Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 17

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To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately—as it seemed—we were busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.

One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some realization of the gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.

The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted, and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death. Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us. After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.

At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men, who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent, returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old party" would be invited, we accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us, and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.

I remember—though it is a petty enough thing to recall—rather resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked—a set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality—Turkish coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan maté, Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless apéritif unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that the plaster casts were hidden.

Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption. He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life, relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office before they were restored to their family.

On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me. In the absence of her husband she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.

"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."

So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.

As soon as I promised to drive over to the school, Sonia announced her intention of accompanying me. For a year or two O'Rane had been something of a public character in Melton, and with Sam to bring her news of him in the holidays, she had not lacked the material of that hero-worship in which all girls of fifteen appear to indulge. O'Rane liked his sympathetic audience as well as another man, and the two were good friends. On Leave-Out Days he would pace the Southampton road dreaming, as Napoleon may have dreamed at eighteen, his wild, romantic vision steadied and kept in focus by the consciousness of his own proved endurance and concentration. Sonia would meet him and trot patiently alongside while he cried to the rolling heavens. Then and now I felt and feel a strange embarrassment in hearing him: he was so unrestrained and lacking in conventional self-consciousness that my skin pricked with a sudden infectious emotion which I tried to suppress. He reminded me of a great actor in everyday clothes declaiming Shakespeare in a fashionable drawing-room. At this time the only two souls on earth who believed in the reality of his dreams were Sonia and—the dreamer.

We panted and clanked through the Forest, pulled up by the roadside to let the boiling water in our radiator cool down and finally arrived at Big Gateway as the school came out of Chapel and wandered up and down Great Court waiting for Roll Call. We watched Burgess coming out of Cloisters and through the Archway, struggling with gown and hood, stole and surplice, all rolled into a tubular bundle and flung over one shoulder like a military overcoat.

"What went ye forth for to see, laddie?" he inquired, as we shook hands. "A reed shaken by the wind?"

"We've come to take O'Rane away with us, sir," I answered.

He sighed pensively, and, as he shook his head, the breeze played with his silky white hair.

"Canst thou find no ram taken by his horns in a thicket?" he demanded.

"What sort of captain did he make, sir?" I asked.

Burgess stroked his long beard and looked from me to Sonia and back again to me.

"Greater love hath no man than this," he said, "that a man lay down his life for his friends. He is an austere man, yet reapeth not that he did not sow, neither gathereth he up that he did not straw. And at the sound of his voice the young men will leave all and follow him even to the isles of Javan and Gadire." He paused till the bell for Roll Call had finished ringing. "Nicodemus, come and see."

Sonia and I squeezed our way in among two or three hundred parents who had profited by proximity to the Head to inquire how 'Bernard' had fared that term; the giant intellect of Burgess we left to discover unaided who 'Bernard' might be. We listened to the Prize Compositions, the Honours of the year, and the removes of the term. Then Sonia's hand slipped through my arm, and her brown eyes suddenly softened. The prizes were being distributed, and we watched and listened until I, at any rate, grew sore-handed and weary of hearing O'Rane's name called out. I began, too, to pity the fags who would have to stagger across Great Court under the growing burden of that calf-bound, gilt-edged pile. He himself went through the ceremony in a dispirited, listless fashion, his thoughts running forward to the moment when he would have to reverse the birch and hand it back to Burgess, while the new captain slipped into his seat and read prayers over his body.

"In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. I should like all boys who are leaving this term to say good-bye to me in my house. Ire licet."

The school poured out into Great Court and formed up in a double line. O'Rane was cheered from School Steps to the Head's house, as no one to my knowledge had been cheered since Pelham gave up his house and retired after forty-three years. The Leaving Books were handed out,—still "Men and Women" as in my day,—the last hand-shakes exchanged. Outside the library windows the school was waiting for O'Rane's reappearance.

"Be not overmuch puffed up with pride, laddie," said Burgess, when they were alone. "Boy is a creature of simple faith and easy enthusiasm. True, in thine youth thou wast clept 'Spitfire' and 'The Vengeful Celt'——"

"Sir ...?"

Burgess waved away the interruption. "Did I not tell thee of the Unsleeping Eye? Laddie, I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this life, yet it may be that the counsel of age may profit a young man. Yet not with thee. To thee I say not, 'Do this' or 'Do that'; there is nought thou canst not do, laddie—thou also art among the prophets." He held out his hand abruptly, and O'Rane took it.

"Sir, I want to thank you ..." he began.

"For that I forbade thee not when thou didst crave admittance?"

"A thousand things beside that, sir. Everything ..."

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping, laddie," said Burgess gently, disengaging his hand. "And thy father and I were young men together. Thou didst know this thing?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yet thou namedst it not?"

O'Rane hesitated and then burst out with a touch of his old universal defiance.

"I wanted to make you take me on my merits, sir."

"Hard is the way of him who would presume to offer help to David O'Rane!" Burgess answered, with a shake of the head.

"But I'd won through so far, sir; I wanted to see how much longer——"

"I blame thee not, laddie. Well, thou hast endured to the end and hast brought new honour to my kingdom. Counsel I withhold from thee: truly the Lord will provide. Fare thee well, David O'Rane."

On our way back to Crowley Court I put Raney outside, in case he preferred the company of his own thoughts for the present. He sat for a few moments with his chin on his chest, but as the car left the town he engaged the chauffeur in earnest conversation, and as we slowed down in front of the house he jumped out and came to the door with the words, "Simpson damns electricity and steam. He swears by oil. Well, if cars are going to knock out horses and you need petrol to drive your cars, there's going to be a tremendous demand for oil in the near future. I want to get in before the rush, I'm going to study oil——"

"You're a soulless Wall Street punter," I said.

Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history, and—characteristically enough—he was ready to fling the whole blazing vigour of his vitality into the next.

"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.

"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.

Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the other. Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had taken place.

"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing knocked into us."

O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.

"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand! From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted stiffening.' My God!"

"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.

"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't read the foreign papers."

Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the continental Press.

"D'you still do that?" I asked.

"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George. They—simply—hate—us—abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."

"Who wants to attack us?" I asked.

"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia, as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people talking like that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."

He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a savage twist of his heel.

"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"

"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other power."

My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews which it conjured up.

"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want another."

"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to war."

"I doubt it," I said. "The temptation's too great. The first day I was given an air-gun—this is many years ago, Raney—I winged a harmless, necessary milch cow. The alpha and omega of British policy should be to have a navy so efficient that no one can attack us and an army so inefficient that we daren't attack anyone else. If you aim at all-round efficiency, you'll probably have the rest of Europe on your back and you'll certainly go bankrupt."

He was preparing an explosive retort when one of the drawing-room windows opened, and Sonia came toward us.

"Bedtime?" I asked, as she held out her hand.

"Rot, isn't it?" she answered, wrinkling her nose. "I shall be sixteen next birthday, too."

"When I was your age ..." O'Rane began improvingly.

"I used to thrash you two or three times a month," I put in.

Sonia looked at him wonderingly.

"Is that true, David?" she demanded.

He nodded his head.

"You beast, George!" Sonia burst out with a concentrated venom that abashed me.

O'Rane glanced in momentary surprise at the rigid indignant little figure with the clenched fists and bitten lip. Then he caught her up in his arms.

"Bambina, you're the only person in the whole world who loves me. George couldn't help himself, though; I was out for trouble. And I could have knocked him down and broken every bone in his body if I'd wanted to—just as I could now. Only he was right and I was wrong. Kiss me good-night, sweetheart."

He lowered her gently till her feet touched the ground, but sudden shyness had come over her, and she would only hold out a hand.

"Clearly I'm in the way," I said, as I moved towards the house.

"I'm coming too," Sonia called out. "No, David, you're grown up now."

He snorted indignantly.

"That's a rotten reason. Are you never going to kiss me again? This year?" She shook her head. "Next year? Some time?"

"Some time. Perhaps."

She ran into the house, and O'Rane and I took one more turn along the terrace before following her.

"Grown up!" he exclaimed, after a moment's silence.

"That's still rankling?" I asked.

"No, I was just thinking. I fancy I was pretty well grown up before we ever met, George."

"As much as you ever will be," I suggested.

"As much as I ever want to be, old son. It's been like an extraordinary dream, you know, these last four years. Everything topsy-turvy.... I was years and years older than you and Jim when you used to thrash me.... If you can imagine yourself coming to a place like Melton after knocking about all round the world, living from hand to mouth.... The holidays were the time I really worked. Do you remember when you and Jim found me at the Empire Hotel? You've never mentioned it from that day to this. I'm not ashamed of it and, though you two had your eyes bulging out of your head, I don't suppose with all your conventionality you think the worse of me for it. Anyway I don't care a damn if you do." He paused and lit a cigarette. "I'm going to have a holiday now, George. Idle about till October. And then in the holidays—vacations, you call 'em, don't you?—I shall get hold of soft, genteel jobs—private tutor to aristocratic imbeciles——"

"And then?"

He yawned luxuriantly.

"And then I shall settle down to earn a great deal of money. I'm never going through the old mill again, George. And when I've earned it I shall buy a villa at Naples and rot there. Are you going into the drawing-room? I don't think I shall, it's such a grand night out here. I want to think over this amazing country of yours, where a man can drop from the skies—I was junior steward on a 'Three Funnel' liner just before—drop down, find his feet, find people to employ him and weigh him out scholarships.... George, so far as I can make out, after four years here, there's not a damn thing you don't fling open to the veriest dago and pay him handsome to take the job. 'Ejectum litore, egentem excepi....' No, that's a bad omen." He spun round and smote me on the shoulder. "I owe a lot to this rotten country and I shall owe a lot more before I'm through with it. Now I'm going to take charge of the piano and sing songs to you...."

It was O'Rane who went into the drawing-room, and I who stayed outside in enjoyment of the night. Roger Dainton took the opportunity of a quiet stroll and a few moments' conversation. While in London he had been sounded in the matter of a baronetcy. I believed him when he protested that his troop of yeomanry had been raised without any thought of what honours or decorations he might draw from the lucky tub after the war. I almost believed him when he said he thought of accepting the offer because it would gratify his wife. And I felt a certain wonder and pity that in his curiously unfriended state, half-way between two social spheres, he should come for advice to a man less than half his own age.