Chapter V: Loring (1)

"The nobles ... have nearly ceased either to guide or misguide; ...
the Noble has changed his fighting sword into a court rapier; and
now loyally attends his King as ministering satellite; divides the
spoil, not now by violence and murder, but by soliciting and
finesse.... For the rest, their privileges every way are now much
curtailed.... Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of
dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously.... Nevertheless, one
has still partly a feeling with the lady Maréchale: 'Depend upon
it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality.'
These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could not
have been there."--THOMAS CARLYLE, "The French Revolution."

I

Somewhere in my library at Lake House there is a little volume of essays entitled "History Re-written." It is a collection of _jeux d'esprit_ exhumed from a dozen reviews by an author whose imagination loved to annihilate a single historical fact and reconstruct the changed consequences. There is one picture of the Greeks flying in disorder before the triumphant Darius on the plain of Marathon, and the subjection of Europe to an Eastern despotism; another of Julius Cæsar successfully defending himself against his would-be assassins; a third of Mahomet dying of starvation during the Hegira. I recall a study of Luther overwhelming the Vatican in argument, Columbus shipwrecked in mid-Atlantic, the Regiment of Flanders firing on the Paris mob, Napoleon leading the Grand Armée to luxurious winter quarters in Moscow.

Sometimes I wonder whether history would have had to be much re-written if the King of England and the German Emperor had been personally more cordial from 1901 to 1910; whether, too, destiny could have been cheated if Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had lived another five years. "C.-B." laboured for peace, and his honesty was not called in question; there was always the certainty that democracy the world over would one day grow strong enough to forbid war; there was always the chance that this decisive strength would come before a military party could issue its mobilization orders.

I know I speak in a minority of one: a thousand pens have shown that war was pre-ordained: yet--I wonder if the writers guess how nearly it was avoided. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned, there was no one of equal authority to carry on his work. For a space the unconvinced preached disarmament to the unbelieving, then impatiently girded themselves for war. The Japanese Alliance, the French Entente, the Russian _rapprochement_ were good platform points for a German scaremonger. If we had continued working for peace and keeping free of continental engagements, I wonder whether our teaching would have had time to bear fruit. My uncle Bertrand thought so and, though my political beliefs are too unstable to matter, he converted me from a showy Liberal Imperialism to an old-fashioned peaceful insularity. The change came gradually. My allegiance to the party weakened when Bill after Bill was contemptuously rejected in the House of Lords, and our leaders fulminated and declined battle. Thereafter a certain uneasiness was occasioned by the vagaries of the Foreign Office. Ostensibly our French Entente was formed to facilitate the settlement of outstanding questions in North Africa; and, though we were told from the Treasury Bench that militarily we were still uncommitted, Lobby gossip had a dozen disquieting theories of new secret engagements. Bertrand used to get his knuckles rapped for indiscreet questions to the Foreign Secretary, but rebuffs from mandarins only increased his suspicion that the whole truth was being withheld from the House of Commons.

Growing distrust of a brilliant and exasperatingly Celestial Ministry determined the course of my later years in Parliament. O'Rane left England at the end of 1906, my constituents rejected me in the first election of 1910; in the intervening time I joined an advanced Radical group in advocating better international understandings and immediate war on the House of Lords. They were the three busiest years of my life, and, when my uncle set his peace organization to work, a day of sixteen hours was divided equally between Fleet Street, the House, and the Central Disarmament Committee in Princes Gardens.

Of the outside world I saw even less than in my first session when I was a loyal party man; and, if there had been no Liberal Bills for Loring to wreck, I should have lost touch with all my former friends. As it was, he would ask me with exaggerated fear how much time I gave him to make peace with his Maker. I would expound the only possible solution of the House of Lords problem--(there were always six at any given time, all mutually destructive)--and under the shadow of the guillotine we would adjourn for dinner and inquire whether anything had been heard of Raney. It is almost superfluous to say that no letter was ever received from him, but Summertown cabled laconically at two-month intervals, and distorted messages reached us from Sally Farwell or Lady Marlyn. It was agreed that whichever first received news of the wanderers should immediately communicate with the other, and the formula--"Lord Loring's compliments, and will you dine with him to-night?"--nine times out of ten meant that the long-suffering Lady Marlyn had recently been handed a flimsy sheet with some such words as "All well Raney married to Dowager Queen of Siam leaving to-day for Java."

When I think of Loring at this time I always recall Burgess's parting advice on our last day at Melton. Few men who prophesied so freely could boast of making so few mistakes; he had predicted that there was no third course beyond a definite career such as the Diplomatic Service and a dilettante politico-social existence of drift such as Loring now pursued. It does not lie in my mouth to pass judgement, but I was sorry to see a man with ten times my ability dabbling in life as negligently as he did. His whole energy was devoted to recapturing the last enchantments of the Middle Ages: ecclesiastically, politically and socially he stood for a vanished order and, when his own generation declined to jump backward across the centuries, he shrugged his shoulders in good-humoured contempt and walked his road alone--obstinate, aloof and correct to the last button of his boot. In the Lords he led the wildest of the Backwoodsmen groups, in Society he fluttered with a swarm where all were called by the Christian name and each took pride in the large number of people he did not know.

Failure is so little honoured that there is something pathetic in the sight of a man refusing to be modernized. At the same time, though my instincts are Bohemian, I am glad to think that at least one section of society refused to be bought up by the invaders who now assailed London with a handful of bank cheques. These years were the era of Adolf Erckmann and his retainers; their war-paint and war-cries, their ruthlessness and ferocity of attack led Loring to dub them "les Apaches," and for seven or eight years before the outbreak of war there was truceless fighting between the old order and the new. Before it was over, Loring was beaten. He kept his own house free of the invaders and occasionally raided their camp and rescued a prisoner. Summertown, for example, had been captured for a time and came near to swelling the number of Peerage and Stage romances. It is to Loring's sole credit that the indiscretion was scotched. But a few local successes could not be magnified into a general victory, and by 1914 London lay at the feet of Erckmann, Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a few other chiefs with their followers drawn from every quarter of England.

Erckmann's first purchase was Lord Pennington--who indeed was on sale for anyone who would give him five meals a day, excitement, noise, youth and not too intellectual conversation. Next came Mrs. Welman, whose spirit yet lived amid the dusts and draughts and dressing-rooms of that Avenue Theatre she had forsaken to marry her wealthy paralytic husband. Thereafter it was simply a question of capillary attraction. The titles glamoured the stage, the stage fascinated the titles, and Erckmann, if he did not attract, at least paid for all. It was a motley gathering with a sadly draggled reputation here and there: you would find one or two Americans, several Jews, a few Germans and an astonishing number of young-men-about-town getting rich without undue toil on the wizard Erckmann's advice. "You wand a good dime, hein?" he would say invitingly. "You gome with me, my vriend." And they came.

According to their lights, too, they had the best time in the world. Ever trooping together from limelight to limelight, you would find a row of them in the stalls for any first night: the Royal Box was always theirs for a costume ball, and visitors to a regatta would punt half a mile to see the splendour of their house-boat. Should you enter a restaurant, their presence would be betrayed by the free-and-easy relations existing between themselves and the waiters--whom they called by nicknames: and, were you a recluse, the "Tickler" would portray the whole horde on Erckmann's lawn at Marlow, or you could sit by your fireside, the "Catch" open on your knees, envying them their presence in "Lord Pennington's house-party in Buckinghamshire."

I give them all credit for their powers of organization. A charity ball in their prehensile hands went with an undoubted swing, and no one who spent a week-end in their company could reasonably complain of dullness. I remember that the papers for some months were full of "Ragging in Country House" cases; there was the mock burglary at Pennington's place, Erckmann's launch tried to shoot Marlow Weir at three o'clock in the morning, and the unexplained fire in Mrs. Welman's Surrey cottage burned one of her maids to death. Some thought that they went perhaps a little too far in this last escapade, and for a time the Smart Set dropped out of the public gaze. Then the Dean of St. Pancras, struggling into the mantle of Savonarola, devoted a course of Advent sermons to anathematizing them on the curious ground that they were responsible for a falling birth-rate, and the discussion--with this decanal benediction on it--became brisk and general.

There were houses in London where I met them, and tables where I supped with voluble, fluffy little footlight favourites whose accent and choice of language were notably more literary at the beginning of the meal than at the end. Dozens of carmined lips used to ask whether I had seen their "show"; other dozens described their next engagements and the number of pounds a week they had just refused. I floundered by the hour in contemporary theatrical history and daringly discussed actor managers by their Christian names.

Loring had no taste for such adventures. To be an Apache was to be refused admission to his house. He complained of their vitality and confessed weakness in repartee when accosted as a "sport" or informed that he "must have a drink."

"We get at cross-purposes," he sighed, stretching himself to his full, handsome, six foot three and smoothing his moustache. "The fault's mine, but there it is. I've arrived fainting at the end of a long journey because I've not got the buffet manner with barmaids."

As a fellow-member of the "Eclectic," I was on nodding terms with Erckmann, but to the end he and Loring never met. Perhaps a dozen other hosts and hostesses ranged themselves on the side of old-fashioned prudery, including for a time Lady Dainton, who assured me that she did not know what Society was coming to. I was dining with her one evening towards the end of 1907 to meet the girl Tom had just engaged himself to marry.

"I mean I would never dream of letting Sonia know such people, don't you know?" she told me.

"I share your view," I said, finding time to recall that in the Daintons' first London Season Sonia had habitually attended the meetings of the Four-in-hand Club on Erckmann's box seat.

"You wait till I'm married, mother!" said Sonia, who had overheard the conversation.

"When's the great event coming off?" I asked.

"Oh, not at present," said Lady Dainton rather hurriedly. "I don't want two weddings in the family at the same time. Besides, Tony's only been at the Bar a short time. We must wait till his position's a little more established, don't you know?"

I agreed, as I always agree with Lady Dainton. Yet as I walked home that night I murmured to myself some hackneyed lines from Robert Burns. If there was one thing more certain to my mind than another, it was that the ever-shrewd Anthony Crabtree relied on the Daintons and the "desperate thing" of marriage to establish his position.

I saw and heard no more of the family until the autumn. One morning in October Loring rang me up with the news that Summertown was in London, dining that night at Hale's. I was invited to meet him and found that eleven months' travel had altogether failed to mature him. A spasmodic, sandy moustache hinted at increasing age, but in other respects he was the same freckled, snub-nosed embodiment of irresponsibility as ever. The same taste for local colour characterized him as when on his return from America he lisped of candy, cocktails, dollar-bills and the art of clubbing as practised by the New York police: he was now the completest Anglo-Indian I have ever met, and his conversation sparkled with sahibs and white men, the Rains and the Hot Weather, the Hills in general and half-sacred Simla in particular. Mr. Warren Hastings, looking sourly down from the wall of Hale's coffee-room, must have seen us as seated at endless Tiffin--paid by means of Chits--where Saises, Khitmutgars and Ayahs entered and salaamed, and twenty-one gun salutes boomed faintly in the distance--as men have politely sat for years round any returned traveller or student of Kipling's Indian stories.

"What have you done with Raney?" Loring asked as the Odyssey drew to its close.

"I left him in Paris," was the answer. "We were going on to Spain, but the guv'nor don't think he's a suitable companion for a simple, unspoiled lad like me. My own adored mother's choice, too, mark you."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Phew! What didn't?" Summertown leant back with his thumbs thrust importantly into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, "I suppose you fellows don't appreciate it's been touch and go for a European War? Nothing but the well-known family tact of the Marlyns----"

"Get to the point," Loring ordered him.

Summertown bowed his head to the reproof.

"We came back overland from Vladivostock to Moscow," he said, "and about that point Raney recollected that his foot was on his native heath and all that sort of thing. We sprang lightly out of the train, seized our grips and Baedeckers, and sauntered round Russia and Poland, eventually bringing up at a spot called Hungary--where, by the way, there's a drink called Tokay ... All right, but you do spoil a good story, you know. From Hungary it is, as they say, a mere step to Austria. So we stepped. Raney's a most astonishing fellow, you know," he explained, in a short digression. "He's lived in all these places and talks the lingo like a beastly native. However, to resume my absorbing narrative, the moon shone out one night and discovered us eating scrambled eggs at a cabaret called the 'Chat Noir,' which being interpreted is 'Black Cat'----"

"Thank you," I said.

"The fruits of travel," he answered, with a bow. "To us enters, as they say in the stage directions, a flat-nosed brute who craves the favour of a match. Raney gave him some chat in Hungarian--which for some dam' silly reason I could never understand is called Magyar--and in a moment they were thick as thieves. I didn't know what all the eloquence was about, but they kept dragging in a chap called Kossuth----"

"I think I've heard the name somewhere," said Loring.

Summertown looked at him with admiration.

"_I_ thought it was one of the filthy waters they give you when you're doing a cure. Kossuth, yes. If you're one of the heads you pronounce it Koshoot and spell it Metternich. Well, these lads spat Magyar at each other and clinked glasses till the band broke down and everybody was staring at our table. Then an Austrian officer in a dream of a grey cloak strolled up and made some offensive remark. Of course, in mere vulgar abuse, dear old Raney's a pretty tidy performer, and they did 'emselves proud. I heard the name O'Rane sandwiched in between the gutturals, and then the Austrian got home with some pretty phrase. Raney went white as the proverbial sheet, picked up his glove from the table and gave that officer the most God Almighty welt across the face that I've ever seen. There--was--the--_devil_ of a scene. I thought you exchanged cards about this point and then nipped over the frontier, leaving the other chap and the seconds and doctors and grave-diggers to keep the appointment for you. Not a bit of it here! Every cursed Austrian in that place jumped up, yelling his damnedest; every dog of an Hungarian did the same. One of the orchestra was a Bohemian, and he broke his 'cello over an Hungarian's head, and there was an Italian behind the bar who walked into the Austrians with a cocktail shaker. I picked up a chair and shouted, 'Vive Kossuth!' never dreaming the poor chap had been dead for years, and then tables and sofas hurtled through the air till the police came in and killed anybody who hadn't been killed already--I'm free to admit I faded away as soon as I'd smashed the last lamp. I thought Raney'd come, too, but he saw it out and was duly marched away with his flat-nosed friend through a perfect forest of drawn swords. It was about one o'clock in the morning, and I didn't think it was healthy to stay up any longer."

He paused to refresh his parched throat.

"Next day I went round to the Embassy," he continued, "and there I had the surprise of my life. While I was improving my mind in the East, that eminently respectable Councillor of Embassy, my father, had been shifted from Paris and sent to Vienna as Chargé d'Affaires. He was very glad to see me, of course, and all that sort of thing, but I couldn't help feeling I should have preferred to carry my little troubles to another man. I toned my story down a good bit, and after some agitated notes and interviews Raney was brought up for judgement with an armed escort. Most of him was in a sling, and the rest just hung down in strips from the bones. As soon as they started talking I found we'd fairly done it in the night before. Our flat-nosed Hungarian friend was mixed up with a Secret Society and pretty consistently shadowed by the police. He and Raney had fraternized and exchanged cards, and, apparently old O'Rane wasn't much of a popular favorite in Austria. He and Vive Kossuth had caused the Government all kinds of vexation which weren't forgotten though both of them were dead, and when the flat-nosed man drank to their pious memory and Raney held forth on Hungarian Independence, you can imagine the Austrian contingent was no end restive.

"The poor old Guv'nor had his work cut out to smooth things down. For about an hour he buttered 'em all up and apologized to everybody, swearing that Raney was tight--which was an absolute lie. There was a fine recommendation to mercy and an allusion to a father's feeling--lump in the throat, all that sort of thing--and then the Guv'nor closed down. I hoped it was all over, but the Austrian lads were out for blood--we had to pay for all the damage, and our friend the officer was trundled along in a wheeled chair to receive our apologies, and then the Minister of the Interior, or the Prefect of Police, or some bug like that, popped into another room with the Guv'nor and dictated terms for the future. _I_ got off with a caution, but poor old Raney took it in the neck. They stripped him and measured him and took his finger-prints and photographed him about a dozen times. And in the afternoon an escort of soldiers frog's-marched us to the Bavarian frontier and took a tender farewell, with a plain statement in writing that, if ever Raney put one toe of either foot on an inch of his Imperial Majesty Franz Josef's territory from now till the end of time, he'd first of all be shot and then disembowelled and then confined in a fortress for the rest of his days. The Guv'nor don't fancy me for the Diplomatic; he says I want discipline, so the Army's going to try its hand on me." He shrugged his shoulders tolerantly. "I don't mind, it's all in the day's work, but I'd have you observe the kind of man my sainted mother sends me abroad with on the grounds that I should only get up to mischief if I went alone."

Of O'Rane's future movements Summertown could tell us nothing beyond the fact that he was shortly starting for Mexico, and that letters to his bank would, in due course, be forwarded.

"I shall write to him to-night," said Loring, as we walked up St. James's Street. Summertown had heard that roulette was being played illicitly somewhere in Chelsea and was anxious to check the accuracy of the report.

"At this hour?" I asked, glancing at my watch. It was past one o'clock.

"I can do it in three lines," he answered. "It's about his friend Crabtree. Have you heard?"

"I can believe anything of him," I said, as I resigned myself to listen.

"Then you _haven't_ heard. Well, the engagement's off. I met your cousin Violet at lunch to-day, and she had it from Lady Dainton. No reason given."

"Either of us can supply it," I said.

Loring made no comment.

"Sonia can do better than that," he said, after we had walked for some time in silence.

"So, possibly, can Crabtree," I suggested. "In her present state----"

"My dear George, she's still a child," he answered, with some warmth.

"There are children and children." I had neither forgiven nor forgotten her behaviour to O'Rane for a year or two.

"I don't think the man who marries Sonia is at all to be pitied," Loring said rather aggressively.

The words may have meant that such a man was to be envied--or equally that he took the risk with his eyes open. But we were at the corner of Half Moon Street, and Loring had waved good-night and was walking towards Curzon Street before I was ready to ask him.

II

I look back on my life between 1907 and 1910 as three years' hard labour. The sentence began to run about a week after Summertown's return from the Continent, and it was only when he had been coaxed and pushed into a commission in the Third Grenadier Guards and I was dining with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace, six months later, that I heard news of O'Rane's strangely devious progress to the New World.

Devious, and yet perhaps not strange. He went by way of British East Africa, though what he did and how long he remained there, no man has discovered. The documentary evidence ended with a two-line postcard from Mombasa, and anyone could interpret it as he pleased. Summertown's explanations grew more and more picturesque as dinner went on. O'Rane, he assured me, was a Great White Rajah holding sway from the Lakes to the Sudan and from the Desert to the now empty throne of Zanzibar; later, he had "gone black" and was living patriarchally in a kraal with scores of natives wives and one immaculate silk hat between himself and unashamed nudity; later still, he had proclaimed himself Mahdi, and was leading frenzied hordes of Dervishes to the recapture of Khartoum. Raney himself told me afterwards that he was at one time bar-tender in the Nairobi Club and the rest of the while turning his hand, not altogether without success, to anything in heaven above or the waters beneath that had money in it. When he left Africa I have no idea, but the next time I heard of him he had unquestionably reached Mexico.

In the meantime I was wearily serving my sentence in London. I have mentioned the guerilla warfare carried on by Bertrand against the Foreign Office from the time of the Franco-British _entente_. Secret treaties or understandings were new and amazingly distasteful to the Radical wing, the Lobby rumours only increased the general uneasiness, and something of a crisis was reached when the undefined alliance was joined by Russia. We fire-eaters had lavished invective on the Czar's Government at the time of "Red Sunday," and a _fainéant_ Duma hardly availed to drive Father Gapon and the litter of dead in the Petersburg streets from our memory. If, of course, one country after another was to be drawn into the _entente_, well and good; there could be no need for so much bated breath and mystery. If, on the other hand, we were dividing Europe into two groups,--at best for a competition in armaments, at worse for a trial of strength,--then the men and women whose lives were handed out as stakes had the right to know the gamble their rulers were meditating.

In this connexion I make free recantation of one heresy: I no longer desire open diplomacy. Had it obtained for the last generation, war might have been postponed; but, if war was as consistently intended by Germany as I am assured on all hands, it would only have been postponed till a less formidable alliance opposed her. To the other half of my creed I remain loyal, though my loyalty be tinged with despair. Now, as then, I look forward to an era of universal arbitration, a _pro rata_ reduction of armaments leading in time to the abolition of national armies and navies and the establishment of a United States of the world with federal control of the world's constabulary. The ideal will not materialize to-day or to-morrow, but--as O'Rane was fond of saying--slavery and torture died hard, the rule of law between individuals did not come in a night.

Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall; perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be--and there is little doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manoeuvres; certainly a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for the Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers provided a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and drudgery, there was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign; _l'appétit vient en mangeant_, and to some extent we succumbed to the enthusiasm we tried to inspire in others.

Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League," floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the lands of sympathizers and suspects.

The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details, and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.

I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper. We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide--but never thwart--our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful, and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing was too great or too small for our attention....

Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the "Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with excited suggestions.

"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay--I don't mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a paper...."

And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title, suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the Watchman about it."

Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus. Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the Sensations they had effected--the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the "Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo" carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as _épatant_ a sensation of universal disarmament--or, for the matter of that, bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform--but a narrow Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or worse we had to get on without them.

Sir John Woburn himself I never met--and am the first to regret the loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.

The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled--Penelope fashion--the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader, Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war, which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the voluntary system by day.

"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."

"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily commercial.

After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the provinces--which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles--and seemed pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared manuscripts.

M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long, I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And, when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some new _édition de luxe_, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man, don't you think you could give _me_ some reviewing to do?" Publishers at one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head knowingly and reassured me.

"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy. He kens well--if you don't--that good reviews never yet sold a bad book, nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."

The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.

No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909 Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly, there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.

The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle, international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to lose by war.

Hard on this criticism followed the question propounded in the late summer of 1914 by a hundred papers and a hundred thousand tongues, what--if anything--the Disarmament League had achieved for all its pamphlets, its speeches and its international propaganda. Well, I think we killed the Chauvinism that plunged this country in the South African War; the criminal Teutonic doctrine that war is a fine thing in itself and the necessary purging of a nation's fatty degeneration found no audience in these islands: we won respect for The Hague Tribunal, and can claim some credit for the Taft Arbitration Treaty with the United States. Perhaps, too, we postponed war when a more bellicose people might have plunged blood-thirstily into the Balkan embroglio. That we impaired the national power of resistance by opposing Lord Roberts' national service propaganda, I resolutely deny. The Haldane Army Reorganization rightly contemplated a naval screen behind which an army of any size could be built up. I for one never committed the illogicality of trying to reduce the Government's ship-building programme without proportional reduction on the part of other countries. Whether I should have embarked on the peace propaganda if the Government had told me its foreign obligations of honour, is another question.

Of course, if anyone asks me to explain away the present fact of war, I must ask in my turn whether a law against duelling had abolished the present fact of assault or isolated murder. Our League had a life of some seven years, the Internationale perhaps six times as long; both these organizations were as powerless to prevent war as two thousand years of Christian teaching.

But my present task is to describe and not to defend or speculate. If I have dealt at some length with the activities of the League, my excuse must be that it monopolized so much of my time between 1908 and 1910. When the paper and the correspondence bureau and the lecturing tours had been organized and set on their feet to stand alone, we were engaged in promoting a better understanding with the principal powers on the Continent. In 1909 my uncle arranged for an extended tour to be undertaken through the principal towns of France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia by representatives of the principal newspapers in the kingdom; on their return at the end of six months, he sent them to the United States, Canada and certain of the South American Republics. In the meantime, a return visit was paid by a hundred and fifty continental journalists, and my uncle and I escorted them round London, introduced them to some of the chief manufacturing centres, divided them into groups of ten and billeted them on sympathetic country houses, with results that were occasionally embarrassing and had not a few of those unrehearsed effects which constitute sometimes the success, sometimes the disaster, but always the comic element in such campaigns of strenuous goodwill.

The return visit of the journalists was followed by a mission of British Trades-Unionists to the Continent; we received a deputation representing Continental Labour in our turn. The Bar went next, and then a Committee of the House of Commons, then a sprinkling of the British Medical Association, and lastly a number of Church of England clergy and Free Church ministers. When I say that each visit called forth a return visit, and that Bertrand and I bore the brunt of entertaining and shepherding our visitors; when I add that my uncle was a member of the House the whole time (and an assiduous attendant), while I kept him company till my defeat in the first election of 1910, it is not wonderful that we both tended to drop out of London social life and to lose touch with all but our most intimate friends and relations.

It was not until the autumn of 1909 that I could find time to spend a fortnight with Loring at House of Steynes. I remember him telling me that the Daintons would be of the party, but it was so long since I had seen them that I had no idea even whether they had spent the intervening time in England. Sonia's engagement was broken off late in 1907, and almost her first appearance in public after the rupture was when we met in Scotland two years later. I gather that Loring, who was lazily attracted by her, paid several visits to Crowley Court, but he and I played Box and Cox so far as London was concerned. When I came back for the opening of Parliament, he moved unobtrusively away to the Riviera, only returning in the height of the season when my hands were full of foreign visitors and my mouth of polyglot civilities and explanations. We no longer met to exchange news of O'Rane, because there was no news to exchange. After his single postcard to Summertown from Mombasa, the silence of the grave descended upon him, and nothing but my conviction of his material indestructibility kept me from fearing that he might in very truth be dead.

And then without warning I was called upon to fulfil my part of the old covenant. On a summer night in 1909 an invitation sang its way over the wires from Knightsbridge to Curzon Street.

"My compliments to Lord Loring, and, if he will dine with me to-night at the Eclectic, I can give him news of Mr. O'Rane."

III

"If you tell me the little man's been writing to you," were Loring's first words, "I'm afraid I shan't believe you."

I helped him to take his coat off and led the way into the dining-room.

"I wouldn't insult your intelligence with such a story," I answered. "It was infinitely more Raneyesque."

"Well, where is he and what's he doing?"

"Where did he _say_ he was going? What did he _say_ he would do?" I asked in turn. "My dear Jim, Raney's one of those people whose dreams come true. He told us he was going to Mexico, and he's gone to Mexico; he told us he was going to make money, and I gather he's making the devil of a lot."

"When's he coming home?" Loring asked.

I was about to admit ignorance when an old recollection stirred in my brain and I completed the history.

"He _told_ me he would dine with me in this room on the first of May next year. He _will_ dine--at that time--in this place."

Loring helped himself to plovers' eggs and began slowly to remove the shells.

"The little man's born out of time, you know," he said, with a laugh. "He belongs to the spacious days of Elizabeth. I'm glad he's in luck. God knows, if ever a man deserved it, if ever there was poetic justice for real pluck ..." he left the sentence eloquently unfinished. "Drive ahead, George."

"In time," I said, "and at a price."

Nearly four years in the House of Commons had made me quite shameless in the matter of log-rolling. I held Loring to ransom and refused to utter another word about O'Rane until he had promised to let me descend on House of Steynes with a party of ten French journalists who were arriving in England in two months' time and had to be shown every side of English social life. It was a preposterous request for me to make, and Loring very properly refused it--not once but several times. Only at the end of a long and--if I may say so--well chosen dinner, when I declined even to mention O'Rane's name, did he show a willingness to compromise.

"Have it your own way!" he exclaimed impatiently. "I shan't be there, though."

"My dear Jim, unless you're there from start to finish----"

"This is sheer blackmail!" he cried.

"As you will," I answered, folding my arms obstinately.

"You're a dirty dog, George," he answered, with slow scorn. "I suppose I shall have to promise, though."

Before telling my tale, I had to explain how it had reached me. The previous evening had been devoted to one of many all-night sittings on the interminable 1909 Budget. I walked home between five and six o'clock in the morning, as the returning market-carts rumbled sleepily westward along Knightsbridge, and belated revellers in vivid dresses and with tired, white faces flashed by in taxis and private cars. My head was aching, my lungs seemed charged with the poisoned air of the House, and I was chilled to the marrow of my bones; cursing a factious Opposition, I had reached the door of my uncle's house in Princes Gardens and was fumbling for my latch-key, when I noticed a man sitting on the steps with his head on his knees and his hands clasped round his legs. He awoke as I tried to squeeze by him, rubbed his eyes, yawned, gazed round him, and then scrambled stiffly to his feet.

"Maybe you're Mr. George Oakleigh?" he asked, with an American intonation almost too strong to be natural. And then, when I bowed in assent, "Gee, but it's cold waiting. D'ye think I could come in for a piece? I've been sitting here since ten last night."

My first desire was for a hot bath, my second for bed. Both points were clearly propounded to the American.

"Guess that'll keep," he answered easily. "I've a message from your friend David O'Rane." He felt in his pocket and produced a card with the name "James Morris." and some address that I have forgotten in Mexico City. On the back was pencilled, "Please give bearer any assistance he may require. D. O'R."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?" I asked unenthusiastically, fingering the card and then glancing at my watch.

"A warm room and something to eat," he answered, with a shiver. "My name's not Morris, by the way, but it'll serve. And I'm not a native of Mexico, but _that'll_ serve. My folk come from this side of the water, but they're not proud of me for some reason. By the same token, I shan't keep you long from your bath. I'm known in Knightsbridge. 'Late to bed and early to rise, Is the rule for Knightsbridge, _if_ you're wise.' All right, I'm not jagged."

Mr. Morris's manner was so unprepossessing that nothing but my regard for O'Rane would have induced me to admit him to the house at this--or any--hour. In appearance, the man was of medium size with powerful hands and thin, riding legs. His hair and skin were fair, his eyes grey, and his features regular though weak. All pretension to good looks, however, was ruined by his expression, which was an unattractive blend of cunning and effrontery. His lower lip shot out at the end of a sentence, as though to conceal the weak line of his chin: deep furrows from nose to mouth formed themselves into a perpetual sneer; the pale eyes were half hidden under their insolent, drooping lids. And with it all there was something pitiful about the man: he was so young, not more than two and twenty; the recklessness was so crude, the frailty of character so patent. He seemed like a highly strung child who had been bullied into obstinacy and violence by an unsympathetic nurse. And that, I believe, was in fact one part of his history.

"Come in, Mr. Morris," I said, opening the door. "I shall be glad to hear any news of O'Rane and to do anything I can for a friend of his."

"A name to conjure with, seemingly," said Morris, with a malicious smile.

"O'Rane's?"

"I reckon so. You'll admit you didn't precisely freeze on to me at first sight. However, no ill feeling."

"It was an unusual hour for a call," I replied.

"And I looked an unusual sort of a customer, eh? Well, never mind. What's this? Cheese? I can do with some of that. No whiskey! I don't use spirits nowadays, not since I met O'Rane."

We sat in silence while he munched bread and cheese, contentedly glancing round the room at the pictures or, when he thought I was not looking, letting his eyes rest on me. The curtains were still drawn, and the yellow light from the chandelier, feeble by contrast with the cold, diamond clarity of the dawn outside, lent an added element of the fantastic to our meeting. I lit a cigar, settled wearily into my chair and told him not to hurry himself.

"Well, start at the beginning," he said at length, "I met him eighteen months ago in Tomlinson's Saloon, Acacia Avenue, Mexico City. He hadn't been in the country more than a few days--landed with five thousand dollars he'd made out Africa way and was looking for likely oil propositions. I was with the Central Syndicate in those days. No need to ask why I was in the accursed country at all, or what I was doing. The Syndicate made me cashier in their innocence of heart, and, though I wasn't overpaid, their bookkeeping left loopholes for a man of enterprise. I used those loopholes some. By the time I met O'Rane, the Syndicate had lent me 4000 dollars--more'n eight hundred pounds--without knowing it. We weren't in sight of an audit, I'd got months to doctor the entries, it was roses all the way." Truculently he thrust forward his lower lip, every inch of him the bragging schoolboy. "Then--I had ninety minutes' warning--the Syndicate started in for amalgamation with the Southern Combine, the accountants rolled up for the valuation--and I thought Mexico City wasn't good for my health."

He paused dramatically, finished his soda water and put down the empty glass.

"That's when I met O'Rane," he went on. "There wasn't much packing or leave-taking to get through. I booked express for New Orleans and turned into Tomlinson's till it was time to get under way for the depot. That's where they took me--I was a fool to run before evening, it was bound to arouse suspicion. I'd been talking to O'Rane a matter of half an hour--oil prospects and such like--when I felt a hand on my shoulder and a shiver down my spine."

He paused again and helped himself to a cigar.

"To this day I don't know why he did it," he resumed, "but I'd not been four and twenty hours in my cell when they told me there was a visitor wanting to speak with me.

"'Tell him I'm only at home on the sixth Friday of the month,' I said.

"_I_ didn't want any durned visitors. He came in, though--leastways he came to the door and peeked through the grille.

"'Morning,' says he, 'you remember we met in Tomlinson's yesterday. My name's O'Rane.'

"'I've not got a card,' says I, 'but you'll find full particulars in the book upstairs.'

"I wasn't out to be civil and I thought he'd taken the hint and cleared. He was still at the grille, though, next time I looked up.

"'Which college were you?' he asks after a bit--for all the world as if we were still drinking cocktails in Tomlinson's. College! If he'd asked my views on Bacon and Shakespeare....

"'What the hell's that to you?' I blazed out.

"'It was Merton or Corpus, but I can't remember which,' he says.

"I didn't say anything to that.

"'I was at the House,' he went on. 'I wanted to see if I couldn't give you a lift up. What's the amount in dispute?'

"'Four thousand,' I answered and heard him whistle.

"'Pounds?' he asks.