The Smoking Room, which—like the rest of London—moved in a regular cycle of elation and depression, optimism and despair, was in deep gloom my first night. The recruiting-figures were shrinking daily, we could look for no help from America and what Lady Maitland called "that Man Wilson's 'too proud to fight' nonsense." Warsaw had just fallen, and Russian Poland lay at the mercy of the enemy; earlier in the week, too, we had experienced our first Zeppelin raid and, while it was easy to count the casualties and demonstrate the 700,000 to 1 odds against any one of us being killed, we felt that something remained to be done and that these birds of death, however exciting to watch, should not be allowed to fly to and fro at will, hover their destructive hour and depart unscathed.
As I can do nothing with criticism which is afraid to materialise into action, I decided to leave the House early and, being at a loose end, to pay my promised call at "The Sanctuary." The fact that I had let a month go by without discovering my host's name disturbed me little in a house where so much was taken for granted, and I boldly pushed open the door, as I had been bidden, and looked into the long, warm room. By firelight it seemed empty at first; then I heard voices and saw the disabled agitator sitting on a sofa with his leg up, talking to the girl whom I had seen on my last visit. As I hesitated by the door, she jumped up and made me welcome.
"Leg not right yet, then?" I said, as I joined them by the sofa. "By the way, my name's Raymond Stornaway."
"Mine's Hilda Merryon," said the girl at once.
I had not had much opportunity of observing her before, but I saw now that she was young and slight, with black hair and very pale, regular features. She had in her manner, too, something scornful which I found immediately antagonistic.
"Oh, I shall be here for weeks," said the young agitator, "if they'll keep me. We're tuberculous as a family, and the knee will probably turn out tuberculous. I'm Peter Beresford."
My niece Yolande, who buys all modern poetry that she can find, tells me that I ought to have been certainly the wiser and perhaps the more impressed by this information; and, if I had spent the last year in England instead of abroad, I might very well have read of Beresford's escapades with the police. Various people have from time to time contributed fragments of his biography. I believe that he started as the dreamy and eccentric son of a Lincolnshire family and that on leaving school he had betaken himself to Moscow on a self-conscious literary holiday. Once there, he refused to come back. The sombre, intoxicating magic of Dostoevski had drawn him, Russia laid her spell upon him; and, when funds from home were cut off, he starved and feasted, worked and slumbered for two years, until the woman with whom he was living forsook him. A violent reaction sent him to Cambridge, a strangely experienced and natively rebellious freshman, for he had written poetry and abandoned it, read medicine and abandoned it, mixed in revolutionary society and drifted under a haunting police surveillance which only relaxed when powerful friends urged his reluctant steps homeward.
"No more public meetings for the present, then," I said.
Anyone may call the words fatuous, but they were harmless and not ill-natured. I quote them because of their effect in lashing Beresford to a passion only describable as insane. I have never met anyone who knew him as a boy, I cannot say whether he was naturally neurotic or whether too early acquaintance with oppression had warped his mind, but I saw a good deal of him between this night and our last meeting and I have consistently felt from the moment of this encounter that he was separated from certifiable madness by a hair's breadth. He had all the suspicion, the sudden fury, the courage and the obstinacy of fanaticism, the whole streaked with morbidity. We talked long that night, and every chapter of his Russian Odyssey ended with the refrain "Alone of the beasts man delights in torturing his fellows;" yet, when he described a meeting in Petersburg being broken up by a charge of Cossacks, I could have sworn that there was gloating in his tale of casualties, as with a man who will pay money to stare at physical deformity. Against this, his hatred of oppression was rooted in a poet's love of beauty. His quarrel with society in peace was that it made man a soul-stunted slave and the countryside an industrial ash-heap, in war that it made him a disembowelled and screaming reproach of the Maker who fashioned him in His image. Beresford had a sense of colour, form and sound which a man will never know unless he be born with it. Again and again it came out in his descriptions. And then I remember his making a sarcastic and grotesquely ineffectual speech to a knot of drunken loafers.
"Do you feel that the sort of thing you were saying the other night does much good?" I persisted, as he glared at me, breathing quickly.