How Paul set forth upon a Quest.
Of old Deleglise's Sunday suppers, which, costumed from head to foot in spotless linen, he cooked himself in his great kitchen, moving with flushed, earnest face about the gleaming stove, while behind him his guests waited, ranged round the massive oaken table glittering with cut glass and silver, among which fluttered the deft hands of Madeline, his ancient whitecapped Bonne, much has been already recorded, and by those possessed of greater knowledge. They who sat there talking in whispers until such time as old Deleglise turned towards them again, radiant with consciousness of success, the savoury triumph steaming between his hands, when, like the sudden swell of the Moonlight Sonata, the talk would rush once more into a roar, were men whose names were then—and some are still—more or less household words throughout the English-speaking world. Artists, musicians, actors, writers, scholars, droles, their wit and wisdom, their sayings and their doings must be tolerably familiar to readers of memoir and biography; and if to such their epigrams appear less brilliant, their jests less laughable than to us who heard them spoken, that is merely because fashion in humour and in understanding changes as in all else.
You, gentle reader of my book, I shall not trouble with second-hand record of that which you can read elsewhere. For me it will be but to write briefly of my own brief glimpse into that charmed circle. Concerning this story more are the afternoon At Homes held by Dan and myself upon the second floor of the old Georgian house in pleasant, quiet Queen Square. For cook and house-maid on these days it would be a busy morning. Failing other supervision, Dan and I agreed that to secure success on these important occasions each of us should criticise the work of the other. I passed judgment on Dan's cooking, he upon my house-work.
“Too much soda,” I would declare, sampling the cake.
“You silly Juggins! It's meant to taste of soda—it's a soda cake.”
“I know that. It isn't meant to taste of nothing but soda. There wants to be some cake about it also. This thing, so far as flavour is concerned, is nothing but a Seidlitz powder. You can't give people solidified Seidlitz powders for tea!”
Dan would fume, but I would remain firm. The soda cake would be laid aside, and something else attempted. His cookery was the one thing Dan was obstinate about. He would never admit that anything could possibly be wrong with it. His most ghastly failures he would devour himself later on with pretended enjoyment. I have known him finish a sponge cake, the centre of which had to be eaten with a teaspoon, declaring it was delicious; that eating a dry sponge cake was like eating dust; that a sponge cake ought to be a trifle syrupy towards the centre. Afterwards he would be strangely silent and drink brandy out of a wine-glass.
“Call these knives clean?” It would be Dan's turn.
“Yes, I do.”
Dan would draw his finger across one, producing chiaro-oscuro.
“Not if you go fingering them. Why don't you leave them alone and go on with your own work?”
“You've just wiped them, that's all.”
“Well, there isn't any knife-powder.”
“Yes, there is.”
“Besides, it ruins knives, over-cleaning them—takes all the edge off. We shall want them pretty sharp to cut those lemon buns of yours.”
“Over-cleaning them! You don't take any pride in the place.”
“Good Lord! Don't I work from morning to night?”
“You lazy young devil!”
“Makes one lazy, your cooking. How can a man work when he is suffering all day long from indigestion?”
But Dan would not be content until I had found the board and cleaned the knives to his complete satisfaction. Perhaps it was as well that in this way all things once a week were set in order. After lunch house-maid and cook would vanish, two carefully dressed gentlemen being left alone to receive their guests.
These would be gathered generally from among Dan's journalistic acquaintances and my companions of the theatre. Occasionally, Minikin and Jarman would be of the number, Mrs. Peedles even once or twice arriving breathless on our landing. Left to myself, I perhaps should not have invited them, deeming them hardly fitting company to mingle with our other visitors; but Dan, having once been introduced to them, overrode such objection.
“My dear Lord Chamberlain,” Dan would reply, “an ounce of originality is worth a ton of convention. Little tin ladies and gentlemen all made to pattern! One can find them everywhere. Your friends would be an acquisition to any society.”
“But are they quite good form?” I hinted.
“I'll tell you what we will do,” replied Dan. “We'll forget that Mrs. Peedles keeps a lodging-house in Blackfriars. We will speak of her as our friend, 'that dear, quaint old creature, Lady P.' A title that is an oddity, whose costume always suggests the wardrobe of a provincial actress! My dear Paul, your society novelist would make a fortune out of such a character. The personages of her amusing anecdotes, instead of being third-rate theatrical folk, shall be Earl Blank and the Baroness de Dash. The editors of society journals shall pay me a shilling a line for them. Jarman—yes, Jarman shall be the son of a South American millionaire. Vulgar? Nonsense! you mean racy. Minikin—he looks much more like forty than twenty—he shall be an eminent scientist. His head will then appear the natural size; his glass eye, the result of a chemical experiment, a touch of distinction; his uncompromising rudeness, a lovable characteristic. We will make him buy a yard of red ribbon and wear it across his shirt-front, and address him as Herr Professor. It will explain slight errors of English grammar and all peculiarities of accent. They shall be our lions. You leave it to me. We will invite commonplace, middle-class folk to meet them.”
And this, to my terror and alarm, Dan persisted in doing. Jarman entered into the spirit of the joke with gusto. So far as he was concerned, our guests, from the beginning to the end, were one and all, I am confident, deceived. The more he swaggered, the more he boasted, the more he talked about himself—and it was a failing he was prone to—the greater was his success. At the persistent endeavours of Dan's journalistic acquaintances to excite his cupidity by visions of new journals, to be started with a mere couple of thousand pounds and by the inherent merit of their ideas to command at once a circulation of hundreds of thousands, I could afford to laugh. But watching the tremendous efforts of my actress friends to fascinate him—luring him into corners, gazing at him with languishing eyes, trotting out all their little tricks for his exclusive benefit, quarrelling about him among themselves—my conscience would prick me, lest our jest should end in a contretemps. Fortunately, Jarman himself, was a gentleman of uncommon sense, or my fears might have been realised. I should have been sorry myself to have been asked to remain stone under the blandishments of girls young and old, of women handsome and once, no doubt, good looking, showered upon him during that winter. But Jarman, as I think I have explained, was no slave to female charms. He enjoyed his good time while it lasted, and eventually married the eldest daughter of a small blacking factory. She was a plain girl, but pleasant, and later brought to Jarman possession of the factory. When I meet him—he is now stout and rubicund—he gives me the idea of a man who has attained to his ideals.
With Minikin we had more trouble. People turned up possessed of scientific smattering. We had to explain that the Professor never talked shop. Others were owners of unexpected knowledge of German, which they insisted upon airing. We had to explain that the Herr Professor was in London to learn English, and had taken a vow during his residence neither to speak nor listen to his native tongue. It was remarked that his acquaintance with colloquial English slang, for a foreigner, was quite unusual. Occasionally he was too rude, even for a scientist, informing ladies, clamouring to know how he liked English women, that he didn't like them silly; telling one gentleman, a friend of Dan, a rather important man who once asked him, referring to his yard of ribbon, what he got it for, that he got it for fourpence. We had to explain him as a gentleman who had been soured by a love disappointment. The ladies forgave him; the gentlemen said it was a damned lucky thing for the girl. Altogether, Minikin took a good deal of explaining.
Lady Peedles, our guests decided among themselves, must be the widow of some one in the City who had been knighted in a crowd. They made fun of her behind her back, but to her face were most effusive. “My dear Lady Peedles” was the phrase most often heard in our rooms whenever she was present. At the theatre “my friend Lady Peedles” became a person much spoken of—generally in loud tones. My own social position I found decidedly improved by reason of her ladyship's evident liking for myself. It went abroad that I was her presumptive heir. I was courted as a gentleman of expectations.
The fishy-eyed young man became one of our regular guests. Dan won his heart by never laughing at him.
“I like talking to you,” said the fishy-eyed young man one afternoon to Dan. “You don't go into fits of laughter when I remark that it has been a fine day; most people do. Of course, on the stage I don't mind. I know I am a funny little devil. I get my living by being a funny little devil. There is a photograph of me hanging in the theatre lobby. I saw a workman stop and look at it the other day as he passed; I was just behind him. He burst into a roar of laughter. 'Little—! He makes me laugh to look at him!' he cluttered to himself. Well, that's all right; I want the man in the gallery to think me funny, but it annoys me when people laugh at me off the stage. If I am out to dinner anywhere and ask somebody to pass the mustard, I never get it; instead, they burst out laughing. I don't want people to laugh at me when I am having my dinner. I want my dinner. It makes me very angry sometimes.”
“I know,” agreed Dan, sympathetically. “The world never grasps the fact that man is a collection, not a single exhibit. I remember being at a house once where the chief guest happened to be a great Hebrew scholar. One tea time, a Miss Henman, passing the butter to some one in a hurry, let it slip out of her hand. 'Why is Miss Henman like a caterpillar?' asked our learned guest in a sepulchral voice. Nobody appeared to know. 'Because she makes the butter fly.' It never occurred to any one of us that the Doctor could possibly joke. There was dead silence for about a minute. Then our hostess, looking grave, remarked: 'Oh, do you really think so?'”
“If I were to enter a room full of people,” said the fishy-eyed young man, “and tell them that my mother had been run over by an omnibus, they would think it the funniest story they had heard in years.”
He was playing a principal part now in the opera, and it was he undoubtedly who was drawing the house. But he was not happy.
“I am not a comic actor, really,” he explained. “I could play Romeo, so far as feeling is concerned, and play it damned well. There is a fine vein of poetry in me. But of course it's no good to me with this face of mine.”
“But are you not sinning your mercies, you fellows?” Dan replied. “There is young Kelver here. At school it was always his trouble that he could give us a good time and make us laugh, which nobody else in the whole school could do. His ambition was to kick a ball as well as a hundred other fellows could kick it. He could tell us a good story now if he would only write what the Almighty intended him to write, instead of gloomy rigmaroles about suffering Princesses in Welsh caves. I don't say it's bad, but a hundred others could write the same sort of thing better.”
“Can't you understand,” answered the little man; “the poorest tragedian that ever lived never wished himself the best of low comedians. The court fool had an excellent salary, no doubt; and, likely enough, had got two-thirds of all the brain there was in the palace. But not a wooden-headed man-at-arms but looked down upon him. Every gallery boy who pays a shilling to laugh at me regards himself as my intellectual superior; while to a fourth-rate spouter of blank verse he looks up in admiration.”
“Does it so very much matter,” suggested Dan, “how the wooden-headed man-at-arms or the shilling gallery boy happens to regard you?”
“Yes, it does,” retorted Goggles, “because we happen to agree with them. If I could earn five pounds a week as juvenile lead, I would never play a comic part again.”
“There I cannot follow you,” returned Dan. “I can understand the artist who would rather be the man of action, the poet who would rather be the statesman or the warrior; though personally my sympathies are precisely the other way—with Wolfe who thought it a more glorious work, the writing of a great poem, than the burning of so many cities and the killing of so many men. We all serve the community. It is difficult, looking at the matter from the inside, to say who serves it best. Some feed it, some clothe it. The churchman and the policeman between them look after its morals, keep it in order. The doctor mends it when it injures itself; the lawyer helps it to quarrel, the soldier teaches it to fight. We Bohemians amuse it, instruct it. We can argue that we are the most important. The others cater for its body, we for its mind. But their work is more showy than ours and attracts more attention; and to attract attention is the aim and object of most of us. But for Bohemians to worry among themselves which is the greatest, is utterly without reason. The story-teller, the musician, the artist, the clown, we are members of a sharing troupe; one, with the ambition of the fat boy in Pickwick, makes the people's flesh creep; another makes them hold their sides with laughter. The tragedian, soliloquising on his crimes, shows us how wicked we are; you, looking at a pair of lovers from under a scratch wig, show us how ridiculous we are. Both lessons are necessary: who shall say which is the superior teacher?”
“Ah, I am not a philosopher,” replied the little man, with a sigh.
“Ah,” returned Dan, with another, “and I am not a comic actor on my way to a salary of a hundred a week. We all of us want the other boy's cake.”
The O'Kelly was another frequent visitor of ours. The attic in Belsize Square had been closed. In vain had the O'Kelly wafted incense, burned pastilles and sprinkled eau-de-Cologne. In vain had he talked of rats, hinted at drains.
“A wonderful woman,” groaned the O'Kelly in tones of sorrowful admiration. “There's no deceiving her.”
“But why submit?” was our natural argument. “Why not say you are going to smoke, and do it?”
“It's her theory, me boy,” explained the O'Kelly, “that the home should be kept pure—a sort of a temple, ye know. She's convinced that in time it is bound to exercise an influence upon me. It's a beautiful idea, when ye come to think of it.”
Meanwhile, in the rooms of half-a-dozen sinful men the O'Kelly kept his own particular pipe, together with his own particular smoking mixture; and one such pipe and one such tobacco jar stood always on our mantelpiece.
In the spring the forces of temptation raged round that feeble but most excellently intentioned citadel, the O'Kelly's conscience. The Signora had returned to England, was performing then at Ashley's Theatre. The O'Kelly would remain under long spells of silence, puffing vigorously at his pipe. Or would fortify himself with paeans in praise of Mrs. O'Kelly.
“If anything could ever make a model man of me”—he spoke in the tones of one whose doubts are stronger than his hopes—“it would be the example of that woman.”
It was one Saturday afternoon. I had just returned from the matinee.
“I don't believe,” continued the O'Kelly, “I don't really believe she has ever done one single thing she oughtn't to, or left undone one single thing she ought, in the whole course of her life.”
“Maybe she has, and you don't know of it,” I suggested, perceiving the idea might comfort him.
“I wish I could think so,” returned the O'Kelly. “I don't mean anything really wrong,” he corrected himself quickly, “but something just a little wrong. I feel—I really feel I should like her better if she had.”
“Not that I mean I don't like her as it is, ye understand,” corrected himself the O'Kelly a second time. “I respect that woman—I cannot tell ye, me boy, how much I respect her. Ye don't know her. There was one morning, about a month ago. That woman-she's down at six every morning, summer and winter; we have prayers at half-past. I was a trifle late meself: it was never me strong point, as ye know, early rising. Seven o'clock struck; she didn't appear, and I thought she had overslept herself. I won't say I didn't feel pleased for the moment; it was an unworthy sentiment, but I almost wished she had. I ran up to her room. The door was open, the bedclothes folded down as she always leaves them. She came in five minutes later. She had got up at four that morning to welcome a troupe of native missionaries from East Africa on their arrival at Waterloo Station. She's a saint, that woman; I am not worthy of her.”
“I shouldn't dwell too much on that phase of the subject,” I suggested.
“I can't help it, me boy,” replied the O'Kelly. “I feel I am not.”
“I don't for a moment say you are,” I returned; “but I shouldn't harp upon the idea. I don't think it good for you.”
“I never will be,” he persisted gloomily, “never!”
Evidently he was started on a dangerous train of reflection. With the idea of luring him away from it, I led the conversation to the subject of champagne.
“Most people like it dry,” admitted the O'Kelly. “Meself, I have always preferred it with just a suggestion of fruitiness.”
“There was a champagne,” I said, “you used to be rather fond of when we—years ago.”
“I think I know the one ye mean,” said the O'Kelly. “It wasn't at all bad, considering the price.”
“You don't happen to remember where you got it?” I asked.
“It was in Bridge Street,” remembered the O'Kelly, “not so very far from the Circus.”
“It is a pleasant evening,” I remarked; “let us take a walk.”
We found the place, half wine-shop, half office.
“Just the same,” commented the O'Kelly as we pushed open the door and entered. “Not altered a bit.”
As in all probability barely twelve months had elapsed since his last visit, the fact in itself was not surprising. Clearly the O'Kelly had been calculating time rather by sensation. I ordered a bottle; and we sat down. Myself, being prejudiced against the brand, I called for a glass of claret. The O'Kelly finished the bottle. I was glad to notice my ruse had been successful. The virtue of that wine had not departed from it. With every glass the O'Kelly became morally more elevated. He left the place, determined that he would be worthy of Mrs. O'Kelly. Walking down the Embankment, he asserted his determination of buying an alarm-clock that very evening. At the corner of Westminster Bridge he became suddenly absorbed in his own thoughts. Looking to discover the cause of his silence, I saw that his eyes were resting on a poster representing a charming lady standing on one leg upon a wire; below her—at some distance—appeared the peaks of mountains; the artist had even caught the likeness. I cursed the luck that had directed our footsteps, but the next moment, lacking experience, was inclined to be reassured.
“Me dear Paul,” said the O'Kelly—he laid a fatherly hand upon my shoulder—“there are fair-faced, laughing women—sweet creatures, that ye want to put yer arm around and dance with.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “There are the sainted women, who lead us up, Paul—up, always up.”
A look, such as the young man with the banner might have borne with him to the fields of snow and ice, suffused the O'Kelly's handsome face. Without another word he crossed the road and entered an American store, where for six-and-elevenpence he purchased an alarm-clock the man assured us would awake an Egyptian mummy. With this in his hand he waved me a good-bye, and jumped upon a Hampstead 'bus, and alone I strolled on to the theatre.
Hal returned a little after Christmas and started himself in chambers in the City. It was the nearest he dared venture, so he said, to civilisation.
“I'd be no good in the West End,” he explained. “For a season I might attract as an eccentricity, but your swells would never stand me for longer—no more would any respectable folk, anywhere: we don't get on together. I commenced at Richmond. It was a fashionable suburb then, and I thought I was going to do wonders. I had everything in my favour, except myself. I do know my work, nobody can deny that of me. My father spent every penny he had, poor gentleman, in buying me an old-established practice: fine house, carriage and pair, white-haired butler—everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to tell her the truth:
'Go home. Wash your face; don't block up the pores of your skin with paint. Let out your corsets. You are thirty-three round the abdomen if you are an inch: how can you expect your digestion to do its work when you're squeezing it into twenty-one? Give up gadding about half your day and most of your night; you are old enough to have done with that sort of thing. Let the children come, and suckle them yourself. You'll be all the better for them. Don't loll in bed all the morning. Get up like a decent animal and do something for your living. Use your brain, what there is of it, and your body. At that price you can have health to-morrow, and at no other. I can do nothing for you.'”
“And sooner or later I blurt it out.” He laughed his great roar. “Lord! you should see the real face coming out of the simpering mask.”
“Pompous old fools, strutting into me like turkey-cocks! By Jove, it was worth it! They would dribble out, looking half their proper size after I had done telling them what was the matter with them.”
“'Do you want to know what you are really suffering from?' I would shout at them, when I could contain myself no longer. 'Gluttony, my dear sir; gluttony and drunkenness, and over-indulgence in other vices that shall be nameless. Live like a man; get a little self-respect from somewhere; give up being an ape. Treat your body properly and it will treat you properly. That's the only prescription that will do you any good.'”
He laughed again. “'Tell the truth, you shame the Devil.' But the Devil replies by starving you. It's a fairly effective retort. I am not the stuff successful family physicians are made of. In the City I may manage to rub along. One doesn't see so much of one's patients; they come and go. Clerks and warehousemen my practice will be among chiefly. The poor man does not so much mind being told the truth about himself; it is a blessing to which he is accustomed.”
We spoke but once of Barbara. A photograph of her in her bride's dress stood upon my desk. Occasionally, first fitting the room for the ceremony, sweeping away all impurity even from under the mats, and dressing myself with care, I would centre it amid flowers, and kneeling, kiss her hand where it rested on the back of the top-heavy looking chair without which no photographic studio is complete.
One day he took it up, and looked at it long and hard.
“The forehead denotes intellectuality; the eyes tenderness and courage. The lower part of the face, on the other hand, suggests a good deal of animalism: the finely cut nostrils show egotism—another word for selfishness; the nose itself, vanity; the lips, sensuousness and love of luxury. I wonder what sort of woman she really is.” He laid the photograph back upon the desk.
“I did not know you were so firm a believer in Lavater,” I said.
“Only when he agrees with what I know,” he answered. “Have I not described her rightly?”
“I do not care to discuss her in that vein,” I replied, feeling the blood mounting to my cheeks.
“Too sacred a subject?” he laughed. “It is the one ingredient of manhood I lack, ideality—an unfortunate deficiency for me. I must probe, analyse, dissect, see the thing as it really is, know it for what it is.”
“Well, she is the Countess Huescar now,” I said. “For God's sake, leave her alone.”
He turned to me with the snarl of a beast. “How do you know she is the Countess Huescar? Is it a special breed of woman made on purpose? How do you know she isn't my wife—brain and heart, flesh and blood, mine? If she was, do you think I should give her up because some fool has stuck his label on her?”
I felt the anger burning in my eyes. “Yours, his! She is no man's property. She is herself,” I cried.
The wrinkles round his nose and mouth smoothed themselves out. “You need not be afraid,” he sneered. “As you say, she is the Countess Huescar. Can you imagine her as Mrs. Doctor Washburn? I can't.” He took her photograph in his hand again. “The lower part of the face is the true index to the character. It shows the animal, and it is the animal that rules. The soul, the intellect, it comes and goes; the animal remains always. Sensuousness, love of luxury, vanity, those are the strings to which she dances. To be a Countess is of more importance to her than to be a woman. She is his, not mine. Let him keep her.”
“You do not know her,” I answered; “you never have. You listen to what she says. She does not know herself.”
He looked at me queerly. “What do you think her to be?” he asked me. “A true woman, not the shallow thing she seems?”
“A true woman,” I persisted stoutly, “that you have not eyes enough to see.”
“You little fool!” he muttered, with the same queer look—“you little fool. But let us hope you are wrong, Paul. Let us hope, for her sake, you are wrong.”
It was at one of Deleglise's Sunday suppers that I first met Urban Vane. The position, nor even the character, I fear it must be confessed, of his guests was never enquired into by old Deleglise. A simple-minded, kindly old fellow himself, it was his fate to be occasionally surprised and grieved at the discovery that even the most entertaining of supper companions could fall short of the highest standard of conventional morality.
“Dear, dear me!” he would complain, pacing up and down his studio with puzzled visage. “The last man in the world of whom I should have expected to hear it. So original in all his ideas. Are you quite sure?”
“I am afraid there can be no doubt about it.”
“I can't believe it! I really can't believe it! One of the most amusing men I ever met!”
I remember a well-known artist one evening telling us with much sense of humour how he had just completed the sale of an old Spanish cabinet to two distinct and separate purchasers.
“I sold it first,” recounted the little gentleman with glee, “to old Jong, the dealer. He has been worrying me about it for the last three months, and on Saturday afternoon, hearing that I was clearing out and going abroad, he came round again. 'Well, I am not sure I am in a position to sell it,' I told him. 'Who'll know?' he asked. 'They are not in, are they?' 'Not yet,' I answered, 'but I expect they will be some time on Monday.' 'Tell your man to open the door to me at eight o'clock on Monday morning,' he replied, 'we'll have it away without any fuss. There needn't be any receipt. I'm lending you a hundred pounds, in cash.' I worked him up to a hundred and twenty, and he paid me. Upon my word, I should never have thought of it, if he hadn't put the idea into my head. But turning round at the door: 'You won't go and sell it to some one else,' he suggested, 'between now and Monday?' It serves him right for his damned impertinence. 'Send and take it away to-day if you are at all nervous,' I told him. He looked at the thing, it is about twelve feet high altogether. 'I would if I could get a cart,' he muttered. Then an idea struck him. 'Does the top come off?' 'See for yourself,' I answered; 'it's your cabinet, not mine.' I was feeling rather annoyed with him. He examined it. 'That's all right,' he said; 'merely a couple of screws. I'll take the top with me now on my cab.' He got a man in, and they took the upper cupboard away, leaving me the bottom. Two hours later old Sir George called to see me about his wife's portrait. The first thing he set eyes on was the remains of the cabinet: he had always admired it. 'Hallo,' he asked, 'are you breaking up the studio literally? What have you done with the other half?' 'I've sent it round to Jong's—' He didn't give me time to finish. 'Save Jong's commission and sell it to me direct,' he said. 'We won't argue about the price and I'll pay you in cash.'”
“Well, if Providence comes forward and insists on taking charge of a man, it is hardly good manners to flout her. Besides, his wife's portrait is worth twice as much as he is paying for it. He handed me over the money in notes. 'Things not going quite smoothly with you just at the moment?' he asked me. 'Oh, about the same as usual,' I told him. 'You won't be offended at my taking it away with me this evening?' he asked. 'Not in the least,' I answered; 'you'll get it on the top of a four-wheeled cab.' We called in a couple of men, and I helped them down with it, and confoundedly heavy it was. 'I shall send round to Jong's for the other half on Monday morning,' he said, speaking with his head through the cab window, 'and explain it to him.' 'Do,' I answered; 'he'll understand.'”
“I'm sorry I'm going away so early in the morning,” concluded the little gentleman. “I'd give back Jong ten per cent. of his money to see his face when he enters the studio.”
Everybody laughed; but after the little gentleman was gone, the subject cropped up again.
“If I wake sufficiently early,” remarked one, “I shall find an excuse to look in myself at eight o'clock. Jong's face will certainly be worth seeing.”
“Rather rough both on him and Sir George,” observed another.
“Oh, he hasn't really done anything of the kind,” chimed in old Deleglise in his rich, sweet voice. “He made that all up. It's just his fun; he's full of humour.”
“I am inclined to think that would be his idea of a joke,” asserted the first speaker.
Old Deleglise would not hear of it; but a week or two later I noticed an addition to old Deleglise's studio furniture in the shape of a handsome old carved cabinet twelve feet high.
“He really had done it,” explained old Deleglise, speaking in a whisper, though only he and I were present. “Of course, it was only his fun; but it might have been misunderstood. I thought it better to put the thing straight. I shall get the money back from him when he returns. A most amusing little man!”
Old Deleglise possessed a house in Gower Street which fell vacant. One of his guests, a writer of poetical drama, was a man who three months after he had earned a thousand pounds never had a penny with which to bless himself. They are dying out, these careless, good-natured, conscienceless Bohemians; but quarter of a century ago they still lingered in Alsatian London. Turned out of his lodgings by a Philistine landlord, his sole possession in the wide world, two acts of a drama, for which he had already been paid, the problem of his future, though it troubled him but little, became acute to his friends. Old Deleglise, treating the matter as a joke, pretending not to know who was the landlord, suggested he should apply to the agents for position as caretaker. Some furniture was found for him, and the empty house in Gower Street became his shelter. The immediate present thus provided for, kindly old Deleglise worried himself a good deal concerning what would become of his friend when the house was let. There appeared to be no need for worry. Weeks, months went by. Applications were received by the agents in fair number, view cards signed by the dozen; but prospective tenants were never seen again. One Sunday evening our poet, warmed by old Deleglise's Burgundy, forgetful whose recommendation had secured him the lowly but timely appointment, himself revealed the secret.
“Most convenient place I've got,” so he told old Deleglise. “Whole house to myself. I wander about; it just suits me.”
“I'm glad to hear that,” murmured old Deleglise.
“Come and see me, and I'll cook you a chop,” continued the other. “I've had the kitchen range brought up into the back drawing-room; saves going up and down stairs.”
“The devil you have!” growled old Deleglise. “What do you think the owner of the house will say?”
“Haven't the least idea who the poor old duffer is myself. They've put me in as caretaker—an excellent arrangement: avoids all argument about rent.”
“Afraid it will soon come to an end, that excellent arrangement;” remarked old Deleglise, drily.
“Why? Why should it?”
“A house in Gower Street oughtn't to remain vacant long.”
“This one will.”
“You might tell me,” asked old Deleglise, with a grim smile; “how do you manage it? What happens when people come to look over the house—don't you let them in?”
“I tried that at first,” explained the poet, “but they would go on knocking, and boys and policemen passing would stop and help them. It got to be a nuisance; so now I have them in, and get the thing over. I show them the room where the murder was committed. If it's a nervous-looking party, I let them off with a brief summary. If that doesn't do, I go into details and show them the blood-spots on the floor. It's an interesting story of the gruesome order. Come round one morning and I'll tell it to you. I'm rather proud of it. With the blinds down and a clock in the next room that ticks loudly, it goes well.”
Yet this was a man who, were the merest acquaintance to call upon him and ask for his assistance, would at once take him by the arm and lead him upstairs. All notes and cheques that came into his hands he changed at once into gold. Into some attic half filled with lumber he would fling it by the handful; then, locking the door, leave it there. On their hands and knees he and his friends, when they wanted any, would grovel for it, poking into corners, hunting under boxes, groping among broken furniture, feeling between cracks and crevices. Nothing gave him greater delight than an expedition of this nature to what he termed his gold-field; it had for him, as he would explain, all the excitements of mining without the inconvenience and the distance. He never knew how much was there. For a certain period a pocketful could be picked up in five minutes. Then he would entertain a dozen men at one of the best restaurants in London, tip cabmen and waiters with half-sovereigns, shower half-crowns as he walked through the streets, lend or give to anybody for the asking. Later, half-an-hour's dusty search would be rewarded with a single coin. It made no difference to him; he would dine in Soho for eighteenpence, smoke shag, and run into debt.
The red-haired man, to whom Deleglise had introduced me on the day of my first meeting with the Lady of the train, was another of his most constant visitors. It flattered my vanity that the red-haired man, whose name was famous throughout Europe and America, should condescend to confide to me—as he did and at some length—the deepest secrets of his bosom. Awed—at all events at first—I would sit and listen while by the hour he would talk to me in corners, telling me of the women he had loved. They formed a somewhat large collection. Julias, Marias, Janets, even Janes—he had madly worshipped, deliriously adored so many it grew bewildering. With a far-away look in his eyes, pain trembling through each note of his musical, soft voice, he would with bitter jest, with passionate outburst, recount how he had sobbed beneath the stars for love of Isabel, bitten his own flesh in frenzied yearning for Lenore. He appeared from his own account—if in connection with a theme so poetical I may be allowed a commonplace expression—to have had no luck with any of them. Of the remainder, an appreciable percentage had been mere passing visions, seen at a distance in the dawn, at twilight—generally speaking, when the light must have been uncertain. Never again, though he had wandered in the neighbourhood for months, had he succeeded in meeting them. It would occur to me that enquiries among the neighbours, applications to the local police, might possibly have been efficacious; but to have broken in upon his exalted mood with such suggestions would have demanded more nerve than at the time I possessed. In consequence, my thoughts I kept to myself.
“My God, boy!” he would conclude, “may you never love as I loved that woman Miriam”—or Henrietta, or Irene, as the case might be.
For my sympathetic attitude towards the red-haired man I received one evening commendation from old Deleglise.
“Good boy,” said old Deleglise, laying his hand on my shoulder. We were standing in the passage. We had just shaken hands with the red-haired man, who, as usual, had been the last to leave. “None of the others will listen to him. He used to stop and confide it all to me after everybody else had gone. Sometimes I have dropped asleep, to wake an hour later and find him still talking. He gets it over early now. Good boy!”
Soon I learnt it was characteristic of the artist to be willing—nay, anxious, to confide his private affairs to any one and every one who would only listen. Another characteristic appeared to be determination not to listen to anybody else's. As attentive recipient of other people's troubles and emotions I was subjected to practically no competition whatever. One gentleman, a leading actor of that day, I remember, immediately took me aside on my being introduced to him, and consulted me as to his best course of procedure under the extremely painful conditions that had lately arisen between himself and his wife. We discussed the unfortunate position at some length, and I did my best to counsel fairly and impartially.
“I wish you would lunch with me at White's to-morrow,” he said. “We can talk it over quietly. Say half-past one. By the bye, I didn't catch your name.”
I spelt it to him: he wrote the appointment down on his shirt-cuff. I went to White's the next day and waited an hour, but he did not turn up. I met him three weeks later at a garden-party with his wife. But he appeared to have forgotten me.
Observing old Deleglise's guests, comparing them with their names, it surprised me the disconnection between the worker and the work. Writers of noble sentiment, of elevated ideality, I found contained in men of commonplace appearance, of gross appetites, of conventional ideas. It seemed doubtful whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise's kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried to compete with others who to the public were comparatively unknown. After a time I ceased to confound the artist with the man, thought no more of judging the one by the other than of evolving a tenant from the house to which circumstances or carelessness might have directed him. Clearly they were two creations originally independent of each other, settling down into a working partnership for purposes merely of mutual accommodation; the spirit evidently indifferent as to the particular body into which he crept, anxious only for a place to work in, easily contented.
Varied were these guests that gathered round old Deleglise's oak. Cabinet Ministers reported to be in Homburg; Russian Nihilists escaped from Siberia; Italian revolutionaries; high church dignitaries disguised in grey suitings; ex-errand boys, who had discovered that with six strokes of the pen they could set half London laughing at whom they would; raw laddies with the burr yet clinging to their tongues, but who we knew would one day have the people dancing to the music of their words. Neither wealth, nor birth, nor age, nor position counted. Was a man interesting, amusing; had he ideas and thoughts of his own? Then he was welcome. Men who had come, men who were coming, met there on equal footing. Among them, as years ago among my schoolmates, I found my place—somewhat to my dissatisfaction. I amused. Much rather would I have shocked them by the originality of my views, impressed them with the depth of my judgments. They declined to be startled, refused to be impressed; instead, they laughed. Nor from these men could I obtain sympathy in my disappointment.
“What do you mean, you villain!” roared Deleglise's caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. “How dare you waste your time writing this sort of stuff?”
He had a copy of the paper containing my “Witch of Moel Sarbod” in his hand—then some months old. He screwed it up into a ball and flung it in my face. “I've only just read it. What did you get for it?”
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Nothing!” he screamed. “You got off for nothing? You ought to have been whipped at the cart's tail!”
“Oh, come, it's not as bad as that,” suggested old Deleglise.
“Not bad! There isn't a laugh in it from beginning to end.”
“There wasn't intended to be,” I interrupted.
“Why not, you swindler? What were you sent into the world to do? To make it laugh.”
“I want to make it think,” I told him.
“Make it think! Hasn't it got enough to think about? Aren't there ten thousand penny-a-liners, poets, tragedians, tub-thumpers, long-eared philosophers, boring it to death? Who are you to turn up your nose at your work and tell the Almighty His own business? You are here to make us laugh. Get on with your work, you confounded young idiot!”
Urban Vane was the only one among them who understood me, who agreed with me that I was fitted for higher things than merely to minister to the world's need of laughter. He alone it was who would listen with approval to my dreams of becoming a famous tragedian, a writer of soul-searching books, of passion-analysing plays. I never saw him laugh himself, certainly not at anything funny. “Humour!” he would explain in his languid drawl, “personally it doesn't amuse me.” One felt its introduction into the scheme of life had been an error. He was a large, fleshy man, with a dreamy, caressing voice and strangely impassive face. Where he came from, who he was, nobody knew. Without ever passing a remark himself that was worth listening to, he, nevertheless, by some mysterious trick of manner I am unable to explain, soon established himself, even throughout that company, where as a rule men found their proper level, as a silent authority in all contests of wit or argument. Stories at which he listened, bored, fell flat. The bon mot at which some faint suggestion of a smile quivered round his clean-shaven lips was felt to be the crown of the discussion. I can only conclude his secret to have been his magnificent assumption of superiority, added to a sphinx-like impenetrability behind which he could always retire from any danger of exposure. Subjects about which he knew nothing—and I have come to the conclusion they were more numerous than was suspected—became in his presence topics outside the radius of cultivated consideration: one felt ashamed of having introduced them. His own subjects—they were few but exclusive—he had the knack of elevating into intellectual tests: one felt ashamed, reflecting how little one knew about them. Whether he really did possess a charm of manner, or whether the sense of his superiority with which he had imbued me it was that made any condescension he paid me a thing to grasp at, I am unable to say. Certain it is that when he suggested I should throw up chorus singing and accompany him into the provinces as manager of a theatrical company he was then engaging to run a wonderful drama that was going to revolutionise the English stage and educate the English public, I allowed myself not a moment for consideration, but accepted his proposal with grateful delight.
“Who is he?” asked Dan. Somehow he had never impressed Dan; but then Dan was a fellow to impress whom was slow work. As he himself confessed, he had no instinct for character. “I judge,” he would explain, “purely by observation.”
“What does that matter?” was my reply.
“What does he know about the business?”
“That's why he wants me.”
“What do you know about it?”
“There's not much to know. I can find out.”
“Take care you don't find out that there's more to know than you think. What is this wonderful play of his?”
“I haven't seen it yet; I don't think it's finished. It's something from the Spanish or the Russian, I'm not sure. I'm to put it into shape when he's done the translation. He wants me to put my name to it as the adaptor.”
“Wonder he hasn't asked you to wear his clothes. Has he got any money?”
“Of course he has money. How can you run a theatrical company without money?”
“Have you seen the money?”
“He doesn't carry it about with him in a bag.”
“I should have thought your ambition to be to act, not to manage. Managers are to be had cheap enough. Why should he want some one who knows nothing about it?”
“I'm going to act. I'm going to play a leading part.”
“Great Scott!”
“He'll do the management really himself; I shall simply advise him. But he doesn't want his own name to appear.”
“Why not?”
“His people might object.”
“Who are his people?”
“How do I know? What a suspicious chap you are.”
Dan shrugged his shoulders. “You are not an actor, you never will be; you are not a business man. You've made a start at writing, that's your proper work. Why not go on with it?”
“I can't get on with it. That one thing was accepted, and never paid for; everything else comes back regularly, just as before. Besides, I can go on writing wherever I am.”
“You've got friends here to help you.”
“They don't believe I can do anything but write nonsense.”
“Well, clever nonsense is worth writing. It's better than stodgy sense: literature is blocked up with that. Why not follow their advice?”
“Because I don't believe they are right. I'm not a clown; I don't mean to be. Because a man has a sense of humour it doesn't follow he has nothing else. That is only one of my gifts, and by no means the highest. I have knowledge of human nature, poetry, dramatic instinct. I mean to prove it to you all. Vane's the only man that understands me.”
Dan lit his pipe. “Have you made up your mind to go?”
“Of course I have. It's an opportunity that doesn't occur twice. 'There's a tide in the affairs—”
“Thanks,” interrupted Dan; “I've heard it before. Well, if you've made up your mind, there's an end of the matter. Good luck to you! You are young, and it's easier to learn things then than later.”
“You talk,” I answered, “as if you were old enough to be my grandfather.”
He smiled and laid both hands upon my shoulders. “So I am,” he said, “quite old enough, little boy Paul. Don't be angry; you'll always be little Paul to me.” He put his hands in his pockets and strolled to the window.
“What'll you do?” I enquired. “Will you keep on these rooms?”
“No,” he replied. “I shall accept an offer that has been made to me to take the sub-editorship of a big Yorkshire paper. It is an important position and will give me experience.”
“You'll never be happy mewed up in a provincial town,” I told him. “I shall want a London address, and I can easily afford it. Let's keep them on together.”
He shook his head. “It wouldn't be the same thing,” he said.
So there came a morning when we said good-bye. Before Dan returned from the office I should be gone. They had been pleasant months that we had spent together in these pretty rooms. Though my life was calling to me full of hope, I felt the pain of leaving them. Two years is a long period in a young man's life, when the sap is running swiftly. My affections had already taken root there. The green leaves in summer, in winter the bare branches of the square, the sparrows that chirped about the window-sills, the quiet peace of the great house, Dan, kindly old Deleglise: around them my fibres clung, closer than I had known. The Lady of the train: she managed it now less clumsily. Her hands and feet had grown smaller, her elbows rounder. I found myself smiling as I thought of her—one always did smile when one thought of Norah, everybody did;—of her tomboy ways, her ringing laugh—there were those who termed it noisy; her irrepressible frankness—there were times when it was inconvenient. Would she ever become lady-like, sedate, proper? One doubted it. I tried to picture her a wife, the mistress of a house. I found the smile deepening round my mouth. What a jolly wife she would make! I could see her bustling, full of importance; flying into tempers, lasting possibly for thirty seconds; then calling herself names, saving all argument by undertaking her own scolding, and doing it well. I followed her to motherhood. What a joke it would be! What would she do with them? She would just let them do what they liked with her. She and they would be a parcel of children together, she the most excited of them all. No; on second thoughts I could detect in her a strong vein of common sense. They would have to mind their p's and q's. I could see her romping with them, helping them to tear their clothes; but likewise I could see her flying after them, bringing back an armful struggling, bathing it, physicking it. Perhaps she would grow stout, grow grey; but she would still laugh more often than sigh, speak her mind, be quick, good-tempered Norah to the end. Her character precluded all hope of surprise. That, as I told myself, was its defect. About her were none of those glorious possibilities that make of some girls charming mysteries. A woman, said I to myself, should be a wondrous jewel, hiding unknown lights and shadows. You, my dear Norah—I spoke my thoughts aloud, as had become a habit with me: those who live much alone fall into this way—you are merely a crystal, not shallow—no, I should not call you shallow by any mans, but transparent.
What would he be, her lover? Some plain, matter-of-fact, business-like young fellow, a good player of cricket and football, fond of his dinner. What a very uninteresting affair the love-making would be! If she liked him—well, she would probably tell him so; if she didn't, he would know it in five minutes.
As for inducing her to change her mind, wooing her, cajoling her—I heard myself laughing at the idea.
There came a quick rap at the door. “Come in,” I cried; and she entered.
“I came to say good-bye to you,” she explained. “I'm just going out. What were you laughing at?”
“Oh, at an idea that occurred to me.”
“A funny one?”
“Yes.”
“Tell it me.”
“Well, it was something in connection with yourself. It might offend you.”
“It wouldn't trouble you much if it did, would it?”
“No, I don't suppose it would.”
“Then why not tell me?”
“I was thinking of your lover.”
It did offend her; I thought it would. But she looked really interesting when she was cross. Her grey eyes would flash, and her whole body quiver. There was a charming spice of danger always about making her cross.
“I suppose you think I shall never have one.”
“On the contrary, I think you will have a good many.” I had not thought so before then. I formed the idea for the first time in that moment, while looking straight into her angry face. It was still a childish face.
The anger died out of it as it always did within the minute, and she laughed. “It would be fun, wouldn't it. I wonder what I should do with him? It makes you feel very serious being in love, doesn't it?”
“Very.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
I hesitated for a moment. Then the delight of talking about it overcame my fear of being chaffed. Besides, when she felt it, nobody could be more delightfully sympathetic. I determined to adventure it.
“Yes,” I answered, “ever since I was a boy. If you are going to be foolish,” I added, for I saw the laugh before it came, “I shan't talk to you about it.”
“I'm not—I won't, really,” she pleaded, making her face serious again. “What is she like?”
I took from my breast pocket Barbara's photograph, and handed it to her in silence.
“Is she really as beautiful as that?” she asked, gazing at it evidently fascinated.
“More so,” I assured her. “Her expression is the most beautiful part of her. Those are only her features.”
She sighed. “I wish I was beautiful.”
“You are at an awkward age,” I told her. “It is impossible to say what you are going to be like.”
“Mamma was a lovely woman, everybody says so; and Tom I call awfully handsome. Perhaps I'll be better when I'm filled out a bit more.” A small Venetian mirror hung between the two windows; she glanced up into it. “It's my nose that irritates me,” she said. She rubbed it viciously, as if she would rub it out.
“Some people admire snub noses,” I explained to her.
“No, really?”
“Tennyson speaks of them as 'tip-tilted like the petals of a rose.'”
“How nice of him! Do you think he meant my sort?” She rubbed it again, but in a kinder fashion; then looked again at Barbara's photograph. “Who is she?”
“She was Miss Hasluck,” I answered; “she is the Countess Huescar now. She was married last summer.”
“Oh, yes, I remember; you told us about her. You were children together. But what's the good of your being in love with her if she's married?”
“It makes my whole life beautiful.”
“Wanting somebody you can't have?”
“I don't want her.”
“You said you were in love with her.”
“So I am.”
She handed me back the photograph, and I replaced it in my pocket.
“I don't understand that sort of love,” she said. “If I loved anybody I should want to have them with me always.”
“She is with me always,” I answered, “in my thoughts.” She looked at me with her clear grey eyes. I found myself blinking. Something seemed to be slipping from me, something I did not want to lose. I remember a similar sensation once at the moment of waking from a strange, delicious dream to find the sunlight pouring in upon me through an open window.
“That isn't being in love,” she said. “That's being in love with the idea of being in love. That's the way I used to go to balls”—she laughed—“in front of the glass. You caught me once, do you remember?”
“And was it not sweeter,” I argued, “the imagination? You were the belle of the evening; you danced divinely every dance, were taken in to supper by the Lion. In reality you trod upon your partner's toes, bumped and were bumped, were left a wallflower more than half the time, had a headache the next day. Were not the dream balls the more delightful?”
“No, they weren't,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “One real dance, when at last it came, was worth the whole of them. Oh, I know, I've heard you talking, all of you—of the faces that you see in dreams and that are ever so much more beautiful than the faces that you see when you're awake; of the wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. I don't believe a word of it. It's tommyrot!”
“I wish you wouldn't use slang.”
“Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it me.”
“I suppose you mean cant,” I suggested.
“No, I don't. Cant is something that you don't believe in yourself. It's tommyrot: there isn't any other word. When I'm in love it will be with something that is real.”
I was feeling angry with her. “I know just what he will be like. He will be a good-natured, commonplace—”
“Whatever he is,” she interrupted, “he'll be alive, and he'll want me and I shall want him. Dreams are silly. I prefer being up.” She clapped her hands. “That's it.” Then, silent, she looked at me with an expression of new interest. “I've been wondering and wondering what it was: you are not really awake yet. You've never got up.”
I laughed at her whimsical way of putting it; but at the back of my brain was a troubled idea that perhaps she was revealing to me the truth. And if so, what would “waking up,” as she termed it, be like? A flash of memory recalled to me that summer evening upon Barking Bridge, when, as it had seemed to me, the little childish Paul had slipped away from me, leaving me lonely and bewildered to find another Self. Was my boyhood in like manner now falling from me? I found myself clinging to it with vague terror. Its thoughts, its feelings—dreams: they had grown sweet to me; must I lose them? This cold, unknown, new Self, waiting to receive me: I shrank away from it with fear.
“Do you know, I think you will be rather nice when you wake up.”
Her words recalled me to myself. “Perhaps I never shall wake up,” I said. “I don't want to wake up.”
“Oh, but one can't go on dreaming all one's life,” she laughed. “You'll wake up, and fall in love with somebody real.” She came across to me, and taking the lapels of my coat in both her hands, gave me a vigorous shake. “I hope she'll be somebody nice. I am rather afraid.”
“You seem to think me a fool!” I was still angry with her, without quite knowing why.
She shook me again. “You know I don't. But it isn't the nice people that take best care of themselves. Tom can't. I have to take care of him.”
I laughed.
“I do, really. You should hear me scold him. I like taking care of people. Good-bye.”
She held out her hand. It was white now and shapely, but one could not have called it small. Strong it felt and firm as it gripped mine.