"You'd better get Mrs. O'Rane to bring Beresford," I said. "I hardly know him."
"Someone must get hold of him before it's too late," Lady Maitland continued gravely, and I could see that he was going to be adopted, whether he liked it or not. "I hear he's got great ability, and it's all misdirected."
"I'd never heard of him before," I confessed. "But then I don't read modern poetry."
"I heard of him from our host—this is between ourselves, of course—; there was some question of prosecuting him again for one of his pamphlets." She raised her voice to demand confirmation of Grayle, but he would only shake his head rather irritably at her want of discretion and say that it was not in the province of his department. "I must talk to dear Sonia about him," she went on, "and we'll arrange a little meeting."
Not only have I led promising statesmen by the hand, I have myself of late been alternately schooled and courted in a way that was hardly known to me before the war. It is partly due, I suppose, to the suspended animation of the Caucus, partly to the increased number of groups and their social backers. As Lady Maitland convoyed the other women to the drawing-room, Grayle threw his sound leg across the shattered knee and told me he was not at all satisfied about our reinforcements. At that, after but five weeks in England, I knew what was coming. Guy Bannerman, with the deep, baying voice of a hound, supplied the dwindling figures of the daily returns, I criticised the waste of resources in men and ships on secondary fields of war, Grayle opined that the country would never appreciate that it was at war until every man was mobilised in the field, the shipyard or the shop, and Maitland took the safe but irritating and unhelpful line that Kitchener knew what he was about and that we must leave it to him.
I preferred to move away and talk to young Lane about his new play, but Grayle quickly recalled me with an exhortation to join him and his friends in their effort to galvanise the Government to action. It was the first of a long series of appeals which terminated a year later with the unblushing bribe of an office which I had as little fitness or right to receive as Grayle to offer. I was content to take refuge in Maitland's advice to leave it to the Government (alternatively to "trust the P. M."; a surprising political retrogression for a man of his antecedents), only adding that one Government should not have to shoulder single responsibility for the joint blunders of all the Allies.
"It's something to cut your losses," said Grayle shortly and with an air of disappointment, "to drop a mistaken policy when it's proved to be mistaken. That's what I want to see done; and that's what this gang of yours won't do. You watch out; France and Russia will make a separate peace, if we don't pull our weight. Let's come up-stairs."
On entering the drawing-room, Guy Bannerman strolled to the fire and entered into conversation with Lady Barbara Neave. Left with a choice of Lady Maitland and Mrs. O'Rane, Grayle pulled up a chair beside Lady Maitland, while Mrs. O'Rane looked at him like a chess-player considering his opponent's last move and then smilingly made room for me on the sofa by her side.
"I thought you were never coming up," she said. "I'm going in a minute, but Lady Maitland tells me she wants to meet Peter, and I waited to find out if you'd come, too. Any day next week."
"I shall be delighted," I said. "Friday's my only free night."