The Earl of Somerville was coming out of the Agricultural Hall and just stepping into his brougham, when a few drops of rain began to fall and a distant clap of thunder was heard. But it would no doubt be over in a few minutes; only a passing shower which would dispel the clouds, clear the leaden atmosphere, and in no way interfere with the midnight picnic to which Lord Somerville was going.

The day had been oppressively hot, and although it was only the second of May, one might have easily believed it to be the month of July. It was fortunate, for several entertainments were organised in that early period of the London Season—theatricals and bazaars, private and public, were announced for every day of the first weeks in May, for the benefit of soldiers’ widows, East-End sufferers and West-End vanities. In fact, never had Londoners’ hearts beaten more passionately for the sorrows and miseries of their fellow-creatures than at the present moment; and it would have been a pity had the charitable efforts of Society leaders been chilled by cutting east winds or drenching downpours of rain. The picnic to which the Earl was going, was to be held in Richmond Park, by torchlight, between midnight and the early hours of the morning. All Society was to be there. The Duchess of Southdown was to take a prominent part in the entertainment. Object lessons in rat catching were to be the chief attraction, as fashionable women had been chosen to take the parts of the rats, and to be chased, hunted, and finally caught by smart men of Society. Great fun was expected from this novel game, and the Upper Ten looked forward to that picnic with excitement. Before this nocturnal episode, there was to be a Tournament at Islington’s Agricultural Hall. “London, by Day and by Night,” was to be represented, in all its graphic aspects, by amateur artists of the Upper Ten, who were always ready to give their services for such a good cause as the S.P.G. But then Society is invariably ready to enter the lists where combatants fight for a noble cause, and it is never seen to shirk ridicule or notoriety, but on the contrary to expose the inefficiencies of its members to the gaping eyes of an ignorant public.

“By God!” exclaimed Lord Somerville as he leaned back on the cushions of his brougham, “I never realised the brutal ferocity of London life until I saw its nocturnal Bacchanals synthesised within so many square feet.”

He passed in review, in his mind’s eye, what he had seen:—Lady Carlton in the leading part of the wildest of street rovers, cigarette in her mouth, reeling from one side of the pavement to the other, nudging this one, thrusting her cigarette under the nose of another, pulling the beard of a stolid policeman, vociferating at the cab drivers. Lord Somerville had seen a good deal of what these women were trying to impersonate, but he never remembered having blushed so deeply, nor of having been so conscious of shame, as he felt that night. But this was only the beginning of the show. The last tableau was most striking. The front of the houses, represented by painted scenery, suddenly rolled off as by enchantment, and there, in view of a breathless public, were to be seen the interiors of gambling houses, massage establishments, night clubs—you can guess the rest! This final scene was all pantomimic, and although not one word was spoken, still, the despair of the man who sees his gold raked away on the green baize, the heartrending bargains of human flesh for a few hours of oblivion, were vivid pictures which left very few shreds of illusions in the minds of a dumbfounded audience. Then came the grand finale of hurry and skurry between the police and the gamblers and night revellers of all sorts; and this was a triumph of mise-en-scÈne and animation. To make it still more realistic, the Countess of Lundy had elected to appear in a night wrap, as two constables made a raid on the so-called massage establishment. But what a night wrap! The Earl smiled as he recalled the masterpiece in which Doucet of Paris had surpassed himself, revealing with subtle suggestiveness the lissome shape of arms and legs, and full curves of the breast through a foam of white lace and chiffon. As he sat in the darkness of his brougham, he closed his eyes and saw the Countess as she had stood in front of the footlights, unblushingly courting the approval of her public; and he still heard in his ears the furious applause of London Society gathered that night in Islington Hall. What had most struck this leader of fashion was the total ignorance in which one class of well-fed, well-protected human beings lived of all miseries that unshielded thousands have to bear. He thought of the many women on whom he daily called, dined with, joked with; how many possessed that ferocious glance of the pleasure-seeker, the audacious stare of the flesh hunter; but he had never noticed in any of these fearless women of his world the slightest slackening of tyranny, nor had he ever noticed, for one moment even, the pathetic humility of the hunted-down street angler, which is after all her one redeeming feature in that erotic tragedy.

Evidently the performance had been a decided success, and would doubtless be a pecuniary triumph. The Bishop of Sunbury, seated near the Earl at the show, had largely expatiated on the good of rummaging into the puddle of London sewers, as he called it in his clerical language. It was by diving deep into the mud that one could drag out one’s erring brothers and sisters, and by bringing London face to face with its social problems one was able to grapple with the enemy—sin. At least, so thought the Bishop, and he endeavoured to persuade the Earl, which was a more difficult task than he believed. The prelate, holding Lord Somerville by one of his waistcoat buttons, had tried to make him appreciate Society’s unselfishness. “My dear Lord Somerville, we hear all about the frivolity of our privileged classes; much is said against them—too much, I fear, is written against the callousness of fashionable women; but I assure you, it is unjust. Many of these sisters of ours, who have to-night moved the public to enthusiasm, have themselves their burden to bear, and many have wept bitter tears over some lost one in Africa. Well, to quote one of them: as you know, the Countess of Lundy—who personified the matron of one of these disgraceful establishments—has last week lost her cherished brother (poor fellow, he died of wounds); but there you see her at her post of duty.”

“More shame on her,” had murmured the Earl, but the Bishop did not hear, or would not, and had walked away.

“By God!”—and the Earl brought down his fist on his knee—“these women have made me see to what depth a woman can sink. And I am going to another of these exhibitions—I am heartily sick of it all.” As he was putting down a window to tell his coachman to turn back to Selby House, the brougham suddenly stopped, and a torrent of rain came through the open window.

“By Jove, Marshall, it is pouring.”

“My lord, I cannot get along. We’ve reached Barnes, but the wind and rain is that strong, the ’orses won’t face it.”

“Turn back by all means. The picnic could not take place in such a storm.” And he closed the window, laughing heartily at Society’s disappointment.

“Well, they are defrauded of their new game, and I am spared another display of female degradation.”

Whether it was owing to the violence of the storm, or to the morbidness into which the last performance had thrown him, is difficult to tell, but Lord Somerville was in a despondent mood and on the brink of mental collapse, and as they are wont in such cases, visions of his past life kept passing to and fro before his half-closed eyes. He was going home! In any case it was better than this infernal comedy of fun and pleasure which invariably ended in gloom and disgust. His home was loneliness made noisy. He lived alone in that palatial mansion in Mayfair; but solitary his life had not been, since his father had left him heir to all sorts of properties, privileges and prejudices. His house had ever since been invaded by men and women of all descriptions. Some were morning callers, some afternoon ones; these were the dowagers and respectable members of the Upper Ten who accepted his invitations to a cup of tea, and made it a pretext to submit to his inspection some human goods for sale. The others were night visitors, and easily dealt with, for their business was direct and personal. Men found him unsatisfactory, for he objected to being made use of, was inaccessible to flattery, and steadily rebuked all attempts at familiarity. He never showed himself ungallant towards the fair sex, but on the contrary was liberal and even grateful for all he received; in fact he was thoroughly just and business-like in the market-place of life, and treated his visitors well, whether they were guests from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., or carousers from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. One thing he strongly disliked, that was any man or woman peeping at a corner of his heart. He often thought he had none, for it had never yet been in request in all his business transactions with Society. Although he had paddled in all the filthy sewers of London and foreign capitals, he somehow had a knack of brushing himself clean of all outward grime; but what he never had been able to get rid of was a nasty flavour which clung to his lips, and which no woman’s kiss could ever take away, nor any Havana cigar dispel. That mephitic taste of life was always on his lips, and to-night it was more deadly bitter than ever. Perhaps the flavour became more noxious as before his mind’s eye passed the vision of Gwendolen Towerbridge, the famous Society beauty. Not only did he thoroughly dislike the girl, but his pride was sorely wounded at having been caught by her. Yes, he was engaged—what the world called engaged—to her. How did it happen? Ah! Few men could really tell how they had been captured. A supper, the top of a coach when returning late from the races; sometimes even less than that: a glass of champagne too many, or a bodice cut too low. These certainly were not important primal causes, but they often were found to be at the fountain-head of many family disasters. The women he had known were divided into two classes: the one that had run the social race, won the prize, and who certainly looked the worse for the course, mentally sweating, and in dire need of a vigorous sponge down; and the other that started for the post, all aglow with the desire to win at any cost and whatever the means, foul or fair, for a little cheating was encouraged, and often practised, on the Turf.

How many more seasons would he have to stand there and watch the ebb and flow of the feminine tide? He had for such a long time felt on his brow the breath of the mare as she galloped past him; and he had too often heard the feverish snort of the winner as she came back, led by her master’s groom. He knew no others. Perhaps a country lass, purely brought up by Christian parents, would modestly wait on a stile until she was won; but that girl would have no repartie, and would look mystified at a problem play. No doubt, in the suburbs there existed women whose sole ambition was to help a life companion in the search of true happiness, who padded the monotonous life of some City clerk who regularly came back by the 6.15 train, bringing home Tit-Bits for the evening recreation, and Home Chat for household requirements. Bah! that woman never could analyse the psychology of cookery, and besides, she was not a lady. He was an epicure in the culinary art, and thirsted for something he had not yet met with: a lady who would be a perfect woman. Then came the war; and he longed to escape the routine of London life and Gwendolen’s incessant requests for presents: he started for South Africa, hoping to lose there the nasty taste that was forever on his lips. Gwendolen soon followed, escorted by some of her friends and their numerous trunks. New frocks were shaken out, bonnets were twisted back into their original shapes, and an improvised season was inaugurated in one of the South African towns, to the utter disgust of her fiancÉ, who, having been wounded, had the misfortune of seeing her parade daily round his bed. The sights he witnessed sickened him unto death; the amalgam of frivolity and callousness seemed to him more irrelevant in that new country, and the physical excitement and interest of danger having worn itself off, he very soon realised that the old game of war must necessarily be played out in a civilisation that boasts of commercial supremacy, and whose scientific discoveries are daily endeavouring to bring nations nearer to one another. He returned to England on sick leave, more embittered than heretofore with Gwendolen, London, and himself. He frequently sat at twilight in his large library at Selby House, wondering whether this was all a fellow could do with his life, and whether the other side was not more entertaining than this rotten old stage? To-night, as he drove in his carriage, listening to the crashing of the thunder, every event of his life came back to him in strong relief and vivid colours, and the prospect of joining in holy matrimony with Gwendolen seemed more than he could bear. Perhaps the taste of death that he so nearly met with in Africa came to him at this hour of night, when all the elements were at war against man; and he came to the conclusion that he was not obliged to submit to life’s platitudes any longer. A gentleman should always quit a card table when he has been cheated. Life had cheated him, and he resolved to leave life. The other side of Acheron could not be a worse fraud than this; besides, he knew all about this world, there was nothing that could astonish him any more, nor keep his attention riveted for more than five minutes. Why not try the experiment? If it were complete oblivion, so much the better, he did not object to a long sleep out of which he would never wake. If it were, as so many declared, eternal punishment—well, the retribution could never, in all its black horror, be any worse than the gnawing heartache of the life in which we were chained.

The brougham rolled on, and very soon Lord Somerville knew he was in the heart of London. The streets were flooded, passengers were rushing along, in vain trying to get into omnibuses or hansoms; shouting, whistling, rent the damp atmosphere, competing with claps of thunder which at times alarmed the inhabitants, especially when the electric lights suddenly went out and Londoners were plunged for a few minutes into utter darkness. Lord Somerville could not remember having ever witnessed such a thunderstorm in town; still, he welcomed its magnitude with joy, for it was the proper accompaniment to his frenzy against an inadequate state of Society. The wheels turned the corner of Piccadilly and Park Lane, not without risk, for the obscurity was dangerous, and in a few seconds the carriage halted before his stately mansion; he opened the door, jumped out, and went into the house without turning round to give orders for next day to his coachman. This seemed peculiar to the servant, as he knew my lord to be very methodical in all that concerned his household.

The Earl entered his library, and after lighting a few electric lights, which were only now throwing a dim and lurid light into the large room, he sank down into a huge armchair. It was very quiet in that room; double doors and double windows shut out the noise of the splashing rain against the window-panes, the thunder even was less violent in this well-padded room, and the lightning could not pierce through the shutters and the thick brocaded draperies. After the fracas of the streets, it seemed to him as if he had already entered the Valley of Death as he sat in this silent place. The picture of his late father was hanging on the panel in front of him, and he looked at it for a considerable time. What could that face tell him at this critical hour, when for long years of his time he had never found one convincing argument with which to enlighten his son on all the grave problems of existence? It was always the same answers to the same inquiries: “My boy, others have gone through life besides yourself, and found it no worse than I have. Don’t think too hard, leave that to those who have to use their brains for a livelihood. You have a bed ready made to lie on, do not complain that it is too soft; but do not forget that you are a gentleman, and that when you have passed a few turnpikes of life—let us say, Eton, Oxford, the War or the Foreign Office—you can do whatever you like, for you are then innocuous; and no one, not even the most Argus-eyed dowager, will consider you dangerous, however wild your mode of life may be. My advice to you is, never fall into the clutches of any woman; to my mind the sex is divided into two dangerous species: the one that kill you before they bore you, the other that bore you before they kill you. But in either way you are a doomed man; though for myself I should prefer being killed to being bored—and as you know, I chose the former.”

Was this all that the aristocratic shape framed in front of him could tell him? It was not enough. He was too robust to be killed by the London Hetaires, and too fastidious to allow himself to be bored by the other species. He listened, but no sound came from the outside; the walls were too thick, the draperies too rich to allow any fracas to disturb the owner of that dwelling. He was hermetically shut out from every outward commotion, and might have lived in a vault. Was not that an image of his privileged life? All things had been so ordained and smoothed down in his easy existence that he could see nothing beyond his own direct surroundings, and could never penetrate into another heart, nor allow anyone to hear the throbs of his own heart. That was called the privilege of the well-bred, and it was all that generations before him had done for his welfare: a double-windowed house and a well-padded life, out of which he never could step. There were barriers at every corner of the road in which he had walked. Harrow, Oxford, the Guards, Downing Street, watched him, reminding him, by the way, that he could prance, kick, roll, do anything he had a mind to, within his boundary; and he heard that haunting whisper in his wearied ears that, however low he sank—he was a gentleman. But outside the boundary was a world called life, with a real, throbbing, howling humanity, a pushing and elbowing crowd with which he evidently had nothing to do; out there he had no business, for over there people answered for themselves, were responsible for their own actions, and he would no doubt fare badly were he to push and elbow for his own sake, independently of all the privileged institutions that propped him up through life. He suddenly remembered that next day there was a Levee, and that he was to be there. No, he would not go, he would escape for once, and for good and all, these recurring functions of social London which seemed to narrow the horizon of life. The best was to make a suitable exit and bring down the curtain on a Mayfair episode; it would puzzle, interest, amuse half of London for the inside of a week, and it would be over. He got up and went to a large bureau that stood in the middle of the room, and began to open drawer after drawer; he brought out some business papers, laid them carefully on the bureau, pulled out bundles of letters, read a few, burnt a great many. Amongst all the correspondence he came across there was not one note from Gwendolen; she did not write, she sent wires about anything, for an appointment at Ranelagh, a bracelet she had seen at Hancock’s, or some more trifling matter; and even then, she hardly sat down to pen these cursory remarks; she sent her wires when at breakfast, close to the dish of fried bacon, at lunch, at tea, on the corner of the silver tray. He opened another drawer and took out a revolver; it was loaded, and he examined it minutely. How long had it been in that drawer and when had he loaded it? He could not recall when last he had seen the arm. He slowly lifted it to his temple and pulled the trigger, as a violent clap of thunder shook the house to its very foundation, causing the electric lights to go out. Lord Somerville fell heavily on the Turkish carpet.