The two young men dined at the Café Royal. “It’s as good a kitchen as there is in London, and in the matter of people it isn’t such a tiresome repetition of those one meets everywhere else as Willis’s or the Prince’s. To see the same shoulders and the same necks, night after night—a fellow gets tired of it.”
To this explanation by Dicky of his choice, as they rolled forward in their hansom, Christian made no direct response. After a little he said: “Very soon now, I am going to do something that seems to have been in my mind for months. Perhaps I have only thought of it since this afternoon: I cannot be sure. But I am going to do it—I am going to know for myself what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses and feathers in their hair—all thinking and talking about themselves and their own little affairs—that does not mean London. And a few large houses in the country, where these same people spend a few months riding after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with idle, sleepy talk—that does not represent England.”
“Doesn’t it!” cried Westland. “I should say that’s just what it did, worse luck!”
“No, no!” protested Christian. “I don’t want to be told that it does—for then I should want to go away altogether. No—there is the other thing, and I am going to find it out, and see it and know it. When all those years of my boyhood and youth I was so proud of being an Englishman, it was not this empty, valueless life of the West End, or the chase of foxes and birds in the country, that I longed for, and nourished pride in.”
“Oh, but they do other things, you know,” laughed Dicky. “They are in Parliament, some of them, or they are at the bar, or in the Services, or they manage estates or are directors in companies, and that sort of thing. And some of them go in a lot for charities, and work on committees and organize things, you know. You’d hardly believe how much of that most of the women let themselves in for.”
“That is not what I mean,” said the other, rather abruptly. “To me all that is not worth the snap of a finger,” and he emphasized his words by a gestured with the hand which rested on the door of the hansom.
At an advanced stage of the dinner, the young men came to the subject again. In reply to a random inquiry Christian said that his grandfather, the duke, as far as he knew, was neither worse nor better in health than he had been all winter. “I have not been to Caermere since my first visit,” he went on. “I am really living upon a programme arranged for me, I should think, by a committee of my relations. Lord Lingfield is my active bear-leader. He conducts me, or sends me, wherever it has been decided that I shall go. It was not deemed important that I should go to Caermere again—and so I have not gone. Voilà tout! If I had been free to myself, I think I should have gone.”
“It must be an awfully jolly place, from the pictures I’ve seen of it,” said Westland.
“Jolly!” cried Christian. “My dear creature, it is a grave, a mausoleum, a place of skulls and dead men’s bones! You have never seen such a family vault in all your days. When I even begin to think of undertaking the task of brightening it into life again, I grow dizzy. The immensity of the work unnerves me. And now I do not know if I shall ever put my hand to it. The country-gentleman idea—which you make so much of in England—it does not appeal to me. It is too idle—too purposeless. Of course my cousin Emanuel, he makes a terrible toil of it—and does some wonderful things, beyond doubt. But after all, what does it come to? He helps people to be extremely fine who without him would only be tolerably fine. But I have the feeling that one should help those who are not fine at all—who have never had the chance to be fine, who do not know what it means. Emanuel’s wife—oh, a very lovely character—she said to me that they disliked coming up to town, the sight of the London poor distressed them so much. Well, that is the point—if I am to help anybody at all, it is the London poor that I should try to help. Emanuel’s plan is to give extra bones, and teach new tricks, to dogs already very comfortable. My heart warms to the dogs without collars, the homeless and hungry devils who look for bones in the gutters.”
“Oh, you’re going in for settlements and that sort of thing,” commented Dicky. “I hear that is rather disappointing work. If you don’t take the sporting papers at the reading-room they say the men won’t come at all. Slingsby Chetwynd was awfully keen on the thing. He went down to stop a whole week—at Shoreditch or Houndsditch or the Isle of Dogs, or somewhere like that—and a woman smashed his hat in, and he fell into a cellar—and he was jolly glad to get back again the same night.”
Christian was pursuing thoughts of his own. The wine was admirable—as indeed it should have been considering the pains Dicky had been at, with pursed lips and lifted eyebrows, in the selection of it—and Christian had found an unaccustomed pleasure in its aromatic, sub-acid taste. He had drunk rather freely of it, and was satisfied with himself for having done so. He leaned back in his chair now, and watching the golden fountain of bubbles forever streaming upward in his glass, mused upon welcome new impulses within him toward the life of a free man.
“None the less,” he remarked, indifferent to the irrelevancy of his theme, “I should have liked to go to Caermere during the winter. I am annoyed with myself now that I did not go—whether it was arranged for me or not. There is a lady there for whom I felt great sympathy. I had expected to be of service to her long before this—but I am of service to no one. She is a cousin—no doubt you know her—Lady Cressage.”
“But she is in London,” put in Westland. “I only know her a little, but Lady Selton used to be by way of seeing a good deal of her. She told me last week that she was in town—taken a little flat somewhere—Victoria Street way, I think. She doesn’t go in for being very smart, you know. Why—yes—of course she’s your cousin by marriage. Awfully pretty woman she was. Gad! how well I remember her season! All the fellows went quite off their heads. How funny—that she should be your cousin!”
Christian took no note of his companion’s closing words, or of the tone in which they had been uttered. He scowled at the playful bubbles in his glass, as he reflected that the news of her arrival in London ought not to have come to him in this roundabout, accidental way. Why did none of his own people tell him? Or still more to the point, why had not she herself told him? He really had given her only an occasional and sporadic thought, during these past four or five months. Now, as he frowned at his wine, it seemed to him that his whole winter had been burdened with solicitude for her. Or no, “burdened” was an ungracious word, and false to boot. He would say “mellowed” or “enriched” instead.
“You must find out for me”—he began, and then, upon a second thought born of pique, checked himself. “Or do not mind—it is of no consequence. I shall hear as a matter of course.” He called for the bill with a decision in his voice which seemed full of warning that the topic was exhausted.
Westland could not help observing the fat roll of crackling white notes which the other drew from his pocket. If they were all of the smallest denomination, they must still represent something like his whole year’s allowance. The general understanding that Christian’s unfamiliarity with English ways excused, and even invited, wise admonition from his friends, prompted him to speak.
“That’s rather a lot to carry about with you, old man,” he said, in gentle expostulation.
“Oh, I like it!” Christian declared, with shining eyes. He snapped the elastic band about the roll, with an air of boyish delight in the sound, as he returned it to his pocket. “If you knew the years in which I counted my sous!”.
It was nearly ten o’clock when they left. Beginning with the Pavilion, they went to four or five music halls, only to find that there were no seats to be had. “Why, of course it’s the boat-race,” exclaimed Dicky at last. “Stupid of me to have forgotten it. I say, I ought to have come for you this morning, and taken you up the river to see it. It’s worth seeing—for once. I wonder Lingfield did not arrange it for you.”
“Oh, several people asked me to join their parties,” Christian replied. “But it did not attract me. The athletics here—they rather annoy me. It is as if people thought of nothing else. And to have students at the universities consumed with the idea—that is specially unpleasant to my mind. You must remember—I am a teacher by profession.”
“We’ll go back to the Empire,” Westland decided. “Ever been there? Well, it’s worth seeing, too—perhaps more than once. The Johnnies’ll be out in extraordinary force, I’m afraid, but then you ought to see them too, I suppose. It takes all sorts to make a world—and the world is what you’ve come out to look at. Let me get the tickets—or, well, if you insist—ask for the promenade.” It was indeed a novel spectacle, which smote and confused his eyes, rather than revealed itself to them, when Christian found himself inside. The broad, low, rounded promenade was so crowded with people that at first sight walking about seemed wholly impracticable, but Dicky stepped confidently into the jumbled throng and began moving through it, apparently with ease, and the other followed him. They made their way to the end, where a man in uniform guarded a staircase; then, turning, they elbowed along back to the opposite end of the half-circle. This gained, there was nothing in Dicky’s thoughts, seemingly, but to repeat the performance indefinitely. Their progress was of a necessity slow. On the inner side a dense wall of backs and high hats rendered hopeless any notion of seeing the stage below. Christian, struggling after his guide, wondered what else there was to see.
After a time it became obvious to him that the women who formed so large an element of the lazily shifting crowd were also the occasion of its being. They walked about, looking the men in the face with a cold, free, impassive scrutiny upon which, even if he had never seen it before, intuition would have fixed a label for him. Other women, from the plush seats on the outer edge of the circle, bent upon the whole moving mass of promenaders the same stoical, inscrutable gaze. The range of age among them did not seem extended to his uninformed glance. In years they were apparently all about alike. Some, indeed, had fresher faces and smoother skins than others, but when the eyes were considered a certain indefinable equality was insisted upon in them all. Their toilets were often striking in effect, and especially their hats—exaggerating both in breadth of brim, and in the height and bulk of the edifice of plumes above, the prevalent fashion in such matters—were notable to the spectator; but Christian found himself, upon consideration, more interested in their eyes than in anything else.
A certain stony quality in this stereotyped gaze of theirs suggested a parallel to his memory; he had seen precisely that same cool, unruffled, consciously unconscious stare in princesses who had looked at him without beholding him in the far-away days of his life about the hotels of the Riviera. It was very curious, he thought—this incongruous resemblance. But a little closer analysis showed that the likeness was but partial. These ladies of the promenade could look about them with the imperturbability of princesses, it was true, but only so long as they saw nothing which concerned them immediately. Nay, now he could discern beneath the surface of this passionless perlustration a couched vigilance of attention, which ever and again flashed uppermost with electric swiftness. When this mercurial change came, one saw the temperament mapped out like a landscape under the illumination of lightning. There gleamed forth expectancy, dread, joy, irritability, fun, dislike or wistful hope—whatever the mood of the instant yielded—with a force of intensity almost startling. Then, as quickly as it came, the look might vanish; even if it flickered on, the briefest interval of repose brought back again the watchful, dispassionate, hardened regard.
“Have you had enough of this?” Dicky asked, with an implication of weariness in his tone.
Christian, halting, took slow and bewildered cognizance of the fact that he had been going from one end of the promenade to the other for a very long time. Insensibly, at some period of the experience, he had taken the lead from his companion, and had been dragging him about in his wake.
“It is very interesting,” was the vague excuse he offered to Dicky, and even more to himself.
A sofa just beside them was for the moment unoccupied. Christian seated himself with the air of one physically tired out. “Ought we not to order drinks?” he asked his companion, who stood over him, looking down somewhat doubtfully.
“Oh, dear, no—not here!” Dicky replied, with conviction. “It’s nearly closing time—and we’ll go over to the club for half an hour—where we know our tipple. Shall we run along now?”
“No—sit down here,” said Christian. He spoke with the authority of a profound emotion, that glowed in his eyes and quivered on his lips. Westland obeyed him, pretending to a nonchalance which his mistrustful glance belied.
“This is all very extraordinary to me,” Christian continued, in a low, strenuous voice. He spoke with even more than his wonted fluency. “It catches hold of me. It fills my mind with new thoughts. There is something in the very air here—”
“Musk and cigarette smoke,” interposed Dicky, lightly. Then he saw that levity struck a false note.
“Pah!” the other jerked forth, impatiently. “Don’t talk like that! It is the most terrible, the most touching, the most inspiring thing I have seen in my life. I breathe in a new ambition here, out of this atmosphere. We were talking of the London poor. I thought they made the loudest appeal—but they are nothing besidethis!” He spread his thin, nervous hand out as he spoke, and swept it in a comprehensive gesture over the spectacle before them. “These are my sisters—my unhappy and dishonored sisters, scorned and scornful—oh, yes, they are all my sisters!”
“But fortunately they don’t know it,” urged Dicky, surveying the ladies with pouting lips and half-closed eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t mention it to them.”
Christian turned round, with one knee on the sofa, and claimed his companion’s attention. “I wanted to be able to add you to my very little list of friends,” he said, gravely. “All the evening I have had that in my mind—and it may be something else, too. But if you cannot understand me, now, when I tell you how all this moves me—and if you only care to mock at what I say—why, then, it is not needful to say more.”
Dicky faced about in turn, and regarded him with a puzzled glance, from which he was at pains to exclude all signs of frivolity. “But you haven’t told mehowit moves you at all,” he said, vaguely.
“Oh, how,” repeated Christian with hesitation. “It is not easy to say just how. But I am devoured by a great compassion. I could weep tears at the heart-misery I see here. They shout in the papers and wring their hands over the massacre of Armenians—but right here—this thing—is it not more cruel and dreadful still? Here there is no question of race hatreds and religious hatreds, but just the cold, implacable pressure of poverty on human souls, crushing them and sinking them in shame.”
“Oh, that’s only a part of the story—not such a deuce of a big part either,” urged the other, gently. “Don’t get so excited about it, my dear fellow. It is by no means a new thing. And wait till you know more about it, and have thought it over—and then, if you feel that there is anything you can do, why, take my word for it, it will still be here. It won’t disappear in the meanwhile. You’ll still be in time.”
Christian regarded him wistfully, and with a mild, faint smile. “You would never enter into my feelings about this,” he said, softly. “We are made differently. It strikes you as strange, does it not, that a young man, coming into contact with this for the first time, should be filled only with the yearning to help these poor girls, and do good to them? It surprises you? It is something new to you, n’est ce pas?”
Dicky grinned within decorous limits. “My dear boy,” he declared, confidentially, “so far from being new, it’s the oldest thing in the world. Every young fellow worth his salt that I have ever known, or that anybody’s ever known, has swelled himself out with precisely these same reform sentiments. In this very promenade here I have witnessed at least a dozen attacks like yours. And don’t think I am jeering at the thing. It is a very beautiful and generous spirit indeed, and I admire it awfully, I assure you—only—only, as one gets to know his way about a trifle better, he sees that there isn’t so much in it as he thought there was. And that’s what I was trying to say to you. Don’t let your first impulses run away with you. If the subject interests you, appeals to you, very well; get to understand it. You will find that it is more complicated, perhaps, than you think. But when you know it all, why, then you can do what you like.”
Some of the light seemed to have been turned out. A definitive blare rolled up from the orchestra below; the throng of promenaders, though still informed by the most leisurely of moods, was converging upon the door of exit. The two young men arose.
Christian suddenly yawned. “I am tired—and depressed,” he said, wearily. “I think I will ask you to let me go home.”
“Nonsense!” said Dicky, promptly. “We’ll go to the club, and get a pick-up, and then you shall see something that won’t depress you. I grant you thisisrather melancholy. God knows why we came.”
An hour or more later, emerging from a confusing sequence of narrow passages and winding ascents and descents, Christian followed Westland out through a groove of painted canvas to the stage of the Hanover Theater.
He had never seen a theater from this point of view, and the first few minutes of his scrutiny—here where he stood at the wings, while Dicky looked after the coats and hats—were full of pleased interest. The huge dusky space of the galleries overhead, strange and formidable in its dark bulk like some giant balloon, was very impressive. By contrast, the stage itself seemed to give out light. A long riband of a table stretched across the back, and down the two sides, and about this clustered many people; shining shirt-fronts and bald heads, pale shimmering dresses and white shoulders, the glitter of napery and plates and glasses—all was radiant under the powerful electric glow from above. He could see now, in the halfshadows down beyond the footlights, two or three rows of heads of people sitting in the front stalls. To his fancy these detached heads appeared to belong to an order of beings quite distinct from those on the stage. He wondered if actors felt their audiences to be thus remote and aloof from themselves.
“We can push our way in at the other end—there’s less of a crush there,” he heard Dicky say to him. He followed his guide across the stage, through groups of conversing guests who had brought out their sandwiches and glasses from the throng, and came eventually to the table itself. Some one held out a bottle toward him, and he lifted a glass to be filled. From under some other stranger’s arm he extricated a plate, containing something in gelatine, he knew not what. In straightening himself he pushed against a person unexpectedly close behind him.
Half turning, with the murmur of an apology upon his lips, his eyes encountered those of a lady, who seemed to know him, and to be smiling at him.
“How d’ye do?” this lady said to him. There could be no doubt about the cordiality of her tone. Her left hand was occupied with a champagne glass and a fan, but her right was being lifted to him, almost against his breast, in greeting. He gazed at her in smiling perplexity, the while he signed that both his own hands were filled.
“You don’t know me from Adam,” she said to him, cheerfully. “But I’m your cousin—Cora Torr, you know.”
You’ve altered so much since I saw you! It was odds against my recognizing you at all,” declared Cora, beaming forth into conversation before Christian had fairly grasped the significance of her identity.
“I should never have believed they would make such an Englishman out of you, in just these few months. Let’s see—it was October, wasn’t it? Yes, of course—the First.” She showed her beautiful teeth in a flash of gaiety. “The pheasants weren’t the only ones that got hit that day. But bygones are bygones.... And how do you like London? How do you find it compares with Paris? I always maintain that there’s more real life here, if you know where to look for it.... But I am afraid you’re not glad to see me.”
“There you are wrong. I am glad to see you,” Christian replied, with deliberation. He made his words good by thrusting his plate back upon the table and shaking her gloved hand. There was a frank smile in his eyes.
“Get my glass filled again,” she suggested—“and-your own too—and let’s get out of the way. These people push as if they had had nothing to eat since Christmas. Of all the hogs in evening clothes, the stage-supper hog is the worst. Well, and how have you been, all this time?”
They had moved across the stage to the entrance, and paused near it in a little nook of momentary isolation. Christian made conventional answer to her query, and to other remarks of hers calling for no earnest attention, the while he concentrated his thoughts upon the fact that they were actually standing here together, talking like old friends.
It was sufficiently surprising, this fact, but even more remarkable was the satisfaction he himself was getting from it. There was no room for doubt; he really enjoyed being with her. There was no special need to concern himself with what she was saying. She hardly paused for replies, and seemed not to mind in the least the automatic character of the few which came to her. He had only to smile a little, and nod, and let his eyes glow pleasurably, and she went blithely on. The perception came suddenly to him that he had been sorry also for her. Indeed, now that he reflected upon it, had not hers been the most cruel misfortune of all? The memory of the drawn, agonized mask of a face she had shown, over the tea-table in the conservatory at Caermere, rose in his mind’s vision. He looked up at the strips of canvas and lamps above, with half-closed eyes, recalling in reverie the details of this suffering face; then he turned abruptly to confront her, and observe afresh the happy contrast she presented to-night.
Cora was looking away for the instant, and apparently conveying by lifted eyebrows and shakes of the head a message of some sort to some person on the bustling stage unknown to him. He glanced instinctively in the direction of her signal, but gained no information—and indeed realized at once that he was not in search of any. Of course, she knew everybody here, and would be exchanging nods and smiles of recognition all the evening. It occurred to him to wonder if her husband, that Captain Edward of unpleasant memory, was on the stage, but he had the power to put the thought promptly out of his mind. It was only Cora that he was interested in, and that he wanted to talk with. And here she was, once more looking into his face, and restoring by her smile his almost jocund pleasure in the situation.
He still maintained the rôle of listener, but it grew increasingly clear to him that when his turn came he would have a good deal to say, and that he would say it well. He had never spoken on familiar terms with an actress before—and the experience put him wonderfully at his ease. He felt that he could say things to her; already he delighted in the assurance of her receptivity, her immunity from starched nonsense, her genial and comforting good fellowship. As he continued to look at her, and to smile, he remembered what people always said, or rather took for granted, about ladies on the stage. The consciousness shaped itself within him that she offered a timely and felicitous compromise—a sort of bridge between those formal, “gun-metal” women of society whom he desired never to see again, and those hapless, unblest creatures of the Empire.
Presently she took his arm, and they moved round to the stalls in front, and found seats a little apart from any one else. A large number of young ladies, in white or light-hued evening dresses, were seated about in the rows before them, and Cora pointed out this one and that among them to Christian. “That is Dolly Montressor—the dancer, you know—her photos are all the rage just now. The girl in pink, over there—just turning round—she is the one who sued young Concannon for breach of promise. You must remember. Her lawyers put the bailiffs in for what she owed them, after they’d taken everything the jury gave her, and she dressed the bailiffs in livery and had them wait at the table at a big supper she gave. The little thicknosed dark man there—next but one to her—he drew a check for the supper and the bailiffs too. You see the small, thin girl with the tomato-colored hair—she didn’t bringhersuit into court—one isn’t fox-headed for nothing. She settled outside at the last minute—the Lord Carmody case, you know—and no one’s ever heard a whisper of any supper she ever gave. It isn’t at all her line. She puts it all into South Africans; they say she’s good for thirty thousand pounds, if she’s got a penny. It isn’t bad, you know, on a salary of six quid, and only the pantomime season at that. Oh, there’s Peggy Wiltshire—just in the doorway. She’s the most remarkable woman in England. How old would you think she was? Forty? Why, my dear man, she was billed as a star in the old original Black Crook—just about the time I was born. She can’t be a minute under sixty. But look at her—the neck and shoulders of a girl! Isn’t it amazing! Why, she was knocking about town when your father was a youngster—and here she is still going strong.”
The tables were being cleared from the stage, and the fringe of gentlemen who remained hungry and thirsty was retiring slowly and with palpable reluctance toward the wings. Some sad-faced musicians emerged wearily from an unsuspected cave beneath the footlights, and exhibited their violins and flutes to the general gaze with an air of profound dejection. Their fiddle strings began to whine at one another, in a perfunctory and bad-tempered groping about for something they were expected to have in common. A stout man on the stage vigorously superintended the removal of the last table, and warned off with a comprehensive gesture the lingering remnant of unsated raveners; then, turning, he lifted his hand. On the instant, some score and more of the young ladies in white and pale pinks and blues and lavenders rose from their front stalls, and moved toward the stage door at the left. They pressed forward like a flock of sheep—and with faces as listlessly vacant as any pasture could afford. Christian observed their mechanical exit with a curling lip.
“If these are the renowned beauties, whose fascinations turn the heads of all the young men about town,” he confided to his companion, “then it says extremely little for the quality of what is inside those heads.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinary!” she mused at him, eyeing the bevy of celebrities with a ruminating glance. “This must be somewhere near the sixth or seventh lot of ’em that even I’ve seen passing through the turnstile, as you might say. Where do they all come from?—and good heavens! where do they all go to? It’s a procession that never stops, you know. You’d think there was a policeman, keeping it moving. You have these girls here—well, they’re the queens, just for the minute. They own the earth. Nothing in the world is too good for them. Very well: just behind them are some other girls, a few years younger. Goodness knows where they were to-night—in the back ranks of the ballets, perhaps, or doing their little turn at the Paragon or the Canterbury, or doing nothing at all—nothing but keeping their toes pointed in this direction. And they are treading close on the heels of these queens you see here; and behindthemare girls of sixteen or so, and behindthemthe little chits of ten and twelve—and they’re all pushing along—and in time each lot gets in front, out under the limelight, and has its little year on the throne—and then gets shoved off to make room for the next. You might have seen two-thirds of these men here ten years ago. But not the women. Oh, no! Only here and there one—an old stager like Polly Wiltshire—or a middle-aged stager like myself. But we’re merely salt to the porridge.”
“But do you not wish to dance?” he asked her. The orchestra had begun a waltz, and the young ladies from the front stalls, each now attached to a stiffly gyrating male figure, were circling about on the stage, with a floating, wave-like swing of their full skirts which revealed to those below in the stalls rhythmic glimpses of whisking feet and trim black ankles.
“I will dance with you with pleasure,” she replied, promptly.
“Unfortunately”—he began with confusion—“it is ridiculous of me, but I never learned.”
“Oh, then, we will sit here and talk,” she insisted. “I truly don’t want to dance. It’s ever so much cooler and more comfortable here. One has to come to these things, you know—you have to show yourself or you’re like the man who fell out of the balloon—simply not in it. But they’re all alike—all deadly stupid unless you’re young and want to kick your legs about—or unless you find some one you’re particularly glad to see.”
Christian did not seek to evade the implication of the genial glance with which she pointed this last remark. “Yes, it is good of you to stay here with me,” he declared. “Except you and my friend who brought me here—I thought I saw him dancing a moment ago—I don’t know a soul. I have been saying to-day,” he continued, settling down in his seat toward her, “that I make friends badly—I remain here in England almost a stranger.”
“Why, I thought you went everywhere. I know I’m forever seeing your name in the ‘Morning Post.’ You spell it Tower, I notice.”
“Oh, yes, I have been going everywhere—but going as one goes alone through a gallery of pictures. I do not bring out any friends with me.”
She stole a swift glance at him, as she fanned herself. “You surprise me,” she commented. “I should have thought everybody would be running after you.”
“Do they? I am not conscious of it.” He spoke wearily. “If they do, it does not interest me. They are not my kind of people. They take no hold whatever upon my sympathy. They make no appeal to the imagination.”
“You could hardly say that about those ladies’ skirts up there,” she jocosely remarked. “I had no idea silk petticoats flapped so.”
He was not to be diverted from his theme. “It is very funny about me,” he went on. “I seem to make no friends among men, of my own age or any other. Of course there are two or three exceptions—but no more. And as for the majority of women, they attract me still less. Yet when, once in a great while, I do meet some one who really interests me, it is always a woman. These few women whom I have in mind—oh, I could count them on the fingers of one hand—they make a much deeper and more lasting impression on me than any man can make.”
“I believe that frequently happens,” she put in lightly. She did not seem to him to be following his thread of reasoning with conspicuous closeness, but her pleasant smile reassured him.
“I think I am most readily moved on the side of my compassion,” he continued, intent upon the development of his self-analysis. “If I am sorry for the people, it is easier for me to like them—that is, if they are young and pretty women.”
Cora laughed aloud at this, then lapsed abruptly into thoughtfulness. “How do you mean?” she asked.
“To-night I went to the place of the—the promenade—the Empire, is it not? And the sight of the young women there—it terribly affected me. I wanted to shout out that they were all my sisters—that I would protect them all—that they should never be forced by poverty and want to face that miserable humiliation again.” She looked at him, her lips parted over the beautiful teeth, a certain blankness of non-comprehension in the beautiful eyes. As she slowly grasped the drift of his words, the eyes and lips joined in a reserved and baffling smile. “You’re a nice boy,” she decided, “but you’re tremendously young. Those girls are lazy, greedy, good-for-nothing hussies. They wouldn’t do honest work for a living if it was brought to them on a silver salver. They haven’t an idea in their empty painted heads except to wheedle or steal money from drunken fools. They’re nothing but—what d’ye call ’em?—parasites. I’d put ’em all on the treadmill, if I had my way.”
Christian sat up a little, and she was alert in noting the signs of disaffection on his mobile face. “Nevertheless, there is a great sorrow and a great shame in it all,” he said, gravely.
“Oh, that I admit,” she declared, making busy work with her fan. “Of course! Perhaps I spoke more sharply than I meant. Every one is sorry for the poor creatures—but—but I confess I’m sorrier still for the girls who have to work like slaves for the barest necessities of life. Why, my dressmaker’s girls, two of ’em—poor little half-starved sisters who may come at nine or ten o’clock at night to deliver things, or try something on—they get twenty-five shillings a week between them. That’s what gets onmynerve.”
He preserved silence for a time, then suddenly sat upright and faced her. A new light shone in his eyes. “I am the dullest person on earth,” he protested. “All this time I have not thought of it. I want to ask you a thousand things about your sister. Did you not know?—She is my oldest friend in England.”
Cora drew a long breath, and held up her fan for a protracted and attentive inspection. “Oh, yes—you mean Frank,” she said, tentatively.
“Frank? Is that her name? She works. She has a machine à écrire—a typewriter it is called. You must tell me about her! Is she very well? And where is she to be found? How shall I go about it to recall myself to her?” As there came no immediate response, he put his further meditations into dreamy words: “She spoke the first kind words to me, here in England. I bade farewell to France and the old hard life, in her company. It was she who pointed with her finger for me to have my first look at England—the little, rose-colored island in the green water, with the purple clouds above it. It seemed that we were very close together—on that one day. And I was so full of the thought of seeing her very soon again! And that was September—and now it is very nearly May!. . . But you have not told me! Where is it that she is to be found? Where does she live?”
“She lives at home with my people,” Cora replied, still with reflective deliberation. It was with a visible effort that she shook off the preoccupied air into which she had lapsed. “But you don’t want to go there—it’s out of the world—red-busses and green-busses and a tram and that sort of thing. But she has an office now of her own; that’s where you’d find her most easily. Bless me if I know where it is—it’s between the Strand and the Embankment, but I never can remember which is Norfolk Street and which Arundel Street—and really I’m not sure she’s on either. But my brother is here. I’ll ask him, presently. And so you know Frank?”
“Ah, yes, but you know her better still,” said Christian, softly, nestling again into the corner of his chair nearest her. “I wanted you to tell me about her.”
“Oh, well—but what is there to tell?” she made answer, vaguely. “She is a good girl; she’s frightfully clever; she works very hard, and gives most of her money to her mamma; she’s successful, too, because she’s got a shop of her own, at last—and—and—that’s about all, isn’t it? You know, we’re not by way of seeing much of each other. There’s no quarrel, of course—not the least in the world—but I’m too frivolous to be in her class at all. I dare say it’s my fault—I ought to go and look her up. That’s what I will do, too, one of these days. But—you mustn’t misunderstand me—she’s an awfully good girl, that is, of course, if you like that sort of girl. And she’s pretty, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I think so,” affirmed Christian, almost with solemnity. “What time would she come to her office—in the morning, I mean?”
“Oh, don’t ask me!” laughed Cora. “At some ghastly hour, when they have breakfast, I believe, in cabmen’s shelters, and the streets haven’t been swept. I know it only by hearsay. I’ve never stopped up quite as late as that, you know. But you see something like it, driving round by Covent Garden on your way home from a late dance, to see the flowers. Have you ever done that?”
Christian shook his head. The idea attracted him, apparently. “At what hour is it?” he asked, with interest.
“Oh, four or five or something like that. It’s really the prettiest sight you ever saw. I used to go often, at this time of year, and take home a cabload of flowers. But I am getting too old now—and too serious-minded. The mother of a family—you know.”
Christian looked at his watch. “It has occurred to me”—he suggested, hesitatingly—“it is now after two—perhaps we could make a party to go this morning. The dancing will not stop earlier, will it?”
On the stage nothing seemed further from any mind than stopping. There was some complicated kind of set dance in progress, which at the moment involved the spectacle of some score of couples, hands all joined, romping madly around in a gigantic ring. The dresses whirled more wildly than ever; the men crooked their legs and hung outward from the circle as they went, stamping their feet and laughing boisterously. Christian’s eyes singled out one young man who seemed to be making most noise of all—and then he perceived that it was Dicky Westland.
“Perhaps it might be arranged,” Cora replied, after consideration, and with a sidelong eye upon her companion. “I will go behind for a moment, and find my brother, and see what he says. No, you stop here. I will come back again.”
So many people were moving about with entire individual freedom, that he offered no objection to her departure. She pushed her way confidently yet affably past the others in the row, and disappeared at the stage door. He had no clues by which to follow her in fancy after that. Once he thought he distinguished her at the back of the stage—but for the rest it was her sister rather than the friendly Cora who engaged his thoughts. The idea that he was to see her again, quite without delay, seemed to illuminate his whole mind.
In the labyrinth of shunted scenery behind the back-curtain, and along the narrow corridors of dressing-rooms, now devoted to varying hospitable uses, Cora prosecuted what was for a time a fruitless search.
“Where are the gentlemen getting their drinks?” she asked at last of a cloak-room attendant, and the answer simplified her task. Downstairs, at the door of the manager’s room, she was lucky enough to hit upon Major Pirie. “Tell Eddy that’ I want him, will you, old man,” she said, nodding with assurance toward the crowded, smoky little interior, “and if that brother of mine is in there, I want to see him for a minute, too.”
The brother came out first—a slender, overdressed youth, with a face which suggested a cheap and inferior copy of Cora’s. It had the self-complacency without the high spirits—the comeliness of line without the delicacy of texture and charm of color. He was obviously young in years, but he regarded her through the eyes of an elderly and wearied person.
“Hello,” he said, amiably enough. “Goin’ to take Eddy home? He won’t be the worse for a friendly lead. Oh, he’s all right, though, up to now. He’s got rippin’ odds against Perambulator from Hoskins, seventy to three, you know, in fivers. Try and get him to let me in on the bet, will you? I offered to take half of it, the minute the bet was made—but he didn’t answer me. You can work it, if you try, old girl.”
“What’s Frank’s address—her office, I mean?” she put in abruptly, “Got a pencil? Go and get one from somebody. Thirty-two A, you say? Thanks! Now tell Eddy to come out.”
“But what’s up? What do you want with Frank? Anything I can tell her?”
“Never you mind! And don’t lisp a word to her, or to Eddy or to any one else. If it comes off, it’ll be a beano for the lot of us.”
“Right you are,” he assented, with a glimmer of animation. “But say, you won’t forget about the Hoskins bet, will you? If I could even have a third of it! I could do with some odd sovereigns just now, and no mistake.”
“Sh-h! Here he comes. You run away-now, d’ye see; I want to talk with Eddy.”
Captain Edward emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke which veiled the throng within the manager’s room. “Well?” he demanded, with a kind of sulky eagerness.
“I haven’t told him you were here,” Cora began, under her breath, drawing her husband aside down the passage. “It didn’t seem to come into the talk. He thinks I’m here with Tom.”
Edward looked down upon his wife, with a slow, ponderous glance of mingled hope and uneasiness. He pulled at his small yellow mustache, and aimlessly jingled some keys in his pocket.
“You’ve had nearly two hours with him, you know,” he protested, doubtfully.
“Don’tI know it!” she ejaculated, holding up her hands in mock pain at the retrospect. “Good God! If I had a thousand pounds to show for it, I’d say it was the hardest earned moneyIever handled.”
“Yes, but you haven’t got anything to show—so far’s I can make out,” he commented with gloom. “You didn’t mention my name at all, eh? But that was what you particularly set out to do, I thought.”
“Well, you thought wrong,” she responded briskly. “I set out to do what was wisest under the circumstances, and I’ve done it. I’ve got an inkling of a game to be played”—she let her eyes twinkle at him as she made this tantalizing little pause—“a game, you old goose, worth seven hundred thousand times anything you ever thought of.”
The ex-hussar regarded her fixedly, the while he pondered her words. “I don’t think I’m very keen about games,” he remarked at last, with obvious suspicion in his tone. “A married woman always gets the worst of games, in the long run.”
She grinned affectionate contempt up at him. “Don’t be such a duffer, Eddy!” she remonstrated with him. “If I had a notion of that sort—do you suppose I’d come and give it away to you? What rot you talk!”
“Yes—but whatisyour game?” he demanded, doggedly.
“I won’t tell you!” She spoke with great apparent decision. “You’d blab it all over the place. You can no more keep a secret than you can keep a ten-pound note.”
“Oh, I say, Cora,” he urged, in grieved protestation. “You know I’m a regular bailey oyster, where a thing has to be kept dark. You’d better tell me, you know. It’ll keep me from—imaginin’ things.”
The wife smiled. “It’s only a plant I’ve got in my mind,” she explained, after consideration. “What’s the matter with my naming a wife for him, eh?”
Edward, upon reflection, pouted his lips. “Probably you’d come a cropper over it, in the first place,” he objected, slowly, “and then even if you did name the winner, she’d probably welsh us out of our winnings—and besides, what do we want of his marrying at all. The longer he puts off getting married, the less the odds against us gets. I should think even a woman could see that.”
Cora permitted herself a frank yawn. “I’ll explain it to you to-morrow,” she said.
“And now I must go back to my Juggins for a few minutes. I’ll come and fetch you when I’m ready to go.”
“I don’t fancy it much, you know,” he urged upon her as she turned. He took a step toward her, and put his hand on her arm. “If your brother Tom was any good”—he began, with a hard growl in his voice—“by God, I’d have half a mind to talk with him aboutmyplan. Old Pirie’d be no use—but if Tom had the sense and the nerve—why, we’d—”
She had held his eye with a steady, comprehending glance, under the embarrassment of which his speech faltered and then lapsed altogether. “No, the less either you or Tom have to do with your plan the better. Go in now, and take a plain soda, and wait for me! You’ve got no plan, mind you. You’ve simply been dreaming about it. Do you hear? You never had a plan! You can’t have one!”
She spoke with significant authority, and he deferred to it with a sullen upward wag of the head. “All right,” he muttered curtly, and turned on his heel.
“Plain soda, mind!” she called after him, and without waiting for an answer, ran briskly up the steps toward the stage.
Captain Edward’s plain soda had become a remote and almost wholly effaced memory by the time his wife again summoned him from the manager’s room.
“We’ll cut this now, if you don’t mind,” she remarked, in her most casual tone. “I’m as tired as if I’d danced every minute.” She had put on her wraps, and her small, pretty face, framed by the white down of her hood, seemed to his scrutiny to wear an expression of increased contentment.
“Anything fresh?” he asked, as they went in search of his coat and hat.
“Yes—fresh is the word,” she replied, with simulated nonchalance. “Fresh, fresher, freshest—as we used to say at school.”
“Wha’ is it?” he inquired, when they were within touch of the open air. The music was still audible behind them, broken by faint, intermittent echoes of stamping feet and laughing voices.
“I’ll tell you about it in the morning,” she answered listlessly. “I hope to heaven you’ve got a cab-fare.”
“Yes, tha’s all right,” said Edward, waving his stick toward the rank in the dark middle distance of the street. “Whyn’t you tell me all about it?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t get onto it now,” she replied, But later, in the hansom, the desire to unburden her mind achieved the mastery.
“Are you awake?” she demanded, and went on: “He’s not a bad sort, that boy, you know.”
“Damn him!” said Edward, breathing heavily.
“I rather like him myself,” she continued. “He’s a bit slow to talk to, and he’s fresher than Devonshire cream, but there isn’t a drop of the Johnnie in him. He’s as clean as my little girl.”
“Damn him,” repeated her husband, but in a milder and even argumentative tone.
“He’s a proper bundle of nerves, that youngster,” she mused, as if talking to herself. “And whatever those nerves of his tell him to do, he’ll do it. And I’d lay odds he’s goin’ to surprise us all. He’s got something boilin’ in his mind—something that’s just struck him to-night—I could see that. Oh, if I was a man!—I’d get out of this hansom now, and I’d follow that lad, and I’d get hold of him somehow, and I’d bend him any way I chose—thatwould be something like!—but then again, you take him some other way, and he’s as stubborn as a moke. But I like him, all the same.” She turned toward her husband, and lifted her voice a little. “I like him so much, I’m thinkin’ of havin’ him for a brother-in-law.”
“Strornary thing,” commented Edward, earnestly, “no man’er where I start from, whenever I get t’ the Circus, I get the hiccups.”
Cora put her head back against the cushions, and closed her eyes.