Stephen McKenna

“ Lady Loring, who had spent the afternoon in her room, came down for a moment, and I saw that her eyes were red and her placid, pretty face haggard with distress.
"Why must it be, George?" she whispered, pointing over the valley to the blue haze of the Gloucestershire hills. "It's all so peaceful here.... And there must be thousands of places like this all over Europe—with men coming home through the fields in the cool of evening.... Why must they start blowing each other to pieces when none of them knows what it's all about? Who can be wicked enough to take the responsibility?" ”

“ I could see Sonia's face brightening, her eyes lighting up like the eyes of a political agent as he shepherds his stalwarts to the poll. Tall and short, dark and fair, stout and lean, they surged forward in an endless black and white stream, as desirable a set of young men as the combined talents of Ashwell and Lady Ullswater could bring together.
"She's launched!" said Bertrand, after an hour of the scene, and we walked upstairs in search of a cigar. By the buffet we found Dainton standing alone and drinking a surreptitious glass of champagne. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His phrase, 'the life we all love and revile,' and the sudden sobering of Arden, had set me thinking of my own life, and as a thing for which a man might die, it seemed a mean and paltry ideal. At Melton and Oxford there had been at least generous illusions, but my dreams had left me in London. The pettiness and personal ambitions of the House, the artificiality and extravagance of society, the lifelessness, the want of purpose, the absence of enthusiasm, seemed to argue a dying civilization. ”

“ As the year drew to its close I was too deeply immersed in politics to watch the social comedy, but in the summer and autumn there was little else to do. For five months I observed the psychological development of a girl who was physically attractive—and nothing more: not gifted, not clever, not accomplished, of no spiritual grandeur—a dainty, brilliant, social butterfly. Sonia was no more than that: I doubt if she ever will be more. Yet men are so constituted that it was enough to assure her triumph.
O'Rane and I observed in company. ”

“ When I was a child in Prague my father took me to see a picture of Rome in the second century—a street scene with patricians in their bordered togas swinging along in litters, and slaves running on ahead, and priests and eunuchs elbowing each other out of the way, and a popular gladiator being recognized and cheered. There's a blaze of sunlight, and you can almost hear the thunder of victorious material prosperity. Noise of jostling humanity and the polyglot shouts of an Empire's citizens in the capital of the world. ”

“ In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his fellows will come out on strike.
"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.
In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I always regarded Loring as the possessor of one sterling quality. Selfish he might be, or indolent, or inconsiderate, an old maid in his fussy little rules of everyday existence and an incurable romantic in his attitude to the life of the twentieth century. With it all he was a man of his word. Under blackmail he had pledged himself to entertain my French journalists, and when the time came for fulfilling the pledge he smiled welcome on them in the hall of House of Steynes. ”

“ There was no movement on Sinclair's part.
"Laddie!" O'Rane's voice took on the very spirit of Burgess. "I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. I pray thee come to me lest a worse thing befall thee. For and if thou harden thine heart, peradventure I may come like a thief in the night and evilly entreat thee so that thou shalt wash thy couch with thy tears. Then shall thy life be labour and sorrow." ”

“ 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. ”

“ We leant out of the window to squirt soda-water on to him as he came down the High with light, swinging step and an engaging devil-may-care swagger. He walked bareheaded, and the fine, black hair—ornately parted and brushed for the occasion—blew into disorder as the autumn wind swept down the street with a scent of fallen leaves and a hint of the dying year.
"You know, Raney, you'd have made an extraordinarily beautiful girl," said Loring reflectively as they met. ”

“ Lady Dainton was one of those women who accumulated arduous and unpaid offices as dukes collected directorships in the golden days of the company-promoting 'nineties. What is more, she worked hard at all of them. When I think of her hurrying from Committee to Prizegiving, and from Prizegiving to Sale of Work, I almost cease to regard woman as man's physical inferior, though I may still wonder how far the world's general welfare would have been retarded had she remained at home with her feet on a sofa and a novel in her lap. ”

“ And I doubt if we've enough knives or plates, but nothing matters as long as we hurry dinner through and let the old man get back to his pipe. He never knows what he's eating and never complains."
At eight o'clock the slam of a door echoed through the desolation of Great Court. With one hand smoothing his long white beard and the other thrust into the bosom of his cassock, Burgess strode across to the Cloisters, hardly pausing to glance at the opal sky or the creeper-clad houses around him, their crumbling stone white and warm from the long afternoon's sunshine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was a deep silence as O'Rane paused. "I—all of us who were out there—have seen it. We can't forget. The courage, the cold, heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying man's face.... We must never let it be forgotten; we've earned the right. As long as a drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or a woman is driven through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great thing to ask? To demand of England to remember that the criminals and loafers and prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters? ”

“ Princes Gardens. When the bitterness of defeat is past, I know few sensations sweeter than that of not being in the House of Commons. It was irritating at first to be debarred from the smoking-room, but, as master of my own time, with no more interrupted dinners, no autumn sessions and no deputations to Ministers, I wondered what frenzy of enthusiasm could have made me for four years the slave of an urbane but vigilant young man like Jellaby, whose one duty in life was to lay me by the heels if I tried to leave the House unpaired. ”

“ By April the grumblers grumbled again and no longer attempted to live as simply as soldiers under fire.
"We were quite sorry for the Belgians," my uncle went on. "We couldn't do too much for them; they were the one topic of conversation——"
"They're still that," I said.
"Yes. Women who have not seen their husbands killed or their daughters violated can always raise a laugh by saying, 'How are your Belgian atrocities getting on? I can't get my creatures to take baths.'" Bertrand heaved a sigh. "So the great nations of the world help the weak. ”

“ Lady Loring and Amy stood at the stairhead and were joined a moment later by Violet and Jim, who took up their position a pace behind to one side. It was a small party, but for twenty minutes a procession of slight girls and smooth-haired, clean-shaven men ascended the stairs—curiously and characteristically English from the easy movements of the girls and the whiteness of their slender shoulders to the sit of the men's coats and the trained condition of their bodies. Good living, hard exercise and fresh air seemed written on every face ”

“ 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." ”

“ I thought of Loring and his dozen wasted years, but he at least was marrying and in the upbringing of a family could look to find an object and an interest. If the war-cloud passed, I should presumably drift on as I had done before, dancing a little less, shooting a little more as the years went by, and gossiping in Fleet Street to give me an excuse for gossiping at the Club. Had I died that night, my record for a man of education would not have been a proud one. My social groove, as I hinted to O'Rane years before at Lake House, held me fast. ”