Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green
by Jerome K. Jerome · English · Gutenberg #2234 · 349,741 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green
Author: Jerome K. Jerome
Release date: June 1, 2000 [eBook #2234]
Most recently updated: January 13, 2018
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2234
Credits: Transcribed from the 1920 J. W. Arrowsmith edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES IN LAVENDER, BLUE AND GREEN ***
Transcribed from the 1920 J. W. Arrowsmith edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
Sketches in Lavender
Blue and Green
BY
JEROME K. JEROME
AUTHOR OF "THREE MEN IN A BOAT"
"THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL," "NOVEL NOTES"
"THE IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW," ETC.
BRISTOL
J. W. ARROWSMITH LTD., QUAY STREET
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
1920
Contents:
Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad
An item of Fashionable Intelligence
Blase Billy
The Choice of Cyril Harjohn
The Materialisation of Charles and Mivanway
Portrait of a Lady
The Man Who Would Manage
The Man Who Lived For Others
A Man of Habit
The Absent-minded Man
A Charming Woman
Whibley's Spirit
The Man Who Went Wrong
The Hobby Rider
The Man Who Did Not Believe In Luck
Dick Dunkerman's Cat
The Minor Poet's Story
The Degeneration of Thomas Henry
The City of The Sea
Driftwood
La-ven-der's blue, did-dle, did-dle!
La-ven-der's green;
When I am king, did-dle, did-dle!
You shall be queen.
Call up your men, did-dle, did-dle!
Set them to work;
Some to the plough, did-dle, did-dle!
Some to the cart.
Some to make hay, did-dle, did-dle!
Some to cut corn;
While you and I, did-dle, did-dle!
Keep ourselves warm.
REGINALD BLAKE, FINANCIER AND CAD
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly
defined, and act consistently. Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure
in creating the impossible. Reginald Blake was as typical a specimen of
the well-bred cad as one could hope to find between Piccadilly Circus and
Hyde Park Corner. Vicious without passion, and possessing brain without
mind, existence presented to him no difficulties, while his pleasures
brought him no pains. His morality was bounded by the doctor on the one
side, and the magistrate on the other. Careful never to outrage the
decrees of either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though stout; and
had achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding
all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (_nee_ Eppington), were as
ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist seeking
material for a problem play. As they stood before the altar on their
wedding morn, they might have been taken as symbolising satyr and saint.
More than twenty years his junior, beautiful with the beauty of a
Raphael's Madonna, his every touch of her seemed a sacrilege. Yet once
in his life Mr. Blake played the part of a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake,
on the same occasion, contenting herself with a singularly mean
_role_--mean even for a woman in love.
The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience. Blake, to do
him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond admiration and
regard. Few things grow monotonous sooner than irregularity. He would
tickle his jaded palate with respectability, and try for a change the
companionship of a good woman. The girl's face drew him, as the
moonlight holds a man who, bored by the noise, turns from a heated room
to press his forehead to the window-pane. Accustomed to bid for what he
wanted, he offered his price. The Eppington family was poor and
numerous. The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a
narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with martyrdom
for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher price, and then
sold herself.
To a drama of this description, a lover is necessary, if the
complications are to be of interest to the outside world. Harry Sennett,
a pleasant-looking enough young fellow, in spite of his receding chin,
was possessed, perhaps, of more good intention than sense. Under the
influence of Edith's stronger character he was soon persuaded to
acquiesce meekly in the proposed arrangement. Both succeeded in
convincing themselves that they were acting nobly. The tone of the
farewell interview, arranged for the eve of the wedding, would have been
fit and proper to the occasion had Edith been a modern Joan of Arc about
to sacrifice her own happiness on the altar of a great cause; as the girl
was merely selling herself into ease and luxury, for no higher motive
than the desire to enable a certain number of more or less worthy
relatives to continue living beyond their legitimate means, the sentiment
was perhaps exaggerated. Many tears were shed, and many everlasting good-
byes spoken, though, seeing that Edith's new home would be only a few
streets off, and that of necessity their social set would continue to be
the same, more experienced persons might have counselled hope. Three
months after the marriage they found themselves side by side at the same
dinner-table; and after a little melodramatic fencing with what they were
pleased to regard as fate, they accommodated themselves to the customary
positions.
Blake was quite aware that Sennett had been Edith's lover. So had half a
dozen other men, some younger, some older than himself. He felt no more
embarrassment at meeting them than, standing on the pavement outside the
Stock Exchange, he would have experienced greeting his brother jobbers
after a settling day that had transferred a fortune from their hands into
his. Sennett, in particular, he liked and encouraged. Our whole social
system, always a mystery to the philosopher, owes its existence to the
fact that few men and women possess sufficient intelligence to be
interesting to themselves. Blake liked company, but not much company
liked Blake. Young Sennett, however, could always be relied upon to
break the tediousness of the domestic dialogue. A common love of sport
drew the two men together. Most of us improve upon closer knowledge, and
so they came to find good in one another.
"That is the man you ought to have married," said Blake one night to his
wife, half laughingly, half seriously, as they sat alone, listening to
Sennett's departing footsteps echoing upon the deserted pavement. "He's
a good fellow--not a mere money-grubbing machine like me."
And a week later Sennett, sitting alone with Edith, suddenly broke out
with:
"He's a better man than I am, with all my high-falutin' talk, and, upon
my soul, he loves you. Shall I go abroad?"
"If you like," was the answer.
"What would you do?"
"Kill myself," replied the other, with a laugh, "or run away with the
first man that asked me."
So Sennett stayed on.
Blake himself had made the path easy to them. There was little need for
either fear or caution. Indeed, their safest course lay in recklessness,
and they took it. To Sennett the house was always open. It was Blake
himself who, when unable to accompany his wife, would suggest Sennett as
a substitute. Club friends shrugged their shoulders. Was the man
completely under his wife's thumb; or, tired of her, was he playing some
devil's game of his own? To most of his acquaintances the latter
explanation seemed the more plausible.
The gossip, in due course, reached the parental home. Mrs. Eppington
shook the vials of her wrath over the head of her son-in-law. The
father, always a cautious man, felt inclined to blame his child for her
want of prudence.
"She'll ruin everything," he said. "Why the devil can't she be careful?"
"I believe the man is deliberately plotting to get rid of her," said Mrs.
Eppington. "I shall tell him plainly what I think."
"You're a fool, Hannah," replied her husband, allowing himself the
licence of the domestic hearth. "If you are right, you will only
precipitate matters; if you are wrong, you will tell him what there is no
need for him to know. Leave the matter to me. I can sound him without
giving anything away, and meanwhile you talk to Edith."
So matters were arranged, but the interview between mother and daughter
hardly improved the position. Mrs. Eppington was conventionally moral;
Edith had been thinking for herself, and thinking in a bad atmosphere.
Mrs. Eppington, grew angry at the girl's callousness.
"Have you no sense of shame?" she cried.
"I had once," was Edith's reply, "before I came to live here. Do you
know what this house is for me, with its gilded mirrors, its couches, its
soft carpets? Do you know what I am, and have been for two years?"
The elder woman rose, with a frightened pleading look upon her face, and
the other stopped and turned away towards the window.
"We all thought it for the best," continued Mrs. Eppington meekly.
The girl spoke wearily without looking round.
"Oh! every silly thing that was ever done, was done for the best. _I_
thought it would be for the best, myself. Everything would be so simple
if only we were not alive. Don't let's talk any more. All you can say
is quite right."
The silence continued for a while, the Dresden-china clock on the
mantelpiece ticking louder and louder as if to say, "I, Time, am here. Do
not make your plans forgetting me, little mortals; I change your thoughts
and wills. You are but my puppets."
"Then what do you intend to do?" demanded Mrs. Eppington at length.
"Intend! Oh, the right thing of course. We all intend that. I shall
send Harry away with a few well-chosen words of farewell, learn to love
my husband and settle down to a life of quiet domestic bliss. Oh, it's
easy enough to intend!"
The girl's face wrinkled with a laugh that aged her. In that moment it
was a hard, evil face, and with a pang the elder woman thought of that
other face, so like, yet so unlike--the sweet pure face of a girl that
had given to a sordid home its one touch of nobility. As under the
lightning's flash we see the whole arc of the horizon, so Mrs. Eppington
looked and saw her child's life. The gilded, over-furnished room
vanished. She and a big-eyed, fair-haired child, the only one of her
children she had ever understood, were playing wonderful games in the
twilight among the shadows of a tiny attic. Now she was the wolf,
devouring Edith, who was Red Riding Hood, with kisses. Now Cinderella's
prince, now both her wicked sisters. But in the favourite game of all,
Mrs. Eppington was a beautiful princess, bewitched by a wicked dragon, so
that she seemed to be an old, worn woman. But curly-headed Edith fought
the dragon, represented by the three-legged rocking-horse, and slew him
with much shouting and the toasting-fork. Then Mrs. Eppington became
again a beautiful princess, and went away with Edith back to her own
people.
In this twilight hour the misbehaviour of the "General," the importunity
of the family butcher, and the airs assumed by cousin Jane, who kept two
servants, were forgotten.
The games ended. The little curly head would be laid against her breast
"for five minutes' love," while the restless little brain framed the
endless question that children are for ever asking in all its thousand
forms, "What is life, mother? I am very little, and I think, and think,
until I grow frightened. Oh, mother, tell me, what is life?"
Had she dealt with these questions wisely? Might it not have been better
to have treated them more seriously? Could life after all be ruled by
maxims learned from copy-books? She had answered as she had been
answered in her own far-back days of questioning. Might it not have been
better had she thought for herself?
Suddenly Edith was kneeling on the floor beside her.
"I will try to be good, mother."
It was the old baby cry, the cry of us all, children that we are, till
mother Nature kisses us and bids us go to sleep.
Their arms were round each other now, and so they sat, mother and child
once more. And the twilight of the old attic, creeping westward from the
east, found them again.
The masculine duet had more result, but was not conducted with the
_finesse_ that Mr. Eppington, who prided himself on his diplomacy, had
intended. Indeed, so evidently ill at ease was that gentleman, when the
moment came for talk, and so palpably were his pointless remarks mere
efforts to delay an unpleasant subject, that Blake, always direct bluntly
though not ill-naturedly asked him, "How much?"
Mr. Eppington was disconcerted.
"It's not that--at least that's not what I have come about," he answered
confusedly.
"What have you come about?"
Inwardly Mr. Eppington cursed himself for a fool, for the which he was
perhaps not altogether without excuse. He had meant to act the part of a
clever counsel, acquiring information while giving none; by a blunder, he
found himself in the witness-box.
"Oh, nothing, nothing," was the feeble response, "merely looked in to see
how Edith was."
"Much the same as at dinner last night, when you were here," answered
Blake. "Come, out with it."
It seemed the best course now, and Mr. Eppington took the plunge.
"Don't you think," he said, unconsciously glancing round the room to be
sure they were alone, "that young Sennett is a little too much about the
house?"
Blake stared at him.
"Of course, we know it is all right--as nice a young fellow as ever
lived--and Edith--and all that. Of course, it's absurd, but--"
"But what?"
"Well, people will talk."
"What do they say?"
The other shrugged his shoulders.
Blake rose. He had an ugly look when angry, and his language was apt to
be coarse.
"Tell them to mind their own business, and leave me and my wife alone."
That was the sense of what he said; he expressed himself at greater
length, and in stronger language.
"But, my dear Blake," urged Mr. Eppington, "for your own sake, is it
wise? There was a sort of boy and girl attachment between them--nothing
of any moment, but all that gives colour to gossip. Forgive me, but I am
her father; I do not like to hear my child talked about."
"Then don't open your ears to the chatter of a pack of fools," replied
his son-in-law roughly. But the next instant a softer expression passed
over his face, and he laid his hand on the older man's arm.
"Perhaps there are many more, but there's one good woman in the world,"
he said, "and that's your daughter. Come and tell me that the Bank of
England is getting shaky on its legs, and I'll listen to you."
But the stronger the faith, the deeper strike the roots of suspicion.
Blake said no further word on the subject, and Sennett was as welcome as
before. But Edith, looking up suddenly, would sometimes find her
husband's eyes fixed on her with a troubled look as of some dumb creature
trying to understand; and often he would slip out of the house of an
evening by himself, returning home hours afterwards, tired and
mud-stained.
He made attempts to show his affection. This was the most fatal thing he
could have done. Ill-temper, ill-treatment even, she might have borne.
His clumsy caresses, his foolish, halting words of tenderness became a
horror to her. She wondered whether to laugh or to strike at his
upturned face. His tactless devotion filled her life as with some sickly
perfume, stifling her. If only she could be by herself for a little
while to think! But he was with her night and day. There were times
when, as he would cross the room towards her, he grew monstrous until he
towered above her, a formless thing such as children dream of. And she
would sit with her lips tight pressed, clutching the chair lest she
should start up screaming.
Her only thought was to escape from him. One day she hastily packed a
few necessaries in a small hand-bag and crept unperceived from the house.
She drove to Charing Cross, but the Continental Express did not leave for
an hour, and she had time to think.
Of what use was it? Her slender stock of money would soon be gone; how
could she live? He would find her and follow her. It was all so
hopeless!
Suddenly a fierce desire of life seized hold of her, the angry answer of
her young blood to despair. Why should she die, never having known what
it was to live? Why should she prostrate herself before this juggernaut
of other people's respectability? Joy called to her; only her own
cowardice stayed her from stretching forth her hand and gathering it. She
returned home a different woman, for hope had come to her.
A week later the butler entered the dining room, and handed Blake a
letter addressed to him in his wife's handwriting. He took it without a
word, as though he had been expecting it. It simply told him that she
had left him for ever.
* * * * *
The world is small, and money commands many services. Sennett had gone
out for a stroll; Edith was left in the tiny _salon_ of their
_appartement_ at Fecamp. It was the third day of their arrival in the
town. The door was opened and closed, and Blake stood before her.
She rose frightened, but by a motion he reassured her. There was a quiet
dignity about the man that was strange to her.
"Why have you followed me?" she asked.
"I want you to return home."
"Home!" she cried. "You must be mad. Do you not know--"
He interrupted her vehemently. "I know nothing. I wish to know nothing.
Go back to London at once. I have made everything right; no one
suspects. I shall not be there; you will never see me again, and you
will have an opportunity of undoing your mistake--our mistake."
She listened. Hers was not a great nature, and the desire to obtain
happiness without paying the price was strong upon her. As for his good
name, what could that matter? he urged. People would only say that he
had gone back to the evil from which he had emerged, and few would be
surprised. His life would go on much as it had done, and she would only
be pitied.
She quite understood his plan; it seemed mean of her to accept his
proposal, and she argued feebly against it. But he overcame all her
objections. For his own sake, he told her, he would prefer the scandal
to be connected with his name rather than with that of his wife. As he
unfolded his scheme, she began to feel that in acquiescing she was
conferring a favour. It was not the first deception he had arranged for
the public, and he appeared to be half in love with his own cleverness.
She even found herself laughing at his mimicry of what this acquaintance
and that would say. Her spirits rose; the play that might have been a
painful drama seemed turning out an amusing farce.
The thing settled, he rose to go, and held out his hand. As she looked
up into his face, something about the line of his lips smote upon her.
"You will be well rid of me," she said. "I have brought you nothing but
trouble."
"Oh, trouble," he answered. "If that were all! A man can bear trouble."
"What else?" she asked.
His eyes travelled aimlessly about the room. "They taught me a lot of
things when I was a boy," he said, "my mother and others--they meant
well--which as I grew older I discovered to be lies; and so I came to
think that nothing good was true, and that everything and everybody was
evil. And then--"
His wandering eyes came round to her and he broke off abruptly. "Good-
bye," he said, and the next moment he was gone.
She sat wondering for a while what he had meant. Then Sennett returned,
and the words went out of her head.
* * * * *
A good deal of sympathy was felt for Mrs. Blake. The man had a charming
wife; he might have kept straight; but as his friends added, "Blake
always was a cad."
AN ITEM OF FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE
Speaking personally, I do not like the Countess of ---. She is not the
type of woman I could love. I hesitate the less giving expression to
this sentiment by reason of the conviction that the Countess of --- would
not be unduly depressed even were the fact to reach her ears. I cannot
conceive the Countess of ---'s being troubled by the opinion concerning
her of any being, human or divine, other than the Countess of ---.
But to be honest, I must admit that for the Earl of --- she makes an
ideal wife. She rules him as she rules all others, relations and
retainers, from the curate to the dowager, but the rod, though firmly
held, is wielded with justice and kindly intent. Nor is it possible to
imagine the Earl of ---'s living as contentedly as he does with any
partner of a less dominating turn of mind. He is one of those
weak-headed, strong-limbed, good-natured, childish men, born to be guided
in all matters, from the tying of a neck-cloth to the choice of a
political party, by their women folk. Such men are in clover when their
proprietor happens to be a good and sensible woman, but are to be pitied
when they get into the hands of the selfish or the foolish. As very
young men, they too often fall victims to bad-tempered chorus girls or to
middle-aged matrons of the class from which Pope judged all womankind.
They make capital husbands when well managed; treated badly, they say
little, but set to work, after the manner of a dissatisfied cat, to find
a kinder mistress, generally succeeding. The Earl of --- adored his
wife, deeming himself the most fortunate of husbands, and better
testimonial than such no wife should hope for. Till the day she snatched
him away from all other competitors, and claimed him for her own, he had
obeyed his mother with a dutifulness bordering on folly. Were the
countess to die to-morrow, he would be unable to tell you his mind on any
single subject until his eldest daughter and his still unmarried sister,
ladies both of strong character, attracted towards one another by a
mutual antagonism, had settled between themselves which was to be
mistress of him and of his house.
However, there is little fear (bar accidents) but that my friend the
countess will continue to direct the hereditary vote of the Earl of ---
towards the goal of common sense and public good, guide his social policy
with judgment and kindness, and manage his estates with prudence and
economy for many years to come. She is a hearty, vigorous lady, of
generous proportions, with the blood of sturdy forebears in her veins,
and one who takes the same excellent good care of herself that she
bestows on all others dependent upon her guidance.
"I remember," said the doctor--we were dining with the doctor in homely
fashion, and our wives had adjourned to the drawing-room to discuss
servants and husbands and other domestic matters with greater freedom,
leaving us to the claret and the twilight--"I remember when we had the
cholera in the village--it must be twenty years ago now--that woman gave
up the London season to stay down here and take the whole burden of the
trouble upon her own shoulders. I do not feel any call to praise her;
she liked the work, and she was in her element, but it was good work for
all that. She had no fear. She would carry the children in her arms if
time pressed and the little ambulance was not at hand. I have known her
sit all night in a room not twelve feet square, between a dying man and
his dying wife. But the thing never touched her. Six years ago we had
the small-pox, and she went all through that in just the same way. I
don't believe she has ever had a day's illness in her life. She will be
physicking this parish when my bones are rattling in my coffin, and she
will be laying down the laws of literature long after your statue has
become a familiar ornament of Westminster Abbey. She's a wonderful
woman, but a trifle masterful."
He laughed, but I detected a touch of irritation in his voice. My host
looked a man wishful to be masterful himself. I do not think he quite
relished the calm way in which this grand dame took possession of all
things around her, himself and his work included.
"Did you ever hear the story of the marriage?" he asked.
"No," I replied, "whose marriage? The earl's?"
"I should call it the countess's," he answered. "It was the gossip of
the county when I first came here, but other curious things have happened
among us to push it gradually out of memory. Most people, I really
believe, have quite forgotten that the Countess of --- once served behind
a baker's counter."
"You don't say so," I exclaimed. The remark, I admit, sounds weak when
written down; the most natural remarks always do.
"It's a fact," said the doctor, "though she does not suggest the shop-
girl, does she? But then I have known countesses, descended in a direct
line from William the Conqueror, who did, so things balance one another.
Mary, Countess of ---, was, thirty years ago, Mary Sewell, daughter of a
Taunton linen-draper. The business, profitable enough as country
businesses go, was inadequate for the needs of the Sewell family,
consisting, as I believe it did, of seven boys and eight girls. Mary,
the youngest, as soon as her brief schooling was over, had to shift for
herself. She seems to have tried her hand at one or two things, finally
taking service with a cousin, a baker and confectioner, who was doing
well in Oxford Street. She must have been a remarkably attractive girl;
she's a handsome woman now. I can picture that soft creamy skin when it
was fresh and smooth, and the West of England girls run naturally to
dimples and eyes that glisten as though they had been just washed in
morning dew. The shop did a good trade in ladies' lunches--it was the
glass of sherry and sweet biscuit period. I expect they dressed her in
some neat-fitting grey or black dress, with short sleeves, showing her
plump arms, and that she flitted around the marble-topped tables,
smiling, and looking cool and sweet. There the present Earl of ---, then
young Lord C---, fresh from Oxford, and new to the dangers of London
bachelordom, first saw her. He had accompanied some female relatives to
the photographer's, and, hotels and restaurants being deemed impossible
in those days for ladies, had taken them to Sewell's to lunch. Mary
Sewell waited upon the party; and now as many of that party as are above
ground wait upon Mary Sewell."
"He showed good sense in marrying her," I said, "I admire him for it."
The doctor's sixty-four Lafitte was excellent. I felt charitably
inclined towards all men and women, even towards earls and countesses.
"I don't think he had much to do with it," laughed the doctor, "beyond
being, like Barkis, 'willing.' It's a queer story; some people profess
not to believe it, but those who know her ladyship best think it is just
the story that must be true, because it is so characteristic of her. And
besides, I happen to know that it is true."
"I should like to hear it," I said.
"I am going to tell it you," said the doctor, lighting a fresh cigar, and
pushing the box towards me.
* * * * *
I will leave you to imagine the lad's suddenly developed appetite for
decantered sherry at sixpence a glass, and the familiar currant bun of
our youth. He lunched at Sewell's shop, he tea'd at Sewell's,
occasionally he dined at Sewell's, off cutlets, followed by assorted
pastry. Possibly, merely from fear lest the affair should reach his
mother's ears, for he was neither worldly-wise nor vicious, he made love
to Mary under an assumed name; and to do the girl justice, it must be
remembered that she fell in love with and agreed to marry plain Mr. John
Robinson, son of a colonial merchant, a gentleman, as she must have seen,
and a young man of easy means, but of a position not so very much
superior to her own. The first intimation she received that her lover
was none other than Lord C---, the future Earl of ---, was vouchsafed her
during a painful interview with his lordship's mother.
"I never knew it, madam," asserted Mary, standing by the window of the
drawing-room above the shop, "upon my word of honour, I never knew it."
"Perhaps not," answered her ladyship coldly. "Would you have refused him
if you had?"
"I cannot tell," was the girl's answer; "it would have been different
from the beginning. He courted me and asked me to be his wife."
"We won't go into all that," interrupted the other; "I am not here to
defend him. I do not say he acted well. The question is, how much will
compensate you for your natural disappointment?"
Her ladyship prided herself upon her bluntness and practicability. As
she spoke she took her cheque-book out of her reticule, and, opening it,
dipped her pen into the ink. I am inclined to think that the flutter of
that cheque-book was her ladyship's mistake. The girl had common sense,
and must have seen the difficulties in the way of a marriage between the
heir to an earldom and a linen-draper's daughter; and had the old lady
been a person of discernment, the interview might have ended more to her
satisfaction. She made the error of judging the world by one standard,
forgetting there are individualities. Mary Sewell came from a West of
England stock that, in the days of Drake and Frobisher, had given more
than one able-bodied pirate to the service of the country, and that
insult of the cheque-book put the fight into her. Her lips closed with a
little snap, and the fear fell from her.
"I am sorry I don't see my way to obliging your ladyship," she said.
"What do you mean, girl?" asked the elder woman.
"I don't mean to be disappointed," answered the girl, but she spoke
quietly and respectfully. "We have pledged our word to one another. If
he is a gentleman, as I know he is, he will keep his, and I shall keep
mine."
Then her ladyship began to talk reason, as people do when it is too late.
She pointed out to the girl the difference of social position, and
explained to her the miseries that come from marrying out of one's
station. But the girl by this time had got over her surprise, and
perhaps had begun to reflect that, in any case, a countess-ship was worth
fighting for. The best of women are influenced by such considerations.
* * * * *
"I am not a lady, I know," she replied quietly, "but my people have
always been honest folk, well known, and I shall try to learn. I am not
wishing to speak disrespectfully of my betters, but I was in service
before I came here, ma'am, as lady's maid, in a place where I saw much of
what is called Society. I think I can be as good a lady as some I know,
if not better."
The countess began to grow angry again. "And who do you think will
receive you?" she cried, "a girl who has served in a pastry-cook's shop!"
"Lady L--- came from behind the bar," Mary answered, "and that's not much
better. And the Duchess of C---, I have heard, was a ballet girl, but
nobody seems to remember it. I don't think the people whose opinion is
worth having will object to me for very long." The girl was beginning
rather to enjoy the contest.
"You profess to love my son," cried the countess fiercely, "and you are
going to ruin his life. You will drag him down to your own level."
The girl must have looked rather fine at that moment, I should dearly
love to have been present.
"There will be no dragging down, my lady," she replied, "on either side.
I do love your son very dearly. He is one of the kindest and best of
gentlemen. But I am not blind, and whatever amount of cleverness there
may be between us belongs chiefly to me. I shall make it my duty to fit
myself for the position of his wife, and to help him in his work. You
need not fear, my lady, I shall be a good wife to him, and he shall never
regret it. You might find him a richer wife, a better educated wife, but
you will never find him a wife who will be more devoted to him and to his
interests."
That practically brought the scene to a close. The countess had sense
enough to see that she was only losing ground by argument. She rose and
replaced her cheque-book in her bag.
"I think, my good girl, you must be mad," she said; "if you will not
allow me to do anything for you, there's an end to the matter. I did not
come here to quarrel with you. My son knows his duty to me and to his
family. You must take your own course, and I must take mine."
"Very well, my lady," said Mary Sewell, holding the door open for her
ladyship to pass out, "we shall see who wins."
But however brave a front Mary Sewell may have maintained before the
enemy, I expect she felt pretty limp when thinking matters calmly over
after her ladyship's departure. She knew her lover well enough to guess
that he would be as wax in the firm hands of his mother, while she
herself would not have a chance of opposing her influence against those
seeking to draw him away from her. Once again she read through the few
schoolboy letters he had written her, and then looked up at the framed
photograph that hung above the mantelpiece of her little bedroom. The
face was that of a frank, pleasant-looking young fellow, lightened by
eyes somewhat large for a man, but spoiled by a painfully weak mouth. The
more Mary Sewell thought, the more sure she felt in her own mind that he
loved her, and had meant honestly by her. Did the matter rest with him,
she might reckon on being the future Countess of ---, but, unfortunately
for her, the person to be considered was not Lord C---, but the present
Countess of ---. From childhood, through boyhood, into manhood it had
never once occurred to Lord C--- to dispute a single command of his
mother's, and his was not the type of brain to readily receive new ideas.
If she was to win in the unequal contest it would have to be by art, not
by strength. She sat down and wrote a letter which under all the
circumstances was a model of diplomacy. She knew that it would be read
by the countess, and, writing it, she kept both mother and son in mind.
She made no reproaches, and indulged in but little sentiment. It was the
letter of a woman who could claim rights, but who asked only for
courtesy. It stated her wish to see him alone and obtain from his own
lips the assurance that he wished their engagement to cease. "Do not
fear," Mary Sewell wrote, "that I shall be any annoyance to you. My own
pride would not let me urge you to marry me against your desire, and I
care for you too much to cause you any pain. Assure me with your own
lips that you wish our engagement to be at an end, and I shall release
you without another word."
The family were in town, and Mary sent her letter by a trusty hand. The
countess read it with huge satisfaction, and, re-sealing it, gave it
herself into her son's hands. It promised a happy solution of the
problem. In imagination, she had all the night been listening to a
vulgar breach of promise case. She herself had been submitted to a most
annoying cross-examination by a pert barrister. Her son's assumption of
the name of Robinson had been misunderstood and severely commented upon
by the judge. A sympathetic jury had awarded thumping damages, and for
the next six months the family title would be a peg on which music-hall
singers and comic journalists would hang their ribald jokes. Lord C---
read the letter, flushed, and dutifully handed it back to his mother. She
made pretence to read it as for the first time, and counselled him to
accord the interview.
"I am so glad," she said, "that the girl is taking the matter sensibly.
We must really do something for her in the future, when everything is
settled. Let her ask for me, and then the servants will fancy she's a
lady's maid or something of that sort, come after a place, and won't
talk."
So that evening Mary Sewell, addressed by the butler as "young woman,"
was ushered into the small drawing-room that connects the library of No.
--- Grosvenor Square with the other reception rooms. The countess, now
all amiability, rose to meet her.
"My son will be here in a moment," she explained, "he has informed me of
the purport of your letter. Believe me, my dear Miss Sewell, no one can
regret his thoughtless conduct more than I do. But young men will be
young men, and they do not stop to reflect that what may be a joke to
them may be taken quite seriously by others."
"I don't regard the matter as a joke, my lady," replied Mary somewhat
curtly.
"Of course not, my dear," added the countess, "that's what I'm saying. It
was very wrong of him altogether. But with your pretty face, you will
not, I am sure, have long to wait for a husband; we must see what we can
do for you."
The countess certainly lacked tact; it must have handicapped her
exceedingly.
"Thank you," answered the girl, "but I prefer to choose my own."
Fortunately--or the interview might have ended in another quarrel--the
cause of all the trouble at this moment entered the room, and the
countess, whispering a few final words of instruction to him as she
passed out, left them together.
Mary took a chair in the centre of the room, at equal distance from both
doors. Lord C---, finding any sort of a seat uncomfortable under the
circumstances, preferred to stand with his back to the mantelpiece. Dead
silence was maintained for a few seconds, and then Mary, drawing the
daintiest of handkerchiefs from her pocket, began to cry. The countess
must have been a poor diplomatist, or she might have thought of this; or
she may have remembered her own appearance on the rare occasions when she
herself, a big, raw-boned girl, had attempted the softening influence of
tears, and have attached little importance to the possibility. But when
these soft, dimpled women cry, and cry quietly, it is another matter.
Their eyes grow brighter, and the tears, few and far between, lie like
dewdrops on a rose leaf.
Lord C--- was as tender-hearted a lout as ever lived. In a moment he was
on his knees with his arm round the girl's waist, pouring out such
halting words of love and devotion as came to his unready brain, cursing
his fate, his earldom, and his mother, and assuring Mary that his only
chance of happiness lay in his making her his countess. Had Mary liked
to say the word at that moment, he would have caught her to his arms, and
defied the whole world--for the time being. But Mary was a very
practical young woman, and there are difficulties in the way of handling
a lover, who, however ready he may be to do your bidding so long as your
eyes are upon him, is liable to be turned from his purpose so soon as
another influence is substituted for your own. His lordship suggested an
immediate secret marriage. But you cannot run out into the street, knock
up a clergyman, and get married on the spot, and Mary knew that the
moment she was gone his lordship's will would revert to his mother's
keeping. Then his lordship suggested flight, but flight requires money,
and the countess knew enough to keep his lordship's purse in her own
hands. Despair seized upon his lordship.
"It's no use," he cried, "it will end in my marrying her."
"Who's she?" exclaimed Mary somewhat quickly.
His lordship explained the position. The family estates were heavily
encumbered. It was deemed advisable that his lordship should marry
Money, and Money, in the person of the only daughter of rich and
ambitious parvenus, had offered itself--or, to speak more correctly, had
been offered.
"What's she like?" asked Mary.
"Oh, she's nice enough," was the reply, "only I don't care for her and
she doesn't care for me. It won't be much fun for either of us," and his
lordship laughed dismally.
"How do you know she doesn't care for you?" asked Mary. A woman may be
critical of her lover's shortcomings, but at the very least he is good
enough for every other woman.
"Well, she happens to care for somebody else," answered his lordship,
"she told me so herself."
That would account for it.
"And is she willing to marry you?" inquired Mary.
His lordship shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, well, you know, her people want it," he replied.
In spite of her trouble, the girl could not help a laugh. These young
swells seemed to have but small wills of their own. Her ladyship, on the
other side of the door, grew nervous. It was the only sound she had been
able to hear.
"It's deuced awkward," explained his lordship, "when you're--well, when
you are anybody, you know. You can't do as you like. Things are
expected of you, and there's such a lot to be considered."
Mary rose and clasped her pretty dimpled hands, from which she had drawn
her gloves, behind his neck.
"You do love me, Jack?" she said, looking up into his face.
For answer the lad hugged her to him very tightly, and there were tears
in his eyes.
"Look here, Mary," he cried, "if I could only get rid of my position, and
settle down with you as a country gentleman, I'd do it to-morrow. Damn
the title, it's going to be the curse of my life."
Perhaps in that moment Mary also wished that the title were at the bottom
of the sea, and that her lover were only the plain Mr. John Robinson she
had thought him. These big, stupid men are often very loveable in spite
of, or because of their weakness. They appeal to the mother side of a
woman's heart, and that is the biggest side in all good women.
Suddenly however, the door opened. The countess appeared, and sentiment
flew out. Lord C---, releasing Mary, sprang back, looking like a guilty
school-boy.
"I thought I heard Miss Sewell go out," said her ladyship in the icy
tones that had never lost their power of making her son's heart freeze
within him. "I want to see you when you are free."
"I shan't be long," stammered his lordship. "Mary--Miss Sewell is just
going."
Mary waited without moving until the countess had left and closed the
door behind her. Then she turned to her lover and spoke in quick, low
tones.
"Give me her address--the girl they want you to marry!"
"What are you going to do?" asked his lordship.
"I don't know," answered the girl, "but I'm going to see her."
She scribbled the name down, and then said, looking the boy squarely in
the face:
"Tell me frankly, Jack, do you want to marry me, or do you not?"
"You know I do, Mary," he answered, and his eyes spoke stronger than his
words. "If I weren't a silly ass, there would be none of this trouble.
But I don't know how it is; I say to myself I'll do, a thing, but the
mater talks and talks and--"
"I know," interrupted Mary with a smile. "Don't argue with her, fall in
with all her views, and pretend to agree with her."
"If you could only think of some plan," said his lordship, catching at
the hope of her words, "you are so clever."
"I am going to try," answered Mary, "and if I fail, you must run off with
me, even if you have to do it right before your mother's eyes."
What she meant was, "I shall have to run off with you," but she thought
it better to put it the other way about.
Mary found her involuntary rival a meek, gentle little lady, as much
under the influence of her blustering father as was Lord C--- under that
of his mother. What took place at the interview one can only surmise;
but certain it is that the two girls, each for her own ends, undertook to
aid and abet one another.
Much to the surprised delight of their respective parents, there came
about a change in the attitude hitherto assumed towards one another by
Miss Clementina Hodskiss and Lord C---. All objections to his lordship's
unwilling attentions were suddenly withdrawn by the lady. Indeed, so
swift to come and go are the whims of women, his calls were actually
encouraged, especially when, as generally happened, they coincided with
the absence from home of Mr. and Mrs. Hodskiss. Quite as remarkable was
the new-born desire of Lord C--- towards Miss Clementina Hodskiss. Mary's
name was never mentioned, and the suggestion of immediate marriage was
listened to without remonstrance. Wiser folk would have puzzled their
brains, but both her ladyship and ex-Contractor Hodskiss were accustomed
to find all things yield to their wishes. The countess saw visions of a
rehabilitated estate, and Clementina's father dreamed of a peerage,
secured by the influence of aristocratic connections. All that the young
folks stipulated for (and on that point their firmness was supernatural)
was that the marriage should be quiet, almost to the verge of secrecy.
"No beastly fuss," his lordship demanded. "Let it be somewhere in the
country, and no mob!" and his mother, thinking she understood his reason,
patted his cheek affectionately.
"I should like to go down to Aunt Jane's and be married quietly from
there," explained Miss Hodskiss to her father.
Aunt Jane resided on the outskirts of a small Hampshire village, and "sat
under" a clergyman famous throughout the neighbourhood for having lost
the roof to his mouth.
"You can't be married by that old fool," thundered her father--Mr.
Hodskiss always thundered; he thundered even his prayers.
"He christened me," urged Miss Clementina.
"And Lord knows what he called you. Nobody can understand a word he
says."
"I'd like him to marry me," reiterated Miss Clementina.
Neither her ladyship nor the contractor liked the idea. The latter in
particular had looked forward to a big function, chronicled at length in
all the newspapers. But after all, the marriage was the essential thing,
and perhaps, having regard to some foolish love passages that had
happened between Clementina and a certain penniless naval lieutenant,
ostentation might be out of place.
So in due course Clementina departed for Aunt Jane's, accompanied only by
her maid.
Quite a treasure was Miss Hodskiss's new maid.
"A clean, wholesome girl," said of her Contractor Hodskiss, who
cultivated affability towards the lower orders; "knows her place, and
talks sense. You keep that girl, Clemmy."
"Do you think she knows enough?" hazarded the maternal Hodskiss.
"Quite sufficient for any decent woman," retorted the contractor. "When
Clemmy wants painting and stuffing, it will be time enough for her to
think about getting one of your '_Ach Himmels_' or '_Mon Dieus_'."
"I like the girl myself immensely," agreed Clementina's mother. "You can
trust her, and she doesn't give herself airs."
Her praises reached even the countess, suffering severely at the moment
from the tyranny of an elderly Fraulein.
"I must see this treasure," thought the countess to herself. "I am tired
of these foreign minxes."
But no matter at what cunning hour her ladyship might call, the
"treasure" always happened for some reason or other to be abroad.
"Your girl is always out when I come," laughed the countess. "One would
fancy there was some reason for it."
"It does seem odd," agreed Clementina, with a slight flush.
Miss Hodskiss herself showed rather than spoke her appreciation of the
girl. She seemed unable to move or think without her. Not even from the
interviews with Lord C--- was the maid always absent.
The marriage, it was settled, should be by licence. Mrs. Hodskiss made
up her mind at first to run down and see to the preliminaries, but really
when the time arrived it hardly seemed necessary to take that trouble.
The ordering of the whole affair was so very simple, and the "treasure"
appeared to understand the business most thoroughly, and to be willing to
take the whole burden upon her own shoulders. It was not, therefore,
until the evening before the wedding that the Hodskiss family arrived in
force, filling Aunt Jane's small dwelling to its utmost capacity. The
swelling figure of the contractor, standing beside the tiny porch,
compelled the passer-by to think of the doll's house in which the dwarf
resides during fair-time, ringing his own bell out of his own first-floor
window. The countess and Lord C--- were staying with her ladyship's
sister, the Hon. Mrs. J---, at G--- Hall, some ten miles distant, and
were to drive over in the morning. The then Earl of --- was in Norway,
salmon fishing. Domestic events did not interest him.
Clementina complained of a headache after dinner, and went to bed early.
The "treasure" also was indisposed. She seemed worried and excited.
"That girl is as eager about the thing," remarked Mrs. Hodskiss, "as
though it was her own marriage."
In the morning Clementina was still suffering from her headache, but
asserted her ability to go through the ceremony, provided everybody would
keep away, and not worry her. The "treasure" was the only person she
felt she could bear to have about her. Half an hour before it was time
to start for church her mother looked her up again. She had grown still
paler, if possible, during the interval, and also more nervous and
irritable. She threatened to go to bed and stop there if she was not
left quite alone. She almost turned her mother out of the room, locking
the door behind her. Mrs. Hodskiss had never known her daughter to be
like this before.
The others went on, leaving her to follow in the last carriage with her
father. The contractor, forewarned, spoke little to her. Only once he
had occasion to ask her a question, and then she answered in a strained,
unnatural voice. She appeared, so far as could be seen under her heavy
veil, to be crying.
"Well, this is going to be a damned cheerful wedding," said Mr. Hodskiss,
and lapsed into sulkiness.
The wedding was not so quiet as had been anticipated. The village had
got scent of it, and had spread itself upon the event, while half the
house party from G--- Hall had insisted on driving over to take part in
the proceedings. The little church was better filled than it had been
for many a long year past.
The presence of the stylish crowd unnerved the ancient clergyman, long
unaccustomed to the sight of a strange face, and the first sound of the
ancient clergyman's voice unnerved the stylish crowd. What little
articulation he possessed entirely disappeared, no one could understand a
word he said. He appeared to be uttering sounds of distress. The
ancient gentleman's infliction had to be explained in low asides, and it
also had to be explained why such an one had been chosen to perform the
ceremony.
"It was a whim of Clementina's," whispered her mother. "Her father and
myself were married from here, and he christened her. The dear child's
full of sentiment. I think it so nice of her."
Everybody agreed it was charming, but wished it were over. The general
effect was weird in the extreme.
Lord C--- spoke up fairly well, but the bride's responses were singularly
indistinct, the usual order of things being thus reversed. The story of
the naval lieutenant was remembered, and added to, and some of the more
sentimental of the women began to cry in sympathy.
In the vestry things assumed a brighter tone. There was no lack of
witnesses to sign the register. The verger pointed out to them the
place, and they wrote their names, as people in such cases do, without
stopping to read. Then it occurred to some one that the bride had not
yet signed. She stood apart, with her veil still down, and appeared to
have been forgotten. Encouraged, she came forward meekly, and took the
pen from the hand of the verger. The countess came and stood behind her.
"Mary," wrote the bride, in a hand that looked as though it ought to have
been firm, but which was not.
"Dear me," said the countess, "I never knew there was a Mary in your
name. How differently you write when you write slowly."
The bride did not answer, but followed with "Susannah."
"Why, what a lot of names you must have, my dear!" exclaimed the
countess. "When are you going to get to the ones we all know?"
"Ruth," continued the bride without answering.
Breeding is not always proof against strong emotion. The countess
snatched the bride's veil from her face, and Mary Susannah Ruth Sewell
stood before her, flushed and trembling, but looking none the less pretty
because of that. At this point the crowd came in useful.
"I am sure your ladyship does not wish a scene," said Mary, speaking low.
"The thing is done."
"The thing can be undone, and will be," retorted the countess in the same
tone. "You, you--"
"My wife, don't forget that, mother," said Lord C--- coming between them,
and slipping Mary's hand on to his arm. "We are both sorry to have had
to go about the thing in this roundabout way, but we wanted to avoid a
fuss. I think we had better be getting away. I'm afraid Mr. Hodskiss is
going to be noisy."
* * * * *
The doctor poured himself out a glass of claret, and drank it off. His
throat must have been dry.
"And what became of Clementina?" I asked. "Did the naval lieutenant,
while the others were at church, dash up in a post-chaise and carry her
off?"
"That's what ought to have happened, for the whole thing to be in
keeping," agreed the doctor. "I believe as a matter of fact she did
marry him eventually, but not till some years later, after the contractor
had died."
"And did Mr. Hodskiss make a noise in the vestry?" I persisted. The
doctor never will finish a story.
"I can't say for certain," answered my host, "I only saw the gentleman
once. That was at a shareholders' meeting. I should incline to the
opinion that he did."
"I suppose the bride and bridegroom slipped out as quietly as possible
and drove straight off," I suggested.
"That would have been the sensible thing for them to do," agreed the
doctor.
"But how did she manage about her travelling frock?" I continued. "She
could hardly have gone back to her Aunt Jane's and changed her things."
The doctor has no mind for minutiae.
"I cannot tell you about all that," he replied. "I think I mentioned
that Mary was a practical girl. Possibly she had thought of these
details."
"And did the countess take the matter quietly?" I asked.
I like a tidy story, where everybody is put into his or her proper place
at the end. Your modern romance leaves half his characters lying about
just anyhow.
"That also I cannot tell you for certain," answered the doctor, "but I
give her credit for so much sense. Lord C--- was of age, and with Mary
at his elbow, quite knew his own mind. I believe they travelled for two
or three years. The first time I myself set eyes on the countess (_nee_
Mary Sewell) was just after the late earl's death. I thought she looked
a countess, every inch of her, but then I had not heard the story. I
mistook the dowager for the housekeeper."
BLASE BILLY
It was towards the end of August. He and I appeared to be the only two
men left to the Club. He was sitting by an open window, the _Times_
lying on the floor beside him. I drew my chair a little closer and
remarked:--"Good morning."
He suppressed a yawn, and replied "Mornin'"--dropping the "g." The
custom was just coming into fashion; he was always correct.
"Going to be a very hot day, I am afraid," I continued.
"'Fraid so," was the response, after which he turned his head away and
gently closed his eyes.
I opined that conversation was not to his wish, but this only made me
more determined to talk, and to talk to him above all others in London.
The desire took hold of me to irritate him--to break down the
imperturbable calm within which he moved and had his being; and I
gathered myself together, and settled down to the task.
"Interesting paper the _Times_," I observed.
"Very," he replied, taking it from the floor and handing it to me. "Won't
you read it?"
I had been careful to throw into my voice an aggressive cheeriness which
I had calculated would vex him, but his manner remained that of a man who
is simply bored. I argued with him politely concerning the paper; but he
insisted, still with the same weary air, that he had done with it. I
thanked him effusively. I judged that he hated effusiveness.
"They say that to read a _Times_ leader," I persisted, "is a lesson in
English composition."
"So I've been told," he answered tranquilly. "Personally I don't take
them."
The _Times_, I could see, was not going to be of much assistance to me. I
lit a cigarette, and remarked that he was not shooting. He admitted the
fact. Under the circumstances, it would have taxed him to deny it, but
the necessity for confession aroused him.
"To myself," he said, "a tramp through miles of mud, in company with four
gloomy men in black velveteen, a couple of depressed-looking dogs, and a
heavy gun, the entire cavalcade being organised for the purpose of
killing some twelve-and-sixpence worth of poultry, suggests the
disproportionate."
I laughed boisterously, and cried, "Good, good--very good!"
He was the type of man that shudders inwardly at the sound of laughter. I
had the will to slap him on the back, but I thought maybe that would send
him away altogether.
I asked him if he hunted. He replied that fourteen hours' talk a day
about horses, and only about horses tired him, and that in consequence he
had abandoned hunting.
"You fish?" I said.
"I was never sufficiently imaginative," he answered.
"You travel a good deal," I suggested.
He had apparently made up his mind to abandon himself to his fate, for he
turned towards me with a resigned air. An ancient nurse of mine had
always described me as the most "wearing" child she had ever come across.
I prefer to speak of myself as persevering.
"I should go about more," he said, "were I able to see any difference
between one place and another."
"Tried Central Africa?" I inquired.
"Once or twice," he answered. "It always reminds me of Kew Gardens."
"China?" I hazarded.
"Cross between a willow-pattern plate and a New York slum," was his
comment.
"The North Pole?" I tried, thinking the third time might be lucky.
"Never got quite up to it," he returned. "Reached Cape Hakluyt once."
"How did that impress you?" I asked.
"It didn't impress me," he replied.
The talk drifted to women and bogus companies, dogs, literature, and such-
like matters. I found him well informed upon and bored by all.
"They used to be amusing," he said, speaking of the first named, "until
they began to take themselves seriously. Now they are merely silly."
I was forced into closer companionship with "Blase Billy" that autumn,
for by chance a month later he and I found ourselves the guests of the
same delightful hostess, and I came to liking him better. He was a
useful man to have about one. In matters of fashion one could always
feel safe following his lead. One knew that his necktie, his collar, his
socks, if not the very newest departure, were always correct; and upon
social paths, as guide, philosopher, and friend, he was invaluable. He
knew every one, together with his or her previous convictions. He was
acquainted with every woman's past, and shrewdly surmised every man's
future. He could point you out the coal-shed where the Countess of
Glenleman had gambolled in her days of innocence, and would take you to
breakfast at the coffee-shop off the Mile End Road where "Sam. Smith,
Estd. 1820," own brother to the world-famed society novelist,
Smith-Stratford, lived an uncriticised, unparagraphed, unphotographed
existence upon the profits of "rashers" at three-ha'pence and
"door-steps" at two a penny. He knew at what houses it was inadvisable
to introduce soap, and at what tables it would be bad form to denounce
political jobbery. He could tell you offhand what trade-mark went with
what crest, and remembered the price paid for every baronetcy created
during the last twenty-five years.
Regarding himself, he might have made claim with King Charles never to
have said a foolish thing, and never to have done a wise one. He
despised, or affected to despise, most of his fellow-men, and those of
his fellow-men whose opinion was most worth having unaffectedly despised
him.
Shortly described, one might have likened him to a Gaiety Johnny with
brains. He was capital company after dinner, but in the early morning
one avoided him.
So I thought of him until one day he fell in love; or to put it in the
words of Teddy Tidmarsh, who brought the news to us, "got mashed on Gerty
Lovell."
"The red-haired one," Teddy explained, to distinguish her from her
sister, who had lately adopted the newer golden shade.
"Gerty Lovell!" exclaimed the captain, "why, I've always been told the
Lovell girls hadn't a penny among them."
"The old man's stone broke, I know for a certainty," volunteered Teddy,
who picked up a mysterious but, in other respects, satisfactory income in
an office near Hatton Garden, and who was candour itself concerning the
private affairs of everybody but himself.
"Oh, some rich pork-packing or diamond-sweating uncle has cropped up in
Australia, or America, or one of those places," suggested the captain,
"and Billy's got wind of it in good time. Billy knows his way about."
We agreed that some such explanation was needed, though in all other
respects Gerty Lovell was just the girl that Reason (not always consulted
on these occasions) might herself have chosen for "Blase Billy's" mate.
The sunlight was not too kind to her, but at evening parties, where the
lighting has been well considered, I have seen her look quite girlish. At
her best she was not beautiful, but at her worst there was about her an
air of breeding and distinction that always saved her from being passed
over, and she dressed to perfection. In character she was the typical
society woman: always charming, generally insincere. She went to
Kensington for her religion and to Mayfair for her morals; accepted her
literature from Mudie's and her art from the Grosvenor Gallery; and could
and would gabble philanthropy, philosophy, and politics with equal
fluency at every five-o'clock tea-table she visited. Her ideas could
always be guaranteed as the very latest, and her opinion as that of the
person to whom she was talking. Asked by a famous novelist one
afternoon, at the Pioneer Club, to give him some idea of her, little Mrs.
Bund, the painter's wife, had remained for a few moments with her pretty
lips pursed, and had then said:
"She is a woman to whom life could bring nothing more fully satisfying
than a dinner invitation from a duchess, and whose nature would be
incapable of sustaining deeper suffering than that caused by an
ill-fitting costume."
At the time I should have said the epigram was as true as it was cruel,
but I suppose we none of us quite know each other.
I congratulated "Blase Billy," or to drop his Club nickname and give him
the full benefit of his social label, "The Hon. William Cecil Wychwood
Stanley Drayton," on the occasion of our next meeting, which happened
upon the steps of the Savoy Restaurant, and I thought--unless a quiver of
the electric light deceived me--that he blushed.
"Charming girl," I said. "You're a lucky dog, Billy."
It was the phrase that custom demands upon such occasions, and it came of
its own accord to my tongue without costing me the trouble of
composition, but he seized upon it as though it had been a gem of
friendly sincerity.
"You will like her even more when you know her better," he said. "She is
so different from the usual woman that one meets. Come and see her to-
morrow afternoon, she will be so pleased. Go about four, I will tell her
to expect you."
I rang the bell at ten minutes past five. Billy was there. She greeted
me with a little tremor of embarrassment, which sat oddly upon her, but
which was not altogether unpleasing. She said it was kind of me to come
so early. I stayed for about half an hour, but conversation flagged, and
some of my cleverest remarks attracted no attention whatever.
When I rose to take my leave, Billy said that he must be off too, and
that he would accompany me. Had they been ordinary lovers, I should have
been careful to give them an opportunity of making their adieus in
secret; but in the case of the Honourable William Drayton and the eldest
Miss Lovell I concluded that such tactics were needless, so I waited till
he had shaken hands, and went downstairs with him.
But in the hall Billy suddenly ejaculated, "By Jove! Half a minute," and
ran back up the stairs three at a time. Apparently he found what he had
gone for on the landing, for I did not hear the opening of the drawing-
room door. Then the Honourable Billy redescended with a sober,
nonchalent air.
"Left my gloves behind me," he explained, as he took my arm. "I am
always leaving my gloves about."
I did not mention that I had seen him take them from his hat and slip
them into his coat-tail pocket.
We at the Club did not see very much of Billy during the next three
months, but the captain, who prided himself upon his playing of the
_role_ of smoking-room cynic--though he would have been better in the
part had he occasionally displayed a little originality--was of opinion
that our loss would be more than made up to us after the marriage. Once
in the twilight I caught sight of a figure that reminded me of Billy's,
accompanied by a figure that might have been that of the eldest Miss
Lovell; but as the spot was Battersea Park, which is not a fashionable
evening promenade, and the two figures were holding each other's hands,
the whole picture being suggestive of the closing chapter of a _London
Journal_ romance, I concluded I had made an error.
But I did see them in the Adelphi stalls one evening, rapt in a
sentimental melodrama. I joined them between the acts, and poked fun at
the play, as one does at the Adelphi, but Miss Lovell begged me quite
earnestly not to spoil her interest, and Billy wanted to enter upon a
serious argument as to whether a man was justified in behaving as Will
Terriss had just behaved towards the woman he loved. I left them and
returned to my own party, to the satisfaction, I am inclined to think, of
all concerned.
They married in due course. We were mistaken on one point. She brought
Billy nothing. But they both seemed quite content on his not too
extravagant fortune. They took a tiny house not far from Victoria
Station, and hired a brougham for the season. They did not entertain
very much, but they contrived to be seen everywhere it was right and
fashionable they should be seen. The Honourable Mrs. Drayton was a much
younger and brighter person than had been the eldest Miss Lovell, and as
she continued to dress charmingly, her social position rose rapidly.
Billy went everywhere with her, and evidently took a keen pride in her
success. It was even said that he designed her dresses for her, and I
have myself seen him earnestly studying the costumes in Russell and
Allen's windows.
The captain's prophecy remained unfulfilled. "Blase Billy"--if the name
could still be applied to him--hardly ever visited the Club after his
marriage. But I had grown to like him, and, as he had foretold, to like
his wife. I found their calm indifference to the burning questions of
the day a positive relief from the strenuous atmosphere of literary and
artistic circles. In the drawing-room of their little house in Eaton
Row, the comparative merits of George Meredith and George R. Sims were
not considered worth discussion. Both were regarded as persons who
afforded a certain amount of amusement in return for a certain amount of
cash. And on any Wednesday afternoon, Henrick Ibsen and Arthur Roberts
would have been equally welcome, as adding piquancy to the small
gathering. Had I been compelled to pass my life in such a house, this
Philistine attitude might have palled upon me; but, under the
circumstances, it refreshed me, and I made use of my welcome, which I
believe was genuine, to its full extent.
As months went by, they seemed to me to draw closer to one another,
though I am given to understand that such is not the rule in fashionable
circles. One evening I arrived a little before my time, and was shown up
into the drawing-room by the soft-footed butler. They were sitting in
the dusk with their arms round one another. It was impossible to
withdraw, so I faced the situation and coughed. A pair of middle-class
lovers could not have appeared more awkward or surprised.
But the incident established an understanding between us, and I came to
be regarded as a friend before whom there was less necessity to act.
Studying them, I came to the conclusion that the ways and manners of love
are very same-like throughout the world, as though the foolish boy,
unheedful of human advance, kept but one school for minor poet and East
End shop-boy, for Girton girl and little milliner; taught but the one
lesson to the end-of-the-nineteenth-century Johnny that he taught to
bearded Pict and Hun four thousand years ago.
Thus the summer and the winter passed pleasantly for the Honourable
Billy, and then, as luck would have it, he fell ill just in the very
middle of the London season, when invitations to balls and dinner
parties, luncheons and "At Homes," were pouring in from every quarter;
when the lawns at Hurlingham were at their smoothest, and the paddocks at
their smartest.
It was unfortunate, too, that the fashions that season suited the
Honourable Mrs. Billy as they had not suited her for years. In the early
spring, she and Billy had been hard at work planning costumes calculated
to cause a flutter through Mayfair, and the dresses and the bonnets--each
one a work of art--were waiting on their stands to do their killing work.
But the Honourable Mrs. Billy, for the first time in her life, had lost
interest in such things.
Their friends were genuinely sorry, for society was Billy's element, and
in it he was interesting and amusing. But, as Lady Gower said, there was
no earthly need for his wife to constitute herself a prisoner. Her
shutting herself off from the world could do him no good and it would
look odd.
Accordingly the Honourable Mrs. Drayton, to whom oddness was a crime, and
the voice of Lady Gower as the voice of duty, sacrificed her inclinations
on the social shrine, laced the new costumes tight across her aching
heart, and went down into society.
But the Honourable Mrs. Drayton achieved not the success of former
seasons. Her small talk grew so very small, that even Park Lane found it
unsatisfying. Her famous laugh rang mechanically. She smiled at the
wisdom of dukes, and became sad at the funny stories of millionaires.
Society voted her a good wife but bad company, and confined its
attentions to cards of inquiry. And for this relief the Honourable Mrs.
Drayton was grateful, for Billy waned weaker and weaker. In the world of
shadows in which she moved, he was the one real thing. She was of very
little practical use, but it comforted her to think that she was helping
to nurse him.
But Billy himself it troubled.
"I do wish you would go out more," he would say. "It makes me feel that
I'm such a selfish brute, keeping you tied up here in this dismal little
house. Besides," he would add, "people miss you; they will hate me for
keeping you away." For, where his wife was concerned, Billy's knowledge
of the world availed him little. He really thought society craved for
the Honourable Mrs. Drayton, and would not be comforted where she was
not.
"I would rather stop with you, dear," would be the answer; "I don't care
to go about by myself. You must get well quickly and take me."
And so the argument continued, until one evening, as she sat by herself,
the nurse entered softly, closed the door behind her, and came over to
her.
"I wish you would go out to-night, ma'am," said the nurse, "just for an
hour or two. I think it would please the master; he is worrying himself
because he thinks it is his fault that you do not; and just now"--the
woman hesitated for a moment--"just now I want to keep him very quiet."
"Is he weaker, nurse?"
"Well, he is not stronger, ma'am, and I think--I think we must humour
him."
The Honourable Mrs. Drayton rose, and, crossing to the window, stood for
a while looking out.
"But where am I to go, nurse?" she said at length, turning with a smile.
"I've no invitations anywhere."
"Can't you make believe to have one?" said the nurse. "It is only seven
o'clock. Say you are going to a dinner-party; you can come home early
then. Go and dress yourself, and come down and say good-bye to him, and
then come in again about eleven, as though you had just returned."
"You think I must, nurse?"
"I think it would be better, ma'am. I wish you would try it."
The Honourable Mrs. Drayton went to the door, then paused.
"He has such sharp ears, nurse; he will listen for the opening of the
door and the sound of the carriage."
"I will see to that," said the nurse. "I will tell them to have the
carriage here at ten minutes to eight. Then you can drive to the end of
the street, slip out, and walk back. I will let you in myself."
"And about coming home?" asked the other woman.
"You must slip out for a few minutes before eleven, and the carriage must
be waiting for you at the corner again. Leave all that to me."
In half an hour the Honourable Mrs. Drayton entered the sick-room,
radiant in evening dress and jewels. Fortunately the lights were low, or
"Blase-Billy" might have been doubtful as to the effect his wife was
likely to produce. For her face was not the face that one takes to
dinner-parties.
"Nurse tells me you are going to the Grevilles this evening. I am so
glad. I've been worrying myself about you, moped up here right through
the season."
He took her hands in his and held her out at arm's length from him.
"How handsome you look, dear!" he said. "How they must have all been
cursing me for keeping you shut up here, like a princess in an ogre's
castle! I shall never dare to face them again."
She laughed, well pleased at his words.
"I shall not be late," she said. "I shall be so anxious to get back and
see how my boy has behaved. If you have not been good I shan't go
again."
They kissed and parted, and at eleven she returned to the room. She told
him what a delightful evening it had been, and bragged a little of her
own success.
The nurse told her that he had been more cheerful that evening than for
many nights.
So every day the farce was played for him. One day it was to a luncheon
that she went, in a costume by Redfern; the next night to a ball, in a
frock direct from Paris; again to an "At Home," or concert, or dinner-
party. Loafers and passers-by would stop to stare at a haggard, red-eyed
woman, dressed as for a drawing-room, slipping thief-like in and out of
her own door.
I heard them talking of her one afternoon, at a house where I called, and
I joined the group to listen.
"I always thought her heartless, but I gave her credit for sense," a
woman was saying. "One doesn't expect a woman to be fond of her husband,
but she needn't make a parade of ignoring him when he is dying."
I pleaded absence from town to inquire what was meant, and from all lips
I heard the same account. One had noticed her carriage at the door two
or three evenings in succession. Another had seen her returning home. A
third had seen her coming out, and so on.
I could not fit the fact in with my knowledge of her, so the next evening
I called. The door was opened instantly by herself.
"I saw you from the window," she said. "Come in here; don't speak."
I followed her, and she closed the door behind her. She was dressed in a
magnificent costume, her hair sparkling with diamonds, and I looked my
questions.
She laughed bitterly.
"I am supposed to be at the opera to-night," she explained. "Sit down,
if you have a few minutes to spare."
I said it was for a talk that I had come; and there, in the dark room,
lighted only by the street lamp without, she told me all. And at the end
she dropped her head on her bare arms; and I turned away and looked out
of the window for a while.
"I feel so ridiculous," she said, rising and coming towards me. "I sit
here all the evening dressed like this. I'm afraid I don't act my part
very well; but, fortunately, dear Billy never was much of a judge of art,
and it is good enough for him. I tell him the most awful lies about what
everybody has said to me, and what I've said to everybody, and how my
gowns were admired. What do you think of this one?"
For answer I took the privilege of a friend.
"I'm glad you think well of me," she said. "Billy has such a high
opinion of you. You will hear some funny tales. I'm glad you know."
I had to leave London again, and Billy died before I returned. I heard
that she had to be fetched from a ball, and was only just in time to
touch his lips before they were cold. But her friends excused her by
saying that the end had come very suddenly.
I called on her a little later, and before I left I hinted to her what
people were saying, and asked her if I had not better tell them the
truth.
"I would rather you didn't," she answered. "It seems like making public
the secret side of one's life."
"But," I urged, "they will think--"
She interrupted me.
"Does it matter very much what they think?"
Which struck me as a very remarkable sentiment, coming from the Hon. Mrs.
Drayton, _nee_ the elder Miss Lovell.
THE CHOICE OF CYRIL HARJOHN
Between a junior resident master of twenty-one, and a backward lad of
fifteen, there yawns an impassable gulf. Between a struggling journalist
of one-and-thirty, and an M.D. of twenty-five, with a brilliant record
behind him, and a career of exceptional promise before him, a close
friendship is however permissible.
My introduction to Cyril Harjohn was through the Rev. Charles Fauerberg.
"Our young friend," said the Rev. Mr. Fauerberg, standing in the most
approved tutorial attitude, with his hand upon his pupil's shoulder, "our
young friend has been somewhat neglected, but I see in him possibilities
warranting hope--warranting, I may say, very great hope. For the present
he will be under my especial care, and you will not therefore concern
yourself with his studies. He will sleep with Milling and the others in
dormitory number two."
The lad formed a liking for me, and I think, and hope, I rendered his
sojourn at "Alpha House" less irksome than otherwise it might have been.
The Reverend Charles' method with the backward was on all fours with that
adopted for the bringing on of geese; he cooped them up and crammed them.
The process is profitable to the trainer, but painful to the goose.
Young Harjohn and myself left "Alpha House" at the end of the same term;
he bound for Brasenose, I for Bloomsbury. He made a point of never
coming up to London without calling on me, when we would dine together in
one of Soho's many dingy, garlic-scented restaurants, and afterwards,
over our bottle of cheap Beaune, discuss the coming of our lives; and
when he entered Guy's I left John Street, and took chambers close to his
in Staple Inn. Those were pleasant days. Childhood is an over-rated
period, fuller of sorrow than of joy. I would not take my childhood
back, were it a gift, but I would give the rest of my life to live the
twenties over again.
To Cyril I was the man of the world, and he looked to me for wisdom, not
seeing always, I fear, that he got it; while from him I gathered
enthusiasm, and learnt the profit that comes to a man from the keeping of
ideals.
Often as we have talked, I have felt as though a visible light came from
him, framing his face as with the halo of some pictured saint. Nature
had wasted him, putting him into this nineteenth century of ours. Her
victories are accomplished. Her army of heroes, the few sung, the many
forgotten, is disbanded. The long peace won by their blood and pain is
settled on the land. She had fashioned Cyril Harjohn for one of her
soldiers. He would have been a martyr, in the days when thought led to
the stake, a fighter for the truth, when to speak one's mind meant death.
To lead some forlorn hope for Civilisation would have been his true work;
Fate had condemned him to sentry duty in a well-ordered barrack.
But there is work to be done in the world, though the labour lies now in
the vineyard, not on the battlefield. A small but sufficient fortune
purchased for him freedom. To most men an assured income is the grave of
ambition; to Cyril it was the foundation of desire. Relieved from the
necessity of working to live, he could afford the luxury of living to
work. His profession was to him a passion; he regarded it, not with the
cold curiosity of the scholar, but with the imaginative devotion of the
disciple. To help to push its frontiers forward, to carry its flag
farther into the untravelled desert that ever lies beyond the moving
boundary of human knowledge, was his dream.
One summer evening, I remember, we were sitting in his rooms, and during
a silence there came to us through the open window the moaning of the
city, as of a tired child. He rose and stretched his arms out towards
the darkening streets, as if he would gather to him all the toiling men
and women and comfort them.
"Oh, that I could help you!" he cried, "my brothers and my sisters. Take
my life, oh God, and spend it for me among your people."
The speech sounds theatrical, as I read it, written down, but to the
young such words are not ridiculous, as to us older men.
In the natural order of events, he fell in love, and with just the woman
one would expect him to be attracted by. Elspeth Grant was of the type
from which the world, by instinct rather than by convention, has drawn
its Madonnas and its saints. To describe a woman in words is impossible.
Her beauty was not a possession to be catalogued, but herself. One felt
it as one feels the beauty of a summer's dawn breaking the shadows of a
sleeping city, but one cannot set it down. I often met her, and, when
talking to her, I knew myself--I, hack-journalist, frequenter of Fleet
Street bars, retailer of smoke-room stories--a great gentleman, incapable
of meanness, fit for all noble deeds.
In her presence life became a thing beautiful and gracious; a school for
courtesy, and tenderness, and simplicity.
I have wondered since, coming to see a little more clearly into the ways
of men, whether it would not have been better had she been less
spiritual, had her nature possessed a greater alloy of earth, making it
more fit for the uses of this work-a-day world. But at the time, these
two friends of mine seemed to me to have been created for one another.
She appealed to all that was highest in Cyril's character, and he
worshipped her with an unconcealed adoration that, from any man less high-
minded, would have appeared affectation, and which she accepted with the
sweet content that Artemis might have accorded to the homage of Endymion.
There was no formal engagement between them. Cyril seemed to shrink from
the materialising of his love by any thought of marriage. To him she was
an ideal of womanhood rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. His love for
her was a religion; it had no taint of earthly passion in its
composition.
Had I known the world better I might have anticipated the result; for the
red blood ran in my friend's veins; and, alas, we dream our poems, not
live them. But at the time, the idea of any other woman coming between
them would have appeared to me folly. The suggestion that that other
woman might be Geraldine Fawley I should have resented as an insult to my
intelligence: that is the point of the story I do not understand to this
day.
That he should be attracted by her, that he should love to linger near
her, watching the dark flush come and go across her face, seeking to call
the fire into her dark eyes was another matter, and quite comprehensible;
for the girl was wonderfully handsome, with a bold, voluptuous beauty
which invited while it dared. But considered in any other light than
that of an animal, she repelled. At times when, for her ends, it seemed
worth the exertion, she would assume a certain wayward sweetness, but her
acting was always clumsy and exaggerated, capable of deceiving no one but
a fool.
Cyril, at all events, was not taken in by it. One evening, at a Bohemian
gathering, the _entree_ to which was notoriety rather than character,
they had been talking together for some considerable time when, wishing
to speak to Cyril, I strolled up to join them. As I came towards them
she moved away, her dislike for me being equal to mine for her; a thing
which was, perhaps, well for me.
"Miss Fawley prefers two as company to three," I observed, looking after
her retreating figure.
"I am afraid she finds you what we should call an anti-sympathetic
element," he replied, laughing.
"Do you like her?" I asked him, somewhat bluntly.
His eyes rested upon her as she stood in the doorway, talking to a small,
black-bearded man who had just been introduced to her. After a few
moments she went out upon his arm, and then Cyril turned to me.
"I think her," he replied, speaking, as was necessary, very low, "the
embodiment of all that is evil in womanhood. In old days she would have
been a Cleopatra, a Theodora, a Delilah. To-day, lacking opportunity,
she is the 'smart woman' grubbing for an opening into society--and old
Fawley's daughter. I'm tired; let us go home."
His allusion to her parentage was significant. Few people thought of
connecting clever, handsome Geraldine Fawley with "Rogue Fawley," Jew
renegade, ex-gaol bird, and outside broker; who, having expectations from
his daughter, took care not to hamper her by ever being seen in her
company. But no one who had once met the father could ever forget the
relationship while talking to the daughter. The older face, with its
cruelty, its cunning, and its greed stood reproduced, feature for
feature, line for line. It was as though Nature, for an artistic freak,
had set herself the task of fashioning hideousness and beauty from
precisely the same materials. Between the leer of the man and the smile
of the girl, where lay the difference? It would have puzzled any student
of anatomy to point it out. Yet the one sickened, while to gain the
other most men would have given much.
Cyril's answer to my question satisfied me for the time. He met the girl
often, as was natural. She was a singer of some repute, and our social
circle was what is commonly called "literary and artistic." To do her
justice, however, she made no attempt to fascinate him, nor even to be
particularly agreeable to him. Indeed, she seemed to be at pains to show
him her natural--in other words, her most objectionable side.
Coming out of the theatre one first night, we met her in the lobby. I
was following Cyril at some little distance, but as he stopped to speak
to her the movement of the crowd placed me just behind them.
"Will you be at Leightons' to-morrow?" I heard him ask her in a low tone.
"Yes," she answered, "and I wish you wouldn't come."
"Why not?"
"Because you're a fool, and you bore me."
Under ordinary circumstances I should have taken the speech for
badinage--it was the kind of wit the woman would have indulged in. But
Cyril's face clouded with anger and vexation. I said nothing. I did not
wish him to know that I had overheard. I tried to believe that he was
amusing himself, but my own explanation did not satisfy me.
Next evening I went to Leightons' by myself. The Grants were in town,
and Cyril was dining with them. I found I did not know many people, and
cared little for those I did. I was about to escape when Miss Fawley's
name was announced. I was close to the door, and she had to stop and
speak to me. We exchanged a few commonplaces. She either made love to a
man or was rude to him. She generally talked to me without looking at
me, nodding and smiling meanwhile to people around. I have met many
women equally ill-mannered, and without her excuse. For a moment,
however, she turned her eyes to mine.
"Where's your friend, Mr. Harjohn?" she asked. "I thought you were
inseparables."
I looked at her in astonishment.
"He is dining out to-night," I replied. "I do not think he will come."
She laughed. I think it was the worst part about the woman, her laugh;
it suggested so much cruelty.
"I think he will," she said.
It angered me into an indiscretion. She was moving away. I stepped in
front of her and stopped her.
"What makes you think so?" I asked, and my voice, I know, betrayed the
anxiety I felt as to her reply. She looked me straight in the face.
There was one virtue she possessed--the virtue that animals hold above
mankind--truthfulness. She knew I disliked her--hate would be, perhaps,
a more exact expression, did not the word sound out of date, and she made
no pretence of not knowing it and returning the compliment.
"Because I am here," she answered. "Why don't you save him? Have you no
influence over him? Tell the Saint to keep him; I don't want him. You
heard what I said to him last night. I shall only marry him for the sake
of his position, and the money he can earn if he likes to work and not
play the fool. Tell him what I have said; I shan't deny it."
She passed on to greet a decrepit old lord with a languishing smile, and
I stood staring after her with, I fear, a somewhat stupid expression,
until some young fool came up grinning, to ask me whether I had seen a
ghost or backed a "wrong 'un."
There was no need to wait; I felt no curiosity. Something told me the
woman had spoken the truth. It was mere want of motive that made me
linger. I saw him come in, and watched him hanging round her, like a
dog, waiting for a kind word, or failing that, a look. I knew she saw
me, and I knew it added to her zest that I was there. Not till we were
in the street did I speak to him. He started as I touched him. We were
neither of us good actors. He must have read much in my face, and I saw
that he had read it; and we walked side by side in silence, I thinking
what to say, wondering whether I should do good or harm, wishing that we
were anywhere but in these silent, life-packed streets, so filled with
the unseen. It was not until we had nearly reached the Albert Hall that
we broke the silence. Then it was he who spoke:
"Do you think I haven't told myself all that?" he said. "Do you think I
don't know I'm a damned fool, a cad, a liar! What the devil's the good
of talking about it?"
"But I can't understand it," I said.
"No," he replied, "because you're a fool, because you have only seen one
side of me. You think me a grand gentleman, because I talk big, and am
full of noble sentiment. Why, you idiot, the Devil himself could take
you in. _He_ has his fine moods, I suppose, talks like a saint, and says
his prayers with the rest of us. Do you remember the first night at old
Fauerberg's? You poked your silly head into the dormitory, and saw me
kneeling by the bedside, while the other fellows stood by grinning. You
closed the door softly--you thought I never saw you. I was not praying,
I was trying to pray."
"It showed that you had pluck, if it showed nothing else," I answered.
"Most boys would not have tried, and you kept it up."
"Ah, yes," he answered, "I promised the Mater I would, and I did. Poor
old soul, she was as big a fool as you are. She believed in me. Don't
you remember, finding me one Saturday afternoon all alone, stuffing
myself with cake and jam?"
I laughed at the recollection, though Heaven knows I was in no laughing
mood. I had found him with an array of pastry spread out before him,
sufficient to make him ill for a week, and I had boxed his ears, and had
thrown the whole collection into the road.
"The Mater gave me half-a-crown a week for pocket-money," he continued,
"and I told the fellows I had only a shilling, so that I could gorge
myself with the other eighteenpence undisturbed. Pah! I was a little
beast even in those days!"
"It was only a schoolboy trick," I argued, "it was natural enough."
"Yes," he answered, "and this is only a man's trick, and is natural
enough; but it is going to ruin my life, to turn me into a beast instead
of a man. Good God! do you think I don't know what that woman will do
for me? She will drag me down, down, down, to her own level. All my
ideas, all my ambition, all my life's work will be bartered for a smug
practice, among paying patients. I shall scheme and plot to make a big
income that we may live like a couple of plump animals, that we may dress
ourselves gaudily and parade our wealth. Nothing will satisfy her. Such
women are leeches; their only cry is 'give, give, give.' So long as I
can supply her with money she will tolerate me, and to get it for her I
shall sell my heart, and my brain, and my soul. She will load herself
with jewels, and go about from house to house, half naked, to leer at
every man she comes across: that is 'life' to such women. And I shall
trot behind her, the laughing stock of every fool, the contempt of every
man."
His vehemence made any words I could say sound weak before they were
uttered. What argument could I show stronger than that he had already
put before himself? I knew his answer to everything I could urge.
My mistake had been in imagining him different from other men. I began
to see that he was like the rest of us: part angel, part devil. But the
new point he revealed to me was that the higher the one, the lower the
other. It seems as if nature must balance her work; the nearer the
leaves to heaven, the deeper the roots striking down into the darkness. I
knew that his passion for this woman made no change in his truer love.
The one was a spiritual, the other a mere animal passion. The memory of
incidents that had puzzled me came back to enlighten me. I remembered
how often on nights when I had sat up late, working, I had heard his
steps pass my door, heavy and uncertain; how once in a dingy quarter of
London, I had met one who had strangely resembled him. I had followed
him to speak, but the man's bleared eyes had stared angrily at me, and I
had turned away, calling myself a fool for my mistake. But as I looked
at the face beside me now, I understood.
And then there rose up before my eyes the face I knew better, the eager
noble face that to merely look upon had been good. We had reached a
small, evil-smelling street, leading from Leicester Square towards
Holborn. I caught him by the shoulders and turned him round with his
back against some church railings. I forget what I said. We are strange
mixtures. I thought of the shy, backward boy I had coached and bullied
at old Fauerberg's, of the laughing handsome lad I had watched grow into
manhood. The very restaurant we had most frequented in his old Oxford
days--where we had poured out our souls to one another, was in this very
street where we were standing. For the moment I felt towards him as
perhaps his mother might have felt; I wanted to scold him and to cry with
him; to shake him and to put my arms about him. I pleaded with him, and
urged him, and called him every name I could put my tongue to. It must
have seemed an odd conversation. A passing policeman, making a not
unnatural mistake, turned his bull's-eye upon us, and advised us sternly
to go home. We laughed, and with that laugh Cyril came back to his own
self, and we walked on to Staple Inn more soberly. He promised me to go
away by the very first train the next morning, and to travel for some
four or five months, and I undertook to make all the necessary
explanations for him.
We both felt better for our talk, and when I wished him good-night at his
door, it was the real Cyril Harjohn whose hand I gripped--the real Cyril,
because the best that is in a man is his real self. If there be any
future for man beyond this world, it is the good that is in him that will
live. The other side of him is of the earth; it is that he will leave
behind him.
He kept his word. In the morning he was gone, and I never saw him again.
I had many letters from him, hopeful at first, full of strong resolves.
He told me he had written to Elspeth, not telling her everything, for
that she would not understand, but so much as would explain; and from her
he had had sweet womanly letters in reply. I feared she might have been
cold and unsympathetic, for often good women, untouched by temptation
themselves, have small tenderness for those who struggle. But her
goodness was something more than a mere passive quantity; she loved him
the better because he had need of her. I believe she would have saved
him from himself, had not fate interfered and taken the matter out of her
hands. Women are capable of big sacrifices; I think this woman would
have been content to lower herself, if by so doing she could have raised
him.
But it was not to be. From India he wrote to me that he was coming home.
I had not met the Fawley woman for some time, and she had gone out of my
mind until one day, chancing upon a theatrical paper, some weeks old, I
read that "Miss Fawley had sailed for Calcutta to fulfil an engagement of
long standing."
I had his last letter in my pocket. I sat down and worked out the
question of date. She would arrive in Calcutta the day before he left.
Whether it was chance or intention on her part I never knew; as likely as
not the former, for there is a fatalism in this world shaping our ends.
I heard no more from him, I hardly expected to do so, but three months
later a mutual acquaintance stopped me on the Club steps.
"Have you heard the news," he said, "about young Harjohn?"
"No," I replied. "Is he married?"
"Married," he answered, "No, poor devil, he's dead!"
"Thank God," was on my lips, but fortunately I checked myself. "How did
it happen?" I asked.
"At a shooting party, up at some Rajah's place. Must have caught his gun
in some brambles, I suppose. The bullet went clean through his head."
"Dear me," I said, "how very sad!" I could think of nothing else to say
at the moment.
THE MATERIALISATION OF CHARLES AND MIVANWAY
The fault that most people will find with this story is that it is
unconvincing. Its scheme is improbable, its atmosphere artificial. To
confess that the thing really happened--not as I am about to set it down,
for the pen of the professional writer cannot but adorn and embroider,
even to the detriment of his material--is, I am well aware, only an
aggravation of my offence, for the facts of life are the impossibilities
of fiction. A truer artist would have left this story alone, or at most
have kept it for the irritation of his private circle. My lower instinct
is to make use of it. A very old man told me the tale. He was landlord
of the Cromlech Arms, the only inn of a small, rock-sheltered village on
the north-east coast of Cornwall, and had been so for nine and forty
years. It is called the Cromlech Hotel now, and is under new management,
and during the season some four coach-loads of tourists sit down each day
to _table d'hote_ lunch in the low-ceilinged parlour. But I am speaking
of years ago, when the place was a mere fishing harbour, undiscovered by
the guide books.
The old landlord talked, and I hearkened the while we both sat drinking
thin ale from earthenware mugs, late one summer's evening, on the bench
that runs along the wall just beneath the latticed windows. And during
the many pauses, when the old landlord stopped to puff his pipe in
silence, and lay in a new stock of breath, there came to us the murmuring
voices of the Atlantic; and often, mingled with the pompous roar of the
big breakers farther out, we would hear the rippling laugh of some small
wave that, maybe, had crept in to listen to the tale the landlord told.
The mistake that Charles Seabohn, junior partner of the firm of Seabohn &
Son, civil engineers of London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mivanway
Evans, youngest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Evans, Pastor of the
Presbyterian Church at Bristol, made originally, was marrying too young.
Charles Seabohn could hardly have been twenty years of age, and Mivanway
could have been little more than seventeen, when they first met upon the
cliffs, two miles beyond the Cromlech Arms. Young Charles Seabohn,
coming across the village in the course of a walking tour, had decided to
spend a day or two exploring the picturesque coast, and Mivanway's father
had hired that year a neighbouring farmhouse wherein to spend his summer
vacation.
Early one morning--for at twenty one is virtuous, and takes exercise
before breakfast--as young Charles Seabohn lay upon the cliffs, watching
the white waters coming and going upon the black rocks below, he became
aware of a form rising from the waves. The figure was too far off for
him to see it clearly, but judging from the costume, it was a female
figure, and promptly the mind of Charles, poetically inclined, turned to
thoughts of Venus--or Aphrodite, as he, being a gentleman of delicate
taste would have preferred to term her. He saw the figure disappear
behind a head-land, but still waited. In about ten minutes or a quarter
of an hour it reappeared, clothed in the garments of the
eighteen-sixties, and came towards him. Hidden from sight himself behind
a group of rocks, he could watch it at his leisure, ascending the steep
path from the beach, and an exceedingly sweet and dainty figure it would
have appeared, even to eyes less susceptible than those of twenty. Sea-
water--I stand open to correction--is not, I believe, considered anything
of a substitute for curling tongs, but to the hair of the youngest Miss
Evans it had given an additional and most fascinating wave. Nature's red
and white had been most cunningly laid on, and the large childish eyes
seemed to be searching the world for laughter, with which to feed a pair
of delicious, pouting lips. Charles's upturned face, petrified into
admiration, was just the sort of thing for which they were on the look-
out. A startled "Oh!" came from the slightly parted lips, followed by
the merriest of laughs, which in its turn was suddenly stopped by a deep
blush. Then the youngest Miss Evans looked offended, as though the whole
affair had been Charles's fault, which is the way of women. And Charles,
feeling himself guilty under that stern gaze of indignation, rose
awkwardly and apologised meekly, whether for being on the cliffs at all
or for having got up too early, he would have been unable to explain.
The youngest Miss Evans graciously accepted the apology thus tendered
with a bow, and passed on, and Charles stood staring after her till the
valley gathered her into its spreading arms and hid her from his view.
That was the beginning of all things. I am speaking of the Universe as
viewed from the standpoint of Charles and Mivanway.
Six months later they were man and wife, or perhaps it would be more
correct to say boy and wifelet. Seabohn senior counselled delay, but was
overruled by the impatience of his junior partner. The Reverend Mr.
Evans, in common with most theologians, possessed a goodly supply of
unmarried daughters, and a limited income. Personally he saw no
necessity for postponement of the marriage.
The month's honeymoon was spent in the New Forest. That was a mistake to
begin with. The New Forest in February is depressing, and they had
chosen the loneliest spot they could find. A fortnight in Paris or Rome
would have been more helpful. As yet they had nothing to talk about
except love, and that they had been talking and writing about steadily
all through the winter. On the tenth morning Charles yawned, and
Mivanway had a quiet half-hour's cry about it in her own room. On the
sixteenth evening, Mivanway, feeling irritable, and wondering why (as
though fifteen damp, chilly days in the New Forest were not sufficient to
make any woman irritable), requested Charles not to disarrange her hair;
and Charles, speechless with astonishment, went out into the garden, and
swore before all the stars that he would never caress Mivanway's hair
again as long as he lived.
One supreme folly they had conspired to commit, even before the
commencement of the honeymoon. Charles, after the manner of very young
lovers, had earnestly requested Mivanway to impose upon him some task. He
desired to do something great and noble to show his devotion. Dragons
was the thing he had in mind, though he may not have been aware of it.
Dragons also, no doubt, flitted through Mivanway's brain, but
unfortunately for lovers the supply of dragons has lapsed. Mivanway,
liking the conceit, however, thought over it, and then decided that
Charles must give up smoking. She had discussed the matter with her
favourite sister, and that was the only thing the girls could think of.
Charles's face fell. He suggested some more Herculean labour, some
sacrifice more worthy to lay at Mivanway's feet. But Mivanway had
spoken. She might think of some other task, but the smoking prohibition
would, in any case, remain. She dismissed the subject with a pretty
_hauteur_ that would have graced Marie Antoinette.
Thus tobacco, the good angel of all men, no longer came each day to teach
Charles patience and amiability, and he fell into the ways of short
temper and selfishness.
They took up their residence in a suburb of Newcastle, and this was also
unfortunate for them, because there the society was scanty and middle-
aged; and, in consequence, they had still to depend much upon their own
resources. They knew little of life, less of each other, and nothing at
all of themselves. Of course they quarrelled, and each quarrel left the
wound a little more raw. No kindly, experienced friend was at hand to
laugh at them. Mivanway would write down all her sorrows in a bulky
diary, which made her feel worse; so that before she had written for ten
minutes her pretty, unwise head would drop upon her dimpled arm, and the
book--the proper place for which was behind the fire--would become damp
with her tears; and Charles, his day's work done and the clerks gone,
would linger in his dingy office and hatch trifles into troubles.
The end came one evening after dinner, when, in the heat of a silly
squabble, Charles boxed Mivanway's ears. That was very ungentlemanly
conduct, and he was heartily ashamed of himself the moment he had done
it, which was right and proper for him to be. The only excuse to be
urged on his behalf is that girls sufficiently pretty to have been spoilt
from childhood by everyone about them can at times be intensely
irritating. Mivanway rushed up to her room, and locked herself in.
Charles flew after her to apologise, but only arrived in time to have the
door slammed in his face.
It had only been the merest touch. A boy's muscles move quicker than his
thoughts. But to Mivanway it was a blow. This was what it had come to!
This was the end of a man's love!
She spent half the night writing in the precious diary, with the result
that in the morning she came down feeling more bitter than she had gone
up. Charles had walked the streets of Newcastle all night, and that had
not done him any good. He met her with an apology combined with an
excuse, which was bad tactics. Mivanway, of course, fastened upon the
excuse, and the quarrel recommenced. She mentioned that she hated him;
he hinted that she had never loved him, and she retorted that he had
never loved her. Had there been anybody by to knock their heads together
and suggest breakfast, the thing might have blown over, but the combined
effect of a sleepless night and an empty stomach upon each proved
disastrous. Their words came poisoned from their brains, and each
believed they meant what they said. That afternoon Charles sailed from
Hull, on a ship bound for the Cape, and that evening Mivanway arrived at
the paternal home in Bristol with two trunks and the curt information
that she and Charles had separated for ever. The next morning both
thought of a soft speech to say to the other, but the next morning was
just twenty-four hours too late.
Eight days afterwards Charles's ship was run down in a fog, near the
coast of Portugal, and every soul on board was supposed to have perished.
Mivanway read his name among the list of lost; the child died within her,
and she knew herself for a woman who had loved deeply, and will not love
again.
Good luck intervening, however, Charles and one other man were rescued by
a small trading vessel, and landed in Algiers. There Charles learnt of
his supposed death, and the idea occurred to him to leave the report
uncontradicted. For one thing, it solved a problem that had been
troubling him. He could trust his father to see to it that his own small
fortune, with possibly something added, was handed over to Mivanway, and
she would be free if she wished to marry again. He was convinced that
she did not care for him, and that she had read of his death with a sense
of relief. He would make a new life for himself, and forget her.
He continued his journey to the Cape, and once there he soon gained for
himself an excellent position. The colony was young, engineers were
welcome, and Charles knew his business. He found the life interesting
and exciting. The rough, dangerous up-country work suited him, and the
time passed swiftly.
But in thinking he would forget Mivanway, he had not taken into
consideration his own character, which at bottom was a very gentlemanly
character. Out on the lonely veldt he found himself dreaming of her. The
memory of her pretty face and merry laugh came back to him at all hours.
Occasionally he would curse her roundly, but that only meant that he was
sore because of the thought of her; what he was really cursing was
himself and his own folly. Softened by the distance, her quick temper,
her very petulance became mere added graces; and if we consider women as
human beings and not as angels, it was certainly a fact that he had lost
a very sweet and lovable woman. Ah! if she only were by his side now--now
that he was a man capable of appreciating her, and not a foolish, selfish
boy. This thought would come to him as he sat smoking at the door of his
tent, and then he would regret that the stars looking down upon him were
not the same stars that were watching her, it would have made him feel
nearer to her. For, though young people may not credit it, one grows
more sentimental as one grows older; at least, some of us do, and they
perhaps not the least wise.
One night he had a vivid dream of her. She came to him and held out her
hand, and he took it, and they said good-bye to one another. They were
standing on the cliff where he had first met her, and one of them was
going upon a long journey, though he was not sure which.
In the towns men laugh at dreams, but away from civilisation we listen
more readily to the strange tales that Nature whispers to us. Charles
Seabohn recollected this dream when he awoke in the morning.
"She is dying," he said, "and she has come to wish me good-bye."
He made up his mind to return to England at once; perhaps if he made
haste he would be in time to kiss her. But he could not start that day,
for work was to be done; and Charles Seabohn, lover though he still was,
had grown to be a man, and knew that work must not be neglected even
though the heart may be calling. So for a day or two he stayed, and on
the third night he dreamed of Mivanway again, and this time she lay
within the little chapel at Bristol where, on Sunday mornings, he had
often sat with her. He heard her father's voice reading the burial
service over her, and the sister she had loved best was sitting beside
him, crying softly. Then Charles knew that there was no need for him to
hasten. So he remained to finish his work. That done, he would return
to England. He would like again to stand upon the cliffs, above the
little Cornish village, where they had first met.
Thus a few months later Charles Seabohn, or Charles Denning, as he called
himself, aged and bronzed, not easily recognisable by those who had not
known him well, walked into the Cromlech Arms, as six years before he had
walked in with his knapsack on his back, and asked for a room, saying he
would be stopping in the village for a short while.
In the evening he strolled out and made his way to the cliffs. It was
twilight when he reached the place of rocks to which the fancy-loving
Cornish folk had given the name of the Witches' Cauldron. It was from
this spot that he had first watched Mivanway coming to him from the sea.
He took the pipe from his mouth, and leaning against a rock, whose rugged
outline seemed fashioned into the face of an old friend, gazed down the
narrow pathway now growing indistinct in the dim light. And as he gazed
the figure of Mivanway came slowly up the pathway from the sea, and
paused before him.
He felt no fear. He had half expected it. Her coming was the complement
of his dreams. She looked older and graver than he remembered her, but
for that the face was the sweeter.
He wondered if she would speak to him, but she only looked at him with
sad eyes; and he stood there in the shadow of the rocks without moving,
and she passed on into the twilight.
Had he on his return cared to discuss the subject with his landlord, had
he even shown himself a ready listener--for the old man loved to
gossip--he might have learnt that a young widow lady named Mrs. Charles
Seabohn, accompanied by an unmarried sister, had lately come to reside in
the neighbourhood, having, upon the death of a former tenant, taken the
lease of a small farmhouse sheltered in the valley a mile beyond the
village, and that her favourite evening's walk was to the sea and back by
the steep footway leading past the Witches' Cauldron.
Had he followed the figure of Mivanway into the valley, he would have
known that out of sight of the Witches' Cauldron it took to running fast
till it reached a welcome door, and fell panting into the arms of another
figure that had hastened out to meet it.
"My dear," said the elder woman, "you are trembling like a leaf. What
has happened?"
"I have seen him," answered Mivanway.
"Seen whom?"
"Charles."
"Charles!" repeated the other, looking at Mivanway as though she thought
her mad.
"His spirit, I mean," explained Mivanway, in an awed voice. "It was
standing in the shadow of the rocks, in the exact spot where we first
met. It looked older and more careworn; but, oh! Margaret, so sad and
reproachful."
"My dear," said her sister, leading her in, "you are overwrought. I wish
we had never come back to this house."
"Oh! I was not frightened," answered Mivanway, "I have been expecting it
every evening. I am so glad it came. Perhaps it will come again, and I
can ask it to forgive me."
So next night Mivanway, though much against her sister's wishes and
advice, persisted in her usual walk, and Charles at the same twilight
hour started from the inn.
Again Mivanway saw him standing in the shadow of the rocks. Charles had
made up his mind that if the thing happened again he would speak, but
when the silent figure of Mivanway, clothed in the fading light, stopped
and gazed at him, his will failed him.
That it was the spirit of Mivanway standing before him he had not the
faintest doubt. One may dismiss other people's ghosts as the phantasies
of a weak brain, but one knows one's own to be realities, and Charles for
the last five years had mingled with a people whose dead dwell about
them. Once, drawing his courage around him, he made to speak, but as he
did so the figure of Mivanway shrank from him, and only a sigh escaped
his lips, and hearing that the figure of Mivanway turned and again passed
down the path into the valley, leaving Charles gazing after it.
But the third night both arrived at the trysting spot with determination
screwed up to the sticking point.
Charles was the first to speak. As the figure of Mivanway came towards
him, with its eyes fixed sadly on him, he moved from the shadow of the
rocks, and stood before it.
"Mivanway!" he said.
"Charles!" replied the figure of Mivanway. Both spoke in an awed whisper
suitable to the circumstances, and each stood gazing sorrowfully upon the
other.
"Are you happy?" asked Mivanway.
The question strikes one as somewhat farcical, but it must be remembered
that Mivanway was the daughter of a Gospeller of the old school, and had
been brought up to beliefs that were not then out of date.
"As happy as I deserve to be," was the sad reply, and the answer--the
inference was not complimentary to Charles's deserts--struck a chill to
Mivanway's heart.
"How could I be happy having lost you?" went on the voice of Charles.
Now this speech fell very pleasantly upon Mivanway's ears. In the first
place it relieved her of her despair regarding Charles's future. No
doubt his present suffering was keen, but there was hope for him.
Secondly, it was a decidedly "pretty" speech for a ghost, and I am not at
all sure that Mivanway was the kind of woman to be averse to a little
mild flirtation with the spirit of Charles.
"Can you forgive me?" asked Mivanway.
"Forgive _you_!" replied Charles, in a tone of awed astonishment. "Can
you forgive me? I was a brute--a fool--I was not worthy to love you."
A most gentlemanly spirit it seemed to be. Mivanway forgot to be afraid
of it.
"We were both to blame," answered Mivanway. But this time there was less
submission in her tones. "But I was the most at fault. I was a petulant
child. I did not know how deeply I loved you."
"You loved me!" repeated the voice of Charles, and the voice lingered
over the words as though it found them sweet.
"Surely you never doubted it," answered the voice of Mivanway. "I never
ceased to love you. I shall love you always and ever."
The figure of Charles sprang forward as though it would clasp the ghost
of Mivanway in its arms, but halted a step or two off.
"Bless me before you go," he said, and with uncovered head the figure of
Charles knelt to the figure of Mivanway.
Really, ghosts could be exceedingly nice when they liked. Mivanway bent
graciously towards her shadowy suppliant, and, as she did so, her eye
caught sight of something on the grass beside it, and that something was
a well-coloured meerschaum pipe. There was no mistaking it for anything
else, even in that treacherous light; it lay glistening where Charles, in
falling upon his knees had jerked it from his breast-pocket.
Charles, following Mivanway's eyes, saw it also, and the memory of the
prohibition against smoking came back to him.
Without stopping to consider the futility of the action--nay, the direct
confession implied thereby--he instinctively grabbed at the pipe, and
rammed it back into his pocket; and then an avalanche of mingled
understanding and bewilderment, fear and joy, swept Mivanway's brain
before it. She felt she must do one of two things, laugh or scream and
go on screaming, and she laughed. Peal after peal of laughter she sent
echoing among the rocks, and Charles springing to his feet was just in
time to catch her as she fell forward a dead weight into his arms.
Ten minutes later the eldest Miss Evans, hearing heavy footsteps, went to
the door. She saw what she took to be the spirit of Charles Seabohn,
staggering under the weight of the lifeless body of Mivanway, and the
sight not unnaturally alarmed her. Charles's suggestion of brandy,
however, sounded human, and the urgent need of attending to Mivanway kept
her mind from dwelling upon problems tending towards insanity.
Charles carried Mivanway to her room, and laid her upon the bed.
"I'll leave her with you," he whispered to the eldest Miss Evans. "It
will be better for her not to see me until she is quite recovered. She
has had a shock."
Charles waited in the dark parlour for what seemed to him an exceedingly
long time. But at last the eldest Miss Evans returned.
"She's all right now," were the welcome words he heard.
"I'll go and see her," he said.
"But she's in bed," exclaimed the scandalised Miss Evans.
And then as Charles only laughed, "Oh, ah--yes, I suppose--of course,"
she added.
And the eldest Miss Evans, left alone, sat down and wrestled with the
conviction that she was dreaming.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
My work pressed upon me, but the louder it challenged me--such is the
heart of the timid fighter--the less stomach I felt for the contest. I
wrestled with it in my study, only to be driven to my books. I walked
out to meet it in the streets, only to seek shelter from it in music-hall
or theatre. Thereupon it waxed importunate and over-bearing, till the
shadow of it darkened all my doings. The thought of it sat beside me at
the table, and spoilt my appetite. The memory of it followed me abroad,
and stood between me and my friends, so that all talk died upon my lips,
and I moved among men as one ghost-ridden.
Then the throbbing town, with its thousand distracting voices, grew
maddening to me. I felt the need of converse with solitude, that master
and teacher of all the arts, and I bethought me of the Yorkshire Wolds,
where a man may walk all day, meeting no human creature, hearing no voice
but the curlew's cry; where, lying prone upon the sweet grass, he may
feel the pulsation of the earth, travelling at its eleven hundred miles a
minute through the ether. So one morning I bundled many things, some
needful, more needless, into a bag, hurrying lest somebody or something
should happen to stay me, and that night I lay in a small northern town
that stands upon the borders of smokedom at the gate of the great moors;
and at seven the next morning I took my seat beside a one-eyed carrier
behind an ancient piebald mare. The one-eyed carrier cracked his whip,
the piebald horse jogged forward. The nineteenth century, with its
turmoil, fell away behind us; the distant hills, creeping nearer,
swallowed us up, and we became but a moving speck upon the face of the
quiet earth.
Late in the afternoon we arrived at a village, the memory of which had
been growing in my mind. It lies in the triangle formed by the sloping
walls of three great fells, and not even the telegraph wire has reached
it yet, to murmur to it whispers of the restless world--or had not at the
time of which I write. Nought disturbs it save, once a day, the one-eyed
carrier--if he and his piebald mare have not yet laid their ancient bones
to rest--who, passing through, leaves a few letters and parcels to be
called for by the people of the scattered hill-farms round about. It is
the meeting-place of two noisy brooks. Through the sleepy days and the
hushed nights, one hears them ever chattering to themselves as children
playing alone some game of make-believe. Coming from their far-off homes
among the hills, they mingle their waters here, and journey on in
company, and then their converse is more serious, as becomes those who
have joined hands and are moving onward towards life together. Later
they reach sad, weary towns, black beneath a never-lifted pall of smoke,
where day and night the clang of iron drowns all human voices, where the
children play with ashes, where the men and women have dull, patient
faces; and so on, muddy and stained, to the deep sea that ceaselessly
calls to them. Here, however, their waters are fresh and clear, and
their passing makes the only stir that the valley has ever known. Surely,
of all peaceful places, this was the one where a tired worker might find
strength.
My one-eyed friend had suggested I should seek lodgings at the house of
one Mistress Cholmondley, a widow lady, who resided with her only
daughter in the white-washed cottage that is the last house in the
village, if you take the road that leads over Coll Fell.
"Tha' can see th' house from here, by reason o' its standing so high
above t'others," said the carrier, pointing with his whip. "It's theer
or nowhere, aw'm thinking, for folks don't often coom seeking lodgings in
these parts."
The tiny dwelling, half smothered in June roses, looked idyllic, and
after a lunch of bread and cheese at the little inn I made my way to it
by the path that passes through the churchyard. I had conjured up the
vision of a stout, pleasant, comfort-radiating woman, assisted by some
bright, fresh girl, whose rosy cheeks and sunburnt hands would help me
banish from my mind all clogging recollections of the town; and hopeful,
I pushed back the half-opened door and entered.
The cottage was furnished with a taste that surprised me, but in
themselves my hosts disappointed me. My bustling, comely housewife
turned out a wizened, blear-eyed dame. All day long she dozed in her big
chair, or crouched with shrivelled hands spread out before the fire. My
dream of winsome maidenhood vanished before the reality of a
weary-looking, sharp-featured woman of between forty and fifty. Perhaps
there had been a time when the listless eyes had sparkled with roguish
merriment, when the shrivelled, tight-drawn lips had pouted temptingly;
but spinsterhood does not sweeten the juices of a woman, and strong
country air, though, like old ale, it is good when taken occasionally,
dulls the brain if lived upon. A narrow, uninteresting woman I found
her, troubled with a shyness that sat ludicrously upon her age, and that
yet failed to save her from the landlady's customary failing of loquacity
concerning "better days," together with an irritating, if harmless,
affectation of youthfulness.
All other details were, however, most satisfactory; and at the window
commanding the road that leads through the valley towards the distant
world I settled down to face my work.
But the spirit of industry, once driven forth, returns with coy steps. I
wrote for perhaps an hour, and then throwing down my halting pen I looked
about the room, seeking distraction. A Chippendale book-case stood
against the wall and I strolled over to it. The key was in the lock, and
opening its glass doors, I examined the well-filled shelves. They held a
curious collection: miscellanies with quaint, glazed bindings; novels and
poems; whose authors I had never heard of; old magazines long dead, their
very names forgotten; "keepsakes" and annuals, redolent of an age of
vastly pretty sentiments and lavender-coloured silks. On the top shelf,
however, was a volume of Keats wedged between a number of the
_Evangelical Rambler_ and Young's _Night Thoughts_, and standing on tip-
toe, I sought to draw it from its place.
The book was jambed so tightly that my efforts brought two or three
others tumbling about me, covering me with a cloud of fine dust, and to
my feet there fell, with a rattle of glass and metal, a small miniature
painting, framed in black wood.
I picked it up, and, taking it to the window, examined it. It was the
picture of a young girl, dressed in the fashion of thirty years ago--I
mean thirty years ago then. I fear it must be nearer fifty, speaking as
from now--when our grandmothers wore corkscrew curls, and low-cut bodices
that one wonders how they kept from slipping down. The face was
beautiful, not merely with the conventional beauty of tiresome regularity
and impossible colouring such as one finds in all miniatures, but with
soul behind the soft deep eyes. As I gazed, the sweet lips seemed to
laugh at me, and yet there lurked a sadness in the smile, as though the
artist, in some rare moment, had seen the coming shadow of life across
the sunshine of the face. Even my small knowledge of Art told me that
the work was clever, and I wondered why it should have lain so long
neglected, when as a mere ornament it was valuable. It must have been
placed in the book-case years ago by someone, and forgotten.
I replaced it among its dusty companions, and sat down once more to my
work. But between me and the fading light came the face of the
miniature, and would not be banished. Wherever I turned it looked out at
me from the shadows. I am not naturally fanciful, and the work I was
engaged upon--the writing of a farcical comedy--was not of the kind to
excite the dreamy side of a man's nature. I grew angry with myself, and
made a further effort to fix my mind upon the paper in front of me. But
my thoughts refused to return from their wanderings. Once, glancing back
over my shoulder, I could have sworn I saw the original of the picture
sitting in the big chintz-covered chair in the far corner. It was
dressed in a faded lilac frock, trimmed with some old lace, and I could
not help noticing the beauty of the folded hands, though in the portrait
only the head and shoulders had been drawn.
Next morning I had forgotten the incident, but with the lighting of the
lamp the memory of it awoke within me, and my interest grew so strong
that again I took the miniature from its hiding-place and looked at it.
And then the knowledge suddenly came to me that I knew the face. Where
had I seen her, and when? I had met her and spoken to her. The picture
smiled at me, as if rallying me on my forgetfulness. I put it back upon
its shelf, and sat racking my brains trying to recollect. We had met
somewhere--in the country--a long time ago, and had talked of
common-place things. To the vision of her clung the scent of roses and
the murmuring voices of haymakers. Why had I never seen her again? Why
had she passed so completely out of my mind?
My landlady entered to lay my supper, and I questioned her assuming a
careless tone. Reason with or laugh at myself as I would, this shadowy
memory was becoming a romance to me. It was as though I were talking of
some loved, dead friend, even to speak of whom to commonplace people was
a sacrilege. I did not want the woman to question me in return.
"Oh, yes," answered my landlady. Ladies had often lodged with her.
Sometimes people stayed the whole summer, wandering about the woods and
fells, but to her thinking the great hills were lonesome. Some of her
lodgers had been young ladies, but she could not remember any of them
having impressed her with their beauty. But then it was said women were
never a judge of other women. They had come and gone. Few had ever
returned, and fresh faces drove out the old.
"You have been letting lodgings for a long time?" I asked. "I suppose it
could be fifteen--twenty years ago that strangers to you lived in this
room?"
"Longer than that," she said quietly, dropping for the moment all
affectation. "We came here from the farm when my father died. He had
had losses, and there was but little left. That is twenty-seven years
ago now."
I hastened to close the conversation, fearing long-winded recollections
of "better days." I have heard such so often from one landlady and
another. I had not learnt much. Who was the original of the miniature,
how it came to be lying forgotten in the dusty book-case were still
mysteries; and with a strange perversity I could not have explained to
myself I shrank from putting a direct question.
So two days more passed by. My work took gradually a firmer grip upon my
mind, and the face of the miniature visited me less often. But in the
evening of the third day, which was a Sunday, a curious thing happened.
I was returning from a stroll, and dusk was falling as I reached the
cottage. I had been thinking of my farce, and I was laughing to myself
at a situation that seemed to me comical, when, passing the window of my
room, I saw looking out the sweet fair face that had become so familiar
to me. It stood close to the latticed panes, a slim, girlish figure,
clad in the old-fashioned lilac-coloured frock in which I had imagined it
on the first night of my arrival, the beautiful hands clasped across the
breast, as then they had been folded on the lap. Her eyes were gazing
down the road that passes through the village and goes south, but they
seemed to be dreaming, not seeing, and the sadness in them struck upon
one almost as a cry. I was close to the window, but the hedge screened
me, and I remained watching, until, after a minute I suppose, though it
appeared longer, the figure drew back into the darkness of the room and
disappeared.
I entered, but the room was empty. I called, but no one answered. The
uncomfortable suggestion took hold of me that I must be growing a little
crazy. All that had gone before I could explain to myself as a mere
train of thought, but this time it had come to me suddenly, uninvited,
while my thoughts had been busy elsewhere. This thing had appeared not
to my brain but to my senses. I am not a believer in ghosts, but I am in
the hallucinations of a weak mind, and my own explanation was in
consequence not very satisfactory to myself.
I tried to dismiss the incident, but it would not leave me, and later
that same evening something else occurred that fixed it still clearer in
my thoughts. I had taken out two or three books at random with which to
amuse myself, and turning over the leaves of one of them, a volume of
verses by some obscure poet, I found its sentimental passages much scored
and commented upon in pencil as was common fifty years ago--as may be
common now, for your Fleet Street cynic has not altered the world and its
ways to quite the extent that he imagines.
One poem in particular had evidently appealed greatly to the reader's
sympathies. It was the old, old story of the gallant who woos and rides
away, leaving the maiden to weep. The poetry was poor, and at another
time its conventionality would have excited only my ridicule. But,
reading it in conjunction with the quaint, naive notes scattered about
its margins, I felt no inclination to jeer. These hackneyed stories that
we laugh at are deep profundities to the many who find in them some
shadow of their own sorrows, and she--for it was a woman's handwriting--to
whom this book belonged had loved its trite verses, because in them she
had read her own heart. This, I told myself, was her story also. A
common enough story in life as in literature, but novel to those who live
it.
There was no reason for my connecting her with the original of the
miniature, except perhaps a subtle relationship between the thin nervous
handwriting and the mobile features; yet I felt instinctively they were
one and the same, and that I was tracing, link by link, the history of my
forgotten friend.
I felt urged to probe further, and next morning while my landlady was
clearing away my breakfast things, I fenced round the subject once again.
"By the way," I said, "while I think of it, if I leave any books or
papers here behind me, send them on at once. I have a knack of doing
that sort of thing. I suppose," I added, "your lodgers often do leave
some of their belongings behind them."
It sounded to myself a clumsy ruse. I wondered if she would suspect what
was behind it.
"Not often," she answered. "Never that I can remember, except in the
case of one poor lady who died here."
I glanced up quickly.
"In this room?" I asked.
My landlady seemed troubled at my tone.
"Well, not exactly in this very room. We carried her upstairs, but she
died immediately. She was dying when she came here. I should not have
taken her in had I known. So many people are prejudiced against a house
where death has occurred, as if there were anywhere it had not. It was
not quite fair to us."
I did not speak for a while, and the rattle of the plates and knives
continued undisturbed.
"What did she leave here?" I asked at length.
"Oh, just a few books and photographs, and such-like small things that
people bring with them to lodgings," was the reply. "Her people promised
to send for them, but they never did, and I suppose I forgot them. They
were not of any value."
The woman turned as she was leaving the room.
"It won't drive you away, sir, I hope, what I have told you," she said.
"It all happened a long while ago.
"Of course not," I answered. "It interested me, that was all." And the
woman went out, closing the door behind her.
So here was the explanation, if I chose to accept it. I sat long that
morning, wondering to myself whether things I had learnt to laugh at
could be after all realities. And a day or two afterwards I made a
discovery that confirmed all my vague surmises.
Rummaging through this same dusty book-case, I found in one of the ill-
fitting drawers, beneath a heap of torn and tumbled books, a diary
belonging to the fifties, stuffed with many letters and shapeless
flowers, pressed between stained pages; and there--for the writer of
stories, tempted by human documents, is weak--in faded ink, brown and
withered like the flowers, I read the story I already knew.
Such a very old story it was, and so conventional. He was an artist--was
ever story of this type written where the hero was not an artist? They
had been children together, loving each other without knowing it till one
day it was revealed to them. Here is the entry:--
"May 18th.--I do not know what to say, or how to begin. Chris loves
me. I have been praying to God to make me worthy of him, and dancing
round the room in my bare feet for fear of waking them below. He
kissed my hands and clasped them round his neck, saying they were
beautiful as the hands of a goddess, and he knelt and kissed them
again. I am holding them before me and kissing them myself. I am
glad they are so beautiful. O God, why are you so good to me? Help
me to be a true wife to him. Help me that I may never give him an
instant's pain! Oh, that I had more power of loving, that I might
love him better,"--and thus foolish thoughts for many pages, but
foolish thoughts of the kind that has kept this worn old world,
hanging for so many ages in space, from turning sour.
Later, in February, there is another entry that carries on the story:--
"Chris left this morning. He put a little packet into my hands at the
last moment, saying it was the most precious thing he possessed, and
that when I looked at it I was to think of him who loved it. Of
course I guessed what it was, but I did not open it till I was alone
in my room. It is the picture of myself that he has been so secret
about, but oh, so beautiful. I wonder if I am really as beautiful as
this. But I wish he had not made me look so sad. I am kissing the
little lips. I love them, because he loved to kiss them. Oh,
sweetheart! it will be long before you kiss them again. Of course it
was right for him to go, and I am glad he has been able to manage it.
He could not study properly in this quiet country place, and now he
will be able to go to Paris and Rome and he will be great. Even the
stupid people here see how clever he is. But, oh, it will be so long
before I see him again, my love! my king!"
With each letter that comes from him, similar foolish rhapsodies are
written down, but these letters of his, I gather, as I turn the pages,
grow after a while colder and fewer, and a chill fear that dare not be
penned creeps in among the words.
"March 12th. Six weeks and no letter from Chris, and, oh dear! I am
so hungry for one, for the last I have almost kissed to pieces. I
suppose he will write more often when he gets to London. He is
working hard, I know, and it is selfish of me to expect him to write
more often, but I would sit up all night for a week rather than miss
writing to him. I suppose men are not like that. O God, help me,
help me, whatever happens! How foolish I am to-night! He was always
careless. I will punish him for it when he comes back, but not very
much."
Truly enough a conventional story.
Letters do come from him after that, but apparently they are less and
less satisfactory, for the diary grows angry and bitter, and the faded
writing is blotted at times with tears. Then towards the end of another
year there comes this entry, written in a hand of strange neatness and
precision:--
"It is all over now. I am glad it is finished. I have written to
him, giving him up. I have told him I have ceased to care for him,
and that it is better we should both be free. It is best that way. He
would have had to ask me to release him, and that would have given him
pain. He was always gentle. Now he will be able to marry her with an
easy conscience, and he need never know what I have suffered. She is
more fitted for him than I am. I hope he will be happy. I think I
have done the right thing."
A few lines follow, left blank, and then the writing is resumed, but in a
stronger, more vehement hand.
"Why do I lie to myself? I hate her! I would kill her if I could. I
hope she will make him wretched, and that he will come to hate her as
I do, and that she will die! Why did I let them persuade me to send
that lying letter? He will show it to her, and she will see through
it and laugh at me. I could have held him to his promise; he could
not have got out of it.
"What do I care about dignity, and womanliness, and right, and all the
rest of the canting words! I want him. I want his kisses and his
arms about me. He is mine! He loved me once! I have only given him
up because I thought it a fine thing to play the saint. It is only an
acted lie. I would rather be evil, and he loved me. Why do I deceive
myself? I want him. I care for nothing else at the bottom of my
heart--his love, his kisses!"
And towards the end. "My God, what am I saying? Have I no shame, no
strength? O God, help me!"
* * * * *
And there the diary closes.
I looked among the letters lying between the pages of the book. Most of
them were signed simply "Chris." or "Christopher." But one gave his name
in full, and it was a name I know well as that of a famous man, whose
hand I have often shaken. I thought of his hard-featured, handsome wife,
and of his great chill place, half house, half exhibition, in Kensington,
filled constantly with its smart, chattering set, among whom he seemed
always to be the uninvited guest; of his weary face and bitter tongue.
And thinking thus there rose up before me the sweet, sad face of the
woman of the miniature, and, meeting her eyes as she smiled at me from
out of the shadows, I looked at her my wonder.
I took the miniature from its shelf. There would be no harm now in
learning her name. So I stood with it in my hand till a little later my
landlady entered to lay the cloth.
"I tumbled this out of your book-case," I said, "in reaching down some
books. It is someone I know, someone I have met, but I cannot think
where. Do you know who it is?"
The woman took it from my hand, and a faint flush crossed her withered
face. "I had lost it," she answered. "I never thought of looking there.
It's a portrait of myself, painted years ago, by a friend."
I looked from her to the miniature, as she stood among the shadows, with
the lamplight falling on her face, and saw her perhaps for the first
time.
"How stupid of me," I answered. "Yes, I see the likeness now."
THE MAN WHO WOULD MANAGE
It has been told me by those in a position to know--and I can believe
it--that at nineteen months of age he wept because his grandmother would
not allow him to feed her with a spoon, and that at three and a half he
was fished, in an exhausted condition, out of the water-butt, whither he
had climbed for the purpose of teaching a frog to swim.
Two years later he permanently injured his left eye, showing the cat how
to carry kittens without hurting them, and about the same period was
dangerously stung by a bee while conveying it from a flower where, as it
seemed to him, it was only wasting its time, to one more rich in honey-
making properties.
His desire was always to help others. He would spend whole mornings
explaining to elderly hens how to hatch eggs, and would give up an
afternoon's black-berrying to sit at home and crack nuts for his pet
squirrel. Before he was seven he would argue with his mother upon the
management of children, and reprove his father for the way he was
bringing him up.
As a child nothing could afford him greater delight than "minding" other
children, or them less. He would take upon himself this harassing duty
entirely of his own accord, without hope of reward or gratitude. It was
immaterial to him whether the other children were older than himself or
younger, stronger or weaker, whenever and wherever he found them he set
to work to "mind" them. Once, during a school treat, piteous cries were
heard coming from a distant part of the wood, and upon search being made,
he was discovered prone upon the ground, with a cousin of his, a boy
twice his own weight, sitting upon him and steadily whacking him. Having
rescued him, the teacher said:
"Why don't you keep with the little boys? What are you doing along with
him?"
"Please, sir," was the answer, "I was minding him."
He would have "minded" Noah if he had got hold of him.
He was a good-natured lad, and at school he was always willing for the
whole class to copy from his slate--indeed he would urge them to do so.
He meant it kindly, but inasmuch as his answers were invariably quite
wrong--with a distinctive and inimitable wrongness peculiar to
himself--the result to his followers was eminently unsatisfactory; and
with the shallowness of youth that, ignoring motives, judges solely from
results, they would wait for him outside and punch him.
All his energies went to the instruction of others, leaving none for his
own purposes. He would take callow youths to his chambers and teach them
to box.
"Now, try and hit me on the nose," he would say, standing before them in
an attitude of defence. "Don't be afraid. Hit as hard as ever you can."
And they would do it. And so soon as he had recovered from his surprise,
and a little lessened the bleeding, he would explain to them how they had
done it all wrong, and how easily he could have stopped the blow if they
had only hit him properly.
Twice at golf he lamed himself for over a week, showing a novice how to
"drive"; and at cricket on one occasion I remember seeing his middle
stump go down like a ninepin just as he was explaining to the bowler how
to get the balls in straight. After which he had a long argument with
the umpire as to whether he was in or out.
He has been known, during a stormy Channel passage, to rush excitedly
upon the bridge in order to inform the captain that he had "just seen a
light about two miles away to the left"; and if he is on the top of an
omnibus he generally sits beside the driver, and points out to him the
various obstacles likely to impede their progress.
It was upon an omnibus that my own personal acquaintanceship with him
began. I was sitting behind two ladies when the conductor came up to
collect fares. One of them handed him a sixpence telling him to take to
Piccadilly Circus, which was twopence.
"No," said the other lady to her friend, handing the man a shilling, "I
owe you sixpence, you give me fourpence and I'll pay for the two."
The conductor took the shilling, punched two twopenny tickets, and then
stood trying to think it out.
"That's right," said the lady who had spoken last, "give my friend
fourpence."
The conductor did so.
"Now you give that fourpence to me."
The friend handed it to her.
"And you," she concluded to the conductor, "give me eightpence, then we
shall be all right."
The conductor doled out to her the eightpence--the sixpence he had taken
from the first lady, with a penny and two halfpennies out of his own
bag--distrustfully, and retired, muttering something about his duties not
including those of a lightning calculator.
"Now," said the elder lady to the younger, "I owe you a shilling."
I deemed the incident closed, when suddenly a florid gentleman on the
opposite seat called out in stentorian tones:--
"Hi, conductor! you've cheated these ladies out of fourpence."
"'Oo's cheated 'oo out 'o fourpence?" replied the indignant conductor
from the top of the steps, "it was a twopenny fare."
"Two twopences don't make eightpence," retorted the florid gentleman
hotly. "How much did you give the fellow, my dear?" he asked, addressing
the first of the young ladies.
"I gave him sixpence," replied the lady, examining her purse. "And then
I gave you fourpence, you know," she added, addressing her companion.
"That's a dear two pen'oth," chimed in a common-looking man on the seat
behind.
"Oh, that's impossible, dear," returned the other, "because I owed you
sixpence to begin with."
"But I did," persisted the first lady.
"You gave me a shilling," said the conductor, who had returned, pointing
an accusing forefinger at the elder of the ladies.
The elder lady nodded.
"And I gave you sixpence and two pennies, didn't I?"
The lady admitted it.
"An' I give 'er"--he pointed towards the younger lady--"fourpence, didn't
I?"
"Which I gave you, you know, dear," remarked the younger lady.
"Blow me if it ain't _me_ as 'as been cheated out of the fourpence,"
cried the conductor.
"But," said the florid gentleman, "the other lady gave you sixpence."
"Which I give to 'er," replied the conductor, again pointing the finger
of accusation at the elder lady. "You can search my bag if yer like. I
ain't got a bloomin' sixpence on me."
By this time everybody had forgotten what they had done, and contradicted
themselves and one another. The florid man took it upon himself to put
everybody right, with the result that before Piccadilly Circus was
reached three passengers had threatened to report the conductor for
unbecoming language. The conductor had called a policeman and had taken
the names and addresses of the two ladies, intending to sue them for the
fourpence (which they wanted to pay, but which the florid man would not
allow them to do); the younger lady had become convinced that the elder
lady had meant to cheat her, and the elder lady was in tears.
The florid gentleman and myself continued to Charing Cross Station. At
the booking office window it transpired that we were bound for the same
suburb, and we journeyed down together. He talked about the fourpence
all the way.
At my gate we shook hands, and he was good enough to express delight at
the discovery that we were near neighbours. What attracted him to myself
I failed to understand, for he had bored me considerably, and I had, to
the best of my ability, snubbed him. Subsequently I learned that it was
a peculiarity of his to be charmed with anyone who did not openly insult
him.
Three days afterwards he burst into my study unannounced--he appeared to
regard himself as my bosom friend--and asked me to forgive him for not
having called sooner, which I did.
"I met the postman as I was coming along," he said, handing me a blue
envelope, "and he gave me this, for you."
I saw it was an application for the water-rate.
"We must make a stand against this," he continued. "That's for water to
the 29th September. You've no right to pay it in June."
I replied to the effect that water-rates had to be paid, and that it
seemed to me immaterial whether they were paid in June or September.
"That's not it," he answered, "it's the principle of the thing. Why
should you pay for water you have never had? What right have they to
bully you into paying what you don't owe?"
He was a fluent talker, and I was ass enough to listen to him. By the
end of half an hour he had persuaded me that the question was bound up
with the inalienable rights of man, and that if I paid that fourteen and
tenpence in June instead of in September, I should be unworthy of the
privileges my forefathers had fought and died to bestow upon me.
He told me the company had not a leg to stand upon, and at his
instigation I sat down and wrote an insulting letter to the chairman.
The secretary replied that, having regard to the attitude I had taken up,
it would be incumbent upon themselves to treat it as a test case, and
presumed that my solicitors would accept service on my behalf.
When I showed him this letter he was delighted.
"You leave it to me," he said, pocketing the correspondence, "and we'll
teach them a lesson."
I left it to him. My only excuse is that at the time I was immersed in
the writing of what in those days was termed a comedy-drama. The little
sense I possessed must, I suppose, have been absorbed by the play.
The magistrate's decision somewhat damped my ardour, but only inflamed
his zeal. Magistrates, he said, were muddle-headed old fogies. This was
a matter for a judge.
The judge was a kindly old gentleman, and said that bearing in mind the
unsatisfactory wording of the sub-clause, he did not think he could allow
the company their costs, so that, all told, I got off for something under
fifty pounds, inclusive of the original fourteen and tenpence.
Afterwards our friendship waned, but living as we did in the same
outlying suburb, I was bound to see a good deal of him; and to hear more.
At parties of all kinds he was particularly prominent, and on such
occasions, being in his most good-natured mood, was most to be dreaded.
No human being worked harder for the enjoyment of others, or produced
more universal wretchedness.
One Christmas afternoon, calling upon a friend, I found some fourteen or
fifteen elderly ladies and gentlemen trotting solemnly round a row of
chairs in the centre of the drawing-room while Poppleton played the
piano. Every now and then Poppleton would suddenly cease, and everyone
would drop wearily into the nearest chair, evidently glad of a rest; all
but one, who would thereupon creep quietly away, followed by the envying
looks of those left behind. I stood by the door watching the weird
scene. Presently an escaped player came towards me, and I enquired of
him what the ceremony was supposed to signify.
"Don't ask me," he answered grumpily. "Some of Poppleton's damned
tomfoolery." Then he added savagely, "We've got to play forfeits after
this."
The servant was still waiting a favourable opportunity to announce me. I
gave her a shilling not to, and got away unperceived.
After a satisfactory dinner, he would suggest an impromptu dance, and
want you to roll up mats, or help him move the piano to the other end of
the room.
He knew enough round games to have started a small purgatory of his own.
Just as you were in the middle of an interesting discussion, or a
delightful _tete-a-tete_ with a pretty woman, he would swoop down upon
you with: "Come along, we're going to play literary consequences," and
dragging you to the table, and putting a piece of paper and a pencil
before you, would tell you to write a description of your favourite
heroine in fiction, and would see that you did it.
He never spared himself. It was always he who would volunteer to escort
the old ladies to the station, and who would never leave them until he
had seen them safely into the wrong train. He it was who would play
"wild beasts" with the children, and frighten them into fits that would
last all night.
So far as intention went, he was the kindest man alive. He never visited
poor sick persons without taking with him in his pocket some little
delicacy calculated to disagree with them and make them worse. He
arranged yachting excursions for bad sailors, entirely at his own
expense, and seemed to regard their subsequent agonies as ingratitude.
He loved to manage a wedding. Once he planned matters so that the bride
arrived at the altar three-quarters of an hour before the groom, which
led to unpleasantness upon a day that should have been filled only with
joy, and once he forgot the clergyman. But he was always ready to admit
when he made a mistake.
At funerals, also, he was to the fore, pointing out to the grief-stricken
relatives how much better it was for all concerned that the corpse was
dead, and expressing a pious hope that they would soon join it.
The chiefest delight of his life, however, was to be mixed up in other
people's domestic quarrels. No domestic quarrel for miles round was
complete without him. He generally came in as mediator, and finished as
leading witness for the appellant.
As a journalist or politician his wonderful grasp of other people's
business would have won for him esteem. The error he made was working it
out in practice.
THE MAN WHO LIVED FOR OTHERS
The first time we met, to speak, he was sitting with his back against a
pollard willow, smoking a clay pipe. He smoked it very slowly, but very
conscientiously. After each whiff he removed the pipe from his mouth and
fanned away the smoke with his cap.
"Feeling bad?" I asked from behind a tree, at the same time making ready
for a run, big boys' answers to small boys' impertinences being usually
of the nature of things best avoided.
To my surprise and relief--for at second glance I perceived I had under-
estimated the length of his legs--he appeared to regard the question as a
natural and proper one, replying with unaffected candour, "Not yet."
My desire became to comfort him--a sentiment I think he understood and
was grateful for. Advancing into the open, I sat down over against him,
and watched him for a while in silence. Presently he said:--
"Have you ever tried drinking beer?"
I admitted I had not.
"Oh, it is beastly stuff," he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.
Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the past,
he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.
"Do you often drink it?" I inquired.
"Yes," he replied gloomily; "all we fellows in the fifth form drink beer
and smoke pipes."
A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.
He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge. Before he reached it,
however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.
"If you follow me, young 'un, or look, I'll punch your head," he said
swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.
He left at the end of the term and I did not see him again until we were
both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he
asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey.
I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed.
During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the
moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and
began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass
of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this,
but his relatives--a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and
a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in
India--were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded
and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust,
and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.
In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the
female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject.
"What's the matter with him?" I said. "Is he ill?"
The old lady chuckled.
"You'll be like that one day," she whispered gleefully.
"When," I asked, not unnaturally alarmed.
"When you're in love," she answered.
"Is _he_ in love?" I inquired after a pause.
"Can't you see he is?" she replied somewhat scornfully.
I was a young man, and interested in the question.
"Won't he ever eat any dinner till he's got over it?" I asked.
She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was only
foolish.
"You wait till your time comes," she answered, shaking her curls at me.
"You won't care much about your dinner--not if you are _really_ in love."
In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought, footsteps in
the passage, and creeping to the door and opening it I saw the figure of
my friend in dressing-gown and slippers, vanishing down the stairs. My
idea was that, his brain weakened by trouble, he had developed
sleep-walking tendencies. Partly out of curiosity, partly to watch over
him, I slipped on a pair of trousers and followed him.
He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for the
pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds of cold
beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I came away,
leaving him fumbling for pickles.
I assisted at his wedding, where it seemed to me he endeavoured to
display more ecstasy than it was possible for any human being to feel;
and fifteen months later, happening to catch sight of an advertisement in
the births column of _The Times_, I called on my way home from the City
to congratulate him. He was pacing up and down the passage with his hat
on, pausing at intervals to partake of an uninviting-looking meal,
consisting of a cold mutton chop and a glass of lemonade, spread out upon
a chair. Seeing that the cook and the housemaid were wandering about the
house evidently bored for want of something to do, and that the dining-
room, where he would have been much more out of the way, was empty and
quite in order, I failed at first to understand the reason for his
deliberate choice of discomfort. I, however, kept my reflections to
myself, and inquired after the mother and child.
"Couldn't be better," he replied with a groan. "The doctor said he'd
never had a more satisfactory case in all his experience."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear that," I answered; "I was afraid you'd been
worrying yourself."
"Worried!" he exclaimed. "My dear boy, I don't know whether I'm standing
on my head or my heels" (he gave one that idea). "This is the first
morsel of food that's passed my lips for twenty-four hours."
At this moment the nurse appeared at the top of the stairs. He flew
towards her, upsetting the lemonade in his excitement.
"What is it?" he asked hoarsely. "Is it all right?"
The old lady glanced from him to his cold chop, and smiled approvingly.
"They're doing splendidly," she answered, patting him on the shoulder in
a motherly fashion. "Don't you worry."
"I can't help it, Mrs. Jobson," he replied, sitting down upon the bottom
stair, and leaning his head against the banisters.
"Of course you can't," said Mrs. Jobson admiringly; "and you wouldn't be
much of a man if you could." Then it was borne in upon me why he wore
his hat, and dined off cold chops in the passage.
The following summer they rented a picturesque old house in Berkshire,
and invited me down from a Saturday to Monday. Their place was near the
river, so I slipped a suit of flannels in my bag, and on the Sunday
morning I came down in them. He met me in the garden. He was dressed in
a frock coat and a white waistcoat; and I noticed that he kept looking at
me out of the corner of his eye, and that he seemed to have a trouble on
his mind. The first breakfast bell rang, and then he said, "You haven't
got any proper clothes with you, have you?"
"Proper clothes!" I exclaimed, stopping in some alarm. "Why, has
anything given way?"
"No, not that," he explained. "I mean clothes to go to church in."
"Church," I said. "You're surely not going to church a fine day like
this? I made sure you'd be playing tennis, or going on the river. You
always used to."
"Yes," he replied, nervously flicking a rose-bush with a twig he had
picked up. "You see, it isn't ourselves exactly. Maud and I would
rather like to, but our cook, she's Scotch, and a little strict in her
notions."
"And does she insist on your going to church every Sunday morning?" I
inquired.
"Well," he answered, "she thinks it strange if we don't, and so we
generally do, just in the morning--and evening. And then in the
afternoon a few of the village girls drop in, and we have a little
singing and that sort of thing. I never like hurting anyone's feelings
if I can help it."
I did not say what I thought. Instead I said, "I've got that tweed suit
I wore yesterday. I can put that on if you like."
He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows. He seemed to be
recalling it to his imagination.
"No," he said, shaking his head, "I'm afraid it would shock her. It's my
fault, I know," he added, remorsefully. "I ought to have told you."
Then an idea came to him.
"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't care to pretend you were ill, and
stop in bed just for the day?"
I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to such
deception
"No, I thought you wouldn't," he replied. "I must explain it to her. I
think I'll say you've lost your bag. I shouldn't like her to think bad
of us."
Later on a fourteenth cousin died, leaving him a large fortune. He
purchased an estate in Yorkshire, and became a "county family," and then
his real troubles began.
From May to the middle of August, save for a little fly fishing, which
generally resulted in his getting his feet wet and catching a cold, life
was fairly peaceful; but from early autumn to late spring he found the
work decidedly trying. He was a stout man, constitutionally nervous of
fire-arms, and a six-hours' tramp with a heavy gun across ploughed
fields, in company with a crowd of careless persons who kept blazing away
within an inch of other people's noses, harassed and exhausted him. He
had to get out of bed at four on chilly October mornings to go
cub-hunting, and twice a week throughout the winter--except when a
blessed frost brought him a brief respite--he had to ride to hounds. That
he usually got off with nothing more serious than mere bruises and slight
concussions of the spine, he probably owed to the fortunate circumstances
of his being little and fat. At stiff timber he shut his eyes and rode
hard; and ten yards from a river he would begin to think about bridges.
Yet he never complained.
"If you are a country gentleman," he would say, "you must behave as a
country gentleman, and take the rough with the smooth."
As ill fate would have it a chance speculation doubled his fortune, and
it became necessary that he should go into Parliament and start a yacht.
Parliament made his head ache, and the yacht made him sick.
Notwithstanding, every summer he would fill it with a lot of expensive
people who bored him, and sail away for a month's misery in the
Mediterranean.
During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling
scandal. He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and knew
nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of the story,
referred casually to the yacht as a "floating hell," and _The Police
News_ awarded his portrait the place of honour as the chief criminal of
the week.
Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped
undergraduate. His favourite literature had hitherto been of the Corelli
and _Tit-Bits_ order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow book, and
tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he subscribed to the
Independent Theatre, and fed "his soul," on Dutch Shakespeares. What he
liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-door with an eligible young
man in the background, or a child and a dog doing something funny. They
told him these things were wrong and made him buy "Impressions" that
stirred his liver to its deepest depths every time he looked at
them--green cows on red hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired
corpses with three feet of neck.
He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered that
nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist saw things
like that, and that whatever an artist saw--no matter in what condition
he may have been when he saw it--that was art.
They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They
read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's
plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic
society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.
One morning I met him coming down the steps of the Arts Club. He looked
weary. He was just off to a private view at the New Gallery. In the
afternoon he had to attend an amateur performance of "The Cenci," given
by the Shelley Society. Then followed three literary and artistic At
Homes, a dinner with an Indian nabob who couldn't speak a word of
English, "Tristam and Isolde" at Covent Garden Theatre, and a ball at
Lord Salisbury's to wind up the day.
I laid my hand upon his shoulder.
"Come with me to Epping Forest," I said. "There's a four-horse brake
starts from Charing Cross at eleven. It's Saturday, and there's bound to
be a crowd down there. I'll play you a game of skittles, and we will
have a shy at the cocoa-nuts. You used to be rather smart at cocoa-nuts.
We can have lunch there and be back at seven, dine at the Troc., spend
the evening at the Empire, and sup at the Savoy. What do you say?"
He stood hesitating on the steps, a wistful look in his eyes.
His brougham drew up against the curb, and he started as if from a dream.
"My dear fellow," he replied, "what would people say?" And shaking me by
the hand, he took his seat, and the footman slammed the door upon him.
A MAN OF HABIT
There were three of us in the smoke-room of the _Alexandra_--a very good
friend of mine, myself, and, in the opposite corner, a shy-looking,
unobtrusive man, the editor, as we subsequently learned, of a New York
Sunday paper.
My friend and I were discussing habits, good and bad.
"After the first few months," said my friend, "it is no more effort for a
man to be a saint than to be a sinner; it becomes a mere matter of
habit."
"I know," I interrupted, "it is every whit as easy to spring out of bed
the instant you are called as to say 'All Right,' and turn over for just
another five minutes' snooze, when you have got into the way of it. It
is no more trouble not to swear than to swear, if you make a custom of
it. Toast and water is as delicious as champagne, when you have acquired
the taste for it. Things are also just as easy the other way about. It
is a mere question of making your choice and sticking to it."
He agreed with me.
"Now take these cigars of mine," he said, pushing his open case towards
me.
"Thank you," I replied hurriedly, "I'm not smoking this passage."
"Don't be alarmed," he answered, "I meant merely as an argument. Now one
of these would make you wretched for a week."
I admitted his premise.
"Very well," he continued. "Now I, as you know, smoke them all day long,
and enjoy them. Why? Because I have got into the habit. Years ago,
when I was a young man, I smoked expensive Havanas. I found that I was
ruining myself. It was absolutely necessary that I should take a cheaper
weed. I was living in Belgium at the time, and a friend showed me these.
I don't know what they are--probably cabbage leaves soaked in guano; they
tasted to me like that at first--but they were cheap. Buying them by the
five hundred, they cost me three a penny. I determined to like them, and
started with one a day. It was terrible work, I admit, but as I said to
myself, nothing could be worse than the Havanas themselves had been in
the beginning. Smoking is an acquired taste, and it must be as easy to
learn to like one flavour as another. I persevered and I conquered.
Before the year was over I could think of them without loathing, at the
end of two I could smoke them without positive discomfort. Now I prefer
them to any other brand on the market. Indeed, a good cigar disagrees
with me."
I suggested it might have been less painful to have given up smoking
altogether.
"I did think of it," he replied, "but a man who doesn't smoke always
seems to me bad company. There is something very sociable about smoke."
He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filling the small den
with an odour suggestive of bilge water and cemeteries.
"Then again," he resumed after a pause, "take my claret. No, you don't
like it." (I had not spoken, but my face had evidently betrayed me.)
"Nobody does, at least no one I have ever met. Three years ago, when I
was living in Hammersmith, we caught two burglars with it. They broke
open the sideboard, and swallowed five bottlefuls between them. A
policeman found them afterwards, sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards
off, the 'swag' beside them in a carpet bag. They were too ill to offer
any resistance, and went to the station like lambs, he promising to send
the doctor to them the moment they were safe in the cells. Ever since
then I have left out a decanterful upon the table every night.
"Well, I like that claret, and it does me good. I come in sometimes dead
beat. I drink a couple of glasses, and I'm a new man. I took to it in
the first instance for the same reason that I took to the cigars--it was
cheap. I have it sent over direct from Geneva, and it costs me six
shillings a dozen. How they do it I don't know. I don't want to know.
As you may remember, it's fairly heady and there's body in it.
"I knew one man," he continued, "who had a regular Mrs. Caudle of a wife.
All day long she talked to him, or at him, or of him, and at night he
fell asleep to the rising and falling rhythm of what she thought about
him. At last she died, and his friends congratulated him, telling him
that now he would enjoy peace. But it was the peace of the desert, and
the man did not enjoy it. For two-and-twenty years her voice had filled
the house, penetrated through the conservatory, and floated in faint
shrilly waves of sound round the garden, and out into the road beyond.
The silence now pervading everywhere frightened and disturbed him. The
place was no longer home to him. He missed the breezy morning insult,
the long winter evening's reproaches beside the flickering fire. At
night he could not sleep. For hours he would lie tossing restlessly, his
ears aching for the accustomed soothing flow of invective.
"'Ah!' he would cry bitterly to himself, 'it is the old story, we never
know the value of a thing until we have lost it.'
"He grew ill. The doctors dosed him with sleeping draughts in vain. At
last they told him bluntly that his life depended upon his finding
another wife, able and willing to nag him to sleep.
"There were plenty of wives of the type he wanted in the neighbourhood,
but the unmarried women were, of necessity, inexperienced, and his health
was such that he could not afford the time to train them.
"Fortunately, just as despair was about to take possession of him, a man
died in the next parish, literally talked to death, the gossip said, by
his wife. He obtained an introduction, and called upon her the day after
the funeral. She was a cantankerous old woman, and the wooing was a
harassing affair, but his heart was in his work, and before six months
were gone he had won her for his own.
"She proved, however, but a poor substitute. The spirit was willing but
the flesh was weak. She had neither that command of language nor of wind
that had distinguished her rival. From his favourite seat at the bottom
of the garden he could not hear her at all, so he had his chair brought
up into the conservatory. It was all right for him there so long as she
continued to abuse him; but every now and again, just as he was getting
comfortably settled down with his pipe and his newspaper, she would
suddenly stop.
"He would drop his paper and sit listening, with a troubled, anxious
expression.
"'Are you there, dear?' he would call out after a while.
"'Yes, I'm here. Where do you think I am you old fool?' she would gasp
back in an exhausted voice.
"His face would brighten at the sound of her words. 'Go on, dear,' he
would answer. 'I'm listening. I like to hear you talk.'
"But the poor woman was utterly pumped out, and had not so much as a
snort left.
"Then he would shake his head sadly. 'No, she hasn't poor dear Susan's
flow,' he would say. 'Ah! what a woman that was!'
"At night she would do her best, but it was a lame and halting
performance by comparison. After rating him for little over
three-quarters of an hour, she would sink back on the pillow, and want to
go to sleep. But he would shake her gently by the shoulder.
"'Yes, dear,' he would say, 'you were speaking about Jane, and the way I
kept looking at her during lunch.'
"It's extraordinary," concluded my friend, lighting a fresh cigar, "what
creatures of habit we are."
"Very," I replied. "I knew a man who told tall stories till when he told
a true one nobody believed it."
"Ah, that was a very sad case," said my friend.
"Speaking of habit," said the unobtrusive man in the corner, "I can tell
you a true story that I'll bet my bottom dollar you won't believe."
"Haven't got a bottom dollar, but I'll bet you half a sovereign I do,"
replied my friend, who was of a sporting turn. "Who shall be judge?"
"I'll take your word for it," said the unobtrusive man, and started
straight away.
* * * * *
"He was a Jefferson man, this man I'm going to tell you of," he begun.
"He was born in the town, and for forty-seven years he never slept a
night outside it. He was a most respectable man--a drysalter from nine
to four, and a Presbyterian in his leisure moments. He said that a good
life merely meant good habits. He rose at seven, had family prayer at
seven-thirty, breakfasted at eight, got to his business at nine, had his
horse brought round to the office at four, and rode for an hour, reached
home at five, had a bath and a cup of tea, played with and read to the
children (he was a domesticated man) till half-past six, dressed and
dined at seven, went round to the club and played whist till quarter
after ten, home again to evening prayer at ten-thirty, and bed at eleven.
For five-and-twenty years he lived that life with never a variation. It
worked into his system and became mechanical. The church clocks were set
by him. He was used by the local astronomers to check the sun.
"One day a distant connection of his in London, an East Indian Merchant
and an ex-Lord Mayor died, leaving him sole legatee and executor. The
business was a complicated one and needed management. He determined to
leave his son by his first wife, now a young man of twenty-four, in
charge at Jefferson, and to establish himself with his second family in
England, and look after the East Indian business.
"He set out from Jefferson City on October the fourth, and arrived in
London on the seventeenth. He had been ill during the whole of the
voyage, and he reached the furnished house he had hired in Bayswater
somewhat of a wreck. A couple of days in bed, however, pulled him round,
and on the Wednesday evening he announced his intention of going into the
City the next day to see to his affairs.
"On the Thursday morning he awoke at one o'clock. His wife told him she
had not disturbed him, thinking the sleep would do him good. He admitted
that perhaps it had. Anyhow, he felt very well, and he got up and
dressed himself. He said he did not like the idea of beginning his first
day by neglecting a religious duty, and his wife agreeing with him, they
assembled the servants and the children in the dining-room, and had
family prayer at half-past one. After which he breakfasted and set off,
reaching the City about three.
"His reputation for punctuality had preceded him, and surprise was
everywhere expressed at his late arrival. He explained the
circumstances, however, and made his appointments for the following day
to commence from nine-thirty.
"He remained at the office until late, and then went home. For dinner,
usually the chief meal of the day, he could manage to eat only a biscuit
and some fruit. He attributed his loss of appetite to want of his
customary ride. He was strangely unsettled all the evening. He said he
supposed he missed his game of whist, and determined to look about him
without loss of time for some quiet, respectable club. At eleven he
retired with his wife to bed, but could not sleep. He tossed and turned,
and turned and tossed, but grew only more and more wakeful and energetic.
A little after midnight an overpowering desire seized him to go and wish
the children good-night. He slipped on a dressing-gown and stole into
the nursery. He did not intend it, but the opening of the door awoke
them, and he was glad. He wrapped them up in the quilt, and, sitting on
the edge of the bed, told them moral stories till one o'clock.
"Then he kissed them, bidding them be good and go to sleep; and finding
himself painfully hungry, crept downstairs, where in the back kitchen he
made a hearty meal off cold game pie and cucumber.
"He retired to bed feeling more peaceful, yet still could not sleep, so
lay thinking about his business affairs till five, when he dropped off.
"At one o'clock to the minute he awoke. His wife told him she had made
every endeavour to rouse him, but in vain. The man was vexed and
irritated. If he had not been a very good man indeed, I believe he would
have sworn. The same programme was repeated as on the Thursday, and
again he reached the City at three.
"This state of things went on for a month. The man fought against
himself, but was unable to alter himself. Every morning, or rather every
afternoon at one he awoke. Every night at one he crept down into the
kitchen and foraged for food. Every morning at five he fell asleep.
"He could not understand it, nobody could understand it. The doctor
treated him for water on the brain, hypnotic irresponsibility and
hereditary lunacy. Meanwhile his business suffered, and his health grew
worse. He seemed to be living upside down. His days seemed to have
neither beginning nor end, but to be all middle. There was no time for
exercise or recreation. When he began to feel cheerful and sociable
everybody else was asleep.
"One day by chance the explanation came. His eldest daughter was
preparing her home studies after dinner.
"'What time is it now in New York?' she asked, looking up from her
geography book.
"'New York,' said her father, glancing at his watch, 'let me see. It's
just ten now, and there's a little over four and a half hours'
difference. Oh, about half-past five in the afternoon.'
"'Then in Jefferson,' said the mother, 'it would be still earlier,
wouldn't it?'
"'Yes,' replied the girl, examining the map, 'Jefferson is nearly two
degrees further west.'
"'Two degrees,' mused the father, 'and there's forty minutes to a degree.
That would make it now, at the present moment in Jefferson--'
"He leaped to his feet with a cry:
"'I've got it!' he shouted, 'I see it.'
"'See what?' asked his wife, alarmed.
"'Why, it's four o'clock in Jefferson, and just time for my ride. That's
what I'm wanting.'
"There could be no doubt about it. For five-and-twenty years he had
lived by clockwork. But it was by Jefferson clockwork, not London
clockwork. He had changed his longitude, but not himself. The habits of
a quarter of a century were not to be shifted at the bidding of the sun.
"He examined the problem in all its bearings, and decided that the only
solution was for him to return to the order of his old life. He saw the
difficulties in his way, but they were less than those he was at present
encountering. He was too formed by habit to adapt himself to
circumstances. Circumstances must adapt themselves to him.
"He fixed his office hours from three till ten, leaving himself at half-
past nine. At ten he mounted his horse and went for a canter in the Row,
and on very dark nights he carried a lantern. News of it got abroad, and
crowds would assemble to see him ride past.
"He dined at one o'clock in the morning, and afterwards strolled down to
his club. He had tried to discover a quiet, respectable club where the
members were willing to play whist till four in the morning, but failing,
had been compelled to join a small Soho gambling-hell, where they taught
him poker. The place was occasionally raided by the police, but thanks
to his respectable appearance, he generally managed to escape.
"At half-past four he returned home, and woke up the family for evening
prayers. At five he went to bed and slept like a top.
"The City chaffed him, and Bayswater shook its head over him, but that he
did not mind. The only thing that really troubled him was loss of
spiritual communion. At five o'clock on Sunday afternoons he felt he
wanted chapel, but had to do without it. At seven he ate his simple mid-
day meal. At eleven he had tea and muffins, and at midnight he began to
crave again for hymns and sermons. At three he had a bread-and-cheese
supper, and retired early at four a.m., feeling sad and unsatisfied.
"He was essentially a man of habit."
* * * * *
The unobtrusive stranger ceased, and we sat gazing in silence at the
ceiling.
At length my friend rose, and taking half-a-sovereign from his pocket,
laid it upon the table, and linking his arm in mine went out with me upon
the deck.
THE ABSENT-MINDED MAN
You ask him to dine with you on Thursday to meet a few people who are
anxious to know him.
"Now don't make a muddle of it," you say, recollectful of former mishaps,
"and come on the Wednesday."
He laughs good-naturedly as he hunts through the room for his diary.
"Shan't be able to come Wednesday," he says, "shall be at the Mansion
House, sketching dresses, and on Friday I start for Scotland, so as to be
at the opening of the Exhibition on Saturday. It's bound to be all right
this time. Where the deuce is that diary! Never mind, I'll make a note
of it on this--you can see me do it."
You stand over him while he writes the appointment down on a sheet of
foolscap, and watch him pin it up over his desk. Then you come away
contented.
"I do hope he'll turn up," you say to your wife on the Thursday evening,
while dressing.
"Are you sure you made it clear to him?" she replies, suspiciously, and
you instinctively feel that whatever happens she is going to blame you
for it.
Eight o'clock arrives, and with it the other guests. At half-past eight
your wife is beckoned mysteriously out of the room, where the parlour-
maid informs her that the cook has expressed a determination, in case of
further delay, to wash her hands, figuratively speaking, of the whole
affair.
Your wife, returning, suggests that if the dinner is to be eaten at all
it had better be begun. She evidently considers that in pretending to
expect him you have been merely playing a part, and that it would have
been manlier and more straightforward for you to have admitted at the
beginning that you had forgotten to invite him.
During the soup and the fish you recount anecdotes of his unpunctuality.
By the time the _entree_ arrives the empty chair has begun to cast a
gloom over the dinner, and with the joint the conversation drifts into
talk about dead relatives.
On Friday, at a quarter past eight, he dashes to the door and rings
violently. Hearing his voice in the hall, you go to meet him.
"Sorry I'm late," he sings out cheerily. "Fool of a cabman took me to
Alfred Place instead of--"
"Well, what do you want now you are come?" you interrupt, feeling
anything but genially inclined towards him. He is an old friend, so you
can be rude to him.
He laughs, and slaps you on the shoulder.
"Why, my dinner, my dear boy, I'm starving."
"Oh," you grunt in reply. "Well, you go and get it somewhere else, then.
You're not going to have it here."
"What the devil do you mean?" he says. "You asked me to dinner."
"I did nothing of the kind," you tell him. "I asked you to dinner on
Thursday, not on Friday."
He stares at you incredulously.
"How did I get Friday fixed in my mind?" inquiringly.
"Because yours is the sort of mind that would get Friday firmly fixed
into it, when Thursday was the day," you explain. "I thought you had to
be off to Edinburgh to-night," you add.
"Great Scott!" he cries, "so I have."
And without another word he dashes out, and you hear him rushing down the
road, shouting for the cab he has just dismissed.
As you return to your study you reflect that he will have to travel all
the way to Scotland in evening dress, and will have to send out the hotel
porter in the morning to buy him a suit of ready-made clothes, and are
glad.
Matters work out still more awkwardly when it is he who is the host. I
remember being with him on his house-boat one day. It was a little after
twelve, and we were sitting on the edge of the boat, dangling our feet in
the river--the spot was a lonely one, half-way between Wallingford and
Day's Lock. Suddenly round the bend appeared two skiffs, each one
containing six elaborately-dressed persons. As soon as they caught sight
of us they began waving handkerchiefs and parasols.
"Hullo!" I said, "here's some people hailing you."
"Oh, they all do that about here," he answered, without looking up. "Some
beanfeast from Abingdon, I expect."
The boats draw nearer. When about two hundred yards off an elderly
gentleman raised himself up in the prow of the leading one and shouted to
us.
McQuae heard his voice, and gave a start that all but pitched him into
the water.
"Good God!" he cried, "I'd forgotten all about it."
"About what?" I asked.
"Why, it's the Palmers and the Grahams and the Hendersons. I've asked
them all over to lunch, and there's not a blessed thing on board but two
mutton chops and a pound of potatoes, and I've given the boy a holiday."
Another day I was lunching with him at the Junior Hogarth, when a man
named Hallyard, a mutual friend, strolled across to us.
"What are you fellows going to do this afternoon?" he asked, seating
himself the opposite side of the table.
"I'm going to stop here and write letters," I answered.
"Come with me if you want something to do," said McQuae. "I'm going to
drive Leena down to Richmond." ("Leena" was the young lady he
recollected being engaged to. It transpired afterwards that he was
engaged to three girls at the time. The other two he had forgotten all
about.) "It's a roomy seat at the back."
"Oh, all right," said Hallyard, and they went away together in a hansom.
An hour and a half later Hallyard walked into the smoking-room looking
depressed and worn, and flung himself into a chair.
"I thought you were going to Richmond with McQuae," I said.
"So did I," he answered.
"Had an accident?" I asked.
"Yes."
He was decidedly curt in his replies.
"Cart upset?" I continued.
"No, only me."
His grammar and his nerves seemed thoroughly shaken.
I waited for an explanation, and after a while he gave it.
"We got to Putney," he said, "with just an occasional run into a tram-
car, and were going up the hill, when suddenly he turned a corner. You
know his style at a corner--over the curb, across the road, and into the
opposite lamp-post. Of course, as a rule one is prepared for it, but I
never reckoned on his turning up there, and the first thing I recollect
is finding myself sitting in the middle of the street with a dozen fools
grinning at me.
"It takes a man a few minutes in such a case to think where he is and
what has happened, and when I got up they were some distance away. I ran
after them for a quarter of a mile, shouting at the top of my voice, and
accompanied by a mob of boys, all yelling like hell on a Bank Holiday.
But one might as well have tried to hail the dead, so I took the 'bus
back.
"They might have guessed what had happened," he added, "by the shifting
of the cart, if they'd had any sense. I'm not a light-weight."
He complained of soreness, and said he would go home. I suggested a cab,
but he replied that he would rather walk.
I met McQuae in the evening at the St. James's Theatre. It was a first
night, and he was taking sketches for _The Graphic_. The moment he saw
me he made his way across to me.
"The very man I wanted to see," he said. "Did I take Hallyard with me in
the cart to Richmond this afternoon?"
"You did," I replied.
"So Leena says," he answered, greatly bewildered, "but I'll swear he
wasn't there when we got to the Queen's Hotel."
"It's all right," I said, "you dropped him at Putney."
"Dropped him at Putney!" he repeated. "I've no recollection of doing
so."
"He has," I answered. "You ask him about it. He's full of it."
Everybody said he never would get married; that it was absurd to suppose
he ever would remember the day, the church, and the girl, all in one
morning; that if he did get as far as the altar he would forget what he
had come for, and would give the bride away to his own best man. Hallyard
had an idea that he was already married, but that the fact had slipped
his memory. I myself felt sure that if he did marry he would forget all
about it the next day.
But everybody was wrong. By some miraculous means the ceremony got
itself accomplished, so that if Hallyard's idea be correct (as to which
there is every possibility), there will be trouble. As for my own fears,
I dismissed them the moment I saw the lady. She was a charming, cheerful
little woman, but did not look the type that would let him forget all
about it.
I had not seen him since his marriage, which had happened in the spring.
Working my way back from Scotland by easy stages, I stopped for a few
days at Scarboro'. After _table d'hote_ I put on my mackintosh, and went
out for a walk. It was raining hard, but after a month in Scotland one
does not notice English weather, and I wanted some air. Struggling along
the dark beach with my head against the wind, I stumbled over a crouching
figure, seeking to shelter itself a little from the storm under the lee
of the Spa wall.
I expected it to swear at me, but it seemed too broken-spirited to mind
anything.
"I beg your pardon," I said. "I did not see you."
At the sound of my voice it started to its feet.
"Is that you, old man?" it cried.
"McQuae!" I exclaimed.
"By Jove!" he said, "I was never so glad to see a man in all my life
before."
And he nearly shook my hand off.
"But what in thunder!" I said, "are you doing here? Why, you're drenched
to the skin."
He was dressed in flannels and a tennis-coat.
"Yes," he answered. "I never thought it would rain. It was a lovely
morning."
I began to fear he had overworked himself into a brain fever.
"Why don't you go home?" I asked.
"I can't," he replied. "I don't know where I live. I've forgotten the
address."
"For heaven's sake," he said, "take me somewhere, and give me something
to eat. I'm literally starving."
"Haven't you any money?" I asked him, as we turned towards the hotel.
"Not a sou," he answered. "We got in here from York, the wife and I,
about eleven. We left our things at the station, and started to hunt for
apartments. As soon as we were fixed, I changed my clothes and came out
for a walk, telling Maud I should be back at one to lunch. Like a fool,
I never took the address, and never noticed the way I was going.
"It's an awful business," he continued. "I don't see how I'm ever going
to find her. I hoped she might stroll down to the Spa in the evening,
and I've been hanging about the gates ever since six. I hadn't the
threepence to go in."
"But have you no notion of the sort of street or the kind of house it
was?" I enquired.
"Not a ghost," he replied. "I left it all to Maud, and didn't trouble."
"Have you tried any of the lodging-houses?" I asked.
"Tried!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I've been knocking at doors, and asking
if Mrs. McQuae lives there steadily all the afternoon, and they slam the
door in my face, mostly without answering. I told a policeman--I thought
perhaps he might suggest something--but the idiot only burst out
laughing, and that made me so mad that I gave him a black eye, and had to
cut. I expect they're on the lookout for me now."
"I went into a restaurant," he continued gloomily, "and tried to get them
to trust me for a steak. But the proprietress said she'd heard that tale
before, and ordered me out before all the other customers. I think I'd
have drowned myself if you hadn't turned up."
After a change of clothes and some supper, he discussed the case more
calmly, but it was really a serious affair. They had shut up their flat,
and his wife's relatives were travelling abroad. There was no one to
whom he could send a letter to be forwarded; there was no one with whom
she would be likely to communicate. Their chance of meeting again in
this world appeared remote.
Nor did it seem to me--fond as he was of his wife, and anxious as he
undoubtedly was to recover her--that he looked forward to the actual
meeting, should it ever arrive, with any too pleasurable anticipation.
"She will think it strange," he murmured reflectively, sitting on the
edge of the bed, and thoughtfully pulling off his socks. "She is sure to
think it strange."
The following day, which was Wednesday, we went to a solicitor, and laid
the case before him, and he instituted inquiries among all the lodging-
house keepers in Scarborough, with the result that on Thursday afternoon
McQuae was restored (after the manner of an Adelphi hero in the last act)
to his home and wife.
I asked him next time I met him what she had said.
"Oh, much what I expected," he replied.
But he never told me what he had expected.
A CHARMING WOMAN
"Not _the Mr. ---_, _really_?"
In her deep brown eyes there lurked pleased surprise, struggling with
wonder. She looked from myself to the friend who introduced us with a
bewitching smile of incredulity, tempered by hope.
He assured her, adding laughingly, "The only genuine and original," and
left us.
"I've always thought of you as a staid, middle-aged man," she said, with
a delicious little laugh, then added in low soft tones, "I'm so very
pleased to meet you, really."
The words were conventional, but her voice crept round one like a warm
caress.
"Come and talk to me," she said, seating herself upon a small settee, and
making room for me.
I sat down awkwardly beside her, my head buzzing just a little, as with
one glass too many of champagne. I was in my literary childhood. One
small book and a few essays and criticisms, scattered through various
obscure periodicals had been as yet my only contributions to current
literature. The sudden discovery that I was the Mr. Anybody, and that
charming women thought of me, and were delighted to meet me, was a brain-
disturbing thought.
"And it was really you who wrote that clever book?" she continued, "and
all those brilliant things, in the magazines and journals. Oh, it must
be delightful to be clever."
She gave breath to a little sigh of vain regret that went to my heart. To
console her I commenced a laboured compliment, but she stopped me with
her fan. On after reflection I was glad she had--it would have been one
of those things better expressed otherwise.
"I know what you are going to say," she laughed, "but don't. Besides,
from you I should not know quite how to take it. You can be so
satirical."
I tried to look as though I could be, but in her case would not.
She let her ungloved hand rest for an instant upon mine. Had she left it
there for two, I should have gone down on my knees before her, or have
stood on my head at her feet--have made a fool of myself in some way or
another before the whole room full. She timed it to a nicety.
"I don't want _you_ to pay me compliments," she said, "I want us to be
friends. Of course, in years, I'm old enough to be your mother." (By
the register I should say she might have been thirty-two, but looked
twenty-six. I was twenty-three, and I fear foolish for my age.) "But
you know the world, and you're so different to the other people one
meets. Society is so hollow and artificial; don't you find it so? You
don't know how I long sometimes to get away from it, to know someone to
whom I could show my real self, who would understand me. You'll come and
see me sometimes--I'm always at home on Wednesdays--and let me talk to
you, won't you, and you must tell me all your clever thoughts."
It occurred to me that, maybe, she would like to hear a few of them there
and then, but before I had got well started a hollow Society man came up
and su
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