I
The time was Saturday afternoon; the place was Surrey; the person of the
drama was Philip Christy.
He had come down by the early fast train to Brackenhurst. All the world
knows Brackenhurst, of course, the greenest and leafiest of our southern
suburbs. It looked even prettier than its wont just then, that town of
villas, in the first fresh tenderness of its wan spring foliage, the
first full flush of lilac, laburnum, horse-chestnut, and guelder-rose.
The air was heavy with the odour of May and the hum of bees. Philip
paused a while at the corner, by the ivied cottage, admiring it
silently. He was glad he lived there--so very aristocratic! What joy to
glide direct, on the enchanted carpet of the South-Eastern Railway, from
the gloom and din and bustle of Cannon Street, to the breadth and space
and silence and exclusiveness of that upland village! For Philip Christy
was a gentlemanly clerk in Her Majesty's Civil Service.
As he stood there admiring it all with roving eyes, he was startled
after a moment by the sudden, and as it seemed to him unannounced
apparition of a man in a well-made grey tweed suit, just a yard or two
in front of him. He was aware of an intruder. To be sure, there was
nothing very remarkable at first sight either in the stranger's dress,
appearance, or manner. All that Philip noticed for himself in the
newcomer's mien for the first few seconds was a certain distinct air of
social superiority, an innate nobility of gait and bearing. So much at
least he observed at a glance quite instinctively. But it was not this
quiet and unobtrusive tone, as of the Best Society, that surprised and
astonished him; Brackenhurst prided itself, indeed, on being a most
well-bred and distinguished neighbourhood; people of note grew as
thick there as heather or whortleberries. What puzzled him more was the
abstruser question, where on earth the stranger could have come from
so suddenly. Philip had glanced up the road and down the road just two
minutes before, and was prepared to swear when he withdrew his eyes not
a soul loomed in sight in either direction. Whence, then, could the man
in the grey suit have emerged? Had he dropped from the clouds? No gate
opened into the road on either side for two hundred yards or more; for
Brackenhurst is one of those extremely respectable villa neighbourhoods
where every house--an eligible family residence--stands in its own
grounds of at least six acres. Now Philip could hardly suspect that so
well dressed a man of such distinguished exterior would be guilty of
such a gross breach of the recognised code of Brackenhurstian manners as
was implied in the act of vaulting over a hedgerow. So he gazed in blank
wonder at the suddenness of the apparition, more than half inclined to
satisfy his curiosity by inquiring of the stranger how the dickens he
had got there.
A moment's reflection, however, sufficed to save the ingenuous young man
from the pitfall of so serious a social solecism. It would be fatal to
accost him. For, mark you, no matter how gentlemanly and well-tailored a
stranger may look, you can never be sure nowadays (in these topsy-turvy
times of subversive radicalism) whether he is or is not really a
gentleman. That makes acquaintanceship a dangerous luxury. If you begin
by talking to a man, be it ever so casually, he may desire to thrust his
company upon you, willy-nilly, in future; and when you have ladies of
your family living in a place, you really CANNOT be too particular what
companions you pick up there, were it even in the most informal and
momentary fashion. Besides, the fellow might turn out to be one of your
social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course,
you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact,
in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes
one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of
those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get
to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know
somebody who does not want to know you.
Guided by these truly British principles of ancestral wisdom,
Philip Christy would probably never have seen anything more of the
distinguished-looking stranger had it not been for a passing accident
of muscular action, over which his control was distinctly precarious.
He happened in brushing past to catch the stranger's eye. It was a clear
blue eye, very deep and truthful. It somehow succeeded in riveting for a
second Philip's attention. And it was plain the stranger was less afraid
of speaking than Philip himself was. For he advanced with a pleasant
smile on his open countenance, and waved one gloveless hand in a sort of
impalpable or half-checked salute, which impressed his new acquaintance
as a vaguely polite Continental gesture. This affected Philip
favourably: the newcomer was a somebody then, and knew his place: for
just in proportion as Philip felt afraid to begin conversation himself
with an unplaced stranger, did he respect any other man who felt so
perfectly sure of his own position that he shared no such middle-class
doubts or misgivings. A duke is never afraid of accosting anybody.
Philip was strengthened, therefore, in his first idea, that the man
in the grey suit was a person of no small distinction in society, else
surely he would not have come up and spoken with such engaging frankness
and ease of manner.
“I beg your pardon,” the stranger said, addressing him in pure and
limpid English, which sounded to Philip like the dialect of the very
best circles, yet with some nameless difference of intonation or accent
which certainly was not foreign, still less provincial, or Scotch, or
Irish; it seemed rather like the very purest well of English undefiled
Philip had ever heard,--only, if anything, a little more so; “I beg
your pardon, but I'm a stranger hereabouts, and I should be so VERY much
obliged if you could kindly direct me to any good lodgings.”
His voice and accent attracted Philip even more now he stood near
at hand than his appearance had done from a little distance. It was
impossible, indeed, to say definitely in set terms what there was about
the man that made his personality and his words so charming; but from
that very first minute, Philip freely admitted to himself that the
stranger in the grey suit was a perfect gentleman. Nay, so much did he
feel it in his ingenuous way that he threw off at once his accustomed
cloak of dubious reserve, and, standing still to think, answered after a
short pause, “Well, we've a great many very nice furnished houses about
here to let, but not many lodgings. Brackenhurst's a cut above lodgings,
don't you know; it's a residential quarter. But I should think Miss
Blake's, at Heathercliff House, would perhaps be just the sort of thing
to suit you.”
“Oh, thank you,” the stranger answered, with a deferential politeness
which charmed Philip once more by its graceful expressiveness. “And
could you kindly direct me to them? I don't know my way about at all,
you see, as yet, in this country.”
“With pleasure,” Philip replied, quite delighted at the chance of
solving the mystery of where the stranger had dropped from. “I'm going
that way myself, and can take you past her door. It's only a few steps.
Then you're a stranger in England?”
The newcomer smiled a curious self-restrained smile. He was both young
and handsome. “Yes, I'm a stranger in your England,” he answered,
gravely, in the tone of one who wishes to avoid an awkward discussion.
“In fact, an Alien. I only arrived here this very morning.”
“From the Continent?” Philip inquired, arching his eyebrows slightly.
The stranger smiled again. “No, not from the Continent,” he replied,
with provoking evasiveness.
“I thought you weren't a foreigner,” Philip continued in a blandly
suggestive voice. “That is to say,” he went on, after a second's pause,
during which the stranger volunteered no further statement, “you speak
English like an Englishman.”
“Do I?” the stranger answered. “Well, I'm glad of that. It'll make
intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy.”
By this time Philip's curiosity was thoroughly whetted. “But you're not
an Englishman, you say?” he asked, with a little natural hesitation.
“No, not exactly what you call an Englishman,” the stranger replied,
as if he didn't quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his
antecedents. “As I tell you, I'm an Alien. But we always spoke English
at home,” he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all
the other information that lay in his power.
“You can't be an American, I'm sure,” Philip went on, unabashed, his
eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the
better for the moment of both reserve and politeness.
“No, I'm certainly not an American,” the stranger answered with a gentle
courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his rudeness in
questioning him.
“Nor a Colonist?” Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint.
“Nor a Colonist either,” the Alien replied curtly. And then he relapsed
into a momentary silence which threw upon Philip the difficult task of
continuing the conversation.
The member of Her Britannic Majesty's Civil Service would have given
anything just that minute to say to him frankly, “Well, if you're not an
Englishman, and you're not an American, and you're not a Colonist,
and you ARE an Alien, and yet you talk English like a native, and have
always talked it, why, what in the name of goodness do you want us to
take you for?” But he restrained himself with difficulty. There was
something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be
more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any
one he had ever met with.
They walked on along the road for some minutes together, the stranger
admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich
perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and
prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too
(or rather, important), but failed to see for his own part where the
quaintness came in. Nay, he took the imputation as rather a slur on so
respectable a neighbourhood: for to be quaint is to be picturesque, and
to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned. But the stranger's voice and
manner were so pleasant, almost so ingratiating, that Philip did
not care to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying
epithet. After all, there's nothing positively insulting in calling a
house quaint, though Philip would certainly have preferred, himself, to
hear the Eligible Family Residences of that Aristocratic Neighbourhood
described in auctioneering phrase as “imposing,” “noble,” “handsome,” or
“important-looking.”
Just before they reached Miss Blake's door, the Alien paused for a
second. He took out a loose handful of money, gold and silver together,
from his trouser pocket. “One more question,” he said, with that
pleasant smile on his lips, “if you'll excuse my ignorance. Which of
these coins is a pound, now, and which is a sovereign?”
“Why, a pound IS a sovereign, of course,” Philip answered briskly,
smiling the genuine British smile of unfeigned astonishment that anybody
should be ignorant of a minor detail in the kind of life he had
always lived among. To be sure, he would have asked himself with equal
simplicity what was the difference between a twenty-franc piece, a
napoleon, and a louis, or would have debated as to the precise numerical
relation between twenty-five cents and a quarter of a dollar; but then,
those are mere foreign coins, you see, which no fellow can be expected
to understand, unless he happens to have lived in the country they are
used in. The others are British and necessary to salvation. That
feeling is instinctive in the thoroughly provincial English nature. No
Englishman ever really grasps for himself the simple fact that England
is a foreign country to foreigners; if strangers happen to show
themselves ignorant of any petty matter in English life, he regards
their ignorance as silly and childish, not to be compared for a moment
to his own natural unfamiliarity with the absurd practices of foreign
nations.
The Alien, indeed, seemed to have learned beforehand this curious
peculiarity of the limited English intellect; for he blushed slightly as
he replied, “I know your currency, as a matter of arithmetic, of course:
twelve pence make one shilling; twenty shillings make one pound--”
“Of course,” Philip echoed in a tone of perfect conviction; it would
never have occurred to him to doubt for a moment that everybody knew
intuitively those beggarly elements of the inspired British monetary
system.
“Though they're singularly awkward units of value for any one accustomed
to a decimal coinage: so unreasonable and illogical,” the stranger
continued blandly, turning over the various pieces with a dubious air of
distrust and uncertainty.
“I BEG your pardon,” Philip said, drawing himself up very stiff, and
scarcely able to believe his ears (he was an official of Her Britannic
Majesty's Government, and unused to such blasphemy). “Do I understand
you to say, you consider pounds, shillings, and pence UNREASONABLE?”
He put an emphasis on the last word that might fairly have struck terror
to the stranger's breast; but somehow it did not. “Why, yes,” the Alien
went on with imperturbable gentleness: “no order or principle, you know.
No rational connection. A mere survival from barbaric use. A score, and
a dozen. The score is one man, ten fingers and ten toes; the dozen is
one man with shoes on--fingers and feet together. Twelve pence make one
shilling; twenty shillings one pound. How very confusing! And then, the
nomenclature's so absurdly difficult! Which of these is half-a-crown, if
you please, and which is a florin? and what are their respective values
in pence and shillings?”
Philip picked out the coins and explained them to him separately. The
Alien meanwhile received the information with evident interest, as a
traveller in that vast tract that is called Abroad might note the habits
and manners of some savage tribe that dwells within its confines, and
solemnly wrapped each coin up in paper, as his instructor named it for
him, writing the designation and value outside in a peculiarly beautiful
and legible hand. “It's so puzzling, you see,” he said in explanation,
as Philip smiled another superior and condescending British smile at
this infantile proceeding; “the currency itself has no congruity or
order: and then, even these queer unrelated coins haven't for the most
part their values marked in words or figures upon them.”
“Everybody knows what they are,” Philip answered lightly. Though for a
moment, taken aback by the novelty of the idea, he almost admitted
in his own mind that to people who had the misfortune to be born
foreigners, there WAS perhaps a slight initial difficulty in this
unlettered system. But then, you cannot expect England to be regulated
throughout for the benefit of foreigners! Though, to be sure, on the
one occasion when Philip had visited the Rhine and Switzerland, he
had grumbled most consumedly from Ostend to Grindelwald, at those very
decimal coins which the stranger seemed to admire so much, and had
wondered why the deuce Belgium, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland could
not agree among themselves upon a uniform coinage; it would be so much
more convenient to the British tourist. For the British tourist, of
course, is NOT a foreigner.
On the door-step of Miss Blake's Furnished Apartments for Families
and Gentlemen, the stranger stopped again. “One more question,” he
interposed in that same suave voice, “if I'm not trespassing too much
on your time and patience. For what sort of term--by the day, month,
year--does one usually take lodgings?”
“Why, by the week, of course,” Philip answered, suppressing a broad
smile of absolute surprise at the man's childish ignorance.
“And how much shall I have to pay?” the Alien went on quietly. “Have you
any fixed rule about it?”
“Of course not,” Philip answered, unable any longer to restrain his
amusement (everything in England was “of course” to Philip). “You pay
according to the sort of accommodation you require, the number of your
rooms, and the nature of the neighbourhood.”
“I see,” the Alien replied, imperturbably polite, in spite of Philip's
condescending manner. “And what do I pay per room in this latitude and
longitude?”
For twenty seconds, Philip half suspected his new acquaintance of a
desire to chaff him: but as at the same time the Alien drew from his
pocket a sort of combined compass and chronometer which he gravely
consulted for his geographical bearings, Philip came to the conclusion
he must be either a seafaring man or an escaped lunatic. So he answered
him to the point. “I should think,” he said quietly, “as Miss Blake's
are extremely respectable lodgings, in a first-rate quarter, and with
a splendid view, you'll probably have to pay somewhere about three
guineas.”
“Three what?” the stranger interposed, with an inquiring glance at the
little heap of coins he still held before him.
Philip misinterpreted his glance. “Perhaps that's too much for you,” he
suggested, looking severe; for if people cannot afford to pay for decent
rooms, they have no right to invade an aristocratic suburb, and bespeak
the attention of its regular residents.
“Oh, that's not it,” the Alien put in, reading his tone aright. “The
money doesn't matter to me. As long as I can get a tidy room, with sun
and air, I don't mind what I pay. It's the guinea I can't quite remember
about for the moment. I looked it up, I know, in a dictionary at home;
but I'm afraid I've forgotten it. Let me see; it's twenty-one pounds to
the guinea, isn't it? Then I'm to pay about sixty-three pounds a week
for my lodgings.”
This was the right spirit. He said it so simply, so seriously, so
innocently, that Philip was quite sure he really meant it. He was
prepared, if necessary, to pay sixty odd pounds a week in rent. Now, a
man like that is the proper kind of man for a respectable neighbourhood.
He'll keep a good saddle-horse, join the club, and play billiards
freely. Philip briefly explained to him the nature of his mistake,
pointing out to him that a guinea was an imaginary coin, unrepresented
in metal, but reckoned by prescription at twenty-one shillings. The
stranger received the slight correction with such perfect nonchalance,
that Philip at once conceived a high opinion of his wealth and solvency,
and therefore of his respectability and moral character. It was clear
that pounds and shillings were all one to him. Philip had been right,
no doubt, in his first diagnosis of his queer acquaintance as a man
of distinction. For wealth and distinction are practically synonyms in
England for one and the same quality, possession of the wherewithal.
As they parted, the stranger spoke again, still more at sea. “And are
there any special ceremonies to be gone through on taking up lodgings?”
he asked quite gravely. “Any religious rites, I mean to say? Any poojah
or so forth? That is,” he went on, as Philip's smile broadened, “is
there any taboo to be removed or appeased before I can take up my
residence in the apartments?”
By this time Philip was really convinced he had to do with a
madman--perhaps a dangerous lunatic. So he answered rather testily, “No,
certainly not; how absurd! you must see that's ridiculous. You're in a
civilised country, not among Australian savages. All you'll have to
do is to take the rooms and pay for them. I'm sorry I can't be of
any further use to you, but I'm pressed for time to-day. So now,
good-morning.”
As for the stranger, he turned up the path through the lodging-house
garden with curious misgivings. His heart failed him. It was half-past
three by mean solar time for that particular longitude. Then why had
this young man said so briskly, “Good morning,” at 3.30 P.M., as if on
purpose to deceive him? Was he laying a trap? Was this some wile and
guile of the English medicine-men?