To-morrow and to-morrow ... a novel

by Stephen McKenna

5

Such a preparation was almost inevitably a preparation for disappointment; but the unexpected end of my first evening at the Turf and Stage left me no time to define my expectations nor judge whether they had been fulfilled. As Barbara had a headache, I entered the resplendent club-room off Hanover Square under Sonia’s protection; and, for all the scars that the last five years had left, I could have fancied for a moment that we were back in 1914 when the “Cottage Cabaret” and “Blue Moon” were tentatively opening their doors. I observed the same mirrored walls and plush sofas, the same small tables surrounding the same polished floor, the same high gallery and beaming, southern band. From the atmosphere I inhaled the same desolating quality, only to be rendered by the desolating name of “smartness”.

I found no hint, however, that my rigidly standardized neighbours were powers behind thrones. Apart from a passion for dancing that grew ever more feverish as youth receded, they were severely domesticated. Men brought their wives to supper, I was told, their sisters to dinner and their mothers to luncheon; I should not have been surprised to hear of a nursery upstairs or to see Gaspard, the incomparable manager, devising quiet games with the children in their parents’ absence. Most of the men that night were young and exceedingly prosperous financiers; the rest, exemplified by Laurence Hunter-Oakleigh and Johnnie Gaymer, had at least the appearance of prosperity. Born to rule, they had all done well in the war; they were doing well in the peace; and their women dominated the situation as shrewdly, as calmly and as confidently as the men. Some trick of memory sent my thoughts back to the “Duchess of Richmond” ball at Loring Castle on the eve of the war. I remembered standing in the hall with Puggy Mayhew, watching the lithe girls and hard-trained men mounting the stairs with their magnificently English self-possession; and, though Mayhew filled a grave in Mesopotamia, I could hear again his tone of startled discovery as he murmured: “There’s nothing to touch them in any country I know.” . . .

I had been invited to meet a girl who aspired to that career of mendicancy and private blackmail which is known to women with a friend in Fleet Street as “freelance journalism”; and, while O’Rane waited in the hall for the rest of his party, Sonia led me downstairs for a cocktail.

“I have a standing invitation from Gaspard to come here at his expense,” she confided. “He considers me rather a draw. And, as Lorrimer is always good for a dress if I’ll wear it in public, I can usually kill two guests with one free dinner. If Johnnie Gaymer would only give me one of his firm’s cars to be seen driving about in, David would get a perfectly good wife below cost.”

As we descended to a more intimate room, with smaller tables half hidden by plates of oysters, I suggested that the assistant-almoner of the Lancing millions could afford to buy his wife a car.

“Then you don’t know David,” she rejoined with a touch of petulance. “He’s working himself to death; but, if any one tries to pay him for what he does, he thinks it’s charity. Let’s talk of something else. You’ve not met this Maitland child? She’s very pretty and very silly, I should think. Just what I was at her age . . . or at my own, I suppose you’d say if I gave you a chance. Finished? Then let’s go up,” she continued with the restlessness that characterized the age or at least the women of it whom I met that night.

One and all, they sat down and jumped up again like marionettes that would collapse if their wires slackened; they looked at one page of a paper and then tossed it away; they clamoured for cigarettes and laid them aside. Finding that her other guests were not yet arrived, Sonia hurried into the dining-room, snatched a youth unknown to me from his protesting party and danced with him till a voice, peevish with hunger, cried: “Bertie, you little beast, come back and order dinner.” She then attached herself precariously to another party, stole some one else’s portion of caviare and rejoined us in the hall with her booty.

O’Rane, I thought, was looking ill and overworked.

“Stornaway’s gone down with pneumonia,” he explained; “so I’ve had all his work to do. It’s a bigger thing than I contemplated. I wonder . . . I wonder very much . . .”

“Whether you can carry out the schemes we discussed at Cannes?,” I asked.

“No! Whether we’ve any place in our present civilization for these colossal fortunes . . . Ah, that’s Ivy’s voice. Come and be introduced.”

I have never known for certain who constituted our party that night. Four of us met in the hall; but we mislaid Sonia as we went to our table; and John Gaymer invited himself to join us until his own friends arrived. Between the dances, some twenty to forty people surged into our corner; during them, I was usually left with one compassionate neighbour. As in a dream, I talked to O’Rane with grave absorption about shell-shock treatment; then I listened as Sam Dainton was convinced against his will that he had spent the previous night in the hall of his hotel, because he could not remember his bedroom number nor his name; then Sonia plunged me in a morass of domestic finance, demanding how any one could keep herself, her husband and child on the pittance which David allowed her.

“And now I’m going to have another,” she added, as the saxophone uttered a warning bleat.

“Dance?,” I asked.

“No, baby, of course. . . . Do knock some sense into David’s head. . . . Good-bye-ee.”

As she slipped away, I found myself alone with a pretty little dark-eyed girl, precocious and unbalanced, whom I remembered with difficulty as Ivy Maitland; and for another five minutes we talked gravely of work and life and careers for women. Ivy must have been younger by several years than any other woman in the club; and in that setting she seemed a human note of interrogation, scored by the present on the threshold of the future. She also seemed sadly out of place. Her friends were too old for her, most of them were married, some were living apart from their wives and others were not living far enough apart from the wives of other men.

At the end of five minutes, forgetting her concern for a career, she darted off to dance with John Gaymer; and her place was taken by Sam Dainton, lately returned from Paris and full of gossip about the conference. The unruffled Gaspard conjured one more chair to our ever-lengthening table; and a basket of plover’s eggs for Sam appeared simultaneously with O’Rane’s chicken and my savoury, while heated revellers lolled over chair-backs with coffee and cigarettes. A warning of indigestion assailed me as I changed my place for the fourth time; intellectual dyspepsia had prostrated me from the moment when these five-minute conversational turns began.

“You look a bit out of the picture, old son,” Sam told me candidly.

“I’m a spectator,” I said. “My uncle feels that I should study the great movement of men.” . . .

“Paris is the spot for that,” he chuckled, with his mouth full. “They call it a peace conference, but I should say it was a full-dress parade for the next war.” . . .

He broke off as Sonia danced up with shining eyes to whisper her discovery that one of our neighbours had married a second husband in the premature belief that the first had been killed. By the time she had done, Sam had finished his plover’s eggs and was in the thick of a discussion with my cousin Laurie, which was to enrich them both if they could only find an out-of-work capitalist to launch them. Ivy concluded an audible disagreement with Gaymer, who I thought was more sodden than his wont, and dragged me headlong into a conversation that seemed to begin as startling indecency and cooled to the temperate obscurity of psychoanalysis.

“You should read Freud,” she told me. “Psychoanalysis explains everything. You are behind the times.”

From the little knowledge which I had been compelled to acquire in the hope of understanding the novels and plays of the period, I should have said that psychoanalysis defiled more than it explained; but I was chiefly interested to distinguish this night as the first on which the old reticences between men and women were torn away.

“Not bored, I hope?,” murmured a voice at my elbow, as Ivy flitted away for the second time.

I turned to see O’Rane sitting huddled with fatigue.

“Bewildered, rather. This . . . this is the generation you’re undertaking to educate,” I said.

“You must expect some kind of reaction.”

“It’s been going on for six months now. . . . However, I’m more concerned with the shepherds than with the sheep.”

It was only as the theatres emptied that I appreciated my uncle’s sardonic wisdom in sending me to study “the great movement of men” in the Turf and Stage. The government was then represented by Lord Lingfield, who danced—for exercise rather than pleasure—with Miss Maud Valance, of the Pall Mall Theatre, and by the Right Honourable Wilmot Dean, who refrained from dancing on the principle that a man must learn to walk before he can run and must be in a condition to stand before he can dance. What weight Mr. Dean and Lord Lingfield contributed to cabinet councils I am too ignorant to guess; at the Turf and Stage they demonstrated that ministers, in spite of a nonconformist head, were not killjoys; and those who did not get many chances of hailing convivial privy councillors by their Christian names took the opportunity when it came.

“It’s about twenty-one years since Gladstone died,” I murmured to O’Rane. “It’s ‘new men, new manners’, with a vengeance.”

In strident conversation with Wilmot Dean, I could hear ‘Blob’ Wister roaring the latest of his political creeds. For three months he had won consequence by purchasing in succession the People’s Tribune, the St. Stephen’s Times and the Daily Echo. No one knew whence the money had been collected; no one that I ever met could tell me whence Wister himself sprang. He burst upon London like Sir Philip Saltash, like Wilmot Dean, like a third of the new men inside the government and on its outskirts, in response to the prime minister’s known desire for business talent. I was still watching the unsteady antics of Lingfield, when Sir Philip Saltash himself rose with a well-remembered lurch and bore down on us with the customary unlighted cigar swinging like a semaphore from the one side of his mouth to the other.

“Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer: “You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury and Pitt and all that lot.”

“I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.

“They wouldn’t be in a state to come here! Old Pitt was a rare one for the booze. People don’t change much. You remember the old Limehouse days? Lloyd-George said that an aristocracy was like old cheese; and the aristocracy answered that Lloyd-George was a dirty little Welsh attorney: ‘Oh, how vulgar!,’ you cried. Was that worse than your old Salisbury’s nicknaming Joey Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’?” He looked round with a fuddled but tolerant smile, as a miller might look when his wheel stopped suddenly, at the corner where startling silence had fallen on the conspiratorial, closely grouped heads of Dean, Wister and Lingfield. “The war opened up a place in the sun for people who hadn’t been brought up to your kid-glove ideas of public life.”

The whispering group was joined by Sir Rupert Foreditch, whose chief claim on his country’s gratitude is that he sacrificed the dilatory chance of promotion on the staff in order to race home after Neuve Chapelle and offer himself for a place in the first coalition. It was by an accident of geography rather than through any lack of zeal that others were before him; but he and the group that broke the first war-administration have the comfort of knowing that all decisions at the Dardanelles were postponed till an embarrassed government could decide which of their willing swords must be declined.

“Would you say,” I asked, “that there was a touch of the adventurer about some of them?”

“A man,” enunciated Saltash, “is only an adventurer till he arrives; then he’s a pioneer. Nobody minds new men when they’re like Asquith. Nobody minds rich men when they’re like Derby.” . . .

“For one reason, because the Stanleys don’t drift from one country to another, seeing which they can turn to their own greatest profit.”

Saltash shook his head incredulously:

“Don’t try to pull any stake-in-the-country stuff on me. That’s well enough for your father-in-law. I sat next to old Crawleigh at a city dinner last week; and he didn’t know what to make of things. I did. And I told him. ‘The aristocracy,’ I said, ‘has been swamped by the middle-classes. Well, if the aristocracy couldn’t keep its end up against men like Chamberlain and Asquith and Lloyd-George, it was best out of the way.’ D’you mind if I bring Foreditch over here? He’s just back from Germany; and I want to know how the land lies there.”

I could not repel such a man at a time when my sole function in the Turf and Stage was to study the new leaders in our political life. When I first met Sir Rupert at Oxford, he was an unbending radical; but the 1906 election brought into the world more radical mouths than there was bread to feed, and, when I took my seat, Foreditch was spaciously enthroned in the wastes of opposition. As a hired assassin, his tale of Budget Leaguers’ scalps won him the deputy-leadership of the Die-Hards when the Parliament Bill came to be fought; and, in the Home Rule controversy, he preached rebellion in Ulster with a gusto not exceeded by Mr. Bonar Law, Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith. An incautious declaration that the kaiser could be trusted to save Ulster from a false Hanoverian, as William of Orange had saved her from a perfidious Stuart, kept Foreditch from reaping the reward of his shell-intrigue in 1916; but, if he missed cabinet rank, he achieved a greater position as the unofficial plenipotentiary who was always being sent, with the easy informality introduced by a ‘business’ government, to make overtures and arrange deals. His ambition, I think, was to play the part of Colonel House to Mr. Lloyd-George’s President Wilson: in the last years of the war he was always vanishing mysteriously to Stockholm or Berne; and, two years after this date, I heard that he was visiting, in disguise, the leaders of all the parties in Ireland.

“The present condition of Germany . . .,” he began; but, before I could hear what it was, an unknown woman bustled up to our table and began to make notes for an article which informed the world two days later (1) that anybody who was anybody would be found dining at the Turf and Stage, (2) that “Lucile”—as she confided to her “darling Betty”—had seen good-looking Bobbie Pentyre dancing with Lady Clackmannan’s girl, (3) that Lady Barbara Oakleigh—“Babs Neave, as we must still think of her”—had been at the table next to “Lucile’s” and (4) that her husband would certainly stand again for parliament when opportunity offered. In its slangy pertness and familiarity, the style was the woman; and, as accuracy was less important to the Daily Picture than snappy diction or a knowing air of intimacy, it would have been idle to correct her statements or to reprove her manners. No doubt she had a livelihood to earn; and those who create a demand have to bear as heavy a responsibility as those who furnish the supply. When I had recovered from my first exasperation, I felt that the loud-voiced lady was less to blame than “Blob” Wister, who owned the paper for which she wrote, and the two million readers (the circulation of the Daily Picture was certified by an impeccable firm of chartered accountants) who liked to think of Miss Murchison as “Lady Clackmannan’s girl” and of Lord Pentyre as “Bobbie”. Those who had no chance of seeing for themselves whether he was good-looking must have been grateful to “Lucile” for lifting a corner of the curtain from the world of beauty, rank and fashion.

“Another section of the public you propose to educate,” I told O’Rane.

“And you,” he retorted. “You heard what Sam Dainton said about the state of Paris. Everybody hating everybody else.” . . .

I looked round to make sure that we were not being overheard. Lucien de Grammont, I knew, was somewhere in the room; but I fancied that he was avoiding me.

“That’s only these damned French,” I said. “Instead of thanking us for pulling them out of the mire, they think they won the war single-handed and our job is just to foot the bill. Hang it all, Raney, we spent more money and provided more ammunition than any one else; we raised about five million men; we stayed on to clear the Germans out of France when it was all we could do to keep the French in the war at all; and, when our papers were gushing about the splendid unity, the French government was making us pay rent for the trenches our men occupied to defend their miserable country. They’re the meanest hounds on earth. During the war, one couldn’t say these things . . .”

“Does one do much good by saying them now? The Americans bring pretty much the same charge against us. You’ve an organization, George, and you should make it your business to fight the hatred-epidemic.” . . .

He broke off, as the bland Gaspard presented himself at our table with the announcement that a lady was waiting outside. When I read Yolande Manisty’s name, I guessed that Raymond Stornaway was worse; when I met her, I knew—without being told—that he was dead. As I came back to the blaze and blare of the dining-room, I felt that this was my first contact with reality that night. The financiers and wire-pullers and propagandists, the glittering corps de ballet, the punctual scribe who chronicled their movements, all belonged to a world of masquerade. I cannot say what lesson Bertrand had sent me there to learn; the lesson which I carried away was a doubt—the first since 1914—of victory.

I drove O’Rane to his house in Westminster and left him to think over Yolande Manisty’s message. By the terms of her uncle’s will, he had—for better or for worse—inherited unconditionally an estate of more than twenty million pounds.