Stephen McKenna

“ Everything that a man did in the old days for his own benefit or amusement,—his daily task, his career, his material output, his accumulation of wealth, his pioneer-work in developing and improving the world, his family-life, even—will now be directed to feeding the war. I don't complain; we're united in a labour gang of forty million souls, and our job is to turn out a better war than Germany. I don't see where it's going to stop and I don't see who's going to stop it. Not the soldiers, because they're shot if they disobey an order; not the Government, because they're the Board of Directors. ”

“ After a year of war O'Rane could have mustered many followers, when he murmured to himself, "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? ”

“ When I had seen him into a taxi, I drove to Milford Square with profound and momentarily increasing distaste for my mission. I felt instinctively that it was foredoomed to failure; I knew that, two hours after I had failed, the Daintons would be staring blankly at each other or pacing nervously up and down the room, refusing—despite my repeated warning—to abandon hope until my failure had been confessed. And I knew that I must see Mrs. O'Rane alone—which Grayle would try to prevent—and make an emotional appeal—which I was ill-equipped for doing.... ”

“ George was the first to move.
"He'll kill him!" he called back to us. "Help me separate them!"
As quickly as an old and a middle-aged man could move, Bertrand and I hurried to his assistance. O'Rane was straddling Beresford's body, pinning both arms to the floor with his knees and gripping his throat with both hands until the eyes glared in the early stages of asphyxiation and the mouth fell open, gobbling hideously. The face was swollen and mulberry-coloured by the time that we could see it, and the first feeble resistance had given place to the dreadful placidity of physical exhaustion. ”

“ Some time passed before we could discuss Maitland's news, for Lord Kitchener had been so imposing an idol, so aloof and mysterious—until you met him at close quarters, as I had done a few days before, when a deputation of us waited on him and sought enlightenment on subjects which we could not discuss openly in the House—so well-established and unshakable; we never expected him to die in the middle of the war, certainly we never dreamed of a death so fortuitous, unnecessary, so much the freak of Providence. ”

“ Lady Maitland proposed valiantly.
"With great submission, a live dog's better than a dead lion," said Bertrand. "I've so much faith in the potentialities of my country that I want to preserve her."
Lady Maitland turned on him with unaffected ferocity. "If you make peace now, you'll disgrace her!" she cried. "We shall never be able to hold up our heads again!"
Young Lady Loring, who was between Bertrand and me, was no less strong.
"Uncle Bertrand, you can't be serious!" she exclaimed. "We should be faithless to those who've died, if we didn't hold on. ”

“ It was a wilful, impatient little face, exacting and rather obstinate, without very much depth of character, but amazingly mobile and young, capable of a child's ecstatic abandonment to happiness and of a melting tenderness when she looked at her husband's unseeing eyes and whimsical, self-protective smile.
"In some ways it's extraordinarily like some of his omnium-gatherum parties at Oxford, Sonia," murmured George, as the tireless fingers at the piano passed from waltz to march and from march to Scandinavian boating-song half as old as time.
Mrs. O'Rane's big eyes swam. ”

“ Germany is fighting for her life, she must fight how she can. A screen of women and children before the advancing armies? One husbands one's troops. The Zeppelin attacks? One always likes to undermine civilian moral, to make the whimperers at home yelp for peace on one's own terms— (and are not you high-minded English warring on civilians—women and children, too—by blockading Germany?) . This is a war of nations with all the nations' human and material resources poured into the scale. If you want to fight, fight to win! ”

“ O'Rane himself, most sympathetic with men and least understanding of women, gave her the keys and cheque-book of his life, imagining that undemonstrative, uncaressing fidelity would meet with like return; Beresford offered a romantic devotion which posed her frigidly among mountain snows and would have sent him through fire to avenge an insult to his idealised conception. And Grayle had strode in, compelling and indifferent, slighting and frightening her alternately, at a time when she was instinctively yearning to be called to order, taken in hand, shaken and even beaten. ”

“ After four years of war do you find many traces of O'Rane's crusading spirit? Loring, he and a thousand others intrigued and pulled wires to be sent out before their turn; since they lost their lives or eyes or limbs, we have seen their places filled by men who were first jeered and shamed, later pricked and driven into the army, under the amused gaze of their more fortunate fellows who had intrigued and pulled wires to be kept at home! We have watched conscience being made a penal offence and persecution exalted into patriotism. We have seen self-denial, like self-sacrifice, made statutory ”

“ Grayle was alive and breathing faintly, though his clothes fell away in handfuls of black ash at the first touch, and his face and head were shockingly burnt and disfigured. Beresford gave no sign of life. His hair was singed and blackened where he had fallen on his face against the bars of the grate; his clothes were as much charred as Grayle's, but his body was almost unmarked, save for a bruise over the heart, no doubt from contact with the point of the fender. Death was probably due to asphyxiation; this was the unofficial opinion of the doctor, pending the inquest. ”

“ My God, Stornaway, if you were a woman and hated a man as she hates Grayle, how would you like to be feeling that he'd had anything to do with your child, how'd you like to go through all this hell of childbirth to bear him, a child? All your life, even if you came to love it or at least to be kind to it, you'd always be reminded, wouldn't you? You'd trace a likeness, it would seem to get stronger and stronger.... I wonder what we should do?"
"I imagine most women would try to stop the child being born."
O'Rane looked up quickly.
"Sonia wouldn't." ”

“ Possibly acting on a hint from George Oakleigh, I was beginning to share his experience that Mrs. O'Rane never resented a certain brutal candour of criticism.
"You do hate me, don't you?" she laughed.
"I have no use for the second-rate."
"And that disposes of me!" She leant down and drew Beresford to her until his head was pillowed on her bosom. "Baby, you're in love with a second-rate woman. So are ever so many people more, I'm afraid. It doesn't speak highly for the first-rate intelligence of men, but then I take men as I find them." ”

“ In London, more even than in the fabled Indian bazaar, the secret of to-day is the thrice-told tale of to-morrow. The same few thousand men and women migrate so regularly from one to another of the same few hundred houses that, if you let fall a piece of gossip at luncheon in Chesterfield Gardens, it will have taken wing to Portman Square and Hans Place by tea-time and will set tongues wagging over the dinner-tables of Westminster, Pall Mall and Piccadilly. ”

“ O'Rane held up one finger and pursed her lips, only to let them break a moment later into a smile.
"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind—with Government sanction—to some one weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organisation Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me." ”

“ Bertrand roused himself to light a fresh cigar. From the angle at which he held it in his mouth, no less than from the way that he screwed up his eyes and peered into the shadows of the rafters, I prepared myself for a paradoxical and probably pretentious generalisation.
"I sometimes feel that war is the new expression of our national activity," he began. "Don't the Rolls-Royce people build only for the Government? Well, that's typical of a gigantic state-socialism which has grown up in a night; you can't build a house or buy a suit of clothes until war-needs have been satisfied. ”

“ All her life she was so restless, she had tried to do too much, she was always looking for new excitements; motherly souls like Lady Maitland always told her that—and then asked her to sell flags outside the War Office. And with every man who fell in love with her there was a phase in which he implored her tenderly and unselfishly to take better care of herself—and then robbed her of her afternoon rest in order to dine early and go to a play. People were wonderfully selfish at heart, especially those like David and Vincent, who made most parade of their unselfishness and devotion.... ”

“ Beresford was limp and crowing, I breathless and sweating before it occurred to me to use my feet. Exploring for Grayle's shins with my heel, I made sure of my mark and lashed out and up as hard as I could kick. It is to be presumed that I caught him on his injured knee, for I heard a gasp of pain, we were jerked abruptly backwards, and Grayle slowly subsided, like a wounded bull in the ring, dragging us on top of him. For a moment we lay motionless; then I heard Beresford's struggles for breath beginning again with feverish, rumbling acceleration. ”