  Which has to do with the Awakening of Youth The boy and girl sprang up apace; their brains developing added perception and quickness under Lovegood’s tuition—wits are whetted by congenial wit. The stripling’s voice broke, lost its treble, and for awhile was awkward to the ear, as his lank limbs to the eye; and a-top of the change the down came upon his lip, adding the last touch of whimsy to youth’s ungainliness. Betty came through the awkward age less awkwardly, showing a lithe gracefulness in her very lankness of limb. The girl it was who began to show shy reservations. The lad was becoming restless with—he knew not what. Coming adolescence was setting his youngster blood a-jigging. Boyhood was gone—youth not fully come. Romance was singing in his ears—adventure thrumming impatient fingers on the windows of his fancy—hot instincts leading his feet—wilfulness challenging his daring. In all this dangerous period of his cubhood, the girl’s sweet companionship steadied the lad—kept him from many tomfool waywardnesses. Her fragrant hair, loose-flowing to the winds, brushed his cheek and veiled him in from much unwholesomeness. The girl’s slender gloved hands held the key to his nobility—opened to him only the view of the best that was in him; whilst his protection of her, and his frank confidence in her, filled the lad’s body with early manhood that had otherwise been filled with indecision and with many and uncouth vulgarities. And just as, his voice breaking, a hoarser accent came into his speech, so, too, a more robust accent came into his thinking. He began to question, first of all here and there, then from roof to base, what he had accepted with a boy’s frank acceptance. The Why and the Whence and the Whither had begun to trouble. He and Betty had taken to going to church of a Sunday evening. At last, puzzled by many things, the lad went boldly and called on the vicar. Encouraged by the well-bred courtesy of the gentle-hearted man and by the noble simplicity and selflessness of his life, and full of eager questionings, he had gone again The inspired word! Inspiration that could allow discrepancies in the simplest details of the most important things—one gospel giving the Annunciation to Mary, another to Joseph—one giving the Anointing by a woman to the beginning of the ministry, the others to the eve of the Crucifixion—all differing in the statement of the great and solemn act of the very Crucifixion—one stating that the Christ bore His cross, the others that Simon bore it—disagreeing even as to the bitter drink that was given and when given—disagreeing as to the hour of the great tragedy—every one of them all contradicting each other as to the sayings on the cross—the statement by Christ in one gospel to the repentant thief that they would that day be in Paradise denying that the Christ really descended into Hell and rose again the third day—one gospel contradicting the others as to the acts and sayings of these thieves—all at variance even about the last dying words—all writing different inscriptions over the suffering head—one stating that the body was embalmed, another denying its embalming. There were larger discrepancies: How could the devil tempt God? And even so, what virtue were in so easy a triumph? Why had God, out of His creation of all things, created the devil? How could He punish for sin who had created sin? Why did God create a world so faultily that He Himself condemned it? Why punish His own bungling upon His miserable creatures? How could He set up as eternal reward the prospect of the good being with Him in the heavens and listening to the agony of the victims of His poor maimed handiwork in hell? What had man done more loathsome than to create a Hell? Was this gruesome heaven of gloating over the agony of the damned to be our Immortality? If these things had been written to-day instead of coming out of the dim glamour of the centuries, would they be believed? The vicar was genuinely shocked. He stammered of Conduct—he did not guess the extent of the boy’s reading. The good man had always looked upon any who questioned Christianity as atheists and agnostics—upon atheists and agnostics as criminal and brutish persons. He had never realized that some of the noblest, greatest, purest and sweetest lives had been lived by these—nor that some of the foulest, most damnable, and criminal lives had been spent in vileness by princes of the Church. The boy bent his brows on the old gentleman’s embarrassment.... The beauty of the service, its music and its splendid symbolism, appealed for awhile to his artistic senses; but the questionings soon began again to unsettle the lad. For he found that he could not get to the root of things in this exquisite place even as far as with his old vicar. He had imagined the Roman Church as united—as agreed. He found it racked from one end to the other by the warring pronouncements of the Fathers. The cardinal himself it was who blew up the bridge that spanned the road to Rome. It was the day of a great mass at the Oratory. It had been noised abroad that the church was to be draped red with handsome draperies—that the cardinal was to speak, robed in his crimson vestments. All the leaders of society that held to the Papist tradition were to be there—and, as events turned out, there was, besides, a large gathering of Society that owned no allegiance to Rome, yet enjoyed a handsome pageant. The boy and girl went—anxious to hear what message the illustrious prince of the Church had for their hearts—what guidance for their lives—what he had to say upon the great intellectual advancement of the age—what upon the great questions that loomed before the puzzled brain of man. And he, the appointed spokesman of the infallible church, smooth-faced, aristocratic, magnificent, arose from his seat at his ordered place in the elaborate service, and his voice broke the musical refrain of the splendid ceremonial with disturbing accent but to reiterate the narrow message of his Church that only through absolute subjection of mind and body to the forms and traditions and quaint superstitions of that Church could man be saved from everlasting damnation; and, with triumphant note, he revelled in the fact, and could get to little else, that the English Church, which had persecuted Rome for generations, had now begun to place her images upon its altars and in the emptied niches of its portals—had indeed filched the rubric and the habits and the symbols of his Church! And, with exultant voice, swelling to arrogance, he, with the same lips that called his Church catholic, whilst in the very act of narrowing it to a parochial destiny, twitted with parochialism the land whose large religious toleration allowed his Church to live unmolested where that same Church had made a shamble and a stews when it was in power, debauching its once opportunity by fire and torture, showing in such strange hellish wise its large Catholicism to such as had differed from its narrow creed. He spoke passionately of past persecution—he omitted to say who had taught the lesson. But of the Why and the How and the Whence and the Whither—nothing. All the flattest Agnosticism.... That evening the striplings, together with Netherby Gomme, It was the large, daring, and frank mind of this man that roused the lad from the lethargic irresponsibility of his boyhood to his duty towards life. Just as the Romanist communion by its ideal of the salvation of the individual through and by the community has weakened the force of the individual, so the innate difference of the Protestant ideal, the salvation of the community by and through the individual, strengthened the lad’s nerve and made his will resolute. He flung off his reliance on others and faced his life and his destiny. He roused from the drowsy contemplation and the fantastic dreads of otherworldliness—ridiculous heavens and more ridiculous hells—and turned to life. For awhile he was not troubled. The genial optimism of youth came back to him. It was soon after this stage of awakening intellectual unrest that the lad found himself embarked on the larger tide of the literary and intellectual unrest of the Continent. Mixing more and more amongst the Bohemians, he found himself amongst frank and fearless thinking; he was roused by the inquisitive genius of France—heard the first words of the daring speculations of German thought. He realized that religious teaching had passed from the Church to the newspaper—to literature—and to the arts; that religion, from being a fierce war of priests, was become a searching into the everyday life of the community, was become a fierce desire to better that life. The angels were flown, theology gone to dust, and man was seeking after the godhead that is in him—he who had kissed the feet of idols, cringing for salvation in whimsical heavens, now stood up and looked at the meaning of manhood. Thou Shalt Not was giving place to Thou Shalt. Of the Coming of Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre upon the Town Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre had caught the ear of the town with the brazen strains of the New Literary Movement. Fresh from France, he had written a novel, Englished in the French idiom, and founded on the closely detailed, elaborately seen, unselected picture of life as it straggles by, that is called Realism—that movement which, combined with splendid courage, had lifted Zola to the front rank in contemporary French literature. Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre had all the faults without the genius of the Frenchman; and, by consequence of these things, Mr. Myre had tasted the sweets of his first success of scandal. People had said that his book was indecent—and read it. Mr. Myre had then struck one of his master-strokes, and straightway set himself up as lawgiver and head and front of Taste by criticising everybody and everything. And with a quick receptive mind for the catchpennies, the slang, and the cant of the studios and of the students’ quarter, of the stage and of the literary schools, he had picked up the details of every movement in the restless air of Paris; and he now proceeded to exploit them in London. That one thing flatly contradicted another gave him no embarrassment—he was there to harass and embarrass. Conventional critics went down before the cocksureness which was the flashy weapon of this, to them, most original man. The erratic amongst the journalists, they that live on the jigging foot, quick to see the vogue of this catchpenny-monger, were soon hard at it, too, seeking to gather in whilst the harvest was for the gathering, rushing to nature, or what their cockney senses told them was nature, so that when they conjured up the vision of the ploughman in the fields one perceived the sourness of his sweat rather than the fragrance of the earth or the mystic significance that is in the ploughing. But Myre founded his eminence on no single dunghill. He set his building on a more certain base—he thrust down his Given boon companions, Myre was wont to make no secret of the fact, nay, rather a pretty confidence of it, that he was exploiting a great passion—“taking up a great woman’s soul by the roots to examine it,” was the florid paraphrase. Art, said he, demanded every sacrifice. That his extravagances were largely paid out of her bread-winnings he did not parade—as smacking perhaps of the too sordid. Realism has its limits. All nature is not to be crammed into an ink-pot nor three hundred pages. Marguerite OlmÉ had come to play in England for three weeks. The French critics had set down her genius as the greatest of the age. In England, few people understanding her, this verdict had been enthusiastically repeated; and after a triumphant procession through the United States, where she was understood still less, it was written down that she was even greater than that. And indeed she was little less. Meanwhile, Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre increased in violence and in volume, magnified by the reflected light; and his conceit grew ecstatic. He made his enemies. They called him Quogge Myre, for short, or The Brixton Celt. There was some spite in it. This at first fretted him somewhat. He had always been distressed that his name was only of one syllable—Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Balzac were of two. Still, there was Poe! He tried his own name on his tongue. He wondered if it could ever sound like the name of a man of genius. Then there came to him a sudden glow—it was more original. He felt that the time was come to gather in disciples; he chose a foreign restaurant, in the French quarter where, he darkly hinted in the press, and to all and sundry, that the wits might be seen of an evening, glittering resplendent. It was at this time that he gave forth the now famous essay in which he showed once for all how the home life checked the range of genius; in which he proved how the wifely milieu stunted the view and narrowed the eagle flight of the original intellect; that same essay in which he showed that a woman should be well content to be simply beautiful, relying on man’s chivalry for her sufficient empire; in which he also proved beyond shadow of doubt that it was due to the meeting of the wits in the tavern and the resulting whetting of the national genius that the French achievement so far transcended the English—indeed, he pointed the moral in a florid picture of Shakespeare glittering at The tavern club was like to be born again. Netherby Gomme, seeing the inquisitive mind of the lad Noll beginning to run upon the literary warfare of the day, set Noll’s heart jigging one evening by calling for him, together with the airy Fluffy Reubens, and taking him out into the London night to spend an hour or two at the great man’s tavern. Wherein a Strutting Cock comes near to Losing a Feather upon his Own Dunghill At a table, with his disciples, sat Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre—a slack-headed, loose-lipped, colourless-haired, untidy-minded fellow enough to outward seeming. As Noll listened to his affected voice and caught the tenor of his mind he understood why the man was known amongst the robuster wits as The Brixton Celt. Sitting next to him, and admiring himself in a mirror opposite, was his friend the poet Aubrey, who, it must be acknowledged, paid but little attention to anyone but himself. As Noll entered the place Myre’s loud drawl was giving utterance to the innuendo that the love of woman was only worth the seeking in order “to take her soul up by the roots and examine it”; on which Aubrey had raised a laugh somewhat at his own cost and yet with a certain vague undefined loss to the Quogge Myre, by saying: “I personally am content to take up my own soul by the roots and examine it.” When the ironic applause and laughter were run down, Aubrey, still gazing at himself, said: “That laugh is sheer affected hypocrisy. I am of the only importance—that is the only real heart’s creed of man.” And he added lovingly: “I thank God that I am beautiful—very beautiful.” It was a historic night.... Quogge Myre had been irked of late by the perpetual reference to him as the English Zola. He felt that he ought to be original. He saw that he must again strike a new and original note. Above all he felt that Realism was running dry—the public were grown used to it; nay, worse, the public had accepted it at his estimate. On this evening he had planned the surprise of a great Renunciation. One or two sonnets had been given by poets, as was the custom in Parisian students’ taverns, before Myre himself arose to read an essay he had just written, and thus give to the privileged few the advantage of the earliest communion with his latest thought. He astounded them that were gathered about him by attacking All these little men stared aghast—they had only just acquired the style and method and some little vogue upon their capture of the tricks of this very Realism. And for a few moments they were dumbfounded. Had they not “written each other up” on their mastery of this very craft! Even they, like Myre, had discovered that the superficial tricks were easily captured. But, as Myre read, they began to glow, as though in some measure sharing in his greatness—he put that hint to them with subtlety. It was that famous essay in which he showed, once for all, with aggressive air as though the prophet of the gospel, that Realism was a Failure—that all Art must be symbolical. Though he still maintained that the expression of it must be of the hammered and perfect metal called Style, he had overstated the case for style—but he did not withdraw everything. He had said that Style was the All in All—that the matter did not matter. He renounced that position. Style was important, but it was the symbols that were significant in art.... Then this man, who baldly stated how he had thrust himself upon Zola, proceeded to tell how he had tricked Zola into giving him the advertisement of his praise, how he had lied to him, how he now despised him, because Zola, being grown rich, wrote in a room that was a bourgeois ideal of handsome furnishing. He employed all his sarcasm on making ridiculous what only the genial hospitality of the kindly Frenchman could have thrown open to his treacherous censure; and he ended with a scalding attack on the coarseness of Zola’s work and on the lack of its artistry. For himself—he had discovered a greater master, whose name was Ibsen. “In so far as my work has unwittingly been symbolical,” said he, with the majesty of a great renunciation, “in so far has it been good. For the rest, it has been written in vain....” To achieve the masterpiece, he was content to go to the Greeks—to Æschylus, to Euripides, to Aristophanes, to Sophocles in drama, to Homer in the Epic, to Phidias in art—the Greeks, he averred, recorded only the Inevitable Thing. As the great man sat down amidst a thunder of applause, Noll leaned over to a pimpled disciple: “Tell me,” said he—“what has this man done?” The youth gazed at him: “Oh, it isn’t that he has done anything yet,” he said. “That will come. He has the right attitude.” The pimply young man blew out cigarette smoke. Netherby Gomme rose to his feet: “I should like to ask our Master,” said he, without trace of smile on his cadaverous face, “and I ask it because I have only read Sophocles in the translation—to which of the plays of Sophocles did he allude when he burst into his splendid eulogy Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre licked his puffy red lips uncomfortably, but said nothing. He smiled cynically to cover his hesitation—the fact was that he had never read a play by Sophocles, even in translation. There was a long tense pause. “Sophocles had the right attitude in all his plays,” he said at last—“what is true of one is true of all.” Netherby sat down, and laughed loud and long: “Spoken like a game-cock!” cried he—“if a game-cock could sing——” Noll touched his sleeve confidentially: “But, Netherby,” said he—“Sophocles did not write Prometheus Bound. It was——” “Hush, Noll—the ass hasn’t the smallest idea of that——” Myre was uneasy, feeling he had not been wholly secure, when all eyes turned upon the entry into the cafÉ of a very beautiful young woman. She walked to a small table and sat down. Myre at once became hysterical; and proceeded to embarrass the girl with his vulgar eyes. She ordered some coffee of the waiter, and, fretted by the admiring stare of these gentlemen, soon rose from the table, shortened her skirts above her dainty ankles, and went out into the night. Myre, offended by the girl’s ignoring, said: “The amateur is sapping the arts of all strength. The county gentry are destroying painting and the drama. That woman is an exquisite stick on the stage—she is connected with a peer.” “Not by marriage, I suppose,” said a handsome youth flippantly; and rising from his chair with Byronic gloom, he put on his silk hat—“I must follow her; she is very beautiful.” He followed her. When he was gone, the pimply young man leaned over to Noll, and said with hushed admiration: “Bartholomew Doome—the wickedest man in London.” “Indeed,” said Noll—“what does he do?” “He has never been known to give way to a decent emotion,” said the youth.... The next day, Mr. Myre bought a translation of the plays of Sophocles, and armed himself against his disciples. A cold sweat broke out upon him as he paid the price and realized how near he had come to losing his wits on his own particular dunghill. Wherein Master Devlin throws a Fierce Sidelight upon the Genius of Poetry Literature might be born and die, and pass wholly away; but the wordy warfare of the distracted parties to each quarrel roused no such serious questioning in the most perfervid contestant’s thinking parts as was now troubling our Noll—the down was on his lip and chin and cheek; and the getting rid of it had mastered his ingenuity. He was balked. The flame of a match had sent the fluff to the ceiling in Æthereal dust more than once; but now the increasing stiffness threatened bristles. He must be driven to the razor or to untidiness—and the eyes of young women forbad the untidiness. In his difficulty he put the point to Netherby Gomme; and Gomme, grimly suppressing the smile that lurked behind his serious eyes, led off the lad forthwith to his barber. It was thus that Noll first came to frequent the place where the wits lost whatsoever strength of hair lay in them. Mike Devlin was lord and leading man of action in the rooms—and it is doubtful if he were not the leading wit—if we may judge by the relics of it that still do duty amongst the youth of the parish. He had two white-coated assistants in his clipping; they made the laughter to his airinesses also, when chins were slow in the wagging, coyly and splutteringly as they dared. A cling of the shop’s bell. The little cockney Irishman roused at sight of Netherby Gomme, and, at the word, he soon had Noll swathed in cloths and bibs and towels, and was lathering the soapsud on his face. Devlin opened a long friendship with the youth by subtlety, shaving deftly the while over somewhat smooth ground: “You’re in literatoor, sorr, I’ll be thinkin’?” said he. “H’m, h’m!” grunted the youth; and added dryly: “More or less.” He winked to Gomme, feeling the joke was with him—and the alert Devlin, catching the wink, saw that the boy was at ease. The first shave, Devlin was wont to say, was as distressing to one’s egoism as the marriage service to a maiden’s modesty. “It won’t be po’try, will it, sorr?” asked Devlin. Noll shook his head: Mike Devlin smiled: “I’m thinkin’ it’s not aisy to put poets under Mike Devlin’s hands without me knowing the feel of them. I can just smell them. Be Joshua, I shaved one every mornin’, when it wasn’t afternoon, for eight months on this very floor, and I got used to the feel of them.... Ah, that was a great poet, mind ye. Eh? I’ve clean forgot his name, but he was a great hairy man wid a head on him like a dam besom—ye could have swept Fleet Street wid him.... When that man walked down the street the whole town looked at him and said That’s a blarsted poet!... Begod, yes, that was a great poet. When he’d got the frenzy on him he hadn’t the time to clean himself. Eh, sir? What did he write? Why, just po’try. His shoulders was stooped with the application of him—begod, the very trousers on him betrayed the genius in him; they had knees on them like a horse that’s endin’ his days in the cab traffic. Oh, yes; ye could see the great man just fretted the pantaloons off himself wid worryin’ at the rhymes.... Po’try’s an oneasy means of livelihood, I’m thinkin’.... And, in fact, I had a slap at it meself.... I tried to pull off one of these pastorals, they call it, wid the cattle goin’ down to the drink and the great dirty blacksmith leanin’ on the anvil, takin’ a spit at his hands and makin’ the sparks fly, and the blacksmith’s daughter wid the beauty of old Trotter’s yellow-haired barmaid on her; but the divil a rhyme could I get to the blacksmith’s daughter but “fills her leathern sides wid water.” Well, in comes the poet one morning and asks me if I’ve made me will; but I told him my paleness was due to the po’try, and that it made life too oneasy and I was going to shake it off me heels. What’s the matter wid po’try? says he. Wid that I discovered me tribulation to him, and he mighty nearly got the whooping-cough—he told me I had better put aside the seductions of the Muse, I was sufferin’ from the echoes of old refrains. But it didn’t cost me a night’s sleep, thank God. Ye know, after all, sir, po’try’s like the hair-cuttin’—ye’ve got to be born to it, or ye’ve got to lave it severely alone.... Eh, sir? Ah, yes—be the gospels, he was a great poet—ye could smell the midnight oil on him. He just lived at the desk, gettin’ the rhymes into collusion. Genius? he was full of it. Free love was nothin’ to that man. Aisy, sorr, or I’ll be cuttin’ the nose off of ye! But as he said to me himself, there’s one law for genius, Devlin, and there’s another law for the middle classes; and it’s bad morals of the middle classes to try and usurp the weaknesses of their betters, says he. By the book, yes; he had the hall-mark of genius on him—he had the divil’s own contempt for the middle classes. They were like orange-peel under the great heels of the man.... Po’try’s a pagan callin’, says he, when all’s said—and if ye’re goin’ to make po’try ye’ve got to live it like a pagan, says he. And, by jewry, he did. Pagan he was—as Pompey’s pillar. Eh, sorr? Can’t I remimber anny-thing he wrote?... God knows. They tell me it was mostly He stood off, and, head on one side, looked at the youth’s clean-shaven face with the air of an artist. “Mind ye, sorr,” said he, damping the soap off his face—“I’m not blamin’ the poets. That’s a queer onnatural life they lead. Mr. Myre, that was in here just now, was complainin’ to another genius of the damn hard life of it he had, what wid the sinfulness of his natural nature, and his emotions, and the doing of things that wasn’t expected of him, and all the celebrated women after him—but now, there’s a man that stands to his principles like a hairy Afghan to his fowlin’-piece—he was sayin’ that an artist must have lived—and it is a part of his sacrifice to himself that he should debauch himself for the good of posterity, otherwise he only guesses at life like the maiden aunt lookin’ furtively over the window blind at the drama of the street. Begod, it’s the keen satirical tongue he has, Mr. Myre, when he’s pullin’ the leg of the maiden aunt.... And the self-respect av him!”... Which discovers a Great Man in the Hour of his Triumph Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre stood at the windows of the best rooms of the best hotel in London—he enjoyed the fine view, the great reach of the Thames—the towers and ancient majestic piles and many-windowed warehouses turning to fairy palaces in the lilac haze of the coming twilight. The great actress’s infatuation for him brought him his every desire in these days; and he felt that such was as it should be—it was pathetic to think of the number of common-minded persons who must have lived in that room and seen no beauty in the world. Nay, it was a crime. He sighed that Nature was so wasteful. He stood, his hands behind his back, his colourless hair with its untidy forelock over his paste-coloured forehead, a smirk under his drooping, ill-kempt moustache. His sloping shoulders shrugged content: “God!” said he—“this is my day.” Indeed, Mr. Myre was thrilled at a far more emotional prospect than any view of a Thames reach. For days the newspapers had been quarrelling over him—his name was everywhere. Worry, worry, worry! and in the midst of the din was always Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre. He had struck a master-stroke.... Quogge Myre had become weary of his scandal. The novelty of his relation to Marguerite OlmÉ was flown. He was not even barred. People treated it as carelessly as though it had been marriage. Nay, worse; society was grown tired of it—he was not asked out so much as he had been. He could see nothing more to be got out of the romantic association; he had had a splendid flash of life with her, the glamour that still remained was but the after-glow—— And the stage notoriously aged women! He was no weakling to dawdle on in the twilight of a romance, kicking his feet aimlessly through the fallen leaves of a withered passion. He saw that he must do something original—or with an original air. He had given to the world a recklessly daring account of his most intimate relations with the great actress, thinly disguised as a romance—indeed, he had forestalled all misunderstanding, had drawn aside all shred of disguise, by inspiring preliminary paragraphs in the press. The result went beyond his wildest hopes; raised him beyond his fondest conceit. The clamour was prodigious; indeed, it did the English press credit, for it displayed a lurking sense of decency, a hint of manhood in the shabbiest. The abuse brought this man to the front again; and the curiosity of smart society was again assured towards him. And it would do more—it would make a dramatic end to his life with the great actress. He had revealed all the secrets of her dressing-table, the little makeshifts of figure, the use of additions to Nature’s artistic handicraft. It had only been fair to himself; for she had begun to be tedious—a bore—humiliation. To sit opposite to the same woman at table day after day! It cramped his imagination. There were two or three other women—it might make a difference if he were not tied to this one—he had only made one mistake—he ought to have cleared off the whole of his debts before he published the book—but—— His man came in. Yes, he would dress for dinner. But he had accepted two invitations for that night—to which of these handsome women must he send the telegram of his inability to go? He decided to dine with the countess. Quogge Myre adored the “intelligent” peerage. In her rooms in Paris sat Marguerite OlmÉ, reading a book. She had been reading it all day—and the red blood burned her face with shame. She missed no word of the brutal details of her most intimate life with this man—there was little reservation, even by innuendo. The elbow-nudgings and the leer at her love-ecstasies—nay, at the very manner in which she had hidden the only small defect of her figure; the display of all her bodily habits; the jibes at the little reliances on the arts of her dressing-table; the sneers at the coming little threat of wrinkles, at the grey threads of hairs amongst the glorious nut-brown masses—tshah! She had been a mad fool to love a man twelve years her junior! Poor fool, she blamed herself! It was one of those books that are written by such men as batten, parasitic, louse-like, upon a woman. And this one not only battened upon her means, but upon her reputation, her honour, her affections, her very soul. Merely to be rich is to live in the most vulgar state of poverty. There have been colossal sneaks in the world of letters, that To betray the woman whose sole folly has been that she loved you! Even though but for a gadding while. A woman can give a man nothing greater than the love of her life—that is the weightiest dower. It is beyond a price. The sentences that can only be whispered—the sentences that cannot be whispered—the tendernesses—the surrenders—the endearments—the mystic emotions that reach in the love of man and woman the nearest to some ecstatic conception of the mystery of life, that are the worthy beginnings of a new life, these things can only be lived; they cannot be spoken of even by the most reverent tongue; but when their exposure is made the foul weapon with which to wound the woman for her only fault in having surrendered herself to an egregious cad, that cad is only fit to be spat upon. The betrayal of the Christ was to this a healthy sin. Such a dirty rogue should be blotted out. The wit of such a man must stink—if he have wit. The art of such a man must be a foul sore. The influence of such a man must be a filthy disease; his companionship a loathsome suppuration; his life a paltry ignominy. Marguerite OlmÉ brushed back her hair from her brow with the wondrous hands that were as eloquent as her voice. She was stunned with shame. She uttered a little moan, when she should have answered a light knock at the door. Her maid entered: “Madame—it is time to dress for the play—it is the first night of——” “Hush, Ernestine!” she said hoarsely; and the girl was startled at the voice. “Madame is ill?” The girl ran to her as to a child. “No——” The wounded woman stroked the girl’s shoulders, and signed to a desk; the maid brought her pen and ink and paper. After she had written awhile, the great actress handed the maid a book and a letter: “Ernestine—this is like a play, isn’t it?” She smiled: “Burn that,” she said—“and post this.” Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre was released from his bondage quite easily. He was cast off. He read the letter, shrugged his shoulders, flung the scented notepaper into the fire. He had promised to read her letter to It was simple enough—quite devoid of style:
Mr. Myre smiled: “The French are so melodramatic!” he said. Wherein we are obliged to Spend a Brief Moment in the Company of the Titled Aristocracy Anthony Baddlesmere stood brooding in the middle of his room, his hands behind his back, and his wits hammering in his skull. “Tsh—sh!” He wondered how it was that he had not seen this tangle until now. The boy was gone; into his place had stepped a youth—Noll was on the verge of manhood. And the lad had the firm mouth and the strong jaw of the Baddlesmeres. It had all flashed upon him suddenly; thus: As he came up the steps to enter the house, the door had opened and there had stepped thereout a very beautiful girl of near sixteen, her skirts not quite as long as they might have been; and beside the girl had walked a handsome youth—his son Noll. Ought this thing to be? This girl’s father, Modeyne, was a gentleman—as a matter of fact of as good blood as himself, if they came to the arbitrament of the Heralds’ Office. But he was utterly unclassed! The fellow was become an Outsider. He was only to be seen in the city, and—pah! with such a rank gang of vulgarians! men whose loud clothes were always aggressively well-brushed, whose hats, worn rakishly to a side, were aggressively shiny, whose glittering boots were always aggressively new and suggestive of the aggressively expensive, whose aitches were the only articles of subtlety and rarity that they paraded, whose manners were overbearing and authoritative. God! Modeyne, even when drunk, shone, for all his falling away, the only man of breeding in the company. Still—he was the falling star. The girl had not a chance. So Anthony argued—with what is called the world’s wisdom—and proceeded to take the most elaborate precautions that she should not have a chance. Noll’s calf-love for the girl must be killed. By Venus! she was uncommon handsome—there was that excuse for the lad. At any rate, there was no time to be lost. This boy Noll was come within two lives of the Cavil property—there was only one between his mother and the peerage. He thought it would be a mistake to say anything to Caroline about it. She might go into opposition. He would make the journey to Cavil and see the old lord at once. It would mean the eating of much pride; it would choke him; but—— Stay. An alienated relative makes but a treacherous ally. Yet—— Lord Wyntwarde strode up and down the great library at Cavil, where he transacted his business, and all such other like unpleasantnesses, amongst the books he never read, his hands in his breeches pockets; and he laughed harshly. He was just in from riding; and his pink hunting-coat, his breeches and long boots were splashed with mud. Anthony, standing in a window, grimly watched him prowling. The old lord threw back his head as he tramped the floor: “Ho, ho!” he bawled, “friend Anthony! I spoke like the damned minor prophets, after all, hey!... So you come to me!... By the dogs, I said it. But you are three years before my prophecy.... You play the cat and banjo with my dates. You make me too previous.” He turned, clinking his spurs as he trod his heels into the thick carpets. “I saw the cub’s birth in the papers ... seventeen years and a while ago. But, the cast-iron joke of it! that you should come to prevent a marriage with an undesirable. Hoho—ho!... I swore it—I swore it should be so.... Gods! how the world goes round! Round and round and round. And no one grows a peppercorn the wiser.... Not a damn peppercorn. Tshah! I did it. But then I foresaw that all the Wattleses would pour their vast wealth into our coffers—they love to have a lord in the family down by Birmingham. Nevertheless, I married a vicar’s daughter against my father’s will—and she brought forth Ponsonby!... Gods! have you seen the Thing?” Anthony said not a word. The old lord took to his pacing again: “By the dogs, an abortion. He cannot stay on a horse long enough for it to kill him. A horse! Dogs, he hasn’t even the blood of the Wattleses in him—he’d turn giddy on an office-stool unless he were strapped to it. He is the very pick of dancing-masters—he has cast back to the bank-manager, except that he can’t count. There he stands against God’s heaven, a knock-kneed reproach to his Maker.... The nearest thing he gets to a horse is to wear riding-breeches and long boots on the parades of fashionable watering-places. But he has thrown out a virtue we none others have had—he has not gone into opposition to the head of his house. He will be the twenty-sixth in the title, and the other twenty-four have pulled their fathers’ beards. He has Anthony nodded: “I must know the conditions,” he said. “You must? Hoho! still the organizer of victory, eh!” Anthony said nothing. He stood and watched the striding figure before him, and bit his teeth on all repartee. He had a dogged desire to win that which he had come to ask; and he was not going to lose it for the sake of a score in grooms’ badinage. He left the waggeries to the noble lord. “Look here, friend Anthony—your uncle sold the estates, and rotted in Boulogne. And the county dropped him—he only had the portraits with him when he died. Well! does the world remember that you come of the Plantagenets? does the county remember that your sires were William of Normandy and Charlemagne and Louis Debonair? Not a whit. It thinks you are a damned scribbling fellow; and, by the dogs, you are. And the lordship of the manor is gone to some cheesemonger from down South—and, hoho! I swear it, your arms are on his carriage panels, the great damned peacock’s tail for crest, and the scarlet torteaux and the blessed chevron. All taken over with the lordship of the manor. Yes, by the three scarlet tortoises, their women are wonderful! brand new popinjays on a brand new stick. Nothing old and dingy in the old home, I can promise you—Chippendale and the eighteenth century all thrust out o’ doors, gone to the workmen’s cottages—and the rooms heavy with full-bellied comfortable saddle-bag lounges and the Latest Thing. But—mine host is in Burke, and glitters in Debrett. And you? Beelzebub! you scribble. You are gone down to the bottom of an ink-pot. And the boy! our good Oliver—where will he go? Yet, by my soul, you did one clean thing—you called him after me—you had sufficient pride to put aside your dirty conceit and give him the name of the house. Wherefore, since he is an Oliver, and since he has gone into opposition to his father, who went into opposition to me—and since two negatives make an affirmative—therefore and whereby and notwithstanding, I’ll help the boy; but I say it shall be on conditions.” Anthony’s one dread was lest he should discover that Caroline was not in the surrender. “And the conditions?” he asked. “Now, don’t you begin hectoring me!” The bloodshot eyes turned glaring upon the silent figure of Anthony that stood sullenly in the window. Anthony laughed sadly. “There is very little of Hector left in me,” he said. “I had hoped to have made a decent competency for the boy—but I The clinking of the spurs and the striding up and down the room began again: “I have not forgotten that there is only Ponsonby between master Oliver’s mother and me. I have not forgotten why you married his mother, Master Anthony.... That was why I prophesied.... Prophecy?” He snorted: “Prophecy be hanged! It was a jabbering of dead certainty.” Anthony’s face flushed hotly: “There is one thing I will not allow—though the boy rot for it—the lie of omission,” he said. “Who lies?” The tramping ceased. Anthony looked him steadily in the eyes: “You have forgotten something, Lord Wyntwarde. There was a time when you were not so pat with a lie.” “I have forgotten nothing.” “You have forgotten to add that you had four children alive—and a brother. We scribbling folk call that the lie of omission; we consider it the lowest of falsehoods. We even hold it a dishonour to utter it.” The bloodshot eyes ceased their glare; and the striding began again: “Still the damned authority on all the moralities,” said my lord. As a fact, he was pleased at the show of fire. He had begun to think this man had lost courage; and he would have trampled him under foot for it. Your braggart only understands courage when it is announced by trumpet. As it was, he remembered the ugly threat of a whip that he had once been under from this fellow. It came to him that he had played the bully to the limits. He went to the bell and rang it; and got to pacing the room again, brooding, until a footman opened the door. “Tell Mr. Fassett I wish to see him,” said his lordship. “Yes—my lud.” A silent chaplain entered the room almost before the servant was gone, and, glancing at his striding lord and his guest, he obeyed the sign to sit down at the desk, noiselessly took his way to it, and placed himself thereat. “Fassett,” said Wyntwarde, prowling the while—“I want notes made upon these points: My kinsman, Oliver Baddlesmere, a young fellow about to go up to Oxford, is to go to Magdalen. The day he writes to me for supplies from Magdalen he is to receive three hundred pounds—and he is to receive it each year he goes up. Any bills in reason for hunters, or in relation to hunting, I will pay—and all wine that shows a gentleman’s He went to the bell and rang it; and turning to Anthony he added: “There are a lot of handsome women with dull husbands staying in the house, friend Anthony.” He laughed roughly: “But I suppose it’s no use asking you to stay for dinner.” He turned to the footman who appeared at the door; and, before Anthony could answer, he said: “This gentleman must catch the next train to town.” He waved his hand with a curt “Good-day”; and tramped out of the room on clanking heels. Anthony decided, thinking it out in the train, to tell Caroline of what had passed, and of the need for getting Noll coached at once for the next term at Oxford. He did not see any particular reason why the lad should go to the university; but everyone did go—it was the thing to do. And then—there was the girl—— He thought, all things considered, there was no need to mention Betty Modeyne. Wherein the Major fights a Brilliant Rearguard Action; and Beats off a Pressing Attack It was the hour of social calls. The suburban world was a-rustle in its best clothes, sallying forth in carriage and on foot to play at being in the whirl of fashion; Major Modeyne stood in drunken dignity on the whitewashed steps of the house, his coat turned outside in, his shirt hanging out before and behind, and flouted by street-boys. And the whole stucco front blushed with shame. Even the titter in the areas, where kitchen-maids peeped through the railings at the rare comedy, was not without some sense of adverse criticism. His “friends” in the city had thought the joke a killingly funny one; indeed, when, at the door of The Cock and Bull in Fleet Street, the Major had thanked them for the honour of their friendship, and, with a rending hiccup, had started amidst street urchins on his solemn homeward procession in this guise early in the afternoon, they had clung to each other and had wept with laughter, hysteric at the splendour of their humour. Nay, it provoked a mighty thirst and much recounting of whimsical details in drinking shops for a long day. The story grew.... But now that he was arrived in his own street, the pestering swarm of street-urchins that buzzed at the Major’s straying heels feared the joke was cracked—yet they were loath to give up the tattered shreds of it whilst there was a guffaw left to them. The point of honour during the journey had been to get in under the play of the Major’s cane, and pluck a strip off his shirt-tails; it had been a running fight as long as he tramped the streets, the victory now with the boys, now with the Major’s lunge of cane; but the gallant officer stood at last before his stronghold, and his back was to it. A bloody nose or so amongst the boys showed that the old soldier had not wholly lost the cunning of a heavy hand. Yet he was vaguely troubled where he stood. He questioned his ability to mount the steps unaided—and mount them he must before he could achieve the ringing of the bell; he feared also that it would involve the turning of his back upon the enemy. With masterly coolness of judgment, he decided to wait until somebody A crowd collected. It was at this dramatic pause that the landlady and her daughter, returning from envious viewing of the Quality rolling by in the Park, came upon the scene. The Major, with wonted gallantry, and a somewhat wide miss or two of his hand at the object, swept off his hat; but the effort lost him his legs, and he suddenly sat upon the steps—the hat flinging out into the road, where it was rushed off with a wild whoop by triumphant urchins and became the football of a fierce game, in which many goals were kicked over neighbouring lamp-posts. The two women, brushing their skirts aside, passed by the fallen Major haughtily. He made a vigorous effort to go up the steps on all fours after the ladies; he reached the topmost as they slammed the door in his face. He sat on the doorstep, and shook his head sadly.... Thus Anthony Baddlesmere found him. Anthony was slackening his pace, hesitant, wondering how to avoid the embarrassment of getting into the house—there was the rustle of a girl’s dress as she flipped past him, light feet ran up the steps, and Betty, ringing the bell, stooped down, gave her father her arm, and, as he struggled to his feet, led him into the yawning doorway. Anthony stepped in after them; and the door was shut. He felt a sudden sense of shame that he had allowed the girl to do what he himself had a little feared to do; and he helped her now to get her father up the stairs and into his room. Arrived thereat and entering, she led the poor dazed soul to an armchair, settled him there comfortably, with mother hands, then went to the windows and flung them open. When she turned, it was to find two angry women in the room—the landlady and her daughter had entered without leave or asking, and instantly began a torrent of upbraiding. Betty went to them: “He cannot understand now—better come to-morrow morning,” she said gently; and they, opening the door, conquering a stubborn desire to stay, slowly went out. Anthony hesitated, not quite knowing what to do. He looked at the girl. The firm mouth was set; but there was no sign of complaint nor of anger upon her. He felt a certain meanness in the object of the journey from which he was just returned. The poor drunken man began to upbraid himself. “Hush, father,” said the girl—— He hiccupped: “I am very drunk,” he said. “Why deny it?” “Ah, father! that you should have come out into the day at last!... I have feared this—for years.” The girl laughed sadly, and went to the window. “Betty,” said Anthony at last—“can I do nothing for you?” She shook her head: “Nothing,” she said. “His will is gone.” She was acquiring knowledge of the world early, this girl—and at first-hand. The next morning, Major Modeyne read a letter at breakfast, and having read it, watching Betty furtively out of the corners of his eyes, he stealthily took advantage of her attention being fixed upon the tea-making to put the letter into his pocket. It was a discomforting, abusive, cruel letter, and it said that he and his daughter received notice to vacate their rooms that day week—that there would be a cab waiting for them and their baggage as soon as it was dark, and that they must go, even if the law were employed to eject them. It stated what it had to say harshly, vulgarly, blatantly. It was not the kind of letter that raises a man’s self-respect. The week passed. The Major had never been gayer, more debonair. He glittered. He was a very sun. When he returned at night few knew. But the mornings saw him blithe and tuneful. The landlady and her daughter began to feel qualms. Still, they hardened their hearts; and it was not until the morning of the last day of the grace given him that the Major alluded to the unpleasant affair. He sent the little maid-of-all-work to say that he wished to see the ladies if they could spare him five minutes—it would only take three. He was ushered into their little sitting-room with all the formalities he himself observed with so rigid an etiquette. “Well, Major!” The landlady broke an embarrassed silence. “Ladies,” said he—“I received a letter a week ago for which I have expected a formal apology. It has not been tendered.” The ladies stiffened, ruffled. The elder said: “Major Modeyne, we hope you do not intend to make us use pressure to you.” “No lady’s pressure has ever met rebuff from me,” said the Major gallantly. “I would meet the lady half way.” The daughter sniffed: “Major, you are pulling ma’s leg,” she said. “Then, madam,” said the Major—“this is no place for her daughter.” “You are trying to be funny, Major,” said the young woman huffily. “Madam, most serious. For, were I to show indignation in my denial I should cast aspersion on a handsome limb; were I to “Lor, Major—I don’t know what you are getting at!” “That I have pulled nothing,” said the Major solemnly. “What do you want?” “Ah, yes,” said the Major—“I came for the apology.” “Then you don’t get it,” said the young woman tartly. The Major bowed. “That, madam, is a matter of taste.” The young woman tossed her head: “We don’t need to go to a school of manners, Major Modeyne.” The Major bowed again: “The letter,” said he, “is illegal.” The women looked at each other uncomfortably. “What?” said the daughter. “Do not be alarmed, ladies; I did not say libellous. God forgive me, it is not that. But it contains instructions about my daughter that cannot hold in the law. My daughter has done nothing deserving of censure; and it is utterly out of your power to eject her from her room. The notice to quit rests with my daughter—and it is my intention that it shall always so rest.” The younger woman sniffed: “Major,” said she, “no one wants to give Miss Betty a shade of trouble—but you must leave at dark to-night——” “Madam, if I go, I go alone.” She nodded: “I’m sorry, Major; but if you don’t go, the drawing-room floor says she will leave—and others in the house are getting restless—and we cannot afford the loss.” The Major pondered upon the problem long. “Yes,” he said, “the drawing-room floor is serious—she is a woman of weight.” The landlady tittered. But the daughter frowned her to order, and said, somewhat to the point: “She pays her way handsomely.” The Major bowed and withdrew. He sang, Sigh no more, ladies, as he sallied up the stairs; and to the profound astonishment of the two puzzled women he did not stir from the house that day. When it was dark, a servant was sent upstairs to the Major to tell him that the cab stood at the door. “All right!” bawled the Major from within. An hour passed. The maid was again sent upstairs to tell the Major that the cab was waiting. “Let it wait,” cried the Major. The cabman became unpleasant, and uttered obscene prose. The two ladies of the house, in support of each other, now went up the stairs and knocked. “Come in,” cried the Major gaily. They went in. He was in bed. The younger woman burst into tears: “There is nothing packed, ma,” she said. “What on earth have you been doing all day, Major Modeyne?” gasped the landlady. “Pitying the lady who has the drawing-room,” said the Major. “Why?” “I don’t know what on earth she will do!” said the Major. The younger woman bridled, sniffingly: “She won’t do anything,” she said hotly. “Ah,” said the Major—“just like me—just like me.” “Is it?” she said testily. “Well, we shall see. The cab has been waiting for you for two hours.” “Most patient cabman!” said the Major—“and who will pay the cabman, madam?” “We intend to accompany you and your baggage to that cab now,” said the young woman. “That you won’t,” said the Major—“for I haven’t a stitch on me; and here I stay in bed until your extremely tasteless letter of a week ago is formally withdrawn.... Good-night, ladies. Allow me to open the door for you——” He made as though to jump out of bed. The two women hurriedly left the room. They went to the drawing-room, knocked and entered, sat down on chairs and wept bitterly. The stout lady of that realm went and held their hands; soothed them; and heard their story out. “Wha—what are we to do, madam?” said they. The stout lady laughed until the tears came. “Well, you two women can’t lead a naked man into a cab,” said she; “I should love to see it, but I’m afraid you will never do it.” They began to weep again. The old lady grew impatient. “Leave the man alone,” said she. And she added, blowing her nose: “I could have loved that creature.” Indeed, Major Modeyne was always the gentleman—even at bay with the Inevitable. Which tells, with quite Unnecessary Frankness, of what chanced at the Tavern of “The Cock and Bull” in Fleet Street In the dining-room of The Cock and Bull was laughter, and the clink of glasses, and some hiccup—for the dinner was long since at an end, and the guests held much wine—not wholly without giddiness and the confusion of tongues. There was more than a hint of Babel. It was the feast of Saint Valentine’s Day, and the commercial gentlemen, fore-gathered there, made the sentiment at The Cock and Bull this night sacred to the Ladies. Major Modeyne, being in the chair, sat at the head of the table; and a-down it, along both sides, were city men; and at the end of all the poetic, sallow, and vague-eyed landlord of the tavern, who, so repute wagged a whispering tongue, had not been above taking his Double First at Oxford—a vague prize to your ordinary mortal that savours of the mysteries of Eleusis and a full hand of trumps at the gaming-table of life, though ’tis said to be useless enough, being of the nature of fireworks in the grey fastnesses of the skull. There’s something of the awesome in big names. However that may be, our landlord was a gloomy fellow in his cups, and ran to latinities, so that the wit came mostly from the head, where was the Authority of the Chair—indeed, Modeyne had repartee so long as he could keep an eyelid up, though fragments of it had served the world of badinage before. The debauch being dedicate to the ladies, then, our gloomy landlord raised the glass to the respectable sentiment of Sweethearts and Wives. And, the toast being drunk, as indeed was the company, the Chair, as an excuse to empty the glasses again, gave the toast of retort, Other Fellows’ Sweethearts and Wives—the hiccup which was the full-stop to the Major’s waggery being drowned in a shout of laughter and the noisy drinking of the toast. Indeed, they stood up to it, one foot on chair and one on table, giving it with musical honours, though, as the draper, a fellow of polygamous sentiments from his own showing, said: “This standing on chairs displayed a childlike confidence in the design of creation and man’s destiny under all conditions to He himself, reeling at his own dazzling elevation, grasped the great lustre chandelier that depended from the ceiling, which, flaring magnificently, gave way with him, so that he fell with it amongst the wine-glasses; and whilst they plucked splinters of broken glass from the lower end of him, he whimsically owned his contrition at having tempted Providence by not sitting anchored to the good seat that had been assigned to him. Still, said he, commerce must follow the army; and the Major had the habit of forlorn hopes, having acquired in youth and on the tented field the taste for “withering fires” and “bloody engagements”—he said this with all apologies—hiccup—to any churchwardens who might be present—hiccup—but he meant bloody engagements. As a fact, these commercial gentlemen adored the army and navy—never were such fire-eaters as they. A tale of carnage, as long as the old flag came out a-top, thrilled them and roused their maddest enthusiasms. They thundered applause upon the heels of the bloodthirsty sentiment. They were ready to die, so they averred hiccuping, in their very cups for the divine right of their king and the infallibility of the upper classes. Was never such service of devotion as they swore to the “Thin Red Line” and the “Handy Man.” Gods, it made the blood leap to hear them—they were thirsting for self-sacrifice—each one of them. Indeed for the dear old flag they were prepared to fling away Christianity—riches—suburban villa—happy home—everything. The glasses leaped to the thunder of their emotions. Here, indeed, were they all aristocrat—hating the democracy with a bitter hatred. The lord mayor’s coach drove at the slow trot through all their varied ambitions, its golden caparisoned horses making it to glitter a fixed star to their designs, a guide to their hopes—and, from that, the ultimate step into the peerage, riches, powdered footmen, and marble halls. It was all tucked away tight behind the bloodshot eyes, in their secret imaginations. When they went to bed at night, took off their trousers, and blew out the light, the dream of these things passed in pageant along the top of their foot-rails. To be a Nob—so they put it with vulgar lip, when confessing to their own souls—that was the Ultimate Thing. They believed in their God—a little hesitantly on occasions; but their belief knew no wavering in the divine inspiration of the statesmanship of the House of Lords. The polygamous draper but echoed the general sentiment when he condemned the vulgarity of the masses. The British workman had his whole contempt—(thus he delivered himself)—the British workman did as little as he could, and got a ridiculously high wage that was so much outside his needs that he was always more or less drunk—hiccup—gen’rally more—hiccup—in the public-house—hiccup hiccup—and the—gin-palace. What did these gorgeous and brightly illuminated drinking-saloons that shone in the darkness of the darkest street mean but the widespread overpayment of the working-man and Long and sustained applause. “Hee-haw!” cooed the Major. “Too-ra-loora-lay.” The draper turned upon him: “Yer can’t get over it, sir—hiccup—there it is.” He swept his hand towards the landlord: “There’s your workman—hiccup—and there’s your public-house”—he swept his hand to the Major. The Major rapped upon the table: “Order! order!” cried he—“the chairman is not a public-house.” He giggled, and titters turned to laughter. The erotic draper sat down: “The army keeps a-jumpin’ on the bloomin’ chest of commerce to-night,” said he, “until I forget—hiccup—forget my intentions.” The Major begged to remind the gentleman that this was not a Labour night, but the Feast of St. Valentine, when even the greyest sparrows skipped amorous with love’s delight along the homely necessary waterspout. The draper apologized handsomely; and they drank together. The draper was now called upon, as a man of taste in the matter, to make the speech of the evening: The Ladies—Lovely Woman. He arose and spoke. He apologized for having disturbed the harmony of the evening by his earlier essay, but the British workman was the thorn in his side—— A waggish commercial person, an atheistic upholsterer and something of a rake, called out that they had all understood that it was the splinter of a sherry glass that had been drawn from the wound. The Major rose and called for order—their honest draper only used a metaphor, a So-to-Speak—besides, the splinter of glass had not been removed from the gentleman’s side, nor by any stretch of the imagination nor tribute to delicacy could it be called his side. The affair of the wine-glass, and therefore all reference to it, must be avoided—it was a painful subject, and the incident was now closed. “Haw-haw!” guffawed the rakish upholsterer. “But the wound ain’t—it was our honest draper that re-opened the wound.” The Major’s eyes twinkled: “Order, order,” cried he. “The wound, sir, and the incident are now closed. The subject before the house is Lovely Woman.” He sat down. The draper licked his lips sullenly, and proceeded. “Gentlemen,” said he, and he thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, raising a drowsy eyebrow—“woman was once content to be. Hiccup. To trip through the banquet of existence appealing to man as the Beautiful; and, being beautiful, to be loved—to sit on the knees of man and kiss him kisses. She is no longer content. Woman has become a danger—a “Order!” cried the Major—“the ladies’ underclothes are out of order.” The draper licked his lips and blinked: “I withdraw the stockings,” said he—“fancy, you and me, gentlemen, mating with a female who knows as much as we do—fancy the want of ’armony there must be in the house where the lady is our equal in intelligence and in the—all the other things that go to make up a man’s natural superiority—hiccup.... I’m against this Pallas Athene business myself—the woman putting on the blooming helmet and coming out and criticising conduct. It’s indelicate. It takes the bloom off the peach of her modesty. Not, mind you, that I’m one as plumps too solid for modesty. Not at all. I don’t go nap on modesty. For my part, I like a woman who can take her buss like a live thing—as women were meant by God’s design so to do. A woman who draws the line at honest kissing is no woman at all—and is of the nature of a public nuisance. A woman who is cold-blooded enough to write sonnets to her love when she might be sitting on his knees and loving her love is committing an offence against her Original Intention—which is a sin against nature. I ask you, then, gentlemen, to fill your glasses and drown Modesty....” Wherein the Major takes to his Bed The winter dawdled late in the city. Saint Valentine went out into the darkness of the night, with silent feet muffled in a heavy fall of snow. And Major Modeyne went with him. They brought him home in the early morning, dead and icy cold, and laid him upon his bed; and when they were gone Betty sat by the still figure and stroked the chill hand that had done intentional ill to none; in such strange manner she tasted for the first time the bitterness of death—in such sorry fashion the poor tattered remains of her childhood fell from her, sitting there, listening for the deep mystic significance of the eternal slaying that is a part of the eternal life.... Betty, as by pronounced habit, was to suffer for it. A jury had to sit upon the tragedy; and the coroner, embarrassedly enough, had to rake up the details that were called the life of the poor broken man that lay silent in death, unheeding and unprotesting and unashamed. Modeyne’s hand had always fallen heaviest upon the small child from whom his thin will would have the most flinched as to the giving of pain. His death, that should have closed the book of the record of the child’s struggles against the public washing of the linen of his sordid details of life, was instead a new whip wherewith she was scourged—the manner of it was the very event that compelled the uncovering of all those little tragedies which the proud child had so courageously hushed under the dignity of her silence. It was made clear by the sworn evidence that the Major had wandered to the great flight of steps on which he was found, that he had taken off his boots to prevent the waking of his landlady, that he had climbed a few of the steps in the darkness, and lain down, under the delusion that he was in bed, and had slept into death, the white snow weaving his winding-sheet. Then it came out that he had sat late at a festive orgy in the rooms of The Cock and Bull tavern in Fleet Street, and had left the place, like most of the others, somewhat vague as to his destination. It also came out that he was some sort of agent for the tavern, It was also hinted that the dead man was highly connected—but the magnificent in their high places kept a frigid silence that showed a dogged decision to bear their loss unflinchingly. Indeed, on the evening of the day on which the dead man was put to his rest for the last time by the silent girl and the handsome youth who had so often shared the task in the small hours of the morning when the unknowing world snored and slept, it was, truth to say, a somewhat vulgar little knot of city men that sat round the table of The Cock and Bull tavern and passed a silk hat round about to collect the little sum that one of them was deputed to take to the girl herself with a vote of their respect and affection for a dead friend and as true a gentleman as any into whom the good God had put good wine. Wherein Tom Folly blunders along in his Self-centred Gig—and drags a Dainty Little Lady’s Skirts into the Wheel Anthony fretted at the death of the Major—fretted at the publicity—fretted at the time of the man’s dying, and the manner; for he had decided to appeal to Betty not to spoil Noll’s prospects, now so suddenly brightening, by getting him entangled in a childish engagement. But Modeyne’s death made it wholly indecent to approach the already so indecent subject for some time; made it in any case the more difficult to broach at all; made it also more urgent that it should be approached. And, to fret the will with further indecision, Anthony, his eyes intent upon the pale girl in the simple black gown, and balked by the strange gravity that had settled upon the slim dainty figure, perceived the exquisite approach, the delicate fragrance and most subtle atmosphere of the coming of womanhood—an atmosphere which made it doubly difficult for him to commit himself to putting into the brutality of speech what cost him shame even in the thinking. Had he only taken Caroline into his scheme, he would not have blundered thus clumsily into a brutality; but he did not—and, with his fatal capacity for not leaving well alone, fretting impatiently through the keen bitter winds of March and the early days of April, he at last brought himself to the pitch of seeing the girl alone and making his appeal. When Anthony knocked at the door and entered her room, she arose, with a smile, to greet him; and he found himself mute. She was so comely, this slender girl of fifteen years, so debonair—as is meet and fit in the young of the most beautiful of all created things. The brown hair, tied with a ribbon at the nape of the white neck, showed the great beauty of the shapely head; and he knew that the soul within the delicate body was the most mystically beautiful of all. He realized that the slightest cruelty would leave harsh scars. Yet he did not withhold himself from the brutalities. She would have made him at ease so prettily; and he decided to be blunt and strike at once, if he would say what he had come to say. The light went out of the trustful grey eyes; the smile flickered out and slowly left the pure face. The slender hands trembled a little—the large eyelids fell, and she bowed her comely head. She wondered what new agony lay in store for her. Thus she stood and said never a word. Just one little movement—the interlacing of the slender fingers together before her—it hid the trembling of the white hands—and she prepared to meet what cut of the lash should fall, in silent dignity. Anthony was taken up with his own difficulty,—yet, as he spoke, the picture of the girl’s humiliation slowly bit into his imagination. “Betty,” he said, “I do not know whether you are aware of it, but there are only two people between Noll, through his mother, and Lord Wyntwarde of Cavil....” The lash cut deep, but he was too engrossed in his object to see the girl’s courage. “Lord Wyntwarde is, frankly, somewhat of a brute—capricious, full of whims. He has, after ignoring the boy from his birth, suddenly expressed a wish that Noll should go to Oxford, a wish also to provide a career for him—such as—I—cannot give him.... He has made, as one of his conditions, a most binding proviso that Noll shall not marry without his consent, nor outside his set——” The girl spake no smallest word, gave no sign. Anthony went on: “I am going to ask you not to spoil Noll’s career——” The words cut into the girl’s very flesh; but she said not a word. Anthony blundered on, brutally unconscious of the simple urgent fact that the girl had not wanted to spoil the lad’s career, that she was in no way on her defence—that he was committing himself to the base insolence, the most ignoble insolence of which we can be guilty, of the lie that presumes the accusation of the innocent. It were as though indifferent cutlery should beg tempered steel to try and be tempered steel. “You are very beautiful,” he said—“you probably do not realize how beautiful. And I am going to appeal to you not to allow Noll to get engaged to you in case he should wish it—for it would be folly in me to pretend that I don’t see that he has a boy’s love for you, which, if other things were different, God knows would be the happiest thing for him.” So he blundered on, excusing the girl from his own insolences; even making all allowances for her out of the deeps of his self-sufficiency. Betty’s fingers remained tight clasped before her—her head bowed down—but she made no slightest movement, standing deathly still. And Anthony, his false step irretrievably made, realized slowly that he had done a brutal and foolish thing; saw perhaps even more clearly that he had won a success; but, rebuffed by the girl’s The door closed upon him. The girl was left utterly alone. A hot flush had burnt into her face. She stretched out her hand and with difficulty reached the mantel. They had now turned even her deep love for this youth, the only being left to her, into a thing to bring her shame. It was the whip of scorpions. She had stood and taken the lashes upon her slender shoulders; but at last the hellish device that invented the punishment of the solitary cell wrung from her lips a pathetic little moan. Wherein a Dainty Little Lady, looking out of the Window of a Shabby Home at a Shabbier Destiny, joins the Streaming Crowd whose Faces pass in the Street, drifting towards the Strange Riot of Living For the first time, Betty reeled beneath the buffets of her destiny—for a moment the world swung away from before her feet—she clutched the mantel, or would have fallen. Passing her slender hand over her head, uttering a pitiful little moan, with the courage of her blood she stood at gaze with the cruelty—faced it—and overcame it.... Practising her wonted and deliberate caution, she considered her next move; before the dusk had taken possession of the town she was dressed for walking; she went out to the shops to buy some needful frills and stuff; she brought the package home with her, and locked herself into her room. It had come to her that morning, indeed she had been at work upon the problem but a few hours before this last blow had been struck at her, that she must still further narrow her narrow expenditure. All that night Betty sewed, her deft fingers lengthening one of her gowns. When she had done, the chill dawn was stealing up the smoky heavens. She put out the lamp, and packed. The memories would come crowding, treading on each other’s heels importunately. Betty remembered only the happinesses; and these, because they made her lip tremble, she put from her with stern and dogged fortitude, bending her wits only on the details of her coming actions, on the things she must do; and it was thus that, when the time came, every move she made fitted into its calculated place with appointed precision, and she was prepared for every event before it nudged at her attention. The sun was well up, and yawning housemaids clumsily astir, before she had put away her last little belongings in the big black trunk. Even at her tender years she had learnt in the harsh school of experience the value that the world sets upon the having of possessions, and the credit that landlords give to such as show responsible luggage. The room looked sadly desolate when she had put away the last of her small belongings; and it was with a strenuous effort that she sat down before the mirror and gathered up and coiled her nut-brown hair about her head for the first time. She stared wide-eyed at the years it added to her age. She dressed herself in her lengthened gown; put on her hat and jacket. When she was finished she stood before the glass a woman—and a very beautiful woman. Yet her brows clouded—at the dread that she looked too young! She wrote a short note to her landlady to say she might be away all day; stole stealthily on to the landing to see that there was no one about; locked her door; put the key in her pocket; ran down the stairs; and let herself out into the street.... All day she spent in the purlieus of Soho, in the search for a room; and it was near upon nightfall when she made a choice. When darkness had come down upon the street, Betty drove up to the door of her old home in a cab; she took the hungry tatterdemalion of a cabman upstairs for her baggage; and, whilst the shabby fellow was getting it down and on to the cab, she herself sought out the landlady in her little office. She put the money for her rooms into the hands of the amazed woman, tried to tell her that she was going away, and broke down into a hoarse murmur. “Go-ing away?” gasped the good creature. Betty squeezed the old body’s hand. She could say nothing. “Miss Betty,” said the other—“you mustn’t go away.... What will the house be without you? Pay when you can, my dear——” But the girl shook her head sadly. She was glad to find that they would only think she had left for lack of means. The old woman patted her shoulder, thrust back the money into her purse, and said that nothing on God’s earth would prevail on her to touch it. She kissed the unhappy girl; and Betty, making a stern effort to check her sobs, stood up, kissed the old face on each cheek, stepped out into the night, and was gone.... Noll had knocked impatiently at the locked door twice that day, and now as the darkness fell, seeing the door open, he leaped up the stairs, calling Betty by name; sprang through the open door; and came to a sudden halt, bewildered to find the room deserted and dismantled. He turned roughly to the landlady’s daughter, who stood at the window weeping. “Where is Miss Modeyne?” he asked hoarsely. “Gone,” sobbed the girl. “Where?” She shook her head: “No one knows, Mr. Noll.” Noll went to the little bed, flung himself down beside it, and sobbed like a child.... Caroline went and seated herself on the bed beside the lad, and stroked the handsome head with her gentle fingers: “Ah, Noll,” said she—“so you too are to taste the bitters of life early!” The young fellow stayed by the bed all night, and would not be comforted. And Caroline most wisely stayed with him. Wherein Dawning Womanhood whispers that Dolls are Dolls Betty, listless and lonely, and in hiding, had not been long in her new-found attic when she won the wan smile of a little old faded lady who lived in the room below. They met on the stairs; and a smile bred a smile. A formal invitation to tea from the little old faded lady followed. The little scented note bore the signature of Flora Jennyns.... When Betty entered the room, and shut the door, she shut out half a century. Miss Flora Jennyns, rustling in full-skirted silks, had the atmosphere of crinolines round and about her; the room was fresh and sweet, and fragrantly quaint and stilted, and of the early Victorian years. Into the armchair before the fire where she was used to sit, Betty made the little lady now go; and the girl went and sat on a footstool by her knees and talked to her, and entered into the dainty faded mind. She saw, with a little smile, that Miss Flora Jennyns at once fell into a little pose—it was the faded reflection of a portrait that hung on the wall—the picture of a graceful simple young woman who leaned her chin on a pretty slender hand, as she sat wrapt in dreams of sweet sentiment; and slowly, from out the faded lines of the old face and head and pose, there came to her the features and pose, modest and virginal, of the portrait. Whilst Betty made tea for her, she learnt that the little old Catholic lady had been a literary success in her youth—a one-time vogue, who was now fading away in the heroic pride of a gentlewoman’s penury—uncomplaining—amidst a sordid world and harsh needs dreaming of romance that had walked in crinolines—living in a withered garden where were but fragrant fallen leaves.... From that day, the little Miss Flora’s smile became more frequent; and from Betty’s attic the bleak loneliness lifted and went out; for, though the vasty gulf of age divided them (youth and old age can only love each other as in a dream, vaguely), the girl did not find so much time for brooding—she had found a something to mother.... Betty came to know him, with a smile, as the Man of Pallid Ideals. He would bring Miss Flora to the door always; ring the bell for her; and with elaborate bow and hat in hand, there take leave of her. Nearer to the lady’s room he never ventured, neither being provided with a chaperon.... Betty one day taxed Miss Flora with the charge that she was in love—and loved a poet. And the little withered waxen cheeks blushed. “You shall read his poems, my dear,” she said; and, rising, she went to a little sandal-wood box, opened the lock with an ornate little key, and, raising the lid, let out the scent of the lavender in which was laid a little book of verse amidst other treasures. Miss Flora handed the little volume to Betty; and she, begging her to leave the box open, said she would only read the precious book in that room. Miss Flora kissed her, and went back to her chair. Betty, sitting in the window in the waning light, learnt from the precious volume that the poet’s name was Cartel de Maungy; and opening the book she found written upon every leaf in tuneful verse the self-revelation of the man, the poet of faded ideals, as his race had been before him—his grandsire had gone to the guillotine for a well-turned sonnet about something that did not matter. On every page was the tale of his placid devotion; his adoration of his Flora—always from a seemly distance; his vows that they should ever move in the ideal; that the touch of his lips upon her fingers is sweet marriage enough for him; in his measured singing of jewelled queens and sapphire nights and pearly dusk he holds her finger-tips reverently and but for the moment, and that only in the distant and proper measure of the gavotte or the like stately trippings to the whispered music of viol and lute and harpsichord—throughout was no coarse bucolic love-embrace. Thus the slender verse sounded its tender music until there was almost shame in the kiss that is kissed upon the mouth. The little old faded lady was possessed of an academic and dainty old-world Papist faith that Æsthetically touched Betty’s sense of beauty. The child had grown up without any kind of formal religious instruction—had picked up from the air, and from straying truths in the air, her sweet concept of life. The pure metal of her quick, alert and vigorous understanding required but little hammering. Only with the lad Noll had come unrest and questioning. Major Modeyne had drifted from his Church—indeed, Betty Betty, with the strange reserve that covered all her deepest thinking, whispered no hint of her own birth in the same faith to the old lady; she tried instead to win from the beautiful and pure and faded mind of Miss Flora some conception of God and the mysteries—only to find the little old lady’s concept, for all the disguises of her delicate mind, exceedingly crude and vague—that, in fact, she had absolutely no concept at all. She saw that it was the wide compassion of the mystic Man of Sorrows that gave, as to most Papists, the exquisite faith in their mysteries. Yet, like the most orthodox, she spoke of the old and the new dispensation—God then had not known His own mind. Puzzled with the great fact that God and Son were absolutely destructive of each other—one the God of War, the other the God of Peace—one the God of Vengeance, demanding Punishment, the other the God of Mercy, offering Forgiveness; the one choosing an indifferent race as a chosen people, the other rejecting that race; the book of the laws of the one obliterating the book of the laws of the other—the girl had awakened from her childhood and realized that she had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and that before the judgment-seat of that knowledge the God of her childhood stood convicted of the very sins, from killing downwards, for which that same God had condemned man to eternal punishments; and, with the true instinct for justice and for the humanities, she forthwith rejected the God and gave all her affection to the Christ, who had thwarted, and by thwarting had confessed the injustice of God. And now, having so decided, and being in sight of a calm harbour of refuge, she found herself baffled with the fury of the factions that professed the Christ. The symbolism and the beauty of the Papist section beckoned her to Rome; but the genius of the child saw all things in the large, and was not to be led aside by details—she was repelled by the contradictions of its belief that at one turn appealed to reason, at the next rejected reason; repelled by its un-Christliness, repelled by the submission of the conscience to its priesthood, repelled by its condemnation of all outside its gates, repelled by its preposterous claims—by its belief in the real presence of the Christ in the wine and wafer of its sacraments. She had only that day come upon a copy of the Cautels, and as she read the cautions to priests, after partaking of the sacraments, that they should not wash their mouths or spit before breaking their fast in case of ejecting the body of Christ in their spittle or vomit, she was stung with shame that such puerile things should be expected of her intelligence—it were as though she had been struck across the face with a whip. The strong blood of the To all the pettiness of the little petty quarrels that were galling the dignity of the age, her clear intellect was too contemptuous to give more than a passing thought. The symbols and the forms, the chief source of the wrangles and squabblings, were no trouble to her, had the things on which they were founded been deep and large with truth. With the greyness of mind, that made of these things a sin, she had no more sympathy than with the narrowness of head that made of them an important part of life.... She had wandered one day into a Quakers’ meeting-house—had been struck with the deep religious atmosphere, the far deeper mysticism than that of her own Church, for all its splendid forms and ceremonial and great beauty of service. She had not felt her reason sullied by the interposition of any gross human body between the Christ and her nobility. She had felt the wondrous dignity of the simple service, in spite of the greyness. She had read of late a novel, a vulgar stupid book, in which a child brought up by an agnostic is made to commit suicide because it cannot believe in a hereafter—in hell. Her reason revolted at the shabby trick, for she saw that no child would commit suicide because there was not a hell; but rather because there was—indeed, she herself remembered that she had suffered torments at night and had wept until her nerves were shaken for fear of hell, and out of compassion for the poor lost souls—nay, had reeled before the brutality that had created these poor souls only to fling them to such hellish predestined doom for all eternity. This literary trash roused her to the feeble foundations of sand on which much so-called religious life is built—especially the religious side of women. For the book had a wide sale. Creeds are an affair of race. They that are of a master race will hold a master creed—they that are of a sloven race will bow to sloven gods. It is the attribute of a slave people to pay homage from fear. This girl was of the master peoples. It was impossible for her to enslave her mind or her body or her soul with the blind credulities. She was of the mighty race that has bred the Protestors. With the passing of her childhood she put away the toys of the childhood of the world. In no bitter or harsh temper, but with affection and sadness she put them away—and took a deeper breath of life. In monastic cells and blind gropings in dark corners where life is a denial, and in the shirking of contradictions, very God is not to be found; but out in the free fresh air of the great world. The truth cannot lie. The girl roused in the dusk of the dying day and took the beautiful image of the Mary, and went down with it to the little old faded lady’s room, and set it upon the mantel there, that it might bring happiness to one whose sweet mind had not passed beyond these things. And she, little and old and faded, seated before the fire, smiled “Mother of God,” sighed the withered lips, “I am so glad not to be alone.” As the girl parted from her image of the Mary, she left the childhood of her intellect behind her. And from that day, Betty raised her frank honest eyes to the facts and verities of the live world about her, and, as she nearest might, fearlessly and cheerfully lived her own sweet life foot to foot and eye to eye with the mystic realities of her appointed destiny, mistaking guesses for truth never. For it is through the humanities alone, be ye sure of this, that we may touch the hem of the garment of God. Wherein Mr. Pompey Malahide loses his Breath in the Midst of a Boast Mr. Pompey Malahide, man of considerable wealth as he had been for years, was now grown so rich that he scarcely knew whether each fresh venture in which he launched might not be doubling his income by the end of the year. City people said, awe-struck, that all he touched turned to gold. But they failed to add that he touched nothing that did not hold hidden treasure. As a fact, he ventured only in the exploitation and invention of things of which he had himself felt the lack, which he felt were wanted at large. His shrewd business insight led him simply to traffic in such things as must turn to gold on their very discovery. Whilst the unimaginative followed a garish eyesight to seek fortune at the goldfields, he stayed at home and won wealth from richer lodes. He did not break hard rock for gold; he made the things that the world had need to buy. His appetite was but whetted by success. He was now destined to make such wealth as is only dreamed of in the dingy city offices of imaginative Jews. Pompey Malahide was on the eve of becoming a millionaire. Yet was he plagued with discontent. He was suffering discomfort. Riches alone contained nothing in themselves. He realized that riches were only a power. He, in communion with himself, striding his room, stood himself by the figure of young Bartholomew Doome, his paid servant; and his vulgarly frank eyes could not rid him of the transparent fact that this other was the master without an effort of his own. This other was the designer—the creator. His own the rude hand that beat out the design. Behind the dry humour and grim smile of the young man was the master wit, a wit always strangely kindly to him, but—tolerant. Whilst in the very act, even whilst he puffed and blew and swaggered and strutted and boasted to the young man of his successes and of his wealth, the warmth ran out of his conceit—he felt that what would have impressed his city friends was but rousing criticism behind those calm eyes that cared no jot for elaborate wealth—eyes that looked upon riches only as a secondary thing. But how? He consulted Doome. Doome, frowning upon the difficulties of the problem, decided that these young women must have a young gentlewoman for companion; he said that he would try and find a girl of breeding of their own age; it was full time; the boy Horace was springing up, and would be leaving Harrow at the end of the term; he ought not to be brought up in a different social atmosphere to the girls or he must of necessity drift into another set and grow into contempt of his sisters. Pompey Malahide nodded many nods. He approved. He sighed a portly sigh. Riches were bringing perplexing burdens. The very spending was a burden. He would have laughed at it all so short a while ago. It was much easier to make wealth than to use it—for a man had only to make money like a tradesman; he had to spend it—like a gentleman. Heigho! Pompey Malahide, approached by the leaders of the Opposition, threw in his lot with the party, was put up for one of the city constituencies, and, in the flood of political reaction that swept the country, was elected to the House of Commons by a large majority. Wherein Miss Betty Modeyne posts a Letter Betty, to avoid meeting Noll, had taken her walks abroad in the dusk only; but the restriction began to fret her will; and she had besides been compelled to the conclusion that she must add a few shillings a week to her slender means, or she would soon run through her small capital. She decided to take the loyal Netherby Gomme into her confidence, to put her position before him, and to rely on him to help her in evading Noll and the Baddlesmeres. She hoped, too, that he might get her some post of daily governess or companion to a city family, or some secretarial billet in a city office. She stole out one evening, and watched the Gommes’ house until she felt sure the place was free of visitors. She tripped up the steps at last, plotting what she would say if, by some chance, Noll should open the door. When she rang the bell, she was answered by the old lady, who was grimly rejoiced to see her. Betty put the old lady into a smiling and important mood, almost before the bang of the slammed door had ceased to echo in the gloomy hall, by at once begging her to summon Netherby downstairs to assist them in serious council on a delicate situation. The grim old woman fussed away, important and bustling. Netherby came with a smile on his long pale face, but the happy glint was soon gone, its place usurped by something akin to tears in his solemn steadfast eyes, as his melancholy features took on their habitual lugubrious length and gloom, when he sat down to discuss the situation—solemn promises of alliance and secrecy being sworn and given. He did not dare to tell Betty of the pathetic scenes that he had gone through, in these very rooms, with the youth Noll; indeed, Betty gave him little opportunity, for she showed no sense of grievance, and passed, as lightly as could be, over the scene with Noll’s father; but Netherby’s lips hardened, and showed an unwonted severity during the reserved statement of the details which had driven the girl to flight—he could fill in Anthony’s phrases, and build upon the skeleton of his mind, all so unwitting of its own limitations. She was relieved, too, to find that Noll’s day was now very fully occupied with work for a tutor. He was to enter at Magdalen as soon as he could go up to Oxford. She could now extend her hours of freedom and the range of her walks without risk of meeting him. She knew when he would be abroad, and where. During the old lady’s absence from the room, it was arranged between Netherby and Betty that Julia was to come and see her in the evenings as often as could be. But Netherby’s keen wits were not deceived by the girl’s reservations. He saw full well that she hungered for the slightest news of Noll—hung upon the smallest details. Before Betty left the house, she was the possessor of a letter of introduction to a Mr. Pompey Malahide, in which her family and connections were recited at a length that, had she known it, would have embarrassed her as much as they were destined to overwhelm the great man—a letter in which she was recommended as an excellent friend and companion to the daughters of that rich personage. This letter that she dropped into the post went under cover to a personal friend of Netherby Gomme’s, and bore the address of a certain Bartholomew Doome. Wherein a Great Financier is Satisfied with his Bargain Betty had dressed herself with elaborate care; yet she stood before a large shop-window and frowned upon herself. She was fretted with a doubt that she looked too young. Ah, the quaint goals of the human! It is ever the itching folly of the young to appear older; of the old to appear younger. And the exceeding great beauty that faced the girl in the mirrored world before her troubled her not at all. She was very, very young. So she turned on dainty heel and called a hansom—to drive her to the elaborate mansion of Mr. Pompey Malahide, who had his gorgeous dwelling amidst the rich who pay extortionately for life in Park Lane. She shrewdly paid this, to her, heavy toll upon her resources, for she knew, her instincts revealed, what stupid people arrive at by mere mathematics and the rebuffs of experience, that a man respects a woman who has the air of rising, Venus-like, armed at all points from a sea of band-boxes. Indeed, the girl’s manner and appearance, following upon the weighty pronouncement of Doome’s introduction, dazzled the city man, who rose to meet her, on her announcement by the elaborate footman. Mr. Pompey Malahide had intended to interview her seated at his desk; but a certain distinction and that air aloof and apart and of another world that baffled him in Doome, baffled him now. He stood up with the sudden and unforeseen intention of trying to be a gentleman. From lack of habit, he missed the trick, and at once fell into the first position for taking an order, and became the deferential shopman. And, to give him his due, his own dignities, or the crudities that passed with him for such, were banished as at a stroke out of his kindly bulk by the ambition which leaped within him that this winsome young woman might transfer something of her gracious bearing and pretty voice to his own two buxom daughters. The very hope of it set his thick blood sounding bassoon notes of delight in his ears, and the proud vision of it went whirling through his emotions. It were as though he had secured an estimate, and could have the work done at a price. To her astonishment, she found the man vulgar; yet almost his first comment had a strange note of good-taste that as much surprised her: “Miss Modeyne,” said he, “that Mr. Bartholomew Doome should recommend you is alone good enough for me.... But”—he hesitated, a little embarrassed, and added with an effort—“I’m a rough man, and I hope I don’t make you misunderstand me, but I have two girls, and I want you to be with them and leaven them with your pretty ways; and if you will allow me to do it in my own way, I would rather you did not enter this house as a companion or a governess, for the girls would—take—well, they would take the wrong way with you. If you would enter my house as the daughter of a friend of friends of mine, come for a long visit, I would pay you your fees without its being known to them or anyone, and I think you yourself would be in a better and pleasanter position.” Betty thought over the scheme for a while; her strict code of honour made her consider only the other value—of what she was giving in return. “Yes,” she said—“perhaps it would be best.... May I see the—girls, first?” Pompey Malahide moved eagerly towards the bell, hesitated—came back: “I’m real glad to think it, Miss Modeyne,” said he; “but look here, there’s another thing. I don’t want any schooling for them. They are as old as you are, the more’s the pity—both gals have got their hair up.... Ah,” he sighed, “you would have been the making of ’em five years ago; you see”—he sighed again, sadly—“they’ve modelled themselves a bit on me now.... Their mother never comes out of her boudoir. But what I was going to say was this: you can tell ’em what’s bad manners, and go with them to picture-galleries and show them the good things, can’t ye? and all that!” Betty smiled: “I think I can do that,” she said simply. He nodded: “That’s right. I like to hear a gal say the name of the fellow who did a picture without lookin’ at the catalogue. And all that sort of thing.... Make the girls smart, and knock some sense into them.... They’re as good as gold—real warm-hearted good gals. But they want style. And you can spare them a ton of it—if you’ll excuse a rough and rather vulgar fellow tellin’ you so.” Betty laughed. “I think I should like to see the girls now,” she said, “before we decide.” “Come along, bless ye,” said he, bustling to the door, and walking out first. “Judith!” he bawled—“Mary!” A girl’s voice called back: A door opened, and two young women entered the hall. They were a couple of handsome girls, with a good swinging swagger of the body, and held themselves aggressively in all the trim comeliness of young womanhood, as though they could pay their way and expected the men to cast a glance that same way. Their full red lips were undisciplined; they were the outward sign of their wills, they would do only what it pleased them to do. No young and comely thing is wholly vulgar; and they were young and comely. The stout man’s bloodshot eyes watched the young girl’s face keenly to read what passed on the first impression; but Betty was not easy to read. She turned to him—was touched with the anxious eagerness of his attitude: “Yes,” she said in a low voice—“I will come.” “Girls!” bawled the millionaire—“here is Miss Betty Modeyne, whose father was a friend of a great friend of mine—take her off with you, and introduce her to your mother—she has come to stay for a good long visit, if a soldier’s daughter can put up with the dull house of a city man.” The two girls came and kissed Betty, and, taking her by the arm, adored her. The young love the beautiful and the young.... Nevertheless, Betty decided to keep on her little attic; and, making a business visit the excuse, she went away for the afternoon to purchase garments and brought back with her the black dress-basket—that was largely filled with emptiness. But it had a lock upon its emptiness. Late that afternoon, as the twilight fell, Mr. Pompey Malahide burst in upon Bartholomew Doome, where he sat in the dusk of his studio; the millionaire praised as lavishly as he spent money. “No,” said Doome, “I have never seen her; but I know all about her.... There are so few beautiful women.” “By the book,” said Mr. Pompey, swelling, “a marchioness, sir—a marchioness. And a chit of a girl, too—ties her very ribbons like a damn blue-blooded countess.... I wonder where some women get it!” Doome rose from his chair languidly, and strolled over to the fussing excited man: “Lord of advertisements,” said he, tapping the chest of the other—“there is a book you do not read—it would baffle you as Bradshaw’s railway guide baffles me. That book is called The Extinct and Dormant Peerage.” The stout millionaire stared at him with questioning eyes: “Well?” he asked. “Well,” said Bartholomew Doome—“she comes out of that.” Wherein the Gallant Major rises from the Dead So, for three several months, the summer shone gaily upon the town, and passed away over the edge of the world in happy fashion enough. And Betty grew to some affection for the kindly rough man who was the clumsy lord of this elaborate house. And out of her liking grew an anxious and increasing fearfulness for the girls. The rude father, hoping to polish diamonds, had sent the two girls to a smart school at Brighton; and they, for lack of association with his frank honesty of act and speech at home, and rebuffed by the dull stupidity of a dowdy mother who scarcely ever left her own room, and finding themselves balked by the discipline of school, had fallen into the realizing of their desires by crooked ways. Of their father’s qualities and open candour, of his frankness of statement, they had only kept an outward semblance that was little better than rudeness and bad manners, but it deceived their father and his blunt honest friends; it was thereby the more dangerous cloak for their intriguing and questionable habits. They had gone to school vulgar and tolerably honest; they had come back with some outward veneer of manners, with much swaggering disdain, the aping of masterfulness, a display of the lordly habit, and with souls utterly corrupt. They had gone to school with rough affection for their father; they had come back filled with critical contempt for him, ashamed of him, and at heart afraid of him—dreading that he should discover that they were afraid of him and ashamed of him. The desires of their full red lips were without discipline, and fretted at restraint; and they fed their desires unstintingly and gave encouragement to every whim. They knew enough of the world to recognise at a glance that Betty was above them by habit and by breeding; they soon knew, by results, that her appearance with them anywhere gave them distinction. Their utter lack of all sense of honour embarrassed Betty at every turn. They lied like drudges; and, with the conceit of the weak, they affected an arrogance which they mistook for the habit of the master class, not seeing that they were wholly devoid of the courage which makes fearlessness of the truth the pronounced habit of the master class. He, poor man, looking to their old glad affection for him, which had been their girlish return for his large love of them, found instead, upon his hearth, that there were two critical young women in possession; realized that his rough endearments were coldly received. He thought, as usual, that the fault was in his own manners. The house, ordered by these girls in a spirit of lavish extravagance, reeked of wealth. The young women, innocent of that courtesy to servants which makes of service an honourable act, were at constant and undignified bickering and war with those beneath them; and as they held always the winning card of dismissal, they never realized that the sullen obedience of the world below stairs was as insulting as open insolence; they still less realized that these sullen flunkies took revenge in spoliation, and that what remained of deference was a mockery and covert contempt. So it came about that the sneaks amongst the servants held the lower quarters of the house in their hands. The young women now began to have social aspirations. They had a vague idea that there was some strange pleasure to be got in the mixing with and being seen with those who but gave them chill encouragement to friendship. But as it so chanced, their ambition for they knew not quite what, was fed by the sudden eagerness of women of high social position to trespass on the broad pages and in the social gossip of the columns of the widely read newspaper which Pompey Malahide held at his beck and will—a newspaper which diffused raucous opinions and created the thoughts of millions throughout the country. The girls found themselves courted. Their arrogance grew, and their strut and swagger increased. Malahide dined at great houses. With the master-will of Doome to advise him, Malahide now found his position still further strengthened by the alliance with and friendship of his boy Horace, who had left Harrow and was going up to Oxford. His baffled affection for his girls turned to a passionate pride in his handsome son; and the boy, frank, honest, golden, gay, debonair, returned the old man’s affection, drilled him in the subtleties with gentleness, and watched over his father like a father. The young fellow, with an astuteness that promised well for the rise of his house, was spending the summer with a Magdalen undergraduate, an old Harrow schoolfellow—a young lord whose father was in the Cabinet; in fact, Horace, with airy cheerfulness, was cementing friendships that might be of value to his father in the political life which he was contemplating for himself, and later on for his son. The millionaire hungered for the lad; and, in his absence, he poured into Betty’s ears all his hopes for him, his pride in him, his affection for him. And it was good to see that his pride in the lad’s aristocratic Betty had hoped, for his father’s sake, that the youth would come home for a few days before his term began at Oxford; but when he came she endured her severest trial. Horace Malahide, fresh from the society of well-bred people, at once found himself at ease with Betty. His bright wit, his airy love of life, his frank ways, his affection and his care for his father, his patience and his delicacy in correcting him, won the esteem of the girl. And she, for a day or so, not knowing the attraction of her own beauty, enjoyed his companionship. She realized, all at once, that he was ignoring his sisters. She found it impossible to withdraw herself from the position. Her sudden avoidances of him inflamed the youth’s desire for her companionship. He became a trial to her. Then came letters sad with sighs. How the young dogs all take to the same water! She found a fragment of the poetic pinned to her dressing-table, in which fragment was much rhyming of Modeyne with “I ween,” and tributes to “dainty shoulders chill, and cruel with disdainings keen,” and complaints of “ignorings of worship that any beauty who, less proud of mien, had been, must surely needs have seen.” The dictionary had been ransacked for rhymes. The lad was in the euphemistic stage of poetic debauchery; and Betty could never abide indifferent verse. He chose the surest way to this very desert of ignorings and shoulders chill and the like disdainings. The devil was in it for the lad all through. So the poetic bugling sounded the trump of his rejection. He went up to Oxford; and for close upon three days was well-nigh disconsolate. The lad’s admiration, most unwitting of it, did the girl a sad disservice. The unspoken verdict of their modish brother, in preferring this girl’s society to theirs, roused the ill-will of his neglected sisters; and the two young women, whilst their full red lips kissed Betty good-morning as sweetly as was their wont, took to tittle-tattling against her. The tittle-tattle bred further tittle-tattle, unloosed suggestive and insinuating tongues, and at last Dame Gossip bumped up, giggling, against the doors of The Cock and Bull in Fleet Street. The tavern vomited its secret. The ghost of Major Modeyne arose from the dead and walked; and was seen in Park Lane. Which has to do with one of those Emotional Crises that change the Whole Tenor of a Man’s Political Convictions The millionaire was in the most hearty of good moods—could not sit still in his office—came home and could not sit still in his home. He tramped his house; was jocularly familiar with the servants; slapped the housemaids on the back; gave them half-sovereigns; twitted them about lovers; chaffed the shocked footman; dug the solemn butler Pontefract in the waistband; punched him in the chest and wind, the astounded servant clumsily guarding the threatened parts; and told him crude stories. He told every separate servant of his household, as he had told every separate clerk in his offices on one pretext or other during the morning, that he was to be the guest of honour at a big banquet together with the Marquis of Malahide—“the head of our family, sir.” Mr. Pompey Malahide had always thanked Providence for his own cunning, for his energy, and, to a certain extent, for his luck—or for that small portion of good chance that remained from all successes after the results of his own keen foresight had been deducted, which, to put it fairly, was little enough. But whilst he felt that he himself shared with Providence not a little of his own credit, there was one thing which he frankly set down generously and without reserve of smallest kind to the gods—that he had been born with a name that was in the peerage. The father of Pompey, when he had left the ancestral calling of rat-catcher on the Lincolnshire estates of the old Marquis of Malahide and had come up to London town to seek his fortune, had taken the name of the man for whom he had had the keenest admiration, whilst to his son he had given in lieu of dedication to the saints the name of the dog which had brought him most honour at the local tavern. And by consequence, the son of the rat-catcher, now grown to fortune, had always felt a kinship between himself and the living marquis, whose bluff sailor ways and jovial bearing made him the idol of the populace. Indeed, a print of the great man’s portrait was the most aggressive decoration in the house—topped by a gilt coronet and flanked, That night, Pompey Malahide sat at the banquet, and as he sat he received a whispered communication from a member of the Cabinet at his right hand that made his face to shine, gorgeous, boisterously glorified. And more—when the guests had risen, it made him commit the mistake which sent titters through the city and laughter through the fashionable clubs for many a day; and this he did from sheer joyousness of heart, yet, so intoxicated was he with his magnificence that city gossips were almost justified in setting it down to the full body of the wine. The guests being risen then, and grouping into tattling knots, our Pompey made his way, exultant, to the group that held the jovial figure of the sailor-marquis. “My lord,” said he—“my name is Malahide—Pompey Malahide. My family is—I—er—believe, in some remote way connected with your lordship’s.” After the silence that fell, all eyes seeking the twinkling eyes of the sailor-marquis, our Pompey received his wound. “Likely enough!” roared the admiral, wringing the fat fingers of the exultant Pompey in his treacherous grip—“likely enough!” And his lordship, being mellow with wine, and in a fine rollicking humour, had slapped him a rousing buffet upon the shoulder so that our Pompey coughed, and with a big jolly laugh the nobleman blandly accepted the likelihood. “Ah, yes—likely enough!” he cried. “The old lord was a damned rogue amongst the women!” The Malahides were all hail-fellow thus. The jesting answer, whilst it had tickled, had not a little shocked some that stood near, and, perhaps not the least, the sense of delicacy of the claimant. A chill aloofness might have made the wounded man adore the idol more. What tyrannies will we not suffer from the gods! But to be overwhelmed in city humour had smitten our Pompey in his most sensitive parts. All that night Pompey Malahide knew no sleep. And he arose in the early morning ashamed and sorely wounded. It had been a shabby enough blow, but he had put himself in the way of a drunken fellow’s fisticuff.... Up he got as soon as it was daylight, kicked his heels out of bed, and, having dressed, ranged restlessly about the house; and it thus chanced that one of his daughters, Judith, early risen, came upon him, and twitted him with looking distressed. In a fit of confidence, he showed the girl the wound. And she, seeing her opportunity, petted him, and as soon as she in decency could turn him from his distress, told him of her discovery of the And into the ears of the brooding man the hot red lips dropped a poisonous suggestion of the girl’s seeking marriage with Horace. The man was in the mood to see ghosts in every shadow. He was too much taken up with his own affairs to smell an ugly plot amongst his own kin. He went to the library, his fast unbroken, and with a sour mouth, and rang the bell. He told the footman who answered his summons to send a maid to Miss Modeyne’s room and tell her he would like to see her when she came down. Betty came tripping at the summons; shut the door; and stood a-wonder before the shamed seated man. She stepped forward anxiously: “Mr. Malahide,” she said—“I hope you are not ill.” He shook his head. He saw that the white hand she put on the desk trembled. A hoarse note came into her voice: “I hope nothing has happened to your son—Horace——” He shook his head. “No, Miss Betty—but I have had information, through a friend, an old friend of my family, this morning that I believe is a lie. I hope to God—it is—a—lie.” Betty suddenly understood that she was the subject of the interview, and silence fell upon her. She drew herself up quietly and awaited the blow. “Miss Betty, this good lady says that your father was a quite impossible person. She says that he was a notorious drunkard. Was he?” Betty bowed her head. “Yes,” she said simply. The hope went out of the man’s eyes; he tried again, trusting to a denial: “She says that he was the subject of a coroner’s inquest, and that his disreputable life was the talk of the town a while ago. Was that so?” Betty said nothing. “She says that he was a Papist—that you came into my house and breathed no word of it. Is that so?” Still no answer. “She says that your companionship may sully the innocence of my girls; which is a damned lie—excuse my saying so.... But she says that people are making comments about my girls being seen with you.... I wish to God that were a lie too.” The brooding man put his face in his hands; and there was a long silence. He roused after a little while and went on again: “She says that you, if you stay here, may win the regard of my boy Horace—she says that it would be worse than Miss Sally Ornce.” For a moment Betty thought wearily that he referred to the The clumsy man gazed miserably out of the window: “I don’t know what in God’s wonder to do,” he said. The girl bowed: “I understand,” she said. “I will go.” She went and shook hands with him; and quietly left the room.... The two ladies, straining their ears at the door that stood slightly ajar into the next room, were edified. They opened the door a little way and peeped in. They would have been extremely annoyed had they known that Betty had caught a glimpse of them—had taken in the situation at a flash. They were surprised to hear their father sigh. When he put his head down on the table and sobbed, they stole away. Indeed, tittering over the details afterwards with friends, they declared, if we may take the word of such as listen at doors, that they were highly amused—that it was near as good as a play.... Betty, tipping the cabman for taking her trunk up to her attic, knocked at Miss Flora Jennyns’ door, entered, and, running to the little old lady’s chair, sank on the footstool at her feet and flung her arms about her knees. “I have come home,” she said, happy to be with the old gentlewoman again. Miss Flora put out her hand and stroked the girl’s brown hair; and she smiled through tears. “I have been very lonely,” she said. A couple of days after Betty had gone, Mr. Pompey Malahide sat down at his desk, a bland smile upon him, and wrote to his son:
Which, to some extent, discloses the Incident of the Sentimental Tea-cups Anthony, forestalling the youngster’s fretting for the girl’s companionship, decided to send him up to Oxford at once; but with all haste it was some months before he could go, and the lad, though he stuck manfully to his heavy work with the tutor, became languid and listless and vague. He fretted silently, and was filled with an ugly distrust of those about him. It had brought to him a sudden revelation of the need to stand alone—a revelation that is a part of the heritage of life to all at emergence from youth, but comes to some roughly enough. He grimly forbore from asking questions, and fell away from his frank boyish friendship with his own people—the cheery, intimate, and open good-fellowship with his father and his mother gave way to a strange aloofness, and there developed in its place a self-reliance and a haughty desire to try the wings of his own judgment that bred much foolishness, as well as strength. His mother sadly put down the lad’s cubbishness to the coming of manhood, and accepted much of the brusqueness as being a part of the inevitable period of cubhood when the whelp is for trying its strength and for leaving the litter. The lad’s arrival at Oxford started the man’s shadow in him to life. He moved towards the shadow eagerly, and grasped at the reality which cast it. Flung suddenly into a sea of youth of his own age, he was at grips with his own strength at once—tried it, as by instinct, against the wills of the youths about him, all of whom, also come abroad out of their homes, were essaying their strength and affections and cunning upon each other, straining the cords wilfully to the breaking pitch both of the affections and of the hostilities. It was the best thing that could have happened to the young blood; the strain of the life kept him from the fret of the injustice that had been put upon him, and drew his mind for awhile from brooding on the blackness of the empty place where his natural mate had until now moved in dainty harmony with his existence. He was in a new world. The atmosphere here was wholly different. It was less literary, more academic; less intellectual, more scholastic; less original, more conventional; less artistic, more grammatic—life, literature, art, every human activity was judged, not by the standard of the emotions, but by the restrictions of the common law, by precedents. The very pleasures were built upon tradition; he could not amuse himself as he willed without being looked upon askance. And all this atmosphere, odd to say, was not created by the professors, but by the youths of his own age, who were coming up from the great public schools. The young fellow began at once to win the friendship of such of the youngsters as had his own frank habits and ways; and it was at this phase that was born his lifelong friendship with young Horace Malahide. Everything in the relation of his fellows to him was done through an atmosphere. His first term threw him into nodding acquaintance with two or three young peers of his own year, and with youngsters who were the sons of county magnates—several of them indeed county magnates themselves. These young fellows he found to be friendly and genial to a certain point, when suddenly they stepped into another atmosphere from which he was subtly excluded. It was done by the most delicate of tricks, and was chiefly made apparent by their manner towards another in their own atmosphere as in comparison with their manner towards him. He noticed the youngsters who had been school-friends at the great public schools, now drifted apart, shifted their affection, stepped quietly away from their old association and habits, and were swallowed each into a well-defined set.... When, however, Noll returned to Oxford for his second term he found himself in a new atmosphere. One of the young peers walked into his rooms as an intimate friend—accosted him with the heartiness that showed him he had passed into the set—he was the same youth—the other was the same youth—something had chanced, and changed the attitude. Noll bent his big brows upon it, resenting it as an impertinence. But the others were equally urbane, friendly—yet not a word passed—there was nothing to make the excuse for a resentment. He only knew some while afterwards that Lord Wyntwarde had asked the youth, meeting him in the hunting-field, if a young cousin of his, one Noll Baddlesmere, were not up at Magdalen with Noll thenceforth moved in the set, and its allied sets. He breathed the atmosphere. But being an airy person, of kindly and genial nature, he was not by way of examining into motives, nor of very strictly carrying out the subtle hints of the others in the Atmosphere; thus it came about that he dove-tailed several cliques that would otherwise have practised a more rigid exclusiveness towards each other. And he carried with him, into the most exclusive groups of young nobles, amongst whom he was soon well-liked, his genial friend Horace Malahide.... Noll’s career at Oxford was a short one. He nearly got through his first year. A certain superficial cleverness laid the gin for the lad’s fall. His taste in literary expression had been cultivated to a brilliancy beyond his years by association with the witty Bohemians, and by the reading of good work; it had, above all, been developed by the artistic guidance of Eustace Lovegood. The lad therefore now found it difficult to wade through the cheap academic facetiousness and thin style of the literary ventures that exploited in dullard local reviews the anÆmic wit which passed for fiery originality amongst the undergraduates, and mistook itself for a revolutionary upheaval in their puerile and stupid magazines. It was natural that he should write, with an almost uncanny facility, a sketch, daring, skilful, and precocious enough to stand out amidst this dead level of the commonplace. He at once made a mark which exaggerated his powers, judged only by comparison with much that was colourless and bloodless and vapid and weak. As a sure result, having caught the eye of the others, and hearing himself quoted, he wrote again; and by the greatest misfortune and not in the least realizing that he was stirring the most offensive of mud in the otherwise healthy stream of the life of the schools, he wrote a satiric sketch on the Greek friendship of two notorious youths, that sent spluttering laughter through the halls and common-rooms, and made the position of the two young nobles at the university wholly untenable. The laughter that greeted The Eton Marriage was not run down when Horace Malahide followed with a satiric newspaper report of the divorce of the two youths, in which dons were solemnly trotted out as chaperons and society beauties and lawyers and officers of the court; whilst a ridiculous series of questions and answers, in examination and cross examination, aired the foibles and cranks and eccentricities and confirmed waggeries of the more pronounced local celebrities. Written as a mere whimsical squib on the seemingly ill-assorted friendship of a burly athletic youth for a dandified effeminate lordling of almost womanly beauty and Æsthetic pretensions, the squib burst and discovered an awful and ugly state of affairs. To none did it bring more startling illumination than to the makers of the squib. Noll and Horace hammered out the business, and came to the conclusion that a certain lack of good-taste on their own part had cost their beloved university a very ugly blow; they withdrew their names at the hint of the solemn faces of their masters and superiors who ruled over them, and gave their farewell reception. They purged their contempt in tea. Noll, in a fit of retrenchment, said it must be tea; having discovered that he had run through his whole three years’ allowances. Horace, always shy of displaying his wealth, on the theory that it was against good taste in the newly enriched, supported the decision for economy and tea—and ordered the most exquisite Limoges service for the solemnities. In far London, Bartholomew Doome, scenting aroma of naughtiness in the air, hastened down to Horace and Oxford for the day, fearing to be out of the scandal, and added his Byronic gloom and atmosphere of tragic wickedness to the smoke-filled rooms. He made a profound impression and many friends; indeed, it may be admitted without exaggerating his success that he was betrayed into no slightest hint of a decent emotion. The tea being drunk, and the kindly farewells taken, the roomful of youths solemnly stood up, and Noll and Horace as solemnly broke their cups that none should again drink from them or sully the memory of the glorious days they had all spent together. The pieces were flung into the street. The others, each taking a cup and saucer with them, in memory of their friendship, shook hands and filed slowly out. As youth broke sentimental tea-cups, the Oxford tradesman who owned the debt for them, sitting in his little counting-house, was reading a letter from a Hebrew friend in the offices of The Tradesmen’s Defence League in London. This letter, after various facetious references to the tradesman’s family, proceeds to display the very shrewdest knowledge of the details that made up Noll’s family history—his connections, his prospects—not wholly unmixed with some sly wit and comical allusions. The writer thinks that Noll may be a coming man, he has done so badly at Oxford; considers that he is not devoid of generous and honourable instincts; is of opinion that any debt he may contract will eventually be paid; and ends with the personal note as thus:
Wherein we are bewildered by the Cooings of Chivalry Betty, flung back again upon her own resources, realized that, for a woman, there were two careers elaborately ordered by the deliberate plan of the world—marriage or vice. For the rest, to woman had been flung the slave-callings, the menial ends of professions, the ill-paid jobs of the commerce of life. This shabby deed of gift was leprously covered by an hypocrisy of Chivalry—which in practice largely worked out as the courting, when it did not interfere with other pleasures, of the young and comely women; the seizing and exploiting of the fortunes of the middle-aged; and the neglect of the old and the unprepossessing. For a while Betty was at her wits’ end to know how to earn the wage of decency, when she again decided to apply to Netherby and ask him to get her some literary hack-work; and Netherby, entrusting her with a review or two of books, was delighted with the result, as was also his editor. Betty felt thankful to be doing work that did not force upon her the wading in personal humiliations; and this her new means of breadwinning, small though it was, helped in its very exercise to give her facility in the craftsmanship of her art—her hand thereby increased its cunning, and literary expression became a confirmed habit. She soon passed from the stage of seeking a style—the careful and laborious picking out of the notes from the music of the instrument and the placing them in telling harmonies, to the mastery of the whole range and gamut of the instrument, when the music came resonant and vivid in answer to the mood of her desire. And she practised also the inevitable typewriter, taking bouts of work upon occasion, to win a little bread or to help Julia to the winning. Click-click-click went the deft fingers, spelling out into print the ill-shaped grammar of the city. She saw much of Julia in these days; and to Julia she brought incalculable good—her cheerfulness and the gaiety and tenderness of her sweet young womanhood gave to the narrow-shouldered half-starved city girl a wholesome companionship that filled out her thin life and enlarged her cockney vision. Julia inhaled the atmosphere of good-breeding and of uncomplaining cheerful Slave-castes mistake womanishness for womanliness. A true woman is neither an idiot nor a man. The girl Julia had lived her girlhood receptively feminine—courageous in her defensive virtues. She was now roused to the positive virtues of womanhood. Which touches upon the Pains of Enjoying the Glow of Self-Abasement whilst Maintaining a Position of Dignity As Noll and Horace stood on the platform of the railway-station at Oxford, waiting for the London express to take them to town, Horace Malahide began to feel some discomfort about the brooding mood of the other—for the first time he was distressed with the question whether they ought not to have remained at Oxford. He knew that Noll had but narrow means. Guessing that Noll was in some embarrassment as to how to explain his sudden return to his people, he, to divert him from worrying, called his wandering attention to a newspaper criticism upon a book which had just come out and was creating considerable stir in the literary world. Horace, holding up the newspaper criticism, put his finger upon the name of Caroline Baddlesmere. Noll roused and read the notice. The writer, Anthony Bickersteth, was proclaimed as the founder of a new school—a new star had risen above the dead level of the commonplace literature of the day—and all of the review that was not violent praise of this Anthony Bickersteth was the cover for a bitter and sneering screed against the work of Caroline Baddlesmere, who, so it bluntly averred, had gone well-nigh to destroying English as an artistic language. The writer’s judgment would have been of more weight, perhaps, had his English been of more value; but even his ill-balanced phrasing, his academic eyes, his dullard’s palate, and his faulty ear, could not altogether damn the object of his adoration; and Noll, struck by the beauty of phrasing in some of the quoted passages, bought a copy of the book at the station stall as the train came clanking in. He ran through its pages on his journey to town.... As they rattled through the outskirts of London, Horace, who had been watching the other’s face, asked: “Is it any good, Noll?” Noll shut up the book, and stretched himself: “Very good,” said he—“but I think the fellow would have shown better taste not to hit at my mother in the Preface.” There was a long pause. Horace broke it: “I’m not going home, thanks,” said Noll—and he added, seeing surprise in the eyes of the other: “I’ve got to face old Lord Wyntwarde first—he’s a sort of relation of mine—and has been paying for my being at Oxford.... My own people are very badly off.... I don’t think I ought to let the unpleasantness of the interview fall upon my people. And I’m funking it....” And he added grimly, after a while: “I understand why men sometimes get drunk.” Horace laughed: “Oh,” said he—“it’ll blow over all right.... Look here, Noll; you’d better come to my people to-day, stay over the night, and go on to-morrow to the eating of dirt....” So it came that Noll spent his first evening in the Malahide household. And the girls both vowed the next day to their separate bosom friends that they “had met their fate.” It leaked out during the confidences of each that Horace had discovered to them that the youth was kinsman to a certain Lord Wyntwarde.... The hot-headed old lord stood a-straddle before his fireplace, and smiled grimly. How the blood of this house repeated itself! Here was this young fellow pacing up and down the room as though he were laying down the terms of a surrender. By the dogs, a handsome young fellow! Like his mother—with a trick or two of the father in him. He himself had thus prowled this room in like disgrace with the lord of the house years ago. What a while ago!... This lad’s father also—now this one! By the book, wonderful! The fact was that the old lord’s wilful admiration followed this proud lad with a sense of affection that was strange to him—the youth appealed to him more than did the more elaborate father. He had more of the beauty of the old house about him. “Noll, my lad,” said he, “I haven’t been listening over-well to what you have been saying—I’ve been thinking hard that you ought to have been my son.” Noll stopped in his walk, stopped in his talk—hesitated. He uttered an embarrassed laugh: “I have been apologizing, sir,” he said. “Have you?” growled Wyntwarde. “That is a relief to me—I thought you were ordering me to apologize.” Noll shrugged his shoulders, and took to his pacing of the room again, silenced. The old lord watched him grimly, saying nothing. Noll suddenly halted, swung round, and faced him: “I am sorry, sir,” said he—“I ought to have rid you of my company before this. But I felt bound to make you what poor reparation I could for all your goodness to me. I did not write, because—a personal apology is always far more punishment to me than the written word. This has been a punishing task to me—I Wyntwarde laughed: “Oho, Noll—so you are run dry at last!... Now I can get a word in edgeways; and I, too, may cackle, though it lack your literary finish.... You see, as we are in the confessional, I may say I have been a bit of a dog in my day. And, by Beelzebub! the gout hasn’t altogether driven the last spark out of me yet.... The tongues still wag about me, I have no smallest doubt.... It isn’t for me to preach you a sermon on your tom-follies, for they are infernally like my own. By God, you are no curate, there’s that much against you in heaven. Still, I will tell you bluntly, I have only had one fear for you—and that is the dandified schoolmaster that is in the heart of your father. The Ffolliotts never had any of the damned studious habits—we have always been sportsmen and gentlemen. And, by my soul, I believe you are bitten by the self-same dog.... It’s this literary business that makes me anxious about you; but a lampoon and a sharp tongue we all of us had the knack of using—that don’t go with long hair and inky fingers and spectacles nor a milkman’s seat on a horse. By God, you may lampoon the Lord Chancellor, for all I care—I never go to the House of Lords except to keep the damned idiot in his place. Lords Chancellor nowadays seem to think the Upper House is a confounded dames’ school. Damn all Lords Chancellor, say I——” “Yes, sir—damn all Lords Chancellor!” said Noll drily. Wyntwarde laughed: “Yes,” said he—“we wander.... Now, look you here, Noll—this house is free to you as long as you keep your fingers from ink-stains and your lips from preaching—the stables are not empty of horses. And, what’s more, I still hold to my bond. The ’Varsity is over—down goes three hundred a year. It would be damned bad morals to give you that again. But you shall have a couple of hundred a year as long as rumour speaks well of you; but the day you throw up the society of gentlemen and mix with the inky-fingered gentry, I will not only cancel you from my will, but, by the dogs, I stop even the allowance——” “I do not accept benefits under threat, sir,” said Noll. Wyntwarde stopped, scowled—burst into a laugh, and passed the matter by: “I would make it more,” he said; “but I suspect the ink-pot——” “If I have a mind to spill ink I will spill it,” said the youth hotly. The old lord chuckled: “You are your father’s son, my boy, on occasion,” said he. “Well, there’s nothing to attract you here just now; but you had better come down for the hunting next winter, eh?” Noll made a step towards him—hesitated—his mouth hardened: The old lord laughed loudly and long: “By God,” said he—“you are a man!” He went to the youth and gripped him by the shoulders: “No, Noll—it can’t be. Your mother would never stand the new aristocracy—it’s so damned like the old profligacy—without the breeding.... Good-bye, my boy; and damn all ink-stains, say I!”... As Noll reached London he decided to go and see his mother, and make her acquainted with his doings and his intentions. He had an uneasy feeling that he had unjustly neglected her of late. He was glad to find, when he arrived, that his father was away from home. As his mother stood there in her attic, listening to him, Noll was filled with a glow of pride in her gentle womanly dignity and her resourceful and uncomplaining good breeding. The place had an air that made the word “attic” classical.... Noll, somewhat embarrassed as to how to broach the subject, had begun by denouncing the preface to the new book which held a sneer at his mother; and she had laughed it quietly by. Then Noll had told her of the reviews; and ended by giving her something of a lesson in the art of letters! He himself thought very well of this new book—and gave his mother more than one good hint from Anthony Bickersteth. Caroline turned to the little mirror over the mantel, as the youth finished speaking, to hide a little dry smile that played about her mouth. She touched her hair with handsome white hands. It was a trick she had. Noll saw the movement; caught the reflected smile in the mirror; and faltered. It came to him that he had been just a trifle patronizing to his mother about this new book by Anthony Bickersteth—a little condescending about her powers. He was chilled with a sudden uneasiness. “Well, Noll?” she asked. Noll went to the attic window and looked out: “Mother,” said he—“I feel ashamed of these doles from Wyntwarde—I must win a career with the pen, and be rid of them.” “You are taking to the hardest trade in the world, Noll—and all the harder because it looks the easiest. Still, I am wholly with you in the sentiment. I should be sorry indeed to see you dependent on Wyntwarde. And I am glad to have you at home—I was looking at your child toys last night, and—I—felt—almost—as if—you were dead!” Noll was silent for awhile: “I find it rather hard to say what I came to say, mother, after that,” said he. “Ah, Noll,” she said—“it is not your fault or mine that childhood “Well, mother—I have found a couple of rooms in New Inn, that will just hold me; and, without Wyntwarde’s help, I ought to be able to keep myself and get into the way of winning my own bread in a very few months.” Caroline Baddlesmere sighed: “Yes, Noll—it is perhaps better that you should make your own life—and in your own way. It is one of the agonies of motherhood that the brood must leave the nest.” “No, mother—it is not that.... I have to pass a room on the stairs that—in the passing—makes my heart ache—takes the man out of me.” His lip trembled. “Yes, Noll; I understand. I have seen you fret at many things here—as I myself have sometimes fretted at them.... I am able, too, to help you a little now—I have had a little windfall——” Noll left the window and went to his mother. He put his hands on her shoulders: “No, mother. I will have none of it. You ought not to be living in an attic—and I am not going to help to keep you there. It is one of the prospects that will make me work—that I should see you in your proper position. Not that, God knows, this attic has ever given me a moment’s shame; for you have made it a palace to me.” Caroline kissed his handsome face: “Noll,” said she—“you are something of a man.” Which is Uneasy with the Restlessness of Youth Sir Pompey Malahide came 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 of 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 the AthenÆum. 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 to his interest 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 to his exertions and his following 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. 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: “For “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:
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. Which has to do with the Breaking of a Pretty Lady’s Picture Horace at this time by letter again urges Noll to get him forthwith and for awhile to Paris and live amongst the clouds—puts it in terms of poetry and of romance and of pounds shillings and pence—essaying all the temptations. His letter ends on the Horatian note: “And, my dear old Noll, do, for the love of art, go and see my people. My old father has urgings to speak on the Liberty of the Press—England’s great Heritage of Freedom—the Source of her Magnificence, of her Benignant Purity—which through Journalism has built up the Conscience of the People—Tol-lol-der-rol-lol-der-rol-lay—and all the rest of it. You know the thumping music of the National Organ when all the stops are out. Now, do give Doome some aid in educating the dear old sire in letters. Look what revolution he hath wrought in English furnishments! The father’s name; is it not become the household word for the artistic home? And why? Because he discovered the Man who could tell him what was good furnishment. He himself at inmost heart prefers the cuckoo-clock.... And the girls too, thou canst widen their view, enlarge the outlook of their narrow Putney eyes; your good-fellowship must of a certainty mitigate their cockney ambitions. They write to me of ‘cutting’ people—‘giving the cold shoulder’ to old friends—they are bitten with all the smart vulgarities, for all the world like dÉclassÉ duchesses and such as are not of assured position. Get thee to my father’s house, Noll—and bear with the overplus of marble, the gaudy boastfulness of the too ornate enrichments. There’s a big heart at the back of it all, and it loves thee. Horace. P.S.—I never suspected Jonkin of being a prude. He makes me feel thrillingly immoral—like a school-girl reading her first classic.” When Noll arrived at the Malahides in the afternoon, Sir Pompey was away from home; but the ladies of the house greeted him gladly. He had not been long with the two young women before he was overwhelmed with the embarrassment of their frank admiration. The elder girl caused him no little uneasiness by her attitude towards him; which the buxom Miss Mary further increased by Noll was never wholly at home amongst the crudities; but he shook off embarrassment, and made an effort to entertain the comely Judith. But ordinary converse died a natural death—Judith Malahide was in no mood for words. She held the handsome young fellow with her handsome eyes; she was unwontedly quiet, and, for marvellous and becoming change, her bearing was restrained with the compelling dignity of passion. She came and stood by him, and Noll realized, with a catch of the breath, that he was being drawn into the whirl of a reckless young woman’s inordinate desire. “Why have you been so long away, Noll?” she asked. Noll in a careless moment answered lightly: “How was I to know that you thought it long, Miss Judith?” The girl’s mood took flame: “There are things a man knows without the telling,” she said. “I would not give a sigh for a man who——” She turned and gazed out of the window; and added with lowered voice: “I had better not say what I was going to say; but—your lips provoke me—to—say things.” Noll watched her for awhile—the exquisite skin, the undisciplined full red mouth, the handsome head. He found a strange pleasure in the nearness of her splendid beauty. She turned to him suddenly; caught the lingering admiration in his eyes: “I should like to know exactly what you were thinking,” she said, commandingly; “do you think you dare tell me?” “I think I dare,” he said lightly; and added seriously: “But I would rather not.” “I want to know,” she said. “I was wondering whether a beautiful woman’s beauty is as much pleasure to herself as it is to——” “To whom?” She finished the broken enigma for him. “To those who look upon it,” he evaded. “And who was the woman, Noll?” He smiled: “Well, to be frank, I would rather not say—it would sound rather fulsome.” She laughed, and reddened: “I think most people, men and women, think they are good-looking—I think handsome people have pleasure in their good looks.... I have.... But it does not bring me the glow that looking at you gives me.” She put her hand upon her bosom. “Miss Judith!” “Any more wonders to unravel?” she asked. She laughed sadly: “So we are to be wise, eh?” She came close to him: “But you have not told me how you are moved by a woman’s face—so how can I tell you—what——” “Miss Judith, I am afraid we are playing with fire.” She turned, frowning out of the window: “You are right,” she said. “These things are made of fire—they are beyond speech.” She turned and came very close to him: “But,” she added hoarsely, “your lips could tell my lips—without—all this prattle——” She put her warm hand upon his sleeve: “I want to know,” she said. “Tsh!” said he. She turned swiftly to the window. A servant entered the room; and the girl, standing still, steadied herself with sudden self-command. “Come,” she said at last—“you have not seen the new white boudoir.” Noll roused, seizing an excuse to leave: “I must be going,” he said. But she would have no denial; and led him upstairs to an exquisitely decorated white room, the beauty of which at once revealed the artistic taste of Bartholomew Doome. Noll saw, as the door closed upon him, that he was in the girl’s boudoir. She came to him, put her arms about his neck, and kissed him. “You do not kiss me, Noll,” she complained passionately. Noll unlocked her arms: “Hush!” said he, and walked to the window. She came and nestled against his shoulder. “Noll, I can’t live this nun’s life——” He put her gently from him: “This is madness,” said he—“utter madness——” He strode to the door—stopped half way: “My God!” he said hoarsely. She followed the gaze of his eyes to the white mantel: “What is it, Noll?” “There is the picture of the girl—to whom I—am—betrothed.” She roused, and stepping, catlike, to the mantel, took down the little portrait of Betty and flung it upon the white marble hearth. The glass smashed, flying into a hundred tinkling pieces. Noll watched her coldly: “Where is Betty Modeyne?” he demanded roughly. The girl faltered, uttered a moan, and leaning her handsome head on the white hand that clutched the mantel, gazed down upon the shattered thing. “Where is Betty Modeyne?” he asked, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. She sighed, and said miserably: “I’m sorry, Noll—but, thank God, I cannot tell you. She is gone.” Wherein, the Barber letting the Cat out of the Bag, we give Chase In the gathering darkness of his dingy little room over the southern gate of New Inn sat Noll Baddlesmere in his shirt-sleeves, cudgelling his wandering wits for epigrams and the dramatic situation; yet though the dun walls did not distract his attention with the restlessness of over-abundant gaieties, nor the sedate quietude nor the narrow view from his grimy windows strain his nerves—indeed, he could scarce hear the turmoil of the traffic in the great Strand hard by—he was unable to settle down to hard work, nor could he rid himself of the fret of his thoughts. For hours he had thus striven to banish his loneliness, but our deceptions fail at last even to deceive ourselves. His instincts were bent on finding Betty; and the gloom of the dying day, though it thwarted his eyesight and raised disturbing ghosts of thought, held the whisper of the fact that he had come near to the flying glimpse of her. It was as though her skirts had rustled across his dreams in the ornate halls of the Malahides, flipped into a baffling doorway, and vanished into mocking silence—yet but a door between. He fretted that he could find no slightest trace of her. He flung down his pen; arose from his desk in the dusky gloom; dressed for the street; and strolled out of his rooms aimlessly into the grey of the evening that held the old quadrangle in a smoky stillness. In the vexed traffic of the Strand he suddenly bethought him of Devlin; and straightway turned his steps towards the barber’s. As he reached the corner of the street where Devlin plied the scissors, he saw Myre hail a hansom and drive off in it. Noll, entering the barber’s room, was greeted by the little cockney Irishman with frantic delight; and Noll himself was glad to step back across the threshold into his old world. He gave up his hat to the dandified little man and sat down in the barber’s chair before the mirror, the little man fussing about him the while. “Devlin,” said he, lying back in the chair, “I saw Mr. Myre leaving this place——” “That’s so, sir,” said Devlin. He tucked some white towels under his chin. “And faith, it’s quite the great man he is now.” “Hoho!” said Noll—“affluent and well-to-do, eh? I suppose he has quite divorced himself from Art, then!” “What’s that?” screamed Devlin, stopping his lathering. “Mr. Myre divorced from Art!” He went to the door to see that it was carefully closed. “Whisht, sir; it’s a fine hairy libel-action ye’ll be wadin’ in at the police courts, Mr. Noll, if ye don’t hold a restraint on ye.” “But my good Devlin—he always swore that reward and affluence destroy the artist!” Devlin laughed; and got back to his lathering: “Ah, Mr. Noll, it’s your old self, it is—findin’ flaws in the Irish logic of him.” He chose a razor. “By the book, I remember well the day Mr. Lovegood pulled the leg of the great man here. Ye’ll remember it, maybe. No?” He held Noll’s chin with damp fingers and began to shave: “Well, says Mr. Myre, says he, it’s death and to the devil with art when the artist works for money and reward, says he. That’s so, says Mr. Lovegood, for I always thought meself, says Lovegood, down in the great resoundin’ belly of him, says he: I always thought meself, says he, that Willie Shakespeare would have turned out less indifferent poetry, says he, if he hadn’t been trying to fill the stalls in his old Globe Theatre all the time, says he, and makin’ eight thousand a year, present reckoning, out of the damned blank poetry of him, says he.... Mr. Myre he licked his lips, wid a black sullen look on him, like a dog that’s been robbed of his bone. And, by the powers, the most simple law officer of the Crown could have foretold that Mr. Myre was going to have a sudden engagement in the city thin and there from the wan smile that came over the head of him. But——” He concentrated his whole attention for a while on the upper lip of Noll, and having shaved it, he added: “But it’s the black mental gloom that got a holt of the great man that day.” “Oh?” asked Noll. “That’s so,” said the barber. “Oh, yes.... And ye didn’t hear tell of it, sir?... Mother of God, it was the talk of the sivin continents.... Ah, begod, sure it’s a damned penny-whistle this Fame, anny way. Ah, sir; it was a great fall that, mind ye. He took it like Julius CÆsar with the Opposition takin’ hacks out of him under Pompey’s pillar—just wid a wan dignified look on him.... Oh, yes; he’s a great man. If stickin’ to it, and the divil’s own confidence in one’s own greatness, and industry, and strong opinions and histrionic adultery can make genius, that man’s a barrel of it——” He was drying Noll’s face, and removing the shaving-cloths from about his chin when the cling of the door-bell gave warning “Whisht!” said the barber, “here’s Mr. Cartel Maungy.” “Who?” “Whisht! I’ll tell ye when he’s gone, Mr. Noll. Sure, the paper’s lyin’ about there somewheres—and I’ll have done with the gintleman in three minutes forty-five seconds.” Noll nodded, and betook himself to a seat, suspecting some mystery that the barber would divulge after his own quaint fashion, which brooked no hurrying—to end in some fantastic nothingness or a good story. The door opened, and there entered, sedate and old-aired, a handsome dandified little old gentleman. The barber, with gorgeous bow and diffident formality, relieved the silent man of his hat and cane, and leading him to a seat, soon had him swathed to the chin in cloths, and was shaving the soap-lathered ascetic face that gazed at the ceiling meditatively. The shaving being done, and the swathings of many white cloths removed from about his chin and shoulders, the courtly figure arose from the chair, and being given his hat and cane by the even more elaborate barber, he withdrew from the room. “Who’s that?” asked Noll. “Well, sir; he’s a kind of Frenchified poet av the name of Cartel de Maungy.... The gintlemen call him The Man of Pallid Ideals,” said the barber. “The gintlemen were saying only last night that he’s been a bit of a literary genius in his time in the minor poet line; but Misther Myre he says the man’s but an Inkstain on the Carpet of Time. Oh, but it’s a trenchant tongue Misther Myre’s got on him when he gets handlin’ the comparisons against literary reputations——” “Yes, yes, Devlin—never mind Mr. Myre. About this man of pallid ideals——” The barber lowered his voice to the confidential: “Ah, now that’s a mighty queer story, Mr. Noll. It’s the victim of the grand passion that man is; Vanus rest his soul. Victim? begod!—he’s the hero of a romance that’s kept a holt of him since his chin began the need of shavin’—and that’s as long as your grandfather or mine can remimber the seasons. That man has just played on the music of his little love-affair until he’s clean pulled the cat-gut out of the old fiddle—plucked at the shtrings of the old melody until he’s torn the bowels out of the old harpsichord of Romance.... Sure, my father shaved him before me, and remembered the day it got about that the girl’s father swore he’d have no damned Frenchified poetaster for son-in-law. And the little gintleman’s been lovin’ the girl ever since, until there’s only the memory of them both left to each other. He might have married the little lady this forty years—the divil a soul to prevent it—but——” He shrugged his shoulders, and gave up the tangle. “Well?” asked Noll. “Well, he goes and walks before her doorway every evenin’, as Noll rose to his feet. “Where?” The barber was startled. Noll strode up to him: “Where does Miss Betty live?” he asked, hoarsely. The little barber gazed at him: “It isn’t ghosts ye are seeing, Mr. Noll?” he asked. Noll put his hand on the other’s shoulder: “Quick, man—where is the house?” “Ah, now—Mr. Noll—ye’re pullin’ the innocent leg of me,” he said, laughing. Noll pulled himself together. He strode to the door. “Quick, Devlin—for God’s sake! Which way does—the—the man of pallid ideals usually go?” he asked roughly. The barber followed him to the street, and standing in the lamp-lit dusk he pointed out the way: “Up there, till ye reach that turn by the red pillar-box, then sharp to the right—then straight on till ye—— Begad, he’s off like a policeman down the kitchen steps when the area belle’s a-ringing——” He stood gaping at the vanishing figure of the youth who strode up the street. The little man’s jaw dropped. “Oh, murder!” He scratched his poll aghast: “Mother of God!” said he—“of coorse! Victoria May Alice told me—there’s been a misunderstandin’—or maybe even a partin’—or some heathen tom-noddy——” He walked into his shop soberly. “Mike Devlin,” said he—and he rubbed his chin ruefully: “ye’ve put your great damn foot slap into the big drum of the farcical tragedy.” Noll strode out. In the glimmering grey of the hustling world he tramped; but the hush was alive with whispers—and the blood was jumping in him. He caught sight at last of the distant back of the Man of Pallid Ideals. He turned, after some walking, into one of those silent streets that give off the noisy thoroughfare of the roaring city, and by the silence he knew that he was in a street where lodgings are. At once he slackened pace, for, a hundred strides before him, walked slowly the slender Man of Pallid Ideals, who at last halted, stood a little while looking up at a window across the street, sighed, and passed brooding into the twilight beyond. Not so Noll. He marked the halting-place, paced the distance, and swung round towards the house opposite. He strode straight across the road, and rang the bell. When the maid opened the door, Noll said: “I wish to see Miss Betty Modeyne at once, please—lead the way to her rooms.” The maid, used to the unquestioning obedience of orders, when given with authority, led the way upstairs, regardless of all the proprieties, careless of etiquette.... Arrived at the topmost landing, she threw open the door: “A visitor to see you, miss,” cried she, wheezy at the high climb; admitted the handsome youth; and forthwith took herself off, descending to her household furbishings and area gossip. Betty, rising from her chair, set aside some needlework, and turned to greet. She saw the youth standing before the closed door, his back to it. She put her white hands upon her bosom. “Noll!” she whispered; and a glad smile of wonder was in her eyes; and the red blood flushed her cheek and lip. Noll went to her and put his arms about her, and kissed her upon the mouth. And he said never a word. Which, in Somewhat Indelicate Eavesdropping Fashion, hovers about a Trysting-Place, and Scandalously Repeats a Private Conversation In the wintry twilight that came hazing softly down upon the city, and cast its dusky shadow over St. James’s Park, sat Noll on a bench, and by his side was Betty Modeyne. He sat stooped forward, elbow on knee, chin in hand, and gazed at the girl’s face lovingly. “Thou dearest heart!” said he; and she reached out her dainty gloved hand and took his within her slender fingers. “Betty,” said he, “you have brought delight to me again—the day and night are full of song and all the world is grown musical—you paint the very greys of life with colour. I am glad to be alive—for you feed my eyes with dreams of you and my senses with the fragrance of you. It would be enough to be alive, but you have filled me with eagerness, my bones with strength, my body with will.... I cannot sit idle longer, nor be content with half-life.... You must marry me, dear heart; and we will go to Paris and begin living splendidly and a-new.” “Hush, Noll,” said she, smiling down upon him; and she stroked his hand. “We are so young, and—I am so glad——” He laughed for love of her: “You would not have us grow old in pretty nothingness, thou dearest of all born things,” he said impatiently—“like the Man of Pallid Ideals and his little faded poetess, dreaming themselves away in a fragile world of dreams! My Betty, it cannot be.” She shook her head provokingly. He pshawed: “We do not live by denials alone, you sweet dreamer,” said he, feeding his eyes upon her eyes—“we are here to live our life—not to shirk the living.... Our feet are planted on the dear brown earth, and only so may we raise our heads amongst the stars.... They prate of other worlds who themselves after all only judge of other worlds by the glorious life that their dullard eyes so scorn in this.... They hold out heavens to us! but what trumpet blast of all the sepulchral souls in heaven shall stir a man like the touch of your dear lips?” He laughed quietly, kissing her gloved fingers: “Are not your very hands exquisitely fashioned but to steal away a man’s heart, my Betty? Why does your white self hold me enthralled unless it be that I may love you—not the vague image of you?” Betty laughed happily: “Well, Noll,” said she—“if you forget me as wholly as you have done these two years, I can almost bear it!” “You were becoming obliterated, sweetheart,” said he hoarsely—“yet you were not leaving me free. Other women’s skirts were rustling in my ears, but your fragrance came between. Now these others are all silent—I hear only you. You must set me no dullard task of loving a vague image of you. I love you, dear heart—and I must love you. I want nothing more. I will have nothing less.” He was silent for awhile; and she held his fingers lovingly. He roused: “They speak gravely of the vague loves of gods and angels; but what is all their thin love to the love of a man for a woman? What do the unbodied gods know that is half so sweet as the love of a woman for a child?” Betty smiled: “Noll,” said she—“you are wasting argument upon me—I love you.” He raised her gloved hand to his lips and kissed the warm fingers: “I have only drifted—aimlessly,” he said. “But I am done with this monk’s life. This day three weeks you come with me to Paris, mated to me. And I will go through my apprenticeship to art and letters and win a wage at the same time.” “But—Noll! you must not throw away a certainty—you have an allowance——” The young fellow’s face darkened: “I discovered from my father, only yesterday, what was the price of Wyntwarde’s allowance to me—and I have written to my cousin that he may keep his money—I go my own way.... He is a man that stands hotly enough on the nobility of his blood; I asked him what was the benefit to me of that blood if it bound me to menial practices. I told him I would be no paid accomplice of his, or any other man’s—that I will pay him back his services to me before I count myself a free man——” “But, Noll——” “I know what you are going to ask, Betty. No; my father and I did not part on the best of terms. I did not think that my father would have sold my freedom.” Betty sighed. Noll heard the sigh, and came out of his brooding fit. He took her hand: “Nay, Betty,” said he—“we must not fill this dear trysting-place “But, Noll”—the tears came brimming to her eyes—“I do not want my love to be a pain to all these others.” “You have done nothing to give them pain, dear heart,” said he. “They have brought their own pain.... Why did my father sell me? It is not you that come between us, but the shabby husk of him.... The last generation cannot wholly understand. Each new brood must live its own experience. Why should he put the brutalities between you and me? He is not your lover, nor can his choice of loves be mine.... There are limits to obedience. They have nearly starved me, body and soul—they have, by their folly, even turned my hungry eyes to the poor women of the streets. And for so poor a reason.... But”—he looked at her gladly—“you have won me back myself, dear heart—the world is very sweet to me this day.” She bent forward and put her dainty hand upon his cheek: “I love you, Noll—but I wish we had not to steal our meetings.” “It is not your fault, Betty—nor mine. They force us to these secret ways.... I was glad to spend my boyhood openly by your side—I loved you, not knowing it. And they must needs break into our pleasant garden and put us apart—and set us brooding on the very glory they would keep us from. And now what was a pleasant glamour, by their starving of it, has burnt into flaming passion. I am no longer content to see you beautiful by my side; I must kiss you. I love you, Betty—the rest is nothing. We’ll leave the reasons and the excusings to the calculating gods.” He took her hand, and pressed the fingers between his own. And she laughed happily: “The disreputable part of it all is that I love you for it, Noll,” she said. He arose, and gave her his hand: “Come, Betty, I fear you may get chilled,” he said; “you see”—he smiled—“I can even set love’s egotism aside, when yours is the gain, and deny myself the sweetest moments——” She gave him her hand and arose; and they walked into the twilit city together. That night, by the candle-light in his narrow lodging, Noll wrote a letter to Paris, whereby Horace was urged to bestir himself and find rooms for a youth and his bride. Which discovers something of Despised Poetry in a Waste-paper Basket Noll, the door having closed on Betty’s skirts, took his way in the darkness of the lamp-lit night towards Soho. He turned to his most loyal and closest friend to secure him as witness to his marriage. As he went, the young fellow forestalled in his mind all the questions that Gomme’s searching humour might ask. Why was he going to Paris? He scarcely knew. He had some vague idea that he must see life before the creative gift of artistry could be his. He had some even more vague idea that he would see such life in Paris. His instinct told him that life would be easier for Betty there—she would not suffer slight. He knew that life would be gayer at a far smaller price. His young blood was jumping for a change. He must be moving—doing. He roused at Gomme’s doorway, ran up the steps, and rang the bell. The house was in gloomy darkness, and, the door being opened, there stepped into the resulting blackness the grim grey figure of Netherby’s mother. “Ah, Mrs. Gomme, how are you?” The youth hailed her, and entered the hall. And he added, as the door was closed behind him: “You look unhappy, Mrs. Gomme.” The old lady sighed: “I am feeling a little lonely, Noll.” “Isn’t Netherby in?” he asked. Her mouth shut firmly: “No,” she said. “Gone out?” “Gone out,” she answered grimly. “Do you know where?” “No,” she said. “He has gone to meet some fool of a girl.” Noll whistled: “Oho!” said he. “Quite so.” “Who?” asked Noll. “God only knows. But come in here, Noll,” said the old lady; and led him into her little sitting-room. She lit the gas; went to her writing-table; took a rumpled piece of paper out of a drawer, and handed it to Noll. Noll smoothed out the piece of paper, glanced at the grim old face before him from under his brows; and read: “There’s glory in my dear love’s hair, Sweet fragrance hath great part in it; The threads have caught my feet in lair, And tangled is my heart in it. The beckoning laughter in her eyes (With the shy look therein) Now wins me to her, then denies The sweet lips and the chin....” The old lady watched the reading keenly. When it was finished, she said: “I found that in his waste-paper basket.” “Oh, fie! Mrs. Gomme!” Noll handed her back the sheet of crumpled paper. The old lady flung it into the fire; she sat down in her armchair and watched it burn. Noll smiled: “Ah, Mrs. Gomme—when a man is in love with a woman he does not write poetry about it—he does it. When a man writes poetry about love, he is not in love with love, but with reputation.” The old lady shook her head grimly: “If it began like that,” said she, unheeding of arguments, and jealous, brooding still—“what must the rest have been like?” Noll laughed, and put his hand on the old lady’s shoulder: “Ah! Mrs. Gomme—the girl has probably followed your example—you see, the last generation set such a bad example in these things....” Wherein we are shown an Emotional Hairdresser at Loggerheads with Destiny It was close upon midnight when Noll, baffled in his attempt to find Gomme, his feet jigging restlessly to a new music that was in his ears, stepped it out through London town, as a man will go on the eve of momentous decision in his life, to visit the old haunts of his boyhood. As he came into the street where had been his old home, he wondered whether his mother lay asleep—what she was doing—what thinking. He saw a light in her rooms; walked across the street; halted before the door, half inclined to take her into his delight—— In the black shadows flung by the street lamp there sat in a huddle on the topmost doorstep the silent figure of a man. Noll bent forward and peered at him: “Devlin?” The barber nodded; he was very pale. He attempted to speak—uttered a rending hiccup—and was still. “What are you doing here?” Devlin hiccupped: “Sittin’ on my—mistress’s—doorstep.” “Why?” “To cool the ferment of my imagination,” said the barber sadly. Noll laughed: “What’s the matter with your imagination?” he asked. “It looks all right.” “It’s torrid——” “Oho!” His pale face nodded: “Quite so—quite damned torrid,” said the hairdresser, and hiccupped fearsomely. “It ferments.” “Rather unpleasant!” said Noll. “On the contr’y,” said the barber—“quite pleasant.... It’s in the morning my head will be bursting.” “Very awkward indeed!” said Noll drily, humouring him. “Come, Devlin—wake up!” Devlin laughed sadly: “I wish them lamps would stop sliding down the street. Would you mind,” said he—“I’m afraid it’s a great trouble I’m putting ye to—would you mind givin’ me your arm?” “Why?” Devlin blinked: “The man who is intoxicated with love should avoid mixing his intoxication with spirits.... I want to take my head carefully in both hands and put it in yon horse-trough.” “Don’t be an ass, Devlin,” said Noll, and sat down beside him on the step. “What’s the meaning of all this?” The barber coughed: “It’s anarchic I am—and filled with philosophic gloom,” he said. “It’s rollin’ round the intestines of me——” “Oho! This is serious indeed!” “It is.... It’s damn terrible.... I’m all at sea—like a great bumping motor-cart going down a great slithery waterfall.” “Bad as that?” said Noll. “It’s worse than that,” said Devlin, and hiccupped. “I wish I could get rid of this damn hiccup,” he added irritably—“it nearly pushes me off the steps each time.” “Well, Devlin—can nothing be done for you?” “It can. And I’m doing it.” “What?” “I’m face to face with my great hairy destiny, and, begod, I’ve hit it and floored it.” “But that is rather rough treatment of your destiny!” “The divil take it, yes. I’ve kicked it out of my life.” Noll put his hand on the other’s shoulder: “Come, Devlin,” he said—“let us have good honest talk. What’s the trouble between you and your destiny?” Devlin coughed: “Well, sir; it’s this way.” He tried to tell off the points under discussion upon his fingers; but, missing his aim, he sadly gave up gesticulation, and put his hands in his pockets. “Ye see, sir, life is only once for the living. That’s a square fact on a fine solid foundation. Even the Presbyterians, God forgive them, can’t get round that with any number of testimonials—nor the Methodies can’t leap that obstruction.... Well, that’s so anyway. That’s the sort of statement on which all the churches meet—the sort of statement that don’t strain the bowels of any tax-payin’ householder to grip between his two fists and look at with the two unblinking eyes in his head.... Now, I, Mike Devlin, said to myself—hiccup—said I—why should this whole mortal journey of me be passed in cuttin’ the stray bits of hair off every damned fool whose hair grows? and wid that, up gets Echo on his hind legs in the dirty old shop and answers: why “When was that, Devlin?” Devlin hiccupped: “It might have been three days ago; and it might have been less; but it seems a godlike fortnight av dreams interspersed wid hiccup and one or two nightmares, Mr. Noll.” “And what are you going to do, Devlin?” “Live,” said the emotional hairdresser splendidly. “Hoho!” said Noll. “I mean to live—to take the stage in the drama of life,” said the barber largely; and he swept his hand towards the pitchy reek of the slumbering universe. “There’s a great hairy soul in me, tearin’ to get out—and it’s above hair-cuttin’. I am moved with the spirit of art.” He hiccupped, apologized, and went on: “I have joined me life with the legitimate drama—I mean to dance the mighty fling of man’s destiny to the tune of a nightly orchestra. I go out to-morrow wid a theatrical company to play the immortal masterpieces of Mr. Sheridan, Doctor Goldsmith, and the Swan of Avon. And, by the gospels, Victoria May Alice goes with me.” Noll whistled. Devlin scowled: “That’s so,” said he. “It’s an ignominious destiny she’s got a holt of—cleanin’ the boots of mediocrities and lodgers.... I’ve been christenin’ the great event all week wid the heavy man of the company—but I lost the fellow about Tuesday——” Noll coughed: “And—er—is Victoria May Alice to be your lawfully wedded wife, Devlin?” “Well, sir—of course it would have been more dramatic not. I’ve struggled with the damned poetry in me; but, in case of the children comin’, I thought I’d have a commonplace corner in me destiny and the marriage certificate.” He leaned over confidentially. “Ye see, sir—no one in the profession need know.” Noll nodded: “And—er—what part are you to play, Devlin?” “I begin as baggage man,” he said loftily—“risin’ to great parts according to me genius.” “And Victoria May Alice?” Wherein we catch a Glimpse of the Benefits that accrue to a Sound Commercial Education Sir Pompey Malahide’s old rival was in all the agony of writing a letter, and neither Isaac Tankerton Wollup’s fat little hands with the grasping pointed finger-tips, nor his bulky body, nor his spelling, aided too well in the recording of his talents on paper. The company promoter held a cigar between the forefinger and second of the hand that held down the sheet of paper to the desk, and he blew and drew the breath of his body whistling through a thick nose as he snored over his labour:
When, in the early morning, Fluffy Reubens, yawning in a loose dressing-gown as he shuffled along muttering guttural curses at the violent ringing of the bell, opened the outer door of Doome’s studio, and thrust out a tousled head, a melancholy man came in with the milk, walked gloomily to the oak chest in the hall, and took possession. Fluffy Reubens shut the door, went over to the seated man, and, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his dressing-gown, and straddling out his legs, stood and gazed at him: “Whee-hee-hewy-hewy-hewy!” whistled he. The cadaverous sickly-looking fellow on the oak chest, watching him suspiciously out of anxious eyes, searched in the breast pocket of his dingy coat, and handed him a sheet of blue paper. Fluffy Reubens kicked it out of his hand; and the sickly person ducked his head and raised a defensive elbow: “Chuck it, guv’nor,” he said hoarsely—and coughed. “Sickers,” said the sickly person. “Who gave you that name?” “What are yer gettin’ at, guv’nor?” “Well, look here, Sick Horse——” “By thunder, sick-horse is good.” And he added: “Who are you?” “A bailiff, sir.” “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I am.” “Well?” “I’m getting used to shame, guv’nor.” The man was seized with a fit of coughing. “You look beastly nervous, Sick-horse. You’d think I was going to kick you from behind.” Sickers sighed gloomily: “The last gentleman did,” he said hoarsely; and added, with a dry throat: “It’s a very assailable calling, sir.” “Look here, Sick-horse,” said Reubens—“I want you to go out and send a telegram for me.” “Oh, no, you don’t, guv’nor.” The man smiled cunningly, laughing a husky laugh. “Why not?” “Well—yer see, guv’nor—when I’ve got my back on a oak chest—well—I know where I are.” Reubens laughed loud and long: “You ass,” roared he—“I’ve only got slippers on.” “I’d rather not, guv’nor—if yer don’t mind.” Fluffy Reubens gazed at him: “Sick-horse,” said he, “don’t move. I’ll be back again in a minute. Stay like that for awhile—you look terrific in that light—sort of Judas Iscariot in the gloom wishing to God he hadn’t taken the money.” He strolled off into the great studio and returned with a canvas and painting materials, and a large yellow official paper. He put the things on the floor, drew up a chair, and, shading his eyes with his hand, tried several views of the uncomfortable man. Sitting down at last, he began rapidly, with swift telling strokes of colour, to sketch in an impression of the dejected figure before him where he sat in the deep shadows of the ill-lit place. “By the way, Sick-horse,” said he—“I suppose I must put you down in the census-paper—you are going to stay the night, of course.” “Ye—yes, sir,” said the man. “So am I—Mr. Doome has lent me his studio, so let us begin. We’ve got your name and your calling. Are you of unsound mind?” The man laughed huskily: “You needn’t put it at that, sir,” said he. “You’ve got a fizzing fine suicidal look on you, when you don’t smile, Sick-horse,” said Fluffy, painting away. “I’ve been pining for a good Judas Iscariot for years.... Don’t shift The pale-faced man nodded gloomily—he was. “Tut, tut! How dreadful!” said Fluffy. “No wonder you’re ashamed of yourself. What’s become of the wife?” “She’s alive,” he said gloomily. Fluffy Reubens coughed: “No luck,” said he. “Any children?” “Fourteen.” “Good God!” said Fluffy Reubens. “I don’t always think so, guv’nor,” said the melancholy figure from the shadows. Reubens painted in silence for a long time. At last he got up and looked keenly at the man: “Empty?” he asked. The bailiff nodded—yes, he was very empty—he was always empty—he was used to it. “Look here, Sick-horse, you look so damn dramatic I must not put anything into you for half an hour yet—I haven’t quite finished. But after that we’ll have breakfast, eh?” The man smiled. Fluffy Reubens jumped up, upsetting his canvas: “For God’s sake, don’t do that!” cried he anxiously; “or we’re lost.... Quick! think of something else—think the coffee’s burnt—think the eggs are addled——” He flung down his brush: “Damnation! Judas Iscariot is dead,” he said. He went to the hall-door, bawled for the woman who looked after the house, and ordered breakfast from an eating-house close by: “For two,” he called. He gathered up the painting things sadly, to carry them into the great studio. The gloomy man on the oak chest coughed: “I’m real sorry, guv’nor; I’ll try the God-forsaken lay again,” said the wretched man huskily; “but I wish to God you hadn’t mentioned them sausages.” “No,” said Fluffy Reubens—“it would never be the same thing—and I haven’t the heart to kick you—even if it brought back Judas Iscariot.” Later in the morning, Fluffy Reubens wrote a telegram to Bartholomew Doome:
He wrote another to Rippley. Wherein a Palace of Art disappears in the Night Bartholomew Doome’s great studio was in a haze with the smoking of much tobacco; and it were almost as though the lolling figures had smoked in church. The tapestried walls showed sombrely rich, their glowing colour only half revealed by the ghostly light of the huge white candles that flamed on high, held aloft by great gilt candlesticks the heavily wrought feet of which stood reflected on the dark-stained floor. And the handsome sheaves of crystal lustres that hung from the ceiling glittered and sparkled aloft like hundreds of precious gems. The beautiful image of the Mary and the spangled ikons of the Russian Church, which stood on the suavely carved mantel, flanked by the pastel of a ballet-girl by Degas, and a frail nude beauty by Manet, gleamed mysterious—religious. Before the mantel, on huge iron dogs, was set a scarlet coffin. On the scarlet coffin sat Bartholomew Doome. About the room, seated at tables, young fellows were bawling a drinking chorus. Before Doome stood the weak-kneed figure of the bailiff, gorgeous in an ill-fitting livery that was a world too capacious for his meagre body. As the drunken fellow held the tankard of beer aloft he made a supreme effort to take a last high note—his voice cracked—he spilled the liquor on his upraised face, spluttered, coughed, tripped over his own feet, and fell—amidst a shout of laughter and loud cries of “Encore” from the assembled throng. Rippley and Fluffy Reubens carried the fallen man to a sofa and laid him upon it. There was a lull in the riot; and in the lull there arose from his chair, unsteadily, the figure of Ponsonby Wattles Ffolliott, rather the worse for drink. Holding a glass in his hand, he straddled over to Doome, where he sat on the scarlet coffin, and he uttered a silly laugh as he brought his vague legs to an unsteady halt. “Hullo, Ffolliott!” cried Doome. “What is it?” Ffolliott blew through dry red lips: “Civilization,” said he, with a racking hiccup—“civilization (hiccup) has its drawbacks.” Ffolliott came nearer, and, disregarding the insinuation, added with drunken confidence: “D’you know, Doome—you don’t mind my saying so—but I believe you’re engaged.” “Nonsense, Ffolliott!” Doome got up from his grim bench and slapped the weak-limbed exquisite a sounding thump on the narrow shoulders with heavy jocular hand’s buffet, so that he spilled the liquor down the front of him. Ffolliott, when he had wiped himself dry with dandified handkerchief, said: “Oh—it’s no use your pretending to be so colossally gay, you know. I always notice that when a fellow makes a delirious fool of himself (hiccup) about a woman (hiccup) he becomes austere—morally austere.” “Hiccup!” said Rippley; and there was loud applause at the tables. Doome laughed: “You were always a comic ass, Ffolliott,” said he—“but when did you degenerate into a philosopher?” “Oh, yes—get me off the rails, of course! But I always notice that when a fellow makes a delirious fool of himself about a woman (hiccup)—fool enough, I mean, to become engaged—he becomes mollar’ly (hic)—mollarly austere.” “Oh, damn!” said Doome. Ffolliott raised drunken eyelids: “But saying damn can go with great moral austerity.” He paused and uttered a giggle. “That’s an epigram, I think,” he said. “What on earth are you jabbering about, Ffolliott?” Ffolliott stuck to his theme with drunken persistence. “A fellow who is engaged doesn’t seem to laugh at the same places in the comedy of life that he laughs at before he is engaged.” “Get on, Ffolliott—get on. You talk like Euclid trying to invent a comic song.” Ffolliott blinked: “I’ve always noticed,” said he—“that a fellow does not become really austere until he is engaged....” He sighed heavily. “I know such a good chap, who’s become engaged. He used to read the Pink Un; but now he reads The Descent of Man.” “Shush!” said Doome impatiently. Ffolliott giggled: “D’you know,” said he—“I started to tell him such a comic story to-day—by George, I’ll tell it to you,” he tittered. “You know how ridiculous a woman with a pronounced nose looks in a bathing-dress! Well. But—perhaps I’d better not tell you—I’m sure you’re engaged——” Doome slapped the narrow shoulders again with jovial hand, and sent more liquor flying down Ffolliott’s trousers: “By Hermes, you are a clever fellow, Ffolliott,” said he. “Oh, no—not always,” bleated the affected voice of Ffolliott—“I’m “But why do you wear an eyeglass?” Ffolliott simpered: “Foljambe of Baliol was the most pronounced man at the ’varsity; he is the most pronounced man at the bar—and Foljambe wears an eyeglass.” “Does he?” “Rather,” bleated Ffolliott. “And though, between you and me (hiccup), Foljambe’s a conceited ass, he is rather a remarkable ass; and I don’t know whether you have noticed it (hiccup), but in these days it takes rather a clever fellow to be a remarkable ass.” Doome smote Ffolliott a rollicking buffet, that sent more liquor down his trousers: “By the Greek gods,” cried Doome, “we are having a roaring evening, eh? Hang me, we are only bachelors once—so we’ll make gay whilst the moon shines. Damn it, you shall sing.” “Oh, yes; I’ll sing. I can’t—but I will——” Fluffy Reubens came up and pushed Ffolliott aside roughly: “Hist!” said he—“Doome, the bailiff’s asleep....” He turned round and called in a loud whisper: “Rippley!” “’Ullo!” “Have you got the furniture vans all ready?” “Yes.” “Where are they?” “In my studio,” said Rippley. “I hope to Jupiter the horses haven’t knocked the stuffing out of my stattoos. I tipped the men to stay all night.” “Splendid! Get ’em round, Rip, quick—by the back way, and into the court here—the door of the dressing-room opens into the court, and was made for taking big pictures through. There’s not a moment to lose.” Rippley hurried out of the room. “Quick, boys—one of you lock the hall door after Rippley!” cried Fluffy Reubens hoarsely; “we’ve got to pack out the whole parcel of toys in a couple of hours.” He flung off his coat, and began to roll up a great Persian carpet. In the early morning, the sleeping bailiff was roused by a rude hand upon his shoulders. “Get up!” said a rough voice. He sat up, untidy, frowsy, weak-eyed, snuffling and grumbling in the ridiculous gorgeousness of the ill-fitting livery. He rubbed his eyes: “God!” said he hoarsely. His jaw dropped; and he stared miserably round the room. Before him stood the vulgar overdressed figure of Mr. Isaac Tankerton Wollup, with his choleric eyes fixed upon him, bullock-like, bloodshot: The miserable man rubbed his drowsy eyes—he rubbed them again. His mouth was too dry to utter speech. He was sitting on the top of a scarlet coffin, that stood on two chairs; and, with the solitary exception of these things, the room was wholly empty of furnishment. He burst into tears. “You bleating idiot!” The vulgar dealer’s eyes snapped contempt. “The house is empty as a money-lender’s unwritten promise. They loaded the vans in the night; and you slept through it all!... Get your legs out o’ the light!” He struck the lean shins with his cane. The poor abject fellow cried out, and, rising, like a whipped cur he slunk across the room, buried his face in his arm, and sobbed against the wall. The bloodshot eyes of the company-promoter, as he stooped down putting his thick hands on his great fat thighs, peered at the white paint on the side of the scarlet coffin; there had been no haste, every letter was balanced and well-drawn, and the whole phrase told decoratively on the scarlet lacquer: Art in England is dead, it said. Try France. The little fat man laughed harshly. He shook his head: “I don’t know how the Beelzebub I shall break this musical comedy to Samuel.... Overreached in my own business and by a Christian!” He walked gloomily out of the place. ****** After the irate dealer had departed, his miserable bailiff ceased his sobbing against the wall, took off the gorgeous coat, and staunched his tears on the sleeve of his tattered shirt. He was a broken figure of dejection—blear-eyed, weak-kneed, ragged, snuffling. He changed into his old clothes, went and seated himself on the scarlet coffin, and crouched there, a woe-begone wonderer in despair. He burst into tears. He put his grimy hand into the side-pocket of his greasy coat for a handkerchief—it struck against a sheet of paper. He blew his nose on a rag, soiled to mud-colour, unfolded the paper, and read it:
Wherein a Poet burns his Verse to keep his Feet Warm In the waning of a bleak March day, Betty walked briskly home to her rooms. It was the eve of her marriage. Noll and she were to go to Paris straight from the ceremony. Betty had the tickets for the journey in her pocket. Horace had secured them lodgings. When the girl had entered the house, mounting the stairs to her attic, she felt a pang. She was going to a glorious life, and leaving the old home to increasing dinginess—it would become shabbier and more shabby; whilst she—stepped it blithely to the seven heavens. And the little faded Miss Flora! Who was to tend her?... The mirth went out of her heart. Someone must always suffer. She stopped at the door, and knocked. She had some flowers at her belt—she would leave them for the little lady—she must see her again before she went. More—— She must break the tidings. She knocked again—the knock of indecision. Not a sound. She opened the door gently, and entered. In the room, in her old-world taffeta-covered chair, before the fire, very still, sat Miss Flora Jennyns; and the girl knew by the quick instinct within her that Death waited at the window. About the narrow shoulders was drawn the India shawl, the weary hand holding the overlapping ends at the withered throat; and on the third finger of the hand was the ring of splendid jewels that sparkled in paint in the picture beyond her. Here was the picture—grown old—vanishing. And the old shoe that peeped from the crumpled threadbare skirts upon the quaint old wool-worked footstool—ah, how shabby! worn with careful brushings—of what gentle uncomplaining penury were these things not sign and emblem! So she sat, fading away in the winter’s light, her dying eyes on the fire’s warmth, and her lips smiling on her little triumphs of long ago—a little withered roseleaf, blown across the footlights of the world’s rude theatre. “Miss Flora!” she whispered in a strange wonder and alarm. “Mother of God!” the old lady’s lips murmured—“the child is come!” She smiled; put out her slender bloodless fingers, and placed them upon the girl’s fresh brown hair: “Dear sweet heart!” said she—“in my love for thee, and in thy gentleness to me, I have known something of motherhood.... I have not—been—wholly—barren.” Betty took the bloodless hand between hers, kissed it and chafed it. It was very cold. She could not speak for tears. The old eyes smiled upon the girl. After a while the dying poetess added: “Nor have I been wholly alone.” She sighed; and, with a smile, she died. Betty, her eyes filled with tears, put out her dainty milk-white hand, with rosy fingers, to the dead eyelids and drew down the blinds that curtained the windows of the departed soul. In the deepening dusk, Betty went out to find Eustace Lovegood.... She mounted the bare creaking stairs to his lodgings, and reaching his high attic, was glad to hear his deep-voiced growl to enter at her knocking. The big man, in a threadbare dressing-gown, arose, with his wonted grand manner, to welcome her; and when he saw who was his visitor his heavy face was lighted with a smile: “Mistress Betty!” said he—“by all that’s charming!” He came to her and, the greetings over, with courtly etiquette led her to his chair—it was the only one in all the bare room. “You look serious,” he said—“sit down and tell me.” Betty hesitated: “There is something on fire—a smell of paper burning,” she said. Lovegood laughed his big laugh: “I am making coffee,” he said. She saw that the kettle in the narrow fireplace was being heated by burning balls of crumpled manuscript. “But why do you heat the kettle with paper?” she asked. He smiled drily: “Ah, Betty—you push me to the extremity of truth. Well, it is because I have nothing else to burn.... Only my rejected poems. And I am badly in need of the coffee. The weather is very severe.” Betty’s eyes filled with tears: “I am sorry,” she said. “Tut, tut! you mustn’t damp the spirits of the kettle, Betty—it begins to boil.... Wonderfully heating thing—poetry!” He went to the kettle. “You shall have first brew,” he added—“that you may never again despise coffee warmed by the passionate glow of verse.... As the big man busied himself with his hospitalities, Betty told him of her errand—begged him to come back with her and give his counsel and aid. He was for going straight away; but she insisted on sitting there until he had drunk his coffee. At the threshold, across the steps of the house, in the twilight of the silent street, lay the dead body of the Man of Pallid Ideals—a nosegay of pale flowers near his gloved hand, his white face turned upwards to the still skies, lit by the pale light of the mystic moon. He had seen the drawn blinds—guessed their significance—gone to her doors, stunned with dread—fallen in the moment of his last act of homage.... |
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