5
At the end of August I contrived a holiday for myself on the north coast of Cornwall, where Lady Pentyre had been good enough to offer me a house. Yolande and her husband accompanied me, and on a passing impulse I pressed O'Rane to join us. We could have given him society and some kind of mental distraction, but the House was still sitting, when I left London, and he made this an excuse for declining. In his place George came for a week, to be followed by several of Yolande's colleagues and friends, whom she invited—I am fairly sure—less for themselves than for the chance of giving an inexpensive holiday to some exceedingly tired women.
It was a fortnight of pure enchantment. We rose at eight and walked over hot, spongy turf to the precipitous cliff-path which led us to our favourite bathing-place in our chosen bay. We bobbed and basked in a sea of liquid sapphire under a blazing sun and only left the water when hunger drove us home. Through long, happy mornings all four of us scrambled like children over the rocks, in and out of unexpected pools, slipping on treacherous bunches of sea-weed and cutting our feet on the cones of a mollusc's shell. We were always so wet and unpresentable by luncheon-time that there was nothing for it but to bathe again and put on dry clothes, which made us late and ravenous, so that we gorged ourselves on dishes which were becoming unprocurable in London and then lay sleeping repletely or glancing at the papers until it was time for another walk among the gorse and heather, a last descent to the foreshore where the Atlantic lay drowsy under the setting sun, creaming and lapping the black and dun rocks.
The papers, when we mustered energy to read them, brought us better news each day. Pressing north and west, the Italian and Russian armies were taking their revenge for the damaging thrust which each had lately sustained, and Austria-Hungary, squeezed simultaneously on two sides, had to adopt the unwelcome and desperate expedient of handing over the eastern troops to German command. The precarious hold on Salonica was strengthened by the safe landing of reinforcements, and, before we left in September, Roumania had thrown in her lot with the Allies.
Even in London, where for two years the soldiers on leave from any front had found individual self-depression and national self-depreciation flourishing most luxuriantly, became infected with brief optimism. In September a report from General Headquarters announced that an infantry advance had been assisted by a mysterious new mechanism that rolled its uncouth way imperviously through the rain of bullets and shrapnel which poured on to its armoured sides, some land battleship which dropped unconcernedly into craters and climbed as unconcernedly over fortifications and chance débris of houses, an invention—the first of British initiative in the war—that bestrode enemy trenches and spattered a hail of death on either hand, a good-humoured steel giant that convulsed the troops until they held their sides and forgot to advance, a something, in fine, that the English soldier with his genius for happy and meaningless nicknames decided to call a "tank."
Old Bertrand, who had a pretentious theory to explain each new set of facts, enunciated a new art of war with the text "Machines versus Men;" the rifle-man to the savage with a spear in his hand was as the machine-gun to the rifle-man—or the tank to the machine-gun. War had been revolutionised, and our old calculations of effectives and losses must go by the board.
The mood of optimism passed as quickly as it had come. Hardly had we finished triumphing over German machine-guns with our tanks, overcoming the Zeppelin menace with our anti-aircraft guns—there was smart sport in October, amounting almost to a battue,—when the autumn campaign ended and we settled down to count the cost and prepare for a third winter. The figures of our losses made the Somme a Pyrrhic victory, and there was troubled wonder where the new drafts were to be found. Ireland, which had been left in suspect and timid neglect—like a dog which has snapped once and may snap again, but is quiet for the moment—became once more a public interest as a candidate for conscription. And ships were mysteriously scarce. And food prices were exorbitant. And the Government was tired, lethargic, void of initiative....
"Thank God! my duty as a citizen is done when I've paid my taxes!" Bertrand Oakleigh exclaimed one night at the House. "I'm glad I'm not a farmer, I'm glad I'm not mixed up with industry. I should be unpatriotic if I didn't double my output of foodstuffs and unpatriotic if I kept one potential piece of cannon-fodder to grow 'em; I'm a pro-German if I manufacture for export to keep up the foreign exchanges—Victory versus Trade!—and Lord knows what I am if I don't cheerfully pay taxes on a business I've had to close down. If I lose money, nobody sympathises; if I make any, I'm called a profiteer, and someone takes it away from me.... Curious how a phrase or an abusive nickname dispenses the people of this country from using such wits as a niggardly Providence has given them! You've only to whisper something about a 'hidden hand,' and a crowded meeting of City men will sit and hypnotise themselves into thinking that there's an active service of secret agents—with poor Haldane as Director General—quietly penetrating our social life and paralysing our efforts in the war. Hidden hand! Pacifist—they can't even throw their absurdities into decent English! Profiteer! We're so astonishingly petty as a nation! I wonder if the same thing's being reproduced in all other countries—the old 'Nous sommes trahis' nonsense.... They're all governments of old men, too,—and they're tired—and no one outside knows what they've had to go through—and everybody's nerves are snapping. I'm sometimes surprised that these fellows have lasted so long, but I think their days are numbered. If you throw your mind back, you'll remember a phase when Asquith's worst political enemies said he was indispensable, the only Prime Minister, the one man who could hold the Government and the country together. You don't hear that now; we've outgrown that phase. Now people are openly saying that he's not master in his own house, that we shall never win the war so long as he's in the saddle, that they'll turn him out the moment they can find someone to put in his place.... Lloyd-George would be in power to-day, if his friends in Fleet Street could be sure that he wouldn't hanky-panky with the Army.... To read the papers, you'd think it was the cumulative effect of reverses like Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, the shortage of food, and the fact that we've done nothing to increase our home production, and our failure to grapple with submarines. It's deeper and blinder than that.... It's because the Government hasn't won the war that it will fail; and any new Prime Minister will fall in exactly the same way, unless he can win it. Results! results! That mountebank Grayle is quite right; he represents average, unthinking, third-rate, violent opinion, and that opinion's becoming articulate. As I've told you before, I don't think a change will do any good, because we set ourselves too big a task, we started on too high a moral plane. I suppose I should be called a 'pacifist' if I suggested that that phase was over and that we'd better moderate our tone before we're compelled to."
The particular non-party War Committee headed by Grayle was waking to activity after its suspended animation during the summer campaign. In his paper, in conversation at the Club and still more in the Smoking Room of the House he was calling for more vigour in administration.... The House of Commons position was curious, he informed me; if he could be sure of a certain number of votes—he would not trouble me with the figures,—we could have a ministry after our own heart. There followed an interval of perhaps five minutes, in which I allowed him to do all the talking. The Unionist members of the Coalition were sick and tired of this eternal "Wait and See;" there would be a secession the moment that a better alternative government had been sketched out; you had only to call a Unionist party meeting and put it to 'em straight. But you didn't want to take an unnecessary toss, you couldn't afford to supply powder and shot to rags like the "Daily News," which were always talking about an intrigue and saying that no government could exist with the Germans in front and back-stabbers behind....
"Nothing's settled yet," he told me after considering academically the offices for which we were both fitted. "But you know the constitutional theory; you're not justified in upsetting a government unless you're prepared to go to Buckingham Palace and take on the job of forming a new administration. Excuse me! I want to have a word with Oakleigh."
The following day I asked Bertrand under what guise the devil had appeared to him, but he had evidently been less patient.
"Grayle went away with a flea in his ear," he grunted. "He's been worrying me so long that I had to stop it once and for all. God knows, I don't care about this ministry; I shouldn't have much faith in any ministry formed out of the present House—the best talent's already on the Treasury Bench—and I don't believe in bringing in your superman from outside—the House of Commons can't be learned in a night, and even a government department needs study. What I object to in Grayle is his picking on me as one of his fifty or sixty new allies; you can picture him buzzing round with his fellow-conspirators—'Shall we try Oakleigh and Stornaway? They're solid, moderate, old members—highly respected. They don't add anything to the common stock, of course, but they carry more weight than the men who are always talking and playing an active part. We might try them, their names would look well on the prospectus—inspire confidence, you know.'" He chuckled maliciously. "I suppose I'm getting very old, but I can't stand young men's conceit in the way I once did. Grayle's like a boy just down from Oxford, doing everything for the first time and imagining that no one's ever done it before. Does he really think this is the first political intrigue in history? I recommended him a course of Disraeli's novels—to improve his technique. Good God! I was playing this game of detaching wobblers and handing out offices that were not in my gift and mobilising the solid, moderate, highly respected old members under Gladstone! I toiled and schemed to keep the Liberal Party out of Rosebery's hands; I was making new parties and pigeon-holing possible cabinets all through the Morley-Harcourt days, I was intriguing to keep C.-B. in command when the Liberal Leaguers intrigued to kick him into the Lords. I've been through it all; and be hanged if I didn't do it better than Grayle!"
Perhaps my manner was too sympathetic. Certainly I was not to escape so easily as Bertrand had done, for Grayle met me leaving the House and offered to drop me on his way home. I accepted because I was nominally amicable with him, because I did not want a wet walk to my hotel and because I could not decently refuse. He talked persuasively the whole way home and was obviously chagrined when I did not invite him into my rooms. He rang me up at breakfast next day and tried to secure my presence at luncheon; once at my office in St. James' Street, once in my department, and once again, when I was tranquilly dining with the Maitlands, I was called to the telephone with an apologetic but urgent request that I would arrange a time when Grayle could have five minutes' conversation with me.
My position was simple and clear. I would be neither bribed nor bullied into any kind of office, I would give no blank cheque for the future to Grayle or anyone else, but I should no doubt be found voting with him against the Government—or with the Government against him—as I had done in the past, judging every division on its merits. A note on my dressing-table informed me that Colonel Grayle had telephoned from the House at eleven.... I picked up my hat, buttoned my coat again and turned my steps towards Milford Square; a far more patient man might be excused for thinking that Grayle was making a nuisance of himself.
The servant who opened the door informed me that Colonel Grayle was out.
"I'll wait," I said. "I've got to see him."
"But he's out of town, sir. He didn't say where he was going or when he'd be back. He very often goes away like that."
The man was sleek of appearance and glib of speech, well-experienced, I thought, in shutting the door to people whom his master did not wish to see. But I did not fall within that category, and Grayle had plagued me sufficiently to justify reprisals.
"When did he go away?" I asked.
"Before dinner, sir."
"Ah, then he must have changed his plans," I said. "He telephoned to me from the House half an hour ago; he's been trying to get hold of me all day, but this is the first opportunity I've had. Is Mr. Bannerman in? If so, I'll talk to him till Colonel Grayle comes in."
"Mr. Bannerman has moved into rooms of his own," the servant told me, yielding ground reluctantly.
I walked into Grayle's smoking-room and left the man to warn him that I was in effective occupation and that he must yield to the inevitable and come down to see me, if he were already at home, or submit to a few minutes of my company when he returned. A moment later I saw that he could not yet have come back from the House, as a pile of letters awaited him on the table and the whiskey and soda set out for his refreshment were untouched. "A model servant," I said to myself, "to have everything ready when you do not expect your master home." I mixed myself a drink and was preparing to light a cigar when I found that I was without matches. On going into the hall, I found my sleek, glib friend mounting guard, as though he expected me to slip out with my pockets full of silver.
He produced a box of matches and struck one for me. As I began to light my cigar, a taxi drove into the square and drew up opposite the house.
"What name shall I tell Colonel Grayle?" asked the servant, as he held open the smoking-room door for me.
Before I had time to answer, I heard a latch-key grating in the lock; the servant moved forward and stopped irresolutely; then the door opened to admit Mrs. O'Rane. Our eyes met for a moment, and for the first time since I had known her I saw her out of countenance. In another moment it was all over, for I had backed into the smoking-room and pushed the door closed. I heard her clear, rather high voice asking whether Colonel Grayle was home yet. The servant murmured something in reply, and I caught the sound of his footsteps growing fainter along the flagged passage. Mrs. O'Rane turned the handle and came in to me, once more self-possessed and in control of herself; there was neither embarrassment nor defiance in her manner; she greeted me as she had once before greeted me, when I first met her at "The Sanctuary."
"I hope you've not been waiting long," she said. "Vincent's usually home by this time. There's not an all-night sitting or anything, is there?"
"Not so far as I know," I answered. "Mrs. O'Rane, I don't think I'll stay any longer."
She looked at my newly lighted cigar and untouched whiskey and soda.
"It's just as you like," she said. "It seems a pity to run away without seeing him, though. I presume you came to see him and not me?"
"I came to see him. I didn't know you were here."
"But I've been here the whole time. Didn't you know that?"
"We didn't."
"But where else was I likely to be?"
"Your husband never suspected that Grayle had any hand in it. I fancy you and Grayle did your best not to enlighten him. You let him think it was another man, and Grayle gave an alibi. I suppose it was all right; I'm not versed in the ethics of the thing."
I made a step towards the door, but Mrs. O'Rane was in my way.
"Yes, I don't know why Vincent said that," she observed reflectively. "Unless he thought that nobody was ever going to know.... But I'm not quite so abandoned as that. I warned you all, I told you my old married life was over; and I was free to start another. As for not enlightening anybody, it's not my business to correct all the mistakes people choose to make.... Now that you've been here, you can report everything you've seen. I'm not hiding anything, and you can say I'm not ashamed of what I've done and I'm quite prepared for all the world to know. He can divorce me as soon as he likes."
The discussion did not make me want to stay any longer in the house, and I had to ask her to let me pass.
"You can tell him that," she added carelessly.
"I don't know that he contemplates divorcing you," I said. "He's never mentioned the subject."
"But he'll have to. He can't go on being nominally married to me, when I'm—well ..."
"Are you sure you don't mean that your own position will be a shade less discreditable when Grayle marries you?" I asked. "Frankly, you haven't been thinking of your husband very much, have you?"
She sighed impatiently.
"You will keep on speaking of him as my husband."
"He is."
"Until he divorces me."
"Unless he divorces you," I substituted.