"Μιοω μνημονα ουμποτην, Procille."—Martial.—"One should not always take after-dinner amenities au pied de la lettre."—Free Translation.
"Μιοω μνημονα ουμποτην, Procille."
—Martial.
—"One should not always take after-dinner amenities au pied de la lettre."
—Free Translation.
Toftrees, at the head of the table, shifted his chair a little so that he was almost facing Gilbert Lothian.
Lothian's arresting voice was quite clear as he spoke to the butler. "That's not the voice of a man who's done himself too well," the novelist thought. But he was puzzled, nevertheless. People like Lothian behaved pretty much as they liked, of course. Convention didn't restrain them. But the sudden request was odd.
And there was that flourishing bow as the women left the room, and certainly Amberley had seemed to look rather strangely at his guest. Toftrees disposed himself to watch events. He had wanted to meet the poet for some time. There was a certain reason. No one knew much about him in London. He lived in the country and was not seen in the usual places despite his celebrity. There had been a good deal of surmise about this new star.
Lothian was like the photographs which had appeared of him in the newspapers, but with a great deal more "personality" than these were able to suggest. Certainly no one looked less like a poet, though this did not surprise the popular novelist, in an age when literary men looked exactly like every one else. But there was not the slightest trace of idealism, of the "thoughts high and hard" that were ever the clear watchwords of his song. "A man who wears a mask," thought Herbert Toftrees with interest and a certain half-conscious fellow-feeling.
The poet was of medium height and about thirty-five years of age. He was fat, with a broad-shouldered corpulence which would have been far less noticeable in a man who was a few inches taller. The clean-shaven face was fattish also, but there was, nevertheless, a curious suggestion of contour about it. It should have been a pure oval, and in certain lights it almost seemed that, while the fatness appeared to dissolve and fall away from it. It was a contour veiled by something that was, but ought not to have been, there.
The eyes were grey and capable of infinite expression—a fact which always became apparent to any one who had been half an hour in his company. But this feature also was enigmatic. For the most part the eyes seemed to be working at half-power, not quite doing or being what one would have expected of them.
The upper lip was short, and the mouth by far the most real and significant part of the face. It was small, but not too small, clearly and delicately cut though without a trace of effeminacy. In its mobility, its sensitive life, its approach to beauty, it said everything in the face. Thick-growing hair of dark brown was allowed to come rather low over a high and finely modelled brow, hair which—despite a natural luxuriance—was cut close to the sides and back of the head.
Such was Toftrees' view of Gilbert Lothian, and it both had insight and was fair. No one can be a Toftrees and the literary idol of thousands and thousands of people without being infinitely the intellectual superior of those people. The novelist had a fine brain and if he could have put a tenth of his observation and knowledge upon paper, he might have been an artistic as well as a commercial success.
But he was hopelessly inarticulate, and æsthetic achievement was denied him. There was considerable consolation in the large income which provided so many pleasures and comforts, but it was bitter to know—when he met any one like Lothian—that if he could appreciate Lothian thoroughly he could never emulate him. And it was still more bitter to be aware that men like Lothian often regarded his own work as a mischief and dishonour.
Toftrees, therefore, watched the man at his side with a kind of critical envy, mingled with a perfectly sincere admiration at the bottom of it all.
He very soon became certain that something was wrong.
His first half-thought was a certainty now. Something that some one had said to him a week ago at a Savage Club dinner—one of those irresponsible but dangerous and damaging remarks which begin, "D'you know, I'm told that so and so—" flashed through his mind.
"Are you in town for long, Mr. Lothian?" he asked. "You don't come to town often, do you?"
"No, I don't," Lothian answered. "I hate London. A damnable place I always think."
The other, so thorough a Londoner, always getting so much—in every way—out of his life in London, looked at the speaker curiously, not quite knowing how to take him.
Lothian seemed to see it. He had made the remark with emphasis, with a superior note in his voice, but he corrected himself quickly.
It was almost as though Toftrees' glance had made him uneasy. His face became rather ingratiating, and there was a propitiatory note in his voice when he spoke again. He drew his chair a little nearer to the other's.
"I knew too much of London when I was a young man," he went on with an unnecessarily confidential and intimate manner. "When I came down from Oxford first, I was caught up into the 'new' movement. It all seemed very wonderful to me then. It did to all of us. We divorced art from morals, we lived extraordinary lives, we sipped honey from every flower. Most of the men of that period are dead. One or two are insane, others have gone quite under and are living dreadful larva-like lives in obscene hells of the body and soul, of which you can have no conception. But, thank God, I got out of it in time—just in time! If it hadn't been for my dear wife. . ."
He paused. The sensitive lips smiled, with an almost painful tenderness, a quivering, momentary effect which seemed grotesquely out of place in a face which had become flushed and suddenly seemed much fatter.
There was a horrible insincerity about that self-conscious smile—the more horrible because, at the moment, Toftrees saw that Lothian believed absolutely in his own emotion, was pleased with himself sub-consciously, too, and was perfectly certain that he was making a fine impression—pulling aside the curtain that hung before a beautiful and holy place!
The smile lingered for a moment. The light in the curious eyes seemed turned inward complacently surveying a sanctuary.
Then there was an abrupt change of manner.
Lothian laughed. There was a snap in his laughter, which, Toftrees was sure, was meant to convey the shutting down of a lid.
"I like you," Lothian was trying to say to him—the acquaintance of ten minutes!—"I can open my heart to you. You've had a peep at the Poet's Holy of Holies. But we're men of the world—you and I!—enough of this. We're in society. We're dining at the Amberleys'. Our confidences are over!"
"So you see," theactualvoice said, "I don't like London. It's no place for a gentleman!"
Lothian's laugh as he said this was quite vague and silly. His hand strayed out towards the decanter of whiskey. His face was half anxious, half pleased, wholly pitiable and weak. His laugh ended in a sort of bleat, which he realised in a moment and coughed to obscure.
There was a splash and gurgle as he pressed the trigger of the syphon.
Intense disgust and contempt succeeded Toftrees' first amazement. So this, after all the fuss, was Gilbert Lothian!
The man had talked like a provincial yokel, and then fawned upon him with his sickly, uninvited confidences.
He was drunk. There was no doubt about that.
He must have come there drunk, or nearly so. The last half hour had depressed the balance, brought out what was hidden, revealed the fellow's state.
"If it hadn't been for my dear wife!"—the tout! How utterly disgusting it was!
Toftrees had never been drunk in his life except at a bump-supper at B.N.C.—his college—nearly fifteen years ago.—The shocking form of coming to the Amberleys' like this!—He was horribly upset and a little frightened, too. He remembered where he was—such a thing was an incredible profanationhere!
. . .He heard a quiet vibrant voice speaking.
He looked up. Gilbert Lothian was leaning back in his chair, holding a newly-lighted cigarette in a steady hand. His face was absolutely composed. There was not the slightest hint that it had been bloated and unsteady the minute before. Intellect and strength—STRENGTH! that was the incredible thing—lay calmly over it. The skin, surely ithadbeen oddly blotched? was of an even, healthy-seeming tint.
A conversation between the Poet and his host had obviously been in progress for several minutes. Toftrees realised that he had been lost in his own thoughts for some time—if indeed this scene was real at all and he himself were sober!
". . .I don't think," Lothian was saying with precision, and a certain high air which sat well upon him—"I don't think that you quite see it in all its bearings. There must be a rough and ready standard for ordinary work-a-day life—that I grant. But when you penetrate to the springs of action——"
"When you do that," Amberley interrupted, "naturally, rough and ready standards fall to pieces. Still we have to live by them. Few of us are competent to manipulate the more delicate machinery! But your conclusion is—?"
"—That hypocrisy is the most misunderstood and distorted word in our mother tongue. The man whom fools call hypocrite may yet be entirely sincere. Lofty assertions, the proclamation of high ideals and noble thoughts may at the same time be allied with startling moral failure!"
Amberley shook his head.
"It's specious," he replied, "and it's doubtless highly comforting for the startling moral failure. But I find a difficulty in adjusting my obstinate mind to the point of view."
"Itisdifficult," Lothian said, "but that's because so few people are psychologists, and so few people—the Priests often seem to me less than any one—understand the meaning of Christianity. But because David was a murderer and an adulterer will you tell me that the psalms are insincere? Surely, if all that is good in a man or woman is to be invalidated by the presence of contradictory evil, then Beelzebub must sit enthroned and be potent over the affairs of men!"
Mr. Amberley rose from his chair. His face had quite lost its watchful expression. It was genial and pleased as before.
"King David has a great deal to answer for," he said. "I don't know what the unorthodox and the 'live-your-own-life' school would do without him. But let us go into the drawing room."
With his rich, hearty laugh echoing under the Waggon roof, the big man thrust his arm through Lothian's.
"There are two girls dying to talk to the poet!" he said. "That I happen to know! My daughter Muriel reads your books in bed, I believe! and her friend Miss Wallace was saying all sorts of nice things about you at dinner. Come along, come along, my dear boy."
The two men left the dining room, and their voices could be heard in the hall beyond.
Toftrees lingered behind for a moment with young Dickson Ingworth.
The boy's face was flushed. His eyes sparkled with excitement and the three glasses of champagne he had drunk at dinner were having their influence with him.
He was quite young, ingenuous, and filled with conceit at being where he was—dining with the Amberleys, brought there under the ægis of Gilbert Lothian, chatting confidentially to the great Herbert Toftrees himself!
His immature heart was bursting with pride, Pol Roger, and satisfaction. He hadn't the least idea of what he was saying—that he was saying something frightfully dangerous and treacherous at least.
"I say, Mr. Toftrees, isn't Gilbert splendid? I could listen to him all night. He talks like that to me sometimes, when he's in the mood. It's like Walter Pater and Dr. Johnson rolled into one. And then he sort of punctuates it with something dry and brown and freakish—like Heine in the 'Florentine Nights'!"
With all his eagerness to hear more—the quiet malice in him welling up to understand and pin down this Gilbert Lothian—Toftrees was forced to pause for a moment. He knew that he could never have expressed himself as this enthusiastic and excited boy was able to do. Ingworth was a pupil then! Lothian could inspire, and was already founding a school . . .
"You know Mr. Lothian very well, I suppose?"
"Oh, yes. I go and stay with Gilbert in the country a lot. I'm nearly always there! I am like a brother to him—he was an only child, you know. But isn't he wonderful?"
"Marvellous!" Toftrees chuckled as he said the word. He couldn't help it.
Misunderstood as his chuckle was, it did the trick and brought confidence in full flood from the careless and excited boy.
"Yes, and I know him so well! Hardly any one knows him so well as I do. Every one in town is crying out to find out all about him, and I'm really the only one who knows. . ."
He looked towards the door. Thoughts of the two pretty girls beyond flushed the wayward, wine-heated mind.
"I'm going to have a liqueur brandy," Toftrees said hastily—he had taken nothing the whole evening—"won't you, too?"
"Now you'd never think," Ingworth said, sipping from his tiny glass, "that at seven o'clock this evening Prince and I—Prince is the valet at Gilbert's club—could hardly wake him up and get him to dress?"
"No!"
"It's a fact though, Mr. Toftrees. We had the devil of a time. He'd been out all day—it was bovril with lots of salt in it that put him right. As a matter of fact—of course, this is quite between you and me—I was in a bit of a funk that it was coming over him again at dinner. Stale drunk. You know! I saw he was paying a lot of compliments to Mrs. Amberley. At first she didn't seem to understand, and then she didn't quite seem to like it. But I was glad when I heard him ask the man for a whiskey and soda just now. I know his programme so well. I was sure that it would pull him together all right—or at least that number two would. I suppose you saw he was rather off when the ladies had gone and you were talking to him?"
"Well, I wasn't sure of course."
"I was, I know him so well. Gilbert's father was my father's solicitor—one of the old three bottle men. But when Gilbert collared number two just now I realised that it would be quite all right. You heard him with Mr. Amberley just now? Splendid!"
"Yes. And now suppose we go and see how he's getting on in the drawing room," said Herbert Toftrees with a curious note in his voice.
The boy mistook it for anxiety. "Oh, he'll be as right as rain, you'll find. It comes off and on in waves, you know," he said.
Toftrees looked at the youth with frank wonder. He spoke in the way of use and wont, as if he were saying nothing extraordinary—merely stating a fact.
The novelist was really shocked. Personally, he was the most temperate of men. He washomme du monde, of course. He touched upon life at other points than the decorous and above-board. He had known men, friends of his own, go down, down, down, through drink. But here, with these people, it was not the same. In Bohemia, in raffish literary clubs and the reprobate purlieus of Fleet Street, one expected this sort of thing and accepted it as part of themilieu.
Under the Waggon roof, at Amberley's house, where there were charming women, it was shocking; it was an outrage! And the frankness of this well-dressed and well-spoken youth was disgusting in its very simplicity and non-moral attitude. Toftrees had gathered something of the young man's past during dinner. Was this, then, what one learnt at Eton? The novelist was himself the son of a clergyman, a man of some family but bitter poor. He had been educated at a country grammar school. His wife was the youngest daughter of a Gloucestershire baronet, impoverished also.
Neither of them had enjoyed all that should have been theirs by virtue of their birth, and the fact had left a blank, a slight residuum of bitterness and envy which success and wealth could never quite smooth away.
"Well, it doesn't seem to trouble you much," he said.
Ingworth laughed. He was unconscious of his great indiscretion, frothy and young, entirely unaware that he was giving his friend and patron into possibly hostile hands and providing an opportunity for a dissection of which half London might hear.
"Gilbert's quite different from any one else," he said lightly. "He is a genius. Keats taking pepper before claret, don't you know! One must not measure him by ordinary standards."
"I suppose not," Toftrees answered drily, reflecting that among the disciples of a great man it was generally the Judas who wrote the biography—"Let's go to the drawing room."
As they went out, the mind of the novelist was working with excitement and heat. He himself was conscious of it and was surprised. His was an intellect rather like dry ice. Very little perturbed it as a rule, yet to-night he was stirred.
Wonder was predominant.
Physically, to begin with, it was extraordinary that more drink should sober a man who a moment before had been making exaggerated and half-maudlin confidences to a stranger—in common with most decent living people, Toftrees knew nothing of the pathology of poisoned men. And, then, that sobriety had been so profound! Clearly reasoned thought, an arresting but perfectly sane point of view, had been enunciated with lucidity and force of phrase.
Disgust, the keener since it was more than tinged by envy, mingled with the wonder.
So the high harmonies of "Surgit Amari" came out of the bottle after all! Toftrees himself had been deeply moved by the poems, and yet, he now imagined, the author was probably drunk when he wrote them! If only the world knew!—itoughtto know. Blackguards who, for some reason or other, had been given angel voices should be put in the pillory for every one to see. Hypocrite!. . .
Ingworth opened the door of the drawing room very quietly. Music had begun, and as he and Toftrees entered, Muriel Amberley was already half way through one of the preludes of Chopin.
Mrs. Amberley and Mrs. Toftrees were sitting close together and carrying on a vigorous, whispered conversation, despite the music. Mr. Amberley was by himself in a big arm-chair near the piano, and Lothian sat upon a settee of blue linen with Rita Wallace.
As he sank into a chair Toftrees glanced at Lothian.
The poet's face was unpleasant. When he had been talking to Amberley it had lighted up and had more than a hint of fineness. Now it was heavy again, veiled and coarsened. Lothian's head was nodding in time to the music. One well-shaped but rather red hand moved restlessly upon his knee. The man was struggling—Toftrees was certain of it—to appear as if the music was giving him intense pleasure. He was thinking about himself and how he looked to the other people in the room.
Drip, drip, drip!—it was the sad, graceful prelude in which the fall of rain is supposed to be suggested, the hot steady rain of the Mediterranean which had fallen at Majorca ever so many years ago and was falling now in sound, though he that caught its beauty was long since dust. Drip, drip!—and then the soft repetition which announced that the delicate and lovely vision had reached its close, that the august grey harmonies were over.
For a moment, there was silence in the drawing room.
Muriel's white fingers rested on the keys of the piano, the candles threw their light upwards upon the enigmatic maiden face. Her father sighed quietly—happily also as he looked at her—and the low buzz of Mrs. Amberley's and Mrs. Toftrees' talk became much more distinct.
Suddenly Gilbert Lothian jumped up from the settee. He hurried to the piano, his face flushed, his eyes liquid and bright.
It was consciously and theatrically done, an exaggeration of his bow in the dining room—not the right thing in the very least!
"Oh, thank you!Thank you!" he said in a high, fervent voice. "How wonderful that is! And you played it as Crouchmann plays it—theonlyinterpretation! I know him quite well. We had supper together the other night after his concert, and he told me—no, that won't interest you. I'll tell you another time, remind me! Now,doplay something else!"
He fumbled with the music upon the piano with tremulous and unsteady hands.
"Ah! here we are!" he cried, and there was an insistent note of familiarity in his voice. "The book of Valses! You know the twelfth of course? Tempo giusto! It goes like this. . ."
He began to hum, quite musically, and to wave his hands.
Muriel Amberley glanced quickly at her father and there was distress in her eyes.
Amberley was standing by the piano in a moment. He seemed very much master of himself, serene and dominant, by the side of Gilbert Lothian. His face was coldly civil and there was disgust in his eyes.
"I don't think my daughter will play any more, Mr. Lothian," he said.
An ugly look flashed out upon the poet's face, suspicion and realisation showed there for a second and passed.
He became nervous, embarrassed, almost pitiably apologetic. The savoir-faire which would have helped some men to take the rebuke entirely deserted him. There was something assiduous, almost vulgar, a frightened acceptance of the lash indeed, which immensely accentuated the suddendéfaillanceand break-down.
In the big drawing room no one spoke at all.
Then there was a sudden movement and stir. Gilbert Lothian was saying good-night.
He had remembered that he really had some work to do before going to bed, some letters to write, as a matter of fact. He was shaking hands with every one.
"I do hope that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you play some more Chopin before long, Miss Amberley! Thank you so much Mrs. Amberley—I'm going to write a poem about your beautiful Dining Room. I suppose we shall meet at the Authors' Club dinner on Saturday, Mr. Toftrees?—so interested to have met you at last."
. . .The people in the drawing room heard him chattering vivaciously to Mr. Amberley, who had accompanied his departing guest into the hall.
No one said a single word. They heard the front door close, and the steps of the master of the house as he returned to them. They were all waiting.
When Amberley came in he made a courtly attempt at ignoring what had just occurred. The calm surface of the evening had been rudely disturbed—yes! For once even an Amberley party had gone wrong—there was to be no fun from this meeting of young folk to-night.
But it was Mrs. Amberley who spoke. She really could not help it. Mrs. Toftrees had been telling her of various rumours concerning Gilbert Lothian some time before the episode at the piano, and with all her tolerance Mrs. Amberley was thoroughly angry.
That such a thing should have happened in her house, before Muriel and her girl friend—oh! it was unthinkable!
"So Mr. Gilbert Lothian has gone," she said with considerable emphasis.
"Yes, dear," Mr. Amberley answered as he sat down again, willing enough that nothing more should be said.
But it was not to be so.
"We can never have him here again," said the angry lady.
Amberley shook his head. "Very unfortunate, extremely unfortunate," he murmured.
"I cannot understand it. Such a thing has never happened here before. Now I understand why Mr. Lothian hides himself in the country and never goes about.Il y avait raison!"
"I don't say that genius is anyexcusefor this sort of thing," Amberley replied uneasily, "and Lothian has genius—but one must take more than one thing into consideration. . ."
He paused, not quite knowing how to continue the sentence, and genuinely sorry and upset. His glance fell upon Herbert Toftrees, and he had a sort of feeling that the novelist might help him out.
"Don't you think so, Toftrees?" he asked.
The novelist surveyed the room with his steady grey eyes, marshalling his hearers as it were.
"But let us put his talent aside," he said. "Think of him as an ordinary person in our own rank of life—Mrs. Amberley's guest. Certainly he could not have taken anything here to have made him in the strange state he is in. Surely he must have known that he was not fit to come to a decent house."
"I shall give his poems away," Muriel Amberley said with a little shudder. "I can never read them again. And I did love them so! I wish you hadn't asked Mr. Lothian to come here, Father."
"There is one consolation," said Mrs. Toftrees in a hard voice; "the man must be realising what he has done. He was not too far gone for that!"
A new voice broke into the talk. It came from young Dickson Ingworth who had slid into the seat by Rita Wallace when Lothian went to the piano.
He blushed and stammered as he spoke, but there was a fine loyalty in his voice.
"It seems rather dreadful, Mrs. Amberley," he said, quite thinking that he was committing literary suicide as he did so. "It is dreadful of course. But Gilbertissuch a fine chap when he's—when he's, all right! You can't think! And then, 'Surgit Amari'! Don't let's forget he wrote 'The Loom'—'Delicate Threads! O fairest in life's tissue,'" he quoted from the celebrated verse.
Then Rita Wallace spoke. "He is great," she said. "He is manifesting himself in his own way. That is all. To me, at any rate, the meeting with Mr. Lothian has been wonderful."
Mrs. Toftrees stared with undisguised dislike of such assertions on the part of a young girl.
But Mrs. Amberley, always kind and generous-hearted, had been pleased and touched by Dickson Ingworth's defence of his friend and master. She quite realised what the lad stood to lose by doing it, and what courage on his part it showed. And when Rita Wallace chimed in, Mrs. Amberley dismissed the whole occurrence from her mind as she beamed benevolently at the two young people on the sofa.
"Let's forget all about it," she said. "Mrs. Toftrees, help me to make my husband sing. He can only sing one song but he sings it excellently—'In cellar cool'—just the thing for a hot night. Joseph! do as I tell you!"
The little group of people rearranged themselves, as Muriel sat down at the piano to accompany her father.
"Le metier de poëte laisse a désirer," Toftrees murmured to his wife with a sneer which almost disguised the atrocious accent of his French.
CHAPTER III
SHAME IN "THE ROARING GALLANT TOWN"
—"Is it for this I have given awayMine ancient wisdom and austere control?""'Très volontiers' repartit le démon. 'Vous aimezles tableaux changeants; je veux vous contenter.'"—Le Sage.
—"Is it for this I have given awayMine ancient wisdom and austere control?"
—"Is it for this I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?"
"'Très volontiers' repartit le démon. 'Vous aimezles tableaux changeants; je veux vous contenter.'"
"'Très volontiers' repartit le démon. 'Vous aimez
les tableaux changeants; je veux vous contenter.'"
—Le Sage.
—Le Sage.
When the door of the house had closed after him, and with Mr. Amberley's courteous but grave good-night ringing in his ears, Gilbert Lothian walked briskly away across the Square.
It was very hot. The July sun, that tempest of fire which had passed over the town during the day, had sucked up all the sweetness from the air and it was sickly, like air under a blanket which has been breathed many times. As it often is in July, London had been delightfully fresh at dawn, when the country waggons were bringing the sweet-peas and the roses to market, and although his mind had not been fresh as the sun rose over St. James' where he was staying, Lothian had enjoyed the early morning from the window of his bedroom. It had been clear and scentless, like a field with the dew upon it, in the country from which he had come five days ago.
Now his mind was like a field in the full sun of noon, parched and full of hot odours.
He was perfectly aware that he had made afaux pas. How far it went, whether he was not exaggerating it, he did not know. The semi-intoxicated person—more especially when speech and gait are more or less normal, as in his case—is quite incapable of gauging the impression he makes on others. In lax and tolerant circles where no outward indication is given him of his state, he goes on his way pleased and confident that he has made an excellent impression, sure that no one has found him out.
But his cunning and self-congratulation quite desert him when he is openly snubbed or reproved. "Was I very far gone?" he afterwards asks some confidential friend who may have been present at his discomfiture. And whatever form the answer may take, the drunkard is abnormally interested in all the details of the event. Born of the toxic influences in his blood, there is a gaunt and greedy vanity which insists upon the whole scene being re-enacted and commented upon.
Lothian had no one to tell him how far he had gone, precisely what impression he had made upon his hosts and their guests. He felt with a sense of injury that Dickson Ingworth ought to have come away with him. The young man owed so much to him in the literary life! It was a treachery not to have come away with him.
As he got into a cab and told the man to drive him as far as Piccadilly Circus, he was still pursuing this train of thought. He had taken Ingworth to the Amberleys', and now the cub was sitting in the drawing room there, with those charming girls! quite happy and at ease. He, Gilbert Lothian himself! was out of it all, shut out from that gracious house and those cultured people whom he had been so glad to meet.
. . .Again he heard the soft closing of the big front door behind him, and his skin grew hot at the thought. The remembrance of Amberley's quiet courtesy, but entire change of manner in the hall, was horrible. He felt as if he had been whipped. The dread of a slight, the fear of a quarrel, which is a marked symptom of the alcoholic—is indeed his torment and curse through life—was heavy upon Lothian now.
The sense of impotence was sickening. What a weak fool he had been to break down and fly like that. To run away! What faltering and trembling incapacity for self-assertion he had shown. He had felt uneasy with the very servant who gave him his opera hat!
And what had he done after all? Very little, surely.
That prelude of Chopin always appealed to him strongly. He had written about it; Crouchmann had played it privately for him and pointed out new beauties. Certainly he had only met Miss Amberley for the first time that night and he may have been a little over-excited and effusive. His thoughts—a poet's thoughts after all—had come too quickly for ordered expression. He was too Celtic in manner, too artistic for these staid cold folk.
He tried to depreciate the Amberleys in his thoughts. Amberley was only a glorified trades-man after all! Lothian tried to call up within him that bitter joy which comes from despising that which we really respect or desire. "Yes! damn the fellow! Helivedon poets and men of letters—privileged people, the salt of the earth, the real forces of life!"
And yet he ought to have stayed on and corrected his mistake. He had made himself ridiculous in front of four women—he didn't care about the men so much—and that was horribly galling.
As the cab swung down Regent Street, Lothian was sure that if his nerves had not weakened for a moment he would never have given himself away. It was, he felt, very unfortunate. He knew, as he could not help knowing, that not only had he a mind and power of a rare, high quality, but that he possessed great personal charm. What he did not realise was how utterly all these things fled from him when he was not quite sober. Certainly at this moment he was unable to comprehend it in the slightest. Realisation would come later, at the inevitable punishment hour.
He over-paid his cabman absurdly. The man's quick and eager deference pleased him. He was incapable of any sense of proportion, and he felt somehow or other reinstated in his own opinion by this trivial and bought servility.
He looked at his watch. It was not very much after ten, and he became conscious of how ridiculously early he had fled from the Amberleys'. But as he stood on the pavement—in the very centre of the pleasure-web of London with its roar and glare—he pushed such thoughts resolutely from him and turned into a luxurious "lounge," celebrated among fast youths and pleasure-seekers, known by an affectionate nick-name at the Universities, in every regimental mess or naval ward-room in Great Britain.
As he went down a carpeted passage he saw himself in the long mirror that lined it. He looked quite himself, well-dressed, prosperous, his face under full control and just like any other smart man about town.
At this hour, there were not many people in the place. It would become crowded and noisy later on.
The white and green tiles of the walls gleamed softly in the shaded lights, electric fans and a huge block of ice upon a pedestal kept the air cool. There were palms which refreshed the eye and upon the porphyry counter at which he was served there was a mass of mauve hydrangea in a copper bowl.
He drank a whiskey and soda very quickly—that was to remove the marked physical exhaustion which had begun to creep over him—ordered another and lit a cigarette.
His nerves responded with magical quickness to the spirit. All day long he had been feeding them with the accustomed poison. The strain of the last half hour had used up more vitality than he had been aware.
For the second time that night—a night so infinitely more eventful than he knew—he became master of himself, calm, happy, even, in the sense of power returned, and complete correspondence with his environment.
The barmaid who served him was—like most of these Slaves of the Still in this part of London—an extremely handsome girl. Her face was painted—all these girls paint their faces—but it was done merely to conceal the pallor and ravages wrought upon it by a hard and feverish life. Lothian felt an immense pity for her, symbolic as she was of all the others, and the few remarks he made were uttered with an instinctive deference and courtesy.
He had been married seven years before this time, and had at once retired into the country with his wife where, by slow degrees, he had felt his way to the work which had at last made him celebrated. But in the past he had known the under side of London well and had chosen it deliberately as hismilieu.
It had in no way been forced upon him. Struggling journalist and author as he was, good houses had been open to him, for he was a member of a well-known family and had made many friends at Oxford.
But the other life was so much easier! If its pleasures were coarse, they were hot and strong! For years, as many a poet has done before him, he lived a bad life, tolerant of vice in himself and others, kind, generous often, but tossed and worn by his passions—rivetting the chains link by link upon his soul—until he had met and married Mary.
And no one knew better than he the horrors of life behind the counters of a bar.
He turned away, as two fresh-faced lads came noisily up to the counter, turned away with a sigh of pity. He was quite unconscious—though he would have been interested at the psychological fact—that the girl had wondered at his manner and thought him affected and dull.
She would much rather have been complimented and chaffed. She understood that. Life is full of anodynes. Mercifully enough the rank and file of the oppressed are not too frequently conscious of their miseries. There is a half-truth in the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss, and if fettered limbs go lame, the chains are not always clanking.
The poor barmaid went to bed that night in an excellent humour, for the two lads Lothian had seen brought her some pairs of gloves. And if she had known of Lothian's pity she would have resented it bitterly.
"Like the fellow's cheek," she would have said.
Lothian, as he believed, had absolutely recovered his own normal personality. He admitted now, as he left the "lounge," that he had not been his true self at the Amberleys'.
"At this moment, as I stand here," he said to himself, "'I am the Captain of my Soul,'" not in the least understanding that when he spoke of his own "soul" he meant nothing more than his five senses.
The man thought he was normal. He was not. On the morrow, when partially recovering from the excesses of to-day, there was a possibility that he might become normal—for a brief period, and until he began to drink again.
For him to become really himself, perfectly clean from the stigmata of the inebriate mind, would have taken him at least six months of total abstinence from alcohol.
Lothian's health, though impaired, had by no means broken down.
A strong constitution, immense vitality, had preserved it, up to this point. At this period, though a poisoned man, an alcoholised body, there were frequent times of absolute normality—when he was, for certain definite spaces of time by the clock, exactly as he would have been had he never become a slave to alcohol at all.
As he stood upon the pavement of Piccadilly Circus, he felt and believed that such a time had come now.
He was mistaken. All that was happening was that there was a temporary lull in the ebb and flow of alcohol in his veins. The brain cells were charged up to a certain point with poison. At this point they gave a false impression of security.
It must be remembered, and it cannot be too strongly insisted on, that the mental processes of the inebriate aredefinite, and areinduced.
The ordinary person says of an inebriate simply that "he is a drunkard" or "he drinks." Whether he or she says it with sympathetic sorrow, or abhorrence, the bald statement rarely leads to any further train of thought.
It is very difficult for the ordinary person to realise that the mental processes aresui generisa Kingdom—though with a debased coinage—which requires considerable experience before it can always be recognised from the ring of true metal.
Alcoholism so changes the mental life of any one that it results in an ego which hasspecialexternal and internal characteristics.
And so, in order to appreciate fully this history of Gilbert Lothian—to note the difference between the man as he was known and as he really was—it must always be kept in mind under what influence he moves through life, and that his steps have strayed into a dreadful kingdom unknown and unrealised by happier men.
He had passed out of one great Palace of Drink.
Had he been as he supposed himself to be, he would have sought rest at once. He would have hurried joyously from temptation in this freedom from his chains.
Instead of that, the question he asked himself was, "What shall I do now?"
The glutton crams himself at certain stated periods. But when repletion comes he stops eating. The habit is rhythmic and periodically certain.
But the Drunkard—his far more sorrowful and lamentable brother—has not even this half-saving grace. In common with the inordinate smoker—whose harm is physical and not mental—the inebriate drinks as long as he is able to, until he is incapacitated. "Where shall I go now?"
If God does indeed give human souls to His good angels, as gardens to weed and tend, that thought must have brought tears of pity to the eyes of the august beings who were battling for Gilbert Lothian.
Their hour was not yet.
They were to see the temple of the Paraclete fall into greater ruin and disaster than ever before. The splendid spires and pinnacles, the whole serene beauty of soul and body which had made this Temple a high landmark when God first built it, were crumbling to decay.
Deep down among the strong foundations the enemy was at work. The spire—the "Central-one"—which sprang up towards Heaven was deeply undermined. Still—save to the eyes of experts—its glory rose unimpaired. But it was but a lovely shell with no longer any grip upon its base of weakened Will. And the bells in the wind-swept height of the Tower no longer rang truly. On red dawns or on pearl-grey evenings the message they sent over the country-side was beginning to be false. There was no peace when they tolled the Angelus.
In oriel or great rose-window the colour of the painted glass was growing dim. The clear colour was fading, though here and there it was shot with baleful fire which the Artist had never painted there,—like the blood-shot eyes of the man who drinks.
A miasmic mist had crept into the noble spaces of the aisles. The vast supporting pillars grew insubstantial and seemed to tremble as the vapour eddied round them. A black veil was quickly falling before the Figure above the Altar, and the seven dim lamps of the Sanctuary burned with green and flickering light.
The bells of a Great Mind's Message, which had been cast with so much silver in them, rang an increasing dissonance. The trumpets of the organ echoed with a harsh note in the far clerestory; the flutes were false, thedolcestop no longer sweet. The great pipes of the pedal organ muttered and stammered in their massive voices, as if dark advisers whispered in the ear of the musician who controlled them.
Lothian had passed from one great Palace of Drink. "Where shall I go?" he asked himself again, and immediately his eye fell upon another, the brilliant illumination upon the façade of a well-known "Theatre of Varieties."
His hot eye-balls drank in the flaring signs, and telegraphed both an impulse and a memory to his brain.
"Yes!" he said. "I will revisit the 'Kingdom.' There is still two thirds of an hour before the performance will be over. How well I used to know it! What a nightly haunt it used to be. Surely, even now, there will be some people I know there?. . .I'll go in and see!"
As Lothian turned in at the principal doors of the most celebrated Music Hall in the world, his pulses began to quicken.
—The huge foyer, the purple carpets, with their wreaths of laurel in a purple which was darker yet, the gleaming marble stairway, with its wide and noble sweep, how familiar all this dignified splendour was, he thought as he entered the second Palace of Drink which flung wide its doors to him this night.
A palace of drink and lust, vast and beautiful! for those who brought poisoned blood and vicious desires within its portals! Here, banished from the pagan groves and the sunlit temples of their ancient glory—banished also from the German pine-woods where Heine saw them in pallid life under the full moon—Venus, Bacchus and Silenus held their unholy court.
For all the world—save only for a few wise men to whom they were but symbols—Venus and Bacchus were deities once.
When the Acropolis cut into the blue sky of Hellas with its white splendour these were the chiefest to whom men prayed, and they ruled the lives of all.
And, day by day, new temples rise in their honour. Once they were worshipped with blythe body and blinded soul. Now the tired body and the besotted brain alone pay them reverence. But great are their temples still.
Such were the thoughts of Lothian—Lothian the Christian poet—and he was pleased that they should come to him.
It showed how detached he was, what real command he had of himself. In the old wild days, before his marriage and celebrity, he had come to this place, and other places like it, to seize greedily upon pleasure, as a monkey seizes upon a nut. He came to survey it all now, to revisit the feverish theatre of his young follies with a bland Olympian attitude.
The poison was flattering him now, placing him upon a swaying pedestal for a moment. He was sucking in the best honey that worthless withering flowers could exude, and it was hot and sweet upon his tongue.
—Were any of the old set there after all? He hoped so. Not conscious of himself as a rule, without a trace of "side" and detesting ostentation or any display of his fame, he wanted to show off now. He wanted to console himself for his rebuff at the house in Bryanstone Square. Vulgar and envious adulation, interested praise from those who were still in the pit of obscurity from which his finer brain had helped him to escape, would be perfectly adequate to-night.
After the episode at the Amberleys', coarse flattery heaped on with a spade would be as ice in the desert.
And he found what he desired.
He passed slowly through the promenade, towards the door which led to the stalls, and the great lounge where, if anywhere, he would find people who knew him and whom he knew.
In a slowly-moving tide, like a weed-clogged wave, the women of the town ebbed and flowed from horn to horn of the moon-shaped crescent where they walk. Against the background of sea-purple and white, their dresses and the nodding plumes in their great hats moved languorously. Sickly perfumes, as from the fan of an odalisque, swept over them.
Many beautiful painted masks floated through the scented aisle of the theatre, as they had floated up and down the bronze corridors of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus in the far off days of St. Paul. A mourning thrill shivered up from the violins of the orchestra below; the 'cellos made their plaint, the cymbals rattled, the kettledrums spoke with deep vibrating voices.
. . .So had the sistra clanked and droned in the old temple of bronze and silver before the altars of Artemis,—the old music, the eternal faces, ever the same!
A chill came to Lothian as he passed among these "estranged sad spectres of the night." He thought suddenly of his pure and gracious wife, alone in their little house in the country, he thought of the Canaanitish harlot whose soul was the first that Christ redeemed. For a moment or two his mind was like a darkened room in which a magic lantern is being operated and fantastic, unexpected pictures flit across the screen. And then he was in the big lounge.
Yes, some of them were there!—a little older, perhaps, to his now much more critical eye, somewhat more bloated and coarsened, but the same still.
"Good heavens!" said a huge man with a blood red face, startling in its menace, like a bully looking into an empty room, "Why, here's old Lothian! Where in the world haveyousprung from, my dear boy?"
Lothian's face lit up with pleasure and recognition. The big evil-faced man was Paradil, the painter of pastels, a wayward drunken creature who never had money in his pocket, but that he gave it away to every one. He was a man spoken of as a genius by those who knew. His rare pictures fetched large prices, but he hardly ever worked. He was soaked, dissolved and pickled in brandy.
A little elderly man like a diseased doll, came up and began to twitter. He was the husband of a famous dancer who performed at the theatre, a wit in his way, an adroit manager of his wife's affairs with other men, a man with a mind as hollow and bitter as a dried lemon.
He was a well-known figure in upper Bohemia. His name was constantly mentioned in the newspapers as an entrepreneur of all sorts of things, a popular, evil little man.
"Ah, Lothian," he said, as one or two other people came up and some one gave a copious order for drinks, "still alternating between the prayer book and the decanter? I must congratulate you on 'Surgit Amari.' I read it, and it made me green with envy to think how many thousand copies you had sold of it."
"You've kept the colour, Edgar," he said, looking into the little creature's face, but the words stabbed through him, nevertheless. How true they were—superficially—how they expressed—and must express—the view of his old disreputable companions. They envied him his cunning—as they thought it—they would have given their ears to have possessed the same power of profitable hypocrisy—as they thought it. Meanwhile they spoke virtuously to each other about him. "Gilbert Lothian the author of 'Surgit Amari'!—it would make a cat laugh!"
One can't throw off one's past like a dirty shirt—Gilbert began to wish he had not come here.
"I ought never to be seen in these places," he thought, forgetting that it was only the sting of the little man's malice that provoked the truth.
But Paradil, kindly Paradil with the bully's face and a heart bursting with dropsical good nature, speedily intervened.
Other men joined the circle; "rounds of drinks" were paid for by each person according to the ritual of such an occasion as this.
In half an hour, when the theatre began to empty, Lothian was really, definitely drunk.
Hot circles expanded and contracted within his head. His face became pale and very grave in expression, as he walked out into Leicester Square upon Paradil's supporting arm. There was a portentous dignity in his voice as he gave the address of his club to the cabman. As he shook hands with Paradil out of the window, tears came into his eyes, as he thought of the other's drunken, wasted life. "If I can only help you in any way, old chap—" he tried to say, and then sank back in oblivion upon the cushions.
He was quite unconscious of anything during the short drive to St. James's Street, and when the experienced cabman pulled down the flag of the taximeter and opened the door, he sat there like a log.