CONFESSIONAL—MASCULINE AND FEMININE

I

"Well, I have one thing to be thankful for; there might have been another man in the background. Now we must get back to work. Labor omnia vincit, my son."

Thus Philip to himself.

Then he continued, less philosophically:—

"I suppose I had better keep right away from her. I simply couldn't stand any half-a-loaf sort of friendship. All the same, I'll keep in the offing, in case I am wanted."

Then he went back to Oxford Street, and told himself that work was the salt of life.

But the spell was broken. Labor omnia vincit proved to be exactly what Julius Mablethorpe had said it was—only half a truth; and Dumps's conclusion that Love and Work are interdependent terms was borne out to the letter. Philip worked as hard as ever—harder, in fact: never had the business in Oxford Street been more efficiently conducted—but the zest of it all was gone. Without Peggy—or prospective Peggy—the day's work, which had been a series of absorbingly interesting enterprises, was now a monotonous round. The whirr of machinery had been music; now it was merely an unpleasant noise. To overcome difficulties and grapple with emergencies had been a sheer joy; to do so now was a weariness to the flesh. Philip could not but recall, as he slogged on, Uncle Joseph's description of his beloved regiment after the episode of Vivien:—The only difference was that whereas the regiment had formerly been commanded by a Damascus blade, it was now commanded by a broomstick. Family history appeared to be walking in a circle.

But he had no blame for Peggy. She had never encouraged him, never led him on, never deliberately appropriated his services. She had been infinitely kind to him—and that was all. If this hitherto unsuspected hardness in her nature was a permanent thing; if she was determined to live her own life and be independent—well, here was a unique opportunity for a knight to prove his metal—to justify his boast that he could serve without ulterior motives or hope of reward. If his Lady had selected another knight in preference to him, matters would have been different: proper pride would have driven Philip away. But so long as Peggy walked alone and unprotected, his vocation in life was clear and unmistakable.

But it was an uphill business; until by a fortunate chance it occurred to those in authority at Coventry that Philip's abilities were being wasted upon the mechanical routine of the London Office. Straightway he was transferred to headquarters, where he was put in charge of the Design and Construction Department of the Company—at liberty to invent and experiment to his heart's content.

Here he felt better. He was relieved of the constant fear of encountering Peggy, and of the exasperating effervescence of Tim. He also felt absolved from any further obligation to cultivate social graces. So he reverted whole-heartedly to the realm of Things, determined to eliminate People from his scheme of life for good and all. Machinery, as Mr. Mablethorpe had said, might break your arms and legs, but it left your heart alone.

Still, it was a black winter. Extreme tragedy is the privilege of the very young—those of riper years do not hug tragedy to their bosoms; they know too much about it; and in this respect Philip, for all his twenty-eight years, was youthful, indeed. But no human experience is without ultimate profit. Most of us have to live some portion of our lives under circumstances which make it necessary to keep our eyes resolutely averted from the future; and once we have acquired the courage which this performance demands,—and it demands a great deal,—we have acquired the most valuable asset that experience can give us. Any one can be happy who has no doubts about the future; that is why children laugh and sing all day; but the man who can keep a stiff upper lip when there is no confidence in his heart can fairly count himself one of those who have graduated with honours in the school of adversity. During those months Philip acquired the priceless art of taking life as it came, and, abandoning the pernicious habit of drawing upon the bank of the Future,—his account was sadly overdrawn there already,—of living within the income that the Present supplied to him. True, it was a mere pittance, but he learned to live on it. Upon such foundations is character built up.

Mr. Mablethorpe summed up the whole situation in his own fashion, when Philip, in the course of a week-end visit, had unburdened his soul over the last whiskey-and-soda on Saturday night.

"Philip, my son, you are learning: your education is proceeding apace. But it hurts, and you are puzzled and indignant. But never mind! Hold on, and things will right themselves. Your sense of proportion will come to the rescue and pull you through. I know, old man, I know! I have been through it all. I wasn't always a dull British householder with an expanding waistcoat. I have been young and now I am old—or perhaps middle-aged—and I know! Middle age has its compensations. When we are young, we alternate between periods when we feel that there is nothing on earth that we cannot do and periods when we feel that there is nothing on earth that we can. Advancing years bring us a comfortable knowledge of our own limitations. Though we may not have so many moments of sheer sublimity—moments when we touch the stars—as the young man, we have fewer hours of blackness. So carry on, Philip. Steer by dead reckoning, if necessary: you will get your bearings in time. This experience will do you no harm, provided you face it between the eyes. I know nothing of your little lady friend, but she does not sound to me like a member of the third sex. On the contrary, she appears to be gratifyingly feminine. Her present attitude is probably a pose of the moment. They can't help being made as they are, you know. I fully expect to find my beloved Dumps suffering from the effects of some germ or other when she comes home from abroad next month. That reminds me. In the spring Dumps is to come out—not of gaol, but of the schoolroom, which at eighteen is very much the same thing—for ever. The festivities will include what she calls a Joy-Week in Town. You had better come and stay with us during that period, and join me in contracting dyspepsia. In fact, I have a ukase from my daughter to that effect. Will you come?"

Philip assented, listlessly. Joy-Weeks were not for him.

II

Miss Jean Leslie lived in a roomy flat high up in a tall block of buildings that overlooked the Thames at Chelsea. The larger of the two rooms was her studio. Hither fat, sweet-scented, and rebellious little boys and girls in expensive laces and ribbons were brought by mothers or nurses; and after they had been coaxed into smiles by the arts and blandishments of their hostess,—and for all her spinsterhood she excelled in that accomplishment,—Jean Leslie painted miniatures of them, for which their doting and opulent parents paid fancy prices.

"My dear, you must be very rich," observed Peggy one afternoon, inspecting three portraits of cherubic innocents, recently completed and awaiting despatch.

Jean Leslie poured out the tea complacently.

"Thank you," she said; "I scrape a living. Sit down and eat something. I have some of your favourite Valencia buns."

But Peggy seemed restless. She wandered round the little sitting-room, minutely examining photographs and pictures which she already knew by heart.

"Peggy Falconer," enquired Miss Leslie at last, "will you come and sit down in that chair, or will I take you by the shoulders and put you there?"

"Sorry, dear," said Peggy; "I have the fidgets."

She dropped rather listlessly into a chair, and then, for no apparent reason, got up and sat in another.

"Why is my best chair not good enough for you?" enquired Miss Leslie sternly. "At your age, you ought not to be manoeuvring to get your back to the window."

"It wasn't that, really," protested Peggy.

"It just was," replied Miss Leslie.

She rose from her seat, and taking the girl by the elbows, turned her toward the light. Peggy submitted, smiling.

"And now," resumed Jean Leslie, sitting down again, "what is the trouble?"

"You really are very Early-Victorian, Jean," said Peggy severely. "You yearn for sentimental confidences and heart-to-heart talks. But it's simply not done now: hearts went out with chignons. Give me a large and heavy piece of that muffin, please, and I will pander to your tastes by talking about Prince Adolphus."

Prince Adolphus was the exalted title of a purely hypothetical Fairy Personage who was one day to lead Miss Leslie to the altar. He had been invented by Miss Leslie herself, and formed a stock subject of humorous conversation with her younger friends.

Miss Leslie said no more, but passed the muffins.

"How is that boy Timothy?" she enquired. The mention of Prince Adolphus had brought Timothy into her thoughts: Timothy had always expressed profound jealousy of His Royal Highness.

Peggy laughed.

"Very careworn," she said. "Since Philip was sent to Coventry he has been in sole charge at Oxford Street. By the way, he wants us to lunch with him on Sunday. Can you manage it?"

"I don't know. I am half-expecting a visit from a fellow countrywoman of mine."

"Do I know her?"

"I doubt it. Her husband is second engineer on a liner that plies between London and Melbourne. She has a good deal of leisure on her hands, poor soul."

Peggy asked the question that a woman always asks another in this connection.

"No," replied Miss Leslie; "neither chick nor child; so when her man has been away for a month or so, and drinking tea with the wives of other second engineers in Gravesend begins to pall, she likes to come round here and crack with me. I knew her in the old days: her father was head forester to us. She would be disappointed if she found me from home. She never tells me when she is coming: she would regard such a proceeding as presumptuous. So"—Miss Leslie sighed resignedly—"I just have to stay in for her. Her husband sailed four weeks ago, and there has been a hurricane in the Indian Ocean this week; so I fancy she is about due."

"Everybody seems to bring their troubles to you, Jean," said Peggy.

Miss Leslie looked up.

"Troubles? Oh, no! I assure you, when Eliza Dishart and I drink tea together, there is no talk of troubles. We are very grand. We talk about the Court, and freights, and the possibility of Union between the Established Kirk and the Free. But trouble—oh, dear, no! Once only did we consent to be informal. That was one wild night in December two years ago. Half the chimney-pots in London were flying about in the air, and she knew that his ship was in the Channel, homeward bound. She came chapping at my door about ten o'clock, just as I was going to bed, and asked me if I would let her sit here for the night. Indeed, I was very glad of her company. I remember I managed to pick out the tune of the 'Hymn for Those at Sea' for her on my piano, and we sang it together. Very ridiculous we must have looked. We have never mentioned the occurrence since."

During this narrative Peggy sat silent and preoccupied. Finally she said:—

"It must be a great relief to be able to unload your worries on to some one else. A girl has just been unloading hers on to me."

Jean regarded her friend's averted face curiously.

"Indeed?" she replied.

"Yes. A man—"

Miss Leslie nodded.

"Quite so," she remarked drily. "She has presumed too far, and he won't come back."

Peggy looked up.

"Now you are getting romantic again," she said reprovingly. "No, it is nothing of the kind. My friend has had to be rather brutal to a man, and she feels sorry for him, and she is afraid he must think rather badly of her—that's all."

"Has she been flirting with the poor creature?" demanded Jean Leslie, in a voice of thunder.

"No. She is not that sort of girl."

"Then where does the brutality come in? There is no brutality in putting a man in his place, provided you do it in time. As soon as a woman sees that a man is preparing to fall in love with her—and she can usually tell about five minutes after she has made his acquaintance—and she doesn't feel like wanting him, she should get him at arm's length at once! Have—has your friend not been overlong in adopting that precaution?"

"She couldn't do it before," explained Peggy, rather eagerly. "They were thrown together in a very unusual way. She saw it coming, but could not do anything to prevent it. And now the man has gone away; and I'm—she is sure he thinks—"

Jean Leslie handed her guest a fresh cup of tea.

"Are you certain," she enquired, "that this friend of yours wanted to keep the young man at arm's length?"

Peggy twisted her long fingers together.

"I rather fancy, from what she said, that she cared for him a bit," she admitted.

"Then why send him away?" demanded Miss Leslie.

Peggy summoned up a troubled smile.

"Dear old Jean," she said, "you are so practical!"

"Practical? Aye!" replied Jean Leslie grimly. "If women were a little more practical and a little less finicky about what they are pleased to call their hearts, this world would be a more understandable place to live in. Listen! I had a girl friend once—as intimate a friend as yours, I dare say—and when the man she wanted asked her to marry him, she said 'No.' She meant 'Yes,' of course,—she merely wanted him to ask her another half-dozen times or so more,—but the stupid man did not understand. He went away, and married some other body whom he did not love, just to be quit of thinking about her. Men are made that way. They will do any daft thing—take to drinking or marry another woman—to drown the pain of remembrance. But this friend of mine, being a woman, could not do that. She just stayed single, and in course of time became an old maid—and a practical one, I promise you! But let us get back to the other girl. Why did she send her lad away?"

"Because there was some one else whom she could not leave."

"A relative?"

"Yes."

Jean Leslie nodded her head slowly and comprehendingly.

"I see," she said at length. "That is different. You mean that the relative would have been helpless without her?"

"Helpless and—friendless," said Peggy gravely.

"Did she tell the young man that that was the reason?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because—because I fancy he was the kind of man who, if he had known the real reason, would have persisted in staying single on her account."

"And why not? Men like that are rare."

"Well, he—she told me that he was the sort of man who had no idea of looking after himself, or making himself comfortable—the sort of man who really needed a wife. It would have been cruel not to let him go. She might have had to keep him waiting twenty years, and she couldn't bear to think of him living in discomfort and loneliness all that time; so—"

"So she gave him another reason?"

"Yes."

"What reason?"

"Oh, the reason a girl usually gives nowadays. Other interests—freedom to live one's own life—and so on. You know."

"Yes, I know," said Jean Leslie bitterly. "You need not tell me. I should like to have just five minutes' talk, in here, with the man that invented the higher education of women! However, that is a digression. Your friend's case, as I have said, is different. Evidently she is not that sort of girl. I don't know what advice to give her, poor soul. She is in deep waters. But you can tell her from me—"

"Yes?" said Peggy eagerly.

"That she is doing the wrong thing"—Peggy caught her breath—"for the right reason. You can also tell her that she is a brave lass. Perhaps it may help her a little to be told that."

"I know it will," said Peggy getting up. "Goodbye, Jean, dearest! I think I will go and tell her now."

Jean Leslie sat long over the teacups, deep in thought. Mechanically, she found and lit a cigarette, and smoked it to the end. Then she lit another. Darkness had fallen by this time, but still she sat on, gazing into the glowing fire.

At last she rose, and turned up the electric lights. Having done this, she surveyed herself intently in the mirror over the mantelpiece. For all her forty-three years she was a youthful woman. She possessed the white teeth and fair complexion that Scandinavian ancestry has bequeathed to the northeastern Highlands of Scotland. Her hair was abundant, and with a little better dressing would have looked more abundant still.

She turned from the mirror with a quaint little moue, and her eyes fell upon a framed photograph which stood upon her writing-table. It was a portrait of Peggy's mother. She picked it up, and regarded it long and thoughtfully.

"Thank God, Death cannot always close the account," she said softly.

Then, with a resigned sigh and a downward glance at her comfortable but unfashionable attire, she seated herself abruptly at the bureau and wrote a letter to her dressmaker.