Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues, what—if anything—the Disarmament League had achieved for all its pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts' national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries. Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.
Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand years of Christian teaching.
But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910. When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of strenuous goodwill.
The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.
It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera, only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations. We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in very truth be dead.
And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.
"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."
III
"If you tell me the little man's been writing to you," were Loring's first words, "I'm afraid I shan't believe you."
I helped him to take his coat off and led the way into the dining-room.