CHAPTER XXXVII
Which is Uneasy with the Restlessness of Youth
Sir Pompey Malahidecame into his baronetcy on a fine summer’s day; and Noll spent the resulting week of high festivities with Horace and the family, and there strengthened his friendship with Bartholomew Doome, whose unsnobbish affection and care of the rough merchant won Noll’s regard even more than his grim humour.
Horace, his father baroneted and the feasting done, decided to go to Paris for a change—“to get the odour of cooked bullocks from his nostrils.” Noll saw him off at the railway-station; saw his man Jonkin, of the ducal manner, tuck him up in his railway-carriage; watched the train slide out of the station—and sighed to lose the light-hearted companionship of the sunny youth.
The departing of a comrade sends a cloud across the bluest sky.
Noll, with the confidence of youth, decided to be a literary celebrity.
He felt that it would be a brilliant and fascinating position to hold; and it required no capital. It was not to be bought. There was an air about it.
But the having his own study and separate establishment did not raise the masterpiece out of the deeps—nor did the world thrill at his originality so readily as he had hoped. He did much chewing of the quill.
Being young, he wrote for art’s sake; and it was the beginning of several affectations in which he half believed.
His solitary hours of work, and of brooding upon work, were fretted with other and more overwhelming dreams. The rustle of women’s petticoats began to trouble him as he wrote. In the faces that passed him in the street he saw beckoning eyes under many a pretty bonnet. And the writing, dragging already for want of life and substance, now further dragged, interrupted by the frills and figures of women.
All nature’s urging of the adolescent to part from the parent brood was calling upon him to pair; and the mystic fascination of the fragrance of women was enhanced by the restlessness ofdawning manhood that vexes the lustiness of youth with the blatant trumpet-call to action, the fret to be up and about and doing.
The dainty place that Betty had held by his side was empty. And the gentle companionship of the girl that had filled the lad’s life gave way to a vague hunger for affection.
To him in his grey loneliness came, as fairy to brooding Cinderella, lighting the sordid gloom of his toil, fitful flashes of the girl’s face in his day-dreams. Betty still held vague possession of his affections. But youth is not content to clutch at thin air.
Noll cudgelled his wits at the desk of his lonely room, in vain.
The masterpiece would not come.
Then the youth decided that he was making a mistake—he was keeping himself too much to himself. He would go deep into the literary world. He was convinced that a literary man can do nothing unless he be in the Literary Swim.
A letter from Horace was his confirmation. Horace was fascinated by the student-life of Paris—its free-handed comradeship, its gaiety, its good-fellowship in all things, its frank acceptance of nature, its rebellion against the rigid conventions, its freedom from cant, its glory in the joy of life. He had decided to give up his life of wealth at home for a few years, to be a poor student in Paris for awhile, to put aside the boredoms of the pampered rich, and, like the strenuous man, to live life largely.
He thought, on the whole, he would keep his valet on—but Jonkin was to dress like himself, as a student, corduroy trousers, black coat, slouch hat and all. There was to be no tomfoolery in it—he was going to be the poor student right through. And the girls of the Latin quarter, heavens! he kissed his hand to them....
Within a month, Noll was elected to a literary club—one of those places where men turn in to wash their hands on the way to theAthenæum.
At the first entry into this club, the youth felt that he was come amongst the very wits. But the minor critic Fosse fussed about him, and took the earliest confidential opportunity to whisper to him with wink and nod that it was owing tohisinterest in him that Noll had been elected over the heads of men who had been waiting for years at the portals in vain. The thrill trickled out of the glamour of his election a little as each of several others confided to Noll that it was owing tohisexertions andhisfollowing that his election had been so speedily secured—and that everyone else in the gathering was but mediocre and painstaking. His conceit in his honours slowly leaked away.
Then Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre, though kind, at once roused uneasiness and soul-searchings in the youth. He pointed out that the man of genius was the type of his time, the outward and visible as much as the inward and spiritual; that in our age the face of genius wore a moustache—Bismarck and Rhodes and Whistler all wore the moustache.
Quogge Myre himself wore a moustache....
As the glamour of initiation wore off, the youth was oppressed with the barrenness of the land—the petty jealousies, the tittle-tattle, the spites, the little treacheries.
He came to have an unpleasant and mean desire to sit the others out always—he knew that the moment the door closed upon him they tore his weaknesses to pieces, and garbled his motives.
And still the masterpiece did not come....
Netherby Gomme, lunching with him at the club, ended by walking back with him to his rooms; and, out of the earshot of the precious company, he warned the youth not to fling his fresh ideas to these people if he would weave them into his own art.
“These are the jackals of the arts, Noll,” said he grimly—“they filch the ideas of other men—they follow hot-foot on the latest success, turning out indifferent copies of the master-wits—they will suck your brains, vampire-like. These are they who, when a genius appears, cannot lift their eyes to his magnificence, to the beauty of his imagination, can but seek out the sources of his inspiration and laboriously accuse him of the footsteps in which he had trod. Be rid of the crew. Or, keep your quaint conceits for your workshop. Give them but the chips.... You gave those fellows this very day the scheme for a large work of art—they have not the brains to see the potentialities that lie latent in an idea—so some fellow of them will make a catchy magazine essay of it—catch the newness of it and exploit it. They are as vulgar thieves as though they stole your pence.... They are no help to you—I have done my best work even in my small way, as many a really big man has done his, in the back room of a dingy house, looking out upon a brick wall. What is in you is in you—you can benefit nothing from these others.... If you have companions, have splendid companions—the big rich-souled man. Friendship is the top of ambition. These others will steal your very tears.”
So the humorist with his arm in Noll’s, affectionately; and left Noll brooding at the threshold of his simple home....
Netherby spoke prophecy.
A month or two later, an article in a leading review, signed by Mr. Fosse, won some notice by its youthful daring, indiscretion, and invention—Noll sighed to see his own wits could be so shabbily clothed.
Noll took up the magazine by veriest chance at the club.
He read the sorry thing, and flung it upon the table; and, as he flung it down, Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre entered the room.
“Ah, Aubrey,” cried he to the languid poet, with loud voice that was ever pitched to carry his carefully wrought spontaneities to the listening world: “I am sorry to be late, but, for pleasant hours with Lady Persimmon, I could almost be content to appear ill-bred. She moves me—so few women move me.” He sat down beside the poet, and slapped the poetic leg giddily: “Fora handsome woman one must neglect even a poet, eh? Ha-ha! even the handsomest and the chastest of them all love their squeeze. Not that I—you know—eh?”
“Tsh!” muttered Aubrey, who had been vainly attempting to check the flow of Myre’s conceit—“Baddlesmere, over there, is her cousin.”
Myre turned a dirty putty colour.
Noll got up from his chair and walked out of the club....
Bartholomew Doome rose languidly from a lounge:
“It was a happy thing for your pink and white complexion, Myre, that Noll Baddlesmere has been too absent-minded to overhear your yawing. I do not think I have ever seen you glitter more consummately caddish. Besides which, you lied. But that’s a detail. To lie to save a woman’s honour has an air—to lie against her is to be banal. It has been done before—and so often.”
He strolled towards the door.
Myre said:
“It is a happy thing for some people that the duel is dead.”
Bartholomew Doome laughed—went out laughing—laughed the length of Piccadilly....
An urgent demand from the Secretary, asking for his subscription, Noll sent on to Mr. Fosse, with a waggish note:
“Dear Fosse,I know from your own lips that I owe my election to the club to your kind offices; and I should be sorry indeed to think that my failure to pay my subscription may cast a slur upon you as my sponsor. I find that the sum that you borrowed from me when you won your success inThe Discriminatorfully covers my subscription, and yields you a handsome profit, and I would beg that you take advantage of the admirable opportunity of paying your debt to me by paying my debt to the club; you will increase my indebtedness to you by withdrawing my name from the books.Yours, not wholly without admiration,Noll Baddlesmere.”
“Dear Fosse,
I know from your own lips that I owe my election to the club to your kind offices; and I should be sorry indeed to think that my failure to pay my subscription may cast a slur upon you as my sponsor. I find that the sum that you borrowed from me when you won your success inThe Discriminatorfully covers my subscription, and yields you a handsome profit, and I would beg that you take advantage of the admirable opportunity of paying your debt to me by paying my debt to the club; you will increase my indebtedness to you by withdrawing my name from the books.
Yours, not wholly without admiration,Noll Baddlesmere.”
Mr. Fosse, odd to say, paid the subscription.
******
When Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre called at Lady Persimmon’s the next day he was told that her ladyship was not at home.
“But,” said my pushful gentleman—“I have just seen visitors go in.”
The footman put himself across the doorway, barring entrance: “You are Mr. Myre, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Her ladyship has given instructions that she is never at home to persons of the name of Myre. Go away.” He slammed the door in the great man’s face.