5
For three weeks I endured an unsought holiday in bed with influenza at the Hyde Park Hotel. In my absence everything seemed to have gone on very much as before, and, when I met O'Rane at the House on the eve of his return to Melton, he told me that he, too, had spent the recess in London with his wife and that Miss Merryon had been packed off to the sea for a change of air. Outwardly all relations were amicable, but Bertrand told me afterwards that Mrs. O'Rane consistently displayed the guarded civility of a wife who had discovered her husband's infidelity, but decides to stay with him rather than create a scandal.
"Are you going back to Melton, then?" I asked O'Rane.
"Yes. I haven't found anything else suitable so far. You see, I feel it must be war-work of some kind; and it must be paid. I don't seem much nearer solvency than when I came back from France twelve months ago."
I had a vision of "The Sanctuary," as I had seen it at the O'Ranes' house-warming, crammed to overflowing with their friends and his chance acquaintances. I knew something of his prodigal generosity and of his wife's no less prodigal extravagance; and I could form no idea how they kept their heads above water. Bertrand, of course, contributed to the up-keep of the household; O'Rane had his salary as a Member and some trifle from Melton; his wife possessed a few hundreds of her own, eked out with chance gifts from admiring friends. Sir Adolphus Erskine, the great financier, would give her a set of furs or a pearl necklace, Lord Pennington would send her a case of champagne out of some unexpected discovery at an auction, but this hardly helped to appease the tradesmen.
"I don't know what you can expect," I said.
O'Rane frowned in perplexity.
"I made a lot of money and I saved a lot of money before the war," he said, "but I don't seem able to do it now.... When other people ... I know it's impracticable to go out and give a loaf to everyone who's hungry, but it's frightfully hard to refuse when you do in fact meet them. I daresay it's mad, but George and everyone will tell you that I've always been tolerably mad, and I'm afraid I've got much madder since the war." He gave one of his whimsical, Puck-like laughs and then added soberly, "Poor Sonia!"
"I hope you're in a state of grace," I said. "You know, a madman can be very cruel."
He looked into my eyes, and I shivered; for, though I knew him to be sightless, he seemed to be looking into my soul.
"Sometimes I feel there's not room for compromise in this life," he said.
"You are—thirty? I'm afraid I'm a quarter of a century older, O'Rane."
"Thank God! there's room for inconsistency," he laughed.
I was at my office the following afternoon when George Oakleigh telephoned to say that his uncle wished to see me at once on a matter of urgency; could I make it convenient to come round immediately? I replied that it was exceedingly inconvenient, but that, if he could play truant from the Admiralty, I could absent myself equally well from my own department.
"Thank God you can come!" he exclaimed with disquieting fervour. "It's a bad business."
I arrived at "The Sanctuary" to find all silent and tense with expectant tragedy. Bertrand sprawled with slackened limbs on a long wicker chair, an untasted drink by his side and an unlighted cigar in his mouth. George was looking bleakly out of the window, with his right hand gripping his left wrist behind his back; the afternoon sun exposed every line and wrinkle of his face, and I found him ten years older, effortless and numbed.
"Tell me what's happened," I said, as I closed the door.
Bertrand looked at me for a moment, though I could see that his attention was wandering, and then turned to his nephew.
"You'd better go back to him," he suggested. "I don't think we've got anything more to say to each other."
The second closing of the door was followed by a long silence.
"Tell me what's happened, Bertrand," I repeated.
"Oh, nothing!" He gave a barking cough of mordant bitterness. "I told George it wasn't fair to drag you in, when you had in fact been spared it. David came back unexpectedly this afternoon to find his wife in Beresford's arms." He buried his face in tremulous hands. "My God! my God! They've not been married a year! And a blind man!"
When Bertrand is cynical, I find him tiresomely cynical; not content with condoning human depravity, he seems to take personal credit to himself for it. When he is humanly moved, I find him unnerving.
"Tell me the whole story," I said, "before I try to comment on it."
"Comment on it?" Bertrand echoed and sat silent, staring at a picture on the opposite wall.
The story, when it came, was old and simple. The end of the holidays found the O'Ranes as undecided about the future as at the beginning; it had been easier, I presume, not to discuss it, and no word had passed until the evening before. Then O'Rane had announced his approaching return to Melton, and from that the game, encounter, what you will, had developed automatically. His wife begged him not to go, hinted that he had promised to stay in London and after the usual interchange was undecided whether she would keep him company. It depended.... There followed the expected debate on Miss Merryon. O'Rane was taking her to Melton whether his wife came or not, as he needed the services of a typist; Mrs. O'Rane would not go, if "that woman" went, and, if O'Rane went with her alone, he knew the consequences....
"Then I went to bed," said Bertrand, pressing his hands to his head. "I imagine they must have had an unprecedented row, and this morning O'Rane went off to Waterloo, leaving his wife like a spitting cat. I slunk out of the house as soon as possible; I didn't want the quarrel at second-hand. Sometime this afternoon O'Rane came back. When he got to Waterloo, he felt that he couldn't part from his wife for three months on such a note. He came back to make friends, to see if they couldn't arrive at some modus vivendi.... He felt his way round the library; it was deserted; felt his way round the hall and found her umbrella in the stand; went upstairs. Her door was locked, and he tapped on it, begging her to let him in. She shouted out that he wasn't to come in; and he stood there minute after minute, praying her to remember their love, to forgive him, to be reasonable, generous, to forget their wretched quarrel. Never a sound came from inside the room. He had worked himself up until he was sweating with emotion. When he stopped, there was utter silence. Then he heard a cough...."
Bertrand paused to sip the drink at his elbow. It was not Sonia's cough; it was the bursting cough of a man who had been trying in a long agony of suffocation to repress it. At the sound something primitive and overmastering took possession of O'Rane. He stepped back and flung himself against the door, but it was old, and the weight of his body only wrung a hollow groan from its solidity; within all was still silent. Again and again he charged the door with his shoulder until one panel split and broke in, and the lock creaked in outrage. Insensible to physical pain which was quickly maddening his brain, he took a last flying leap which wrenched handle and lock from the wood-work and sent him to measure his length on the floor.
The same uncanny silence greeted his entrance. He drew himself upright, rubbing his bruised shoulder, and embarked on what from Bertrand's account was truly the grimmest game of Blind Man's Buff. With the muscles of his back and arms braced to resist an attack, he advanced slowly with arms outstretched and body bent, like a foot-ball player waiting to collar his man. In the first half of the room his groping hands touched only the familiar tables and chairs, but with every yard forward he was uncovering a retreat for the adversary. Retracing his steps, he kicked the door closed, pushed a bed against it and advanced once more towards the window. In the unbroken silence he had to keep stopping suddenly for a half-heard sound of hurried breathing, but his own pulses were hammering so loudly that he could not trust his ears. Nearer and nearer to the window he crept, until an unnamed sense told him that he was within touch of a human body; as he paused, there was a shiver followed by a sharp intake of breath; someone's nerves were breaking under the ordeal. The waving arms swept forward and closed on a woman's shoulders.
"Sonia!" he panted and could say no more.
For a moment longer the silence continued; then from behind her came the foot-shuffle of the man whom she had been shielding. O'Rane's hands dropped, and he sprang beyond her, only to bark his knuckles on the wall, as his unseen quarry doubled and ran; there was an instant's vague chase, the sound of a lame man sparing his injured leg, the squeak of rolling castors, as the bed was dragged back from the door, a scratching for the handle that was no longer there and finally the echoing slam of the door itself. O'Rane sprawled once more on the floor, as his foot met a rucked billow of carpet; the hurried limp grew distant and faded; there followed the slam of a second door, and the house returned to its afternoon silence.
What either found to say to the other neither Bertrand nor I had any means of guessing.
"She's gone," he told me hollowly. "I saw her driving away, as I came back from the House—just before we sent for you. O'Rane was standing in the middle of the library like a—like a man in catalepsy. George came in a moment later, and we had the story as I've given it to you." He paused and breathed deeply. "I'm getting too old for this sort of thing, Stornaway; my—my brain strikes work at a time like this, you must tell me what we've got to do. There'll be murder, if he ever gets his hands on Beresford, and we've got to stop that. I'd murder the fellow myself, if I could, but we can't have David hanging for him. And we must do something for David."
With a quavering hand he picked up the tumbler from the table by his side and sipped its contents mechanically. His eyes were half-closed, and his mind at least was asleep with very exhaustion. My own worked feverishly with utter want of concentration. I told myself that I might have expected this after my surprise meeting in Beresford's flat, that it had been going on for Heaven knows how many weeks; then that none of this was to the point, that O'Rane was in a bath of liquid fire, that something must be done; lastly—yet my first thought and appreciation—that none of us knew what to do, that nothing could be done.
I have no idea how long I stood staring at Bertrand's shrunken face and closed eyes. Death had left his fingerprints on the big, self-indulgent face when the old man had his stroke at the beginning of the war. I remember wondering how many more rounds he would survive.... Yet he had lived fully, powerfully and pleasurably for more than his allotted span; young O'Rane was little more than thirty and he had already undergone what would have broken men of less heroic spirit.
Instinctively I moved towards the door, and at the slight sound Bertrand opened his eyes and asked what I was going to do.
"God knows!" I answered.
Instinctively I found myself walking down the stairs which Beresford and O'Rane had descended so precipitously an hour or two before. The same strained air of expectancy hung over the passages and hall, and, when I pushed aside the curtain and entered the library, George started like a surprised criminal. The room was in twilight, and it took my eyes several moments to grow accustomed to the change from the sunset glow upstairs. Then I caught sight of O'Rane sprawling on the sofa, motionless and silent; his hair was dishevelled, his clothes dusty on one side, and I could see white skin and a stain of blood through a rent in one trouser-knee.
"It's—Stornaway," George explained.
For a moment O'Rane seemed not to have heard; then he said:
"Thanks. Thanks to you both. Later on, perhaps.... Just now I'd rather——"
I exchanged glances with George, who shrugged his shoulders and rose silently to his feet. O'Rane collected himself and walked to the door, fortified by the routine of social convention, as though he were speeding a dinner-guest on his way. I passed by the flame-coloured curtain and turned the handle of the door, looking round to recapture the vision seen one night when O'Rane caught his wife to his heart, while I looked on and envied them something that had never been granted to me. There was no response to my pull, but, at the rattle, O'Rane stepped forward with a muttered apology, pulling a cumbrous key from his pocket and feeling for the lock with the fingers of his other hand. George and I passed into the street, the door closed behind us, and I caught the sound of rusty wards turning in an unaccustomed lock. George put his arm through mine and asked if I was going back to the House.
"I shall dine at the Club," I said; and I wondered how either of us could speak so conventionally.
We walked the length of Millbank in silence.
"You'd have thought he had enough to put up with already, wouldn't you?" George asked dispassionately; then, with a tremor in his voice, "God in heaven! it's a smash-up for Raney! I didn't think she was capable of it, I've known her all her life, I'd have sworn she'd have pulled up in time.... Of course, she's always had to have people fluttering round her and paying her compliments, and I wasn't a bit surprised to find a boys' school of young Guardees hanging about the house the moment she'd moved into it. It was the same when she was engaged to Jim Loring—God knows, she knocked a big enough hole in his life, you'd have thought there'd be some reactive effect on her.... But, on my soul, because she'd been doing it so long, I thought she could be trusted. I thought she really loved Raney, I thought he was the only person who could manage her.... He would treat her like a man. 'No one's ever let up on me. Trust people, and they'll repay your trust....' All that balderdash.... It's succeeded amazingly well with men, he can do what he likes with them. But women must be fundamentally different.... We're both bachelors, of course.... But I always feel there was a lot to be said for Petruchio. Raney loved her most kinds of ways, and she loved him on and off in some fashion for years; he really only won her, when he was frankly brutal to her—I had the story from both, so I know; she was caught in Austria, like you, and he smuggled her back and shewed her pretty clearly who'd got the stronger personality; then she married him after he'd gone blind, when all our emotions were in tatters; and, having once married her, he seemed to think that mere love and trust were enough to keep her. I don't know; I've never had to live with a woman; I can't help feeling, though, that, just as he won her by main force, so he could only hope to keep her by main force. And he didn't even give her the 'mere love and trust' I've been talking about; he trusted her all right, but I think the kind of practical Christianity that he tried to set up was too much to ask of anyone—let alone a spoilt darling like Sonia.... He's always been so infernally uncompromising, it's his strength and his weakness; it's because he was uncompromising that he's kept alive and it's because he's been uncompromising with her that he's brought this on himself."
We had walked up Whitehall and were waiting for a gap in the traffic by the Admiralty Arch.
"But this is all ancient history, George," I reminded him. "What are we going to do?"
"To soften the blow? Nothing. We can't do anything. Sonia's cleared out, I suppose she' gone off to join Beresford. Well, Bertrand thinks Raney's equal to murder, but you can trust Beresford to keep out of the way.... I suppose there'll be a divorce.... I honestly don't know what to do about Raney. He's my oldest and dearest friend, but I don't know more than the surface of him.... God! If I had Sonia's throat in my two hands!" He broke off and pulled me roughly off the kerb, gripping my arm until we were half-way down Cockspur Street. "I've never been faced with this kind of thing, Stornaway. I suppose you must have been?"
"Nothing so bad as this," I was able to answer him.
We walked on into Pall Mall without speaking. Then George gripped my arm again.
"That poor devil alone in the dark with this—this to occupy his thoughts!"
I made no comment. I do not see what comment was possible.
"I feel so hopelessly at sea!" he exclaimed agitatedly. "Stornaway, you've had to pull people out of holes before; can nothing be done? Can't we get her to go back? Would he receive her back? Of course, we're all of us seeing red now, but somehow every hour that she spends with Beresford makes it harder to get her back; if we could use Raney's love for her——"
"D'you want her to go back?" I interrupted.
"God knows what I want!" he sighed.
We had reached the steps of the County Club, and I told George to come in and have some dinner with me. Both of us were already engaged in different parts of London, but we wanted to hold together.
"Come to Hale's," he said, shaking his head. "It's pretty well deserted since the war; everybody's fighting. I can't risk meeting a crowd of people I know and having to pretend nothing's up."
Leaving St. James' Square, we walked through King Street and entered the squat Regency house which had sheltered succeeding generations of London's exquisites for a hundred years. The coffee-room was deserted, and we had a choice of wine, food and service; but I have never eaten a gloomier meal. Every few minutes George would say, "Look here, you know, something's got to be done about this!" and I would reply, "Nothing can be done." Then we would attack a new course. Though we had chosen Hale's to be secure from interruption, I am not sure that we were not both a little relieved at the end of dinner when Vincent Grayle limped in with an evening paper under his arm and asked leave to join us for the short remainder of our meal. I can get on with him at a pinch; George cannot; but we shared a common need for diversion.
"I've just this moment got back from France," Grayle said to explain his late arrival. "I've been having a lively week at G.H.Q., watching the professional soldiers losing the war for us." He summoned a waiter and truculently ordered dinner. "Anything happening in London?" he asked.
"Nothing much," I told him. "What news from the Front?"
"Everybody's very cheery, getting ready for the big push. They all seem quite sure that they're going to break through this time, and there's an amount of ammunition and reserves that really does put you in good heart when you think how the men out there were starving in the first part of the war—thanks to the gang we had running things on this side. Whether we've got the generals is another question; if not, we must make a remarkably big clean sweep, politicians included."
He was evidently preparing one of his usual attacks, and, though I had welcomed the momentary diversion, neither George nor I wanted a political argument at such a time. With a trumped-up apology we went into the morning-room for coffee and liqueurs, leaving Grayle to his opinions and his evening paper.
"We don't seem to have thought out anything very helpful," sighed George, as he threw himself into a chair. "D'you think it's the least good going round to Beresford's place and forcing Sonia to go back?"
"Do you want her to go back, even if you can make her?" I asked once more. "She's been saying for weeks that she regarded her marriage as at an end; now she's proved it. Do you want to send her back on those terms? And does O'Rane want to have her back?"
George covered his face with his hands, shaking his head despairingly from side to side.
"I—don't—know," he groaned. "And this must have bowled poor old Raney over so much that I don't suppose he knows. Ordinarily—but it's absurd to use such a word.... I can only say this; he loved her so much, he loved her for so many years, he believed in her—or in some wonderful idealised conception of her by which he saw every kind of saintly quality where the rest of us only regarded her as a good-natured, but quite heartless, fascinating coquette—he thought of her and dreamed of her, she was so much a part of his life, the big part, the only thing that mattered...." He paused, out of breath. "You'd have said that it would have been like cutting off his arms and legs, if he'd lost her, if she'd died or married Jim Loring or the other fellow she was engaged to.... But I don't know now. When you've given all that love and trust, when you've idealised anyone, and the whole conception crumbles away.... Stornaway, he's extraordinarily frank; I fancy I know more of him than most people. Well, I do know how he loved that strumpet; I don't know, I can't say whether he'd love her still or whether he'd just want to strangle her and then cut his own throat.... But I think it's worth trying. We can at least give him a chance, we can keep his hands off her——" He jumped up, leaving his coffee untasted. "I'm going to have a shot."
"Shall I come with you?" I asked.
He was already half-way to the door.
"I want everyone I can get!" he threw back over his shoulder.
We drove to Sloane Square, and in ten minutes' time I found myself once more mounting the stairs to Beresford's flat. The lower floors were silent and deserted, but, as we climbed higher, I heard voices and the tramp of heavy feet growing louder and more distinct with every yard that we covered. As we rounded the corner of the passage, I stopped with a sickening sense of foreboding, when I found my path blocked by a policeman. For a moment no one spoke, and I fancied that we were being scrutinised with disfavour, even with suspicion. George, however, was too much preoccupied to be daunted.
"Is Mr. Beresford at home, d'you know?" he asked. The constable shook his head. "D'you happen to know where he is? I have to see him on a matter of great urgency. If he's not in, I'll go in and wait till he comes back."
He made a step forward, but the man shewed no sign of yielding.
"Afraid I can't let you by, sir," he said. "No one's allowed in."
I was assailed by a dreadful certainty that we had arrived too late.
"Why not?" I demanded, but my voice quavered too much to be effective.
"Mr. Beresford's been arrested."
"But, in God's name, what for?"
"That's none of my business," was the answer.
George was diving significantly into his trouser-pocket, but I felt that what lay before me was too serious for trifling with half-crowns. I handed the man my card and repeated my request.
"It's not mere curiosity," I said. "If you don't tell me, there are others who will; but I want to save time."
I always have the letters "M.P." printed on my cards to impress government departments, for throughout the public service there is an inherited dread that a question may be asked in the House; the hierarchy from top to bottom makes it the first business of life to avoid such publicity. This instinct of self-preservation, deeply-rooted as a horse's fear of a snake in the grass, led the constable to inform me promptly that Beresford had been arrested for issuing seditious literature; his flat was at the moment being searched.
My own sigh of relief was drowned by a deeper sigh from George.
"When did this take place?" he asked.
"To-day, sir. I can't tell you the time; I've only just come on duty."
"Was there anyone there besides Mr. Beresford? Is there anyone there now?"
"The inspector, sir; and two men."
George thanked him and led me by the arm to the head of the stairs.
"Thank God!" he whispered. "You—you thought so, too; I could see it in your face. Oh, Christ, if they were going to arrest the fellow, why couldn't they have done it sooner? I don't know what to do now. At least—I must go back to 'The Sanctuary' and see what's happened there." He dragged me down stairs and into our taxi at a pace which more than once threatened to break both our necks. "Where the devil can she have gone to, Stornaway? She'd naturally come here. But, when they arrested him ..."
The shrouded lamp over "The Sanctuary" door was unlighted when we arrived; the door was locked against us, and, though I now remembered hearing the key turn when O'Rane shewed us out, the cherished little piece of his beloved childish symbolism was grown painfully familiar.
"Come round to the other door," said George, and we were admitted and ushered into Bertrand's room. "Any news?" he enquired gently.
Someone had drawn the blinds, someone had brought in a tray of food; otherwise the room was unchanged in aspect, and Bertrand seemed not to have moved since I left him stretched in the long wicker chair three hours earlier.
"News?" he repeated, opening his eyes and blinking at us. "David's gone back to Melton. Ah! this is a bad business! Give me a hand up, George; I'm tired. I sometimes think I've lived too long."