3
This dinner was to be my last frolic as an irresponsible spectator.
When, as editor and managing-director, I proposed the toast of “Peace”, a vibration from my colleagues’ eagerness troubled my rigid negations and stirred doubt in my bland assurance. Was Bertrand’s project so hare-brained as I had thought? I questioned myself in honest uncertainty as I settled my tie and looked down on the double row of expectant faces. The old man’s predictions at Cannes were fulfilled as soon as the conference met and a vague parliament of man reformed as a quarrelsome committee of ten; the clash between President Wilson’s fourteen points and Mr. Lloyd-George’s election speeches rang out when the committee of ten shrank to a camarilla of four; and, if we had ever doubted the apathy of the British public, our doubt must have evaporated day by day as the first House of Commons in the new glacial age sat with hands folded and eyes set jealously on the position each member had wrested from the war. Twice or thrice in these months a vigilance-committee of sterner and more unbending new members sent hectoring telegrams to keep their representatives up to the mark; President Wilson once ordered his ship to get up steam; and the Duchess of Ross dined out intermittently on M. Clemenceau’s latest epigram; but it is substantially true to say that no one in England thought of the peace-treaty until it was submitted for the approval of parliament.
In my speech I confined myself to congratulating Bertrand on his staff. At the end, he hoisted himself slowly to his feet and indicated his own part in our endeavour:
“You young men will have to do the work; but perhaps, from a long experience, I may be able to advise you. No lasting peace can be founded on a sense of grievance; and, though the heathen are raging furiously now, they’ll outgrow that phase. Maybe it’s because I had to keep my mouth shut during the war, maybe old age is making me more radical. This is not a party organ, it never was; it was an expression of liberal spirit, and that’s what it has to be again. We were called hard names when war broke out; but we had the right vision. Labour still thinks parochially; toryism still thinks imperially, which is the same thing; radicalism must think internationally. These fierce local patriotisms are an unconscionable time a-dying; but England is a bigger conception than the heptarchy, Europe is a bigger conception than England, the world is a bigger conception than Europe. We depend too much on our neighbours to blow them out of existence every few years. That truth has been vouchsafed to those of us who are at this table; we have to get it accepted.”
I rang a bell; and we were handed early copies of our first number. Every man turned avidly to his own contribution. Then Barbara sent for me to help her receive our guests.
This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder, miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife; and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand. As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed:
“A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years before you were born.”
As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their lips; débutantes of a generation after mine pressed under the elbows of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to charm back into their fold.
“I didn’t know there were so many people in the world!,” she exclaimed in one of the few brief lulls.
Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed:
“It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.”
As the brief lull ended, my thoughts went back to the morning of Armistice Day when I paused on my way home from the Admiralty to reckon how many of my own generation had survived the war. As Robson bent, straightened himself and turned at the stair-head, I expected at every moment to hear him calling out “Captain Dainton” or “Lord Loring” or “Mr. Arden”; had I shut my eyes to their absence, I could have fancied that we were living in 1914. Now, as then, Crawleigh was so much engrossed in a political altercation with Bertrand that he walked stormily into the drawing-room without noticing us; Sam Dainton trotted up grinning—as usual—and whispering scandal into Violet Loring’s reluctant ear; Sir Roger, waiting uneasily for his wife, was mistaken—as usual—for a hired waiter and urged to tell John Gaymer where he could get his usual drink.
“The last time I did this sort of thing was at my coming-of-age ball,” Barbara murmured.
“Which you gave for yourself because no one would give it for you?”
“Well, I hated father’s friends; and he hated mine,” she laughed. “Besides, I’d been in so many scrapes that I had to see whether people would continue to know me.”
“They all came,” I said.
“Except one. That was the time when Jack Waring proposed to me one day and quarrelled with me the next,” she explained lightly. “Why he wanted to marry me when he disapproved of everything I did . . . I invited him specially.” . . .
“And he wouldn’t come?”
“No. Apparently . . . Eric isn’t coming . . . to-night.”
The announcement fell so tranquilly, it was so long since we had mentioned Eric Lane’s name that I doubted for a moment if I had heard her aright.
“You . . . invited him?,” I asked.
“Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he won’t be trampled on,” she whispered.
I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection? I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful jealousy.
“You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond calls it.”
“It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate, among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct heir . . .”
“Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.”
“The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance. Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming conscious of their strength.”
As I looked down the stairs, Crawleigh and Bertrand were finishing their altercation. I heard Raymond telling them that it was time for old men to be in bed; and the phrase reminded me of my meeting with Saltash. In every sense of the term, they were old men, no longer able to hold their own against the young vigour of Saltash’s recruits; in any struggle of class with class, the material ammunition had passed from their hands. Their prestige was weakening before the pressure of those who excelled them in everything but length of tradition; and that tradition was now being cut short.
“I suppose you can call yourself a radical and still believe in the value of a good strain in breeding,” I said. “That hard-worked creature ‘the historian of the future’ will have to say, I suppose, that the people of this country carried a heavier burden than any other in the war? I think he’ll say that, of all our people, those who carried the heaviest burden were the leaders. In fighting, in directing, in paying . . . And in being killed: that’s why there are so few of them here to-night. We shall be the poorer if we lose that strain.”
“We’ll hope there are still enough of them left to carry it on,” said O’Rane.
“The next few years will be a race; there’ll be a fight against time, to spread the tradition before the people who maintain it are swallowed up.”
We talked at random until Sonia came to collect him for another party.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring Eric,” I heard him say to Barbara on leaving. “Some friend of his had a first night; and he’d promised to look in.”
“Did he say if he was coming on?,” asked Barbara.
“I should think it depends on the time. There was some talk about a supper-party afterwards.”
“Then I don’t suppose he will,” she answered with the composure of complete indifference. “Good-night, David. Good-night, Sonia.”
When we were by ourselves, I sent the servants to bed; and we sat for half-an-hour discussing the party.
“Half-past one,” she sighed at last. “Nobody can be coming now.”
“If any one does,” I said, “he’ll find an excellent doorstep to sit on. Come to bed, Babs.”
“I must write one letter first. You go on and turn out the lights. If you see my torch, you might put it on the hall-table.”
I chose a book and went to my room. Only when I was in bed did I discover that I had brought the wrong book; and, on going downstairs again, I saw the lights in the hall blazing. Then, as I reached the drawing-room, I caught sight of Barbara, seated in a high-backed chair at the stair-head. At first I thought she was asleep; then I saw that she was staring through the hall to the front door.
“Is anything the matter?” I asked.
“He can’t be coming now,” she answered.
“Who? Eric?”
My earlier whisperings of jealousy were silenced by her utter forlornness. I did not care whether her thoughts and affection and heart and soul were his, so long as I could take the look of pain out of her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I understood and was sorry for her; but the name had roused her, and she stood up with languid dignity:
“Yes.” . . . She was once again the alert and vigilant hostess of an hour before. “I thought it would look so terribly rude if he came here and found no one to receive him. After I’d specially asked him, too,” she added on a higher note. Then her self-possession returned to her. “It’s two o’clock. As he hasn’t come now, I suppose . . . he’s not coming . . . at all.” . . .