"Wholesome things almost always disagreewith me," said Madame Valtesi, in her croaky voice, "unless I eat them at the wrong time. Now, a hot bun before breakfast in the morning, or in bed at night, might suit me admirably; but if I ate one now, I should feel miserable. Your strawberries look most original, quite the real thing. Do not be angry with me for discarding the buns. If I ate one, I should really infallibly lose my temper."
"How curious," said Mr. Amarinth, taking a bun delicately between his plump white fingers. "My temper and my heart are the only two things I never lose! Everything else vanishes. I think the art of losing things is a very subtle art. So few people can lose anything really beautifully. Anybody can find a thing. That is so simple. A crossing sweeper can discover a sixpence lying in the road. It is the crossing sweeper who loses a sixpence who shows real originality."
"I wish I could find a few sixpences," said Madame Valtesi slowly, and sipping her tea with her usual air of stony gravity. "Times are so very bad. Do you know, Mr. Amarinth, I am almost afraid I shall have to put down my carriage, or your brother. I cannot keep them both up, and pay my dressmaker's bill too. I told him so yesterday. He was very much cut up."
"Poor Teddy! Have his conversational powers gone off? I never see him. The world is so very large, isn't it?"
"No, he still talks rather well." Then she added, turning to Lady Locke, "You know I always give him five shillings an hour, in generous moments ten, to take me about and talk to me. He is a superbraconteur. I shall miss him very much."
"The profession of a conversationalist is so delightful," said Mrs. Windsor, "I wonder more people don't follow it. You are too generous, Esmé; you took it up out of pure love of the thing."
"The true artist will always be an amateur," said Lord Reggie, dreamily, and gazing towards Lady Locke with abstracted blue eyes, "just as the true martyr will always live for his faith. Esmé is like the thrush. He always tells us his epigrams twice over, lest we should fail to capture their first fine careful rapture. Repetition is one of the secrets of success nowadays. Esmé was the first conversationalist in England to discover that fact, and so he won his present unrivalled position, and has known how to keep it."
"Conversational powers are sometimes very distressing," said Madame Valtesi. "Last winter I was having my house in CromwellRoad painted and papered. I went to live at a hotel, but the men were so slow, that at last I took possession again, hoping to turn them out. It was a most fatal step. They liked me so much, and found me so entertaining, that they have never gone away. They are still painting, and I suppose always will be. Whenever I say anything witty they scream with laughter, and I believe that my name has become a household word in Whitechapel or Wapping, or wherever the British workman lives? What am I to do?"
"Read them Jerome K. Jerome's last comic book," said Amarinth, "and they will go at once. I find his works most useful. I always begin to quote from them when I wish to rid myself of a bore."
"But surely he is a very entertaining writer," said Lady Locke.
"My dear lady, if you read him you will find that he is the reverse of Beerbohm Tree as Hamlet. Tree's Hamlet was funny without being vulgar. Jerome's writings are vulgar without being funny. His books are like Academy pictures. They are all deserving of a place on the line."
"I think he means well," said Mrs. Windsor, taking some strawberries.
"I am afraid so," Amarinth answered."People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don't fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical."
"Good intentions have been the ruin of the world," said Reggie fervently. "The only people who have achieved anything have been those who have had no intentions at all. I have no intentions."
"You will at least never be involved in an action for breach of promise if you always state that fact," said Lady Locke, laughing.
"To be intentional is to be middle class," remarked Amarinth. "Herkomer has become intentional, and so he has taken to painting the directors of railway companies. The great picture of this year's exhibition is intentional. The great picture of the year always is. It presents to us a pretty milkmaid milking her cow. A gallant, riding by, has dismounted, and is kissing the milkmaid."
Madame Valtesi blinked at him for a moment in silence. Then she said with an air of indescribable virtue—
"What a bad example for the cow!"
"Ah! I never thought of that!" cried Mrs. Windsor.
"One seldom does think how easily propercows—and people—are put to confusion. That is why they so often flee from the plays of London to those of Paris. They can be confused there without their relations knowing it."
"Why are old men who have seen the world always so proper?" asked Lord Reggie. "The other day I was staying with an old general at Malta, and he took Catulle Mendez' charming and delicate romance, 'Mephistophela,' out of my bedroom and burnt it. Yet his language on parade was really quite artistically blasphemous. I think it is fatal to one's personality to see the world at all."
"Then I must be quite hopeless," said Lady Locke, "for I have spent eight years in the Straits Settlements."
"Dear me!" murmured Madame Valtesi. "Where is that? It sounds like one of the places where that geographical little Henry Arthur Jones sends the heroes of his plays to expiate their virtues."
"It is quite a mistake to imagine that the author or the artist should stuff his beautiful, empty mind with knowledge, with impressions, with facts of any kind," said Amarinth. "I have written a great novel upon Iceland, full of colour, of passion, of the most subtle impurity, yet I could not point you out Iceland upon themap. I do not know where it is, or what it is. I only know that it has a beautiful name, and that I have written a beautiful thing about it. This age is an age of identification, in which our god is the Encyclopædia Britannica, and our devil the fairy tale that teaches nothing. We go to the British Museum for culture, and to Archdeacon Farrar for guidance. And then we think that we are advancing. We might as well return to the myths of Darwin, or to the delicious fantasies of John Stuart Mill. They at least were entertaining, and no one attempted to believe in them."
"We always return to our first hates," said Lord Reggie, rather languidly.
"Do have some more tea, Madame Valtesi," pleaded Mrs. Windsor.
"No, thank you. I never take more than one cup on principle—the principle being that the first cup is the best, like the last word. I want to take a stroll round the rose garden, if I may. Mr. Amarinth, will you come with me?"
She added in an undertone to him, as they walked slowly away together—
"I always hate to see people drinking when I have finished. It makes me feel like a barmaid."
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie were left alone together for the time. Mrs. Windsor had gone into the cottage to write a note, asking the curate of Chenecote to dine the next day. She always asked the curate to dine during the Surrey week. She thought it made things so deliciously rustic. Lord Reggie was still looking very tired, and eating a great many strawberries. He did both mechanically, and as if he didn't know he was doing them. As Lady Locke glanced at him, she felt that he certainly fulfilled her expectations, so far as being cool and young went. His round baby collar seemed to take off quite five years from his age, and his straw hat, with its black riband, suited him very well. Only the glaring green carnation offended her sight. She longed to ask him why he wore it. But she felt she had no right to. So she watched him looking tired and eating strawberries, until he glanced up at her with his pretty blue eyes.
"These strawberries are very good," he said."I should finish them, only I hate finishing anything. There is something so commonplace about it. Don't you think so? Commonplace people are always finishing off things, and getting through things. They map out their days, and have special hours for everything. I should like to have special hours for nothing. That would be much more original."
"You are very fond of originality?"
"Are not you?"
"I don't quite know. Perhaps I have not met many original people in my life. You see I have been out of England a great deal, and out of cities. I have lived almost entirely among soldiers."
"Soldiers are never original. They think it is unmanly. I once spent a week with the commander of one of our armies of occupation, and I never heard the same remarks so often in all my life. They thought everything was an affectation. Once, when I mentioned Matthew Arnold at the mess, they thought he was an affectation."
"Oh, surely not."
"They did, really. I explained that he had been a school-inspector. I thought that might reassure them. But they evidently did not believe me. They knew nothing about anything or anybody. That would have been rathercharming, only they thought they knew everything."
"I think you must have been unfortunate in your experience."
"Perhaps I was. I know I tried to be manly. I talked about Wilson Barrett. What more could I do? To talk about Wilson Barrett is generally supposed to show your appreciation of the heroic age. Of course nobody thinks about him now. But I was quite a failure. I went to five dinner-parties, I remember, during that week, and we all conversed about machine-guns at each of them. I felt as if the whole of life was a machine-gun, and men and women were all quick-firing parties."
"I suppose we are most of us a little inclined to talk shop, as it is called."
"But we ought to talk general shop, the shop in which everything is sold from Bibles to cheap cheese. Only we might leave out the Bibles. Mrs. Humphrey Ward has created a corner in them."
"You have finished the strawberries after all."
Reggie burst into an almost boyish laugh.
"So I have. We none of us live up to our ideals, I suppose. But really I have none. I agree with Esmé that nothing is so limited as to have an ideal."
"And yet you look sometimes as if you might have many," she said, as if half to herself. The curious motherly feeling had come upon her again, a kind of tenderness that often leads to preaching.
Reggie glanced up at her quickly, and with a pleased expression. A veiled tribute to his good looks delighted him, whether it came from man or woman. Only an unveiled one surpassed it in his estimation.
"Ah! but that means nothing," he said. "It is quite a mistake to believe, as many people do, that the mind shows itself in the face. Vice may sometimes write itself in lines and changes of contour, but that is all. Our faces are really masks given to us to conceal our minds with. Of course occasionally the mask slips partly off, generally when we are stupid and emotional. But that is an inartistic accident. Outward revelations of what is going on inside of us take place far more seldom than silly people suppose. No more preposterous theory has ever been put forward than that of the artist revealing himself in his art. The writer, for instance, has at least three minds—his Society mind, his writing mind, and his real mind. They are all quite separate and distinct, or they ought to be. When his writing mind and his real mind get mixed up together,he ceases to be an artist. That is why Swinburne has gone off so much. If you want to write really fine erotic poetry, you must live an absolutely rigid and entirely respectable life. The 'Laus Veneris' could only have been produced by a man who had a Nonconformist conscience. I am certain that Mrs. Humphrey Ward is the most strictly orthodox Christian whom we have. Otherwise, her books against the accepted Christianity could never have brought her in so many thousands of pounds. I never read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more angelic in expression."
"I never read that book."
"Then you have gained a great deal. Poor Oscar! He is terribly truthful. He reminds me so much of George Washington."
"Shall we walk round the garden if you have really finished tea?" said Lady Locke,rising. "What a delicious afternoon it is, so quiet, so detached from the rest of the year, as Mr. Amarinth might say. I am glad to be away from London. It is only habit that makes London endurable."
"But surely habit makes nothing endurable. Otherwise we should like politics, and get accustomed to the presence of solicitors in Society."
"I do like politics," Lady Locke said, laughing. "How beautiful these roses are! Ah, there is Tommy. You don't know my little boy, do you?" Tommy, in fact, now came bounding towards them along a rose alley. His cheeks were flushed with excitement, and, as he drew nearer, they saw that his brown eyes were sparkling with a dimmed lustre behind a large pair of spectacles, that were set rakishly upon his straight little nose.
"My dear boy," exclaimed his mother, "what on earth are you doing? How hideous you are!"
"Harry Smith has lent them to me," cried Tommy exultantly. "He says I look splendid in them."
"That is all very fine, but Harry Smith requires them, and you don't. His father won't like it. You must give them back, Tommy.Shake hands with Lord Reginald Hastings. He has come to stay here."
Tommy shook hands scrutinisingly, and at once broke conversational ground with—
"Do you know who the great Athanasius was?"
"He was an excellent person, who will always be widely known to fame for his omissions. He did not write the Athanasian creed. For that reason he will always be deserving of our respect."
Tommy listened to these remarks with profound attention, and expressed himself very well satisfied with this addition to his youthful knowledge. He thrust his hot hand into Lord Reggie's with the artless remark—
"You are more clever than Cousin Betty!" and invited him to join forthwith in a game of ball upon the bowling-green. To Lady Locke's surprise, Lord Reggie did not resist the alluring temptation, but ran off with the boy quite light-heartedly. She stood watching them as they disappeared across the smooth, green lawn.
"I can't understand him," she thought to herself. "He seems to be talented, and yet an echo of another man, naturally good-hearted, full of horrible absurdities, a gentleman, and yet not a man at all. He says himselfthat he commits every sin that attracts him, but he does not look wicked. What is he? Is he being himself, or is he being Mr. Amarinth, or is he merely posing, or is he really hateful, or is he only whimsical, and clever, and absurd? What would he have been if he had never seen Mr. Amarinth?"
She began vaguely to dislike Mr. Amarinth, vaguely to like Lord Reggie. Her boy had taken a fancy to him, and she was an unreasonably motherly mother. People who are unreasonably motherly like by impulse wholly very often, and hate by impulse. Their mind has no why or wherefore with which to bolster up their heart. She went slowly towards the cottage to dress for dinner, and all the time that she was walking, she continued, rather strenuously, to like Lord Reggie.
That evening, after dinner, there was music in the small drawing-room, which was exquisitely done up in Eastern style, with an arched roof, screens of wonderfully carved wood brought from Upper Egypt, Persian hangings and embroideries, divans and prayer rugs, on which nobody ever prayed. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both played the piano in an easy, tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the softrather than with the loud pedal. Lord Reggie played a hymn of his own, which he frankly acknowledged was very beautiful. He described it as a hymn without words, which, he said softly, all hymns should be. There was archaic simplicity, not to say baldness, about it which sent Mrs. Windsor into exotic raptures, and, as it was exceedingly short, it made its definite mark.
There was a moon in the night, full, round, and serene, and the French windows stood open to the quiet garden. The drawing-room was very dimly lighted, and as Reggie played, he was in shadow. His white, sensitive face was only faintly to be seen. It looked pure and young, Lady Locke thought, as she watched him. He was so enamoured of his hymn that he played it over and over again, and, from his touch, it seemed as if he were trying to make the Steinway grand sound as much like a spinet as possible.
Madame Valtesi sat on a sofa with her long, slim feet supported upon an embroidered cushion. She was smoking a cigarette with all the complete mastery of custom. Mrs. Windsor stood near the window, idly following with her eyes the perambulations of Bung, who was flitting about the garden like a ghost with a curled tail and a turned-up nose. Mr. Amarinthleaned largely upon the piano, in an attitude of rapt attention. His clever, clean-shaved face wore an expression of seraphic sensuality.
Lady Locke listened quietly. She had never heard any hymn so often before, and yet she did not feel bored.
At last Lord Reggie stopped, and said, "Esmé, the curate comes to dine to-morrow. Remember to be very sweet to him. I want to play the organ on Sunday morning, and he must let us do an anthem. I will compose one. We can get up a choir practice on Friday night, if Mrs. Windsor does not mind."
"Oh, charming!" Mrs. Windsor cried from the window. "I love a choir practice above all things. Choir boys are so pretty. They must come to the practice in their nightgowns, of course. I am sure Mr. Smith will be delighted. But you must remember to be very high church to-morrow night. Mr. Smith is terribly particular about that."
"I don't think I know how to be High Church," said Madame Valtesi very gravely. "Does one assume any special posture of body, or are one's convictions to be shown only in attitude of mind?"
"Oh, there is no difficulty," said Lord Reggie. "All one has to do is to abuse the Evangelical party. Speak disrespectfully of theBishop of Liverpool, and say that Father Staunton and the Bishop of Lincoln are the only preachers of true doctrine in England. The Ritualists are very easily pleased. They put their faith in preachers and in postures. If I were anything, I would be a Roman Catholic."
"Should you like to confess all your sins?" asked Lady Locke, in some surprise.
"Immensely. There is nothing so interesting as telling a good man or woman how bad one has been. It is intellectually fascinating. One of the greatest pleasures of having been what is called wicked is, that one has so much to say to the good. Good people love hearing about sin. Haven't you noticed that although the sinner takes no sort of interest in the saint, the saint has always an uneasy curiosity about the doings of the sinner? It is a case of the County Council and Zaeo's back over and over again."
"Yes, we love examining each other's backs," said Madame Valtesi.
Esmé Amarinth sighed musically and very loudly, and remarked—
"Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe in the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same dish with different colouredspoons. And we beat each other with the spoons, like children."
"And the dish gives us indigestion," said Madame Valtesi. "I once spent a week with an aunt who had taken to Litany, as other people take to dram-drinking, you know. We went to Litany every day, and I never had so much dyspepsia before in my life. Litany, taken often, is more indigestible than lobster at midnight."
"How exquisite the moon is!" said Lady Locke, rising and going towards the window.
"The moon is the religion of the night," said Esmé. "Go out into the garden all of you, and I will sing to you a song of the moon. It is very beautiful. I shall give it to Jean de Reszke, I think. My voice will sound better from a distance. Good voices always do."
He sat down at the piano, and they strolled out through the French windows into the green and silent pleasaunce.
His voice was clear and open, and he spoke rather than sang the following verses, while they stood listening till the rippling accompaniment trickled away into silence:—
Oh! beautiful moon with the ghostly face,Oh! moon with the brows of snow,Rise up, rise up from your slumbering place,And draw from your eyes the veil,Lest my wayward heart should failIn the homage it fain would bestow—Oh! beautiful moon with the ghostly face,Oh! moon with the brows of snow.Oh! beautiful mouth like a scarlet flow'r,Oh! mouth with the wild, soft breath,Kiss close, kiss close in the dream-stricken bow'r,And whisper away the world;Till the wayward wings are furled,And the shadow is lifted from death—Oh! beautiful mouth like a scarlet flow'r,Oh! mouth with the wild, soft breath!Oh! beautiful soul with the outstretched hands,Oh! soul with the yearning eyes,Lie still, lie still in the fairy landsWhere never a tear may fall;Where no voices ever callAny passion-act, strange or unwise—Oh! beautiful soul with the outstretched hands,Oh! soul with the yearning eyes!
The song was uttered with so much apparent passion that Lady Locke felt tears standing in her eyes when the last words ceased on the cool air of the night.
"How beautiful," she said involuntarily to Lord Reggie, who happened to be standing beside her. "And how wrong!"
"Surely that is a contradiction in terms," the boy said. "Nothing that is beautiful can possibly be wrong."
"Then how exquisitely right some womenhave been whom Society has hounded out of its good graces," Madame Valtesi remarked.
"Yes," said Reggie. "And how exquisitely happy in their rectitude."
"But not in their punishment," said Mrs. Windsor. "I think it is so silly to give people the chance of whipping you for what they do themselves."
"Society only loves one thing more than sinning," said Madame Valtesi, examining the moon magisterially through her tortoise shell eyeglass.
"And what is that?" said Lady Locke.
"Administering injustice."
"Well, what would you all like to do with yourselves to-day?" asked Mrs. Windsor on the following morning after breakfast, which was over at half-past ten, for they all got up early as a mark of respect to the country air; and indeed, Mr. Amarinth declared that he had been awake before five, revelling in the flame-coloured music of the farmyard cocks.
"I should like to go out shopping," remarked Madame Valtesi, who was dressed in a white serge dress, figured with innocent pink flowers.
"But, my dear, there are no shops!"
"There is always a linen-draper's in every village," said Madame Valtesi; "and a grocer's."
"But what would you buy there?"
"That is just what I wish to know. May I have the governess cart? I want to try and feel like a governess."
"Of course. I will order it. Will you drive yourself?"
"Oh no, I am too blind. Lady Locke, won't you come with me? I am sure you can drive. I can always tell by looking at people what they can do. I could pick you out a dentist from a crowd of a hundred people."
"Or a driver?" said Lady Locke. "I think I can manage the white pony. Yes, I will come with pleasure."
"I shall go into the drawing-room and compose my anthem for Sunday," said Lord Reggie. "I am unlike Saint Saëns. I always compose at the piano."
"And I will go into the rose-garden," said Esmé, "and eat pink roses. There is nothing more delicious than a ripe La France. May I, Mrs. Windsor? Please don't say 'this is liberty hall,' or I shall think of Mr. Alexander, the good young manager who never dies—but may I?"
"Do. And compose some Ritualistic epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night. How delightfully rustic we all are! So naïve! I am going to order dinner, and add up the household accounts for yesterday."
She rustled away with weary grace, rattling delicately a large bunch of keys that didn't open any thing in particular. They were a part of her get up as a country hostess.
A few moments later some simple chords,and the sound of a rather obvious sequence, followed by intensely Handelian runs, announced that Lord Reggie had begun to compose his anthem, and Madame Valtesi and Lady Locke were mounting into the governess cart, which was rather like a large hip bath on wheels. They sat opposite to each other upon two low seats, and Lady Locke drove sideways.
As they jogged along down the dusty country road, between the sweet smelling flowery banks, Madame Valtesi said—
"Do governesses always drive in tubs? Is it part of the system?"
"I don't know," answered Lady Locke, looking at the hunched white figure facing her, and at the little shrewd eyes peering from beneath the shade of the big and aggressively garden hat. "What system do you mean?"
"The English governess system; simple clothes, no friends, no society, no money, no late dinner, supper at nine, all the talents, and bed at ten whether you are inclined to sleep or not. Do they invariably go about in tubs as well?"
"I suppose very often. These carts are always called governess carts."
Madame Valtesi nodded enigmatically.
"I am glad I have never had to be a governess," said Lady Locke thoughtfully. "From a worldly point of view, I suppose I have been born under a lucky star."
"There is no such thing as luck in the world," Madame Valtesi remarked, putting up a huge white parasol that abruptly extinguished the view for miles. "There is only capability."
"But some capable people are surely unlucky."
"They are incapable in one direction or another. Have you not noticed that whenever a man is a failure his friends say he is an able man. No man is able who is unable to get on, just as no woman is clever who can't succeed in obtaining that worst, and most necessary, of evils—a husband."
"You are very cynical," said Lady Locke, flicking the pony's fat white back with the whip.
"All intelligent people are. Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be. If one says that Christianity has never converted the Christians, or that love has ruined more women than hate, or that virtue is an accident of environment, one is sure to be dubbed a cynic. And yet all these remarks are true to absolute absurdity."
"I scarcely think so."
"But, then, you have been in the Straits Settlements for eight years. They are true in London. And there are practically not more than about five universal truths in the world. One must always locate a truth if one wishes to be understood. What is true in London is often a lie in the country. I believe that there are still many good Christians in the country, but they are only good Christians because they are in the country—most of them. Our virtues are generally a fortunate, or unfortunate, accident, and the same may be said of our vices. Now, think of Lord Reggie. He is one of the most utterly vicious young men of the day. Why? Because, like the chameleon, he takes his colour from whatever he rests upon, or is put near. And he has been put near scarlet instead of white."
Lady Locke felt a strange thrill of pain at her heart.
"I am sure Lord Reggie has a great deal of good in him!" she exclaimed.
"Not enough to spoil his charm," said Madame Valtesi. "He has no real intention of being either bad or good. He lives like Esmé Amarinth, merely to be artistic."
"But what in Heaven's name does that word mean?" asked Lady Locke. "It seemsalmost the only modern word. I hear it everywhere like a sort of refrain."
"I cannot tell you. I am too old. Ask Lord Reggie. He would tell you anything."
The last words were spoken with slow intention.
"What do you mean?" said Lady Locke hastily.
"Here we are at the post-office. Would it not be the proper thing to do to get some stamps? No? Then let us stop at the linen-draper's. I feel a strong desire to buy some village frilling. And there are some deliciously coarse-looking pocket-handkerchiefs in the window, about a yard square. I must get a dozen of those."
At lunch that day Lord Reggie announced that he had composed a beautiful anthem on the words—
"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks."
"They sound exactly like something of Esme's," he said, "but really they are taken from the 'Song of Solomon.' I had no idea that the Bible was so intensely artistic. There are passages in the Book of Job that I should not be ashamed to have written."
"You remind me of a certain lady writerwho is very popular in kitchen circles," said Esmé, "and whose husband once told me that she had founded her style upon Mr. Ruskin and the better parts of the Bible. She brings out about seven books every year, I am told, and they are all about sailors, of whom she knows absolutely nothing. I am perpetually meeting her, and she always asks me to lunch, and says she knows my brother. She seems to connect my poor brother with lunch in some curious way. I shall never lunch with her, but she will always ask me."
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast," Mrs. Windsor said, with a little air of aptness.
"That is one of the greatest fallacies of a melancholy age," Esmé answered, arranging the huge moonstone in his tie with a plump hand; "suicide would be the better word. 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' has made suicide quite the rage. A number of most respectable ladies, without the vestige of a past among them, have put an end to themselves lately, I am told. To die naturally has become most unfashionable, but no doubt the tide will turn presently."
"I wonder if people realise how dangerous they may be in their writings," said Lady Locke.
"One has to choose between being dangerous and being dull. Society loves to feel itself upon the edge of a precipice, I assure you. To be harmless is the most deadly enemy to social salvation. Strict respectability would even handicap a rich American nowadays, and rich Americans are terribly respectable by nature. That is why they are always so anxious to get into the Prince of Wales' set."
"I suppose Ibsen is responsible for a good deal," Mrs. Windsor said rather vaguely. Luncheon always rendered her rather vague, and after food her intellect struggled for egress, as the sun struggles to emerge from behind intercepting clouds.
"I believe Mr. Clement Scott thinks so," said Amarinth; "but then it does not matter very much what Mr. Clement Scott thinks, does it? The position of the critics always strikes me as very comic. They are for ever running at the back of public opinion, and shouting 'come on!' or 'go back!' to those who are in front of them. If half of them had their way, our young actors and actresses would play in Pinero's pieces as Mrs. Siddons or Charles Kean played in the pieces of Shakespeare long ago. A good many of them found their claims to attention on the horrible fact that they once knew Charles Dickens, a circumstance of whichthey ought rather to be ashamed. They are monotonous dwellers in an unenlightened past like Mr. Sala, who is even more commonplace than the books of which he is for ever talking. Mr. Joseph Knight is their oracle at first nights, and some of them even labour under the wild impression that Mr. Robert Buchanan can write good English, and that Mr. George R. Sims—what would he be without the initial?—is a minor poet."
"Dear me! I am afraid we are all wrong," said Mrs. Windsor, still rather vaguely; "but do you know, we ought really to be thinking of our walk up Leith Hill. It is a lovely afternoon. Will you attempt it, Madame Valtesi?"
"No, thank you. I think I must have been constructed, like Providence, with a view to sitting down. Whoever thinks of the Deity as standing? I will stay at home and read the last number of 'The Yellow Disaster.' I want to see Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's idea of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has drawn him sitting in a wheelbarrow in the gardens of Lambeth Palace, with underneath him the motto, 'J'y suis, j'y reste.' I believe he has on a black mask. Perhaps that is to conceal the likeness."
"I have seen it," Mrs. Windsor said; "it is very clever. There are only three lines in thewhole picture, two for the wheelbarrow and one for the Archbishop."
"What exquisite simplicity!" said Lord Reggie, going out into the hall to get his straw hat.
In the evening, when they assembled in the drawing-room for dinner, it was found that both Mrs. Windsor and Madame Valtesi had put on simple black dresses in honour of the curate. Lady Locke, although she never wore widow's weeds, had given up colours since her husband's death. As they waited for Mr. Smith's advent there was an air of decent expectation about the party. Mr. Amarinth looked serious to heaviness. Lord Reggie was pale, and seemed abstracted. Probably he was thinking of his anthem, whose tonic and dominant chords, and diatonic progressions, he considered most subtly artistic. He would like to have written in the Lydian mode, only he could not remember what the Lydian mode was, and he had forgotten to bring any harmony book with him. He glanced into the mirror over the fireplace, smoothed his pale gold hair with his hand, and prepared to be very sweet to the curate in order to obtain possession of the organ on the ensuing Sunday.
"Mr. Smith," said one of the tall footmen, throwing open the drawing-room, and a tall,thin, ascetic looking man, with a shaved, dark face, and an incipient tonsure, entered the room very seriously.
"Dinner is served."
The two announcements followed one upon the other almost without a pause. Mrs. Windsor requested the curate to take her in, after introducing him to her guests in the usual rather muddled and perfunctory manner. When they were all seated, and Mr. Amarinth was beginning to hold forth over the clear soup, she murmured confidentially to her companion—
"So good of you to take pity upon us. You will not find us very gay. We are really down here to have a quiet, serious week—a sort of retreat, you know. Mr. Amarinth is holding it. I hope nobody will have a fit this time. Ah! of course you did not come last year. Do you like Chenecote? A sweet village, isn't it?"
"Very sweet indeed, outwardly. But I fear there is a good deal to be done inwardly; much sweeping and scouring of minds before the savour of the place will be quite acceptable on high."
"Dear me! I am sorry to hear that. One can never tell, of course."
"I have put a stop to a good deal already,I am thankful to say. I have broken up the idle corners permanently, and checked the Sunday evening rowdyism upon the common."
"Indeed! I am so glad. Mr. Smith has broken up the idle corners, Madame Valtesi. Is it not a mercy?"
Madame Valtesi looked enigmatical, as indeed she always did when she was ignorant. She had not the smallest idea what an idle corner might be, nor how it could be broken up. She therefore peered through her eyeglasses and said nothing. Mr. Amarinth was less discreet.
"An idle corner," he said. "What a delicious name. It might have been invented by Izaac Walton. It suggests a picture by George Morland. I love his canvases, rustics carousing——"
But before he could get any further, Reggie caught his eye and formed silently with his lips the words, "Remember my anthem."
"He idealises so much," Amarinth went on easily. "Of course a real carouse is horribly inartistic. Excess always is, although Oscar Wilde has said that nothing succeeds like it."
"Excess is very evil," Mr. Smith said rather rigidly. "Excess in everything seems to be characteristic of our age. I could wish thatmany would return to the ascetic life. No wine, thank you."
"Indeed, yes," said Mrs. Windsor, "that is what I always think. There is something so beautiful in not eating and drinking, and not marrying, and all that; but at least we must acknowledge that celibacy is quite coming into fashion. Our young men altogether refuse to marry nowadays. Let us hope that is a step in the right direction."
"If they married more and drank less, I don't fancy their morals would suffer much," Madame Valtesi remarked with exceeding dryness, looking at Mr. Smith's budding tonsure through her tortoise-shell eyeglass.
"The monastic life is very beautiful," said Lord Reggie. "I always find when I go to a monastery, that the monks give me very excellent wine. I suppose they keep all their hair shirts for their own private use."
"That is the truest hospitality, isn't it," said Lady Locke.
"The high church party are showing us the right way," Mr. Amarinth remarked impressively, with a side-anthem glance at Lord Reggie which spoke volumes. "They understand the value of æstheticism in religion. They recognise the fact that a beautiful vestment uplifts the soul far more than a dozen badchants by Stainer, or Barnby, or any other unmusical Christian. The average Anglican chant is one of the most unimaginative, unpoetical things in the world. It always reminds me of the cart-horse parade on Whit Monday. A brown Gregorian is so much more devotional."
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Smith, who had been listening to these remarks with acquiescence, but who now manifested some obvious confusion.
"A brown Gregorian," Mr. Amarinth repeated. "All combinations of sounds convey a sense of colour to the mind. Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta."
"I think the Bishops are beginning to understand Gregorian music a little better. No plover's eggs, thank you," said Mr. Smith, who was totally without a sense of melody, but who assumed a complete musical authority, based on the fact that he intoned in church.
"The Bishops never go on understanding anything," said Mr. Amarinth. "They conceal their intelligence, if they have any, up their lawn sleeves. I once met a Bishop. It was at a garden party at Lambeth Palace. He took me aside into a small shrubbery, and informed me that he was really a Buddhist. He added that nearly all the Bishops were."
"Is it true that Mr. Haweis introduced his congregation to a Mahatma in the vestry after service last Sunday?" said Madame Valtesi. "I heard so, and that he has persuaded Little Tich to read the lessons for the rest of the season. I think it is rather hard upon the music halls. There is really so much competition nowadays!"
"I know nothing about Mr. Haweis," said Mr. Smith, drinking some water from a wineglass. "I understood he was a conjurer, or an entertainer, or something of that kind."
"Oh no, he is quite a clergyman," exclaimed Mrs. Windsor. "Quite; except when he is in the pulpit, of course. And then I suppose he thinks it more religious to drop it."
"Since I have been away there has been a great change in services," said Lady Locke. "They are so much brighter and more cheerful."
"Yes, Christians are getting very lively," said Madame Valtesi, helping herself to a cutlet in aspic. "They demand plenty of variety in their devotional exercises, and what Arthur Roberts, or somebody, calls 'short turns.' The most popular of all the London clergymen invariably has an anthem that lasts half-an-hour,and preaches for five minutes by a stop watch."
"I scarcely think that music should entirely oust doctrine," began Mr. Smith, refusing an entrée with a gentle wave of his hand.
"The clergyman I sit under," said Mrs. Windsor, "always stops for several minutes before his sermon, so that the people can go out if they want to."
"How inconsiderate," said Mr. Amarinth; "of course no one dares to move. English people never dare to move, except at the wrong time. They think it is less noticeable to go out at a concert during a song than during an interval. The English labour under so many curious delusions. They think they are respectable, for instance, if they are not noticed, and that to be talked about is to be fast. Of course the really fast people are never talked about at all. Half the young men in London, whose names are by-words, are intensely and hopelessly virtuous. They know it, and that is why they look so pale. The consciousness of virtue is a terrible thing, is it not, Mr. Smith?"
"I am afraid I hardly caught what you were saying. No pudding, thank you," said that gentleman.
"I was saying that we moderns are reallyall much better than we seem. There is far more hypocrisy of vice nowadays than hypocrisy of virtue. The amount of excellence going about is positively quite amazing, if one only knows where to look for it; but good people in Society are so terribly afraid of being found out."
"Really! Can that be the case?"
"Indeed, it can. Society is absolutely frank about its sins, but absolutely secretive about its lapses into goodness, if I may so phrase it. I once knew a young nobleman who went twice to church on Sunday—in the morning and the afternoon. He managed to conceal it for nearly five years, but one day, to his horror, he saw a paragraph in theStar—theStaris a small evening paper which circulates chiefly among members of the Conservative party who desire to know what the aristocracy are doing—revealing his exquisite secret. He fled the country immediately, and is now living in retirement in Buenos Ayres, which is, I am told, the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned purgatory."
"Good gracious! London must be in a very sad condition," said Mr. Smith, in considerable excitement. "No, thank you, I never touch fruit. Things used to be very different, I imagine, although I have never been in town except for the day, and then merely to call upon my dentist."
"Yes, this is an era of change," murmured Lord Reggie, who had spoken little and eaten much. "Good women have taken to talking about vice, and, in no long time, bad men will take to talking about virtue."
"I think you are wronging good women, Lord Reggie," said Lady Locke rather gravely.
"It is almost impossible to wrong a woman now," he answered pensively. "Women are so busy in wronging men, that they have no time for anything else. Sarah Grand has inaugurated the Era of women's wrongs."
"I am so afraid that she will drive poor, dear Mrs. Lynn Linton mad," said Mrs. Windsor, drawing on her gloves—for she persisted in believing that the presence of Mr. Smith constituted a dinner party. "Mrs. Linton's articles are really getting so very noisy. Don't you think they rather suggest Bedlam?"
"To me they suggest nothing whatever," said Amarinth wearily. "I cannot distinguish one from another. They are all like sheep that have gone astray."
"I must say I prefer them to Lady Jeune's," said Mrs. Windsor.
"Lady Jeune catches society by the throat and worries it," said Madame Valtesi.
"She worries it very inartistically," added Lord Reggie.
"Ah!" said Amarinth, as the ladies rose to go into the drawing-room; "she makes one great mistake. She judges of Society by her own parties, and looks at life through the spectacles of a divorce court judge. No wonder she is the bull terrier of modern London life."
Mrs. Windsor paused at the dining-room door and looked back.
"We are going to have coffee in the garden," she said. "Will you join us there? Don't stay too long over your water, Mr. Smith," she added, with pious archness.
"No; but I never take coffee, thank you," he answered solemnly.
Esmé Amarinth was generally amusing and whimsical in conversation, but, like other men, he had his special moments, and the half-hour after dinner, when the ladies, longing to remain as invisible listeners, had retired to the bald deserts of feminine society, was usually his time of triumph. His mental stays were then unfastened. He could breathe forth his stories freely. His wittiest jokes, nude, no longer clad in the shadowy garments of more or less conventional propriety, danced like bacchanals through the conversation, and kicked up heels to fire even the weary men of society. He expanded into fantastic anecdote, and mingled many abon motwith the blue spirals of his mounting cigarette smoke. But to-night Mr. Smith's gentle, "I never smoke, thank you," reminded him that the fate of Lord Reggie's anthem was hanging in the balance. He resolved to tread warily among clerical prejudices, so, lighting a cigarette, and pushing the claret away from him with one plump hand, hedrew his chair slowly towards Mr. Smith's, and a sweet smile spread deliberately over his rather large and intelligent face.
"I was very much interested in your remark about doctrine and music at dinner," he began in his most carefully modulated voice, "and I wanted to pursue the subject a little farther, only the minds of ladies are so curious and unexpected, that I thought it better to refrain. Have you noticed that many women make a kind of profession of being shocked?"
"Surely no," said Mr. Smith, sipping his water with an inquiring air.
"Yes, positively it is so, especially if a truth about religion is uttered. They are apt to think that all truths about religion are blasphemous. It is wonderful how ready good women are to find blasphemy where it is not, and to confuse reasoning with ribaldry."
"Ah!" said the curate, looking the more ascetic because he was slightly confused in mind.
"Now you spoke of music ousting doctrine. Do you not think that the truest, the most poignant doctrine, speaks, utters itself through the arts. Music has its religion and its atheism, painting its holiness and its sin. A statue, in its white and marble stillness, may suggest to us dreams in which the angels walk, or visions that I will not characterise in the presence of an ordained priest. Even architecture may incline us to worship, and a few broken fragments of stone to faith. Have you ever been in Greece?"
"I have never been out of my own country," said Mr. Smith, "except once, when I spent a week in Wales."
"I have never made an exhaustive study of Welsh art," said Amarinth, "but I believe Mr. Gladstone thinks it gallant, while others prefer to call it little. But the point I wanted to suggest was merely this, that we can draw doctrine from the music and the painting of men, as well as from literature and sermons."
"I have never thought of it before," said Mr. Smith doubtfully.
"Mozart and Bach have given me belief that not even the subversive impotencies of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the terribly obvious 'mysteries' of Dr. A. C. Mackenzie, have been able to take from me," murmured Lord Reggie.
"Ah! Reggie, each decade has its poet Bunn," remarked Amarinth. "We have our Bunn in Mr. Joseph Bennett, but where are his plums? Religion dwells in the arts, Mr. Smith, as irreligion so often, unhappily, lurks in the sciences."
"Indeed I have no opinion of science," the curate said with authoritative disapproval.
"Science is too often a thief. Art is a prodigal benefactor. She provides for us an almshouse in which we can take refuge when we are old and weary. And in music especially—in good music—all doctrine is crystallised. The man who has genius gathers together all his highest thoughts and aspirations, all his beliefs, his trust, his faith, and gives them forth in his art, in his music, or in his picture. Lord Reginald, for instance, would convert more men to Christianity by his exquisite and purple anthem than most preachers by all their sermons."
"Indeed, has Lord Reginald composed an anthem?" asked the curate, gazing upon Reggie with a priestly approval.
"He has, and one that Roman Catholics have delighted in. Forgive my allusion to an alien faith, but the Romanists, with all their mistakes, are not unmusical."
"I see much good in Rome," said Mr. Smith solemnly, "although it is mingled with many errors. No, not any nuts, thank you; I never touch nuts. I should like to hear this anthem."
"I could play it to you with pleasure," Reggie said, drooping his fair head slightly,"but of course it is all wrong on a piano. It requires the organ and sweet boys' voices."
"We have anthems in the church here," said Mr. Smith. "We have even done masses."
"How exquisite!" said Amarinth. "A village mass. There is something beautifully original in the notion. Ah! Mr. Smith, if your boys could have done Lord Reggie's anthem they would have learnt the doctrine of music."
"Perhaps they—would it be possible—on Sunday?" Mr. Smith said, glowing gently.
Amarinth got up, dropping his cigarette end into his finger bowl.
"Reggie, we have found a true artist in Chenecote," he said. "Play Mr. Smith your purple notes, and I will go and take my coffee on the lawn. The moon washes the night with silver, and, thank Heaven! there are no nightingales to ruin the music of the stillness with their well-meant but ill-produced voices. Nature's songster is the worst sort of songster I know."
He walked with an ample softness into the little hall, and passed out through the French windows of the drawing room into the shadowy garden.
On the lawn he found Lady Locke sittingalone, sipping her coffee in a basket chair. Madame Valtesi and Mrs. Windsor had strolled into the scented rose garden to discuss the inner details of a forthcoming divorce case. The murmur of their voices, uttering names of co-respondents, was faintly heard now and then as they passed up and down the tiny formal paths.
Esmé Amarinth sank down into a chair by Lady Locke and sighed heavily.
"What is the matter?" she asked.
"You have a beautiful soul," he said softly, "and I have a beautiful soul too. Why should there not be a sympathy between us? Lady Locke, I am the victim of depression. I am suffering from the malady of life. I usually have an attack of it in the morning, but it flies when the stars come out and leaves me brilliant. What can be the matter with me to-night? I ask myself the question with the most poignant anxiety, I can assure you."
She glanced at his large and solemn face, at his ample cheeks and loose mouth, and smiled slightly.
"Some circumstances have been unkind to you, perhaps?" she said.
"That could not hurt me," he answered, "for, thank Heaven! I am no philosopher, and never take facts seriously. Circumstances, mydear Lady Locke, are the lashes laid into us by life. Some of us have to receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on a coat—that is the only difference."
"Are you a pessimist?" she asked.
"I hope so. I look upon optimism as a most quaint disease, an eruption that breaks out upon the soul, and destroys all its interest, all its beauty. The optimist dresses up the amazing figures of life like Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and pipes a foolish tune—the Old Hundredth or some such thing—for them to dance to. We cannot all refuse to see anything but comic opera peasants around us."
"Yet we need not replace them with pantomime demons."
"Demons, as you call them, are much more interesting. Nothing is so unattractive as goodness, except, perhaps, a sane mind in a sane body. Even the children find the fairies monotonous, I believe. An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand."
"Every one of them sinister."
"Why not? Where would be the drama without the crime? The clash of swords is the music of the world. People talk so much tome about the beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. The Apostle Thomas was artistic up to a certain point. He appreciated the value of shadows in a picture. To be on the alert is to live. To be lulled in security is to die."
"But if you pushed that amusing theory to its limits you would arrive at the contradiction in terms—to be happy is to be miserable."
"Certainly. To be what is commonly called happy is a mental complaint demanding careful treatment. The happy people of the world have their value, but only the negative value of foils. They throw up and emphasise the beauty, and the fascination of the unhappy. Scarlet and black are the finest of all the colours. And to cease to doubt is to despair—for a really talented man or woman. That is why people become sceptics. They desire to save themselves from intellectual annihilation."
"Yet the mental pleasure of proving a case may be keen."
"But it cannot be lasting. You do not see the delight that must attend upon conjecture. Let me put it to you in another way. Can you conceive loving a man whom you felt you understood?"
"Certainly. Especially if he were difficult for other people to understand."
"Ah! you begin to appreciate the value of doubt. We often begin by desiring others to enjoy what we shall eventually want for ourselves. The moment we understand a human being, our love for that human being spreads his wings preparatory to flying out of the window."
Lady Locke, who had begun to look earnest, seemed to recollect herself with an effort, and dispelled the gravity that was settling over her face with a smile.
"You go very far in your admirable desire to amuse," she said.
"I think not," he answered, putting down her cup with an elaborate serenity. "One must perpetually doubt to be faithful. Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this while men did not, and so women once ruled the world. But men are awakening from their mental slumber, and are becoming incomprehensible. Lord Reggie is an instance of what I mean. The average person finds him exquisitely difficult to comprehend. He fascinates by being sedulously unexpected. Listen to his anthem. He is beginning to play it.How unexpected it is. It always does what the ear wants, and all modern music does what the ear does not want. Therefore the ear always expects to be disappointed, and Lord Reggie astonishes it by never disappointing it."
The faint music of the piano now tinkled out into the night, and numerous simple harmonies and full closes fell melodiously upon their hearing.
"Lord Reggie is certainly very unlike his anthem," said Lady Locke, listening a little sadly.
"Reggie is unlike everything except himself. He is completely wonderful, and, wonderfully complete. He lives for sensations, while other people live for faiths, or for convictions, or for prejudices. He would make any woman unhappy. How beautiful!"
"Is it always a sign of intelligence to be what others are not?"
But she received no direct answer to her question, for at this moment Madame Valtesi and Mrs. Windsor came to them across the lawn. They had finished trying the divorce case.
"What is that about intelligence?" Madame Valtesi asked croakily.
"Dear Lady!" said Esmé, getting up out of his chair slowly, "intelligence is the demonof our age. Mine bores me horribly. I am always trying to find a remedy for it. I have experimented with absinthe, but gained no result. I have read the collected works of Walter Besant. They are said to sap the mental powers. They did not sap mine. Opium has proved useless, and green tea cigarettes leave me positively brilliant. What am I to do? I so long for the lethargy, the sweet peace of stupidity. If only I were Lewis Morris!"
"Unfortunate man! You should treat your complaint with the knife. Become a popular author."
She laughed without smiling, an uncanny habit of hers, and turned to the window.
"I hear Mr. Smith saying that he must go," she said.
Mrs. Windsor rustled forward to speed the parting guest.
That night Esmé said to Reggie in the smoking room—
"Reggie, Lady Locke will marry you if you ask her."
"I suppose so," the boy said.
"Shall you ask her?"
"I suppose so. Mr. Smith is going to do my anthem on Sunday."
They lit their cigarettes.