"Parliament before everything else," my uncle had said. With debates and committees, dinners and intrigues, great Liberal receptions and levees, I had time for nothing else. No schoolboy counted the days to the end of term more eagerly than I did as we came in sight of August.
II
As the session drew to a close I gave a dinner-party at the House to the Lorings, Daintons, Farwells and one or two more. Truth to tell, I gave many dinners in the early days when it was still a pleasure to leap up between courses for a division. I almost liked to be called away from the "Eclectic" by an urgent telephone summons, and the joy of being saluted by the police in Palace Yard, or asked whether anything was happening in the House, died hard. I was six-and-twenty at the time, and it amused me to be buttonholed by the inveterate log-rollers of the Lobby or pumped by pressmen as I emerged from a secret meeting of intrigue in one of the Committee Rooms.
Loring had dined informally with me on many occasions—to examine the personnel of the Liberal party, he said, and classify those members who had stood for a bet or to improve their practice or acquire copy for their next novel. He became an assiduous attendant in the House of Lords as soon as we had any measures to send there, but in the early days he lived a butterfly life, and one of the conditions of my invitations was that he should give me news of that old world from which I was now cut off. Roger Dainton had lost his seat in the great landslide, and I had seen nothing of the family since the previous autumn. He was one of many, and so much had my uncle filled me with vicarious enthusiasm for political life, that I refused an invitation to Crowley Court in order to enter for the Parliamentary Golf Handicap, wherein Robert Plumer defeated me in the first round in comfortable time to return and argue a case before the Privy Council, while I dawdled on in contemplation of a game I dislike playing and loathe watching.
My dinner opened promisingly, as Lady Dainton was recognized by two Ministers on the way to the Harcourt Room and by a third as we took our seats. Summertown, I recollect, was in disgrace, as he had the previous week bade lasting farewell to his College in consequence of riding a motor-bicycle round the Quad, and half-way up the staircase of one of the Censors at six o'clock in the morning after the Bullingdon Ball. He had, however, won a pair of gloves from Sonia for his trouble. I contrived to separate him from his mother, and he underwent no worse punishment than hearing his future discussed at the top of three penetrating voices. Lady Marlyn assumed the world to be as deaf as herself, and I could see poor Sally Farwell blushing as her mother pierced and overcame the murmur of the surrounding tables. "A regular good-for-nothing scamp, Mr. Oakleigh. I want to send him abroad, but I wouldn't trust him alone. Do you think your nice friend Mr. O'Rane would care about the responsibility again? You know there was dreadful trouble with Jack over an Italian girl in New York."
I hastened to assure her that O'Rane would greedily accept the offer. I would myself have thrown up my seat and escorted Summertown round the world in person rather than have his indiscretions with the Italian girl shouted through the echoing dining-room.
"Has anyone seen anything of O'Rane?" I asked Sonia in the course of dinner.
"He was at Commem.," she answered. "Sam made up a party with Lord Summertown and David and a few more."
"It must have been quite like old times," I said, recalling Sonia's first and my last appearance at a Commemoration Ball.