I went home to my solitary dinner, and afterwards took down a volume of Emerson and tried to read. I thought the cool and spacious philosopher might allay a certain fever in my blood. But he did nothing of the kind. He wrote for cool and spacious people like himself; not for corpses like me revivified suddenly with an overcharge of vital force. I pitched him—how much more truly companionable is a book than its author!—I pitched him across the room, and thrusting my hands in my pockets and stretching out my legs, stared in a certain wonder at myself.
I, Simon de Gex, was in love; and,horribile dictu!in love with two women at once. It was Oriental, Mormonic, New Century, what you will; but there it was. I am ashamed to avow that if, at that moment, both women had appeared before me and said “Marry us,” I should have—well, reflected seriously on the proposal. I had passed through curious enough experiences, Heaven knows, already; but none so baffling as this. The two women came alternately and knocked at my heart, and whispered in my ear their irrefutable claims to my love. I listened throbbingly to each, and to each I said, “I love you.”
I was in an extraordinary psychological predicament. Lola had remarked, “You are not quite alive even yet.” I had come to complete life too suddenly. This was the result. I got up and paced the bird-cage, which the house-agents termed a reception-room, and wondered whether I were going mad. It was not as if one woman represented the flesh and the other the spirit. Then I might have seen the way to a decision. But both had the large nature that comprises all. I could not exalt one in any way to the abasement of the other. All my inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor. I was clamouring for the real. Was she not the incarnation of the real? Her very directness piqued me to a perverse and delicious obliquity. And I knew, as I knew when I parted from her months before, that it was only for me to awaken things that lay virginally dormant. On the other hand stood Lola, with her magnetic seduction, her rich atmosphere, her great wide simplicity of heart, holding out arms into which I longed to throw myself.
It was monstrous, abnormal. I hated the abominable indelicacy of weighing one against the other, as I had hated the idea of their meeting.
I paced my bird-cage until it shrank to the size of a rat-trap. Then I clapped on my hat and fled down into the streets. I jumped into the first cab I saw and bade the driver take me to Barbara's Building. Campion suddenly occurred to me as the best antidote to the poison that had entered my blood.
I found him alone, clearing from the table the remains of supper. In spite of his soul's hospitable instincts, he stared at me.
“Why, what the——?”
“Yes, I know. You're surprised to see me bursting in on you like a wild animal. I'm not going to do it every night, but this evening I claim a bit of our old friendship.”
“Claim it all, my dear de Gex!” he said cordially. “What can I do for you?”
It was characteristic of Campion to put his question in that form. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have asked what was the matter with me. But Campion, who all his life had given, wanted to know what he could co.
“Tell me fairy tales of Lambeth and idylls of the Waterloo Bridge Road. Or light your pipe and talk to me of Barbara.”
He folded up the tablecloth and put it in the sideboard drawer.
“If it's elegant distraction you want,” said he, “I can do better than that.” He planted himself in front of me. “Would you like to do a night's real work?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“A gentleman of my acquaintance named Judd is in the ramping stage ofdelirium tremens. He requires a couple of men to hold him down so as to prevent him from getting out of bed and smashing his furniture and his wife and things. I was going to relieve one of the fellows there now, so that he can get a few hours' sleep, and if you like to come and relieve the other, you'll be doing a good action. But I warn you it won't be funny.”
“I'm in the mood for anything,” I said.
“You'll come?”
“Of course.”
“That's splendid!” he shouted. “I hardly thought you were in earnest. Wait till I telephone for some medicine to be sent up from the dispensary. I promised to take it round with me.”
He telephoned instructions, and presently a porter brought in the medicine. Campion explained that it had been prescribed by the doctor attached to the institution who was attending the case.
“You must come and see the working of our surgery and dispensary!” he cried enthusiastically. “We charge those who can afford a sixpence for visit and medicine. Those who can't are provided, after inquiry, with coupons. We don't want to encourage the well-to-do to get their medical advice gratis, or we wouldn't be able to cope with the really poor. We pay the doctor a fixed salary, and the fees go to the general fund of the Building, so it doesn't matter a hang to him whether a patient pays or not.”
“You must be proud of all this, Campion?” I said.
“In a way,” he replied, lighting his pipe; “but it's mainly a question of money—my poor old father's money which he worked for, not I.”
I reminded him that other sons had been known to put their poor old father's money to baser uses.
“I suppose Barbara is more useful to the community that steam yachts or racing stables; but there, you see, I hate yachting because I'm always sea-sick, and I scarcely know which end of a horse you put the bridle on. Every man to his job. This is mine. I like it.”
“I wonder whether holding down people suffering fromdelirium tremensis my job,” said I. “If so, I'm afraid I shan't like it.”
“If it's really your job,” replied Campion, “you will. You must. You can't help it. God made man so.”
It was only an hour or two later when, for the first time in my life, I came into practical touch with human misery, that I recognised the truth of Campion's perfervid optimism. No one could like our task that night in its outer essence. For a time it revolted me. The atmosphere of the close, dirty room, bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, bathroom, laundry—all in one, the home of man, wife and two children, caught me by the throat. It was sour. The physical contact with the flesh of the unclean, gibbering, shivering, maniacal brute on the foul bed was unutterably repugnant to me. Now and again, during intervals of comparative calm, I was forced to put my head out of the window to breathe the air of the street. Even that was tainted, for a fried-fish shop across the way and a public-house next door billowed forth their nauseating odours. After a while access to the window was denied me. A mattress and some rude coverings were stretched beneath it—the children's bed—on which we persuaded the helpless, dreary wife to lie down and try to rest. A neighbour had taken in the children for the night. The wife was a skinny, grey-faced, lined woman of six-and-twenty. In her attitude of hopeless incompetence she shed around her an atmosphere of unspeakable depression. Although I could not get to the window, I was glad when she lay down and spared me the sight of her moving fecklessly about the room or weeping huddled up on a broken-backed wooden chair and looking more like a half-animated dish-clout than a woman.
The poor wretch on the bed was a journeyman tailor who, when sober, could earn fair wages. The cry of the wife, before Campion awed her into comparative silence, was a monotonous upbraiding of her husband for bringing them down to this poverty. It seemed impossible to touch her intelligence and make her understand that no words from her or any one could reach his consciousness. His violence, his screams, his threats, the horrors of his fear left her unmoved. We were there to guard her from physical danger, and that to her was all that mattered.
In the course of an hour or so the nausea left me. I felt braced by the grimness of the thing, and during the paroxysms I had no time to think of anything but the mechanical work in hand. It was all that Campion and I, both fairly able-bodied men, could do to keep the puny little tailor in his bed. Horrible shapes menaced him from which he fought madly to escape. He writhed and shrieked with terror. Once he caught my hand in his teeth and bit it, and Campion had some difficulty in relaxing the wretch's jaw. Between the paroxysms Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word. The wife, poor creature, whimpered on her mattress. It was not a pleasant vigil. It lasted till the grey dawn crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion's men from Barbara's Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in to help the slatternly wife light a fire and make some tea. I have enjoyed few things more than the warm, bitter stuff which I drank out of the broken mug in that strange and depressing company.
I went out into the street with racked head and nerves and muscles. Campion kept his cloth cap in his hand, allowing the morning wind to ruffle his shaggy black hair, and drew a long breath.
“I think the worst is over now. As soon as he can be moved, I'll get him down to the annexe at Broadstairs. The sea air will pull him round.”
“Isn't it rather hopeless?” I asked.
He turned on me. “Nothing's hopeless. If you once start the hopeless game down here you'd better distribute cyanide of potassium instead of coals and groceries. I've made up my mind to get that man decent again, and, by George, I'm going to do it! Fancy those two weaklings producing healthy offspring. But they have. Two of the most intelligent kids in the district. If you hold up your hands and say it's awful to contemplate their upbringing you're speaking the blatant truth. It's the contemplation that's awful. But why contemplate when you can do something?”
I admitted the justice of the remark. He went on.
“Look at yourself now. If you had gone in with me last night and just stared at the poor devil howling with D.T. in that filthy place, you'd have come out sick and said it was awful. Instead of that, you buckled to and worked and threw off everything save our common humanity, and have got interested in the Judds in spite of yourself. You'll go and see them again and do what you can for them, won't you?”
I was not in a merry mood, but I laughed. Campion had read the intention that had vaguely formulated itself in the back of my mind.
“Of course I will,” I said.
We walked on a few steps down the still silent, disheartening street without speaking. Then he tugged his beard, half-halted, and glanced at me quickly.
“See here,” said he, “the more sensible people I can get in to help us the better. Would you like me to hand you over the Judd familyen bloc?”
This was startling to the amateur philanthropist. But it is the way of all professionals to regard their own business as of absorbing interest to the outside world. The stockbroking mind cannot conceive a sane man indifferent to the fluctuations of the money market, and to the professional cricketer the wide earth revolves around a wicket. How in the world could I be fairy godfather to the Judd family? Campion took my competence for granted.
“You may not understand exactly what I mean, my dear Campion,” said I; “but I attribute the most unholy disasters of my life to a ghastly attempt of mine to play Deputy Providence.”
“But who's asking you to play Deputy Providence?” he shouted. “It's the very last idiot thing I want done. I want you to do certain definite practical work for that family under the experienced direction of the authorities at Barbara's Building. There, do you understand now?”
“Very well, I'll do anything you like.”
Thus it befell that I undertook to look after the moral, material, and spiritual welfare of the family of an alcoholic tailor by the name of Judd who dwelt in a vile slum in South Lambeth. My head was full of the prospect when I awoke at noon, for I had gone exhausted to sleep as soon as I reached home. If goodwill, backed by the experience of Barbara's Building, could do aught towards the alleviation of human misery, I determined that it should be done. And there was much misery to be alleviated in the Judd family. I had no clear notion of the means whereby I was to accomplish this; but I knew that it would be a philanthropic pursuit far different from my previous eumoirous wanderings abut London when, with a mind conscious of well-doing, I distributed embarrassing five-pound notes to the poor and needy.
I had known—what comfortable, well-fed gentleman does not?—that within easy walking distance of his London home thousands of human beings live like the beasts that perish; but never before had I spent an intimate night in one of the foul dens where the living and perishing take place. The awful pity of it entered my soul.
So deeply was I impressed with the responsibility of what I had undertaken, so grimly was I haunted by the sight of the pallid, howling travesty of a man and the squeezed-out, whimpering woman, that the memory of the conflicting emotions that had driven me to Campion the night before returned to me with a shock.
“It strikes me,” I murmured, as I shaved, “that I am living very intensely indeed. Here am I in love with two women at once, and almost hysterically enthusiastic over a delirious tailor.” Then I cut my cheek and murmured no more, until the operation was concluded.
I had arranged to accompany Lola that afternoon to the Zoological Gardens. This was a favourite resort of hers. She was on intimate terms with keepers and animals, and her curious magnetism allowed her to play such tricks with lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts as made my blood run cold. As for the bears, they greeted her approach with shrieking demonstrations of affection. On such occasions I felt the same curious physical antipathy as I did when she had dominated Anastasius's ill-conditioned cat. She seemed to enter another sphere of being in which neither I nor anything human had a place.
With some such dim thoughts in my head, I reached her door in Cadogan Gardens. The sight of her electric brougham that stood waiting switched my thoughts into another groove, but one running oddly parallel. Electric broughams also carried her out of my sphere. I had humbly performed the journey thither in an omnibus.
She received me in her big, expansive way.
“Lord! How good it is to see you. I was getting the—I was going to say 'the blind hump'—but you don't like it. I was going to turn crazy and bite the furniture.”
“Why?” I asked with masculine directness.
“I've been trying to educate myself—to read poetry. Look here”—she caught a small brown-covered octavo volume from the table. “I can't make head or tail of it. It proved to me that it was no use. If I couldn't understand poetry, I couldn't understand anything. It was no good trying to educate myself. I gave it up. And then I got what you don't like me to call the hump.”
“You dear Lola!” I cried, laughing. “I don't believe any one has ever made head or tail out of 'Sordello.' There once was a man who said there were only two intelligible lines in the poem—the first and the last—and that both were lies. 'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,' and 'Who would, has heard Sordello's story told.' Don't worry about not understanding it.”
“Don't you?”
“Not a bit,” said I.
“That's a comfort,” she said, with a generous sigh of relief. “How well you're looking!” she cried suddenly. “You're a different man. What have you been doing to yourself?”
“I've grown quite alive.”
“Good! Delightful! So am I. Quite alive now, thank you.”
She looked it, in spite of the black outdoor costume. But there was a dash of white at her throat and some white lilies of the valley in her bosom, and a white feather in her great black hat poised with a Gainsborough swagger on the mass of her bronze hair.
“It's the spring,” she added.
“Yes,” said I, “it's the spring.”
She approached me and brushed a few specks of dust from my shoulder.
“You want a new suit of clothes, Simon.”
“Dear me!” said I, glancing hastily over the blue serge suit in which I had lounged at Mustapha Superieur. “I suppose I do.”
It occurred to me that my wardrobe generally needed replenishing. I had been unaccustomed to think of these things, the excellent Rogers and his predecessors having done most of the thinking for me.
“I'll go to Poole's at once,” said I.
And then it struck me, to my whimsical dismay, that in the present precarious state of my finances, especially in view of my decision to abandon political journalism in favour of I knew not what occupation, I could not afford to order clothes largely from a fashionable tailor.
“I shouldn't have mentioned it,” said Lola apologetically, “but you're always so spick and span.”
“And now I'm getting shabby!”
I threw back my head and laughed at the new and comical conception of Simon de Gex down at heel.
“Oh, not shabby!” echoed Lola.
“Yes, my dear. The days of purple and fine linen arevorbei. You'll have to put up with me in a threadbare coat and frayed cuffs and ragged hems to my trousers.”
Lola declared that I was talking rubbish.
“Not quite such rubbish as you may think, my dear. Shall you mind?”
“It would break my heart. But why do you talk so? You can't be—as poor—as that?”
Her face manifested such tragic concern that I laughed. Besides, the idea of personal poverty amused me. When I gave up my political work I should only have what I had saved from my wreck—some two hundred a year—to support me until I should find some other means of livelihood. It was enough to keep me from starvation, and the little economies I had begun to practise afforded me enjoyment. On the other hand, how folks regulated their balance-sheets so as to live on two hundred a year I had but a dim notion. In the course of our walk from Barbara's Building to the Judds the night before I had asked Campion. He had laughed somewhat grimly.
“I don't know. I don't run an asylum for spendthrift plutocrats; but if you want to see how people live and bring up large families on fifteen shillings a week, I can show you heaps of examples.”
This I felt would, in itself, be knowledge of the deepest interest; but it would in no way aid me to solve my own economic difficulty. I was always being brought up suddenly against the problem in some form or another, and, as I say, it caused me considerable amusement.
“I shall go on happily enough,” said I, reassuringly. “In the meantime let us go and see the lions and tigers.”
We started. The electric brougham glided along comfortably through the sunlit streets. A feeling of physical and spiritual content stole over me. Our hands met and lingered a long time in a sympathetic clasp. Whatever fortune held in store for me here at least I had an inalienable possession. For some time we said nothing, and when our eyes met she smiled. I think she had never felt my heart so near to hers. At last we broke the silence and talked of ordinary things. I told her of my vigil overnight and my undertaking to look after the Judds. She listened with great interest. When I had finished my tale, she said almost passionately:
“Oh, I wish I could do something like that!”
“You?”
“Why not? I came from those people. My grandfather swept the cages in Jamrach's down by the docks. He died of drink. He used to live in one horrible, squalid room near by. I remember my father taking me to see him when I was a little girl—we ourselves weren't very much better off at that time. I've been through it,” she shivered. “I know what that awful poverty is. Sometimes it seems immoral of me to live luxuriously as I do now without doing a hand's turn to help.”
“Chacun a son metier, my dear,” said I. “There's no need to reproach yourself.”
“But I think it might be mymetier,” she replied earnestly, “if only I could learn it.”
“Why haven't you tried, then?”
“I've been lazy and the opportunity hasn't come my way.”
“I'll introduce you to Campion,” I said, “and doubtless he'll be able to find something for you to do. He has made a science of the matter. I'll take you down to see him.”
“Will you?”
“Certainly,” said I. There was a pause. Then an idea struck me. “I wonder, my dear Lola, whether you could apply that curious power you have over savage animals to the taming of the more brutal of humans.”
“I wonder,” she said thoughtfully.
“I should like to see you seize a drunken costermonger in the act of jumping on his wife by the scruff of the neck, and reduce him to such pulp that he sat up on his tail and begged.”
“Oh, Simon!” she exclaimed reproachfully. “I quite thought you were serious.”
“So I am, my dear,” I returned quickly, “as serious as I can be.”
She laughed. “Do you remember the first day you came to see me? You said that I could train any human bear to dance to whatever tune I pleased. I wonder if the same thought was at the back of your head.”
“It wasn't. It was a bad and villainous thought. I came under the impression that you were a dangerous seductress.”
“And I'm not?”
Oh, that spring day, that delicious tingle in the air, that laughing impertinence of the budding trees in the park through which we were then driving, that enveloping sense of fragrance and the nearness and the dearness of her! Oh, that overcharge of vitality! I leaned my head to hers so that my lips nearly touched her ear. My voice shook.
“You're a seductress and a witch and a sorcerer and an enchantress.”
The blood rose to her dark face. She half closed her eyes.
“What else am I?” she murmured.
But, alas! I had not time to answer, for the brougham stopped at the gates of the Zoological Gardens. We both awakened from our foolishness. My hand was on the door-handle when she checked me.
“What's the good of a mind if you can't change it? I don't feel in a mood for wild beasts to-day, and I know you don't care to see me fooling about with them. I would much rather sit quiet and talk to you.”
With a woman who wants to sacrifice herself there is no disputing. Besides, I had no desire to dispute. I acquiesced. We agreed to continue our drive.
“We'll go round by Hampstead Heath,” she said to the chauffeur. As soon as we were in motion again, she drew ever so little nearer and said, in her lowest, richest notes, and with a coquetry that was bewildering on account of its frankness:
“What were we talking of before we pulled up?”
“I don't know what we were talking of,” I said, “but we seem to have trodden on the fringe of a fairy-tale.”
“Can't we tread on it again?” She laughed happily.
“You have only to cast the spell of your witchery over me again.”
She drew yet a little nearer and whispered: “I'm trying to do it as hard as I can.”
An adorable softness came into her eyes, and her hand instinctively closed round mine in its boneless clasp. The long pent-up longing of the woman vibrated from her in waves that shook me to my soul. My senses swam. Her face quivered glorious before me in a black world. Her lips were parted. Careless of all the eyes in all the houses in the Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, and in the head of a telegraph boy whom I only noticed afterwards, I kissed her on the lips.
All the fulness and strength of life danced through my veins.
“I told you I was quite alive!” I said with idiotic exultation.
She closed her eyes and leaned back. “Why did you do that?” she murmured.
“Because I love you,” said I. “It has come at last.”
Where we drove I have no recollection. Presumably an impression of green rolling plain with soft uplands in the distance signified that we passed along Hampstead Heath; the side thoroughfare with villa residences on either side may have been Kilburn High Road; the flourishing, busy, noisy suburb may have been Kilburn: the street leading thence to the Marble Arch may have been Maida Vale. To me they were paths in Dreamland. We spoke but little and what we did say was in the simple, commonplace language which all men use in the big crises of life.
There was no doubt now of my choice. I loved her. Love had come to me at last. That was all I knew at that hour and all I cared to know.
Lola was the first to awake from Dreamland. She shivered. I asked whether she felt cold.
“No. I can't believe that you love me. I can't. I can't.”
I smiled in a masterful way. “I can soon show you that I do.”
She shook her head. “I'm afraid, Simon, I'm afraid.”
“What of?”
“Myself.”
“Why?”
“I can't tell you. I can't explain. I don't know how to. I've been wrong—horribly wrong. I'm ashamed.”
She gripped her hands together and looked down at them. I bent forward so as to see her face, which was full of pain.
“But, dearest of all women,” I cried, “what in the world have you to be ashamed of?”
She paused, moistened her lips with her tongue, and then broke out:
“I'll tell you. A decent lady like your Eleanor Faversham wouldn't tell. But I can't keep these things in. Didn't you begin by saying I was a seductress? No, no, let me talk. Didn't you say I could make a man do what I wanted? Well, I wanted you to kiss me. And now you've done it, you think you love me; but you don't, you can't.”
“You're talking the wickedest nonsense that ever proceeded out of the lips of a loving woman,” I said aghast. “I repeat in the most solemn way that I love you with all my heart.”
“In common decency you couldn't say otherwise.”
Again I saw the futility of disputation. I put my hand on hers.
“Time will show, dear. At any rate, we have had our hour of fairyland.”
“I wish we hadn't,” she said. “Don't you see it was only my sorcery, as you call it, that took us there? I meant us to go.”
At last we reached Cadogan Gardens. I descended and handed her out, and we entered the hall of the mansions. The porter stood with the lift-door open.
“I'm coming up to knock all this foolishness out of your head.”
“No, don't, please, for Heaven's sake!” she whispered imploringly. “I must be alone—to think it all out. It's only because I love you so. And don't come to see me for a day or two—say two days. This is Wednesday. Come on Friday. You think it over as well. And if it's really true—I'll know then—when you come. Good-bye, dear. Make Gray drive you wherever you want to go.”
She wrung my hand, turned and entered the lift. The gates swung to and she mounted out of sight. I went slowly back to the brougham, and gave the chauffeur the address of my eyrie. He touched his hat. I got in and we drove off. And then, for the first time, it struck me that an about-to-be-shabby gentleman with a beggarly two hundred a year, ought not, in spite of his quarterings, to be contemplating marriage with a wealthy woman who kept an electric brougham. The thought hit me like a stone in the midriff.
What on earth was to be done? My pride rose up like thedeux ex machinain the melodrama and forbade the banns. To live on Lola's money—the idea was intolerable. Equally intolerable was the idea of earning an income by means against the honesty of which my soul clamoured aloud.
“Good God!” I cried. “Is life, now I've got to it, nothing but an infinite series of dilemmas? No sooner am I off one than I'm on another. No sooner do I find that Lola and not Eleanor Faversham is the woman sent down by Heaven to be my mate than I realise the same old dilemma—Lola on one horn and Eleanor replaced on the other by Pride and Honour and all sorts of capital-lettered considerations. Life is the very Deuce,” said I, with a wry appreciation of the subtlety of language.
Why did Lola say: “Your Eleanor Faversham?”
I had enough to think over for the rest of the evening. But I slept peacefully. Light loves had come and gone in the days past; but now for the first time love that was not light had come into my life.
“The Lord will find a way out of the dilemma,” said I confidently to myself as I neared Cadogan Gardens two days after the revelatory drive. “Lola is in love with me and I am in love with Lola, and there is nothing to keep us apart but my pride over a matter of a few ha'-pence.” I felt peculiarly jaunty. I had just posted to Finch the last of the articles I had agreed to write for his reactionary review, and only a couple of articles for another journal remained to be written in order to complete my literary engagements. Soon I should be out of the House of Bondage in which I had been a slave, at first willingly and now rebelliously, from my cradle. The great wide world with its infinite opportunities for development received my liberated spirit. I had broken the shackles of caste. I had thrown off the perfumed garments of epicureanism, the vesture of my servitude. My emotions, once stifled in the enervating atmosphere, now awake fresh and strong in the free air. I was elemental—the man wanting the woman; and I was happy because I knew I was going to get her. Such must be the state of being of a dragonfly on a sunny day. And—shall I confess it?—I had obeyed the dragon-fly's instinct and attired myself in the most resplendent raiment in my wardrobe. My morning coat was still irreproachable, my patent leather boots still gleamed, and having had some business in Piccadilly I had stepped into my hatter's and emerged with my silk hat newly ironed. I positively strutted along the pavement.
For two days I had not seen her or heard from her or written to her. I had scrupulously respected her wishes, foolish though they were. Now I was on my way to convince her that my love was not a moment's surge of the blood on a spring afternoon. I would take her into my arms at once, after the way of men, and she, after the way of women, would yield adorably. I had no doubt of it. I tasted in anticipation the bliss of that first embrace as if I had never kissed a woman in my life. And, indeed, what woman had I kissed with the passion that now ran through my veins? In that embrace all the ghosts of the past women would be laid for ever and a big and lusty future would make glorious beginning. “By Heaven,” I cried, almost articulately, “with the splendour of the world at my command why should I not write plays, novels, poems, rhapsodies, so as to tell the blind, groping, loveless people what it is like?
“Take me up to Madame Brandt!” said I to the lift-porter. “Madame Brandt is not in town, sir,” said the man.
I looked at him open-mouthed. “Not in town?”
“I think she has gone abroad, sir. She left with a lot of luggage yesterday, and her maid, and now the flat is shut up.”
“Impossible!” I cried aghast.
The porter smiled. “I can only tell you what has happened, sir.”
“Where has she gone to?”
“I couldn't say, sir.”
“Her letters? Has she left no address to which they are to be forwarded?”
“Not with me, sir.”
“Did she say when she was coming back?”
“No, sir. But she dismissed her cook with a month's wages, so it seems as though she was gone for a good spell.”
“What time yesterday did she leave?”
“After lunch. The cabman was to drive her to Victoria—London, Chatham and Dover Railway.”
“That looks like the 2.20 to Paris,” said I.
But the lift-porter knew nothing of this. He had given me all the information in his power. I thanked him and went out into the sunshine a blinking, dazed, bewildered and piteously crushed man.
She had gone, without drum or trumpet, maid and baggage and all, having dismissed her cook and shut up the flat. It was incredible. I wandered aimlessly about Chelsea trying to make up my mind what to do. Should I go to Paris and bring her back by main force? But how did I know that she had gone to Paris? And if she was there how could I discover her address? Suddenly an idea struck me. She would not have left Quast and the cattery in the same unceremonious fashion to get on as best they might. She would have given Quast money and directions. At any rate, he would know more than the lift-porter of the mansions. I decided to go to him forthwith.
By means of trains and omnibuses I arrived at the house in the little street off Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, where the maker of gymnastic appliances had his being. I knocked at the door. A grubby man appeared. I inquired for Quast.
Quast had left that morning in a van, taking his cages of cats with him. He had gone abroad and was never coming back again, not if he knew it, said the grubby man. The cats were poison and Quast was a low-down foreigner, and it would cost him a year's rent to put the place in order again. Whereupon he slammed the door in my face and left me disconsolate on the doorstep.
The only other person with whom I knew Lola to be on friendly terms was Sir Joshua Oldfield. I entered the first public telephone office I came to and rang him up. He had not seen Lola for a week, and had heard nothing from her relating to her sudden departure. I went sadly home to my bird-cage in Victoria Street, feeling that now at last the abomination of desolation had overspread my life.
Why had she gone? What was the meaning of it? Why not a line of explanation? And the simultaneous disappearance of Quast and the cats—what did that betoken? Had she been summoned, for any reason, to the Maison de Sante, where Anastasius Papadopoulos was incarcerated? If so, why this secrecy? Why should Lola of all people side with Destiny and make a greater Tom Fool of me than ever? This could be no other than the final jest.
I do not care to remember what I did and said in the privacy of my little room. There are things a man locks away even from himself.
I was in the midst of my misery when the bell of my tiny flat rang. I opened the door and found my sister Agatha smiling on the threshold.
“Hallo!” said I, gazing at her stupidly.
“You're not effusive in your welcome, my dear Simon,” she remarked. “Won't you ask me to come in?”
“By all means,” said I. “Come in!”
She entered and looked round my little sitting-room. “What a pill-box in the sky! I had no idea it was as tiny as this. I think I shall call you Saint Simon Stylites.”
I was in no mood for Agatha. I bowed ironically and inquired to what I owed the honour of the visit.
“I want you to do me a favour—a great favour. I'm dying to see the new dances at the Palace Theatre. They say they dance on everything except their feet. I've got a box. Tom promised to take me. Now he finds he can't. I've telephoned all over the place for something uncompromising in or out of trousers to accompany me and I can't get hold of anybody. So I've come to you.”
“I'm vastly flattered!” said I.
She dismissed my sarcasm with bird-like impatience.
“Don't be silly. If I had thought you would like it, I should have come to you first. I didn't want to bore you. But I did think you would pull me out of a hole.”
“What's a hole?” I asked.
“I've paid for a box and I can't go by myself. How can I? Do take me, there's a dear.”
“I'm afraid I'm too dull for haunts of merriment,” said I.
She regarded me reproachfully.
“It isn't often I ask you to put yourself out for me. The last time was when I asked you to be the baby's godfather. And a pretty godfather you've been. I bet you anything you don't remember the name.”
“I do,” said I.
“What's it then?”
“It's—it's——” I snapped my fingers. The brat's name had for the moment gone out of my distracted head. She broke into a laugh and ran her arm through mine.
“Dorcas.”
“Yes, of course—Dorcas. I was going to say so.”
“Then you were going to say wrong, for it's Dorothy. Now youmustcome—for the sake of penance.”
“I'll do anything you please!” I cried in desperation, “so long as you'll not talk to me of my own affairs and will let me sit as glum as ever I choose.”
Then for the first time she manifested some interest in my mood. She put her head to one side and scanned my face narrowly.
“What's the matter, Simon?”
“I've absorbed too much life the last few days,” said I, “and now I've got indigestion.”
“I'm sorry, dear old boy, whatever it is,” she said affectionately. “Come round and dine at 7.30, and I promise not to worry you.”
What could I do? I accepted. The alternative to procuring Agatha an evening's amusement was pacing up and down my bird-cage and beating my wings (figuratively) and perhaps my head (literally) against the bars.
“It's awfully sweet of you,” said Agatha. “Now I'll rush home and dress.”
I accompanied her down the lift to the front door, and attended her to her carriage.
“I'll do you a good turn some day, dear,” she said as she drove off.
I rather flatter myself that Agatha had no reason to complain of my dulness at dinner. In my converse with her I was faced by various alternatives. I might lay bare my heart, tell her of my love for Lola and my bewildered despair at her desertion; this I knew she would no more understand than if I had proclaimed a mad passion for a young lady who had waited on me at a tea-shop, or for a cassowary at the Zoo; even the best and most affectionate of sisters have their sympathetic limitations. I might have maintained a mysterious and Byronic gloom; this would have been sheer bad manners. I might have attributed my lack of spontaneous gaiety to toothache or stomach-ache; this would have aroused sisterly and matronly sympathies, and I should have had the devil's own job to escape from the house unpoisoned by the nostrums that lurk in the medicine chest of every well-conducted family. Agatha, I knew, had a peculiarly Borgiaesque equipment. Lastly, there was the worldly device, which I adopted, of dissimulating the furnace of my affliction beneath a smiling exterior. Agatha, therefore, found me an entertaining guest and drove me to the Palace Theatre in high good humour.
There, however, I could resign my role of entertainer in favour of the professionals on the stage. I sat back in my corner of the box and gave myself up to my harassing concerns. Young ladies warbled, comic acrobats squirted siphons at each other and kicked each other in the stomach, jugglers threw plates and brass balls with dizzying skill, the famous dancers gyrated pyrotechnically, the house applauded with delight, Agatha laughed and chuckled and clapped her hands and I remained silent, unnoticed and unnoticing in my reflective corner, longing for the foolery to end. Where was Lola? Why had she forsaken me? What remedy, in the fiend's name, was there for this heart torture within me? The most excruciating agonies of the little pain inside were child's play to this. I bit my lips so as not to groan aloud and contorted my features into the semblance of a smile.
During a momentary interval there came a knock at the box door. I said, “Come in!” The door opened, and there, to my utter amazement, stood Dale Kynnersley—Dale, sleek, alert, smiling, attired in the very latest nicety of evening dress affected by contemporary youth—Dale such as I knew and loved but six months ago.
He came forward to Agatha, who was little less astounded than myself.
“How d'ye do, Lady Durrell? I'm in the stalls with Harry Essendale. I tried to catch your eye, but couldn't. So I thought I'd come up.” He turned to me with frank outstretched hand, “How do, Simon?”
I grasped his hand and murmured something unintelligible. The thing was so extraordinary, so unexpected that my wits went wandering. Dale carried off the situation lightly. It was he who was the man of the world, and I the unresourceful stumbler.
“He's looking ripping, isn't he, Lady Durrell? I met old Oldfield the other day, and he was raving about your case. The thing has never been done before. Says they're going mad over your chap in Paris—they've given him medals and wreaths and decorations till he goes about like a prize bull at a fair. By Jove, it's good to see you again.”
“You might have taken an earlier opportunity,” Agatha remarked with some acidity.
“So I might,” retorted Dale blandly; “but when a man's a born ass it takes him some time to cultivate sense! I've been wanting to see you for a long time, Simon—and to-night I just couldn't resist it. You don't want to kick me out?”
“Heaven forbid,” said I, somewhat brokenly, for the welcome sight of his face and the sound of his voice aroused emotions which even now I do not care to analyse. “It was generous of you to come up.”
He coloured. “Rot!” said he, in his breezy way. “Hallo! The curtain's going up. What's the next item? Oh, those fool dogs!”
“I adore performing dogs!” said Agatha, looking toward the stage.
He turned to me. “Do you?”
The last thing on earth I desired to behold at that moment was a performing animal. My sensitiveness led me to suspect a quizzical look in Dale's eye. Fortunately, he did not wait for my answer, but went on in a boyish attempt to appease Agatha.
“I don't despise them, you know, Lady Durrell, but I've seen them twice before. They're really rather good. There's a football match at the end which is quite exciting.”
“Oh, the beauties!” cried Agatha over her shoulder as the dogs trotted on the stage. I nodded an acknowledgment of the remark, and she plunged into rapt contemplation of the act. Dale and I stood at the back of the box. Suddenly he whispered:
“Come out into the corridor. I've something to say to you.”
“Certainly,” said I, and followed him out of the box.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and looked at me with the defiant and you-be-damned air of the young Briton who was about to commit a gracious action. I knew what he was going to say. I could tell by his manner. I dreaded it, and yet I loved him for it.
“Why say anything, my dear boy?” I asked. “You want to be friends with me again, and God knows I want to be friends again with you. Why talk?”
“I've got to get if off my chest,” said he, in his so familiar vernacular. “I want to tell you that I've been every end of a silly ass and I want you to forgive me.”
I vow I have never felt so miserably guilty towards any human being as I did at that moment. I have never felt such a smug-faced hypocrite. It was a humiliating position. I had inflicted on him a most grievous wrong, and here he was pleading for forgiveness. I could not pronounce the words of pardon. He misinterpreted my silence.
“I know I've behaved rottenly to you since you've been back, but the first step's always so difficult. You mustn't bear a grudge against me.”
“My dear boy!” I cried, my hand on his shoulder, touched to the heart by his simple generosity, “don't let us talk of grudges and forgiveness. All I want to know is whether you're contented?”
“Contented?” he cried. “I should just think I am. I'm the happiest ass that doesn't eat thistles!”
“Explain yourself, my dear Dale,” said I, relapsing into my old manner.
“I'm going to marry Maisie Ellerton.”
I took him by the arm and dragged him inside the box.
“Agatha,” said I, “leave those confounded dogs for a moment and attend to serious matters. This young man has not come up to see either of us, but to obtain our congratulations. He's going to marry Maisie Ellerton.”
“Tell me all about it,” said Agatha intensely interested.
A load of responsibility rolled off my shoulders like Christian's pack. I looked at the dog football match with the interest of a Sheffield puddler at a Cup-tie, and clapped my hands.
An hour or so later after we had seen Agatha home, and Dale had incidentally chucked Lord Essendale (the phrase is his own), we were sitting over whisky and soda and cigars in my Victoria Street flat. The ingenuousness of youth had insisted on this prolongation of our meeting. He had a thousand things to tell me. They chiefly consisted in a reiteration of the statement that he had been a rampant and unimagined silly ass, and that Maisie, who knew the whole lunatic story, was a brick, and a million times too good for him. When he entered my humble lodging he looked round in a bewildered manner.
“Why on earth are you living in this mouse-trap?”
“Agatha calls it a pill-box. I call it a bird-cage. I live here, my dear boy, because it is the utmost I can afford.”
“Rot! I've been your private secretary and know what your income is.”
I sighed heavily. I shall have to get a leaflet printed setting out the causes that led to my change of fortune. Then I can hand it to such of my friends as manifest surprise.
Indeed, I had grown so used to the story of my lamentable pursuit of the eumoirous that I rattled it off mechanically after the manner of the sturdy beggar telling his mendacious tale of undeserved misfortune. To Dale, however, it was fresh. He listened to it open-eyed. When I had concluded, he brought his hand down on the arm of the chair.
“By Jove, you're splendid! I always said you were. Just splendid!”
He gulped down half a tumbler of whisky and soda to hide his feelings.
“And you've been doing all this while I've been making a howling fool of myself! Look here, Simon, you were right all along the line—from the very first when you tackled me about Lola. Do you remember?”
“Why refer to it?” I asked.
“I must!” he burst in quickly. “I've been longing to put myself square with you. By the way, where is Lola?”
“I don't know,” said I with grim truthfulness.
“Don't know? Has she vanished?”
“Yes,” said I.
“That's the end of it, I suppose. Poor Lola! She was an awfully good sort you know!” said Dale, “and I won't deny I was hit. That's when I came such a cropper. But I realise now how right you were. I was just caught by the senses, nothing else; and when she wrote to say it was all off between us my vanity suffered—suffered damnably, old chap. I lost the election through it. Didn't attend to business. That brought me to my senses. Then Essendale took me away yachting, and I had a quiet time to think; and after that I somehow took to seeing more of Maisie. You know how things happen. And I'm jolly grateful to you, old chap. You've saved me from God knows what complications! After all, good sort as Lola is, it's rot for a man to go outside his own class, isn't it?”
“It depends upon the man—and also the woman,” said I, beginning to derive peculiar torture from the conversation.
Dale shook his wise head. “It never comes off,” said he. After a pause he laughed aloud. “Don't you remember the lecture you gave me? My word, you did talk! You produced a string of ghastly instances where the experiment had failed. Let me see, who was there, Paget, Merridew, Bullen. Ha! Ha! No, I'm well out of it, old chap—thanks to you.”
“If any good has come of this sorry business,” said I gravely, “I'm only too grateful to Providence.”
He caught the seriousness of my tone.
“I didn't want to touch on that side of it,” he said awkwardly. “I know what an infernal time you had! It must have been Gehenna. I realise now that it was on my account, and so I can never do enough to show my gratitude.”
He finished his glass of whisky and walked about the tiny room.
“What has always licked me,” he said at length, “is why she never told me she was married. It's so curious, for she was as straight as they make them. It's devilish odd!”
“Yes,” I assented wearily, for every word of this talk was a new pain. “Devilish odd!”
“I suppose it's a question of class again.”
“Or sex,” said I.
“What has sex to do with being straight?”
“Everything,” said I.
“Rot!” said Dale.
I sighed. “I wish your dialectical vocabulary were not so limited.”
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.
“Still the same old Simon. It does my heart good to hear you. May I have another whisky?”
I took advantage of this break to change the conversation. He had told me nothing of his own affairs save that he was engaged to Maisie Ellerton.
“Heavens!” cried he. “Isn't that enough?”
“An engagement isn't an occupation.”
“Isn't it, by Jove?” He laughed boyishly. “I manage, however, to squeeze in a bit of work now and then. The mater has always got plenty on hand for me, and I do things for Raggles. He has been awfully decent. The first time I met him or any of the chiefs after the election I was in a blue funk. But no one seemed to blame me; they all said they were sorry; and now Raggles is looking out for a constituency for me to nurse for the next General Election. Then thingswillhum, I promise you!”
He waved his cigar with the air of a young paladin about to conquer the world. In spite of my own depression, I could not help smiling with gladness at the sight of him. With his extravagantly cut waistcoat, his elaborately exquisite white tie, his perfectly fitting evening clothes, with his supple ease of body, his charming manner, the preposterous fellow made as gallant a show as any ruffling blade in powder and red-heeled shoes. He had acquired, too, an extra touch of manhood since I had seen him last. I felt proud of him, conscious that to the making of him I had to some small degree contributed.
“You must come out and lunch with Maisie and me one day this week,” said he. “She would love to see you.”
“Wait till you're married,” said I, “and then we'll consider it. At present Maisie is under the social dominion of her parents.”
“Well—what of it?”
“Just that,” said I.
Then the truth dawned on him. He grew excited and said it was damnable. He wasn't going to stand by and see people believe a lot of scandalous lies about me. He had no idea people had given me the cold shoulder. He would jolly well (such were his words) take a something (I forget the adjective) megaphone and trumpet about society what a splendid fellow I was.
“I'll tell everybody the whole silly-ass story about myself from beginning to end,” he declared.
I checked him. “You're very generous, my dear boy,” said I, “but you'll do me a favour by letting folks believe what they like.” And then I explained, as delicately as I could, how his sudden championship could be of little advantage to me, and might do him considerable harm.
In his impetuous manner he cut short my carefully-expressed argument.
“Rubbish! Heaps of people I know are already convinced that I was keeping Lola Brandt and that you took her from me in the ordinary vulgar way—”
“Yes, yes,” I interrupted, shrinking. “That's why I order you, in God's name, to leave the whole thing alone.”
“But confound it, man! I've come out of it all right, why shouldn't you? Even supposing Lola was a loose woman—”
I threw up my hand. “Stop!”
He looked disconcerted for a moment.
“We know she isn't, but for the sake of argument—”
“Don't argue,” said I. “Let us drop it.”
“But hang it all!” he shouted in desperation. “Can't I do something! Can't I go and kick somebody?”
I lost my self-control. I rose and put both my hands on his shoulders and looked him in the eyes.
“You can kick anybody you please whom you hear breathe a word against the honour and purity of Madame Lola Brandt.”
Then I walked away, knowing I had betrayed myself, and tried to light a cigar with fingers that shook. There was a pause. Dale stood with his back to the fireplace, one foot on the fender. The cigar took some lighting. The pause grew irksome.
“My regard for Madame Brandt,” said I at last, “is such that I don't wish to discuss her with any one.” I looked at Dale and met his keen eyes fixed on me. The faintest shadow of a smile played about his mouth.
“Very well,” said he dryly, “we won't discuss her. But all the same, my dear Simon, I can't help being interested in her; and as you're obviously the same, it seems rather curious that you don't know where she is.”
“Do you doubt me?” I asked, somewhat staggered by his tone.
“Good Heaven's, no! But if she has disappeared, I'm convinced that something has happened which I know nothing of. Of course, it's none of my business.”
There was a new and startling note of assurance in his voice. Certainly he had developed during the past few months. What I had done, Heaven only knows. Misfortune, which is supposed to be formative of character, seemed to have turned mine into pie. How can I otherwise account for my not checking the lunatic impulse that prompted my next words.
“Well, something has happened,” said I, “and if we're to be friends, you had better know it. Two days ago, for the first time, I told Madame Brandt that I loved her. This very afternoon I went to get her answer to my question—would she marry me?—and I found that she had disappeared without leaving any address behind her. So whenever you hear her name mentioned you can just tell everybody that she's the one woman in the whole wide world I want to marry.”
“Poor old Simon,” said Dale. “Poor old chap.”
“That's exactly how things stand.”
“Lord, who would have thought it?”
“How I've borne with you talking about her all this evening the devil only knows,” I cried. “You've driven me half crazy.”
“You should have told me to shut up.”
“I did.”
“Poor old Simon. I'm so sorry—but I had no idea you had fallen in love with her.”
“Fallen in love!” said I, losing my head. “She's the only woman on God's earth I've ever cared for. I want her as I've wanted nothing in the universe before.”
“And you've come to care for her as much as that?” he said sympathetically. “Poor old Simon.”
“Why the devil shouldn't I?” I shouted, nettled by his “poor old Simons.”
“Lola Brandt is hardly of your class,” said Dale.
I broke out furiously. “Damn class! I've had enough of it. I'm going to take my life into my own hands and do what I like with it. I'm going to choose my mate without any reference to society. I've cut myself adrift from society. It can go hang. Lola Brandt is a woman worth any man's loving. She is a woman in a million. You know nothing whatever about her.”
The last words were scarcely out of my mouth when an echo from the distance came and, as it were, banged at my ears. Dale himself had shrieked them at me in exactly the same tone with reference to the same woman. I stopped short and looked at him for a moment rather stupidly. Then the imp of humour, who for some time had deserted me, flew to my side and tickled my brain. I broke into a chuckle, somewhat hysterical I must admit, and then, throwing myself into an arm-chair, gave way to uncontrollable laughter.
The scare of the unexpected rose in Dale's eyes.
“Why, what on earth is the matter?”
“Can't you see?” I cried, as far as the paroxysms of my mirth would let me. “Can't you see how exquisitely ludicrous the whole thing has been from beginning to end? Don't you realise that you and I are playing the same scene as we played months ago in my library, with the only difference that we have changed roles? I'm the raving, infatuated youth, and you're the grave and reverend mentor. Don't you see? Don't you see?”
“I can't see anything to laugh at,” said Dale sturdily.
And he couldn't. There are thousands of bright, flame-like human beings constituted like that. Life spreads out before them one of its most side-splitting, topsy-turvy farces and they see in it nothing to laugh at.
To Dale the affair had been as serious and lacking in the fantastic as the measles. He had got over the disease and now was exceedingly sorry to perceive that I had caught it in my turn.
“It isn't funny a bit,” he continued. “It's quite natural. I see it all now. You cut me out from the very first. You didn't mean to—you never thought of it. But what chance had I against you? I was a young ass and you were a brilliant man of the world. I bear you no grudge. You played the game in that way. Then things happened—and at last you've fallen in love with her—and now just at the critical moment she has gone off into space. It must be devilish painful for you, if you ask me.”
“Oh, Dale,” said I, shaking my head, “the only fitting end to the farce would be if you wandered over Europe to find and bring her back to me.”
“I don't know about that,” said he, “because I'm engaged, and that, as I said, gives me occupation; but if I can do anything practicable, my dear old Simon, you've only got to send for me.”
He pulled out his watch.
“My hat!” he exclaimed. “It's past two o'clock.”