2
“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the metropolis of England.”
“For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San Remo, Hythe . . .”
In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on, meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season, of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent tragedy.
“Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I suppose you don’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more money and a bit less work than the bar?”
If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who sent me testimonials beginning: “Public school and university ex-service officer, 1914-1918, wounded.” . . . If others received half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them; and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced, with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks.
“Nobody could want less work than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck pointed out.
“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle . . .”
“My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered.
“Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him.
In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses, land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’ candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the pleadings of Peace would never do.
At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals; and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and treatment of international prostration.
“The whole of Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany. Take Austria. Take Russia.”
And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics, had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and, if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow was so far from London.
I had heard so much of the coming royalist counterrevolution that I fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia.
“Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me.
Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances!
“Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’.
“The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of religion should be regarded as paid agitators.
Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but, without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold.
“Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved upstairs.
“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal; politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it absolutely to yourself.”
I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel, however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier. After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that night for their retirement.
“I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves, don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizing this party, of course; but the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.”
If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties had the ceremony and pomp of a levée. In 1920 we had no time for the ceremony, no money for the pomp.
“I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation.
The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of recognition.
“Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely, “for one who can find time to be hospitable.”
As we drifted uncomfortably about the house, I found it expedient to leave at least this charge unanswered. The smoking-room was given up to bridge, the dining-room to an endless supper; musicians, whom in time I came to suspect our butler of keeping on a chain in one of the cellars, were imprisoned on a landing: and both drawing-rooms were cleared for dancing. “Solitudinem faciunt: pacem appellant. I’m off,” said Bertrand in bewilderment. “Promise you won’t invite me again!” And I shared his bewilderment. The success of the party, as of the late war, lay in unity of command. Our butler was generalissimo; and Barbara asked only that I would leave him alone. If the men could not find cigars, they appealed to Robson; when an uninvited guest strayed into the hall, demanding who the guy was who was giving this show, Robson introduced him promptly to his hostess; I saw him supplying powder and carrying out repairs to torn dresses; and, when our musicians knocked off work for the night, Robson obliged at the piano, apologizing for the slow, melodious waltzes of my undergraduate days and regretting that he had no temperament for jazz-music.
“I wish I knew his history,” Barbara murmured plaintively. “I daren’t ask for fear of finding he has a wife. That would break my heart, because I’m determined to marry him if anything happens to you, George.”
Lady Dainton, meanwhile, was going from strength to strength of disapproval.
“I would sooner give up society altogether,” she announced, “than countenance its present form. This, of course, is different,” she added vaguely and without conviction.
Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they amused Barbara.