"Otherwise you get no food," as my barbarian young cousin, Greville Hunter-Oakleigh, confessed to me one night at the Monagasc Minister's ball in Grosvenor Gardens. He had danced dutifully with "all the right people," and was now going on with Violet, Summertown and two brother officers in search of supper. Greville and Violet had been invited; Summertown issued invitations to the others on the principle that hostesses were always glad of a few extra men.
"You're so damned William-and-Maryish," he complained, when I refused to come without a card. "If you won't, you won't, but they're frightfully rich and they'll do you awfully well. So long. We shall be back in a couple of hours."
He hurried away, and I set myself to protect my sister Beryl from Lady Ullswater, who was marking her down as a new-comer and angling for the privilege of chaperoning her. Before our ball took place I had an offer of the whole Brigade from John Ashwell, but we thought it would be amusing to make our own arrangements. A number of people strayed in without being asked, but this was in some sense balanced by our being able to refuse invitations to a host of Erckmann's protégés.
Erckmann himself—Sir Adolf, as he became—we were compelled to invite out of compliment to Lady Dainton. For some time her husband had been observable at the Eclectic Club, lunching with Erckmann and consuming an amount of champagne and Corona cigars that argued business discussion. There followed an issue of new companies with the name of Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., M.P., on the prospectus; later I met Erckmann at dinner in Rutland Gate; later still the Daintons took a moor. It was one of those rare business associations in which everyone secured what he wanted. I myself, a mere private in a stage army, was invited to join a party for Ober-Ammergau, and, if I declined to witness a Passion Play in Erckmann's company, my refusal was prompted less by social prejudice than by superstitious scruple.
At first I was mildly surprised to find the Daintons so much in public so soon after Sonia's engagement had been broken off; but the longer I lived in London the more people I found skirmishing to get away from other people and on one occasion in Coronation week, I remember seeing Loring, Crabtree, O'Rane and Sonia under the same roof. In practice, however, they kept apart without undue contrivance. Crabtree became engaged at this time to Mrs. Pauncefote, widow of the Staffordshire brewer and a woman some eleven years his senior; he was now in a position to woo the electors of the Brinton Division, and little was seen of him in London. O'Rane, on the rare occasions when I met him hurrying to or from the Continent, diving into the Conservative Central Office or disappearing into the industrial north, maintained an attitude of mystery and would tell me nothing of his movements. He was incessantly restless and as self-absorbed as ever, but the lines of his old, clear-cut scheme of life had lost something of their sharpness. His breach with the past seemed almost complete, marked in black and white—or so I fancied—by a letter I had given him to read twelve months before at the Charing Cross Hotel. At the end of the season he and Sonia met at the Embassy Ball; they bowed and passed on. Then his eyes sought mine as though wondering what were my thoughts. I made some comment on her dress; he made no answering comment at all.
As for Loring, I hardly saw him from the spring of 1911, when he hurried abroad, to the spring of 1914, when he returned. As a matter of form he came back for the Coronation, but did not stay an hour more than was necessary. Summertown, never a veracious chronicler, worked up a picturesque story of the yacht moored by Hungerford Bridge, and its owner changing out of his robes as he drove down the Embankment and dropping his coronet into the river in his haste to get away from England. I have but a confused idea where he went during those three years, and the question is immaterial. The important thing is that he was absent from London at a time when London was almost oppressively full of Sonia Dainton.
She was on the defensive when we first met, as though expecting me to blame her for the broken engagement. When, as was natural, I said nothing, she developed a curious recklessness and gave me to understand that, whosever the fault, she did not care a snap of the fingers for the consequences. It was partly pose, I think, and partly a very modern refusal to allow her feelings to be stirred below the surface, partly also the manner and spirit of her surroundings. I always fancy I saw a change in her from the day when Lady Dainton relaxed her social severity and opened her doors to Erckmann and his cortège. With her catchwords, her volubility and over-ready laugh, something of hysteria seemed to have crept into her life. Whatever the entertainment, she was among the first to arrive and the last to go, dancing hard, supping heartily, talking incessantly, laughing gustily and smoking with fine abandon. Hourly new excitement, prostration, forgetfulness—that seemed the formula.
"What happens on Sundays, Sonia?" I once asked her, when we met for supper and a discussion of our day's work.
"I take laudanum," was the answer.
It was true in spirit; it may even have been true in fact. I was often reminded of a chorus girl I once saw in undergraduate days at a Covent Garden Ball, whirling through the night—like Sonia—from one till three, and at four o'clock lying asleep in a box with her cheek on her arm, oblivious and—I hope—happy; in any case too weary to dream what the future might hold. Looking back on the four years of carnival that ended with the war, I seem to find in Sonia the embodiment of the age's spirit.