SUB ROSA
From the interview, which Shelton had the mixed delight of watching,
between Ferrand and the Honourable Mrs. Dennant, certain definite
results accrued, the chief of which was the permission accorded the
young wanderer to occupy the room which had formerly been tenanted by
the footman John. Shelton was lost in admiration of Ferrand's manner in
this scene.. Its subtle combination of deference and dignity was almost
paralysing; paralysing, too, the subterranean smile upon his lips.
“Charmin' young man, Dick,” said Mrs. Dennant, when Shelton lingered to
say once more that he knew but very little of him; “I shall send a note
round to Mrs. Robinson at once. They're rather common, you know--the
Robinsons. I think they'll take anyone I recommend.”
“I 'm sure they will,” said Shelton; “that's why I think you ought to
know--”
But Mrs. Dennant's eyes, fervent, hare-like, were fixed on something
far away; turning, he saw the rose in a tall vase on a tall and spindly
stool. It seemed to nod towards them in the sunshine. Mrs. Dennant dived
her nose towards her camera.
“The light's perfect now,” she said, in a voice muffled by the cloth.
“I feel sure that livin' with decent people will do wonders for him. Of
course, he understands that his meals will be served to him apart.”
Shelton, doubly anxious, now that his efforts had lodged his client in a
place of trust, fell, back on hoping for the best; his instinct told him
that, vagabond as Ferrand was, he had a curious self-respect, that would
save him from a mean ingratitude.
In fact, as Mrs. Dennant, who was by no means void of common-sense,
foresaw, the arrangement worked all right. Ferrand entered on his duties
as French tutor to the little Robinsons. In the Dennants' household he
kept himself to his own room, which, day and night, he perfumed with
tobacco, emerging at noon into the garden, or, if wet, into the study,
to teach young Toddles French. After a time it became customary for him
to lunch with the house-party, partly through a mistake of Toddles, who
seemed to think that it was natural, and partly through John Noble, one
of Shelton's friends, who had come to stay, and discovered Ferrand to be
a most awfully interesting person he was always, indeed, discovering
the most awfully interesting persons. In his grave and toneless voice,
brushing his hair from off his brow, he descanted upon Ferrand with
enthusiasm, to which was joined a kind of shocked amusement, as who
should say, “Of course, I know it's very odd, but really he 's such an
awfully interesting person.” For John Noble was a politician, belonging
to one of those two Peculiar parties, which, thoroughly in earnest, of
an honesty above suspicion, and always very busy, are constitutionally
averse to anything peculiar for fear of finding they have overstepped
the limit of what is practical in politics. As such he inspired
confidence, not caring for things unless he saw some immediate benefit
to be had from them, having a perfect sense of decency, and a small
imagination. He discussed all sorts of things with Ferrand; on one
occasion Shelton overheard them arguing on anarchism.
“No Englishman approves of murder,” Noble was saying, in the gloomy
voice that contrasted with the optimistic cast of his fine head, “but
the main principle is right. Equalisation of property is bound to come.
I sympathise with then, not with their methods.”
“Forgive me,” struck in Ferrand; “do you know any anarchists?”
“No,” returned Noble; “I certainly do not.”
“You say you sympathise with them, but the first time it comes to
action--”
“Well?”
“Oh, monsieur! one doesn't make anarchism with the head.”
Shelton perceived that he had meant to add, “but with the heart, the
lungs, the liver.” He drew a deeper meaning from the saying, and seemed
to see, curling with the smoke from Ferrand's lips, the words: “What do
you, an English gentleman, of excellent position, and all the prejudices
of your class, know about us outcasts? If you want to understand us you
must be an outcast too; we are not playing at the game.”
This talk took place upon the lawn, at the end of one of Toddles's
French lessons, and Shelton left John Noble maintaining to the youthful
foreigner, with stubborn logic, that he, John Noble, and the anarchists
had much, in common. He was returning to the house, when someone called
his name from underneath the holm oak. There, sitting Turkish fashion on
the grass, a pipe between his teeth, he found a man who had arrived the
night before, and impressed him by his friendly taciturnity. His
name was Whyddon, and he had just returned from Central Africa; a
brown-faced, large-jawed man, with small but good and steady eyes, and
strong, spare figure.
“Oh, Mr. Shelton!” he said, “I wondered if you could tell me what tips
I ought to give the servants here; after ten years away I 've forgotten
all about that sort of thing.”
Shelton sat down beside him; unconsciously assuming, too, a cross-legged
attitude, which caused him much discomfort.
“I was listening,” said his new acquaintance, “to the little chap
learning his French. I've forgotten mine. One feels a hopeless duffer
knowing no, languages.”
“I suppose you speak Arabic?” said Shelton.
“Oh, Arabic, and a dialect or two; they don't count. That tutor has a
curious face.”
“You think so?” said Shelton, interested. “He's had a curious life.”
The traveller spread his hands, palms downwards, on the grass and looked
at Shelton with, a smile.
“I should say he was a rolling stone,” he said. “It 's odd, I' ve seen
white men in Central Africa with a good deal of his look about them.
“Your diagnosis is a good one,” answered Shelton.
“I 'm always sorry for those fellows. There's generally some good in
them. They are their own enemies. A bad business to be unable to take
pride in anything one does!” And there was a look of pity on his face.
“That's exactly it,” said Shelton. “I 've often tried to put it into
words. Is it incurable?”
“I think so.”
“Can you tell me why?”
Whyddon pondered.
“I rather think,” he said at last, “it must be because they have too
strong a faculty of criticism. You can't teach a man to be proud of his
own work; that lies in his blood “; folding his arms across his breast,
he heaved a sigh. Under the dark foliage, his eyes on the sunlight, he
was the type of all those Englishmen who keep their spirits bright
and wear their bodies out in the dark places of hard work. “You can't
think,” he said, showing his teeth in a smile, “how delightful it is to
be at home! You learn to love the old country when you're away from it.”
Shelton often thought, afterwards; of this diagnosis of the vagabond,
for he was always stumbling on instances of that power of subtle
criticism which was the young foreigner's prime claim to be “a most
awfully interesting” and perhaps a rather shocking person.
An old school-fellow of Shelton's and his wife were staying in the
house, who offered to the eye the picture of a perfect domesticity.
Passionless and smiling, it was impossible to imagine they could ever
have a difference. Shelton, whose bedroom was next to theirs, could hear
them in the mornings talking in exactly the tones they used at lunch,
and laughing the same laughs. Their life seemed to accord them perfect
satisfaction; they were supplied with their convictions by Society just
as, when at home, they were supplied with all the other necessaries of
life by some co-operative stores. Their fairly handsome faces, with the
fairly kind expressions, quickly and carefully regulated by a sense of
compromise, began to worry him so much that when in the same room he
would even read to avoid the need of looking at them. And yet they were
kind--that is, fairly kind--and clean and quiet in the house, except
when they laughed, which was often, and at things which made him want to
howl as a dog howls at music.
“Mr. Shelton,” Ferrand said one day, “I 'm not an amateur of
marriage--never had the chance, as you may well suppose; but, in any
case, you have some people in the house who would make me mark
time before I went committing it. They seem the ideal young married
people--don't quarrel, have perfect health, agree with everybody, go to
church, have children--but I should like to hear what is beautiful in
their life,” and he grimaced. “It seems to me so ugly that I can only
gasp. I would much rather they ill-treated each other, just to show they
had the corner of a soul between them. If that is marriage, 'Dieu m'en
garde!'.
But Shelton did not answer; he was thinking deeply.
The saying of John Noble's, “He's really a most interesting person,”
grew more and more upon his nerves; it seemed to describe the Dennant
attitude towards this stranger within their gates. They treated him
with a sort of wonder on the “don't touch” system, like an object in
an exhibition. The restoration, however, of, his self-respect proceeded
with success. For all the semblance of having grown too big for
Shelton's clothes, for all his vividly burnt face, and the quick but
guarded play of cynicism on his lips--he did much credit to his patrons.
He had subdued his terror of a razor, and looked well in a suit of
Shelton's flannels. For, after all, he had only been eight years exiled
from middle-class gentility, and he had been a waiter half that time.
But Shelton wished him at the devil. Not for his manners' sake--he was
never tired of watching how subtly the vagabond adapted his conduct to
the conduct of his hosts, while keeping up his critical detachment--but
because that critical detachment was a constant spur to his own vision,
compelling him to analyse the life into which, he had been born and was
about to marry. This process was disturbing; and to find out when it had
commenced, he had to go back to his meeting with Ferrand on the journey
up from Dover.
There was kindness in a hospitality which opened to so strange a bird;
admitting the kindness, Shelton fell to analysing it. To himself, to
people of his class, the use of kindness was a luxury, not significant
of sacrifice, but productive of a pleasant feeling in the heart, such
as massage will setup in the legs. “Everybody's kind,” he thought; “the
question is, What understanding is there, what real sympathy?” This
problem gave him food for thought.
The progress, which Mrs. Dennant not unfrequently remarked upon, in
Ferrand's conquest of his strange position, seemed to Shelton but a
sign that he was getting what he could out of his sudden visit to green
pastures; under the same circumstances, Shelton thought that he himself
would do the same. He felt that the young foreigner was making a
convenient bow to property, but he had more respect for the sarcastic
smile on the lips of Ferrand's heart.
It was not long before the inevitable change came in the spirit of the
situation; more and more was Shelton conscious of a quaint uneasiness in
the very breathing of the household.
“Curious fellow you've got hold of there, Shelton,” Mr. Dennant said to
him during a game of croquet; “he 'll never do any good for himself, I'm
afraid.”
“In one sense I'm afraid not,” admitted Shelton.
“Do you know his story? I will bet you sixpence”--and Mr. Dennant paused
to swing his mallet with a proper accuracy “that he's been in prison.”
“Prison!” ejaculated Shelton.
“I think,” said Mr. Dennant, with bent knees carefully measuring his
next shot, “that you ought to make inquiries--ah! missed it! Awkward
these hoops! One must draw the line somewhere.”
“I never could draw,” returned Shelton, nettled and uneasy; “but I
understand--I 'll give him a hint to go.”
“Don't,” said Mr. Dennant, moving after his second ball, which Shelton
had smitten to the farther end, “be offended, my dear Shelton, and by no
means give him a hint; he interests me very much--a very clever, quiet
young fellow.”
That this was not his private view Shelton inferred by studying Mr.
Dennant's manner in the presence of the vagabond. Underlying the
well-bred banter of the tranquil voice, the guarded quizzicality of his
pale brown face, it could be seen that Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq.,
J.P., accustomed to laugh at other people, suspected that he was being
laughed at. What more natural than that he should grope about to see
how this could be? A vagrant alien was making himself felt by an English
Justice of the Peace--no small tribute, this, to Ferrand's personality.
The latter would sit silent through a meal, and yet make his effect. He,
the object of their kindness, education, patronage, inspired their fear.
There was no longer any doubt; it was not of Ferrand that they were
afraid, but of what they did not understand in him; of horrid subtleties
meandering in the brain under that straight, wet-looking hair; of
something bizarre popping from the curving lips below that thin,
lopsided nose.
But to Shelton in this, as in all else, Antonia was what mattered. At
first, anxious to show her lover that she trusted him, she seemed never
tired of doing things for his young protege, as though she too had set
her heart on his salvation; but, watching her eyes when they rested
on the vagabond, Shelton was perpetually reminded of her saying on the
first day of his visit to Holm Oaks, “I suppose he 's really good--I
mean all these things you told me about were only....”
Curiosity never left her glance, nor did that story of his four days'
starving leave her mind; a sentimental picturesqueness clung about that
incident more valuable by far than this mere human being with whom
she had so strangely come in contact. She watched Ferrand, and Shelton
watched her. If he had been told that he was watching her, he would have
denied it in good faith; but he was bound to watch her, to find out
with what eyes she viewed this visitor who embodied all the rebellious
under-side of life, all that was absent in herself.
“Dick,” she said to him one day, “you never talk to me of Monsieur
Ferrand.”
“Do you want to talk of him?”
“Don't you think that he's improved?”
“He's fatter.”
Antonia looked grave.
“No, but really?”
“I don't know,” said Shelton; “I can't judge him.”
Antonia turned her face away, and something in her attitude alarmed him.
“He was once a sort of gentleman,” she said; “why shouldn't he become
one again?”
Sitting on the low wall of the kitchen-garden, her head was framed by
golden plums. The sun lay barred behind the foliage of the holm oak,
but a little patch filtering through a gap had rested in the plum-tree's
heart. It crowned the girl. Her raiment, the dark leaves, the red wall,
the golden plums, were woven by the passing glow to a block of pagan
colour. And her face above it, chaste, serene, was like the scentless
summer evening. A bird amongst the currant bushes kept a little chant
vibrating; and all the plum-tree's shape and colour seemed alive.
“Perhaps he does n't want to be a gentleman,” said Shelton.
Antonia swung her foot.
“How can he help wanting to?”
“He may have a different philosophy of life.”
Antonia was slow to answer.
“I know nothing about philosophies of life,” she said at last.
Shelton answered coldly,
“No two people have the same.”
With the falling sun-glow the charm passed off the tree. Chilled and
harder, yet less deep, it was no more a block of woven colour, warm and
impassive, like a southern goddess; it was now a northern tree, with a
grey light through its leaves.
“I don't understand you in the least,” she said; “everyone wishes to be
good.”
“And safe?” asked Shelton gently.
Antonia stared.
“Suppose,” he said--“I don't pretend to know, I only suppose--what
Ferrand really cares for is doing things differently from other people?
If you were to load him with a character and give him money on condition
that he acted as we all act, do you think he would accept it?”
“Why not?”
“Why are n't cats dogs; or pagans Christians?”
Antonia slid down from the wall.
“You don't seem to think there 's any use in trying,” she said, and
turned away.
Shelton made a movement as if he would go after her, and then stood
still, watching her figure slowly pass, her head outlined above the
wall, her hands turned back across her narrow hips. She halted at the
bend, looked back, then, with an impatient gesture, disappeared.
Antonia was slipping from him!
A moment's vision from without himself would have shown him that it
was he who moved and she who was standing still, like the figure of one
watching the passage of a stream with clear, direct, and sullen eyes.