IV
To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately—as it seemed—we were busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.
One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some realization of the gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.
The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted, and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death. Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us. After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.
At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men, who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent, returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old party" would be invited, we accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us, and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.
I remember—though it is a petty enough thing to recall—rather resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked—a set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality—Turkish coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan maté, Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless apéritif unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that the plaster casts were hidden.
Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption. He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life, relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office before they were restored to their family.
On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me. In the absence of her husband she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.
"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."
So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.