Chapter III: Bertrand Oakleigh (1)

"The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's,
Is--not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,--but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,
May lead within a world which (by your leave)
Is Rome or London, not Fool's-Paradise.
Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make Paradise of London if you can,
You're welcome, nay, you're wise."
ROBERT BROWNING, "Bishop Blougram's Apology."

I

I left Oxford with a sense of oppressive loneliness.

It was not entirely the sorrow of parting from a place I had for four years loved but too well; it was not altogether the prospect of making a fresh start--I was pleasurably excited by that; the feeling of forlornness arose, I think, from the recognition that the next step would have to be taken alone. I suppose I am shy; certainly I lack initiative. There had hitherto always been someone to keep me in countenance--Loring at my private school, at Melton and, later, at Oxford, and there had always been someone to act as a stimulus. At one time it was Burgess, who laid the foundation of any knowledge I have gleaned, and made me as temperate, passionless and sterile as I have become--as deeply imbued, perhaps, with the indifference that masquerades as toleration.

At another time I was stirred from philosophic doubt by the fanaticism of O'Rane. The fire he lit burned too brightly to last, but by strange irony as it began to flicker I came under the influence of my guardian Bertrand Oakleigh, a man so disillusioned that in very factiousness of opposition I was driven to fan the dying embers of my young enthusiasms. My intimate acquaintance with him began in the autumn of 1904, some fifteen months after I had come down. In the interval I must admit to a feeling of intellectual homelessness.

The last moments of the Oxford phase came at the end of July after six weeks in Ireland with my mother. I returned to London and picked up Loring, and the two of us presented ourselves for our vivâs. There was little worthy of record in my own case. A fat-faced man in a B.D. hood opened at random the Index and Epitome to the Dictionary of National Biography, turned the leaves, shut the book with a snap and called my name. For perhaps six minutes I drew on my imagination for the early life of the Young Pretender; then in an oily, well-fed voice my examiner remarked, "Thank you. That will do." I disliked the voice, I disliked the man. He is probably a bishop now.

When my own ordeal was over I strolled round the Schools to see how the Greats men were getting on. To my delight I found Loring in the middle of his vivâ--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the vivâ was in progress, for I have no idea when it started. Maradick of Corpus was examining, and everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. The candidate was leaning back with his chair tilted at an angle and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat; so far as a lay man could judge he was making out an effective case against the Pragmatism of William James, of which, by an appropriate coincidence, Maradick was regarded as one of the greatest living exponents. The scornful demolition went on unchecked until Loring introduced some such name as Müsseldorf.

"Who?" interrupted Maradick.

"Müsseldorf. Johan Müsseldorf of Nürnburg. Died about 1830. It's his 'Prolegomena' I'm quoting. He exploded Pragmatism before James was born."

"Exploded? Well, er ... that's as may be. I remember now you mentioned him in one of your papers. He's not very well known in this country."

"I don't know about this country," Loring rejoined. "He's shamefully neglected in this university. Yet he undoubtedly anticipated Schopenhauer on Will. Or if you look at Lincke's 'Note on Berkeley's Subjective Idealism'...."

"Lincke, did you say?" inquired another of the examiners.

The remainder of that vivâ has passed into history, and when I went up to take my M.A. three years later the story was told me of three different people. On the last day of the written work, Loring had expressed dissatisfaction with his papers, and I heard later that when he began his vivâ the examiners regarded him as a hopeless, unsalvageable third. They asked formal questions, and he replied by burlesquing such of their lecture theories as he had picked up at second hand. It was by pure chance that he mentioned Müsseldorf, but the awe of unfamiliarity with which the name was received led him to try experiments with the mass of mid-nineteenth century metaphysics that for two years I had seen him reading in the window-seats of "93D" or reciting of an evening to a restless Siamese kitten.

I arrived in time to see the three examiners taking counsel together, while Loring looked on with the good-natured tolerance of a man who is prepared to give up his whole day in a good cause.

"We think, my colleagues and I," said Maradick at length, "that this discussion had better be continued in another room. Perhaps you will come this way with me? We should like to hear you more fully on this subject, but of course there are other candidates to consider."

I have only Loring's unchecked, picturesque narrative of what took place during the next hour, as I was not sure whether the public was admitted to this private, auricular examination.

"They'll give me a first on that," he predicted, as we walked up the High together. "Bound to! Oh, it was one of our better vivâs! I hauled out every German philosopher I'd ever heard of, and a fair sprinkling that I made up on the spot, carefully adding an outline of their work and pointing out where they differed from our esteemed old friend Lincke. Maradick don't know much about modern German metaphysics, and he knows a dam' sight less about the German language. I quoted long passages to establish my points, and when I couldn't think of any to suit, I just made 'em up! I'd no idea my German was so fluent. If they _don't_ give me a first, I'll expose Maradick for pretending to recognize quotations from two non-existent authors named Frischmann and Reichwald respectively." He led the way to the station with an obvious sense of a good day's work done.

I imagine that every man, before he attains wisdom, endures a part or the whole of a walking tour. O'Rane had propounded the idea in the course of our last term, and his eloquence was sufficient to shake even Loring. On leaving Oxford we repaired to House of Steynes, where Raney was awaiting us with a haversack and ash-plant, and without giving our enthusiasm a chance to cool we struck south with no more destination nor time-limit than was implied in the determination to walk until we quarrelled or grew tired of walking. It is a tribute to our friendship that three weeks later we reached Loring Castle, Chepstow, unsundered and harmonious.

There was, I suppose, too much variety for us to grow weary of each other's society. Marching without map or time-table, we billeted ourselves for the night on any friend we encountered on the way, and when none was available we put up at the first hotel that promised adequate bathing accommodation. Our kit was not immoderate--brushes, razors, sponges and pyjamas. When we needed clean clothes we bought them, and got rid of the old through the parcels post. This last was the only matter of disagreement between us, for Loring professed an overwhelming desire to heap unwelcome gifts on the unsuspecting men who chanced to be in the public eye at the moment.

"I've walked clean through these boots," I remember his remarking one night at Windermere, as I yawned through an attack on the current Education Bill in a fiery local organ. "George, d'you think your friend Dr. Clifford would like some capital brown bootings? Or Lord Hugh Cecil?" He seized the paper from my hands and turned the pages thoughtfully. "Eugene Sandow! That does it! Why, it may be his birthday to-morrow for all you know!" And it was only by concerted physical force that we restrained him.

The result of our Schools reached us at Shrewsbury: Loring had got a first and I a second.

"It's one in the eye for dear old Burgess," he remarked, when we congratulated him. "I shall go down to Melton next term and ask for an extra half, just to score him off. And now I really _can_ take things easily."

"Why don't you stand for a fellowship?" I asked. I remembered his dread of leaving Oxford and found it in my heart to envy him his chance of living on and off in--say All Souls for another half-dozen years.

"Why in God's name should I?" he demanded. "I've satisfied myself, and anyone else who's interested in the subject, that I've got some ability. Now the only artistic thing is to waste it. There's no distinction in belonging to an effete aristocracy unless people can be induced to think you're being thrown away. I'm going to be a Dreadful Object Lesson."

He leaned back in his chair, yawned and sat with closed eyes until we roused him.

"Seriously, what are you going to do?" O'Rane inquired.

Loring adopted the manner of a Hyde Park orator.

"Live abroad," he said, "and squander the rents that I wring from the necessitous poor. Come back in time to shoot the birds or hunt the foxes that have overrun my tenants' land. Go down to the House once every few years to vote against democratic measures. Marry an actress of questionable virtue and die, leaving a son who has only to take the trouble to be born in order to become an hereditary legislator and a permanent obstacle to the People's Will. It'll be very hard work, but someone must do it, or Drury Lane and the Liberal Publication Department would have to close down. That's what's expected of tenth transmitters of foolish faces, isn't it, George?"

"It's the least you can do," I assured him.

"And the most. That's the sad part about it." His face grew reflective and his voice lost its note of banter. "Time was when I hugged delusions and called them ideals. I used to think there was room in the body politic for men who were rich enough and high placed enough to be quite independent of party considerations,--men who could wait and take long views, men without seats to lose or constituents to bother about, men who couldn't be bought because there was nothing big enough to offer them. The enormous majority of M.P.'s go into politics for what they can get out of them--legal jobs, office, local honour and glory--and it gets worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait, these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest shift their leaders may suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."

I suggested that with all its faults our English public life was still ethically the cleanest in the world and was so far from consistently deteriorating that it was still some way above eighteenth-century England. If he found it corrupt it was for him to raise it to his ideal.

"My dear George," he answered, "the ideal perished on the day I discovered Unionists and Radicals both talking of 'big views' and 'the higher patriotism' and at the same time helping themselves out of the public purse. No, no! _Suave mari magno._ I shall endeavor not to marry the actress of questionable virtue, but I shan't attempt to etherialize politics. They're too dirty, for one thing, and they're too dam' dull for another."

He might have added that they were too uncertain. In twenty years' tolerably close observation it is the unexpected changes of politics that impress me most--the big Bills that evoke none of the expected opposition, the little Bills that break Ministries, the inflation or sudden pricking of a reputation, the constant shifting and re-arranging of parties. Ten days after Loring's criticism of politics on the score of their dullness, the three of us were at Chepstow waiting for the weather to mend before pushing on to London. The Khaki Parliament does not rank high among periods of consummate human dignity; its birth was overshadowed and embarrassed by the South African War; its early and middle life were given over to Education and Licensing Bills of which I imagine even their authors were not unduly proud. Then without warning came the news that Chamberlain had declared for Mercantilism, Protection, Fair-Trade--whatever name was dug out of the economy primers before the movement was baptized with the name of Tariff Reform.

The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French National Convention.

My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club. The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying, and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism, Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."

I can see now that there was little originality in the book. Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall. Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.

Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and glittering epigram, their logic--and faith in logic, their assurance and perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful: there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social Reform. The Liberal League--most gentlemanly of parties--was captured; its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to their own again.

Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous, Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford mind. I remember my relief some years later in reading "The Break-up of the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized, ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on governmental control and coercion.

Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight--never strong--underwent one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone, because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail: for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled with me as far as Alexandria.

A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon O'Rane gave me the reason.

"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, of course, who else? She had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."

"What's her objection?" I asked.

"Oh, Sonia's too young, and speaking as her mother--my God, I thought that ullage was kept for penny novelettes! The girl of the present day.... Well, the long and the short of it was--I didn't mean to--but I told her Sonia and I were engaged. That gave her something to think about, George."

He strode fiercely across the lawn with his hands clasped Napoleonically behind his back.

"What did she say?" I asked, hurrying to overtake him.

"Wouldn't _hear_ of it, don't you know?" he answered mimickingly. "We were a pair of children, don't you know? I'd behaved scandalously in mentioning such a thing, it was monstrous; what had I got to support her on? It was all her fault for ever letting Sonia go to Oxford, young men were not to be trusted, and after the years she'd known me, don't you know?" He blew a long breath. "She couldn't have said much more if we'd eloped."

"Well, what's going to happen now?"

He flung his hands out in wild gesticulation, and his black eyes were round and hot with angry surprise.

"She declined to recognize the engagement and told me I was to consider it off," he said. "I told her I proposed to marry Sonia. '_That_ is for _us_ to decide!'" He clutched my arm and marched me the length of the lawn. "George, she's getting damnably pompous since they made Dainton a bart. We seemed to have reached a bit of an impasse. '_I_ don't recognize even an understanding,' she said, 'and I shall not permit Sonia to do so. If you persist in this--nonsense, my husband and I shall have to consider whether it is advisable for you and Sonia to have any opportunities of meeting, don't you know? If you will take my advice....' Pah! And then she handed it out. I must think of my career, I was a mere boy; you needed to be married to appreciate that marriage was an expensive luxury...."

"You seem to have taken it in the neck, Raney," I said as he choked and grew silent in his disgust.

"Pretty fairly. I'm not to write. I'm honour-bound not to mention the subject to Sonia on pain of having the door shut in my face next time. 'Of course, we shouldn't like that. You're an old friend. Perhaps if you had sisters of your own, don't you know. She started to get patronizing, George, so I asked her to tell me whether she admitted me to the house because I was _fit_ to be admitted, or out of pity because I hadn't a home of my own and was a bastard----"

At the risk of writing myself down old-fashioned and conventional, I admit there are two or three words that send a shiver through me.

"My dear Raney ...!" I began.

He laid a hand on my arm.

"You can't improve on what she said, old man," he assured me.

"Call a spade 'a spade' by all means," I said, "but not 'a bloody shovel.' Especially with women. They have to pretend to be shocked."

He threw up his head with a mirthless laugh.

"There was devilish little pretence about Lady Dainton. It wasn't a word I ought to have used, and apparently it wasn't a thing I ought to have been. I suppose--she hadn't--heard about it before." He stood silent for many moments. "I asked her whether my presence was still acceptable. Of course she was bound ... did it very nicely, all the same. She said I was as welcome as before last June."

He took out a pipe and began filling it. I have met few men to whom the trite metaphor of "blowing off steam" was so applicable.

"Was that all?" I asked.

"I told her I regarded myself as being still engaged to Sonia." His eyes suddenly blazed and his voice rose. "And that I'd marry her if the whole world was in our way. Children indeed! Does she think there's some fixed age for falling in love?" Again he blew a long breath. "She said she couldn't be responsible for what I chose to fancy about myself, but that I knew her views. There the row ended."

There was a subdued leave-taking that night, and for some days the gloom spread by Lady Dainton seemed to hang round her house and family. For all my wisdom and superiority in discussing the rash engagement with Amy Loring, I was sorry to see it broken off. Two, three years before I had been as anxious as O'Rane to marry and I do not know that a disappointment hurts less at eighteen than later in life. It is true that there was no pecuniary embarrassment in my case, but at that age I refused to regard it as a serious obstacle in O'Rane's path. If anyone wanted money, he either manoeuvred himself into a job or put his shoulders to the wheel and made it. The one course, I then fondly believed, was as delightfully simple as the other. In few words, Lady Dainton was entirely wrong and O'Rane entirely right.

I carried that opinion with me to Cairo and beyond. The days of our passage out were days in which Sonia would come on deck in the morning rather white of face and waterily bright of eye. By night, as we strolled aft and looked out over the creaming wake, I would try to invent little consoling speeches and tell her of men who had amassed fortunes almost in an hour; and she--at sixteen and a half--would gaze across the gulf that separated her from one-and-twenty. On that day she would marry him if she married beggary with him, though beggary was but so much rhetoric on her lips. O'Rane's future, as they had mapped it out together a dozen times, included two things that stood out above the rest--the revival of the title that had died with his father and a fortune wherewith to restore his father's estate. From so determined a republican no less could be expected.

The month I spent in Cairo made me doubtful whether Raney had not met his match in Lady Dainton. Even conceding the practicability of her daughter's generous assumptions, I doubted whether fair time would be granted for their maturing. Lady Dainton's ambition carried her far and fast; she was now, after five years' assiduity, reckoned unhesitatingly as of county family; a like assiduity directed on London would, in another five years, leave no house unstormed. I know no one outside an Oscar Wilde play who talked so persistently of the difference between those who were "in Society" and the others who were not. I studied her method--and was astonished by its simplicity. She engaged a good suite at Shepheard's, aware beforehand of the class of visitors she was likely to meet there; by perseverance and an agreeable manner she succeeded in getting to know all who--in her own phrase--were "worth knowing"; and with the aid of an undeniable flair for organization she made up other people's minds for them and tirelessly arranged expeditions and parties. (It was curiously like the "Pinkerton's Hebdomadary Picnics" of "The Wrecker.") And on her return to England there started a paper-chase of invitations, beginning, "I hope you are not one of the people who think friendships abroad should be forgotten at home, like some dreadful indiscretion...."

I left Cairo with the feeling that Lady Dainton, were her circumstances ever reduced, would always be worth bed, board and a retaining-fee for a Lunn and Perowne Pleasure Cruise.

I also thought that David O'Rane, undergraduate, must cut an insignificant figure in her dominating eyes.

II

The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.

After the absence of a year, in which I made my way from London through Africa, India, Australia to South America and back again through the States, Japan, China and Russia, I am free to admit that I sinned frequently and soliloquized interminably to men who neither knew nor wished to hear about the countries I had visited. I was very young at the time, and that must be my excuse. Greater age, and my sufferings at the hands of others, will now restrain my pen and limit me to a single reminiscence.

On my way home in the late summer of 1904 I broke the journey at Paris to stay with Johnny Carstairs, who was now--after a truncated career at Oxford--established as an honorary attaché at the Embassy. I never visit Paris without turning into the Luxembourg to see what Whistlers are on view and this time, as I came out into the Gardens, I saw Draycott. He looked shabby and unshaven, but not more so than any conscientious English student in the Quartier Latin, and at no time since he exchanged the extreme of foppery for the extreme of Bohemianism had a frayed shirt or porous boots seemed valid reason in his eyes for cutting a friend.

"The reason?" Carstairs echoed, when we met for _déjeuner_ in the Café d'Harcourt. "I know it, of course, but----"

Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.

"Don't be professional," I said.

"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.

I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on the quayside at Calais--threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was the first of my experience--and the most complete.

After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of a _conseille de famille_, to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my mother's course for her--the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining and unanswerable question:

"What about you, George?"

As so often with men of weak initiative, the question--with a little judicious delay--was answered for me. My uncle and former guardian wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed--and accepted her fate. He arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the shooting--there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating notice--Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.

"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner. "What d'you want to do that for?"

"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"

"H'm. You won't make money out of _that_ kind of book."

"Then you've read it?" I said.

Bertrand knocked the ash from his cigar and thought out a disparaging answer.

"Oh, I looked at it," he said vaguely. "It's unequal. Some parts worse than others."

"It was written by several people," I explained.

"Which part was your handiwork?"

"Which did you think the worst?" I asked in turn.

My uncle looked at me suspiciously.

"You're not proud of your precious babe," he observed.

"The opportunity would be too irresistible for you if I were."

Then he laughed, and with that laugh was born the friendship of many years. It was a pity, he felt, that a young man should bury himself in the dreariest house of the dampest county of the damnedst island in the world. Why should I not come to London, see a little of politics and society, 'try it on the dog, so to say'--which by amplification meant testing the principles of "Thursday Essays" on a popular meeting? If, as a good, catholic hater, there was one thing he hated more than another, it was writing letters: why should I not sign on as his secretary? Though untrained, I should learn much, and anyone with enough superfluous energy to rush into print could handle his correspondence before breakfast.

"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.

"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.

"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you know."

So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopædic intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.

Some sides of his character--his disillusionment, independence and far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred--were attributable to early struggles and later disappointments. After leaving Trinity College he saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and well-trodden road.

Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr. Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and--I am afraid--a love of mischief-making for its own sake.

His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the Houses of Parliament, he would--by his own standards of justice--be the sole survivor.

Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man. His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly--by some curious irony--ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence he kept to himself.

Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management. His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes "an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis Roederer per man.

I soon ceased to wonder at my uncle's objection to sending out invitations in his own hand. For luncheon he kept open house, and any man might come to seek or offer advice and continue coming till a more than ordinarily brutal insult convinced him that his presence was no longer welcome; it was at a dinner that his formal entertaining displayed itself. On Mondays we had "these damned official Liberals"--candidates and members; ex-Ministers and leaders of dissentient minorities; ecstatic, white-hot Nonconformist pastors and worried party journalists trying to reconcile the two-and-seventy jarring sects into which Liberalism split after the Chesterfield speech. Bertrand would glower at them, individually and in bulk, but, as the shrill, earnest voices rose and mingled, I could see his eyes travelling from time-server to _intransigeant_, as though his fingers were on the pulse of the whole unwieldy, centrifugal party. And when he had looked longer than usual at a man, he would wander round the table and murmur casually, "Stay behind for another cigar when the Bulls of Bashan have gone."

The Thursday dinners and the guests invited to them were marked in his book with a D--which stood for Duty, Dull or Damnable, according to his temper.

"I have to do it, George," he explained, with a half apologetic headshake. "For fifty years I've dined with them, and they must come and dine with me. If I refused to meet 'em ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "All my time would be taken up inventing excuses. Take my tip and dine out on Thursdays. I'll put you up for the Eclectic. Don't miss Saturday, though. The Saturday dinners are sometimes quite amusing."

In ten years I do not believe I missed a single Saturday dinner and for reward I think I have met what Lady Dainton would call "everybody worth meeting" in Bohemian, artistic, un-Social London. Looking round the long table at the authors and musicians, the returned travellers and soldiers on leave from a forgotten fringe of Empire, I was always reminded of a well-attended dinner of the Savage Club. You were invited--not for what you were, but for what you had done or because you could talk; and Bertrand in black tie and short jacket radiated a new urbanity over the gathering. We dined soon after eight and sat talking into the early morning. About midnight a sprinkling of actors and Sunday journalists would drop in for sandwiches, champagne and cigars. If there were vocalists or composers, the piano was dragged in from the morning-room; I used to hear a good deal of poetry recited before or in lieu of publication, and, whenever Carden, the "Wicked World" cartoonist, was with us, he would sit with one leg thrown across the other, his cigar at an acute angle and a spiral of blue smoke curling into his eyes, while he covered the backs of the ménus with caricatures in charcoal. I have a drawer full of them somewhere--Trevor-Grenfell who penetrated the Himalayas by a new pass, Woodman as 'Lord Arthur' in "Eleventh Hour Repentance," Milhanovitch at the piano and a dozen more.

Failing professional talent, my uncle would be called on to make sport. The only men I know who eclipsed him in memory were Burgess and O'Rane, and he had lived so long in London, hearing and storing the gossip of every hour, that it was almost impossible to find him at fault. That he was a stimulating talker, experimenting in talk and taking risks in conversation, I judge from the eagerness of his guests to get him started, and--to put the same test in other words--by the keen competition to secure invitations for a Saturday dinner. I remember a Thursday night when Loring came and wrestled with Bertrand over the official Catholic attitude towards Modernism. I met him in the street a few weeks later, and he begged me to congratulate him.

"What's happened?" I asked.

"You ought to know," he answered. "It came in your fist. I've been asked for a Saturday."

And Loring was in small things the least enthusiastic of men.

My secretarial duties took no more than an hour or two a day, and at the beginning of 1905 I followed my uncle's advice and put some of my political formulæ to practical test by going down three or four times a week to Wensley Hall Settlement in Shadwell. The impulse came from Baxter-Whittingham, who wrote to remind me of "our pleasant talks at Oxford" and to say that not a man could be spared with the working classes in their present scandalous condition of neglect. Thirty per cent of my generation worked for longer or shorter periods in one or other of the university and college missions: my seniors, laid by the heels in the slumming epidemic of the eighties and nineties, were there before me, and my juniors continued the supposedly good work after my defection. I therefore speak with misgiving and a sense of personal unworthiness in confessing that East End mission work left me singularly and embarrassingly cold. From some lukewarmness of spirit I failed to catch the enthusiasm which made my fellows dedicate their lives to the work and allowed them all to drop it when a dawning practice or the design of matrimony laid more pressing claim to their leisure. Bertrand indeed, indulged a favourite form of disparagement as soon as I made my intention known to him.

"I've been through all that," he told me. "It's all right; you'll outgrow it."

And I outgrew it in some ten weeks. Others have told me they made lasting and unique friendships. Such good fortune did not come my way. I doubted, and still doubt, the possibility of friendship between a Shadwell stevedore and the angular, repellent product of an English public school and university; this is not to put one above the other, but merely to disbelieve the existence of a common intellectual currency. Further, I am too self-conscious to run a Boys' Club or play billiards with the men without a sense of unreality and a fear of being thought patronizing. I question my own moral and social right, moreover, to conduct raids into the houses of Thames watermen and, if anyone seek to justify such mission work as I found in progress at Wensley Hall on the ground that it showed rich and poor how the other lived, it is mere platitude to answer that the poor revealed to me as little of their normal life as I to them of mine. Throughout my time in Shadwell I felt like a bogus curate at an endless choir treat.

And, if in looking back on it all I do not wholly regret the weeks I spent there, it is because of my consciously earnest and religiously hearty fellow-workers in the mission field. Chief of them in 1905 was Baxter-Whittingham, or simply "Baxter," as he was known to all Shadwell but myself, sometimes scholar of Lincoln and a man ten years my senior, who had gone from Oxford to the East End and never returned. It was the fashion at Wensley Hall to regard Whittingham as a Latter-Day Saint (I use the phrase in its unspecialized sense, without reference to the school of Brigham Young); and I am ready to believe that in thirty per cent of his character Whittingham was entirely saintly. Admiring disciples told me how he lived in a single room of a workman's cottage on fifteen shillings a week with a supererogatory fast thrown in on any colourable pretext. The first thirty per cent of him compassionately and whole-heartedly loved the poor. Another twenty per cent was given up to an emotionalism bordering on sensuality in ritual, music and art.

And the remaining fifty per cent of Baxter-Whittingham was pure _arrivisme_. He had risen early and cornered the market in poverty; there was no one to equal him on East End Housing Problems, the Drink Question, Sweating and the Minimum Wage. His little "Other Half of London" and "England's Shame" created a considerable sensation and were accepted without criticism. Indeed, who was in a position to criticize the man who knew Shadwell and had lived there ten years? When the disciples prevailed on him to stand in the 1906 election his candidature aroused an interest that spread far beyond the limits of his division. And when he was returned a party was waiting, ready made, in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. Ministers might shake their heads irritably over another Incorruptible, but many a private member felt easier in his mind for the presence of the hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped figure in the loose-fitting, semi-clerical clothes, who seemed to carry England's poor in one pocket and England's conscience in another.

And then, and then came Spring, and, rose in hand,
My threadbare Penitence a-pieces tore.

I left Wensley Hall at the beginning of the 1905 Season, lured by cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. Early in April I met John Ashwell at a dinner-dance given by the Sinclairs: he casually elicited my name and address, satisfied himself of my _bona fides_ and went to work like an industrious, dapper, well-fed little mole. Within a week strange cards arrived for me without explanation, within a month they had assumed the dimensions of a moderate snowstorm.

"Who _is_ Mr. John Ashwell?" I asked my uncle one morning, throwing over a card bearing his compliments.

"A Society promoter," Bertrand answered. "D'you know Lady Ullswater? Those two have started a registry office for eligible young men." He handed back the card. "Your name's on the books. He sends lists of dancing men to struggling hostesses at so many guineas a dozen. Lady Ullswater brings girls out at a hundred pounds a head, with another fifty pounds if there's a presentation; for three hundred pounds and all expenses--a couple of thousand in all, say--she'll give a ball at the Empire Hotel. 'Lady of Title willing to chaperone young girls of good family. Introductions.' _You_'ve seen her advertisements--every spring for the last fifteen years. Ashwell takes a commission on any suitable match he brings off in a girl's first season. Don't cherish too many illusions about London Society, George; anybody can get there who's willing to pay. And unless you're particularly anxious to be married off to someone you don't know, I should advise you to avoid Ashwell. A year or two ago I heard him with my own ears tell a woman that he'd got a man he wanted her daughter to meet--heir to a viscounty and a good deal of money; only an uncle in the way, and _he_ was a bad life. Of course if you feel you're immune, the pander to plutocracy is as amusing to study as anyone else."

Bertrand's description was not of a kind to send me out of my way in search of Ashwell, but in the course of nine years I saw as much of him as I wanted to. Of an artificial society he was, perhaps, the most artificial member.

III

Failing to learn much of working class conditions at first hand, I decided to reform them from the distant security of Westminster.

It was a few weeks after my apostasy from the Wensley Hall Settlement that I asked my uncle what steps he advised me to take in order to get myself elected to the House of Commons. "Thursday Essays" seemed to have committed me to a political career, and faithful reading of the party press had put my mind in a fine ferment over the immorality of the Unionist handling of Education, Licensing and Indentured Labour. Moreover, like most of those who had learned their political economy from Mill, I was intellectually offended that the dead heresy of Protection should be dragged from the grave it shared with Bi-metallism and galvanized into life. And I suffered all the fierce irritation of the impatient idealist at sight of a lethargic Government slumbering in office and barring the path of hurrying academic reformers. I felt that much must be swept away and much more built up. I had nailed on the public doors my theses of Federation, Land Reform, Franchise Adjustment, Single-Chamber Government and the rest. The offer of the Viceroyalty of India would not have kept me from the House.

"Want to stand?" Bertrand echoed. "My dear boy, you'll outgrow that phase."

"But the hopeless chaos!" I protested. "We've become an Imperial people, an industrial nation, and we're still trying to run with an obsolete machine."

"And--you--think--you--can--alter--it?" Paper and ink can never reproduce the cold scorn of his voice.

"I can have a dam' good try," I answered, with assurance.

Bertrand went to his writing-table and scribbled a note.

"Take this to Abingdon Street," he said, handing it to me. "You'll find you're more than welcome these hard times. I should go there on foot," he added gloomily--"along Knightsbridge and through the Park, where you can see the trees and hear the birds singing. London has its charms in the season, George. And you're a dancing man, aren't you?"

I admitted the charge.

"You'll soon outgrow _that_," he hastened to add, as though repentant of having found one good thing in life. "Well, _chacun à son goût_. But you'd find, if you came to the Gallery once or twice...."

"Is there any phase in life I _shan't_ outgrow, Bertrand?" I asked.

He selected a cigar, pinched it, lit it and blew a cloud of smoke.

"No," he answered at length.

"And what happens at the end of it all?"

"You die."

"Well, what keeps _you_ going? What phase are you in?"

He stared out of the window at the stream of hansoms and omnibuses rolling in a double line east and west.

"The great spectacle of life," he replied, with a wave of the hand. "You see it rather well from the House or the Club. That reminds me, I'd better put your name down. Come and lunch there to-day, and I'll show you the place. Yes, the great movement of men. I'm not tired of that yet. But you've got ideals, you're going to do things, you aren't content to sit and watch--and that's why I'm warning you against the House. There you'll only find jobs and disappointed men and backbiting and a spirit of compromise. However, you wouldn't believe me though I rose from the dead to tell you; a man has to find these things out for himself. You'd better tell the Whips who you are."

I walked down to the Central Office reflecting that Bertrand, to judge by his tone, had perhaps not yet quite escaped the phase of idealism.

His forecast of my reception was accurate enough. There were seats to fight in borough and county, north and south, east and west. I could have my choice, and with a year-book open on my knee I made comparative tables of the majorities against me. In the course of the interview there was diplomatic skirmishing on both sides as the Central Office reconnoitered to find out how much I was prepared to put down, and I tried to ascertain how far the Party Funds would help me. In consideration of a sum I was not willing to furnish, I could have the reversion of a safe seat in a mining area; at the other end of the scale, the Whips would pay all expenses if I would consent to break my shins on the five thousand Unionist majority in South St. Vincent's. Eventually, I undertook to pay my own expenses and fight the Cranborne division of Wiltshire, where there was a hostile majority of one thousand eight hundred. Then I jumped into a hansom and joined my uncle for luncheon at the Eclectic Club.

"The charm of this place," exclaimed Bertrand as he led me up the great staircase, "is that once you're a member you can be sure of meeting most of the men you want to and all the ones you don't. It's not political, so you find scallywags of all types. That's why it's called the Eclectic."

The great, grimy, eighteenth-century building--Hamilton's finest work, I always think--is too well known to need description, and anyone who has driven down Pall Mall or up St. James's Street is familiar with the line of bow-windows overlooking Marlborough House, and the row of choleric members who stare disgustedly at the street on wet days and revile the English climate. Within a few months I was privileged to take my place among them, and Bertrand spent an industrious week introducing me to the rules, conventions and personalities of the Club.