2
I had not intended to come into The Sanctuary, but O’Rane insisted that Sonia would be disappointed if I turned back at the door. We found her in the nursery, playing with her elder boy, while the baby was packed protesting to bed in the next room. I had not often been privileged to catch Sonia in a domestic attitude and was ill-prepared for her efficiency. This child in her lap was a beautiful creature, in radiant health and exuberant spirits, with his mother’s brown hair and eyes. There was a lusty crow of delight when O’Rane came into the room; and, as I shook hands with Sonia, the child demanded shrilly that the interrupted tale of the day before should be resumed.
“Will you say good-night to David junior?,” she asked me, as Daniel surrendered to the spell of O’Rane’s story.
“If he’s not asleep,” I said; and she conducted me into the presence of a wide-awake and fierce Japanese doll, who gripped two of my fingers and demanded truculently what I was doing in his nursery.
At three years old, the child had his father’s flashing black eyes and imperious manner. Sonia added that he had also more than his father’s indomitable obstinacy.
“Is he equally fearless?,” I asked.
For answer she pointed from a green bruise on the child’s forehead to a padlocked grille over the window:
“David had a fire-escape fitted the other day. He went down it himself just to learn the way; and this infant must needs follow. He’d never been on a ladder in his life, but he climbed cheerfully out of the window . . .”
“Trusting to the special providence that looks after all O’Ranes,” I put in.
“By the mercy of heaven a policeman caught him; but if he behaves like that now . . .”
“He looks like keeping you fully occupied.”
“I can do what I like with him at present,” she answered, “because he realizes I’m only a woman, and I can get on the soft side of him. When he’s old enough to see that women can be more easily bullied than men, more easily hurt . . . I don’t envy his wife. I don’t envy any wife.”
“Yet if all marriages were dissolved by act of parliament . . .,” I began, as she led me downstairs.
“Should I take David on again? I wonder! He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. . . . What fools we women are! And what fools men are! They don’t want a woman to have a will of her own; and, when she echoes their will, they find her insipid. And what a fool I’ve always been! Once I thought it would be wonderful to run away . . . as I did. But that was only a wonderful fit of bad temper,” she added with the candour that she always employed in discussing herself.
“And one that you’ll never repeat.”
“No. In those days I was so hungry for children that I thought myself quite immodest: if I’d had my first one earlier, we should never have had our great tragedy. Now that I’ve got two, you need never be afraid I shall run away again even if David ties me to the bed and beats me. I honestly, honestly don’t think of myself any longer except through them. I want them to have the best chance in life: all that you and Jim and my brothers had. They must go to the best schools, the best universities; they must never be driven down the wrong road like so many boys because they haven’t the money to go by the right one. They must be secure.” . . . Her face darkened; and she turned to the fire. “David won’t promise me that. My father can’t afford it.” . . .
I believe that, if her husband could have seen Sonia at that moment as I saw her, he would have compromised with his insurgent conscience. Once before, when he came back from France, I had seen her, as now, on her knees; pleading, as now, for the privilege of serving him and, as now, wholly forgetful of her too insistent self.
“He’s not easy to move when he’s made up his mind,” I said, with memories of our conversation earlier in the afternoon.
Sonia shook her head ruefully:
“Don’t I know that? You remember when that unemployment deputation came to see him? We’ve had about three a day ever since. Does that influence him? The press camps on our doorstep. He’s besieged in his office. This afternoon that man Griffiths came here again.”
“What did you do with him?”
Her patience suddenly deserted her:
“I sent him to Hampstead. This is a private house, when all’s said and done. I don’t suppose he got any satisfaction there, but I thought the walk would be good for him. Odious little creature!”
It was now that I feel I might have done some good by speaking strongly. Neither Griffiths nor any other grown man deserved to be sent on a fool’s errand; in cooler moments Sonia would have been ashamed to play such a trick. Her answer, I suppose, would have been that Griffiths and her husband were too much for any one’s coolness; and I feared—no doubt, weakly—that I should lose my slight influence over her if I sided with her husband. When he came down from the nursery, she was still indignant enough to retail Griffiths’ visit and to ask O’Rane whether the deputation had reached Hampstead in time to find him.
“I had to say I could do nothing for them,” he answered a little wearily. “I’ve given all I can spare of my own money; and I’ve collected as much as I can from other people. If they come again, you might tell them that.”
“You must tell them yourself,” Sonia replied stiffly. “I’m not going to make myself responsible.”
“I only wanted you to save them a useless journey. When you sent them to me, you gave them some sort of hope; and that makes it so much harder when I have to turn them down.”
“Perhaps in time you’ll find it so hard . . .” she muttered.
“I can’t go back on what I’ve said. It’s only unkind to give them a long walk for nothing. Promise me you won’t do it again, Sonia.”
“Let’s hope they won’t come again. If they do, I shall again send them to you.” Then, without disguise, her temper broke. “I’m not consulted about what you do with this money, so I wash my hands of it. This is not your office; and you can’t blame me if you refuse to give them anything for their trouble.”
“I can only repeat that you make my task more difficult,” O’Rane answered patiently.
“Before I’ve done, I hope to make it impossible,” Sonia retorted defiantly, as she hurried out of the library and up the stairs.
I had a second opportunity of speaking strongly, this time to O’Rane; and I failed to press it. The papers that night gave long accounts of the opening of parliament and longer, less hackneyed descriptions of the demonstration by the unemployed. I detected for the first time a note of uneasiness as, for the first time, unemployment passed out of the realm of abstract statistics and incarnated itself in ragged armies of hungry men. I remembered Philip Hornbeck’s blithe assurance that Griffiths could do little harm so long as the armies were scattered; well, their banners shewed that they were scattered no longer. One nervous leader-writer compared this march with the advance of the Marseillais on Paris and asked angrily how the police had allowed it; another, more valiant, rehearsed the history of the Fascismo movement in Italy and warned the proletariat at large—without considering whether the proletariat was likely to read such a paper—that England would never yield to mob-violence. A third, mentioning O’Rane by name, exhumed the controversy of the summer and enquired whether those who had voluntarily undertaken a national responsibility could abandon it at such a time in satisfaction of a “doctrinaire whim”. In less blunt terms than the sandwichman had displayed, O’Rane’s ‘sentence of death’ was brought up against him; and it was with some muddled, premonitory feeling of an isolated conflict between Griffiths and the O’Ranes that I uttered my warning.
“Suspend your sentence,” I said, “until the new government has declared its unemployment policy.”
O’Rane replied with the entirely logical and utterly irrelevant thesis that unemployment was a consequence of the war, that the community had called the tune and must pay the piper, that one government had imposed conscription of men’s lives and that another could impose conscription of their wealth. The state had turned prosperous civilians into soldiers; the state must turn these soldiers back into prosperous civilians.
His cold reasoning and neat phrasing reminded me of a speech at some undergraduate debating-society.
“I can only hope,” I said, “that you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.”
Hungry men had no time for debating-society arguments. I hoped, too, that Sonia would not be forced to say ‘no’ again. Hungry men had no taste for being ordered to walk from Westminster to Hampstead as a move in the game with her husband. I said no more. And, amid my self-reproaches, I find a barren comfort in the knowledge that neither Sonia nor her husband would have listened, though one rose from the dead to warn them.