Robert Hugh Benson

Dick Guiseley sat over breakfast in his rooms off Oxford Street, entirely engrossed in a local Yorkshire paper two days old.

His rooms were very characteristic of himself. They were five in number—a dining-room, two bedrooms, and two sitting-rooms divided by curtains, as well as a little entrance-hall that opened on to the landing, close beside the lift that served all the flats. They were furnished in a peculiarly restrained style—so restrained, in fact, that it was almost impossible to remember what was in them. One was just conscious of a sense of extreme comfort and convenience. There was nothing in particular that arrested the attention or caught the eye, except here and there a space or a patch of wall about which Dick had not yet made up his mind. He had been in them two years, indeed, but he had not nearly finished furnishing. From time to time a new piece of furniture appeared, or a new picture—always exceedingly good of its kind, and even conspicuous. Yet, somehow or other, so excellent was his taste, as soon as the thing was in place its conspicuousness (so to speak) vanished amidst the protective coloring, and it looked as if it had been there for ever. The colors were chosen with the same superfine skill: singly they were brilliant, or at least remarkable (the ceilings, for instance, were of a rich buttercup yellow); collectively they were subdued and unnoticeable. And I suppose this is exactly what rooms ought to be.

The breakfast-table at which he sat was a good instance of his taste. The silver-plate on it was really remarkable. There was a delightful Caroline tankard in the middle, placed there for the sheer pleasure of looking at it; there was a large silver cow with a lid in its back; there were four rat-tail spoons; the china was an extremely cheap Venetian crockery of brilliant designs and thick make. The coffee-pot and milk-pot were early Georgian, with very peculiar marks; but these vessels were at present hidden under the folded newspaper. There were four chrysanthemums in four several vases of an exceptional kind of glass. It sounds startling, I know, but the effect was not startling, though I cannot imagine why not. Here again one was just conscious of freshness and suitability and comfort.

---

But Dick was taking no pleasure in it all this morning. He was feeling almost physically sick, and the little spirit-heated silver dish of kidneys on his Queen Anne sideboard was undisturbed. He had cut off the top of an egg which was now rapidly cooling, and a milky surface resembling thin ice was forming on the contents of his coffee-cup. And meanwhile he read.

The column he was reading described the wedding of his uncle with Miss Jenny Launton, and journalese surpassed itself. There was a great deal about the fine old English appearance of the bridegroom, who, it appeared, had been married in a black frock-coat and gray trousers, with white spats, and who had worn a chrysanthemum in his button-hole (Dick cast an almost venomous glance upon the lovely blossom just beside the paper), and the beautiful youthful dignity of the bride, "so popular among the humble denizens of the country-side." The bride's father, it seemed, had officiated at the wedding in the "sturdy old church," and had been greatly affected—assisted by the Rev. Matthieson. The wedding, it seemed, had been unusually quiet, and had been celebrated by special license: few of the family had been present, "owing," said the discreet reporter, "to the express wish of the bridegroom." (Dick reflected sardonically upon his own convenient attack of influenza from which he was now completely recovered.) Then there was a great deal more about the ancient home of the Guiseleys, and the aristocratic appearance of Viscount Merefield, the young and popular heir to the earldom, who, it appeared, had assisted at the wedding in another black frock-coat. General Mainwaring had acted as best man. Finally, there was a short description of the presents of the bridegroom to the bride, which included a set of amethysts, etc....

---

Dick read it all through to the luxuriant end, down to the peals of the bells and the rejoicings in the evening. He ate several pieces of dry toast while he read, crumbling them quickly with his left hand, and when he had finished, drank his coffee straight off at one draught. Then he got up, still with the paper, sat down in the easy-chair nearest to the fire and read the whole thing through once more. Then he pushed the paper off his knee and leaned back.

---

It would need a complete psychological treatise to analyze properly all the emotions he had recently gone through—emotions which had been, so to say, developed and "fixed" by the newspaper column he had just read. He was a man who was accustomed to pride himself secretly upon the speed with which he faced each new turn of fortune, and the correctness of the attitude he assumed. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the Artistic Stoic was the ideal towards which he strove. But, somehow, those emotions would not sort themselves. There they all were—fury, indignation, contempt, wounded pride, resignation, pity—there were no more to be added or subtracted; each had its place and its object, yet they would not coalesce. Now fury against his uncle, now pity for himself, now a poisonous kind of contempt of Jenny. Or, again, a primitive kind of longing for Jenny, a disregard of his uncle, an abasement of himself. The emotions whirled and twisted, and he sat quite still, with his eyes closed, watching them.

But there was one more emotion which had made its appearance entirely unexpectedly as soon as he had heard the news, that now, greatly to his surprise, was beginning to take a considerable place amongst the rest—and this was an extraordinarily warm sense of affection towards Frank—of all people. It was composed partly of compassion, and partly of an inexplicable sort of respect for which he could perceive no reason. It was curious, he thought later, why this one figure should have pushed its way to the front just now, when his uncle and Jenny and, secondarily, that Rector ("so visibly affected by the ceremony") should have occupied all the field. Frank had never meant very much to Dick; he had stood for the undignified and the boyish in the midst of those other stately elements of which Merefield, and, indeed, all truly admirable life, was composed.

Yet now this figure stood out before him with startling distinctness.

First there was the fact that both Frank and himself had suffered cruelly at the hands of the same woman, though Frank incomparably the more cruelly of the two. Dick had the honesty to confess that Jenny had at least never actually broken faith with himself; but he had also the perspicuity to see that it came to very nearly the same thing. He knew with the kind of certitude that neither needs nor appeals to evidence that Jenny would certainly have accepted him if it had not been that Lord Talgarth had already dawned on her horizon, and that she put him off for a while simply to see whether this elderly sun would rise yet higher in the heavens. It was the same consideration, no doubt, that had caused her to throw Frank over a month or two earlier. A Lord Talgarth in the bush was worth two cadets in the hand. That was where her sensibleness had come in, and certainly it had served her well.

It was this community of injury, then, that primarily drew Dick's attention to Frank; and, when once it lead been so drawn, it lingered on other points in his personality. Artistic Stoicism is a very satisfying ideal so long as things go tolerably well. It affords an excellent protection against such misfortunes as those of not being appreciated or of losing money or just missing a big position—against all such ills as affect bodily or mental conveniences. But when the heart is touched, Artistic Stoicism peels off like rusted armour. Dick had seriously began to consider, during the last few days, whether the exact opposite of Artistic Stoicism (let us call it Natural Impulsiveness) is not almost as good an equipment. He began to see something admirable in Frank's attitude to life, and the more he regarded it the more admirable it seemed.

Frank, therefore, had begun to wear to him the appearance of something really moving and pathetic. He had had a communication or two from Jack Kirkby that had given him a glimpse of what Frank was going through, and his own extremely artificial self was beginning to be affected by it.

---

He looked round his room now, once or twice, wondering whether it was all worth while. He had put his whole soul into these rooms—there was that Jacobean press with the grotesque heads—ah! how long he had agonized over that in the shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, wondering whether or not it would do just what he wanted, in that space between the two doors. There was that small statue of a Tudor lady in a square head-dress that he had bought in Oxford: he had occupied at least a week in deciding exactly from what point she was to smile on him; there was the new curtain dividing the two rooms: he had had half a dozen patterns, gradually eliminated down to two, lying over his sofa-back for ten days before he could make up his mind. (How lovely it looked, by the way, just now, with that patch of mellow London sunlight lying across the folds!)

But was it all worth it?... He argued the point with himself, almost passively, stroking his brown beard meditatively; but the fact that he could argue it at all showed that the foundations of his philosophy were shaken.

Well, then ... Frank ... What about him? Where was he?

(II)

About eleven o'clock a key turned in his outer door and a very smart-looking page-boy came through, after tapping, with a telegram on a salver.

Dick was writing to Hamilton's, in Berners Street, about a question of gray mats for the spare bedroom, and he took the telegram and tore open the envelope with a preoccupied air. Then he uttered a small exclamation.

"Any answer, sir?"

"No. Yes.... Wait a second."

He took a telegraph-form with almost indecent haste, addressed it to John Kirkby, Barham, Yorks, and wrote below:

"Certainly; will expect you dinner and sleep.—Richard Guiseley."

Then, when the boy had gone, he read again the telegram he had received:

He pondered it a minute or so. Then he finished his note to Hamilton's, but it was with a distracted manner. Then for several minutes he walked up and down his rooms with his hands in his jacket-pockets, thinking very deeply. He was reflecting how remarkable it was that he should hear of Frank again just at this time, and was wondering what the next move of Providence would be.

The rest of Dick's day was very characteristic of him; and considering my other personages in this story and their occupations, I take a dramatic sort of pleasure in writing it down.

He went out to lunch with a distinguished lady of his acquaintance—whose name I forbear to give; she was not less than seventy years old, and the two sat talking scandal about all their friends till nearly four o'clock. The Talgarth affair, even, was discussed in all its possible lights, and Dick was quite open about his own part in the matter. He knew this old lady very well, and she knew him very well. She was as shrewd as possible and extremely experienced, and had helped Dick enormously in various intricacies and troubles of the past; and he, on the other hand, as a well-informed bachelor, was of almost equal service to her. She was just the least bit in the world losing touch with things (at seventy you cannot do everything), and Dick helped to keep her in touch. He lunched with her at least once a week when they were both in town.

At four he went to the Bath Club, ordered tea and toast and cigarettes, and sat out, with his hat over his eyes, on the balcony, watching the swimmers. There was a boy of sixteen who dived with surprising skill, and Dick took the greatest possible pleasure in observing him. There was also a stout man of his acquaintance whose ambition it had been for months to cross the bath by means of the swinging rings, and this person, too, afforded him hardly less pleasure, as he always had to let go at the fourth ring, if not the third, whence he plunged into the water with a sound that, curiously enough, was more resonant than sibilant.

At six, after looking through all the illustrated papers, he went out to get his coat, and was presently in the thick of a heated argument with a member of the committee on the subject of the new carpet in the front hall. It was not fit, said Dick (searching for hyperboles), for even the drawing-room of the "Cecil."

This argument made him a little later than he had intended, and, as he came up in the lift, the attendant informed him, in the passionless manner proper to such people, that the Mr. Kirkby who had been mentioned had arrived and was waiting for him in his rooms.

(III)

Shortly before midnight Dick attempted to sum up the situation. They had talked about Frank practically without ceasing, since Dick's man had set coffee on the table at nine o'clock, and both had learned new facts.

"Well, then, wire to go down to this man, Parham-Carter," said Dick, "the first thing after breakfast to-morrow. Do you know anything about the Eton Mission?"

"No. One used to have a collection for it each half, you know, in the houses."

"How do we go?"

"Oh! railway from Broad Street. I've looked it up. Victoria Park's the station."

Dick drew two or three draughts of smoke from his cigar-butt, and laid it down in a small silver tray at his elbow. (The tray was a gift from the old lady he had lunched with to-day.)

"All you've told me is extraordinarily interesting," he said. "It really was to get away this girl that he's stopped so long?"

"I expect that's what he tells himself—that's the handle, so to speak. But it's chiefly a sort of obstinacy. He said he would go on the roads, and so he's gone."

"I rather like that, you know," said Dick.

Jack snorted a little.

"Oh, it's better than saying a thing and not doing it. But why say it?"

"Oh! one must do something," said Dick. "At least, some people seem to think so. And I rather envy them, you know. I'm afraid I don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't do anything. Unless you can call this sort of thing doing something." He waved his hand vaguely round his perfectly arranged room.

Jack said nothing. He was inclined to be a little strenuous himself in some ways, and he had always been conscious of a faint annoyance with Dick's extreme leisureliness.

"I see you agree," went on Dick. "Well, we must see what can be done."

He stood up smiling and began to expand and contract his fingers luxuriously before the fire behind his back.

"If we can only get Frank away," murmured Jack. "That's enough for the present."

"And what do you propose to do with him then?"

"Oh, Lord! Anything. Go round the world if he likes. Come and stay at my place."

"And suppose he thinks that's a bit too near to ... to Lady Talgarth.".

This switched Jack back again to a line he had already run on for an hour this evening.

"Yes, that's the ghastly part of it all. He's sure not to have heard. And who the devil's to tell him? And how will he take it?"

"Do you know," said Dick, "I'm really not frightened about that? All you've told me about him makes me think he'll behave very well. Funny thing, isn't it, that you know him so much better than I do? I never dreamed there was so much in him, somehow."

"Oh, there's a lot in Frank. But one doesn't always know what it is."

"Do you think his religion's made much difference?"

"I think it's done this for him," said Jack slowly. "(I've been thinking a lot about that). I think it's fixed things, so to speak ...." He hesitated. He was not an expert in psychological analysis. Dick took him up quickly. He nodded three or four times.

"Exactly," he said. "That's it, no doubt. It's given him a center—a hub for the wheel."

"Eh?"

"It's ... it's joined everything on to one point in him. He'll be more obstinate and mad than ever before. He's got a center now.... I suppose that's what religion's for," he added meditatively.

This was Greek to Jack. He looked at Dick uncomprehendingly.

Dick turned round and began to stare into the fire, still contracting and expanding his fingers.

"It's a funny thing—this religion," he said at last. "I never could understand it."

"And what about Archie?" asked Jack with sudden abruptness. (He had no continuity of mind.)

Dick brought his meditations to a close with equal abruptness, or perhaps he would not have been so caustic as regards his first cousin.

"Oh, Archie's an ass!" he said. "We can leave him out."

Jack changed the subject again. He was feeling the situation very acutely indeed, and the result was that all its elements came tumbling out anyhow.

"I've been beastly uncomfortable," he said.

"Yes?" said Dick. "Any particular way?"

Jack shifted one leg over the other. He had not approached one element in the situation at all, as yet, with Dick, but it had been simmering in him for weeks, and had been brought to a point by Frank's letter received this morning. And now the curious intimacy into which he had been brought with Dick began to warm it out of him.

"You'll think me an ass, too, I expect," he said. "And I rather think it's true. But I can't help it."

Dick smiled at him encouragingly. (Certainly, thought Jack, this man was nicer than he had thought him.)

"Well, it's this—" he said suddenly. "But it's frightfully hard to put into words. You know what I told you about Frank's coming to me at Barham?"

"Yes."

"Well, there was something he said then that made me uncomfortable. And it's made me more and more uncomfortable ever since ..." (He paused again.) "Well, it's this. He said that he felt there was something going on that he couldn't understand—some sort of Plan, he said—in which he had to take part—a sort of scheme to be worked out, you know. I suppose he meant God," he explained feebly.

Dick looked at him questioningly.

"Oh! I can't put it into words," said Jack desperately. "Nor did he, exactly. But that was the kind of idea. A sort of Fate. He said he was quite certain of it.... And there were lots of little things that fitted in. He changed his clothes in the old vestry, you know—in the old church. It seemed like a sort of sacrifice, you know. And then I had a beastly dream that night. And then there was something my mother said. ... And now there's his letter: the one I showed you at dinner—about something that might happen to him.... Oh! I'm a first-class ass, aren't I?"

There was a considerable silence. He glanced up in an ashamed sort of way, at the other, and saw him standing quite upright and still, again with his back to the fire, looking out across the room. From outside came the hum of the thoroughfare—the rolling of wheels, the jingle of bells, the cries of human beings. He waited in a kind of shame for Dick's next words. He had not put all these feelings into coherent form before, even to himself, and they sounded now even more fantastic than he had thought them. He waited, then, for the verdict of this quiet man, whom up to now he had deemed something of a fool, who cared about nothing but billiards and what was called Art. (Jack loathed Art.)

Then the verdict came in a surprising form. But he understood it perfectly.

"Well, what about bed?" said Dick quietly.

(IV)

It was on the morning of the twenty-fourth that Mr. Parham-Carter was summoned by the neat maid-servant of the clergy-house to see two gentlemen. She presented two cards on a plated salver, inscribed with the names of Richard Guiseley and John B. Kirkby. He got up very quickly, and went downstairs two at a time. A minute later he brought them both upstairs and shut the door.

"Sit down," he said. "I'm most awfully glad you've come. I ... I've been fearfully upset by all this, and I haven't known what to do."

"Now where is he?" demanded Jack Kirkby.

The clergyman made a deprecatory face.

"I've absolutely promised not to tell," he said. "And you know—"

"But that's ridiculous. We've come on purpose to fetch him away. It simply mustn't go on. That's why I didn't write. I sent Frank's letter on to Mr. Guiseley here (he's a cousin of Frank's, by the way), and he asked me to come up to town. I got to town last night, and we've come down here at once this morning."

Mr. Parham-Carter glanced at the neat melancholy-faced, bearded man who sat opposite.

"But you know I promised," he said.

"Yes," burst in Jack; "but one doesn't keep promises one makes to madmen. And—"

"But he's not mad in the least. He's—"

"Well?"

"I was going to say that it seems to me that he's more sane than anyone else," said the young man dismally. "I know it sounds ridiculous, but—"

Dick Guiseley nodded with such emphasis that he stopped.

"I know what you mean," said Dick in his gentle drawl. "And I quite understand."

"But it's all sickening rot," burst in Jack. "He must be mad. You don't know Frank as I do—neither of you. And now there's this last business—his father's marriage, I mean; and—"

He broke off and looked across at Dick.

"Go on," said Dick; "don't mind me."

"Well, we don't know whether he's heard of it or not; but he must hear sooner or later, and then—"

"But he has heard of it," interrupted the clergyman. "I showed him the paragraph myself."

"He's heard of it! And he knows all about it!"

"Certainly. And I understood from him that he knew the girl: the Rector's daughter, isn't it?"

"Knows the girl! Why, he was engaged to her himself."

"What?"

"Yes; didn't he tell you?"

"He didn't give me the faintest hint—"

"How did he behave? What did he say?"

Mr. Parham-Carter stared a moment in silence.

"What did he say?" snapped out Jack impatiently.

"Say? He said nothing. He just told me he knew the girl, when I asked him."

"Good God!" remarked Jack. And there was silence.

Dick broke it.

"Well, it seems to me we're rather in a hole."

"But it's preposterous," burst out Jack again. "Here's poor old Frank, simply breaking his heart, and here are we perfectly ready to do anything we can—why, the chap must be in hell!"

"Look here, Mr. Parham-Carter," said Dick softly. "What about your going round to his house and seeing if he's in, and what he's likely to be doing to-day."

"He'll be at the factory till this evening."

"The factory?"

"Yes; he's working at a jam factory just now."

A sound of fury and disdain broke from Jack.

"Well," continued Dick, "(May I take a cigarette, by the way?), why shouldn't you go round and make inquiries, and find out how the land lies? Then Kirkby and I might perhaps hang about a bit and run up against him—if you'd just give us a hint, you know."

The other looked at him a moment.

"Well, perhaps I might," he said doubtfully. "But what—"

"Good Lord! But you'll be keeping your promise, won't you? After all, it's quite natural we should come down after his letter—and quite on the cards that we should run up against him.... Please to go at once, and let us wait here."

In a quarter of an hour Mr. Parham-Carter came back quickly into the room and shut the door.

"Yes; he's at the factory," he said. "Or at any rate he's not at home. And they don't expect him back till late."

"Well?"

"There's something up. The girl's gone, too. (No; she's not at the factory.) And I think there's going to be trouble."