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WAS at Romilly Hall the night Prince Detloff gave an address on the “Dawn of Liberty in Russia.” It was a year after Evesham had gone away to Canada, and three months after Paul had married my youngest and silliest sister, poor dear! Evelyn had written her first novel, shocking my father to his inmost soul because of its alarming audacity—it would be regarded nowadays as innocent and old-fashioned stuff—and the beautiful Beatrice was engaged to a young man in Coutts’s Bank who was very highly connected, she said. I had left the publishing office of Carvell & Bliss—hating the drudgery—and was a free-lance journalist and short-story writer, helping to wear out the pavement of Fleet Street and earning odd guineas now and then, but not often.

It was as a journalist that I went that night to Romilly Hall. That is to say, I had to make a brief report of Detloff’s speech for a Socialist weekly whose editor was a friend of mine and a fellow-member of the Fabians. It was my first assignment of the kind, and I felt absurdly embarrassed and self-conscious because I had to take my seat at the reporters’ table in full view of Katherine, Paul, and my sister Clare, who sat in the front row of chairs between Canon and Mrs. Lambert.

They greeted me with smiling eyes, and Paul was vastly amused.

Throughout the lecture I kept glancing at Katherine, whom I did not see so often now. The affair with Hugh Evesham had somehow altered her. She looked less girlish, more beautiful, I thought, and farther removed from my boyish adoration. I could see that she was deeply interested in a lecture that seemed to me very dull and dreary, and she kept her eyes on the speaker, as though absorbed in what he had to say.

This Russian professor was a man of middle-age, though at that time I should have described him as an old fogey, after a glance at his haggard, thought-lined face. He was shabbily dressed in a frock coat very shiny at the elbows and creased at the skirt, over trousers that bagged below the knee. He wore false cuffs, I remember, and in a moment of eloquence one of them became unfastened, and shot over his wrist, to the great amusement of Paul, who winked at me and gave an audible guffaw. He had a black beard, and his hair, thin on top, was untidy, so that a lock fell over his right forehead. His hands were long and thin and delicate, but neither as a Russian Prince nor as a Professor of Philology at King’s College was he an ornamental figure. Yet he had an air of dignity, and there was both humour and humanity in those deep-set eyes of his.

For some reason I kept the notes I made—perhaps because it was my first effort at reporting—and, looking over them again after all these years, I see that he told his working-class audience of the utter denial of liberty in Russia under the Romanoffs, and described the miseries of the serfs before their liberation in 1862, and the brutal condition under which the peasantry still lived. Then he gave a series of stories about the men and women who were fighting against the tyranny of a mediæval system so that the Russian people might have some share in their own government, liberty of speech, elementary education, and opportunities of social progress. They were friends of his, he said, these courageous workers. Some of them were his old schoolfellows. They were aristocrats, professors, poets, painters, women of noble birth, girl students, peasant women—the finest types of Russian character and intellect. And they were imprisoned, flogged, tortured, and outraged for no other crime than spreading liberal ideas and denouncing tyranny.

They were going into the fields and factories, disguised as working-folk, to preach ideas of liberty among the people and teach them to read and write. But the secret police routed them out, some of the peasants betrayed them, and they were sent to the living death of the Siberian mines, or kept in solitary confinement in the Schlüsselburg, or the fortress of Peter and Paul, until they went mad, or died, or committed suicide. One girl had cut her throat with a pair of rusty scissors. A young poet, his dearest friend, had beaten out his brains against the prison wall. Another had soaked his mattress in paraffin and burnt himself alive. One beautiful girl—Yakinova—was torn from her young husband because she protested against an outrage on a peasant girl, and, with her four months’ old baby, was put in a cell where rats tried to devour her child.

“I do not speak all these things from hearsay,” said Prince Detloff. “As a young man I was arrested for writing an article on liberty which displeased the Governor of Moscow. I was taken to the fortress of the Schlüsselburg, fifty versts from St. Petersburg, on the island of Lake Ladoga. It was in 1887, when I was a beardless boy with a love of life. Of my fellow-prisoners—sentenced for a revolutionary conspiracy—thirteen were executed, three committed suicide, and sixteen died insane.”

He spoke of the freedom in England, the splendour and justice to our constitutional government, and appealed to English democracy to give their sympathy, at least, to their oppressed brothers and sisters in Russia, where liberty was only a dream in the hearts of idealists.

“It is a dream,” he said, “that one day will be gloriously fulfilled. It is a dream which is with me, waking or sleeping, because of the agonies of the people whom I love, and from whom I am exiled—the patient, long-suffering, great-hearted, simple-souled Russian race.”

As a convinced pacifist, he was not in favour of revolution by violence, and believed that the liberation of Russia would be accomplished by the spirit of sacrifice, by the education of the masses, and, above all, by the love and humanity which were spreading among the peoples of the world. “Where love is,” he said, quoting Tolstoy, “there God is also.”

I saw the ardent sympathy in Katherine’s eyes as she looked up at the gaunt figure on the platform. Perhaps he saw it too, that evening, and felt the coldness of his life warmed suddenly by the glowing light of that girl with her slim beauty. They had a long talk after the general discussion, which was led by Canon Lambert, who paid tribute to the “noble patriotism” of their distinguished guest, and deplored the agony of Russia, which he contrasted with

Liberty, the chartered right of Englishmen,

Won by our fathers in many a glorious field.

From Paul I heard that Katherine was attending some of Detloff’s lectures at King’s College, and then one day he blurted out the astounding news that she was going to marry him.

“It’s a case of Svengali!” said Paul, laughing uneasily. “The fellow’s mesmerised her.”

He put his hand on my arm, and said: “Don’t take it to heart so much. She knows her own mind. And, after all, he’s a Russian prince, though he looks like a tramp. Fairly respectable, I mean.”

“It’s impossible!” I cried. “Katherine and that old ruffian? It’s a crime. It’s horrible! Surely Canon Lambert and your mother won’t allow it, Paul?”

Paul grinned, and didn’t seem to think there was much hope in that quarter.

“The mater is rather taken with the idea of having a prince in the family. As for the governor, he says that Kitty’s old enough to choose for herself, and that old Bluebeard—that’s my name for him—is one of the noblest men alive. You know my old governor! Always ready to avoid a row and make the best of everything. You had better speak to Katherine yourself. She thinks a lot of you, old man. Never lost faith in your idealism!”

I answered as Paul had once spoken to Hugh Evesham.

“Damn my idealism!”

But that night when Katherine came to supper, looking very shy when my father made a flowery allusion to her engagement and hoped that she would be as happy as she made other people by her grace and charm—Beatrice spoilt this rhetoric by laughing in the middle of it—I made some excuse to take her into the billiard-room, so that I might be alone with her while the others were playing whist.

“Katherine!” I said, “For God’s sake——”

She knew my meaning, and did not pretend otherwise.

“I shall be very happy. He’s wonderfully good and kind, and he worships the ground under my feet! It’s time he had some joy in life.”

“Yes, but you,” I said. “You! Where does your joy come in? An old man like that——”

Katherine laughed in her low-toned voice.

“Not so old, Gilbert! Forty-three. A good marrying age! Past the follies of youth. I shall be safe with him.”

“One doesn’t marry for safety,” I told her bitterly. “One marries for love. Marriage without love is hell. Katherine, I implore you——”

She put her hand on my sleeve and smiled at my emotional appeal.

“I haven’t said I don’t love him! I do. I love and respect him, and perhaps respect lasts longest.”

I made rather a fool of myself then, and prattled about my own love, and even had tears in my eyes. And then I said I’d rather she married Hugh Evesham than throw herself away on an old scarecrow like Detloff.

At Hugh Evesham’s name she turned rather pale, but spoke without anger.

“It was that affair which makes it easier to marry an older man. One who has proved himself. Serge has led a life of self-sacrifice. He won’t deceive me. Think how unhappy I should have been if I had married Hugh, and then found out!”

She raised my hand to her lips and kissed it, and said: “Don’t be miserable for my sake! I’ve had a lucky escape, and now I’m going to be happy—and safe.”

It was that word “safe” which she repeated as though it meant much to her. I know now that she wanted safety from the temptation of Hugh Evesham, of which she was afraid, though he was so far away. It was what the modern psychoanalysts call a “complex,” in their ridiculous jargon.

Katherine was married to Serge Detloff on a rainy day in November—at the Brompton Oratory, as her Russian was a Catholic. Canon Lambert was present, and gave his daughter away, much to the scandal of his Bishop, though his own views were so “broad” that he would have gone just as willingly to a Jewish synagogue or a Mohammedan mosque. Evelyn and Beatrice were bridesmaids, in dresses which would frighten the modern “flapper,” though they no doubt impressed the crowd outside the church as the last word in loveliness and fashion. Paul was persuaded to wear a “topper” for the occasion, and sat on it in church, to the consternation of Clare and his own hilarious amusement.

My father wore a gardenia in his buttonhole, and his romantic heart was touched by the beauty of the bride, whom he kissed after the ceremony with the style and chivalry of Don Quixote. My mother wept a little, as she always did at weddings, knowing, no doubt, the anxieties of motherhood, and the great risk, anyhow. Katherine’s Russian was, for once, well dressed, in a brand-new frock coat, and the church was filled with his fellow exiles and admiring students, who threw confetti at him as he came out, and kissed him—at least, the Russians did—on both cheeks.

I saw nothing of all that. I was plugging along somewhere between Shaftesbury Avenue and Hampstead, wet through, splashed with mud, with anguish in my heart, with miserable self-pity, and rage against life, and no hope ahead. I was very young and sensitive! Since then I have learnt to smile at life, and steel myself to inevitable tragedies. It doesn’t do to expect very much, and self-pity is the worst weakness.

La vie est vaine;

Un peu d’amour.

Un peu de haine,

Et puis—bonjour!

La vie est brève;

Un peu d’espoir,

Un peu de rève,

Et puis—bonsoir!

When I saw Katherine and her husband three months after their marriage—a letter from her broke down my silly shyness at meeting her again—they seemed perfectly happy, though desperately poor. The humour had come back into Katherine’s candid eyes. She laughed easily, as in the old days before the episode with Hugh. She was glad to see me again, and bullied me a little for staying away so long. And her bearded Russian was so cordial and simple and friendly, that I forgot to hate him, and became one of his devotees.

They lived somewhere in Brixton at first, because it was cheap and Detloff could get up easily to King’s College in the Strand. I saw him going in there sometimes, still in his shiny frock coat, but cleaner and neater with regard to his linen—that was Katherine’s handiwork—and with his beard cut to a rakish shape. There was the glint of happiness in his eyes. He walked with a brisker step, and looked ten years younger.

Afterwards they moved to a house in South Kensington. That was when one of Katherine’s aunts died—a sister of the obscure peer in the family—and left her three hundred a year. It was in the larger house in the Cromwell Road that Michael uttered his first cry in a world which was devising merry tortures for the youth that happened to be born about that time.