"Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one of this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views and habits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement, the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinous sources."

H. G. Wells, "An Englishman Looks at the World."

I

"England has had her Long Parliament and her Short Parliament. On my soul, George, I don't know that this won't deserve to be called the 'Mad Parliament.'"

The speaker was my uncle, the time a few weeks after the beginning of the 1906 Session, the place a corner-seat below the gangway. We had survived the oratorical flood of the debate on the Address and were settling down to work. The giant Liberal majority, "independent of the Irish," as we used to boast in those days, but discreetly respectful to the disturbingly large Labour contingent, was finding its sea-legs; new members no longer prefaced their exordia with a "Mister Chairman and Gentlemen," and the lies and counter-lies of the Election, the sectional mandates from the electors and the specific pledges to constituents were gradually ceasing to be rehearsed in public. We passed crushing votes of confidence in the Free Trade system, arranged the evacuation of the Rand by the Chinese coolies, ascertained that the parliamentary draughtsmen were wasting no time over our Education and Licensing Bills,—and lay back with a yawn to luxuriate in our own strength, and dream of the new England we were calling into existence.

For a time our work was negative. After twenty years of misrule we had to cleanse the country before we could begin our inspired task, and in those early weeks I voted correctly and spent the rest of my day looking round me and attempting to memorize the new faces. The Treasury Bench needed no learning. I had met some of the Ministers in Princes Gardens and knew the rest by sight, but I gazed at it more than at any other part of the House—in a spirit of hero-worship, I suppose, on being brought into working partnership with men I had idealized for fifteen years.

In ability it was a great Ministry, and after nearly ten years I have much the same feeling for its leading members as before: the same love for 'C.-B.,' most human, diplomatic and forgiving of men; the same reverence for the aloof, austere Sir Edward Grey with his Bunyanesque Saxon speech and aura of Arthurian romance; the same admiration for the boundless intellectual efficiency of Mr. Haldane and Mr. Asquith; and the same delighted uncertainty in watching the volatile, lambent fire of Mr. Lloyd George's genius. In the delicate work of Cabinet-making, the deft fingers of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman hardly slipped, and to a Liberal Leaguer like myself the result was a brilliant compromise. The head and legs, the Prime Minister and the lesser office-holders, were Radicals of the Dispersion; the body was made up of Liberal Imperialists who, by sheer weight of intellect and personal authority, might be expected to control the movements of the extremities.

Yet, when the history of the 1906 Parliament comes to be written, the one thing stranger than the capture of the Cabinet by the Liberal League will be the capture of the Liberal League by the unofficial members. The House was overwhelmingly Radical and Nonconformist: it closed its ears to the wider Imperialism, and in 'Liberal League' saw but 'Whig Party' writ large. The result was hardly fortunate. Rather than surrender principle or power, the Whigs went to work underground, systematically corrupting the Radical majority in the House in the brief intervals of misleading the Radical majority in the Cabinet. Perhaps it was invincible necessity that demanded it, perhaps the Whig section showed the higher statesmanship in committing Democracy to a course it might not have taken without blinkers. I say no more than that it was unfortunate in its effect on the House and precarious as a policy on which life and death depended. Which Ministers knew what they were fighting for or against in the Big-and-Little-Navy struggle? Would the House have yawned so impatiently through the Army debates and the formation of the Expeditionary Force if it had known the Government's continental engagements? Was it safe to assume that a great pacific party would declare war within a few hours of learning the promises made in its name?

It was dangerous, but my purpose is not to arraign Ministers. Their double life is now only of interest to me as explaining in some measure the sterility of that monster majority at which I gazed in exultant wonder during my first session, explaining, too, the failure of that Mad Parliament which looked on life through the rose-tinted sunset haze of a "Back-to-the-Land" campaign and concentrated all political justice within the outer cover of a Plural Voting Bill. By counting heads, we were so powerful—and we did so little for all the Utopias we foreshadowed in our pulsing perorations.

"A Mad Parliament, George," my uncle repeated, "but a devilish funny one. We're made all ready to reverse the Tory measures of the last four or five years. Now, if you watch, you'll see the poor relations coming hat in hand to the mandarins."

I watched for some time, inside the House and out; watched and saw the Nationalists—hardly hat in hand—rejecting the Irish Councils Bill and calling for payment in Home Rule currency. I saw the Labour Party fed first with the Trades Disputes Bill, then with the provision for payment of members; and I saw the Welsh mollified with a promise of Disestablishment. It was to everybody's advantage that the Government should not be wound up till the preference shareholders had been paid, and as the last half-year's interest became due the commercial travellers of the Cabinet started on the road with social reform samples—old age pensions, land taxation, small holdings and insurance. The Radical Ministers were good salesmen and did a roaring trade; the country settled down to a riot of social legislation; the very board of Whig directors caught something of the infectious enthusiasm, and, as it was too late to talk of foreign debenture holders, the least they could do was to increase their outlay to attract new customers.

There was tragi-comedy in the spectacle, for the board and its travellers never worked in harmony, and neither section of supporters was satisfied. There was no attempt at comprehensive, imaginative social reconstruction—nothing but successive sops of clamorous minorities. Of my Thursday Club programme—with its Poor Law and Housing Reforms, its Secular Education and Federal Parliament, above all with its determined attempts to solve the Wage Problem and free the industrial system from the scandal and crime of strikes and lock-outs, not one item was achieved. Not one item had a chance of being achieved when the contest with the Lords was postponed beyond the rejection of the first Liberal Bill. But the debts had not then been paid. Street hoardings still bore tattered remnants of fluttering election posters, the Liberals had been out of office for half a generation, and the Whig foreign policy was barely begun.

So the party shirked the election, its groups scrambled for favours from the Government, and Ministers talked social reform, universal brotherhood and a "naval holiday" to a House they were afraid to take into their confidence. The 1906 Parliament might have produced a social programme or a foreign policy with the backing its conditions necessitated. It did neither. No one troubled to educate new members or organize the party. It was chiefly, I think, the number of groups, the strangeness of their visions and their common failure to recognize the impossible in politics, that moved my uncle to speak of the Mad Parliament. I am not so vain as to think the "Thursday Programme" wrote the last word in political science; I do claim, however, that as a piece of co-ordinated, imaginative thinking it treated the State as a whole, not as a bundle of warring sections to be divided and ruled, bribed and silenced. It attempted to bring the machinery of government into line with twentieth-century requirements. It tried to carry out, at leisure and in a spirit of reason, the structural changes that will have to be hurriedly improvised after the war.

By the time I had learned the names and constituencies of two-thirds of the members I had begun to notice how individuals agglomerated in the Smoking-Room and lobbies. The only characteristic common to every group was that it imagined itself the apostle of an exclusive salvation. The "Thursday Party" was reproduced a dozen times over, and, in looking back sadly on the futility of all our empty dreams, I feel that the Whips' Office must be held responsible for wasting the greatest opportunity of reform since the French Revolution. So long as we voted obediently, nothing mattered. We were never welded into a party, never educated politically; and the waste of enthusiasm was hardly less criminal than the waste of talent.

I can speak impersonally in this matter, for no one dreamed of thinking me fit for the most insignificant office—myself least of all; but there was no justification for ignoring great commercial organizers like Barrow, Trentley, Justman and half a dozen more—men whose ability had been proved time and again—and farming out under-secretaryships to fashionable barristers like Turkinson or scions of great houses like Cheely-Wickham. One of the first groups I distinguished was that of the middle-aged successful business men for whom no use could be found save as units in a division.

Another and a sadder was the largest in the House—the stalwarts, the 'sound party men.' Under present conditions no Government could live without them; they know it, and in that knowledge find two-thirds of their reward. The remainder comes by way of knighthoods—after a year or two of power it was impossible to walk through the lobby without being jostled by knights—occasionally by a Privy Councillorship and always by a sense of personal importance. How they loved to repeat what the Prime Minister had said to them—man to man! How infallible was the Liberal Ministry, whatever its inconsistencies! How treacherous their opponents! The Liberal rank and filer, I suppose, is no more stupid than his counterpart on the other side, but he is as depressing in conversation as might be expected of a man unoriginal in thought and uncritical in mind, whose supreme function is vehemently to propagate the imperfectly grasped ideas of others. I require no more loyal supporter than the Right Honourable Harry Marshall-James or the hundred men who are Marshall-James in everything but name; but I am not likely to find a man more pompous of manner and mediocre of mind.

And he is one of inimitably many, for the Ministry discouraged ability outside the Treasury Bench, finding distant appointments for the men it could not swallow at home. "No Army," as Jellaby, one of the Junior Whips, told me, "can be composed entirely of field-marshals." In his place I should have said the same thing: undoubtedly the same thought was felt, if never expressed, in the Nationalist party, so alien in spirit that I never knew the half of its members' names.

"I've sat opposite or alongside them many years," said my uncle reflectively. "I've seen the hair of so many of them turn gradually whiter. Some of them are elderly men, George; if Home Rule doesn't come in their time.... And there are still people who call them paid agitators; the Sinn Fein party still pretends they're prolonging the agony in order to keep their job. Ye gods! how sick of it all they must be! There are men on those benches—barristers and writers—who could have made the world their own. What d'you suppose they wouldn't give now to have their youth back—and their youth's opportunities? You may live to see the tragedy repeated with Labour."

He pointed with his finger to a group of three men high up on a back bench—Dillworth, Champion and Tomlin. I had heard the first two in the debate on the Address, and the last I was to hear many times before I left the House. They represented the Socialist State, and for passion, logic and incorruptibility ran the Nationalists close. As the Session aged, nine-tenths of the new members were unconsciously affected by the moral atmosphere of the House; compromise dulled the fine edge of our convictions, our constant close proximity to the Opposition mellowed our spirit; and a recognition of personal traits, the utterance of feeble, obscure, friendly jokes induced the belief that our worst enemy was fool rather than knave. The intransigeant Socialists kept their souls untainted by compromise; for them there was no dealing with Liberal or Conservative, and, when Tomlin spoke on Labour questions, you could imagine a Socialist foot-rule in his hand by which every reform was to be measured.

I disapprove the Socialist State he expounded, I dispute his premises and charge him with possessing the same excessive logic which led primitive ascetics to inch-by-inch suicide or drove doctrinaires of the French Revolution to destroy church spires in the interests of Republican equality. But I admire his passion of soul and intensity of vision; I recognize that his group of idealogues at least appreciated that the perfect State presupposes an all-embracing social philosophy.

There are few more moving sights than a preacher without a congregation, or with one that is incapable of understanding. St. Francis of Assisi won warmer response from his birds than Campion or Dillworth from the 1906 Parliament. Their audience numbered too many barristers, and the Bar has never been famous for its imagination or sympathy. Socialism, as offered by Campion and accepted by, say, Robert Plumer, K.C., suggested the form that the Sermon on the Mount might assume in the hands of an efficient parliamentary draughtsman. The Socialists were not slow to appraise their critics, and I sometimes think a great part of the later industrial troubles rose from a belief that laws and agreements were framed by skilled hair-splitters for the confusion of trusting manual workers.

The belief was fostered by the Press and a generous use of the "lawyer-politician" catchword. I have never been associated with the law, but I had opportunities of studying my legal colleagues in bulk, and a sillier phrase never obsessed the mind of a considerable people. Granted that the Bar was of arid, unimaginative temper, granted that it invaded the House for what the House could give it, may not the same charge be brought against seven-tenths of the non-legal members? And pressmen and barristers alone seem to enjoy the faculty of assimilating huge masses of strange matter in short time.

The Bar in Parliament appeared at its worst, not in the Chamber but in the Smoking-Room. I remember my uncle taking me aside after my election and counselling me as though I were a younger brother going to school for the first time. I was to sit tight until I had learned the procedure of the House, and after that—well, any man of average intelligence who wore out his patience and his trousers for ten years would be in the Ministry at the end. I was to put parliament before everything else and shed any idea that I could write novels between divisions, or contribute to the Press, or live with one foot in the House and the other in Mayfair. I was to cultivate the personal touch and read Ronsard for the pleasure of quoting him to Mr. Windham. But first and last and all the while I was to avoid the Smoking-Room.

"It's the grave of young reputations, George," he told me one day when we were seated there in a corner consecrated immemorially to his private use. "You sit and talk about what you're going to do, you discuss your neighbors,—this comes well from me, I know, but I'm an old sinner with a wasted life, and you're still a boy,—you shuffle jobs and appointments everlastingly, and in the meantime Ministers never see you, you learn nothing and you're always a day late for your opportunities. Remember that there's never any warning in the House, George. You'll get a dozen chances of winning your spurs, but only by sitting, sitting, sitting in your place when other people have gone away to dinner. Leave the Smoking-Room alone, my boy."

So for one session I followed his advice. After two hours in the "grave of young reputations" I returned to my corner seat, leaving a knot of barristers to cast lots for the vacant Harleyridge recordership, leaving my uncle, too, to watch the great movement of men. My sense of duty was so shortlived that I may be pardoned for dwelling on it and saying that the Smoking-Room is the most interesting place in the House. A year or two later, when I appreciated the wonderful mandarinesque inaccessibility of the Cabinet and saw how little the private member was wanted anywhere but in the division lobbies, I hurried away to places where at the least a man could smoke and talk.

The change was not ennobling but it gave infinitely more varied food for thought. I watched the social levelling-up of Radicalism and saw stern, unbending Nonconformists honoured and decorated for all the world like Tory supporters of the Establishment. At one time Baxter-Whittingham, looking strangely like a famished undertaker in his loose, half-clerical clothes, had criticized the Government as persistently as Campion or Dillworth; his mind stored with the memory of working-class conditions in Shadwell, his voice throbbing with indignation and pity, he had arraigned a Ministry that wasted days on the Address and hours on the obsolete circumlocutions of "Honourable and gallant members," "Mr. Speaker, I venture to say—and I do not think the most captious critic will contradict me ...," while men starved and women trod the path of shame, while little children went barefoot and verminous.

The silent fortitude of the Treasury Bench under his attacks was a thing to mark and remember. "It amuses him and doesn't hurt us," said my friend Jellaby, the Whip. "So long as he votes...." And Baxter-Whittingham never divided the House against the Government. Once when the Feeding of School Children Bill was in Committee he became dangerous: the Treasury Bench was deserted, and he lavished fine irony on the Ministerial passion for reform. Free-lances and others who had entrusted their social consciences to Whittingham, or were nettled by the intolerable aloofness of Ministers, followed in the same strain, and an excited Whip drove me out of the tea-room and bade me hold myself in readiness for trouble.

The following day the smoking-room presented a strange appearance. Seven members of the Cabinet and four lesser Ministers mingled with the common herd—like naughty schoolboys propitiating a ruffled master. They cracked jokes and slapped us on the back, bade us take pot-luck with them, and asked how things were looking in our constituencies. I lunched with a Secretary of State that day and, to redress the balance, kept my promise to dine with Sir Gerald Matley, the Wesleyan potter and Liberal knight. We were given a wonderful dinner, starting with caviar and ending with cigars like office-rulers, which we were urged to pocket, six at a time, to smoke on the way home. Flushed and rebellious, Philip drunk swore to move the adjournment unless he got a promise of warmer support for the School Children Bill. Philip sober was a shade less valiant. Matley and I, alone of that heroic cave, kept to our undertaking, and our fellow-braves avoided the House for a couple of days. The Treasury Bench smiled a little contemptuously as we proceeded to the Orders of the Day, but the lesson was not entirely thrown away. When the Minimum Wage Appeal Board was set up, Baxter-Whittingham (and who more fit?) was appointed Controller at a salary of £1250 a year, and Shadwell and the House of Commons knew him no more.

"Parliament before everything else," my uncle had said. With debates and committees, dinners and intrigues, great Liberal receptions and levees, I had time for nothing else. No schoolboy counted the days to the end of term more eagerly than I did as we came in sight of August.

II

As the session drew to a close I gave a dinner-party at the House to the Lorings, Daintons, Farwells and one or two more. Truth to tell, I gave many dinners in the early days when it was still a pleasure to leap up between courses for a division. I almost liked to be called away from the "Eclectic" by an urgent telephone summons, and the joy of being saluted by the police in Palace Yard, or asked whether anything was happening in the House, died hard. I was six-and-twenty at the time, and it amused me to be buttonholed by the inveterate log-rollers of the Lobby or pumped by pressmen as I emerged from a secret meeting of intrigue in one of the Committee Rooms.

Loring had dined informally with me on many occasions—to examine the personnel of the Liberal party, he said, and classify those members who had stood for a bet or to improve their practice or acquire copy for their next novel. He became an assiduous attendant in the House of Lords as soon as we had any measures to send there, but in the early days he lived a butterfly life, and one of the conditions of my invitations was that he should give me news of that old world from which I was now cut off. Roger Dainton had lost his seat in the great landslide, and I had seen nothing of the family since the previous autumn. He was one of many, and so much had my uncle filled me with vicarious enthusiasm for political life, that I refused an invitation to Crowley Court in order to enter for the Parliamentary Golf Handicap, wherein Robert Plumer defeated me in the first round in comfortable time to return and argue a case before the Privy Council, while I dawdled on in contemplation of a game I dislike playing and loathe watching.

My dinner opened promisingly, as Lady Dainton was recognized by two Ministers on the way to the Harcourt Room and by a third as we took our seats. Summertown, I recollect, was in disgrace, as he had the previous week bade lasting farewell to his College in consequence of riding a motor-bicycle round the Quad, and half-way up the staircase of one of the Censors at six o'clock in the morning after the Bullingdon Ball. He had, however, won a pair of gloves from Sonia for his trouble. I contrived to separate him from his mother, and he underwent no worse punishment than hearing his future discussed at the top of three penetrating voices. Lady Marlyn assumed the world to be as deaf as herself, and I could see poor Sally Farwell blushing as her mother pierced and overcame the murmur of the surrounding tables. "A regular good-for-nothing scamp, Mr. Oakleigh. I want to send him abroad, but I wouldn't trust him alone. Do you think your nice friend Mr. O'Rane would care about the responsibility again? You know there was dreadful trouble with Jack over an Italian girl in New York."

I hastened to assure her that O'Rane would greedily accept the offer. I would myself have thrown up my seat and escorted Summertown round the world in person rather than have his indiscretions with the Italian girl shouted through the echoing dining-room.

"Has anyone seen anything of O'Rane?" I asked Sonia in the course of dinner.

"He was at Commem.," she answered. "Sam made up a party with Lord Summertown and David and a few more."

"It must have been quite like old times," I said, recalling Sonia's first and my last appearance at a Commemoration Ball.

"We fought like cats," she replied. "Tony Crabtree——"

"You didn't tell me he was of the party," I interrupted. Possibly there was more in my tone than in the words used.

"Why not?" Sonia asked, her big brown eyes filled with simple wonder. "You surely aren't still thinking of that absurd affair in Scotland?"

"What absurd affair?" I asked.

"You know perfectly well what I mean."

"I didn't know it was a matter of public discussion," I said.

"But it was the sort of thing that might have happened to anyone," she protested. "Of course at first ..." Her little white shoulders raised themselves almost imperceptibly. "But we've been meeting on and off all the season; we couldn't stand and glare, and it was much easier to be friends. We soon made it up, and he's been to stay with us in Hampshire. Well, I got Sam to take him up for Commem., and David must needs fight with him about something. I didn't mind, I'm not Tony's keeper, but David was so full of righteous indignation that I found him very dull. There was a sort of 'it-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you' reproachful look about him, so that in desperation I just asked him if he didn't love me any more."

"You're utterly soulless, Sonia," I observed, by way of gratifying her.

Her eyes shone with mischievous delight.

"His very words! Men are wonderfully unoriginal. I just leant forward and kissed him on his eyelids—it's all right!" she exclaimed; "he insists that we're morally engaged—and whenever I do that he simply crumples up. It's rude to look quite so surprised, George."

"And yet your people are quite respectable," I said thoughtfully.

She shook her head and sighed.

"You've become dreadfully proper and old-fashioned, George," she told me, "since you got into this musty old House. You're almost as bad as David, without the excuse of caring a snap of the fingers for me. He lectured me and lectured me, but when it was over he wanted to dash away and spend his life in a moorland cottage with me, sins and all."

"That temptation, at least, you had the fortitude to resist," I said.

She wrinkled her nose and pouted. "Me no likee. There are such millions of things I simply can't do without, and David can't give them me, and if he could he wouldn't. He is so serious, poor lamb! And it's always about the wrong things. After all, George, what does matter in life? It's frightfully serious to be ugly, or grow old, or not to know how to dress—I'm all right there at present, and perhaps I shan't mind when the time comes and I get all skinny and lined. It'll be frightfully serious if Lady Knightrider doesn't ask me up for the Northern Meeting, or if Daddy doesn't raise my allowance—I told you I was broke, didn't I? Well, I am. In the meantime——" She broke off and hummed two bars of a waltz. "Life is good, George."

"We were discussing Raney," I reminded her.

"Were we? I'd forgotten about him."

"It is an old habit of yours. What part does he play in your tragedy?"

"Tragedy?" she echoed, not altogether displeased at the choice of word.

"It'll be a tragedy before you've played it out," I told her.

She was quite thoughtful for a moment or two, and when she spoke again I could see her discretion obviously declining a challenge that her curiosity longed to take up.

"David's perfectly free to do whatever he likes," she answered, a shade combatively. "I'm not going to decide anything for the present; life's far too much fun, and we've got all eternity before us. He's in no hurry either."

"I thought he was in treaty for that moorland cottage," I said.

"Oh, that was merely a passing brain-storm. I told him the life I was leading, and he thought it over and decided to let me have my fling—so considerate of him!—and when I'm tired of vanities, if neither of us has found anyone better and either of us has got any money, v'lÀ tout!"

With an exquisite wave of her hand she dismissed the subject and invited me to admire her dress, which was more transparent than most but otherwise not remarkable.

"Why don't you both have the honesty to admit you've made a mistake?" I asked.

"It amuses him," said Sonia tolerantly.

"And you?"

She gazed across the room with her head on one side.

"And you, Sonia?" I repeated.

"I'll tell you some day," she promised, and with that the subject finally dropped.

I wrote that day to Oxford—knowing no other address—to ask O'Rane to stay with me in Ireland. After considerable delay and the dispatch of a reply-paid telegram I received an answer dated from Melton.

"My dear George," it ran—and I preserve it as the only letter I ever received from the world's worst correspondent—"many thanks. Delighted to come. Villiers has gone under temporarily with rheumatic fever, contracted by sitting on wet grass to watch his house being defeated in the Championship; I am knocking the Under Sixth into shape in his absence. I have achieved considerable popularity with the boys, and Burgess would like to keep me in perpetuity. It's not bad fun. Some of the kids who fagged for me in Matheson's are now grown men, about five times the size of me. As I haven't got a degree yet, of course I'm not entitled to wear a gown, and the lads despise me accordingly. Burgess, seen at close quarters as a colleague, is even greater than I thought. I have gathered from him and the common-room some hideous stories of you and Jim. Blackmail will be the prop of my declining years.—Ever yours,

"D. O'R."

I had received a conditional promise from the Daintons, and to complete my party I invited the Lorings. Amy accepted, and Jim refused. Looking back at this time I remember that it was not easy to frame an invitation that he would not refuse. It was a weariness going to other people's houses, he told me, eating strange food, not being master of his own time. Assuming that I wanted to see him, why didn't I come to House of Steynes? Smilingly but resolutely he declined to come.

Where his personal comfort was concerned Loring could be wonderfully unadaptable. "I waste a fair portion of my life in the House," he used to argue. "Do let me enjoy the rest of the time in my own way." His mother and sister caught the refrain and abetted him. Indeed, a legend grew up that he was the hardest-worked member of either House and could therefore claim indulgences in the off hours when he was not struggling heroically against the latest Radical machination.

The old controversies are dead, but Loring's theory of the House of Lords is of hardier growth. Posing as the reader of Democracy's secret thoughts, he would leave House of Steynes amid rows of bowing flunkeys, motor to the station, where the stationmaster hastened to be obsequious, and step into his reserved carriage. With a great deal of bowing and smiling the guard would lock the door that his lordship might be undisturbed till he reached London. And at Euston a chauffeur and footman would meet him. "Yes, my lord"; "No, my lord"; "Very good, my lord." It would take another four men adequately to open the great doors of Loring House, but in time, and with more assistance where needed, he would be driven down to Westminster, there to display the knowledge of social conditions and public opinion acquired in his journeyings abroad.

So it was when the planets were yet young, so it will be when the earth grows cold, though the man who fled discomfited from Shadwell after ten days should perhaps refrain from criticism.

In what most men count the great things of life, Loring never abused his position; in the small, he became frankly unclubbable. I had known him long enough to laugh at the old-maidish fixed order of incompatibilities that he mistook for a well-regulated life. It was very conservative, very unadaptable, and he had an unanswerable reason for everything. You dined with him at the ElysÉe because Armand had the finest hand in London for a homard au tartare—the practice and the tribute continued for years after the great chef had bought himself an hotel in Boston and bade farewell to London. You dined at eight-fifteen because—well, because Loring always dined at eight-fifteen, and food at any other hour was supper or a meat tea. You hurried your dinner so as not to miss the star turn at the "Round House," which was timed for nine-twenty-five, and, when you had seen that, you had to leave—because Loring always left at that point, in turn because there was never anything worth seeing after ten. You then sat for half an hour—a dreadfully uncomfortable half-hour—at Hale's, where smoking was not allowed (few men smoked in 1630 when Martin Hale opened his tavern in Piccadilly at the fringe of "the town"): it would never have done, he would assure you, to arrive at your next destination before eleven; equally no man on earth could wish to stay later than two a.m.

It was impossible to wean him from his little rules, and the world must follow his lead—or live elsewhere. (Which course was adopted, he hardly cared.) I fought to preserve my prejudices against his—and he beat me. At ten-ten I was left in my stall at the "Round House," and he was half-way to Hale's. And when he decided that he could not and would not meet women at breakfast, I scarcely hoped he would make an exception in favour of Lake House. If my mother and Beryl persisted in breakfasting with their guests—I can see the very shrug of his shoulders as though he had put his objections into words—it was really, really simpler for me to meet him in Scotland where there would be no hideous domestic surprises in store for anyone.

So my autumn party in 1906 brought me Amy but not her brother. "Tell George I hope you're all missing me," he wrote to her. I hastened to assure him that with my uncle, O'Rane, the Daintons, the Hunter-Oakleighs from Dublin and four or five more, his absence had not been remarked.

III

I always doubted the wisdom of including O'Rane in a house-party, for the Lake House estate offered little but its snipe-shooting, and he refused to shoot. There was, however, a library, a garden, some purple, green, brown and grey mountain scenery and—for anyone who cared to do so—the mountains themselves to climb. For the most part he paced up and down the terrace at the margin of the lake, gazing dreamily over its mirror-like surface to the tree-clad hills on the other side. In the past twelve months he had lost much of his animation and had become curiously rapt and reflective. The change did not make him an easier guest to entertain. We have known each other these many years now and stayed together in a dozen different houses, yet I never quite get rid of the feeling that he is from another world and another century. Sometimes one or other of us would keep him corporeal company for a while: usually he was alone—thinking out the future. In the last days of July he had taken his First in Greats, and academic Oxford lay at his feet.

"What's the next stage, Raney?" I asked him one evening when we were alone in the garden. "All Souls?"

He shrugged his shoulders, linked arms with me and paced the lowest terrace by the lake's border. It was a night of rare stillness, and the moon was reflected full and unwavering in the black water: behind us, fifty yards up the side of the mountain, blinding squares of yellow light broke up the dark face of the house; a chord was struck, and a girl's voice began to sing with an Irish intonation.

"What a lovely place the world would be if it weren't for the men and women in it!" he exclaimed.

"Even with them it's tolerable," I said.

I was deliciously tired after a long day's tramp; a hot bath, dinner and the placid night set me at peace with all men.

"For you, yes," he answered reflectively.

"And for a number of others," I said.

The voice above me grew low and died away. Someone began to play an air from "La BohÈme."

"For anybody without imagination," he murmured. "You've been in the House for nearly a year now, George; d'you think the world's a happier place?"

"I'm afraid there's no such thing as statutory happiness, Raney."

A vision of Baxter-Whittingham floated before my eyes, and an echo of his phrases came back to my ears. O'Rane picked up a handful of gravel, seated himself on the parapet of the terrace and began tossing stones into the lake.

"I'm looking for inspiration, George," he said, after a pause. "Just now I'm at a loose end. I've been through Melton and the House, I've seen about a dozen different kinds of working-class life, and before I came to England I took part in the great primitive struggle for existence. Now, if I like, I suppose I can get a fellowship, go into one of the professions, lead a comfortable life...." His voice rose a tone and quickened into excitement. "George, it won't do. We pretend the world's civilized, and yet every now and again some murderous war breaks out. We've been drinking champagne up there, and there are people dying of starvation. There are people dying of cancer and phthisis—and we haven't stopped it. There are young girls being turned into harlots hourly. Hunger, disease, death and the loss of a soul's purity. It won't do." He sighed, and a shadow of despair came over his dark eyes. "I talked to Jim Loring in the same strain a few weeks ago; he's waiting for the world to come back to a belief in God. Poor old Jim hasn't learned much mediaeval history! I talked to your uncle yesterday: he's a social Darwinian—these scourges are all divinely appointed to keep us from getting degenerate. I talked to you this morning, and you virtually told me five years of Liberal Government would set it all right. They won't! It isn't the law that's wrong, it's the soul of man. You've had workhouses for two-thirds of a century, and people still starve. In half a dozen years we've seen war in South Africa and Manchuria. Men still seduce women; there's cruelty to children and animals that would make you sick if you heard a thousandth part of it; there are blind, hare-lipped babies being born to parents of tainted blood.... It won't do, George."

I seated myself on the parapet beside him and lit a cigarette.

"Will you tell me the remedy, Raney?" I asked.

He looked at me for a moment before answering.

"Would you act upon it if I did?"

"I'd like to hear it first," I said.

"To see how much it inconveniences you." He laughed, and there was a bitterness in the smile on his thin lips that told forth his utter scorn of soul for the makeshift, worldly materialism for which I stood in his eyes. "It'll inconvenience us the devil of a lot, but that's what we're here for. We're supposed to have been educated. We've got to give a lead. The first duty of society is to make existence possible, the second is to make a decent thing of life. Gradually we're getting the first, but we're not in sight of the second." He looked out over the black, unmoving water and shook his head sadly. "We've got no social conscience, we've got no imagination to give us one. Look here, you'd think me a pretty fair swine if I took Sonia away for a week to an hotel, said good-bye at the end of it and packed her home?"

"It's not done," I admitted.

His clenched fist beat excitedly on the flat stone balustrade.

"Tom Dainton's got a flat in Chelsea and a woman living with him. Is that done?"

"I don't do it myself," I said. His information was not new to me: I had even met the girl, once when she was living with Tom, once with his predecessor.

"God in heaven! She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister probably; there was a time when she was clean-minded ... and that brute-beast salves his conscience by telling himself that somebody else corrupted her before he came along! I told him exactly what I thought of him."

I had a fair idea of O'Rane's capacity for invective.

His lips curled till his teeth gleamed white in the moonlight.

"Do you still meet?" I inquired.

"I'd cut him in his own house! It isn't that I set great store by marriage, I'm not in a position to do that. If he wants to be ultra-modern, let him live with her by all means—and introduce her to his people. He'd kill a man who treated his own sister like that.... Imagination! Imagination! That's the basis of the social conscience, George. If Beryl had consumption, you'd sell the shirt off your back to heal her. You'd do pretty well as much for a sister of mine. You'd write a check for a hundred pounds if I recommended a hard case to you. And because you don't hear, because you don't see the poor devils lying under your eyes...."

"Where's the damned thing to stop, Raney? There are people starving the world over."

"Thank God you recognize it! It hurts as much to starve in the Punjab as under the windows of Lake House."

"But I'm not interested in people I've never seen," I said, lighting another cigarette.

"You'd jump overboard to save a drowning man without waiting to be introduced. Human life's sacred, George: the value we attach to it is the one test of civilization I know."

"But how does one start? Take my own case and be as pointed as you like. An Irish landowner, Liberal member of Parliament, comfortable means, unmarried, without any particular desire to leave the world worse than I found it—what am I to do? Frankly, Raney, I've not got the temperament to turn vegetarian or go about in sandals. I'm part of a very conventional, stupid, artificial world; all my relations and friends are in the same galley. My soul's taken root. What am I to do?"

He picked up a second handful of gravel and jerked the stones thoughtfully into the shining water.

"D'you remember the boys in Æsop who did what I'm doing—flinging stones into a lake? It was all in fun, but they hit a frog, and the frog told them what was fun for them was death for him. If you want an everyday test, you can ask yourself over every act you do or refrain from doing whether you're causing pain to a living creature—by word, deed, thought. That's the only standard worth having, and if everyone adopted it.... As they will some day; we're growing slightly more humane...."

We had had a record bag that day: I was in good form and Bertrand could not miss a bird. I mentioned this to O'Rane to recall him to our limitation.

"A hundred years ago you'd have watched two hapless cocks slashing each other to death," he retorted. "People were flogged within an inch of their lives. Witch-hunts were hardly out of fashion. Two thousand years ago malefactors were nailed to wooden crosses and left to die, gladiators were set to fight wild beasts...." His voice trembled with exultant, fierce irony, and his dark eyes blazed in the setting of his white face. "Now we're grown so effete that we almost shudder when some upstanding son of Belgium takes a rhinoceros whip and lashes a Congo native till the smashed ribs burst through his flesh." His voice fell as suddenly as it had risen. "Have you ever set eyes on a new-born babe? It's a wonderful thing, so tiny and so perfect, with its little limbs and organs and the marvellous little nails on its toes and fingers.... I think of that beautiful, soft, warm, living creature cherished and fed to manhood, and then flung to the demons for them to torture. I see it torn in pieces by a shell or eaten up by disease. And in the old days we might have seen it stretched on a rack, or broken joint by joint with the wheel and boot...." The sentence died away in a long shudder that shook his whole body. "Come back to the house, George," he cried, jumping down from the parapet. "I've travelled three thousand miles in the last five seconds, all the way to Greece and back, where the Turks used to put hot irons on the chests of their prisoners just to teach them not to be rebels. Ten years ago! Who says this is not the best of all possible worlds?"

I took his arm and walked up the stone steps that joined the three terraces. There was still a light in the drawing-room, and we found Sonia writing letters and smoking a cigarette. The accomplishment was new and precarious. She started as we came in through the window and hastily closed the blotting-book.

"Oh, it's only you!" she exclaimed with relief as she saw us. "I was simply dying for a cig., and I can't smoke in my room, or mother would smell it through the door." She opened the blotter and extracted a rather battered cigarette "I've been writing to a friend of yours, David," she went on teasingly. "Mr. Anthony Crabtree."

"De gustibus non est disputandum," O'Rane answered with a shrug of the shoulders.

"You must translate, please."

"It amuses you and it doesn't hurt him," I suggested.

"Who? David?" She walked over to O'Rane's chair and sat down on the arm of it, bending over him and running her fingers through his fine, black hair. So Delilah may have wooed Samson to slumber, with the same practised touch, the same absence of amateurishness or spontaneity. "I'm very fond of Tony."

O'Rane looked at her with half-closed eyes.

"How old are you, Sonia?" he asked.

"I think you ought to remember. Twenty. And I'm never going to be any more."

"It's not so very old," he said reflectively.

"It'll be horrid to be twenty-one," she answered, with a pout. "I shall have to pay my own bills—and I'm frightfully in debt. It's such fun, too, to be quite irresponsible. Of course you were born old, David; if I lived to be a hundred I should never catch you up."

"Twenty," he repeated. "No, it's not so very old. In five years' time——"

"My dear, I shall be a quarter of a century old!" she exclaimed.

"You'll be tired of it all by then."

"I shall be dead or married," she answered gloomily.

"Not married. I shall come to you then—you'll have outgrown your present phase and I shall be a rich man. I shall come to you...." He broke off and sat looking up into her eyes.

Sonia drew back her hand and returned his gaze steadily. A smile of mockery flickered for a moment round her lips.

"And then?" she demanded.

"I shall ask you to marry me."

"And if I ...?" she began.

He sat upright and caught her two wrists in his right hand.

"If you say 'no'? You won't; you can't! You'll want me by then, want someone you can depend on. And, if you don't, you'll have to take me just the same. You won't be able to say 'no.'"

His voice had grown low, and he spoke with clear deliberation. I once watched a neurotic woman being put to sleep by a hypnotist. O'Rane's low, determined tone reminded me of the doctor's suggestive insistence. "Now you are going to sleep. You are, oh! so tired. Your eyes are so heavy. So heavy! So sleepy!..." Her voice in answering dropped to the same key.

"You think anyone could make me obey him? Try it, friend David!"

"Five years will make a difference. I haven't given many orders, Sonia, but they've always been obeyed. I haven't done very much—yet, but I've never failed to do what I wanted." Sonia tried to be defiant, but her eyes suddenly fell, and she slipped down from the arm of the chair and moved towards the door.

"Ah! you're an infant prodigy," she observed jauntily. "I must go to bed, though."

"Sonia, come back here!"

O'Rane had not raised his voice, but Sonia paused in her passage across the room. In her place I should have done the same.

"What do you want?" she asked uneasily.

"Come back here."

Like a child being taught its first lesson in obedience, she hesitated, moved forward, paused and came on.

"What d'you want?" she repeated, drumming her fingers nervously on the arm of the chair.

O'Rane smiled.

"You may go to bed now," he answered.

With sudden petulance she stamped her foot.

"David, if you think it's funny to try and make a fool of me ...! You're perfectly odious to-night." I was moving forward to intervene as peacemaker, and Sonia seized the opportunity to shake me by the hand and wish me good-night.

"You needn't pay overmuch attention to Raney," I said.

"Oh, I don't," she answered airily, but her hand as it touched mine was curiously cold.

O'Rane walked over to the writing-table and returned with her letter.

"Now you see," he remarked enigmatically as he gave it her.

"See what?"

"It doesn't make me jealous to be told you're very fond of Crabtree," he answered. "Good night, Sonia."

I closed the door behind her, poured out two whiskies and sodas and filled a pipe.

"You're extraordinarily infantile, Raney," I said.

"It was as well she should know."

"Mind you don't drive her into his arms," I said. "Next time she may accept him."

"Next time?"

For the moment I had forgotten that O'Rane had not been present at Crabtree's discomfiture the previous autumn at House of Steynes. When I remembered I wished I had not introduced the subject.

"Oh! this is getting beyond a joke!" he exclaimed, when I had given him the irreducible minimum of information. "I've a good mind to drop a hint to Lady Dainton."

"My dear fellow, the intimacy is recognized and approved by her. You can't tell her anything she doesn't know."

He picked up his tumbler and sipped thoughtfully.

"I could tell her a number of things," he returned after a pause. "How Crabtree pumped me to find out what they were worth, whether Crowley was their own property and so forth. As cousin to an undischarged bankrupt he conceives himself to be conferring a favour on a family he once described in my hearing to Beaumorris as 'very decent middle-class people.' Fair spoil, in other words, for my Lord Beaumorris and his family. It would be very salutary for Lady Dainton to hear that."

"It will hardly increase your present inconsiderable popularity," I suggested.

He finished his drink and walked with me to the door.

"There's no harm in telling Sonia he's a cad," he insisted.

"If she cares for him, it won't shake her: if she doesn't, it'll make her very angry. I wish to God I hadn't told you, Raney. Promise me at least that you won't choose my house to do it in!"

"Oh, the whole thing may be a mare's nest," he answered easily. "I shan't act till I've something to act on. Have you been invited to Crowley Court this autumn?"

"I've been told to fix my own time," I replied.

"They've got a party on in November. I was thinking of going then if I'm not bear-leading Summertown round the world. Why shouldn't we go together? Brother Crabtree may be there with any luck."

"Brother Crabtree is sure to be there," I answered, as I lighted him to his room and turned back to my own.

IV

Five days later my guests were scattered to the four winds. Bertrand stayed behind until it was time to move on to the Hunter-Oakleighs in Dublin, and O'Rane was waiting to accompany me to House of Steynes. A great quiet descended on Lake House, and I recalled Valentine Arden's maxim that the charm of a house party lies in the moment of its dispersal.

"You're not being quite so strenuous as usual, David," observed my uncle one morning after breakfast.

"I can't hurry the calendar, sir," Raney answered. "I must wait for November."

"All Souls?" I asked.

He nodded. "And then the Bar. And then the House."

The 1906 Parliament was distinguished by a little group of men who had cleared the board of honours at Oxford, blazed into fame at the Bar and entered the House as fashionable silks and rising politicians while still in the thirties. Their reputation preceded them from the time they were freshmen, and their career became the model for succeeding generations. I imagine that Simon, Hemmerde, and F. E. Smith were to the Oxford of their day what O'Rane was to the Oxford of mine—marked men with no conceivable limit to the heights they might attain.

"You think it's possible to reform the world from the House of Commons?" I asked.

O'Rane looked through the open window over the placid lake to the smoke-blue mountains beyond.

"You can only reform the world by reforming the men who compose it," he answered. "And you can't do that by Acts of Parliament. You've not found that out yet, George. I have."

"Then why are we to be honoured?" Bertrand inquired.

Raney turned round and faced into the room.

"There are some things the House alone can do, sir. Within the next ten years you're going to have labour troubles as near revolution as makes no odds. I've spied out the land, and there's an ugly temper abroad. And probably you'll have a European War. We're too rich, sir."

"There will be labour troubles every ten years," Bertrand answered with a yawn. "The young men who've never starved their way through a strike have to learn what their fathers learned."

"We're too rich internationally," O'Rane persisted. "We've got all the fair places of the earth, and the sansculottes of Europe will fight us for them, just as the sansculottes of England will fight for a bigger share of profits."

My uncle shook his head.

"The world's getting too democratic, David," he said. "Democracy doesn't fight democracy; no one has anything to gain. And we leave the fair places of the world open to the world. Anyone can come too."

He picked up his hat and walked through the window into the morning sunshine. O'Rane looked for a moment at the broad-shouldered back and massive head, then turned to me with a gesture of despair.

"When I get into the House, George," he said, "it'll be to fight your uncle. Years ago—the night after I left Melton—I told you in the garden at Crowley Court that we had given away our weakness before all Europe. There are not ten men in this country who understand Continental opinion. I called for ten years' reorganization of the Empire. Now it seems that every step we take to defend ourselves against attack makes Germany think we're preparing to attack her. Sooner or later there'll be a casus belli."

"Half a dozen years ago we were faced with an inevitable war with France," I reminded him. "Now we're the best of friends."

"There's been no Pan-French school since Sedan," he retorted. "I should be sorry to see England going down before the storm. With all its blemishes I think the civilization of this country is the finest in all the world." He stood opposite the window with the autumn sun shining on to his thin face, and as I looked there were tears in his great black eyes. "Any country," he went on tremulously, "that takes a steward from a Three-Funnel Liner and ... and ... and ..."

His voice died away. I knocked out my pipe and began filling it again.

"Come out into the garden, Raney," I said, taking his arm.

He laughed and obeyed.

"Burgess, too, used to say I wasn't accountable for my actions," he remarked.

"A little of your madness would make better men of a number of us," I said.

He stopped short to drink in all the misty damp beauty of the autumn morning, momentarily forgetful of me and of our conversation. Another moment and the mood was past.

"Oh! it's made, not born," he said. "If you'd seen Jews massacred before you were seven.... Poor dear Lady Dainton can't think what my father was about over my upbringing! She's quite right. I learned all the wrong things, met all the wrong people—and this is the result!"

At the end of the week we crossed to Scotland together, spent ten days with the Lorings and separated in Edinburgh. Towards the middle of October we met again in London, and, as I was now qualified to take my M.A., I seized the excuse for a visit to Oxford and motored O'Rane up in time for the first All Souls paper. There was an interval between the written work and the candidates' dinner, so we arranged to slip down for eight-and-forty hours to Crowley Court. "You will find some old friends here," Lady Dainton wrote. "Lord Loring, Mr. Arden and Lord Summertown are coming to-morrow, and Tony Crabtree is already with us...."

"I told you so," I remarked to O'Rane as we left Princes Gardens and climbed into the car.

"I shouldn't be at all surprised if we had to dislodge the fellow," he answered, as a man might speak of installing a new drainage system.

There was a curious similarity of purpose in our descent on Oxford. Each had a rather wearisome formality to go through, and the result in either case was equally certain. Candidates for the degree of M.A. paid fees to their college and the university chest, caught a hurried Latin formula, changed their gowns, tipped their scouts, bowed to the Vice-Chancellor and got rid of a red and black silk hood at the earliest possible opportunity. Candidates for All Souls Fellowships presented their credentials to the Warden, disposed of a stated number of papers in the Hall and paraded their table manners at dinner and in Common Room the following Sunday. The formality ended with an announcement in "The Times," and anyone who had not sufficiently cleared his friends' houses of undesirable guests was now at liberty to return and complete the eviction.

I took my M.A. as other and better men have taken it before and since.

Also like other men before and since, O'Rane was—not elected. It was the first time I had known him fail to carry out an undertaking he had set himself, and my faith in him would have received a shock unless I had heard the full story. All he said as we got into the car at the "Randolph" was:

"I probably shan't go through with this show."

"Why the devil not?" I demanded.

At first he made no answer, but, as we slid away from the lights of Oxford and headed through Abingdon and the wet white mist of a November afternoon southward to the Berkshire Downs, he offered fragments of explanation. There were two fellowships and sixteen candidates, of whom three stood head and shoulders above their rivals: O'Rane with first in Mods. and Greats, the Ireland and Gaisford prizes and a Chancellor's medal; Oldham of Balliol with a second in Mods., a first in Greats and a first in Law; and Brent of the House who had taken Pass Mods., a first in History and the Stanhope Essay prize. There was prima facie a lion with no martyr.

"I walked down the High with old Brent," O'Rane told me. "He was rather down on his luck—man who's lived on scholarships since he could walk, not a bob in the world, and no guts to make a career for himself. With a fellowship he can go to the Bar; otherwise he'll moulder in the Civil Service."

"But, my dear Raney," I exclaimed, "the decision doesn't rest with you."

"No, but—I can do something for him," he said with a smile. "You know my philosophy."

"Yes, but what about yourself?" I asked.

"In the words of Burgess, 'The Lord will provide.' I've made twenty-three pounds in ten days as a waiter in this country; in a Long Island Delicatessen store——"

"Are you going back there?"

"If need be. I've settled nothing—not even about this fellowship. I'm waiting for an omen, George. A lot depends on the next few hours; I must think things out. What are you pulling up for?"

"My near-side head light's gone out," I answered, as I scrambled past him into the road.

On my return O'Rane was standing with one foot braced against the steering-wheel and the other planted on the back of the driving-seat; he was gazing intently down the road we had just traversed. There was nothing coming up behind; he stood for a moment more in silence and then slipped back into his seat.

"It's too misty," he said, with the suggestion of a sigh in his voice.

"What were you looking at?" I asked.

"I was trying to see Oxford. The lights of Oxford. D'you remember 'Jude the Obscure'? It was here—any height round here—that he stood gazing at Oxford and wondering if he'd ever get there. God! Don't I know that man's heart! Ever since I was a tiny child.... And I remember my father, just when he was dying,—it was almost the last word on his lips—telling me where to go and what I was to do...."

He paused abruptly and turned over old thoughts.

"Go on, Raney," I said.

"Hallo! Were you listening? I was only rambling."

"Go on rambling then—about your father."

He turned up the collar of his coat and sank lower into his seat.

"It was just the end; they carried him up from the PeirÆus, and he rallied for one last flicker. 'I'm going now, Boy,' he whispered—smiling, though two-thirds of him were shot away. 'I've not made much of a thing of life; see if you can do better. We've not a bad record as a family. Go back to England—Oxford.' He started coughing, and when it was over I thought he was dead. Suddenly he sat up and spoke very quickly. 'I'm really going now, Davie. Good-bye, Boy. Try to forgive me!'" Raney's voice had grown very husky. "Forgive him! The man was a god! Besides, I didn't understand till people started calling me Lord O'Rane, and then I went to a priest to find out. It was like rubbing in father's death.... And the priest explained—a bit, and said I should understand when I was older. And that was all—all I care to tell you, anyway, old man. I didn't enjoy my first trip round the world. Perhaps if Summertown's invitation still holds good...."

He broke off and began to whistle reflectively between his teeth.

"What are you going to do, Raney?"

"Why bother? I've got five years to turn round in before Sonia's ready for me——"

"When you do marry her, I shall give you a very handsome present—I don't like betting on these things."

"I shall marry her, George," he answered, with assurance. "I've got five years to make money in—here or abroad—a thousand a year——"

"In five years?"

"Less. Three. Two. If I don't make it in two, working twelve hours a day, I'll make it in three, working eighteen."

"I rather doubt——"

It was the one word that lashed him like a whip. His hand descended on my driving arm and gripped it till the car rocked from side to side.

"If—I—ever—doubted—anything——!" he whispered.

"Let go my arm!" I cried.

"Sorry!" He laughed and went back to his normal tone. "Dear old George! If I'd ever doubted, d'you think I could have stood going round with a guitar in Chinatown—handing basins on a liner.... Doubt!"

An hour later we turned in through the drive gates of Crowley Court.

V

As I slowed down opposite the door, it occurred to me to ask whether O'Rane had made his peace with Tom Dainton.

"No. And never shall," he grunted. "Fortunately he's not here, though. If he were——"

The sentence was cut short as the doors were flung open, and Crabtree, gorgeous in white waistcoat and pink carnation, advanced into the white glare of the headlights.

"Stout fellows!" he cried heartily. "Haven't seen you for ages, Raney——"

"How do you do, Crabtree?" O'Rane responded, in a tone that would have chilled a blast furnace.

"Come along in! Never mind about the car, George; one of the men'll take it round. How are the lads of Oxenford, what? How's the House? How's everything?"

The questions were so clearly rhetorical that I attempted no answer. Sir Roger came in sight, crossing the hall, and I hurried in to shake hands with him, reflecting that full two-thirds of my antagonism to Crabtree arose from his inveterate use of my Christian name.

"The ladies have gone up to dress, George," said Dainton. "We shall find everyone else in the billiard-room. If you'd care for a drink——"

He hurried on ahead, hardly giving me time to shed my coat and cap, for all the world like a trusted old family servant making me at home in his master's absence. The impression was not altogether a capricious fancy: I remember a ball at Crowley Court where the stately wife of a newly honoured manufacturing chemist whispered loudly to her host, "Sir Zachary and Lady Smithe. Smithe, my man, not Smith, mind."

In the billiard-room we found Loring and Summertown perfunctorily practising fancy cannons, while Valentine Arden ostentatiously slumbered at full length on a divan. Tea was long past, dinner some way ahead; and, as Arden complained, he hadn't tasted a cocktail since leaving London.

"You may not know it, Raney," yawned Loring as Sir Roger closed the door behind us and hurried away to order whisky and soda, "but you've saved my life. Another ten minutes of Crabtree! It only shows the folly of staying in other people's houses. With the best intentions in the world they spring disquieting surprises on you. Really, after a certain episode not a thousand miles from—shall we say?—House of Steynes last autumn, I thought I should be safe in coming here. The rising generation beats me, and as for poor Valentine——"

Arden roused at sound of his own name.

"They offered one curried lobster for breakfast," he proclaimed, tremulous with indignation; "there were only two kinds of chutney, and no Bombay duck. One cannot eat curry without Bombay duck."

He relapsed into exhausted slumber, and Summertown seized upon O'Rane.

"Look here, young fellow, my lad," he said, "I'm properly in the soup. You remember the bilge my lady mother's been talking about my seeing more of the world...."

Arden stirred in his sleep and opened one eye.

"The desire of a mother that her son shall see rather more of the world," he observed, "not infrequently coincides with an ambition to see rather less of her son."

Summertown quelled the interruption at the end of a half-butt and continued to state his case.

"Well, when you seemed doubtful about coming, Crabtree butted in. He'd heard all ex's were to be paid. I shall be dans le consommÉ, as the French say, if you cry off."

O'Rane, who appeared to be tired and subdued, promised to think over the proposal.

"When do your rotten results come out?" persisted Summertown. "Time's getting on, you know. I want to be back in town by next season."

"I'll let you know to-night," said O'Rane, crossing the room and making a seat for himself at the end of Arden's divan.

I guessed then—what I afterwards found out for certain—that he was beginning to repent of his recent quixotism. The big, warm, comfortable house threw into striking relief the shanties and bleak skies that were likely to be his home and shelter for some years to come.

"Well, don't be a dirty dog," said Summertown, in conclusion. "If I get stuck with Crabtree.... Steady!"

He picked up his cue and began knocking the balls about as the door opened, and Crabtree entered. A moment or two passed before we could try a fresh cast in conversation, and it is more than probable that the newcomer guessed we had been discussing him.

"Aren't you lads going to dress?" he inquired, as he straightened his tie before a mirror and glanced at his watch.

"Presently, presently," answered Loring, who was in fact already on his feet and only delayed with the perversity of a man who dislikes being ordered about. "You coming up, Valentine? There's only just time, if you're going to have a bath."

"One is going to be very late," said Arden sleepily. "It may cut dinner a bit short. One is bored with dinner. One hates having to talk when one is eating; and, if one doesn't talk, other people will. One is bored with other people."

"Have a drink?" said Summertown encouragingly, as he helped himself again. "With enough alcohol you can bear almost anything. I can't stand playing five-pence a hundred auction, but I did last night—thanks to the tranquillizing influence of '47 port. True, I cut the match-box by an oversight, but that might have happened to anyone. And Lady Dainton told me I ought to wear glasses. Here you are, Valentine. Three times a day before meals or any other hour. Even our host brightened visibly last night. Another half glass, and there'd have been horrible revelations—second establishment in Brixton, undiscovered bank fraud—I think to-night I shall move round by him and keep the wine circulating."

"You talk too much, Summertown," said O'Rane, on whom the tone of the conversation was grating.

"So will old Dainton!" rejoined Summertown gleefully. "No, you're quite right, Raney. Dam' bad form to tighten a man up at his own table, specially if he's got a weak head. You hear that, Crabtree? Drink fair all round and no doping."

"I'd drink two to one against Dainton," Crabtree answered valiantly.

"All through?" asked Summertown, not without a certain admiration. "Bet you a pony you don't."

"Done! Jim shall hold the stakes, George umpire. I remember once when I was staying with my cousin Beaumorris——"

Loring was standing with his back to the fire, yawning and occasionally reminding Arden that it was time to dress. At the mention of his name he strolled into the light and crossed to the door, only pausing to remark:

"It's just as well to remember whose house you're in, Crabtree. Time to dress, Summertown." And, as he entered the hall, "Don't drink whisky on an empty stomach, young man."

Summertown, whose leading characteristics throughout his short life were a cheerful immaturity and chronic instability of temperament, became immediately contrite. His rare moments of seriousness were marked by a pathetic desire to stand well in Loring's eyes.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry!" he exclaimed. "It won't happen again, Loring. I swear it won't."

Loring laughed and caught his arm.

O'Rane and I were the last to leave the billiard-room, and, as we came to the foot of the staircase, Sonia appeared in sight on the landing above. For the moment we were invisible to her, and she pattered lightly down the stairs, waving one hand to Crabtree, who was standing astride the rug in front of the fire.

"Hope I haven't kept you waiting, Tony?" she called out.

Crabtree responded with some decorous conventionality, and in another second we came into the light and were face to face with Sonia.

"Hallo, children, where were you hiding?" she asked as we shook hands. "Have they elected you to your old fellowship, David?"

"I haven't finished yet," he answered. "I say, Sonia...."

He paused and looked almost anxiously at her. The firelight glowing across the hall struck sparks of gold out of her brown hair, and her arms and shoulders gleamed white through the transparent, blue gauze of her dress.

"Say on, MacDavid," she bade him.

"Summertown wants me to go abroad with him. I don't know whether to accept or not."

"He asked me, too." Crabtree called out. "I wish you'd make up your great mind, Raney."

O'Rane kept his eyes fixed on the face in front of him.

"Which is it to be, Sonia?" he asked.

"My dear, I don't care," she answered. "Of course, it'll be more amusing for Lord Summertown if Tony goes. There's a compliment for you," she called out, blowing a kiss across the hall. Crabtree bowed with mock gravity. "You're getting dreadfully ponderous in your old age, David. On the other hand, I don't believe I can spare Tony. How long are you going to be away?"

"Six months if Crabtree goes. Three to five years if I do. It won't be with Summertown the whole time; I shall have business to attend to. I didn't know whether you——"

Sonia clasped her hands with a dramatic gesture of surprise.

"My dear! you are humble all of a sudden! I'm honoured! Have I any wishes ...? Dear me!"

"Then I may take it you haven't?"

"It's for Lord Summertown to say," she answered impatiently. "I don't mind."

O'Rane nodded and began to walk up the stairs, while Sonia crossed the hall at a ragtime shuffle, humming a plantation song. As we reached the first landing, he remarked:

"I told you I was looking for an omen."

Before dressing he scribbled a note to Oxford, and, when we met in the drawing-room before dinner, I heard him tell Summertown that he would be ready to start by the end of the week.

In my uncle's phrase, women are the strangest of all the sexes, and I do not pretend to explain Sonia's frame of mind at this time. Perhaps O'Rane was right in thinking she must be allowed of her own accord to grow weary of the world that Crabtree and Summertown represented; perhaps she was piqued by his refusal to run errands for her; perhaps I am right in thinking she was at this time incapable of any deep emotion. It is all guesswork.

Crabtree took charge of the dinner that night in a hearty, efficient manner, though O'Rane and I suffered from the disability common to all late arrivals in a house-party: a mint of catchwords and private jokes had been coined before we came. It was impossible to understand without an explanation, and the explanation so often analysed the poor little jest out of life. Moreover, I was sleepy after my long drive, and the elderly girl whom I took in—I always suspected Sonia's guests of being selected as foils—persisted in discussing the higher education of women. As Valentine Arden observed half-way through when my indefatigable neighbour trained her batteries on him: "If a woman is good-looking, education is superfluous; if she is not it is inadequate." I was mortified to think how much I might have been spared if I had been able to frame that formula earlier in the evening.

When the ladies left us, I roused slightly with the effort of getting up and opening the door. Crabtree moved into the chair between Dainton and myself, and, leaning in front of us, whispered to Summertown:

"I've given him a stroke a hole all the way."

For a moment I did not follow the allusion, but, when Summertown shook his head and murmured "No takers,"—still more, when Crabtree hurriedly finished his second glass of port and reached for the decanter—I appreciated that he was seriously measuring hardness of head with his host, as he had backed himself to do before dinner in the billiard-room.

"Don't be an ass, Crabtree," I whispered, as he filled Dainton's glass for the third time.

A humorous wink was my reward, and in elaborate dumb-show he informed me that, while his host had drunk no more than three glasses of champagne and two of port he himself had achieved exactly double that figure.

"Just getting into my stride," he murmured, and, if I find few opportunities of praising Crabtree, let me do justice to his powers of consuming alcohol. Certain dining clubs of Oxford used to experiment on him, now trying to make an impression by sheer weight of metal, now cunningly seeking to sap his defences with injudicious mixtures. For all the success they achieved, the bottles might have been carried into the street and emptied down the nearest drain. The big round face never flushed, the sleek, black head never swam. Then, as now, the lustiest of his opponents dropped out of the race just as he was settling down.

At first no one else observed what was afoot. Loring and O'Rane were talking together at the other end of the room, and Summertown and Arden had drawn back their chairs till they were screened by my back. I alone noticed that Dainton had grown very silent, and, as Crabtree kept up a voluble monologue, every one else was free to listen or talk as he chose. The first warning came with a tinkle of broken glass and a deep stain on the cloth.

"Clumsy of me!" exclaimed Dainton. "I hope I didn't splash you? Extraordinarily clumsy of me. No; no more, thanks. I can't think how I came to be so clumsy." Crabtree waved away the protest and began filling a fresh glass. "I don't deserve it after being so clumsy, you know."

A moment later coffee was brought in, and I saw Dainton taking several matches to a cigar that he had not cut. Faithful to the terms of his wager, Crabtree achieved a successful right and left with the liqueurs and brought down one kummel as the tray was handed me and another as it reached him. Also, he very considerately helped his host to a glass.

"Drop it, Crabtree," I said, as the footman passed out of hearing. "This is getting beyond a joke."

He winked even more humorously than before and pointed to the two glasses beside his plate. I saw Loring turn and whisper in O'Rane's ear, their eyes were fixed for a moment on Dainton's face, and then O'Rane called out:

"Have you got any matches down there, Crabtree? Shy 'em over, will you?"

A heavy silver match-box was tossed in a parabola through the air. Raney lit his cigar and cried:

"Coming over!"

This time no parabola was described. The path of the projectile was a straight line from O'Rane's upraised hand to the stem of Dainton's glass.

"A1 direction and perfect elevation," Arden remarked. The glass fell where it was struck, spreading a film of white liquid over the dessert-plate, and O'Rane sprang to his feet with profuse—and I have no doubt sincere—regret for spoiling an eighteenth-century Venetian set.

"Am I plagiarizing anyone if I call you a cad, Crabtree?" he inquired twenty minutes later, as they crossed the hall to the drawing-room.

"Damn your soul ...!" began Crabtree, genuinely offended; but the door was reached before the theme could be developed.

There was a tell-tale spot of colour round O'Rane's cheek-bones, however, and Sonia with quick perception manoeuvred Crabtree into a chair by her mother's side. She herself remained standing till the rest of us were seated and then beckoned to O'Rane to share a sofa with her by the other fire at the far end of the room.

"Look here, David," she began severely.

O'Rane was engrossed in his own reflections and began thinking aloud.

"He's not a white man, you know," he said musingly. "I beg your pardon, Sonia?"

She lay back disdainfully with her hands clasped behind her head.

"David, I've got an idea that you and Tony never meet without quarrelling. Other people get on with him. I get on with him. Well, if you think it's good form to go to other people's houses and pick quarrels with guests who are good enough for them——"

O'Rane shook his head.

"He's not. That's the whole trouble."

"I'm fairly particular in the people I care to have as friends, David," she answered, in a tone which even her companion recognized as dangerous.

"The Lord preserve you in that belief," he exclaimed ironically. "If you want my candid opinion——"

"I don't."

"Perhaps you're afraid to hear it?" he jeered.

Sonia shrugged her shoulders with an air of boredom.

"You may say what you like," she told him, "but perhaps you'll regret it afterwards."

"I'll risk that. Well, to use a word you English always fight shy of, the fellow's not a gentleman."

Sonia clenched her hands and bit her lip to keep control of herself.

"You dare to say that of a friend of mine?"

"That's the pity of it, Sonia," O'Rane returned easily. "You're too good to be contaminated with that kind of stuff. He hasn't the instincts of a gentleman."

From an early age most people had hastened to conciliate and agree with Sonia when she was angry. I know nothing more characteristic of O'Rane than his repetition of the insult. She collected herself and struck coolly at his most vulnerable part.

"Perhaps, from what I know of you, you're not in a position to be a very good judge," she suggested.

Eight years before when O'Rane was cast up on the shore at Melton, it is no exaggeration to say that such a remark would have brought the speaker within easy distance of being killed. Now he only went pale and sat very still until he could speak dispassionately.

"I shall be on the high seas in a week's time," he told her, "and we shan't meet again for some years. I've given you my parting advice——"

Sonia was worsted, but she would not admit defeat without a last struggle.

"And when you come back you will find us married," she answered in a level voice.

"I'll come back for your wedding!" he laughed.

"I forget how long you said...."

"My child, you won't be married to Crabtree in three years."

"David, to-night before dinner——"

O'Rane waved his hand in deprecation.

"I don't disbelieve you! Will you give me your blessing before I start? I'm supposed to be superstitious, and as I'm beginning again from the bottom of the ladder—God! it's nearly ten years since my last effort—Part friends, Sonia."

"I don't care if I never see you again!" she answered passionately. "You simply think of new ways of trying to humiliate me——"

"Lord be praised there's still some one fond enough of you to try," he murmured half to himself.

Late that night O'Rane sat on the foot of my bed detailing his last interview. I told him things that nobody but he would need to be told—that he had only himself to thank for his dismissal, that a spoiled and petted semi-professional beauty was not a good medium for his unduly direct methods and that he could congratulate himself on driving Sonia three-fourths against her will into Crabtree's arms—in the very terms of the warning I had given him at Lake House.

"You see, I don't want to marry a professional beauty," he objected.

"Then take Sonia at her word and don't meet her again," I said.

"But that's only one side of her, the artificial side, the London hothouse side. Before all this, when she was a child of twelve and I lived in a misery of spirit that would drive some men to suicide.... In those days Sonia—Bah! she's ashamed of it now, but she showed me the whole of her brave, tender, generous soul—I said, and I say still, that there's hope of salvation for the damned if he comes before the Judgement Seat and boasts that once, even for a moment——"

His voice rose and grew rich with the familiar Irish rhetoric till I begged him to remember the slumbering household.

"There are so many Sonia Daintons," he mused, "but that's the one I always see. It's the one I shall see for the next three years." He uncurled his legs and slid down from the bed. "I sail next week, George. Dine with me on Thursday to say good-bye."

"No, you dine with me."

"I asked you first—my last favour on English soil: I'll dine the night I get back."

"That's a little vague," I complained. "You may be gone ten years."

He rose gracefully to the bait.

"Make it as definite as you like. This is nineteen six. Say nineteen ten. I shall be back in—May. First of May, let's call it. Shall we say the Club?"

"By all means. Will eight o'clock suit you? And what shall I order?"

"Oh, you know I eat anything. Are black ties allowed at the Eclectic? No, wait a bit, it'll be the beginning of the Season, and the House'll be sitting; you'll either be in morning dress or full regimentals. You please yourself, and I'll come in a short jacket. Good night."

"Good night, Raney, you old ass."

"I shall be there," he insisted, as he switched off the light.

Six days later the papers announced to all whom it might concern that Lord Summertown and Mr. D. O'Rane had left Tilbury for Bombay by the P. & O. "Multan."