if you want a list of my bad qualities, go to your niece. I'm not such a success with serious people, and Yolande talks about 'Ministers,' when she means 'the Government,' and '25 George II,' when she wants to quote some musty old law; and she considers herself a political hostess because she once bribed the Committee of the Aborigines Protection Society to meet the Governor of the Seychelles at dinner. Yolande would start a salon on one poet and two private secretaries! Oh, I know she's your niece, but you can't help that." She paused to draw breath. "George only thinks that I'm second-rate."
"I think that you're deliberately second-rate," I said. "Which is a pity. If you'd ever got to grips with life, if you'd suffered or been in love——"
"D'you mean that I'm not in love with David?"
"You're still trying on emotions in a room full of mirrors. By the way, we went through all this candour and self-absorption in the 'nineties, and I think people did it better then. If you'll take advice from a comparative stranger, twice your age, drop all this patter about this man and that being in love with you."
Mrs. O'Rane became suddenly majestic.
"You mean I'm behaving disloyally to David?" she demanded.
Her majesty was as superficial and unconvincing as everything else about her.
"My dear young lady, if you must try these airs and graces, don't try them on me," I begged, watching curiously to see whether there was any criticism she would resent so long as it was focussed on her.
She turned slowly away with everything of affronted dignity except its essence, exactly as I had expected her to do. A moment later she turned to me again, but by that time Lady Maitland, whose vigorous head and neck always makes me think of a lioness that has been rolling in French chalk, had first asked me to find a place in my office for her third boy, who was leaving school at Christmas and seemed too delicate for the army, though he was exceptionally quick at figures—just the man that the Treasury wanted—and then enquired what I knew of the young Beresford who was staying at "The Sanctuary." She would like me to bring him to see her as soon as he was able to get out. He was a poet, she understood; very wrong-headed about the war, but a good talker and interesting to meet.... She had a small party on Thursday; that man Christie, who had been removed forcibly from the House for calling the Speaker a liar and refusing to withdraw, a ritualistic clergyman who was in conflict with the Court of Arches, an obscure traveller who had proceeded on foot from Loanda to Port Sudan, the managing director of the Broadway music-hall and a novelist whose name she had forgotten.
(I may here say that I went and was given the opportunity of stroking all the lions' necks twelve hours before the proletariat caught sight of them and of trying to explain Lady Maitland to several little knots of bewildered Scandinavian and Dutch delegates and some self-conscious and incorruptible Labour Members who had either resigned from the Ministry or hoped to get into it. What Lady Maitland thought of the lions, they and we knew at once; what the lions thought of Lady Maitland they had hardly time to formulate before being hurried away to tea at Ross House, dinner with old Lady Pentyre and supper at Mrs. Carmichael's. I have found it easier never to refuse anything to Lady Maitland, but I hesitate to reckon how many times in a political crisis I have been persuaded to lead political aspirants to school. When O'Shaunessy was returned as a Sinn Feiner and refused to take his seat, I, who had met him in America five and twenty years before, was deputed to bring him to luncheon and Federal Home Rule with the Carmichaels, dinner and a united-Ireland-in-the-face-of-the-enemy with the Duchess of Ross. There was to have been a patient search for compromise at Lady Pentyre's next day, but O'Shaunessy shook his head at me over the brim of his tumbler and confided that these people gave you too much talk and too little to drink.)
"You'd better get Mrs. O'Rane to bring Beresford," I said. "I hardly know him."
"Someone must get hold of him before it's too late," Lady Maitland continued gravely, and I could see that he was going to be adopted, whether he liked it or not. "I hear he's got great ability, and it's all misdirected."
"I'd never heard of him before," I confessed. "But then I don't read modern poetry."
"I heard of him from our host—this is between ourselves, of course—; there was some question of prosecuting him again for one of his pamphlets." She raised her voice to demand confirmation of Grayle, but he would only shake his head rather irritably at her want of discretion and say that it was not in the province of his department. "I must talk to dear Sonia about him," she went on, "and we'll arrange a little meeting."
Not only have I led promising statesmen by the hand, I have myself of late been alternately schooled and courted in a way that was hardly known to me before the war. It is partly due, I suppose, to the suspended animation of the Caucus, partly to the increased number of groups and their social backers. As Lady Maitland convoyed the other women to the drawing-room, Grayle threw his sound leg across the shattered knee and told me he was not at all satisfied about our reinforcements. At that, after but five weeks in England, I knew what was coming. Guy Bannerman, with the deep, baying voice of a hound, supplied the dwindling figures of the daily returns, I criticised the waste of resources in men and ships on secondary fields of war, Grayle opined that the country would never appreciate that it was at war until every man was mobilised in the field, the shipyard or the shop, and Maitland took the safe but irritating and unhelpful line that Kitchener knew what he was about and that we must leave it to him.
I preferred to move away and talk to young Lane about his new play, but Grayle quickly recalled me with an exhortation to join him and his friends in their effort to galvanise the Government to action. It was the first of a long series of appeals which terminated a year later with the unblushing bribe of an office which I had as little fitness or right to receive as Grayle to offer. I was content to take refuge in Maitland's advice to leave it to the Government (alternatively to "trust the P. M."; a surprising political retrogression for a man of his antecedents), only adding that one Government should not have to shoulder single responsibility for the joint blunders of all the Allies.
"It's something to cut your losses," said Grayle shortly and with an air of disappointment, "to drop a mistaken policy when it's proved to be mistaken. That's what I want to see done; and that's what this gang of yours won't do. You watch out; France and Russia will make a separate peace, if we don't pull our weight. Let's come up-stairs."
On entering the drawing-room, Guy Bannerman strolled to the fire and entered into conversation with Lady Barbara Neave. Left with a choice of Lady Maitland and Mrs. O'Rane, Grayle pulled up a chair beside Lady Maitland, while Mrs. O'Rane looked at him like a chess-player considering his opponent's last move and then smilingly made room for me on the sofa by her side.
"I thought you were never coming up," she said. "I'm going in a minute, but Lady Maitland tells me she wants to meet Peter, and I waited to find out if you'd come, too. Any day next week."
"I shall be delighted," I said. "Friday's my only free night."
"Good. It will be just the four of us. Dear Sir Maurice is such a bore, poor darling; I really can't invite him. Now I must go. Shall we say somewhere about eight?"
As she got up, I looked at my watch and found that, for all the excellence of the dinner and the time that we were charged with spending over our wine, it was not yet ten. The Maitlands gave no hint of leaving, nor did Mrs. O'Rane vouchsafe a reason for her early departure. I saw her shaking hands with Grayle and heard him icily asking her to wait while he telephoned for a cab. With equal polite iciness of tone she assured him that she would find one in the Brompton Road. I saw her smiling mischievously to herself, as she walked out of the room; Grayle's smile, on his return, was mysterious, and I surmised that another trial of strength was in progress.
As we stood on the door-step an hour later, I asked him if we were meeting at "The Sanctuary" the following week.
"She said something about it," he answered, "but I shan't go."
"You're too old for this sort of nonsense, Grayle," I told him.
"What sort of nonsense?"
But before I could answer, a taxi crawled invitingly past the door.