4
A reputation for honesty is often embarrassing; when coupled with efficiency, it is always disastrous. For five-and-twenty years I have reeled under the name of a "good business man," and this has exposed me to attack by every impulsive woman and woolly-headed man who has wanted something done without quite knowing how to do it, who has wished money collected without quite knowing how to set about it, who has dragged his committee and himself knee-deep into the mire of stagnant insolvency without knowing whether to go on or to struggle back. Then someone has said, "We must co-opt Mr. Raymond Stornaway."
As the reputation has long ceased to be an honour and is now only a nuisance, I propose to affect no false modesty about it. Before the war I was always being made a governor of some new school or hospital, and my success is to be measured by the fact that I almost invariably got my own way in committee—(if I was not voted into the chair at once, I overwhelmed the chairman until he yielded place)—and as invariably I raised the funds which I had been appointed to find. Perhaps I hoped that, as everyone had comfortably survived my absence for a year, I should be allowed a respite, but on the morrow of this Arabian Night of mine I was to discover that London contained as many voluble, sympathetic and unpractical women as ever, all convinced that they had only to form a committee of their friends, dispense with book-keeping, insert their photographs in the illustrated papers and stretch out both hands to a man who knew a man who had a friend on one of the daily papers.
Lady Maitland rustled in, grey-haired and majestic, as I was finishing breakfast the first morning; the Duchess of Ross starved me into submission before she would let me go down to luncheon; and by night I was duly included in the Committees of the Belgian Relief Fund, the Emergency Hospital Fund and the Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The following day Mountstuart of the Treasury wheedled me into the Deputy Commissionership of the War Charities Control Department, and I found myself after an interval of thirty years once more a Government servant, charged to see that the amateur enthusiasm of Eleanor Ross and her friends did not defraud the public too flagrantly and that a reasonable proportion of the money collected was in fact paid over to the objects for which it had been raised.
Throughout August and the first half of September I set myself to learn my new duties, spending the morning in the St. James' Street Committee rooms and the afternoon at the Eaton Hotel, where my Department had been installed in a faded coffee-room enlivened by a sardonic portrait of Lord Beaconsfield in Garter robes and made business-like by rickety trestle tables, paste pots and letter trays, internecine telephones and japanned deed-boxes earmarked as His Majesty's property by a white crown and "G.R." It took me several bashful days to grow acclimatised to the epicene life of the office, but I discovered in time and with relief that the expensive young women with the Johnsonian capacity for conversation and tea were every whit as much frightened of me as I of them. The men afforded material for my insatiable interest in my fellow creatures; we had a few journalists, a stockbroker or two, several college tutors, an elderly miscellany which had retired some years before and was returning to active service for the duration of the war, two or three men rejected or invalided out of the army and three or four whose reason for not being in the army was not so obvious—a gathering which was partly patriotic, wholly impecunious and very different from the collection of unfledged naked intelligences which were distributed through the public offices of other days by the Civil Service Commissioners.
When I had subdued Lady Pentyre in the morning and ploughed through the familiar files in the afternoon, I devoted the evening to private business. A year's accumulation of letters made a considerable pile, which was not reduced by the kindly friends who thought it necessary to congratulate me on my return; nor was my leisure increased by those others who invited me to lunch or dinner with a persistency that brooked no refusal. In time, however, I had read myself abreast of the periodical literature produced by the hospitals and schools; in time, too, I began to tackle the Lancing inheritance and paid formal visits to Ripley Court and the house in Pall Mall to see that they were satisfactory to the War Office. So long as the war continued, I was not likely to be faced by poor Deryk Lancing's inability to dispose of the income of the Trust.
A month slipped imperceptibly away before I had got rid of the arrears of work and felt justified in taking on extra burdens. Then I paid my first visit to the House of Commons and tried in one evening to get the temper of a House which I had left toiling acrimoniously in 1914 with the third presentation of the Home Rule Bill. The Front Benches were pleasantly mingled in late-found amity, there was a solid, unquestioning Ministerial majority, but in place of an official opposition I found a curious collection of cliques not wholly satisfied with all the heroic remedies of the Government and fearful that criticism might be construed as factiousness. I was to find later that, with the abdication of the House of Commons, all control of administration fell gradually into the hands of the Press.
The Smoking Room, which—like the rest of London—moved in a regular cycle of elation and depression, optimism and despair, was in deep gloom my first night. The recruiting-figures were shrinking daily, we could look for no help from America and what Lady Maitland called "that Man Wilson's 'too proud to fight' nonsense." Warsaw had just fallen, and Russian Poland lay at the mercy of the enemy; earlier in the week, too, we had experienced our first Zeppelin raid and, while it was easy to count the casualties and demonstrate the 700,000 to 1 odds against any one of us being killed, we felt that something remained to be done and that these birds of death, however exciting to watch, should not be allowed to fly to and fro at will, hover their destructive hour and depart unscathed.
As I can do nothing with criticism which is afraid to materialise into action, I decided to leave the House early and, being at a loose end, to pay my promised call at "The Sanctuary." The fact that I had let a month go by without discovering my host's name disturbed me little in a house where so much was taken for granted, and I boldly pushed open the door, as I had been bidden, and looked into the long, warm room. By firelight it seemed empty at first; then I heard voices and saw the disabled agitator sitting on a sofa with his leg up, talking to the girl whom I had seen on my last visit. As I hesitated by the door, she jumped up and made me welcome.
"Leg not right yet, then?" I said, as I joined them by the sofa. "By the way, my name's Raymond Stornaway."
"Mine's Hilda Merryon," said the girl at once.
I had not had much opportunity of observing her before, but I saw now that she was young and slight, with black hair and very pale, regular features. She had in her manner, too, something scornful which I found immediately antagonistic.
"Oh, I shall be here for weeks," said the young agitator, "if they'll keep me. We're tuberculous as a family, and the knee will probably turn out tuberculous. I'm Peter Beresford."
My niece Yolande, who buys all modern poetry that she can find, tells me that I ought to have been certainly the wiser and perhaps the more impressed by this information; and, if I had spent the last year in England instead of abroad, I might very well have read of Beresford's escapades with the police. Various people have from time to time contributed fragments of his biography. I believe that he started as the dreamy and eccentric son of a Lincolnshire family and that on leaving school he had betaken himself to Moscow on a self-conscious literary holiday. Once there, he refused to come back. The sombre, intoxicating magic of Dostoevski had drawn him, Russia laid her spell upon him; and, when funds from home were cut off, he starved and feasted, worked and slumbered for two years, until the woman with whom he was living forsook him. A violent reaction sent him to Cambridge, a strangely experienced and natively rebellious freshman, for he had written poetry and abandoned it, read medicine and abandoned it, mixed in revolutionary society and drifted under a haunting police surveillance which only relaxed when powerful friends urged his reluctant steps homeward.
"No more public meetings for the present, then," I said.
Anyone may call the words fatuous, but they were harmless and not ill-natured. I quote them because of their effect in lashing Beresford to a passion only describable as insane. I have never met anyone who knew him as a boy, I cannot say whether he was naturally neurotic or whether too early acquaintance with oppression had warped his mind, but I saw a good deal of him between this night and our last meeting and I have consistently felt from the moment of this encounter that he was separated from certifiable madness by a hair's breadth. He had all the suspicion, the sudden fury, the courage and the obstinacy of fanaticism, the whole streaked with morbidity. We talked long that night, and every chapter of his Russian Odyssey ended with the refrain "Alone of the beasts man delights in torturing his fellows;" yet, when he described a meeting in Petersburg being broken up by a charge of Cossacks, I could have sworn that there was gloating in his tale of casualties, as with a man who will pay money to stare at physical deformity. Against this, his hatred of oppression was rooted in a poet's love of beauty. His quarrel with society in peace was that it made man a soul-stunted slave and the countryside an industrial ash-heap, in war that it made him a disembowelled and screaming reproach of the Maker who fashioned him in His image. Beresford had a sense of colour, form and sound which a man will never know unless he be born with it. Again and again it came out in his descriptions. And then I remember his making a sarcastic and grotesquely ineffectual speech to a knot of drunken loafers.
"Do you feel that the sort of thing you were saying the other night does much good?" I persisted, as he glared at me, breathing quickly.
His sudden blaze of anger seemed to dab two spots of scarlet on his shining, prominent cheek-bones.
"For you—no good!" he cried. "I told those fools not to fight, I asked them what they were fighting for! They didn't know. How should they? But you know. Keep the dogs fighting one another, and they won't turn on you. But when your troops come back, the troops that you have drilled and taught to shoot, when they ask why their companions were killed——"
The girl relaxed the scornful attitude of aloofness, which she had preserved throughout the evening, to touch his arm warningly; he coughed and went back to his cigarette.
I laughed at him, partly because it was good for him and partly to help me keep my own temper.
"That stuff didn't go down the other night, and it won't go down with me. You've been talking quite sensibly so far——" He bowed ironically. "You can't make war without killing people, and there would have been no peace or safety, if we'd stood out. Of course, if you want to see this country or Russia treated as Belgium has been treated——"
He snorted contemptuously and told me, as an eye-witness, that the Belgian atrocities could at their worst always be matched by the Russian atrocities in East Prussia. ("Alone of the beasts man delights in torturing his fellows.") But why strain at the gnat and swallow the camel? The major atrocity was war; and, the greater the war, the greater the atrocity. "The English were not too humane in South Africa. No. And South Africa was child's play, it didn't matter who won. You were less humane still in putting down the Indian Mutiny, where you were fighting for our lives. Germany is fighting for her life, she must fight how she can. A screen of women and children before the advancing armies? One husbands one's troops. The Zeppelin attacks? One always likes to undermine civilian moral, to make the whimperers at home yelp for peace on one's own terms—(and are not you high-minded English warring on civilians—women and children, too—by blockading Germany?). This is a war of nations with all the nations' human and material resources poured into the scale. If you want to fight, fight to win! Sink your hospital ships! They will have to be replaced, and fewer troops, less food, less ammunition will be carried in consequence."
He threw himself back exhausted and gave way to a fit of coughing which threatened to tear him in pieces. I looked at my watch and got up to go.
"You should have preached this before the war," I suggested.
"It will be before the next war," he gasped. "And war there will be! I'm sick of this 'war-to-end-war' claptrap! That's been thought in every war, it was thought when Europe was leagued against Napoleon, as it is now leagued against the Kaiser! There will be war until the fools I addressed that night, those dogs who fight for the masters that betray them, turn and tear their masters limb from limb. Yes. If they don't do that before the world is ripe for another vintage, if they wait till present memories have faded and another generation of old men sits in power to send young men to their death——"
His pity again became merged in imaginative blood-lust until he seemed to revel in the horror of his own description. Science was to be applied without mercy or discrimination. When the maximum of destruction had been effected in the field, the war would be carried behind the lines to those who made its continuance possible. There would be no quarter for prisoners, who might escape, nor for the wounded, who might recover and fight again. The nurses and doctors who dragged the wounded back to life and patched them into the semblance of men were making new soldiers; it was not convenient that the enemy should be presented with new soldiers, so the war must be continued against these nurses and doctors. And against the countrymen, who raised food for the troops, and the artificers, who supplied them with arms, and the women, who came to take men's places on the farm and in the workshop, and the old men, who lent money to buy more guns and shells, and the young boys, who day by day drew nearer to the age when they, too, would be soldiers, and the last woman in the country, who, if she did nothing else, could bear a child to the last man....
Beresford's voice rose until it broke, and his words poured out more and more quickly. The fellow had the impressiveness which is born of conviction, and the girl by his side no longer attempted to restrain him, but a sound unheard by me stopped him abruptly, and he glanced over his shoulder with quick apprehension, as the door opened and closed. It was not the glance that I associate with an easy conscience, and I was suddenly sorry for the man. A moment later the hunted look left his face, as the flame-coloured curtain was drawn aside, and my host appeared in sight. There was the same whimsical smile in his big, black eyes that I had seen when we met before—mischievous, kindly, and baffling. He threw his hat into a chair and gave his cane to the Saint Bernard to carry; as he came into the room I was struck by the lightness and grace of his movements. The atmosphere cleared of its electricity.
"Only a small party to-night," he murmured.
The girl on the sofa looked up quickly.
"I'm here," she said, "and Mr. Beresford and——" She hesitated and blushed to find that she had forgotten my name.
"Raymond Stornaway," I supplemented. "You said I might come again."
He turned and grasped my hand.
"I've heard our friend George Oakleigh speak about you!" he cried. "I didn't know, the other night, that it was you. Haven't you just been released from Austria? My wife said something.... They're a funny people, the Austrians; there's no pleasing them. Now, when they get hold of you, they simply won't let you go, but the last time I was in the country—officially—they escorted me over the frontier and hinted that they'd put a bullet in me, if I ever came back. And all because of a regrettable little disturbance in Vienna, when an Austrian officer said things about my father and myself which I thought—and think still—a gentleman does not say."
As I looked at the animated, thin face, I was trying hard to remember where I had seen it before. At the mention of Vienna I saw again an open-fronted café on the Ring-Strasse with white-aproned waiters bustling, gesticulating and shouting round a swaying mass of combatants; in the heart of the struggle I saw a thin-faced, black-haired boy fighting like a tiger; one arm hung limp and helpless by his side or flapped horribly with the movements of his body, and his face was streaming with blood. I saw his companion bring down the lamp with a blow from a chair, I remember how infinitely more alarming and suggestive the cries, the groans and general tumult of the fight became in the darkness. It was no affair of mine, however, and I was far down the Ring-Strasse when the police cut their way into the mêlée with drawn swords.
"I was in the café at the time," I told him. "You were there with Jack Summertown. I'm surprised that either of you got out alive."
"You were there?" he echoed with a burst of boyish laughter. "It was a great night! I've still got some of the marks! I wondered who you were.... Of course, we've got scores of friends in common. You know Bertrand Oakleigh in the House? Well, he lives here. The place in Princes Gardens is being used as a hospital, so George has a room at his Club and the old man stays with us. He gave us the house—he's always been astonishingly generous to me—but of course I couldn't accept it like that. I only let him give it to me on condition that I was allowed to share it with others. Perhaps now my symbolism——"
He broke off with a laugh and asked whether the others had looked after me well.
"I'm sorry my wife's not here," he said. "Let me see, she wasn't in the last time, either; the fact is, Colonel Grayle telephoned to say that he'd been given a box for some theatre and would we dine with him and go on? I'd already promised to dine at the House and I don't go to the play much, anyway, but she thought she'd like to go, and she hasn't come in yet. To-night you've got to wait."
It was half-past eleven, and I held out my watch to him, shaking my head.
"Look at the time," I said.
He took out the repeater that I had seen before and set it striking.
"I set mine by Big Ben this evening," I told him.
"Ah, but I can't see it. I—haven't the use of my eyes, you know. If you feel you must go, I will only remind you that the door will be open next time. I've got any amount to talk to you about, and my wife will be most frightfully sorry to have missed you again. I rather gathered that you and Grayle and she had been dining in the same house that night, but you were at different ends of the table, and she didn't hear your name."
"I don't yet know yours," I said.
"David O'Rane," he answered. "There's no particular reason why you should, unless George has ever talked to you about me. Now, will you swear—on your honour—that you'll come again? And it must be before I go away. Good-night!"