And Tom came, with the seal of art and love upon him, but was his old boyish self, and sat on the arm of Ted’s armchairs, and inveighed against scholiasts, and wondered if Ted had ever heard of Pheidias. After tea they strolled down together through the gathered dusk, and sat on the bridge, and once more Tom dropped a match in the river, and waited to hear it fizz. But the difference was there, and Ted wondered if Tom would speak of it. Once he seemed on the point of it. The willow which overhangs the river had just begun to break into tender leaf, and the delicate foliage hung round it like a green mist. Tom paused a moment, and grew serious.
“Look at it,” he said, “it’s like the loveliest thing on earth; it is youth bursting into——” and he broke off suddenly.
Once again later in the evening he grew serious,and it was so odd for Tom to be serious twice in a day, that Markham wondered.
“How I can have been such a fool when I was here I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody told me once that I thought Cambridge narrow simply because I wasn’t broad enough to appreciate it. Well, I think she was right. Mind, I don’t go back on anything I said this afternoon about scholiasts. You are narrow, old boy, so don’t misunderstand me.”
“Who was it said that?” asked Markham.
“Miss Wrexham, I think. Didn’t you meet her at home? She often tells home truths without making them unpleasant. That is not very common.”
“Oh, do you think home truths are unpleasant?” asked Markham. “I rather like you telling me I’m narrow.”
“My dear Ted, I never said home truths were unpleasant. I only said that she told me home truths without making them unpleasant.”
“What’s the difference?”
“All the difference in the world. Whether they are unpleasant or not simply depends on the personality of the person who tells you them.”
“You mean you think Miss Wrexham is not unpleasant?” asked Markham.
“Certainly, she’s not unpleasant. I think she’s quite delightful. I suppose you don’t appreciate her.”
“Well, I hardly know her. I remember what May said of her.”
Tom sat up in his chair.
“What did she say of her?”
“She said she thought she wasn’t genuine.”
“That’s not quite true. Miss Wrexham is nearly always what you want her to be, but she doesn’t seem to me to forfeit her genuineness. She is the most adaptable person I ever saw. To me she praises the Parthenon, to ManversLa Dame qui s’amuse. But to any one who doesn’t know her well, that must appear like want of genuineness.”
Tom rose and walked up and down the room.
“I am getting terriblybourgeoisin my tastes, Manvers would tell me. I care for nothing now but loyalty and honesty and genuineness and quiet country life.”
Markham stared.
“My dear Tom, you really shouldn’t give me such surprises. What has happened to the bustle and stir of the world, and statuettes bowling cricket-balls?”
“I don’t know. It was a phase, I suppose. One can’t reach one’s proper development except through phases. Paul was a Pharisee of the Pharisees; Augustine was a debauchee, a sensualist with the shroud round his feet.”
“Paul, Augustine,” said Ted, with a smile; “let us continue the list. What about you?”
Tom paused.
“I don’t know. I only know I have changed, that something very big has happened to me. Perhaps some time you will know what it is. I’m going to bed, Teddy.”
Tomstayed at Cambridge two days, having meant to stay a week, but he found the need of getting home again imperative. He longed to tell Ted all about it, but something prevented him. Ted was as delightful as ever, but Tom felt that the difference between them could not be bridged by a confidence, as you bridge over a ravine first by a wire or a rope, and strengthen it till it will bear men and beasts. His confidence, he felt, would not reach to the other side, but dangle dismally in the air. Before he left, however, he had another talk with him, in which he expressed his feelings about the ravine, though he made no direct attempts to bridge it over.
“These two days have been charming,” he said; “you must be dreadfully happy here, Teddy.”
Ted looked up suspiciously.
“Is Saul also among the prophets?” he asked. “You nearly startled me out of my wits yesterday by saying that you liked quiet country life, and cows, and now you like Cambridge!”
Tom frowned and looked about for inspiration.
“I spent a week in London a month ago,” he said, “and enjoyed it immensely. There were a heap of people I knew, and I went dancing and dining allnight, and all day the noise of the town roared round me. Then I went home, and as it was a lovely day, I got out at the park gates and walked. Do you remember that little hollow just to the left of the drive, where I shot two woodcock one day? Well, it is full of birch trees, and the birch trees were beginning to have a little green cloud of leaves round them, and all over the ground were clumps of primroses pushing up among last year’s dead leaves. The sun was setting, and the rays struck the birch trunks horizontally. I felt as if I could have sat there for ever and looked at it. As a matter of fact, in five minutes I was tired of it, and went on walking.”
“Is it a parable?” asked Ted.
“Yes; obviously Cambridge is the quiet, little, green hollow. I remember I used to think it so terrible that people should live there for ever, and only busy themselves with what went on in the little hollow. I was wrong. When I stopped in the little hollow at home, I thought there could be nothing more lovely than to live there always.”
“In fact, you wanted to—you envied the birds which did?”
“In the same way as one envies people who grow beards, when one is shaving in the morning,” said Tom. “I wouldn’t ever really grow one myself. But I envied the birds to whom such a hollow was native and natural.”
Markham laughed.
“Birds and beards—what metaphor are you going to employ next?”
Tom stood in front of him, smoking meditatively.
“If the green hollow satisfies you, you are right to live there always; but one cannot be two people. I couldn’t live there always. I said just now I was in love with cows and country life. So I am; but if I knew there was nothing else, I should be absolutely wretched. Of course, every human being is a mass of limitations, saddled with the idea that he can be unlimited, and, personally, I can’t limit myself to living always in the green hollow, and any one who can seems to me necessarily more limited than I. A man is judged by his power of desire. To desire much is better than to desire little.”
“You are not very convincing,” remarked Ted.
“No one has ever convinced anybody of anything, except by triumphant achievement of some sort,” said Tom, “and because I call you a bird in a green hollow, I shan’t convince you you had better have been a man, or that I am one either. But what I mean is this. We are all human beings, and we ought to live in a human environment. We differ from beasts chiefly because we have high and intelligible emotions. It is our duty to mix with all sorts of people, to know what every one is thinking about, to be ecstatically miserable, to be ecstatically happy, and to fall in love.”
“Oh, that part of human life is well looked after,” said Markham; “it is almost universal to fall in love. I suppose, by the way, that you are going off now because your ten minutes—or was it five—in the green hollow is over?”
Markham spoke rather bitterly. These two days had been very pleasant to him, and Tom’s delightfulhabit of falling back at once into his old relations with every one made him feel that his own circle had narrowed, while Tom’s had widened, and his remarks about green hollows had emphasized this.
Tom looked up.
“No, I am not the least tired of it,” he said, “and that is partly the reason why I am going. It is always a pity to stop till one is tired of a thing. You see, necessarily I am not so much at home here as you are, and that I should be tired of it some time goes without saying. But I have another reason for going, which perhaps you will know about soon.”
“You said that last night,” said Markham.
“Only once? I wonder I haven’t said it oftener.”
He paused a moment, and mentally threw a rope across the ravine, and saw it fail to reach the other side, and dangle helplessly in the air.
“Well, good-bye, old boy; I must be off if I am to catch my train,” he said. “I’m going straight home. Messages of all sorts, I suppose? I read Aristophanes most mornings with your father. I am very stupid, but he is very kind.”
It was nearly dark when he got home, but the evening was still and warm, and after tea he took a short stroll up to the top of the hill in front of the house, and watched the crimson-splashed west paling to saffron before the approach of night. In front lay a gentle slope of thick-growing, tussocky grass, and beyond, a clump of silver-stemmed birch trees, standing slender and still luminous in the gathering dusk. Through the bushes the little noises of night crept stealthily about, and one by one the stars were litin the velvet sky, and all things lay hushed under the benediction of night.
But in his mind, as the colours faded out of earth and air, a golden morrow dawned and brightened. He would see her to-morrow; he would come as a man to a woman; he would claim his right to know his fate, be it best or worst. He would not have hastened even if he could those few hours that lay between him and the next day. There had been something in their intercourse of late which made him know, or think he knew, that it would be well with him. The fine instinct of a lover, which formulates nothing, made him absolutely and entirely happy at the present moment. Unconsciously, he enjoyed the pleasures of the Higher Hedonist, who knows that the long-drawn pause before the full melody bursts out is of infinite moment. The anticipation of pain is nearly always keener, especially to imaginative and emotional people, than the pain itself, and the same thing is true, even in a higher degree, of joy. Not that Tom was conscious at the time that he waspro temporea philosopher of the Higher Hedonist school. All he knew was that the thought of May flooded the half hour he sat alone and looked at the paling west, and made it a rosary of passionately happy moments.
Tom, who could never be in time for breakfast at an easy half-past nine at Cambridge, found no difficulty in getting to the vicarage at half-past eight. Breakfast passed as usual, Mr. Markham making vitriolic comments on the tactics of the Liberal party, and May and Tom trying to originate intelligentobservations on politics, which they seldom or never succeeded in doing, and after breakfast Mr. Markham and Tom lit pipes and began on their Aristophanes.
The vicar observed that Tom was even less attentive than usual, and, with a certain amount of tact, remembered, at the end of half an hour, that he had some pressing work to do.
Tom shut up his book at once, and hoped he hadn’t already taken up too much of the vicar’s time. The vicar replied: “Not at all,” and nobody knew what to say next.
But a remembrance of his own days of love and youth, the memory of standing in a quiet shaded garden, and offering to a girl his life and love, came across the elder man, and he turned to the window with his hands in his pockets, so as not to look at Tom.
“You needn’t go up yet, need you?” he asked. “I am coming your way in half an hour, and we might go up together. May has got an idle morning to-day; make her play croquet with you. There’s a capital new set I ordered the other day, which we put up on Saturday.”
“Thanks, I’ll wait,” said Tom bluntly. “I suppose I shall find Miss Markham in the garden?”
“Yes; I saw her go out just now. You’ll be ready in half an hour, then?”
May was seated under a tree at the far end of the garden, and Tom strolled across the lawn to her. There was a book in her lap, which she was not reading, and she saw him coming and smiled. For the first time in his life Tom found the difficulty ofseeing some one he knew, a long way off, approaching, and beginning to smile at the right moment, non-existent.
He sat down on the grass by her, and for a few moments neither spoke a word. But when a thing is inevitable the most awkward people cannot prevent it. Then he got up and knelt by her. She was sitting in a low chair, and their eyes were on a level, and he looked her gravely in the face.
“I love you more than the whole world,” said Tom bravely, “and I have come to ask you whether you care for me at all.”
“Yes, Tom,” she said, and their lips met in a lover’s first kiss.
Tom’s marriage with May Markham took place in July. It was celebrated quietly at Applethorpe, but the world and his wife condescended to take considerable interest in it. The season was beginning to wear a little thin, and the marriage of a wealthy and fairly well-connected young man, who had many friends, with an absolutely unknown girl who, the world said, was extraordinarily beautiful, and who, so said his wife, was rather a stick, was a matter of some interest when interests were beginning to get rather few. Moreover, for various reasons, this particular marriage had been talked about to a certain extent, and when a thing is talked about, its reputation is made. It matters very little whether abuse or praise is showered on anything, as long as it is showered with sufficient liberality, and a little story connected with Tom was the subject of both abuse and praise, and when these are mixed in the right proportions,the matter becomes one of almost overwhelming interest. The story, which the intelligent reader may take for what it is worth, but which certainly was not true, was merely that he had been engaged to Miss Maud Wrexham. But the world and his wife care not at all whether a story is true or not: it is sufficient if it amuses or interests them. Fiction, after all, adds a great charm to human life, and if we did away with fiction altogether, we should have to discard pleasant little fictions as well as unpleasant little fictions. Such a prospect would strike terror into the whole human race from George Washington down to Ananias and Sapphira.
For the next three months the newly wedded pair disappeared out of the ken of their fellows, but about the middle of October they came back to Applethorpe, and lived at the Park with old Mr. Carlingford. That amiable old cynic had completely lost his heart to May, who, for a time, extinguished his desire for observing the weaknesses of human nature. But I am bound to add that, as soon as the two went abroad, his habit returned on him.
His remark on their return is worth recording. May was tired with the journey, and went to bed early, and he and Tom sat up over the fire, while Tom descanted on perfect womanhood. The old gentleman listened with amusement and satisfaction, and when he took up his candle to go to bed he turned to his son and said—
“I believe you are more in love with her than ever. What time are family prayers to be?”
“At nine,” said Tom.
Mr. Carlingford was so much pleased at the brilliance of his induction that he appeared punctually next morning, and seemed to take an intelligent interest in a lesson from Joshua.
Tom and May had been out one day hunting in a delightful sloppy week following a frosty Christmas, and after a long run had got home rather tired and stiff, after dark had fallen. Tea was laid in the hall, and as soon as May had finished she went upstairs to change her riding habit, while Tom sat on with his chair drawn close up to the grate, smoked cigarettes, and reflected that really the nicest part of hunting was getting home again. He proposed to have a hot bath before dinner, but the fire was too good to leave just yet.
He had just arrived at these comfortable conclusions when May came down again, with her hat and jacket on.
Tom looked up in surprise.
“Where on earth are you going, dear?” he asked.
“I’ve just been told that poor old Lambert is dying,” said May, “and I must go down to see him. Poor old fellow, he was in danger yesterday, and he was so frightened of death. I ought not to have gone out hunting to-day, Tom; he may be dead.”
“But you oughtn’t to go out now,” said Tom; “you’re awfully tired. I suppose all has been done that can be done.”
“Tom, I must go!” said she.
“Well, send round to the stables, and tell them to have the brougham out at once.”
“No, dear, I can’t wait.”
Tom got up.
“Well, you shan’t go alone. I shall come with you.”
“No, why should you?”
“Nonsense, May,” said Tom, putting on his hat and coat, and opening the front door. “Good Lord, it’s beginning to snow again! I was afraid it would.”
They walked on some time in silence, and then Tom, thrusting his hand through May’s arm, found she had only got a thin jacket on.
“May, you really shouldn’t come out like this,” he said. “You will catch your death of cold. You must go back and put something thicker on.”
“No, I can’t, I can’t,” said May quickly. “I may be too late as it is.”
“May, it’s madness. Here, I forgot—take this.”
Tom took off his coat and held it out for her.
“No, Tom, it’s all right; I don’t want anything more.”
“I insist on your putting it on,” said Tom.
“Please, Tom.”
“May, do as you are told,” said Tom. “My darling, you shall put it on. I really mean it!”
Tom had his way, and the two walked quickly on again, Tom’s long coat almost touching the ground, and the sleeves coming nearly to the tips of her fingers. This time May thrust her hand through Tom’s arm.
“You’re very good to me,” she said. “Ah, here’s the house! Come inside; you can’t wait in the snow. They will all be in the other room.”
A woman, with eyes red with weeping, opened the door to them, and as soon as she saw May, burst out crying again.
“Thank God you’ve come, miss,” she said. “He’s been asking for you all the evening, and he’s far gone. And how are you, Master Tom? Won’t you come by the fire, sir? You’re all over snow. It’s a poor fire, I’m afraid, but we’ve had no time to think of aught to-day.”
Tom felt utterly bewildered and helpless. He tried to respond to the woman’s greeting, but found no words. May in the mean time had slipped off her coat.
“He’s in here, I suppose,” she said. “I will go in at once.”
The two went in together, and Tom sat down by the fire. The door had been left half open, and he could hear words spoken inside.
“Here’s Miss May, Jack,” said the woman, keeping to the name she had always known her by; “she’s come to see you.”
There was the sound of a chair being moved along the ground, and after a moment’s silence he heard May’s voice.
“Dear old friend, I have come just in time to see you before you go. It is not so dreadful, is it? Christ has taken you by the hand; He is just going to cure you of all your pain and suffering, and what is even better, of all your sin. He has been through all you are going through. We are very weak, but infinitely strong in His strength. Yes, you know that, do you not?”
There came some reply from the dying man which he could not catch, and the harsh, unpleasant voice of the doctor broke in.
“He’s going fast,” he said.
Tom heard the chair pushed away, and May’s voice began again.
“It is nearly all over. You are very tired, are you not, and want to rest. Let us say the best prayer of all over together—‘Our Father——’”
The door from the outside opened, and Mr. Markham came in. He looked puzzled and surprised to see Tom there. Tom rose to meet him.
“Hush!” he whispered. “May is in there with Lambert. He is on the point of death. He has been asking for her all the evening, they say.”
Mr. Markham began taking off his coat, and stood for a moment before the fire.
“I shall wait a minute or two till May comes out,” he said.
At a sudden impulse, however, Tom rose, quietly closed the door into the sick room, and sat down again by the fire. All the sordid shabbiness of the place contrasted too painfully with the supreme scene which was going on within, and he wished to separate the two. On the table stood a teapot, and a teacup without a saucer, into which was thrust a half-eaten crust of bread. A dull, spiritless fire, half-choked in grey ash, smouldered in the grate, and the kettle, with its lid off, stood in the fender, half-overturned, in a puddle of water. A wooden china-faced clock, painted with a scroll of pink and blue flowers, stood on the mantelpiece between two white crockery dogs,and marked the moments with a harsh insistence. There was a slipper, worn down at the heel, lying on the shabby worsted rug, which lay crooked by the fender, and another, presumedly its fellow, half under the table. A hungry, mournful-looking cat sat blinking at them from under the table with anxious, perturbed eyes, while inside that door May knelt by the bed of a dying cottager, and in some mysterious way knew how to reach the dim-lit soul of the old man, and to make it easy for him to die. There was a reality about it which Tom felt the revivalist meeting had lacked.
The clock on the mantelpiece had scarcely beaten out five loud minutes when the door opened again and May came out.
“Ah! you have come,” she said in a low voice to her father; “it is just too late. He died quite peacefully and happily.”
“I was here this afternoon,” he replied, “and I just went back to the vicarage, and came on again.”
May turned to Tom.
“Tom, dear, you’d better go home. I must wait here a little. These poor people want me.”
“Mayn’t I wait for you?” said Tom.
“No, dear. I shall be tidying up and putting things straight. You’d better go home. But I wish you’d send the carriage back for me in about an hour. I’m rather tired, and then you can take your coat.”
Tom got up and put on his coat.
“Is there anything I can do, May?” asked her father.
“You might just come in and speak to Mrs. Lambert. Yes, do that; she would like it.”
The two went back into the sick room, and Tom out into the night. Something in what had taken place impressed him profoundly. What was that power which the old man felt, which was able to ease his last lonely moments? How could words be of any avail, when that last horrible, ghastly parting of soul and body came? Tom, like all healthy, vigorous people, felt an intense physical loathing at the thought of death. It was terrible and unnatural that this beautiful machine should in a moment become a dead thing, something to be buried away out of sight. How could words make death seem death no longer, but the beginning of life? For the swindling greengrocer and his increased balance, which to him appeared to be the direct effect of grace, but to Tom to have had a much more sublunary and intelligible connection with his taking the pledge, there was an explanation which he could appreciate, but this was altogether different. The test was a real test; certain words had for a man round whom the inevitable loneliness of death lay like a cold, blinding mist, a comfort which made him face it with calmness, and to May, as to him, they must have been the expression of something very real. For the first time in his life he had seen, in an aspect that could not be mistaken, the consolation of religious beliefs. The most severe test conceivable had been applied, and a belief in a Power stronger than death had proved itself stronger than death. And Tom, in whom unfamiliarity with such phenomena had bred,not contempt, but absolute want of interest, was much puzzled. Somehow the tragic, simple scene which he had just been through was more convincing than a hundred volumes full of the triumphant sufferings of martyrs.
Tom suddenly felt rather vexed and hurt in his mind. Why did this mean so much to May and to others, and so little to him? If the power of that Life and Death was all-embracing, why had it not touched him? Why had the belief in which he had been brought up passed from him so utterly, being remembered now only as he remembered nursery rhymes and childish stories?
May came back an hour later, just in time to dress for dinner, and in spite of the love and trust which existed between them, neither of them spoke of that which troubled them. May was longing to say to him, “Tom, how is it that this means nothing to you? It was for you He lived and died,” but a very natural reticence prevented her. She saw that Tom was rather upset about something, and this was not the time for it. Such a subject must come spontaneously, inevitably, and meanwhile she was content to bide her time, trusting in the Power which never yet failed. But they both felt at that moment that something had come between them.
Just as they were going down to dinner Tom said to her—
“I am glad you went, May; you made it easier for the poor old fellow. How real it all is to you!”
“Yes, Tom,” she said, “it is the realest thing in the world.”
Unluckily, at that moment Tom’s candle fell out of the candle-stick he was carrying, spattering his trousers with wax, and making it absolutely imperative to speak of the annoying ways of wax candles, and the possible opportunity passed, and it became harder to take advantage of the next.
Old Mr. Carlingford was not very well. He was suffering from a slight attack of gout, and the man who behaves cheerfully and equably under such an infliction has yet to be found. Consequently at dinner he spent his irritation by being less amiably cynical than usual, and he discussed questions of ethics in a somewhat unpleasant manner.
“Good and bad is a very poor division to make of the human race,” he said. “How is one to know in ninety cases out of a hundred if a man is good or not? He doesn’t wear a certificate round his neck. You might as well divide the race, for any practical purpose, into those who have got strawberry marks on their left arm and those who have not. Fools and wise is the only proper classification.”
“But they don’t wear certificates round their necks,” said Tom.
“No, Tom, and people don’t wear certificates round their necks to say whether they’ve got noses or not. The fact is so patent.”
“Only to the wise,” said Tom.
“Exactly so, and the fools don’t matter. Whereas about good and bad, the better a man is the more easily is he deceived, because it is impossible to know much of this wicked world and remain good. ‘Keep yourself unspotted from the world!’ Yes, youcan do that if you seal yourself hermetically up in a convent or monastery, in which case it is hard to see why you have been born at all. To live like that casts a stigma on the intelligence of the Creator.”
Tom unthinkingly laughed, for the conviction which his father threw into this last remark amused him, but looking up he saw May flush deeply and bend her eyes over her plate. Dessert was on the table, and she ate her orange quickly, and rose to leave.
Tom saw the trouble in her face, but did not see how to remedy it. He and his father drew their chairs up to the fire, and the latter, abstaining for hygienic reasons from port, “took it out” in cynicism.
“I don’t mind saying these things to you, Tom,” he said, “because I don’t think you are a fool. Do you remember when you told me you were going to be a sculptor, how I warned you against folly? A dislike of folly is the one thing I have successfully cultivated, and I should like put on my tombstone: ‘He hated a fool.’ Especially I hate those fools who talk about their consciences. Conscience is simply ecclesiastical argot for digestion. No man with a good digestion has a bad conscience. The health of the conscience varies with the health of the digestion.”
“But people with bad digestions have good consciences sometimes,” said Tom.
“Yes, because their health is so inferior that they cease thinking about their bodies, and as they have to think about something, they think about an imaginary existence which they call their souls.”
“Is that all your creed?” asked Tom. “I believe in my digestion.”
“No, it’s not my creed at all. It is a self-evident proposition; nobody makes creeds of self-evident propositions, or we should all say twice two are four every morning. My creed is, I believe in nothing, but I am amused at everything except the gout.”
Tom laughed and helped himself to some more port.
“I wish you had the gout, Tom,” went on the old gentleman; “it is perfectly loathsome to see you drinking port when I can’t. I never am quite sure whether I would sooner have port and gout or neither, but I believe that if one goes on drinking port when one has gout one dies. That would annoy me immensely. Any one can die.”
“Yes, it’s very easy,” said Tom. “I suppose that’s why every one does it.”
“It’s sheer laziness in most cases,” said his father; “people die when they cease to be interested in things. Unless, of course, they catch small-pox or cholera, but gentlemen don’t do such things.”
“Poor old Lambert is dead,” said Tom, after a pause; “he died this evening. May was with him.”
“That wife of yours is an angel,” remarked Mr. Carlingford. “I really begin to believe in angels, at least in one angel, when I think of her. If I was Providence I should be immensely proud of myself for having invented her. I suppose she helped him through it?”
“Yes, she did help him,” said Tom eagerly; “he had been asking for her all the afternoon, and sheprayed with him, and he died quietly instead of being afraid.”
“What did she say to him?”
“Ah, don’t ask me, father,” said Tom, rising. “It was all very strange to me, because it was so real to them both.”
“But what was real to them?” asked his father. “Don’t you suppose that the mere presence of May was what soothed the old man?—it would soothe me, I know. I hope May will be with me when I die. But I shan’t want soothing—I shan’t die until I no longer want to live. I am sure of that, and it is a most comforting thought, and as soon as I no longer want to live I am quite content that the powers of hell should do their worst, as that hymn we had on Easter Sunday says.”
“No, it wasn’t her mere presence,” said Tom; “it was that she reminded him of what they both believed.”
“Well, if he believed it, why did he need to be reminded of it?” demanded his father. “It is so odd that Christians send for clergymen on their death-beds, especially as those particular Christians who do so seem to me to look upon God Himself as a sort of immeasurable clergyman. It ought to be the one time they do not want them. No, you may depend on it, it was simply her presence. Have you finished drinking liquid gout? If so, we’ll go.”
When May went to bed Mr. Carlingford kissed her very affectionately.
“My dear, I wonder whether you are as nice to Tom as you are to me,” he said. “I don’t believeyou can be, or else I should be jealous of him. Good-night, dear; you’ve had a tiring day.”
The two were moving up to London the next week, whither old Mr. Carlingford absolutely and entirely declined to accompany them. “London is only tolerable,” he said, “when it is quite full of fools. I dare say there are plenty, even in January, but I can’t go to the New Cut to look for them. The New Cut smells of cabbages and Salvation armies.”
“You’d much better come with us, father,” said Tom. “You know you will feel awfully lonely without us.”
“I would sooner be lonely than live in that barrack in Grosvenor Square in January,” said he; “besides, the house will be full of models and clay. I believe we are all clay, and I don’t want to associate with models.”
“There will soon be clay models too,” added Tom. “I’m going to work hard.”
His father looked meditatively out of the window. The carriage had come round, and they were putting in the luggage.
“If all men had to work and all women had to weep, every self-respecting man would cut his throat this moment, and every self-respecting woman would drown herself in her tears. What charming things family parties would be, you know! Perhaps it’s right for you to work, though I don’t see why you should; but don’t let May weep. Ah, here she is! Well, good-bye. I suppose one or both of you will be coming down here soon.”
May’s inclination had been to stop down in thecountry longer, but Tom represented that he really had to begin to work at once, and that no one in the world—not even himself—could work in the country. The Golden Age was going to return—the earth was again to be peopled with gods and goddesses; a shining procession was to begin to walk out of his studio. The grand style was possible. While the Hermes stood still and smiled at the baby on his arm nothing was impossible. Art ruled the world. He thought of the old paradox that nature copied art, and found that it contained its grain of truth. Until Turner painted golden liquid sunsets, they did not exist, or at any rate no one saw them, whereas now any one who had seen a first-rate Turner could find one on any clear summer’s evening in the country; and until he saw the Hermes he did not know there were such people, but as a matter of fact he met half a dozen of them now in every street in London. They were there all the time, but one had to be taught how to see them. And he finished up with “Ars longa.”
This last argument appealed to May. Tom was ready to begin working; it was criminal to delay. The herald of the Golden Age, the Iris who was to bring it down from heaven, was a statue of Demeter mourning for her lost child. Tom had already made a small clay sketch of it, and he could wait no longer. Besides, there was Wallingthorpe to be confuted. That eminent artist had used all his powers of eloquence in abuse, persuasion, and lament over Tom, who had heard him unmoved, and merely asked him as a personal favour to wait until he saw whatcould be done. Wallingthorpe talked about civilization and advance, and the torchlight procession of artists who ran and handed on the flaring brand from the one to the other until it reached the goal. The torch was in Tom’s hands, and instead of running on with it towards the goal, he was deliberately running backwards and laying it at the feet of Praxiteles. It was a Vandalism.
Tom roared with laughter over that brilliant tirade, and vowed he would make a heroic group, in which he himself was kneeling before Praxiteles and handing him the torch of Art, while Wallingthorpe in a frock coat and tall hat was trying to snatch it away. It was a fine subject. Many thanks for the suggestion.
So May yielded, and paid farewell visits among all the old parishioners, and one snowy afternoon in January, as has been stated, they drove away from Applethorpe up to London, and Tom started his work as an artist seriously and with set purpose.
Parliamentmet early that year, and when Tom and May migrated to London the two Houses were already sitting. London was consequently fairly full, and the Wrexhams, among others, were installed there. Lord Chatham was one of those quietly effective men whose opinion is held to be safe and reliable, chiefly because they support everything of the old order, and oppose, not vehemently, but steadily, everything of the new. Lady Chatham and Maud were with him, and the excellent arrangements which her ladyship was in the habit of making were very frequently thrown completely out of gear by the fog. In fact, she had serious thoughts now and then of permanently allowing twenty minutes extra per mile for the carriage, and fifteen for pedestrians.
Maud was very well pleased to be in London again. Measures of considerable material import were being debated, and she liked to feel the heart of the country beating. She had never been more interested in life generally, and the Chathams’ house was becoming famous in a manner for the large number of clever people whom she collected round her. She had a certain gift of making people talk, without letting them know they were being made. The autumn shewould have confessed was dull, but the reason why she found it so she would not have confessed, even to herself. She had attended Tom’s wedding, and had behaved delightfully, but when it was over she found herself, as it were, facing a blank wall. Blank walls are not inspiriting things to contemplate, and after a few weeks of contemplation she arrived at the sensible conclusion that she would face it no longer, and she had spent the autumn in demolishing it stone by stone. And now by dint of real exertion, which was almost heroic in its untiringness, she could conscientiously say there was not one stone left on another, and in consequence the advent of May and Tom was an event which she regarded with pure pleasure. In other words, she considered she had “got over it.” Tom, she felt sure, was completely unconscious of what had been going on, and they could meet again with perfect frankness and unreserve. She had met May once or twice before the marriage, and thought of her as a sort of exceedingly beautiful cow.
Maud was just writing a note to accept Mrs. Carlingford’s invitation to dinner. There were only to be four of them, the fourth being Manvers, who had come to England for a week or two, and whom May thought Maud had met at Athens. May had got a slight cold and was going to wear a tea-gown, and would Maud do the same? She called her “Dear Miss Wrexham,” and remained “hers truly.”
Manvers had been to see Tom already that day immediately on his arrival in London, and Tom had scouted the idea of his going to a hotel, and insisted on his staying with them. Manvers made sundryefforts to talk to May and make himself agreeable to her, but he did not think he had succeeded very well. Like Maud, he thought of her as a sort of cow, and he did not appreciate her style of beauty. But Tom was as nice as ever, and still quite mad, which was, he confessed, disappointing, but it would certainly pass off.
The three had gone together to see Tom’s studio and the herald of the Golden Age in clay. The pose he had chosen was admirably simple and wonderfully successful. The goddess stood with one foot trailing behind, the heel off the ground, resting on her foremost foot; the arms hung limply by her sides, and her head was drooped in sorrow for her lost child. The face was the face of his wife, subtly idealized, but preserving the look of portraiture. Tom had been working very hard at it, and in the clay it was sufficiently finished to allow one to see what it would be like. He worked in his old desultory manner, with fits of complete idleness and spells of almost superhuman exertion, with the difference that the fits of complete idleness were now the exception, not the rule.
The studio was an enormous room at the top of the house, with an admirable north light. It had been furnished by Tom without the least regard to expense or coherency. Things of all ages and styles were jumbled up together, but everything was good of its kind. It was the sort of room which, if you did not happen to think it perfectly hideous, you would think entirely charming. The furniture itself was Louis Quinze, for Tom’s taste told him that there was nofurniture but French; the walls were hung with Algerian and Cairene embroideries; in one corner of the room stood a cast of the Hermes, in another a bronze Japanese dragon. Two wide shelves ran round three sides of the room, and on these were massed together, with fine artistic catholicity, spoils from half the world. There were Tanagra statuettes from Greece, blue hawk-headed porcelain gods from Egypt, earthenware from Cabylia, a great copper Russian samovar, “laborious orient ivory” from India, plates from Rhodes, and embroidery from Arachova, a bronze helmet fished out of the river at Olympia, a great tortoiseshell box from Capri, a bronze Narcissus from Naples, blue-bead mummy nets, hideous German silver pipes, and amber and arrows from the Soudan. The platform where the model stood was covered with a great tiger skin, with grinning jaws and snarling teeth, and in the middle of the room stood the clay sketch of the mourning goddess. The incongruity of the whole touched completeness when May, Tom, and Manvers stood there side by side and looked at it.
Manvers’s first impulse was to laugh. His appreciation of contrasts was strong, and the contrasts here were really picturesque. What was this poorpasséegoddess doing in this atmosphere of complete modernity? She was as much out of place as a Quaker at a music-hall. But he was far too much of an artist not to admire and wonder at the extraordinary power of the thing. Tom seemed to have learnedtechniquenot by experience, but by instinct. He was an artist by nature, not by practice; likeWalter, he sang because he must. To Manvers this was puzzling, because he held firmly to the creed that an artist makes beautiful things because he chooses to, not because his artistic nature compels him. They stood silent for some moments, and then Manvers spoke.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “It seems to me almost perfectly Greek.”
Though the prophet has no honour in his own country, it is at least gratifying for him to find it in another. Tom had been almost painfully anxious that he should say that, but now it was said he had an unreasoning fear that Manvers had not meant it.
“Do you mean that?” he cried. “Are you sure you are not saying it to please me?”
“My dear Tom, I am saying it neither to please you nor myself. I don’t like Greek things, you know.”
May turned on him gravely.
“Surely it is admirable?” she asked.
“It is admirable surely,” replied Manvers, “but it is my nature not to admire it. You should hear Tom heap abuse on my little things. His tongue was an unruly member whenever he looked atLa Dame qui s’amuse,—by the way, she is finished, Tom. It would have pleased him in what he calls his unregenerate days, and I his Paradisiacal days, before the fall.”
“We’ve got a little statuette of his downstairs which I’ll show you,” said May. “It is of a boy shooting. He never quite finished it.”
“That beast of a thing which was in my room at Applethorpe?” said Tom. “I shall smash it.”
“No, dear, you won’t: you gave it me. I shall go and get it.”
“No, it shan’t come up here,” said Tom. “We’ll all go down. This Temple is no place for Manvers.”
But Manvers was interested, and he stayed some minutes more, advising, suggesting, and praising. It was as impossible for him not to admire the prodigious skill of the work, as it was not to dislike the spirit of it. The whole thing he regarded as a most lamentable waste of time and skill which might have been most profitably employed.
But before the statuette of the boy shooting his praise was of a very different order. It was thoroughly modern, and though not ugly, was undeniably pretty. The figure represented a lad in volunteer uniform, lying on the ground, shooting, or rather aiming, with a rifle. The head was bent over to the back-sight of the gun, the mouth slightly open, one eye shut, and one leg lightly crossing the other just above the ankle. The thing was marvellously fresh and unstudied. May claimed it as her possession, and showed it with just pride. Tom really had succeeded, as he had vowed he would, in making trousers beautiful.
May left the two friends together, and went off to pay some calls, and in her absence Manvers talked more freely. He had felt something of a traitor in her grey eyes when he had said that the Demeter was not in his line.
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Tom,” he said, handing the statuette respectfully. “It really is abominably good, from the top of the forage cap down to the bootlace tag, and that bottom of thetrouser rucking up slightly over the other boot is an inspiration. You really are an unfortunate devil to be saddled with the grand style. As for that horror in the studio—you call my things horrors, so why shouldn’t I call yours?—the sooner you pitch it out of the window the better. Not that I don’t think it good—I think it is admirable—and as I said, almost perfectly Greek, but it simply won’t do. If you are to do anything nowadays you must be intelligible—that is to say, modern. You must not produce exercises, however good, in an art that is past. You are like those estimable people—I think they are archdeacons as a rule—who are always writing Latin translations in elegiac verses of ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’ in the pages of theGuardian. Nobody cares for interesting survivals. Why should they? People will not cudgel their brains to see what things mean. You have to label them!”
“Yes, you have to label a thing likeLa Dame qui s’amuse,” said Tom, “or else no one would know whether it was meant for a woman of fashion or acocotte.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Manvers. “I don’t care what they call it, but you must make them understand the spirit of the thing. The spirit of Demeter is out of date. But that boy shooting is intelligible. Any one can see how good it is, and yet somehow it is not vulgar. To be vulgar is to be popular. You haven’t seen my ballet girl dancing. It is incomparably vulgar. I think it is the vulgarest thing I ever saw, and I’m not boasting when I say all Paris raves about it.”
“All Paris!” broke in Tom; “all the cities of the plain!”
“Not at all: all the most civilized people of the most civilized town in the world. You really had better smash the Demeter. What will you do with her? They will probably take her at the Academy—in fact, I should think they certainly would, and in the autumn they will send her back to you, or rather you will have to go with a drayman’s cart and fetch her. She’ll be very heavy. If you were an academician, and got a very good piece of Carrara for her, Pears might buy her, ‘after using our soap,’ you know.”
Tom grew more and more impatient, and could contain himself no longer.
“Don’t talk blasphemy here!” he shouted. “The only object of art, according to you, is to make fifty silly women look at the abortions you produce for five minutes while they are racking their brainless heads for a new piece of scandal. You are welcome to them. And if no one else cares for my Demeter, May does, and the rest of the world may go to the deuce for all we care. You are a rank heretic, and when you die you will go to a place entirely peopled with the types you love, while I shall sit at wine with gods and goddesses.”
“What will happen to your other people? The boy shooting, for instance?”
“If he shows so much as the muzzle of his ugly gun, I shall kick him downstairs to join you and your fellows.”
“Many thanks. I have your promise. He will bea charming addition, and I shall be delighted to see him.”
Tom burst out laughing.
“Do you know I’m delighted to see you, heretic or no heretic. We won’t talk shop any more. Miss Wrexham is coming to dinner to-night. You remember her, don’t you?”
“Very well. She flattered me about my statuette. I never forget any one who flatters me.”
“You flattered yourself, you mean. She was fonder of the Parthenon.”
“I am not jealous of the Parthenon,” said Manvers; “she may flirt with the whole Acropolis if she likes. But you’ll have to let me go at ten. Wallingthorpe has a gathering. He is very refreshing.”
“He is a social Narcissus,” said Tom. “It is so silly to be Narcissus.”
“Not if other people agree with you.”
“But nobody admires Wallingthorpe as much as he admires himself.”
“No; but he never ceases to hope that they soon will. Hope springs eternal, you know. He is very sanguine. Whether they will or not has nothing to do with the question; the only point is whether he sincerely believes they will, and he certainly does that.”
“His motto is, ‘The proper study of mankind is me.’”
“That’s not grammar,” said Manvers.
“Possibly not; but the sublimity of the theme is sufficient excuse.”
Manvers took out a cigarette-case, and then paused.
“Is it allowed here?” he asked.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter if we open the windows afterwards,” said Tom; “but May doesn’t like smoke all over the house.”
Manvers shut his cigarette case up with a click.
“My dear Tom, if one fails in the small decencies of life, one is lost. Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
“That’s a silly proverb,” said Tom; “it is tithing the mint and anise and cummin.”
“No; that’s just what it is not doing. It is keeping them intact, and not tithing them.”
Tom laughed.
“I don’t think that means anything,” he said. “But let’s go to the smoking-room; we’ll have tea sent there. No, you shan’t come to the studio; I don’t wish to force my uninteresting survivals on you. I’m quite delighted to see you again. And this evening it will be the dear old Athens party over again, only we shan’t have Arthur Wrexham to peck at!”
Maud Wrexham, as her custom was, came rather late, and began making excuses before she was well inside the room.
“It really wasn’t my fault this time,” she said; “all the conceivable accidents happened, and where the carriage in which I was to have come is now, I can’t say. Mother made a beautiful plan—it seemed to work all right on paper—that the brougham was to drop three of us in different parts of London at the same moment. But the laws of time and space intervened. Ah! how do you do, Mr. Manvers?It’s charming to see you again, and there was a block at the corner, and I had to go back for my gloves.”
Tom laughed.
“You must have started wonderfully early,” he said, “because you are only ten minutes late. May I take you in?”
Maud, Tom, and Manvers had much to say to each other, and May a good deal to listen to. They all rather tended to talk at once. Every now and then one of the others would drop out of the conversation and pick her up, but naturally enough Tom did not talk much to her; Manvers made several well-meaning efforts, but was unable to sustain the conversation long, as he was listening to what the other two were saying, and talking himself, and Maud sat on the opposite side of the table, and the candles and flowers made communication difficult. It must be confessed that May found the dinner a little wearisome, for in her somewhat isolated life she had not had any opportunities of acquiring that most useful accomplishment of talking nonsense, or of talking naturally and fluently about nothing particular.
Manvers was maintaining a new and startling theory that the only readable descriptions of any place on the face of the earth were written by people who had never set eyes on the place in question, and supported his theory by his own experiences at Athens.
“I knew,” he said, “as we all know, that there was an Acropolis with buildings of white marble on it,and when you looked out from it you gazed over the grey olive groves, and the plain of Attica, and the violet crown of mountains, and the sea, and Salamis. Before I went to Athens, I could have described it in beautiful language, and talked of the delicate air, and the rose gardens. But now I’ve been there it is all spoiled for me.”
“There aren’t any rose gardens,” objected Maud, “and there is usually sirocco.”
“Exactly so. It is folly to be wise. The rose gardens are part of the spirit of Greece, just as much as the plane-trees by the Ilyssus and thesoi-disantdelicate air.”
“And there are no plane-trees,” said Maud.
Tom laughed.
“So much the worse for the Ilyssus. If there are not, there ought to be.”
“Yes; but when some one who has been to Athens reads your description,” said Maud, “he will know that it doesn’t resemble Athens at all.”
“But one doesn’t write descriptions for people who have been there, nor do people who have been there read them,” said Manvers. “Books of travel are written for people who have never been abroad, and who will never go. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Carlingford?”
May crumbled her bread attentively.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” she said; “but go on. Won’t you tell us more?”
Manvers frowned. If one never takes one’s self seriously, it is terribly disconcerting to find that other people do.
“What I mean is that the literal accuracy of a description does not matter at all,” he said. “When Turner painted a picture, he arranged Nature as suited him. He raised the level of the sea two hundred feet, and made a valley where there was a hill. He made the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”
“So you would have Greek maidens and Greek youths walking about the streets in your description of Athens?” asked Maud.
“Yes, if I thought they should be there, but I don’t. They must have been so uncivilized. Fancy dressing in a yard and a half of bath-towelling.”
“Then all you do is to reconstruct Athens as it seems to you it ought to be?”
“Yes; that is just what I mean,” said Manvers. “Unfortunately, I have been there now, and I know that there are square, white hotels, and dirty streets, and ugly little boot-blacks, and horrible smells. All that warps the original and typical conception. I have an idea of what Athens ought to be, and if I write about it at all, it would be my duty to memorialize that.”
“All the same,” said Tom, “your conception of what it ought to be may not tally with that of any one else; and if such a person goes there, he will see that your conception is not only false, but, according to his ideas, not characteristic.”
“But if there is some one—and who shall assure me there is not?—who never has been, and never will go, whose conception tallies with mine, think of his infinite delight! It would more than counter-balance the cold accuracies of all those people who say I am a liar. He will say, ‘Here am I who never set eyes on Athens and never will, and behold, it is exactly as I hoped and thought it would be.’”
Tom laughed uproariously.
“I believe you are right,” he said. “I shall write a description of America.”
“Do, do,” said Manvers. “Describe New York, with 716 avenues, and telephones and telegraph wires making a fine network of the sky, and elevated roadways—whatever they are—every hundred yards, with Pullman cars, containing gentlemen playing lacrosse, running on them every hundred seconds at a hundred miles an hour. Describe the molasses-stores, and Vanderbilt driving Maud V. down Broadway, scattering gold to the Irish constabulary; describe the omnibuses in the street, and the omniboats on the river, with their cargo of hams, which but ten minutes before were pigs. And describe the backwoods, with the solitary redskin burying his tomahawk under a primeval banana tree against the sunset sky. America is a magnificent subject. Half England will say that it is exactly what they thought it was, and that there is no longer any need of going there. After all, the great point of books of travel is to save one going anywhere.”
May’s feeling of being out of all this was strong upon her. Manvers, she felt sure, was talking sheer nonsense, but how was it that Tom and Maud evidently felt amused by it all? As he was speaking, she found herself going rapidly over in her own mind what he had said—of course he did not mean it, butto her that was an argument in its disfavour. She had finished dessert, and glanced across at Maud. But Maud did not catch her eye, and was sitting with her elbows on the table, and evidently no thought of going into the next room had entered her head.
A man came in with coffee and cigarettes, and handed them round. Maud raised her hand to the box, but looked suddenly across to May, and dropped her hand again.
Tom caught and intercepted her look.
“May doesn’t mind—do you, May?” he said. “Miss Wrexham wants a cigarette. It was I who taught her to smoke out in Athens.”
“Yes, it’s quite true,” said Maud.
“Oh, please smoke if you want to,” said May. “I don’t mind the smell in the least. Tom wanted to teach me, but he gave it up. But why shouldn’t we go into the studio or the library? It is more comfortable.”
“Oh, let’s stop here,” said Tom, “it’s just like Athens. We all used to sit with our elbows on the table after dinner, and drink coffee, while Manvers talked to us.”
But Maud interposed. Her passion for being nice to everybody had suffered no cooling. She saw, too, that May was rather put out at the possible transgression of that wonderful English custom of women leaving the men at the dinner-table not to drink wine. She pushed her chair back and got up.
“Oh, I think the library would be much nicer,” she said. “Those big chairs you have got there aremade for talking in. And it’s so nice and dark in there. Every one is more amusing in the dark.”
Tom and Manvers rose too, and they all went into the library. Maud looked round the room until she had found what she called “her chair,” and sank down into it with a little contented sigh.
“That’s so nice,” she said; “and now let’s go on exactly where we left off.”
The room was lighted by a couple of heavily shaded lamps on the table, which cast a small brilliant circle of light on to the near surrounding objects, and left the rest of the room in darkness. Maud was sitting opposite the fire; Manvers and Tom on a low settee on each side of it, and May at some little distance off.
“Really life is becoming beautifully simple and easy,” said Manvers. “One can get almost anything one wants if one pays for it. And usually one has to pay so little. Look at Niagara in London! I am told by people who have been to the real one, that it is exactly like. You can see Niagara for a shilling, and allowing eighteenpence for a cab, you have seen one of the greatest marvels of Nature, purified by art, for the ridiculously small sum of two-and-six.”
“How purified by art?” asked Maud.
“Well, there are no mosquitoes, and no beggars, and no American tourists. And if only they would bottle up the noise of Niagara in a phonograph and have it sent to London, the thing would be quite perfect—a complete triumph of Art over Nature.”
“It’s all very well to talk about an equal distribution of wealth,” said Tom, “but an unequal distribution is the only possible working arrangement. If every one had enough, or was equally rich, you couldn’t get anything unpleasant done for you.”
“It’s too terrible to think of,” said Manvers. “You would have to brush your own boots, and cook your own dinner, and make your own bed. It is only because we hope to receive rewards, perishable or imperishable, that we ever do anything at all. Nirvana will be all very well when we don’t wear boots, or sleep in beds. If a man is poor enough he will do anything for a sovereign. It’s so nice that the pauper class should be so numerous.”
“But there’s plenty of room for improvement yet,” said Maud. “One can’t give a man a sovereign to go to the dentist for one, or have one’s hair cut. Those are the really unpleasant things.”
Manvers stared pensively at the fire.
“Of course one’s body is a most rough and ill-made machine,” he said. “An oculist told me the other day that the lens of the eye was a very imperfect instrument, and that they could make much better lenses nowadays. Our bodies are the only natural things there are left, and we see in them how very inferior Nature is.”
May sat silent. The whole tone of the conversation, especially Manvers’ last speech, grated on her. She longed to get up and say what she thought, but somehow she felt awkward and uncultivated. Manvers’ glib tongue and easy sentences seemed to her like the buzzing of a mosquito in the dark—alittle thing, no doubt, but sufficient to make one very uncomfortable. Was life with its hopes, fears, aims, its possibilities and limitations, just food for an epigram or a paradox spoken between two cigarettes and a cup of coffee? Were the poor, the drudges, the unhappy of this world, no more to any of these three than a peg on which to hang an idle joke about the conveniences of modern life? If Manvers did not mean what he said, it was terrible enough, but if he did, it was more terrible still. And why did not Tom say something and stop this unseemly jesting? The feeling she had had at dinner that they were talking about things she did not understand or care for, had given place to a keener and more poignant indignation that they were talking of things of which they knew nothing, but which she loved and cared for with all her soul. Were the poor poor, simply in order to administer to the pleasures of the rich? Was there no mighty all-merciful plan working behind and through misery and poverty, and wealth and happiness?
At last she could bear it no longer, and she got up out of her chair and walked slowly up to the fireplace. Manvers instantly rose and drew a chair up for her.
“I was afraid you would find it cold over there,” he said.
“Thanks! Please don’t get up,” said May.
She stood warming her hands for a moment, and then turned to him.
“I think it is terrible to talk like that,” she said; “turning the frightful suffering and poverty we seearound us into a mere jest. Of course you did not mean what you said, but it is no subject for jesting.”
Manvers was vexed and angry. To take things seriously appeared to him an almost unpardonable breach of social etiquette: it really was not decent.
“I assure you I meant all I said,” he replied; “though of course you are quite right about the terrible misery and poverty round us. I don’t deny the tragic side of it for a moment. But I am an optimist; I prefer to look on the brighter side of things, and instead of dwelling on the tragedy and horror of poverty, I like to dwell on its more cheerful aspect, namely, the immense conveniences which it affords to people who are not poor. In that I am bound to say I find a certain consolation.”
The room was dark, and Maud did not see how grave May’s face was. She listened to what Manvers said, and laughed. Then for a moment there was a dead silence until May spoke again.
“Then do you really think that three-quarters of the world is poor in order that one-quarter may be able to make them do distasteful work for them?”
“Oh, I don’t go as far as that,” said Manvers. “I don’t attempt to account for poverty or misery. I only notice a perfectly obvious effect of the unequal distribution of wealth, namely, that the rich can get almost all unpleasant things done for them by proxy, in exchange for varying quantities of gold and silver.”
“You can never have seen the real misery of poverty if you can talk about it like that,” said May.
Manvers lit another cigarette.
“Ah, there you are wrong,” he said. “I have known it myself, real grinding poverty, when you don’t know how or where you will get your next meal. I don’t ever speak of it, because, as I said, I prefer the cheerful side of life. It was unpleasant, I confess, but I did not make a martyr of myself—I don’t like martyrs—so why should I look on others in the same state as martyrs?”
Tom had left the room some moments before, and came back during this last speech. He knew what Manvers’ early history had been, but was surprised to hear him mention it. He regarded it, he knew, as sensitive people regard some slight deformity.
May looked up at Manvers.
“I am sorry,” she said; “of course I didn’t know. But I feel very deeply about these things.”
“Then you will spare a little pity for my early years too,” he said, laughing. “That is charming of you. Good heavens, it’s after ten, Tom; I must go at once, and if you will lend me a latchkey, I needn’t wake anybody up.”