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Title: The Secret Victory Author: Stephen McKenna Release Date: February 1, 2015 [EBook #48133] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET VICTORY *** Produced by David Edwards, Denis Pronovost and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Cover page THE SENSATIONALISTS: III THE SECRET VICTORY STEPHEN McKENNA By STEPHEN McKENNA THE SENSATIONALISTS Part One: LADY LILITH Part Two: THE EDUCATION OF ERIC LANE Part Three: THE SECRET VICTORY SONIA MARRIED SONIA MIDAS AND SON NINETY-SIX HOURS’ LEAVE THE SIXTH SENSE SHEILA INTERVENES NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Title page COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Printer PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS WITH GRATITUDE TO TEX WITH LOVE Epistle Dedicatory TO ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS You, who have read the three volumes of The Sensationalists in manuscript, place me under further obligation by allowing me to dedicate the third to you in commemoration of a friendship which has been long, intimate and—to me— unmatched. Though I acquit you of responsibility for shortcomings in anything that I have written, the tale of these shortcomings would have been far longer if I had not availed myself of your unfailing vigilance and ever-ready help, as I have profited by your sensitive criticism and sympathetic encouragement. The novel-trilogy is so little acclimatized to latter-day Georgian England that, though it may need no defence, it has provoked attacks from readers who will suffer all artistic forms but those which are offered to the public in his present majesty’s reign; I say no more in its apology than that it provides a convenient medium for a study in which the story-teller occupies, in succession, three different standpoints. In Lady Lilith, the emotion hunters and sensation-mongers who supply the drama of this trilogy are still practising their poses in mirrored and passionless detachment; in The Education of Eric Lane, artifice has grown to such strength that, in its contest with reality, the battle—between antagonists no longer detached nor passionless—stands drawn; in The Secret Victory, a close contact with reality deflates the tumid pretensions of artifice and forces an amateur company of tragi-comedians into the revealing daylight of the open street. Even if it had been possible to present these three phases in a single volume, I should have been sorry to lose the interval which bridged the transition from one phase to another. Whether a study of flamboyantly conscious egotism deserves three volumes can hardly be decided impartially by one who has attempted the study; but the novelist has at no time been more insistently urged to contemplate unabashed egotism than in an age when the camera and the printing-press, the public confession and the private conversation, the conclusions of psychology and the phantasies of psycho-analysis combine forces to further the cult of personality. “Ninety-five per cent. of the human race,” said Mr. Cutler Walpole in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “suffer from chronic blood-poisoning, and die of it. It’s as simple as A. B. C. Your nuciform sac is full of decaying matter....” Ninety-five per centum would seem a modest estimate for the proportion of the human race which, in one social division of England at the present time, is dying spiritually of acute egomania. In reading the manuscript of this trilogy you encountered characters whom you had met in earlier novels; if at some future time you have the patience to read those later novels which have been executed, or at least planned, but not yet published, you are more than likely to meet some of them again. The practice of carrying certain characters from one book to another is hardly so much an arrogant assumption that the public has made their acquaintance in a former presentation as an effort to give additional verisimilitude to a picture which is being built up in sections: an academic history of the years before the war, of the war itself and of the years following it would inevitably introduce, in volume after volume, some at least of the same warriors, statesmen, financiers and social leaders; if, in an imaginary picture of the same period, the novelist offends by following the same method, he offends in the consoling company of Balzac, Disraeli and Thackeray among the dead and of Galsworthy and Mackenzie among the living. To you I need offer no excuse for having hitherto confined myself for the most part to men and women whose means and leisure enable them to be occupied with public affairs or preoccupied with private introspection: as human beings, susceptible to pain and pleasure, they are not less interesting than those who devote a greater proportion of their time to the struggle for existence; in the opinion of some, they may win an added interest by the larger air of a more spacious life and by the subtile discrimination of wider intellectual sympathies; if a novelist offends by neglecting the narrow streets and sunless cottages of this era, he offends once more in the company of Disraeli and Thackeray. The present volume of The Sensationalists brings the trilogy to an end; the reception accorded to the first volumes was too evenly mixed to indicate how the third will be greeted; but, since all three books were planned and completed as one whole before the first was published, it is as one whole that I should like them to be judged. Jointly and severally, however, their fate is of less importance to me than the pleasure which I derived from writing them; and, in the present volume, no words give me greater pleasure than those on the dedication page. Ever yours, Stephen McKenna. Lincoln’s Inn, 24 August, 1921. vii viii ix CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Vigil 15 II Dawn 38 III The Wilderness of This World 57 IV Everybody’s Business 79 V The Price of Sympathy 95 VI The Reward of Sympathy 111 VII A Double Rescue 125 VIII Half-Honeymoon 152 IX A Double Escape 181 X The Wandering of Ishmael 210 XI Mirage 228 XII Night 248 XIII Journey’s End 276 XIV Vigil 291 xi THE SECRET VICTORY “There is no God; but still, behind the veil, The hurt thing works, out of its agony. Still like the given curse that did not fail Return the pennies given to passers-by. There is no God; but we, who breathe the air, Are God ourselves, and touch God everywhere.” —John Masefield: Lollingdon Downs. 15 THE SECRET VICTORY CHAPTER ONE VIGIL “Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; Bless your heart, they don’t mind—they’re exceedingly kind— They don’t blame you—as long as you’re funny!” W. S. Gilbert: “The Family Fool.” Roused by a report of peace hardly less deafening than the crash of war four and a half years earlier, the winter garden of the Majestic hummed like a vast and airless beehive. On the long sofas by the walls, in deferential clusters round some slow-voiced, arm-chair oracle and in wavering groups at one moment distinct and at another herded together, everybody who could find room between the crowded tables and the obtrusive palm-tubs eagerly volleyed question and answer, contributing his pennyworth of gossip and retiring with his pound of rumour. No one in New York had seriously doubted that Germany would accept the armistice terms; but, until they were signed, the talk of private dinners and public celebrations remained half-hearted. Now that the invitations had been discharged, no one knew what to do next. One group of lean, sagacious officers debated how soon they would be demobilized and restored to their businesses; a harassed parliament of women exchanged acid confidences about the apartments which they had taken when their husbands came to New York for the war; a second and a younger group of officers deplored the untimely cessation of hostilities before they had seen any fighting. “‘All-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go,’” hummed one. “Why, Carstairs, when did you get here?” He shook hands with an agitated young Englishman who was peering over the heads and under the arms of his neighbours. “Hullo, Long! I left Washington last night. You’ve not seen my wife, have you?” “Lady John was over by the far door a while back. I’ll shew you.” He took Carstairs by the arm and dragged him through the crowd to a corner where a young woman had entrenched herself behind a row of palm-tubs and a breastwork of wicker chairs. “Much obliged. I say, what about a drink? Oh, of course, you’re not allowed to. Never mind, there’s a good time ahead of you as soon as you’re out of uniform. By the way, we’re coming to your dinner. Very good of you to ask us.” The officer bowed and went back to his own group. Carstairs dropped limply into a chair and rang a bell. “God, what a mob! And what a day! I haven’t had a moment to myself. The horrors of peace!” His wife pressed his hand sympathetically, and the gold of a new wedding-ring caught and flung back the light from the great arc-lamps. “Could you do anything about our passages?” she asked. “Yes, I wandered into the chancery and got them to make up a bag. After that there was no difficulty, but the boat will be ankle-deep in Ministry of Munitions people and Treasury people and Propaganda people. There are more English officials than Americans in New York to-day. Precious glad every one will be to get rid of us! By the way, Sadler Long wants to give us a farewell dinner at the Biltmore; I said you weren’t doing anything. Was that all right?” “Is it to-night?” “No. We’re dining with Grant to-night at the Plaza. It’s a farewell dinner to Eric Lane, the dramatist fellow. The great American people will be both tired and dyspeptic by the time it’s given a farewell dinner to every munition-contractor, exchange-stabilizer and itinerant lecturer in the country.” “I want to meet Mr. Lane,” said Lady John. “Well, you’ll have every opportunity on the boat. I can’t say I do.” A waiter came to their table with two cocktails. Carstairs signed for them, lighted a cigarette and leaned back with one leg thrown over the other. On the far side of the serried palm-tubs and wicker chairs, an English voice said: “Waiter! I ordered a Number Twenty-Three.” “Number Twenty-Three,” repeated the waiter, turning his head for an instant in full flight. Eric Lane nodded and pretended to read his paper, refusing to be driven from a comfortable chair because a strange Englishman, with the notorious tact of the English, chose to discuss him by name at two yards’ distance. Until three minutes before, he had been agreeably lulled by the high hum of American voices; but this drawling English, with a hint of impatient superiority in it, assailed and defeated him. He was also humanly curious to know what the strange Englishman had heard or thought about him. “I like his plays,” said Lady John. “Is there anything against him?” Lane decided that she must be a New Englander. Then he recalled his glimpse of the underhung, impatient Englishman and remembered that Frances Naylor of Boston had married Lord John Carstairs six months earlier. The match had caused nearly a week’s excitement, for Carstairs was brother and heir-presumptive to the imbecile Duke of Ross, while Frances Naylor was a future heiress and a present beauty. “Oh, I’ve no objection to him personally,” said Carstairs. “But I don’t suppose we’re very popular with him as a family. There was a blighted romance between him and my cousin, Barbara Neave.” He laughed, and Eric Lane felt his cheeks warming. “I’m afraid you’ll find Barbara—and her relicts and reputation—rather a mouthful.” 16 17 18 Not for the first time Frances Carstairs wished that the English had fewer relations. She had been bewilderingly initiated into the complex family tangle of the Neaves and Lorings, the Carstairs and Knightriders; John had drawn her ingenious plans to shew who had married whom, but every new name impaled her on a new genealogical tree, so that she openly dreaded her arrival in England and the threatened tour of inspection among her husband’s manifold connections. “But I thought you told me your cousin had married recently,” she said. “Yes, she married George Oakleigh. He was a son of Miles Oakleigh, the head of the family; and his cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, who’s of the Catholic branch in the county Dublin, married my cousin, Jim Loring, who was killed in ’15. I know it’s confusing at first——” “It’s maddening! What has all this to do with Mr. Lane? If your cousin—our cousin——” “Oh, that’s all over, but he may feel she made rather a fool of him. However, he’s in good company: when she was seventeen, I was supposed to be engaged to her, and Crawleigh had to contradict it in the press; and, to my knowledge, she’s been married off to six people in as many years, beginning with one of the young princes and ending with some barrister. She’s all right if you don’t take her seriously, but I’m told that Lane did, rather. She tried to drive him in double harness with the barrister until they both bolted in opposite directions; then Lane came out here, and the other man, Waring, quietly retired to the country; then she married George Oakleigh. And that’s the end of Barbara.” Lady John felt that a criticism was expected of her, but could not decide how far it was safe to disapprove of her celebrated new cousin without incurring a charge of provincialism. “Well, she had her fair share of romance,” she ventured after a pause. “I should think you’re all rather relieved.” “The Crawleighs were a bit disappointed,” answered Carstairs; “but it might have been worse. Relieved? I don’t know. When I said that was the end of Barbara... There’s a curious little group that my cousin Jim Loring used to call “the Sensationalists”; they were always playing a part and pulling up their psychology by the roots to see how it was growing. Anything for a new emotion! Barbara always had more personality than the rest of them put together and she led them till she really made London too hot to hold her. Then the war came. The men were killed off and the women married; but the old Adam’s still alive in some of them. I’m wondering what Barbara’s next outbreak will be; she had one emotion by marrying a tame-cat Irish squireen, but how long she’ll stick to him... I’m sure we’ve not finished with her yet. You’ll find London a curious place... Look here, if we’re going to be in time, I must go up; I haven’t unpacked yet.” At the creak of chairs, Eric Lane buried himself in his paper, only looking up when the bull-necked, consequential young man and his lithe, decorative companion had sauntered languorously past, leaving in his nostrils an elusive hint of violets and in his memory a dissolving view of pearls, a gold bag, white gloves, a cloak tentatively martial and exquisitely neat shoes. Lady John he had never seen before; Carstairs he now remembered as a young man with too much chin and too little hair, intermittently to be found in London theatres; they had overlapped for a year or two at Oxford where Carstairs won a brief notoriety by removing the minute hand of the General Post Office clock every Sunday night throughout one term; twelve years in the diplomatic service had robbed him of irresponsibility without putting anything in its place. As they disappeared from sight, Eric threw his paper away and lighted a cigar. After long months of solitude, it was stimulating to hear how the world represented by Carstairs summarized and dismissed his contribution to the romantic Odyssey of Lady Barbara Neave. He had not, himself, been able to dismiss it so easily; and, when he left England at the end of 1916, Eric was determined never to come back. His health was shattered; Dr. Gaisford bluntly threatened him with a sanatorium; and he needed distance and change of work to heal a bruised spirit. After lecturing in the United States, he travelled for six months in South America and started on an aimless and endless holiday in Japan. While he was in Tokio, he heard that Barbara was married. At a time when the German armies were pouring down on Paris, the news was telegraphed all over the world; and the press of Tokio, New York, Ottawa, Sydney and Calcutta gave her a column of description. Eric was dining with two men from the Embassy, and throughout the evening they discussed nothing else. When he first saw the headline: “Marriage of Lady Barbara Neave,” he fought for breath as though his heart had stopped; then, with slowly returning composure, he realized for the first time that finality had been achieved and that, in all the months when he was philosophizing and hardening his heart, he had been waiting for a fantastic miracle to happen, hoping to see Barbara, breathless and dusty from the train, coming into his hotel. The London telegram killed his faith in romance. And the excited column of small type killed his faith in women, for Barbara had apparently walked into the street and married the first man that she saw.... “Who’s this Oakleigh?,” asked his host, squeezing the last drop of relish out of the story. “I’ve never heard of him.” “He’s a very nice fellow,” Eric found himself answering. Oakleigh henceforth was to have the stolen intoxication of glorying in Barbara when she was well and comforting her when she was ill, of seeing her great eyes change from mockery to tenderness and from tenderness to ecstasy; but Oakleigh could never have from her those fifteen fevered months when their hearts had beaten together... “I’ve known him ever since I was at Oxford. He used to be in the House; and then he ran a paper... He has a place in Ireland—” “What they call ‘a suitable alliance’?,” suggested his host. “Oh, very.” “It’s rather a disappointing finish to her career...” The gossiping discussion rambled on, introducing name after name of the men whom Lady Barbara had been expected to marry. Eric waited for his own and, when it was not cited, relapsed into reverie. He had received a letter that morning from his sister, telling him that she was engaged and asking whether he would be home in time for the wedding. If he had ever doubted, there was now no question of returning to England; he was too well known to be left in peace. The Oakleighs and Neaves, the Knightriders and Lorings, the Pentyres and Carstairs, the Maitlands and Poynters all moved in the same little set of three or four hundred people. Fifteen years before he had dreamed at Oxford of the day when he would burst upon their startled world and hold it captive; the dream had sustained him through the mortification of neglect 19 20 21 22 and the despair of ill-health until of a sudden the reality threw his dream into shadow. In London, in Boston, in Tokio he was recognized in the street; to escape the fulfilment of his own prayers he had to travel by unfamiliar lines and hide himself in unknown hotels; for ultimate and enduring sanctuary he must retire to a land untouched by books and theatres. After three months’ desultory wandering he returned to Tokio and booked a passage to China. Already his health was improving; and, if he could lose all touch with English ways of thought, he might begin to lose touch with himself, to shed his personality, almost to change his identity; upcountry it must be possible to find a civilization and scenery so strange that it would absorb him. As he left his hotel for the shipping office, he was handed a cable from his American agent: “Following from Lane Lashmar Hampshire England for you care of me despatched fourteenth your father seriously ill think you should return as soon as possible.” Eric studied the time of despatch and retransmission with stupid deliberation, giving himself time to recover from the shock. This meant, of course, that his father was dying, was perhaps already dead; and it was his duty to be shocked. Lashmar on the fourteenth, New York on the sixteenth, Tokio on the eighteenth;—the war had made cabling a slow business... He was a selfish brute not to have told his mother where he was going instead of leaving her to track him through his American agent and, before that, through his London agent. His father had never been ill since he was a child, but he had overworked for years; this probably meant a stroke.... Eric discovered that he was quite dispassionate; perhaps he was too much numbed to feel. He must of course return immediately; if anything happened, the eldest son must be at hand. Once in England, he must let the future take care of itself. Three weeks later he landed at San Francisco and arrived in New York two days before the armistice was signed. “Mother’s Son” was still running at the Grafton; he was met unexpectedly at the station, and, before the day was out, two reporters had called at the Majestic and sought an interview. He tried to dine by himself and was instantly caught up by a group of friends who set about organizing a banquet in his honour. A private party of twelve swept within twenty-four hours far beyond the organizer’s control. Half New York had been to one or other of the plays; scores of people had already met him, hundreds more wanted to meet him. “Look at it this way,” said his agent, Justus Grant, defensively. “Every one knows you’re here. Well, if it gets out that we’ve given you a dinner and cornered you, they’ll all ask why in Hell they weren’t invited. I’ve got to live in New York, and you haven’t. It’s only one speech, whether we’re twelve or twelve hundred. And you’ve only to stand and shake a few more hands.” “I’ll do my best,” Eric promised with ebbing patience. “It’s a tremendous honour....” Then he began reading the letters which he had brought from his agent’s. Lady Lane wrote to confirm her cable and to say that his father had indeed had a stroke. His life was no longer in danger, though for some days his speech had been affected and many months must go by before he could resume work. There was no immediate urgency for Eric to return; he must decide for himself. Of course, he had been terribly missed, and every one was looking forward to seeing him. After resolving never to go back to England, Eric felt that nothing would now keep him away. There was almost everything to be said against it, and, in its favour, only that he had secured a cabin where others had tried and failed. The reason was frivolous, his mind was aimless; and he accepted the reason, because it chimed with his mood of aimlessness. Moreover—a reason yet more frivolous!—Justus Grant was arranging a farewell dinner for him, and, after being bidden God-speed, he could not decently loiter in New York any longer. Of such stuff were made the cardinal decisions of a man’s life. Three years earlier, on the night of his first meeting with Barbara Neave, she had asked him to wait till the end of her rubber and to take her home. The crowd in the winter garden was thinning, and Eric could study in peace the notes which he had jotted down for his speech. Though Carstairs’ chatter had set his nerves jangling, he must face a graver ordeal when he was welcomed to the midst of Barbara’s friends in London; if for the moment he could not abdicate, he must sit his throne worthily; but he felt contempt for this servile herd which abased itself before him. For two years he had lived in isolation; and, if he was now flung face to face with his public, he would shew that he could preserve his isolation in their midst. He roused from moody reverie to find his host standing, watch in hand, before him. “Haven’t you dressed yet?,” asked Grant anxiously. “The automobile’s at the door.” Instead of thinking about his speech, Eric was only brooding over the hollowness of his belated, unwanted triumph; three years earlier it would have intoxicated him to take New York or London by storm, but he was wondering for the first time whether this lust for theatrical sensationalism did not really lower him to the level of Barbara Neave and her school. Certainly he had outgrown the phase so much that he would have been almost a little glad to shew his contempt by making every one wait.... For a moment he pretended to be unconscious of Grant’s presence; then he was stung to activity by a fear that this scorn of soul was only another experiment in sensationalism.... “I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he cried, as he ran out of the winter garden. For one night he must enter into the spirit of his company; after that he would hide himself where he could escape equally the emotion of courting triumph and of avoiding it. Hundreds were assembled at the Plaza, when he arrived: how many hundreds he was too indifferent to enquire, but they were lined up in rows; the rumble of countless conversations shrank to a whisper and died away in a moment’s silence; then every one who knew him hastened to shake hands, while the rest begged to be introduced. For all his indifference, Eric was warmed by his reception. Throughout his wanderings in South America and Japan, imagination and will had swung alternate hammers to fashion a new life which he could find worth living. Here was acclamation. The throne awaited him, if he could mount it worthily. He was but thirty-five, his health had returned to him... All his life he had prayed for this moment of domination.... A waiter interrupted the chorus of welcome by thrusting his way forward with a tray of cocktails and caviare 22 23 24 25 sandwiches. In the moment’s lull Eric saw Carstairs at his elbow and turned to him. “I believe we have met,” he said, holding out his hand. “I just missed you when I called at the Embassy last year.” Carstairs shook hands awkwardly and muttered an introduction to his wife. “When I was in Japan, I saw that Barbara had married my friend George Oakleigh,” Eric went on. “I know them both very well. Jim Loring, of course, was one of my greatest friends. And your mother used to be kind enough to ask me to some of her parties.” He had dropped his indifference in a calculated effort to shew these Carstairs that, even if they did not want to meet him, he would meet them or not as he liked. This dinner, after all, was his apotheosis; some one at his elbow was whispering that five hundred tickets had been sold and that the committee could have sold more than twice that number. It was astonishing that a thousand educated men and women had no better use for their time and money; astonishing, too, that he had allowed himself to be dragged out for public display, for in all that vast gathering there was not one eager face that he wished ever to see again. Indifference and aloofness returned as a protection against such a sense of loneliness as he had never known when he was most isolated. “I believe we’re going by your boat,” said Lady John. “That will be delightful,” Eric answered. The babble of voices rose and swelled until the chairman wound his way back to Eric’s side and led him into the dining- room. Detachment changed for a moment to antagonism as he walked between the long whispering rows: warm waves of scent beat upon his cheeks; before, behind and on either side he felt the magnetism of a thousand eyes drawing him out of his self-sufficiency and assailing his frozen reserve. As quickly as his companion would allow, he walked on, looking stiffly ahead, to the seat of honour. There, while the rigid, whispering rows broke up and poured in at his heels, he looked idly at the men and women who made up a world which he had left for ever. It was difficult to see all the tables and impossible to count his hosts; but the printed plan shewed him name after honoured name; New York political, New York a night’s lodging for itinerant diplomacy, New York literary and artistic, New York rich, New York fashionable and New York merely curious had crowded into the great room; and his health was to be proposed by Nelson Millbank, who had been ambassador in London when Eric was still unborn. Through the flowers, over the little Stars and Stripes and the Union Jacks fluttering between the vases he tried to identify those who were nearest to him. Every one seemed to be looking in his direction; and, to escape their eyes, he turned to his neighbour. “America’s always been uncommonly good to me, Mr. Millbank,” he said, “but I’ve never had anything of this kind before.” “You will shew your gratitude by coming back,” was the answer, “though we feel that the indebtedness lies the other way.” “I’m leaving you from necessity and not choice.” “For leisure—and for more plays, we hope. And what psychological material, Mr. Lane! Had I your genius and your youth... The convulsion’s as great, when you turn a soldier into a civilian, as when you turn a civilian into a soldier. It will be your privilege to capture and preserve for us the impression of a world in travail. A man gets his discharge papers one morning—and finds himself with an old life to take up or a new life to make....” “Yes. I’ve been thinking of that for some time,” said Eric, half to himself. “Though I’m not a soldier... It’s all right if he himself has changed with the world around him; in peace the individual moves more quickly than the mass, but in war the mass moves more quickly than the individual.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked up to find the woman opposite him leaning forward with a faint air of diffidence and a question in embryo. “There’s no old life for women to take up, is there?” she asked, plucking up courage, but evidently disconcerted by the clear ascendancy of her own voice. “Woman is unchanging,” Eric answered, “she resigns herself to civilization, but she has never been civilized. Man is, to her, a physiological incident and a domestic accessory, so that a war only affects woman by withdrawing so many potential fathers of her children and supporters of her house.” He glanced covertly at the plan of the table and found opposite his own name that of Lady Woodstock. Sir Matthew Woodstock, three chairs away, was a partner in Woodstock, McArthur and Company and had been sent to America by the Ministry of Munitions as British representative on the Purchasing and Priority Council. To right and left rose an eager debate on sex and conduct. Eric had thrown them a bait which, he knew well, few men and no woman could resist. An “academic” discussion of sex enabled them to talk about themselves, to indulge their own sex-curiosity, to fancy themselves wholesomely fearless and unprejudiced; it enabled him to dine peacefully in the soothing haze of sham-intellectuality and to study anew the names on the table-plan. Next to Carstairs he saw Mrs. O’Rane deep in conversation with John Gaymer; next to him was Lady John, with O’Rane on her other side. It was indeed no great exaggeration to say that there were more British officials than Americans in New York; and the sight of this compact alien colony set Eric thinking about his speech. He was unlikely to enter the Plaza again, but he could not spend a week in London without meeting O’Rane or Gaymer; his valediction should be something for them to remember and quote when he had slipped through their hands into a retirement from which, this time, there would be no return... He was roused by the touch of a woman’s hand on his sleeve. Finding him unoccupied, his neighbour was asking him to sign her menu. Instantly her example was followed by every one who saw him writing; menus were passed from hand to hand, waiters appeared from other tables with piled-up trays; he was still signing when Nelson Millbank whispered a question and stood up to propose the toast of the evening. Eric lighted his cigar and leaned back, looking over the heads of the diners to a vast fan-group of the Allied flags, draped over the main door. At a semicircular table twenty feet away the press-men were industriously scribbling: two were looking up at him from their sketch-books and down to the sketch-books again; he posed himself and sat patiently still. 26 27 28 29 Millbank’s rising had been greeted with a storm of cheers and clapping; his opening sentences called forth fresh cheers, and punctually thereafter, at the polished end of each resonant period, as he half turned to the guest of the evening or indicated him with a slight movement of his hand, there was a new outburst of applause. Though he listened with only half his attention, Eric knew that it was a great speech from a man who had been known for more than forty years as one of the greatest after-dinner speakers in America. That much, at least, he had expected, but he was hardly prepared for the white-hot enthusiasm of the audience. This, if anything, should stimulate a man to better work than he had ever yet accomplished; but for two years all work had mysteriously lost its savour and purpose. If he ever wrote again, he would still be artist enough to give forth only the best that was in him, but he no longer cared for the applause of a blurred, indistinguishable mob; his plays, indeed, were running in three continents, but in a thousand audiences there was no one whose judgement mattered to him as in the old days when above “the mad houseful’s plaudits” he looked “through all the roaring and the wreaths” for one half smile of praise from Barbara. Had all these bright-eyed men and women masked their faces, were Millbank speaking an unknown tongue, Eric could not have had less in common with them. Mrs. O’Rane threw him a dazzling glance of congratulation; and, before he could bow, he had to overcome his surprise that she had recognized him. In all this funeral throng he alone knew that for two years he had been dead.... Voice, gesture and mounting sentiment shewed that the peroration was at hand: “And, lastly, I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the honour and the opportunity of having my name associated for a moment of one night with the loved name of our guest. He and I stand at the remote opposite ends of life, so that I cannot hope to meet him often again. You, who will meet him and see him and read him, I congratulate and envy. I ask you to rise and join me in wishing him long life, health and prosperity.” There was an instant’s silence, and the room rose in a wave of black and white. “Lane! Lane! Lane!” The thundering repetition of his name drowned the clink of the glasses, the individual toasts and even the college yell which rocketed from the end of the room. Eric bowed to Millbank, then turned slowly and inclined his head to right, to left and in front. The speech had intoxicated them; they looked at him with shining eyes, an inch removed from hysteria. “And what do they expect I can say after that, sir?” Eric whispered to Millbank, as the applause died slowly away and he sat down. “Take your time, Mr. Lane.” Once more every one was looking at him in a silence broken only by a buzzing commentary on Millbank’s speech. Eric straightened his tie, pulled down his waistcoat and laid his watch on the table beside his finger-bowl. As he pushed back his chair and slowly drew himself erect, he caught sight of his reflection in three long mirrors: black-haired and white- cheeked, aquiline and thin, with deep-set brown eyes and lips tightly compressed, he could fancy that he was looking at his own dead body. The applause broke out again, ten times louder and longer than before; there was a blinding flash of silver light from a magnesium flare, followed by dense grey clouds of smoke. As they cleared away, he once more established the position of Carstairs and his wife, holding himself upright and only touching the table with the tips of his fingers. Though slightly built, he was tall enough to dominate an audience; in three years of public speaking he had acquired such composure that he could stand for a full minute without saying anything. It was a test of grip; if he could hold his company without speaking, he could do what he liked with it afterwards. Before he turned to Millbank, the great room was as silent as the Festspielhaus before the opening bar of Parsifal. Something seemed to have come to life within him, for he now felt that he must at all costs eclipse Millbank’s speech; if he could not match his slow stateliness of eloquence and diction, he would master him in pure lyrical fire and music.... “Mr. Millbank, Your Excellencies, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen...” The voice was flexible and light, capable of infinite emotional variation, boyish and appealing after Millbank’s deep resonance. Eric had discarded and forgotten his rehearsed speech. Dreary months of stereotyped lecturing set him ablaze to speak his soul. The audience had surrendered to his presence and surrendered again to his voice; he could twist every man and woman round his finger.... Forty minutes had passed before he sat down. There was no applause, for none dared break the silence; but he had made them laugh and he had brought tears into the eyes of the woman opposite; the audience had quivered and gasped. Now, if they had not guessed it before, they knew how he inspired with his own genius the actors who interpreted his plays; henceforth they would recognize whose personality it was that spread magnetically across the foot-lights... He picked up the dead cigar from his plate and felt for a match. He would have liked to look at Carstairs, but it was unnecessary; Carstairs himself, with his unmistakable English drawl, broke the silence by exclaiming: “Oh, I say, that was devilish good, you know!” Thereat the pent storm of cheering gushed forth as though he had touched a spring. There followed a presentation and more introductions. Eric stood bowing to congratulations and trying to answer five questions at a time until the chairman rescued him and took him back to the Majestic. Even there he was constrained to hold a new court and to accept the homage of those who had not found an opportunity of speaking to him before. Mid- night was striking as he shook the last hand and lighted his last cigar; with it came nervous exhaustion and an abrupt reaction, in which once more he seemed to have crossed the boundary between two lives and to be wandering alone in eternal emptiness.... As he walked back to the winter garden a woman rose from her chair and hurried up to him. “Mr. Lane, I must thank you for that speech! It was wonderful! I’ve never heard anything like it. Aren’t you dreadfully tired?” The cloak and scarf kept him for a moment from recognizing her as the woman who had sat opposite him at dinner. “I am, rather,” he answered, leaning against the arm of a chair. “But it’s the last speech I shall ever make.” “In America, you mean? It’s so glorious to feel that I’ve actually met you! You’re crossing on the Lithuania, aren’t you? So are we. I shall hope to see you on board. And I shall make a thorough nuisance of myself by asking you to write in my autograph book. Now I mustn’t keep you; I expect you’ve all sorts of packing to do.” 30 31 32 “I’m glad to say I haven’t unpacked since I left Japan... Good-night, Lady Woodstock.” She looked up at him curiously for a moment and then broke into a laugh. “I’m not—Mr. Lane, you’re not mistaking me for Lady Woodstock, are you?” “I thought you were. I saw your name on the plan of the table—” “Oh, but that was because she was too tired to come. Sir Matthew brought me in her place. Wasn’t that a piece of luck for me? I’m his secretary. He’s not come in yet, has he? I simply daren’t go to bed until I’ve found out whether he has any more work for me.” “He was still at the Plaza, when I left,” said Eric. “Then I suppose I must wait up for him.” She chose herself a chair, threw open her cloak and untied the scarf from her hair. Now that the girl had told him what she was, Eric wondered how he could ever have imagined her to be anything else. She looked eighteen or twenty and displayed the brisk assurance which he had come to regard as a woman’s price of admission to the temporary civil service. Her hair was bobbed and surrounded with a red band; a serviceable black dress revealed slender arms and shoulders; and her regular, rather sharp features were agreeably relieved by grey-blue eyes which seemed younger and less self-confident than the rest of her. Eric had met and striven to avoid very many of her type in English government offices; they were at all times too much emancipated for his liking, too energetic, efficient and certain of themselves, too conscious of sex- superiority to concern themselves with sex-equality. Sir Matthew Woodstock’s secretary looked devastatingly conscientious and practical; she billeted herself in the most comfortable chair with the determination which he could imagine her shewing when she arranged appointments and guarded her employer from unauthorized telephone assaults. And she would call him her “chief” rather than her “employer.”... Force of habit, rather than any personal interest, had led Eric to spend a moment in cataloguing her; thereafter he was only concerned to find a polite excuse for going to bed. The girl seemed conscious that she had thrust herself upon him, for, after a short silence, she looked at her watch and exclaimed: “I’d no idea it was so late! Mr. Lane, I mustn’t keep you up.” She coloured bashfully as she spoke, and Eric felt that he had been unkind in not putting her at ease. The flush so changed her façade of efficiency and determination that, though she evidently wanted him to stay, she did not know how to ask. “I’ll finish my cigar with you, if I may,” he said. “You must have a wearing life with Sir Matthew, if he always keeps you up as late as this. Have you been with him long?” The jejune encouragement restored her composure; and Eric saw with dismay that he must talk in self-defence or submit to unrestricted loquacity. “Two years,” she answered; then in rapid, unsought confidence: “You see, he and father were great friends at Cambridge, and, when I wanted to do war-work, father wouldn’t let me learn to make munitions and mother wouldn’t let me go into an office. They’re afraid to allow me out of their sight. I wanted to nurse or drive a car, but father and mother —” “You have a lot to put up with from your parents!,” Eric interrupted. “Oh, they’re hopeless. I expect you’ve met father—” “I don’t even know your name, as you assure me you’re not Lady Woodstock.” “Ivy Maitland. Father’s the judge, you know.” “I don’t know him, but he’s a brother of the general, isn’t he? I know Lady Maitland very well—your aunt, I mean.” “Oh, as if mother knew anybody or anybody knew mother! Well, I had to do something: both my sisters were married, and my brothers were fighting. Then Sir Matthew wanted a secretary....” Eric wondered how quickly he could finish his cigar without spoiling it, then settled resignedly in his chair and listened with eyes half-closed. Miss Maitland had worked for Sir Matthew Woodstock in London, New York, Paris, Rome and Petrograd, crowding into two years more excitement and experiences than she had dreamed of knowing in a life-time. She was nineteen and looking for new worlds to explore, but, as with Alexander on the confines of India, the army insisted on returning home: and there, Sir Matthew told her with regret, he had his own trained staff, and there would be no work for her. “What are you going to do when you get back to England?,” asked Eric in the first negotiable pause. “Get hold of a new job before father has time to see that the war’s over,” she answered promptly. “There’ll be a row, of course, when he finds out... D’you employ a secretary in England, Mr. Lane?” “I used to.” “And you will again. Will you take me? Sir Matthew will tell you that I’m a first-rate shorthand-typist, I’m fairly well- educated, I’m intelligent, I hope I’ve got a certain amount of tact. I’ll tell you that I’m honest—honest in the sense that, when I take money from a person, I work my fingers to the bones for him.” Eric smiled and shook his head. “It wouldn’t be very practicable,” he said. “Why not? I’ll come to you for a month without salary! Three months! I can’t afford more than that.” Underneath her eagerness Eric fancied that he could detect something more than restless impetuosity. “My dear Miss Maitland, you must think me very sordid,” he laughed. “Well, why won’t you give me a trial?” “For purely conventional reasons. I know your uncle and aunt very well. I’m not going to be party to a conspiracy for taking away the daughter of a very eminent judge against his wishes. If I can help you to find work of which your parents approve, I’ll do what I can. But I’ve been away from England so long that I can’t promise anything; and I’ve no idea how long I shall be there.” 33 34 35 36