SONIA MARRIED

BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

AUTHOR OF "SONIA," "MIDAS AND SON," "NINETY-SIX
HOURS' LEAVE," ETC.

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE METROPOLITAN PUBLICATIONS, INC.
——
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

EPISTLE DEDICATORY

To WALTER FRANCIS ROCH

My dear Roch,

Ever since you read "SONIA" in manuscript, you have been the book's most generous critic. May I mark my gratitude for this and for a friendship older than "SONIA" by dedicating its successor to you? Perhaps you remember openly doubting whether in fact the spiritual shock of war could so change and steady Sonia as to make her a fitting wife for any man, O'Rane most of all; you may recollect my confessing that such a marriage of hysterical impulse contained the seeds of instant disaster.

Sequels are admittedly failures, but I look on this book less as a sequel than as an epilogue or footnote. Sonia was not to know happiness until she had suffered, and the sacrifice in the early days of war was to many a new and heady self-indulgence. It is the length of the war, the sickening repetition of one well-placed blow after another on the same bruised flesh that has tested the survivors. 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? And that we've all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too great a strain on our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but—but must we stand at street corners to tell what we've seen? To ask the bystanders—and ourselves—whether we went to war to preserve the right of inflicting pain?"

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; and the comprehensive plea of war has excused the recrudescence of that feverish licence which many of us superstitiously felt the war had been sent to end. Financially, morally and politically we were living on the last few hundreds of our capital. And in public life the war stepped in where honour feared to tread.

I dedicate this book to you in sympathy, because we would both recapture, if we could, O'Rane's first fine careless rapture. But there is little permanence in collective moral upheavals; action and reaction are equal and opposite, and the same violence which transformed the world in 1914 has hastened the return to pre-1914 conditions. The House of Commons, as you know it, and the society outside the House of Commons, as I know it, are not going to legislate a new world into existence in the spirit of the Constituent Assembly. We have worked, like old Bertrand Oakleigh, through the phases of extravagant hope and premature pessimism; we are tired and dispirited, chiefly anxious to end the strain, glad if we can curtail the slaughter, though we are growing used to this, but concerned more for securing the peace of the world in our lifetime than for declaring any other dividend on the lives which have been expended. "We shall be dazed and bruised before an end is made, laddie, staggering like drunken men," as Dr. Burgess prophesied in "SONIA," "Peradventure, if ye speak of the Promised Land, men will arise and stone you with stones, saying, 'Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, and when we did eat bread to the full.' I am an old man, laddie, and old men and weary men, broken with the cares of this life, are fain to go back to the things they know."

What is left to those who are weak or obstinate enough to feel that the things they know are capable of improvement and that man is essentially perfectible? If a collective revival flicker to smoking extinction, can you attain the same results from the aggregate of individual efforts? O'Rane, you will find, tries both extremes.

Always cordially yours,

Stephen McKenna. 

Lincoln's Inn, 1918.

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