I wish I had not called on Lola Brandt. She disturbs me to the point of nightmare. In a fit of dream paralysis last night I fancied myself stalked by a panther, which in the act of springing turned into Lola Brandt. What she would have done I know not, for I awoke; but I have a haunting sensation that she was about to devour me. Now, a woman who would devour a sleeping Member of Parliament is not a fit consort for a youth about to enter on a political career.
The woman worries me. I find myself speculating on her character while I ought to be minding my affairs; and this I do on her own account, without any reference to my undertaking to rescue Dale from her clutches. Her obvious attributes are lazy good nature and swift intuition, which are as contrary as her tastes in tobacco and tea; but beyond the obvious lurks a mysterious animal power which repels and attracts. Were not her expressions rather melancholy than sensuous, rather benevolent than cruel, one might take her as a model for Queen Berenice or the estimable lady monarchs who yielded themselves adorably to a gentleman's kisses in the evening and saw to it that his head was nicely chopped off in the morning. I can quite understand Dale's infatuation. She may be as worthless as you please, but she is by no means the vulgar syren I was led to expect. I wish she were. My task would be easier. Why hasn't he fallen in love with one of the chorus whom his congeners take out to supper? He is an aggravating fellow.
I have declined to discuss her merits or demerits with him. I could scarcely do that with dignity, said I; a remark which seemed to impress him with a sense of my honesty. I asked what were his intentions regarding her. I discovered that they were still indefinite. In his exalted moments he talked of marriage.
“But what has become of her husband?” I inquired, drawing a bow at a venture.
“I suppose he's dead,” said Dale.
“But suppose he isn't?”
He informed me in his young magnificence that Lola and himself would be above foolish moral conventions.
“Indeed?” said I.
“Don't pretend to be a Puritan,” said he.
“I don't pretend to like the idea, anyhow,” I remarked.
He shrugged his shoulders. It was not the time for a lecture on morality.
“How do you know that the lady returns your passion?” I asked, watching him narrowly.
He grew red. “Is that a fair question?”
“Yes,” said I. “You invited me to call on her and judge the affair for myself. I'm doing it. How far have things gone up to now?”
He flashed round on me. Did I mean to insinuate that there was anything wrong? There wasn't. How could I dream of such a thing? He was vastly indignant.
“Well, my dear boy,” said I, “you've just this minute been scoffing at foolish moral conventions. If you want to know my opinion,” I continued, after a pause, “it is this—she doesn't care a scrap for you.”
Of course I was talking nonsense.
I did not condescend to argue. Neither did I dwell upon the fact that her affection had not reached the point of informing him whether she had a husband, and if so, whether he was alive or dead. This gives me an idea. Suppose I can prove to him beyond a shadow of doubt that the lady, although flattered by the devotion of a handsome young fellow of birth and breeding, does not, as I remarked, care a scrap for him. Suppose I exhibit her to him in the arms, figuratively speaking, of her husband (providing one is lurking in some back-alley of the world), Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos, a curate, or a champion wrestler. He would do desperate things for a month or two; but then he would wake up sane one fine morning and seek out Maisie Ellerton in a salutary state of penitence. I wish I knew a curate who combined a passion for bears and a yearning for ladylike tea-parties. I would take him forthwith to Cadogan Gardens. Lola Brandt and himself would have tastes in common and would fall in love with each other on the spot.
Of course there is the other time-honoured plan which I have not yet tried—to arm myself with diplomacy, call on Madame Brandt, and, working on her feelings, persuade her in the name of the boy's mother and sweetheart to make a noble sacrifice in the good, old-fashioned way. But this seems such an unhumourous proceeding. If I am to achieve eumoiriety I may as well do it with some distinction.
“Who doth Time gallop withal?” asks Orlando.
“With a thief to the gallows,” says Rosalind. It is true. The days have an uncanny way of racing by. I see my little allotted span of life shrinking visibly, like thepeau de chagrin. I must bestir myself, or my last day will come before I have accomplished anything.
When I jotted down the above not very original memorandum I had passed a perfectly uneumoirous week among my friends and social acquaintances. I had stood godfather to my sister Agatha's fifth child, taking upon myself obligations which I shall never be able to perform; I had dined amusingly at my sister Jane's; I had shot pheasants at Farfax Glenn's place in Hampshire; and I had paid a long-promised charming country-house visit to old Lady Blackadder.
When I came back to town, however, I consulted my calendar with some anxiety, and set out to clear my path.
I have now practically withdrawn from political life. Letters have passed; complimentary and sympathetic gentlemen have interviewed me and tried to weaken my decision. The great Raggles has even called, and dangled the seals of office before my eyes. I said they were very pretty. He thought he had tempted me.
“Hang on as long as you can, for the sake of the Party.”
I spoke playfully of the Party (a man in my position, with one eye on Time and the other on Eternity, develops an acute sense of values) and Raggles held up horrified hands. To Raggles the Party is the Alpha and Omega of things human and divine. It is the guiding principle of the Cosmos. I could have spoken disrespectfully of the British Empire, of which he has a confused notion; I could have dismissed the Trinity, on which his ideas are vaguer, with an airy jest; in the expression of my views concerning the Creator, whom he believes to be under the Party's protection, I could have out-Pained Tom Paine, out-Taxiled Leo Taxil, and he would not have winced. But to blaspheme against the Party was the sin for which there was no redemption.
“I always thought you a serious politician!” he gasped.
“Good God!” I cried. “In my public utterances have I been as dull as that? Ill-health or no, it is time for me to quit the stage.”
He laughed politely, because he conjectured I was speaking humourously—he is astute in some things—and begged me to explain.
I replied that I did not regard mustard poultices as panaceas, thevox populias theVox Dei, or the policy of the other side as the machinations of the Devil; that politics was all a game of guess-work and muddle and compromise at the best; that, at the worst, as during a General Election, it was as ignoble a pastime as the wit of man had devised. To take it seriously would be the course of a fanatic, a man devoid of the sense of proportion. Were such a man, I asked, fitted to govern the country?
He did not stop to argue, but went away leaving me the conviction that he thanked his stars on the Government's providential escape from so maniacal a minister. I hope I did not treat him with any discourtesy; but, oh! it was good to speak the truth after all the dismal lies I have been forced to tell at the bidding of Raggle's Party. Now that I am no longer bound by the rules of the game, it is good to feel a free, honest man.
Never again shall I stretch forth my arms and thunder invectives against well-meaning people with whom in my heart I secretly sympathise. Never again shall I plead passionately for principles which a horrible instinct tells me are fundamentally futile. Never again shall I attempt to make mountains out of mole-hills or bricks without straw or sunbeams out of cucumbers.
I shall conduct no more inquiries into pauper lunacy, thank Heaven! And as for the public engagements which Dale Kynnersley made for me during my Thebaid existence on Murglebed-on-Sea, the deuce can take them all—I am free.
I only await the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, for which quaint post under the Crown I applied, to cease to be a Member of Parliament. And yet, in spite of all my fine and superior talk, I am glad I am giving up in the recess. I should not like to be out of my seat were the House in session.
I should hate to think of all the fascinating excitement over nothing going on in the lobbies without me, while I am still hale and hearty. When Parliament meets in February I shall either be comfortably dead or so uncomfortably alive that I shall not care.
Ce que c'est que de nous!I wonder how far Simon de Gex and I are deceiving each other?
There is no deception about my old friend Latimer, who called on me a day or two ago. He is on the Stock Exchange, and, muddle-headed creature that he is, has been “bearing” the wrong things. They have gone up sky-high. Settling-day is drawing near, and how to pay for the shares he is bound to deliver he has not the faintest notion.
He stamped up and down the room, called down curses on the prying fools who came across the unexpected streak of copper in the failing mine, drew heart-rending pictures of his wife and family singing hymns in the street, and asked me for a drink of prussic acid. I rang the bell and ordered Rogers to give him a brandy and soda.
“Now,” said I, “talk sense. How much can you raise?”
He went into figures and showed me that, although he stretched his credit to the utmost, there were still ten thousand pounds to be provided.
“It's utter smash and ruin,” he groaned. “And all my accursed folly. I thought I was going to make a fortune. But I'm done for now.” Latimer is usually a pink, prosperous-looking man. Now he was white and flabby, a piteous spectacle. “You are executor under my will,” he continued. “Heaven knows I've nothing to leave. But you'll see things straight for me, if anything happens? You will look after Lucy and the kids, won't you?”
I was on the point of undertaking to do so, in the event of the continuance of his craving for prussic acid, when I reflected upon my own approaching bow and farewell to the world where Lucy and the kids would still be wandering. I am always being brought up against this final fireproof curtain. Suddenly a thought came which caused me to exult exceedingly.
“Ten thousand pounds, my dear Latimer,” said I, “would save you from being hammered on the Stock Exchange and from seeking a suicide's grave. It would also enable you to maintain Lucy and the kids in your luxurious house at Hampstead, and to take them as usual to Dieppe next summer. Am I not right?”
He begged me not to make a jest of his miseries. It was like asking a starving beggar whether a dinner at the Carlton wouldn't set him up again.
“Would ten thousand set you up?” I persisted.
“Yes. But I might as well try to raise ten million.”
“Not so,” I cried, slapping him on the shoulder. “I myself will lend you the money.”
He leaped to his feet and stared at me wildly in the face. He could not have been more electrified if he had seen me suddenly adorned with wings and shining raiment. I experienced a thrill of eumoiriety more exquisite than I had dreamed of imagining.
“You?”
“Why not?”
“You don't understand. I can give you no security whatsoever.”
“I don't want security and I don't want interest,” I exclaimed, feeling more magnanimous than I had a right to be, seeing that the interest would be of no use to me on the other side of the Styx. “Pay me back when and how you like. Come round with me to my bankers and I'll settle the matter at once.”
He put out his hands; I thought he was about to fall at my feet; he laughed in a silly way and, groping after brandy and soda, poured half the contents of the brandy decanter on to the tray. I took him in a cab, a stupefied man, to the bank, and when he left me at the door with my draft in his pocket, there were tears in his eyes. He wrung my hand and murmured something incoherent about Lucy.
“For Heaven's sake, don't tell her anything about it,” I entreated. “I love Lucy dearly, as you know; but I don't want to have her weeping on my door-mat.”
I walked back to my rooms with a springing step. So happy was I that I should have liked to dance down Piccadilly. If the Faculty had not made their pronouncement, I could have no more turned poor Latimer's earth from hell to heaven than I could have changed St. Paul's Cathedral into a bumblebee. The mere possibility of lending him the money would not have occurred to me.
A man of modest fortune does not go about playing Monte Cristo. He gives away a few guineas in charity; but he keeps the bulk of his fortune to himself. The death sentence, I vow, has compensations. It enables a man to play Monte Cristo or any other avatar of Providence with impunity, and to-day I have discovered it to be the most fascinating game in the world.
When Latimer recovers his equilibrium and regards the transaction in the dry light of reason, he will diagnose a sure symptom of megalomania, and will pity me in his heart for a poor devil.
I have seen Eleanor Faversham, and she has released me from my engagement with such grace, dignity, and sweet womanliness that I wonder how I could have railed at her thousand virtues.
“It's honourable of you to give me this opportunity of breaking it off, Simon,” she said, “but I care enough for you to be willing to take my chance of illness.”
“You do care for me?” I asked.
She raised astonished eyes. “If I didn't, do you suppose I should have engaged myself to you? If I married you I should swear to cherish you in sickness and in health. Why won't you let me?”
I was in a difficulty. To say that I was in ill-health and about to resign my seat in Parliament and a slave to doctor's orders was one thing; it was another to tell her brutally that I had received my death warrant. She would have taken it much more to heart than I do.
The announcement would have been a shock. It would have kept the poor girl awake of nights. She would have been for ever seeing the hand of Death at my throat. Every time we met she would have noted on my face, in my gait, infallible signs of my approaching end. I had not the right to inflict such intolerable pain on one so near and dear to me.
Besides, I am vain enough to want to walk forth somewhat gallantly into eternity; and while I yet live I particularly desire that folks should not regard me as half-dead. I defy you to treat a man who is only going to live twenty weeks in the same pleasant fashion as you would a man who has the run of life before him.
There is always an instinctive shrinking from decay. I should think that corpses must feel their position acutely.
It was entirely for Eleanor's sake that I refrained from taking her into my confidence. To her question I replied that I had not the right to tie her for life to a helpless valetudinarian. “Besides,” said I, “as my health grows worse my jokes will deteriorate, until I am reduced to grinning through a horse-collar at the doctor. And you couldn't stand that, could you?”
She upbraided me gently for treating everything as a jest.
“It isn't that you want to get rid of me, Simon?” she asked tearfully, but with an attempt at a smile.
I took both hands and looked into her eyes—they are brave, truthful eyes—and through my heart shot a great pain. Till that moment I had not realised what I was giving up. The pleasant paths of the world—I could leave them behind with a shrug. Political ambition, power, I could justly estimate their value and could let them pass into other hands without regret. But here was the true, staunch woman, great of heart and wise, a helper and a comrade, and, if I chose to throw off the jester and become the lover in real earnest and sweep my hand across the hidden chords, all that a woman can become towards the man she loves. I realised this.
I realised that if she did not love me passionately now it was only because I, in my foolishness, had willed it otherwise. For the first time I longed to have her as my own; for the first time I rebelled. I looked at her hungeringly until her cheeks grew red and her eyelids fluttered. I had a wild impulse to throw my arms around her, and kiss her as I had never kissed her before and bid her forget all that I had said that day. Her faltering eyes told me that they read my longing. I was about to yield when the little devil of a pain inside made itself sharply felt and my madness went from me. I fetched a thing half-way between a sigh and a groan, and dropped her hands.
“Need I answer your question?” I asked.
She turned her head aside and whispered “No.”
Presently she said, “I am glad I came back from Sicily. I shouldn't have liked you to write this to me. I shouldn't have understood.”
“Do you now?”
“I think so.” She looked at me frankly. “Until just now I was never quite certain whether you really cared for me.”
“I never cared for you so much as I do now, when I have to lose you.”
“And you must lose me?”
“A man in my condition would be a scoundrel if he married a woman.”
“Then it is very, very serious—your illness?”
“Yes,” said I, “very serious. I must give you your freedom whether you want it or not.”
She passed one hand over the other on her knee, looking at the engagement ring. Then she took it off and presented it to me, lying in the palm of her right hand.
“Do what you like with it,” she said very softly.
I took the ring and slipped it on one of the right-hand fingers.
“It would comfort me to think that you are wearing it,” said I.
Then her mother came into the room and Eleanor went out. I am thankful to say that Mrs. Faversham who is a woman only guided by sentiment when it leads to a worldly advantage, applauded the step I had taken. As a sprightly Member of Parliament, with an assured political and social position, I had been a most desirable son-in-law. As an obscure invalid, coughing and spitting from a bath-chair at Bournemouth (she took it for granted that I was in the last stage of consumption), I did not take the lady's fancy.
“My dear Simon,” replied my lost mother-in-law, “you have behaved irreproachably. Eleanor will feel it for some time no doubt; but she is young and will soon get over it. I'll send her to the Drascombe-Prynnes in Paris. And as for yourself, your terrible misfortune will be as much as you can bear. You mustn't increase it by any worries on her behalf. In that way I'll do my utmost to help you.”
“You are kindness itself, Mrs. Faversham,” said I.
I bowed over the delighted lady's hand and went away, deeply moved by her charity and maternal devotion.
But perhaps in her hardness lies truth. I have never touched Eleanor's heart. No romance had preceded or accompanied our engagement. The deepest, truest incident in it has been our parting.
Dale's occupation, like Othello's, being gone, as far as I am concerned, Lady Kynnersley has despatched him to Berlin, on her own business, connected, I think, with the International Aid Society. He is to stay there for a fortnight.
How he proposes to bear the separation from the object of his flame I have not inquired; but if forcible objurgations in the vulgar tongue have any inner significance, I gather that Lady Kynnersley has not employed an enthusiastic agent.
Being thus free to pursue my eumoirous schemes without his intervention, for you cannot talk to a lady for her soul's good when her adorer is gaping at you, I have taken the opportunity to see something of Lola Brandt.
I find I have seen a good deal of her; and it seems not improbable that I shall see considerably more. Deuce take the woman!
On the first afternoon of Dale's absence I paid her my promised visit. It was a dull day, and the room, lit chiefly by the firelight, happily did not reveal its nerve-racking tastelessness. Lola Brandt, supple-limbed and lazy-voiced, talked to me from the cushioned depths of her chair.
We lightly touched on Dale's trip to Berlin. She would miss him terribly. It was so kind of me to come and cheer her lonely hour. Politeness forbade my saying that I had come to do nothing of the sort. To my vague expression of courtesy she responded by asking me with a laugh how I liked Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos.
I replied that I considered it urbane on his part to invite me to see his cats perform.
“If you were to hurt one of his cats he'd murder you,” she informed me. “He always carries a long, sharp knife concealed somewhere about him on purpose.”
“What a fierce little gentleman,” I remarked.
“He looks on me as one of his cats, too,” she said with a low laugh, “and considers himself my protector. Once in Buda-Pesth he and I were driving about. I was doing some shopping. As I was getting into the cab a man insulted me, on account, I suppose, of my German name. Anastasius sprang at him like a wild beast, and I had to drag him off bodily and lift him back into the cab. I'm pretty strong, you know. It must have been a funny sight.” She turned to me quickly. “Do you think it wrong of me to laugh?”
“Why shouldn't you laugh at the absurd?”
“Because in devotion like that there seems to be something solemn and frightening. If I told him to kill his cats, he would do it. If I ordered him to commit Hari-Kari on the hearthrug, he would whip out his knife and obey me. When you have a human soul at your mercy like that, it's a kind of sacrilege to laugh at it. It makes you feel—oh, I can't express myself. Look, it doesn't make tears come into your eyes exactly, it makes them come into your heart.”
We continued the subject, divagating as we went, and had a nice little sentimental conversation. There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and vividness of expression.
Indeed, when one comes to think of it, a tinker's dog has a fine education if he be naturally a shrewd animal and takes advantage of his opportunities; and a fine education, too, of its kind was that of the vagabond Lola, who on her way from Dublin to Yokohama had more profitably employed her time than Lady Kynnersley supposed. She had seen much of the civilised places of the earth in her wanderings from engagement to engagement, and had been an acute observer of men and things.
We exchanged travel pictures and reminiscences. I found myself floating with her through moonlit Venice, while she chanted with startling exactness the cry of the gondoliers. To my confusion be it spoken, I forgot all about Dale Kynnersley and my mission. The lazy voice and rich personality fascinated me. When I rose to go I found I had spent a couple of hours in her company. She took me round the room and showed me some of her treasures.
“This is very old. I think it is fifteenth century,” she said, picking up an Italian ivory.
It was. I expressed my admiration. Then maliciously I pointed to a horrible little Tyrolean chalet and said:
“That, too, is very pretty.”
“It isn't. And you know it.”
She is a most disconcerting creature. I accepted the rebuke meekly. What else could I do?
“Why, then, do you have it here?”
“It's a present from Anastasius,” she said. “Every time he comes to see me he brings what he calls an'offrande''. All these things”—she indicated, with a comprehensive sweep of the arm, the Union Jack cushion, the little men mounting ladders inside bottles, the hen sitting on her nest, and the other trumpery gimcracks—“all these things are presents from Anastasius. It would hurt him not to see them here when he calls.”
“You might have a separate cabinet,” I suggested.
“A chamber of horrors?” she laughed. “No. It gives him more pleasure to see them as they are—and a poor little freak doesn't get much out of life.”
She sighed, and picking up “A Present from Margate” kind of mug, fingered it very tenderly.
I went away feeling angry. Was the woman bewitching me? And I felt angrier still when I met Lady Kynnersley at dinner that evening. Luckily I had only a few words with her. Had I done anything yet with regard to Dale and the unmentionable woman? If I had told her that I had spent a most agreeable afternoon with the enchantress, she would not have enjoyed her evening. Like General Trochu of the Siege of Paris fame, I said in my most mysterious manner, “I have my plan,” and sent her into dinner comforted.
But I had no plan. My next interview with Madame Brandt brought me no further. We have established telephonic communications. Through the medium of this diabolical engine of loquacity and indiscretion, I was prevailed on to accompany her to a rehearsal of Anastasius's cats.
Rogers, with a face as imperturbable as if he was announcing the visit of an archbishop, informed me at the appointed hour that Madame Brandt's brougham was at the door. I went down and found the brougham open, as the day was fine, and Lola Brandt, smiling under a gigantic hat with an amazing black feather, and looking as handsome as you please.
We were blocked for a few minutes at the mouth of the courtyard, and I had the pleasure of all Piccadilly that passed staring at us in admiration. Lola Brandt liked it; but I didn't, especially when I recognised one of the starers as the eldest Drascombe-Prynne boy whose people in Paris are receiving Eleanor Faversham under their protection. A nice reputation I shall be acquiring. My companion was in gay mood. Now, as it is no part of dealing unto oneself a happy life and portion to damp a fellow creature's spirits, I responded with commendable gaiety.
I own that the drive to Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos's cattery in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, was distinctly enjoyable. I forgot all about the little pain inside and the Fury with the abhorred shears, and talked a vast amount of nonsense which the lady was pleased to regard as wit, for she laughed wholeheartedly, showing her strong white, even teeth. But why was I going?
Was it because she had requested me through the telephone to give unimagined happiness to a poor little freak who would be as proud as Punch to exhibit his cats to an English Member of Parliament? Was it in order to further my designs—Machiavellian towards the lady, but eumoirous towards Dale? Or was it simply for my own good pleasure?
Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos, resplendently raimented, with the shiniest of silk hats and a flower in the buttonhole of his frock-coat, received us at the door of a small house, the first-floor windows of which announced the tenancy of a maker of gymnastic appliances; and having kissed Madame Brandt's hand with awful solemnity and bowed deeply to me, he preceded us down the passage, out into the yard, and into a ramshackle studio at the end, where his cats had their being.
There were fourteen of them, curled up in large cages standing against the walls. The place was lit by a skylight and warmed by a stove. The floor, like a stage, was fitted up with miniature acrobatic paraphernalia and properties. There were little five-barred gates, and trapezes, and tight-ropes, and spring-boards, and a trestle-table, all the metal work gleaming like silver. A heavy, uncouth German lad, whom the professor introduced as his pupil and assistant, Quast, was in attendance. Mr. Papadopoulos polyglotically acknowledged the honour I had conferred upon him. He is very like the late Emperor of the French; but his forehead is bulgier.
With a theatrical gesture and the remark that I should see, he opened some cages and released half a dozen cats—a Persian, a white Angora, and four commonplace tabbies, who all sprang on to the table with military precision. Madame Brand began to caress them. I, wishing to show interest in the troupe, prepared to do the same; but the dwarf scurried up with a screech from the other end of the room.
“Ne touchez pas—ne touchez pas!”
I refrained, somewhat wonderingly, from touching. Madame Brandt explained.
“He thinks you would spoil the magnetic influence. It is a superstition of his.”
“But you are touching.”
“He believes I have his magnetism—whatever that may be,” she said, with a smile. “Would you like to see an experiment? Anastasius!”
“Carissima.”
“Is that the untamed Persian you were telling me of?” she asked, pointing to a cage from which a ferocious gigantic animal more like a woolly tiger than a tom-cat looked out with expressionless yellow eyes. “Will you let Mr. de Gex try to make friends with it?”
“Your will is law, meine Konigin,” replied Professor Papadopoulos, bowing low. “But Hephaestus is as fierce as the flames of hell.”
“See what he'll do,” laughed Lola Brandt.
I approached the cage with an ingratiating, “Puss, puss!” and a hideous growl welcomed me. I ventured my hand towards the bars. The beast bristled in demoniac wrath, spat with malignant venom, and shot out its claws. If I had touched it my hand would have been torn to shreds. I have never seen a more malevolent, fierce, spiteful, ill-conditioned brute in my life. My feelings being somewhat hurt, and my nerves a bit shaken, I retreated hastily.
“Now look,” said Lola Brandt.
With absolute fearlessness she went up to the cage, opened it, took the unresisting thing out by the scruff of its neck, held it up like a door-mat, and put it on her shoulder, where it forthwith began to purr like any harmless necessary cat and rub its head against her cheek. She put it on the floor; it arched its back and circling sideways rubbed itself against her skirts.
She sat down, and taking the brute by its forepaws made it stand on its hind legs. She pulled it on to her lap and it curled round lazily. Then she hoisted it on to her shoulder again, and, rising, crossed the room and bowed to the level of the cage, when the beast leaped in purring thunderously in high good humour. Mr. Papadopoulos sang out in breathless delight:
“If I am the King of Cats, you, Carissima, are the Queen. Nay, more, you are the Goddess!”
Lola Brandt laughed. I did not. It was uncanny. It seemed as if some mysterious freemasonic affinity existed between her and the evil beast. During her drive hither she had entered my own atmosphere. She had been the handsome, unconventional woman of the world. Now she seemed as remote from me as the witches in “Macbeth.”
If I had seen her dashing Paris hat rise up into a point and her umbrella turn into a broomstick, and herself into one of the buxom carlines of “Tam O'Shanter,” I should not have been surprised. The feats of the mild pussies which the dwarf began forthwith to exhibit provoked in me but a polite counterfeit of enthusiasm. Lola Brandt had discounted my interest. Even his performance with the ferocious Persian lacked the diabolical certainty of Lola's handling. He locked all the other cats up and enticed it out of the cage with a piece of fish. He guided it with a small whip, as it jumped over gates and through blazing hoops, and he stood tense and concentrated, like a lion-tamer.
The act over, the cat turned and snarled and only jumped into its cage after a smart flick of the whip. The dwarf did not touch it once with his hands. I applauded, however, and complimented him. He laid his hand on his heart and bent forward in humility.
“Ah, monsieur, I am but a neophyte where Madame is an expert. I know the superficial nature of cats. Now and then without vainglory I can say I know their hearts; but Madame penetrates to and holds commune with their souls. And a cat's soul, monsieur, is a wonderful thing. Once it was divine—in ancient Egypt. Doubtless monsieur has heard of Pasht? Holy men spent their lives in approaching the cat-soul. Madame was born to the privilege. Pasht watches over her.”
“Pasht,” I said politely in French, in reply to this clotted nonsense, “was a great divinity. And for yourself, who knows but what you may have been in a previous incarnation the keeper of the Sacred Cats in some Egyptian temple.”
“I was,” he said, with staggering earnestness. “At Memphis.”
“One of these days,” I returned, with equal solemnity, “I hope for the privilege of hearing some of your reminiscences. They would no doubt be interesting.”
On the way back Lola thanked me for pretending to take the little man seriously, and not laughing at him.
“If I hadn't,” said I, “he would have stuck his knife into me.”
She shook her head. “You did it naturally. I was watching you. It is because you are a generous-hearted gentleman.”
Said I: “If you talk like that I'll get out and walk.”
And, indeed, what right had she to characterise the moral condition of my heart? I asked her. She laughed her low, lazy laugh, but made no reply. Presently she said:
“Why didn't you like my making friends with the cat?”
“How do you know I didn't like it?” I asked.
“I felt it.”
“You mustn't feel things like that,” I remarked. “It isn't good for you.”
She insisted on my telling her. I explained as well as I could. She touched the sleeve of my coat with her gloved hand.
“I'm glad, because it shows you take an interest in me. And I wanted to let you see that I could do something besides loll about in a drawing-room and smoke cigarettes. It's all I can do. But it's something.” She said it with the humility of the Jongleur de Notre Dame in Anatole Frances's story.
In Eaton Square, where I had a luncheon engagement, she dropped me, and drove off smiling, evidently well pleased with herself. My hostess was standing by the window when I was shown into the drawing-room. I noted the faintest possible little malicious twinkle in her eye.
During the afternoon I had a telephonic message from my doctor, who asked me why I had neglected him for a fortnight and urged me to go to Harley Street at once. To humour him I went the next morning. Hunnington is a bluff, hearty fellow who feeds himself into pink floridity so as to give confidence to his patients. In answer to his renewed inquiry as to my neglect, I remarked that a man condemned to be hanged doesn't seek interviews with the judge in order to learn how the rope is getting on. I conveyed to him politely, although he is an old friend, that I desired to forget his well-fed existence. In his chatty way he requested me not to be an ass, and proceeded to put to me the usual silly questions.
Remembering the result of my last visit, I made him happy by answering them gloomily; whereupon he seized his opportunity and ordered me out of England for the winter. I must go to a warm climate—Egypt, South Africa, Madeira—I could take my choice. I flatly refused to obey. I had my duties in London. He was so unsympathetic as to damn my duties. My duty was to live as long as possible, and my wintering in London would probably curtail my short life by two months. Then I turned on him and explained the charitable disingenuousness of my replies to his questions. He refused to believe me, and we parted with mutual recriminations. I sent him next day, however, a brace of pheasants, a present from Farfax Glenn. After all, he is one of God's creatures.
The next time I called on Lola Brandt I went with the fixed determination to make some progress in my mission. I vowed that I would not be seduced by trumpery conversation about Yokohama or allow my mind to be distracted by absurd adventures among cats. I would clothe myself in the armour of eumoiriety, and, with the sword of duty in my hand, would go forth to battle with the enchantress. All said and done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior? It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt. As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical fancy had assigned to her, they had no existence in reality. She was the most commonplace person I had ever encountered, and I had been but a sentimental lunatic.
In this truly admirable frame of mind I entered her drawing-room. She threw down the penny novel she was reading, and with a little cry of joy sprang forward to greet me.
“I'm so glad you've come. I was getting the blind hump!”
Did I not say she was commonplace? I hate this synonym for boredom. It may be elegant in the mouth of a duchess and pathetic in that of an oyster-wench, but it falls vulgarly from intermediate lips.
“What has given it to you?” I asked.
“My poor little ouistiti is dead. It is this abominable climate.”
I murmured condolences. I could not exhibit unreasonable grief at the demise of a sick monkey which I had never seen.
“I'm also out of books,” she said, after having paid her tribute to the memory of the departed. “I have been forced to ask the servants to lend me something to read. Have you ever tried this sort of thing? You ought to. It tells you what goes on in high society.”
I was sure it didn't. Not a duchess in its pages talked about having a blind hump. I said gravely:
“I will ask you to lend it to me. Since Dale has been away I've had no one to make out my library list.”
“Do turn Adolphus out of that chair and sit down,” she said, sinking into her accustomed seat. Adolphus was the Chow dog before mentioned, an accomplished animal who could mount guard with the poker and stand on his head, and had been pleased to favour me with his friendship.
“I miss Dale greatly,” said I.
“I suppose you do. You are very fond of him?”
“Very,” said I. “By the by, how did you first come across Dale?”
She threw me a swift glance and smiled.
“Oh, in the most respectable way. I was dining at the Carlton with Sir Joshua Oldfield, the famous surgeon, you know. He performed a silly little operation on me last year, and since then we've been great friends. Dale and some sort of baby boy were dining there, too, and afterwards, in the lounge, Sir Joshua introduced them to me. Dale asked me if he could call. I said 'Yes.' Perhaps I was wrong. Anyhow,voila! Do you know Sir Joshua?”
“I sat next to him once at a public dinner. He's a friend of the Kynnersleys. A genial old soul.”
“He's a dear!” said Lola.
“Do you know many of Dale's friends?” I asked.
“Hardly any,” she replied. “It's rather lonesome.” Then she broke into a laugh.
“I was so terrified at meeting you the first time. Dale can talk of no one else. He makes a kind of god of you. I felt I was going to hate you like the devil. I expected quite a different person.”
The diplomatist listens to much and says little.
“Indeed,” I remarked.
She nodded. “I thought you would be a big beefy man with a red face, you know. He gave me the idea somehow by calling you a 'splendid chap.' You see, I couldn't think of a 'splendid chap' with a white face and a waxed moustache and your way of talking.”
“I am sorry,” said I, “not to come up to your idea of the heroic.”
“But you do!” she cried, with one of her supple twists of the body. “It was I that was stupid. And I don't hate you at all. You can see that I don't. I didn't even hate you when you came as an enemy.”
“Ah!” said I. “What made you think that? We agreed to argue it out, if you remember.”
She drew out of a case beside her one of her unspeakable cigarettes. “Do you suppose,” she said, lighting it, and pausing to inhale the first two or three puffs of smoke, “do you suppose that a woman who has lived among wild beasts hasn't got instinct?”
I drew my chair nearer to the fire. She was beginning to be uncanny again.
“I expected you were going to be horrified at the dreadful creature your friend had taken up with. Oh, yes, I know in the eyes of your class I'm a dreadful creature. I'm like a cat in many ways. I'm suspicious of strangers, especially strangers of your class, and I sniff and sniff until I feel it's all right. After the first few minutes I felt you were all right. You're true and honourable, like Dale, aren't you?”
Like a panther making a sudden spring, she sat bolt upright in her chair as she launched this challenge at me. Now, it is disconcerting to a man to have a woman leap at his throat and ask him whether he is true and honourable, especially when his attitude towards her approaches the Machiavellian.
I could only murmur modestly that I hoped I could claim these qualifications.
“And you don't think me a dreadful woman?”
“So far from it, Madame Brandt,” I replied, “that I think you a remarkable one.”
“I wonder if I am,” she said, sinking back among her cushions. “I should like to be for Dale's sake. I suppose you know I care a great deal for Dale?”
“I have taken the liberty of guessing it,” said I. “And since you have done me the honour of taking me so far into your confidence,” I added, playing what I considered to be my master-card, “may I venture to ask whether you have contemplated”—I paused—“marriage?”
Her brow grew dark, as she looked involuntarily at her bare left hand.
“I have got a husband already,” she replied.
As I expected. Ladies like Lola Brandt always have husbands unfit for publication; and as the latter seem to make it a point of honour never to die, widowed Lolas are as rare as blackberries in spring.
“Forgive my rudeness,” I said, “but you wear no wedding ring.”
“I threw it into the sea.”
“Ah!” said I.
“Do you want to hear about him?” she asked suddenly. “If we are to be friends, perhaps you had better know. Somehow I don't like talking to Dale about it. Do you mind putting some coals on the fire?”
I busied myself with the coal-scuttle, lit a cigarette, and settled down to hear the story. If it had not been told in the twilight hour by a woman with a caressing, enveloping voice like Lola Brandt's I should have yawned myself out of the house.
It was a dismal, ordinary story. Her husband was a gentleman, a Captain Vauvenarde in the French Army. He had fallen in love with her when she had first taken Marseilles captive with the prodigiosities of her horse Sultan. His proposals of manifold unsanctified delights met with unqualified rejection by the respectable and not too passionately infatuated Lola. When he nerved himself to the supreme sacrifice of offering marriage she accepted.
She had dreams of social advancement, yearned to be one of the white faces of the audience in the front rows. The civil ceremony having been performed, he pleaded with her for a few weeks' secrecy on account of his family. The weeks grew into months, during which, for the sake of a livelihood, she fulfilled her professional engagements in many other towns. At last, when she returned to Marseilles, it became apparent that Captain Vauvenarde had no intention whatever of acknowledging her openly as his wife. Hence many tears. Moreover, he had little beyond his pay and his gambling debts, instead of the comfortable little fortune that would have assured her social position. Now, officers in the French Army who marry ladies with performing horses are not usually guided by reason; and Captain Vauvenarde seems to have been the most unreasonable being in the world. It was beneath the dignity of Captain Vauvenarde's wife to make a horse do tricks in public, and it was beneath Captain Vauvenarde's dignity to give her his name before the world. She must neither be Lola Brandt nor Madame Vauvenarde. She must give up her fairly lucrative profession and live in semi-detached obscurity up a little back street on an allowance of twopence-halfpenny a week and be happy and cheerful and devoted. Lola refused. Hence more tears.
There were scenes of frantic jealousy, not on account of any human being, but on account of the horse. If she loved him as much as she loved that abominable quadruped whose artificial airs and graces made him sick every time he looked at it, she would accede to his desire. Besides, he had the husband's right—a powerful privilege in France. She pointed out that he could only exercise it by declaring her to be his wife. Relations were strained. They led separate lives. From Marseilles she went to Genoa, whither he followed her. Eventually he went away in a temper and never came back. She had not heard from him since, and where he was at the present moment she had not the faintest idea.
“So you went cheerfully on with your profession?” I remarked.
“I returned to Marseilles, and there I lost my horse Sultan. Then my father died and left me pretty well off, and I hadn't the heart to train another animal. So here I am. Ah!”
With one of her lithe movements she rose to her feet, and, flinging out her arms in a wide gesture, began to walk about the room, stopping here and there to turn on the light and draw the flaring chintz curtains. I rose, too, so as to aid her. Suddenly as we met, by the window, she laid both her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face earnestly and imploringly, and her lips quivered. I wondered apprehensively what she was going to do next.
“For God's sake, be my friend and help me!”
The cry, in her rich, low notes, seemed to come from the depths of the woman's nature. It caused some absurd and unnecessary chord within me to vibrate.
For the first time I realised that her strong, handsome face could look nobly and pathetically beautiful. Her eyes swam in an adorable moisture and grew very human and appealing. In a second all my self-denying ordinances were forgotten. The witch had me in her power again.
“My dear Madame Brandt,” said I, “how can I do it?”
“Don't take Dale from me. I've lived alone, alone, alone all these years, and I couldn't bear it.”
“Do you care for him so very much?”
She withdrew her hands and moved slightly. “Who else in the wide world have I to care for?”
This was very pathetic, but I had the sense to remark that compromising the boy's future was not the best way of showing her devotion.
“Oh, how could I do that?” she asked. “I can't marry him. And if I do what I've never done before for any man—become his mistress—who need know? I could stay in the background.”
“You seem to forget, dear lady,” said I, “that Captain Vauvenarde is probably alive.”
“But I tell you I've lost sight of him altogether.”
“Are you quite so sure,” I asked, regaining my sanity by degrees, “that Captain Vauvenarde has lost sight of you?”
She turned quickly. “What do you mean?”
“You have given him no chance as yet of recovering his freedom.”
She passed her hand over her face, and sat down on the sofa. “Do you mean—divorce?”
“It's an ugly word, dear Madame Brandt,” said I, as gently as I could, “but you and I are strong people and needn't fear uttering it. Don't you think such a scandal would ruin Dale at the very beginning of his career?”
There was a short silence. I was glad to see she was feminine enough to twist and tear her handkerchief.
“What am I to do?” she asked at last. “I can't live this awful lonely life much longer. Sometimes I get the creeps.”
I might have given her the sound advice to find healthy occupation in training crocodiles to sit up and beg; but an idea which advanced thinkers might classify as more suburban was beginning to take shape in my mind.
“Has it occurred to you,” I said, “that now you have assumed the qualifications imposed by Captain Vauvenarde for bearing his name?”
“I don't understand.”
“You no longer perform in public. He would have no possible grievance against you.”
“Are you suggesting that I should go back to my husband?” she gasped.
“I am,” said I, feeling mighty diplomatic.
She looked straight in front of her, with parted lips, fingering her handkerchief and evidently pondering the entirely new suggestion. I thought it best to let her ponder. As a general rule, people will do anything in the world rather than think; so, when one sees a human being wrapped in thought, one ought to regard wilful disturbance of the process as sacrilege. I lit a cigarette and wandered about the room.
Eventually I came to a standstill before the Venus of Milo. But while I was admiring its calm, mysterious beauty, the development of a former idea took the shape of an inspiration which made my heart sing. Fate had put into my hands the chance of complete eumoiriety.
If I could effect a reconciliation between Lola Brandt and her husband, Dale would be cured almost automatically of his infatuation, and I should be the Deputy Providence bringing happiness to six human beings—Lola Brandt, Captain Vauvenarde, Lady Kynnersley, Maisie Ellerton, Dale, and Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos, who could not fail to be delighted at the happiness of his goddess.
There also might burst joyously on the earth a brood of gleeful little Vauvenardes and merry little Kynnersleys, who might regard Simon de Gex as their mythical progenitor. It might add to the gaiety of regiments and the edification of parliaments. Acts should be judged, thought I, not according to their trivial essence, but by the light of their far-reaching consequences.
Lola Brandt broke the silence. She did not look at me. She said:
“I can't help feeling that you're my friend.”
“I am,” I cried, in the exultation of my promotion to the role of Deputy Providence. “I am indeed. And a most devoted one.”
“Will you let me think over what you've said for a day or two—and then come for an answer?”
“Willingly,” said I.
“And you won't——?”
“What?”
“No. I know you won't.”
“Tell Dale?” I said, guessing. “No, of course not.”
She rose and put out both her hands to me in a very noble gesture. I took them and kissed one of them.
She looked at me with parted lips.
“You are the best man I have ever met,” she said.
At the moment of her saying it I believed it; such conviction is induced by the utterances of this singular woman. But when I got outside the drawing-room door my natural modesty revolted. I slapped my thigh impatiently with what I thought were my gloves. They made so little sound that I found there was only one. I had left the other inside. I entered and found Lola Brandt in front of the fire holding my glove in her hand. She started in some confusion.
“Is this yours?” she asked.
Now whose could it have been but mine? The ridiculous question worried me, off and on, all the evening.