I am a personage apart from humanity. I vary from the kindly ways of
man. A curse is on me.
Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of
the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of
no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith. I might be an
ancient dweller in the Thebaid struggling towards dreams of celestial
habitations, and confronted only by grotesque visions of hell. No
matter what I do, I'm baffled. I look upon sorrow and say, “Lo, this is
tragedy!” and hey, presto! a trick of lightning turns it into farce. I
cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the
apotheosis of the fantastic is not its goal,” and immediately a grinning
irony comes to give the lie to my credo.
Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, I am
undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of view, being
doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, to stretch out my
hand for ever to grasp realities and find I can do nought but beat the
air with my bladder; to listen with strained ear perpetually expectant
of the music of the spheres, and catch nothing but the mocking jingle of
the bells on my fool's cap?
I don't know. I give it up.
Such were my thoughts on the morning after my interview with Dale, when
I had read a long, long letter from Lola, which she had despatched from
Paris.
The letter lies before me now, many pages in a curious, half-formed
foreign hand. Many would think it an ill-written letter--for there are
faults of spelling and faults of grammar--but even now, as I look
on those faults, the tears come into my eyes. Oh, how exquisitely,
pathetically, monumentally, sublimely foolish! She had little or nothing
to do with it, poor dear; it was only the Arch-Jester again, leading her
blindly away, so as once more to leave me high and dry on the Hill of
Derision.
“. . . My dear, you must forgive me! My heart is breaking, but I know
I'm doing right. There is nothing for it but to go out of your life for
ever. It terrifies me to think of it, but it's the only way. I know you
think you love me, dear; but you can't, you can't _really_ love a woman
so far beneath you, and I would sooner never see you again than marry
you and wake up one day and find that you hated and scorned me. . . .”
Can you wonder that I shook my fist at Heaven and danced with rage?
“. . . Miss Eleanor Faversham called on me just a few minutes after you
left me that afternoon. We had a long, long talk. Simon, dear, you must
marry her. You loved her once, for you were engaged, and only broke it
off because you thought you were going to die; and she loves you, Simon,
and she is a lady with all the refinement and education that I could
never have. She is of your class, dear, and understands you, and can
help you on, whereas I could only drag you down. I am not fit to black
her boots. . . .”
And so forth, and so forth, in the most heartrending strain of insensate
self-sacrifice and heroic self-abasement. The vainest and most heartless
dog of a man stands abashed and helpless before such things in a woman.
She had not seen or written to me because she would not have her
resolution weakened. After the great wrench, succeeding things were
easier. She had taken Anastasius's cats and proposed to work them in
the music-halls abroad and send the proceeds to be administered for the
little man's comfort at the Maison de Sante. As both her name and the
Papadopoulos troupe of cats were well known in the “variety” world, it
would be a simple matter to obtain engagements. She had already opened
negotiations for a short season somewhere abroad. I was not to be
anxious about her. She would have plenty of occupation.
“. . . I am not sending you any address, for I don't want you to know
where I am, dear. I shan't write to you again unless I scribble things
and tear them up without posting. This is final. When a woman makes such
a break she must do it once and for all. Oh, Simon, when you kissed me
two days ago you thought you loved me; but I know what the senses are
and how they deceive people, and I had only just caught your senses
on that spring afternoon, and I made you do it, for I had been aching,
aching for months for a word of love from you, and when it came I was
ashamed. But I should have been weak and shut my eyes to everything if
Miss Faversham had not come to me like God's good angel. . . .”
At the fourth reading of the letter I stopped short at these words.
God's good angel, indeed! Could anything have been more calculated to
put a man into a frenzy? I seized my hat and stick and went in search
of the nearest public telephone office. In less than ten minutes I had
arranged an immediate interview with Eleanor Faversham at my sister
Agatha's, and in less than half an hour I was pacing up and down
Agatha's sitting-room waiting for her. God's good angel! The sound
of the words made me choke with wrath. There are times when angelic
interference in human destinies is entirely unwarrantable. I stamped and
I fumed, and I composed a speech in which I told Eleanor exactly what I
thought of angels.
As I had to wait a considerable time, however, before Eleanor appeared,
the raging violence of my wrath abated, and when she did enter the room
smiling and fresh, with the spring in her clear eyes and a flush on her
cheek, I just said: “How d'ye do, Eleanor?” in the most commonplace way,
and offered her a chair.
“I've come, you see. You were rather peremptory, so I thought it must be
a matter of great importance.”
“It is,” said I. “You went to see Madame Brandt.”
“I did,” she replied, looking at me steadily, “and I have tried to write
to you, but it is more difficult than I thought.”
“Well,” said I, “it's no use writing now, for you've managed to drive
her out of the country.”
She half rose in her chair and regarded me with wide-blue eyes.
“I've driven her out of the country?”
“Yes; with her maid and her belongings and Anastasius Papadopoulos's
troupe of performing cats, and Anastasius Papadopoulos's late pupil and
assistant Quast. She has given up her comfortable home in London and now
proposes to be a wanderer among the music-halls of Europe.”
“But that's not my fault! Indeed, it isn't.”
“She says in a letter I received this morning bearing no address, that
if you hadn't come to her like God's good angel, she would have remained
in London.”
Eleanor looked bewildered. “I thought I had made it perfectly clear to
her.”
“Made what clear?”
She blushed a furious red. “Can't you guess? You must be as stupid as
she is. And, of course, you're wildly angry with me. Aren't you?”
“I certainly wish you hadn't gone to see her.”
“Was it merely to tell me this that you ordered me to come here?” she
asked, with a touch of anger in her voice, for however much like God's
good angels young women may be, they generally have a spirit of their
own.
I felt I had been wanting in tact; also that I had put myself--through
an impetuosity foreign to what I had thought to be my character--in a
foolish position. If I replied affirmatively to her question, she
would have served me perfectly right by tossing her head in the air and
marching indignantly out of the room. I temporised.
“In order to understand the extraordinary consequences of your
interview, I should like to have some idea of what took place. I know,
my dear Eleanor,” I continued as gently as I could, “I know that you
went to see her out of the very great kindness of your heart--”
“No, I didn't.”
I made a little gesture in lieu of reply. There was a span of silence.
Eleanor played with the silky ears of Agatha's little Yorkshire terrier
which had somehow strayed into the room and taken possession of her lap.
“Don't you see, Simon?” she said at last, half tearfully, without taking
her eyes off the dog, “don't you see that by accusing me in this way
you make it almost impossible for me to speak? And I was going to be so
loyal to you.”
A tear fell down her cheek on to the dog's back, and convicted me of
unmitigated brutality.
“What else could you be but loyal?” I murmured. “Your attitude all
through has shone it.”
She flashed her hand angrily over her eyes, and looked at me. “And I
wanted to be loyal to the end. If you had waited and she had waited, you
would have seen. As soon as I could have conveyed it to you decently, I
should have shown you----Ah!” She broke off, put the Yorkshire terrier
on the sofa beside her, and rose with an impatient gesture. “You want to
know why I called on Lola Brandt? I felt I had to know for myself what
kind of woman she was. She was the woman between us--you and me. You
don't suppose I ceased to care for you just because what we thought was
a fatal illness broke off our engagement! I did care for you. I cared
for you--in a way; I say 'in a way'--I'll tell you why later on. When we
met here the last time do you think I was not moved? I knew your altered
position would not allow you to suggest a renewal of the engagement so
I offered you the opportunity. Do you remember? But I could not tell
whether you still cared for me or whether you cared for the other woman.
So I had to go and see her. I couldn't bear to think that you might feel
in honour bound to take me at my word and be caring all the time for
some one else. I went to see her, and then I realised that I didn't
count. Don't ask why. Women know these things. And I found that she
loved you with a warmth and richness I'm incapable of. I felt I had
stepped into something big and splendid, as if I had been a caterpillar
walking into the heart of a red rose. I felt prim and small and petty.
Until then I had never known what love meant, and I didn't feel it;
I couldn't feel it. I couldn't give you a millionth part of what
that woman does. And I knew that having lived in that atmosphere, you
couldn't possibly be content with me. If you had waited, I should have
found some means of telling you so. That's what I meant by saying I
was loyal to you. And I thought I had made it clear to her. It seems I
didn't. It isn't my fault.”
“My dear,” said I, when she had come to the end of this astonishing
avowal, and stood looking at me somewhat defiantly and twisting her
fingers nervously in front of her, “I don't know what in the world to
say to you.”
“You can tell me, at least, that my instinct was right.”
“Which one? A woman has so many.”
“That you love Lola Brandt.”
I lifted my arms in a helpless gesture and let them drop to my sides.
“One is not one's own master in these things.”
“Then you do?”
“Yes,” said I in a low voice.
Eleanor drew a long breath, turned and sat down again on the sofa.
“And she knows it?”
“I have told her so.”
“Then why in the world has she run away?”
“Because you two wonderful and divinely foolish people have been too big
for each other. While you were impressed by one quality in her she was
equally impressed by another in you. She departed, burning her ships, so
as to go entirely out of my life for the simple reason, as she herself
expresses it, that she was not fit to black your boots. So,” said I,
taking her left hand in mine and patting it gently, “between you two
dear, divine angel fools, I fall to the ground.”
A while later, just before we parted, she said in her frank way:
“I know many people would say I've behaved with shocking
impropriety--immodestly and all that. You don't, do you? I believe half
the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight
at things. Perhaps I've gone too straight this time--but you'll forgive
me?”
I smiled and squeezed her hand. “My dear,” said I, “Lola Brandt was
right. You are God's good angel.”
I went away in a chastened mood, no longer wrathful, for what could
woman do more for mortal man than what Eleanor Faversham had attempted?
She had gone to see whether she should stand against her rival, and with
a superb generosity, unprecedented in her sex, she had withdrawn. The
magnanimity of it overwhelmed me. I walked along the street exalting her
to viewless pinnacles of high-heartedness. And then, suddenly, the Devil
whispered in my ear that execrated word “eumoiriety.” It poisoned the
rest of the day. It confirmed my conviction of the ironical designs of
Destiny. Destiny, not content with making me a victim of the accursed
principle in my own person, had used these two dear women as its
instruments in dealing me fresh humiliation. Where would it end? Where
could I turn to escape such an enemy? If I had been alone in green
fields instead of Sloane Square, I should have clapped my hands to my
head and prayed God not to drive me crazy. I should have cried wild vows
to the winds and shaken my fist at the sky and rolled upon the grass
and made a genteel idiot of myself. Nature would have understood. Men
do these things in time of stress, and I was in great stress. I loved
a woman for the first time in my life--and I was a man nearly forty. I
wanted her with every quivering nerve in me. And she was gone. Lost in
the vast expanse of Europe with a parcel of performing cats. Gone out of
my life loving me as I loved her, all on account of this Hell-invented
principle. Ye gods! If the fierce, pure, deep, abiding love of a man for
a woman is not a reality, what in this world of shadows is anything but
vapour? I grasped it tight, hugged it to my bosom--and now she was gone,
and in my ears rang the derisive laughter of the enemy.
Where would it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too
outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a
street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person,
comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no
superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to
encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains
of Bedlam had ever conceived. Why should not this little lady tripping
along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw
her arms round my neck and salute me as her long-lost brother? Why
should not the patient horses in that omnibus suddenly turn into
griffins and begin to snort fire from their nostrils? Why should not
that policeman, who, on his beat, was approaching me with the heavy,
measured tread, suddenly arrest me for complicity in the Pazzi
Conspiracy or the Rye House Plot? Why should not the whole of the
decorous street suddenly change into the inconsequence of an Empire
ballet? Why should not the heavens fall down and universal chaos envelop
all?
The only possible reason I can think of now is that the Almighty Powers
did not consider it worth while to go to quite so much trouble on my
account.
This, however, gives you some idea of my state of mind. But though it
lasted for a considerable time, I would not have you believe that I
fostered it unduly. Indeed, I repudiated it with some disgust. I took it
out, examined it, and finding it preposterous, set to work to modify it
into harmony with the circumstances of my every-day life. Even the most
sorely tried of men cannot walk abroad shedding his exasperation around
like pestilence. If he does, he is put into a lunatic asylum.
If a man cannot immediately assuage the hunger of his heart, he must
meet starvation with a smiling face. In the meantime, he has to eat so
as to satisfy the hunger of his body, to clothe himself with a certain
discrimination, to attend to polite commerce with his fellow man and to
put to some fair use the hours of his day. I did not doubt but that
by means of intelligent inquiry which I determined to pursue in every
possible direction I should sooner or later obtain news of Lola. A lady
with a troupe of performing cats could not for long remain in obscurity.
True, I might have gone in gallant quest of her; but I had had enough of
such fool adventures. I bided my time, consulted with Dale, who took
up the work of a private detective agency with his usual zeal, writing
letters to every crony who languished in the exile of foreign embassies,
and corresponding (unknown to Lady Kynnersley) with the agencies of
the International Aid Society, did what I could on my own account, and
turned my attention seriously to the regeneration of the Judds.
As the affairs of one drunken tailor's family could not afford me
complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself
insensibly drawn by Campion's unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of
small duties connected with Barbara's Building. Before I could realise
that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening class
of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who assembled in one of the
lecture-rooms to listen to my recollections of the history of England.
I was to continue the course begun by a young Oxford man, who, for some
reason or other, had migrated from Barbara's Building to Toynbee Hall.
“I've never done any schoolmastering in my life. Suppose,” said I, with
vivid recollections of my school days, “suppose they rag me?”
“They won't,” said Campion, who had come to introduce me to the class.
And they did not. I found these five and twenty youthful members of the
proletariat the most attentive, respectable, and intelligent audience
that ever listened to a lecture. Gradually I came to perceive that they
were not as villainous-looking and uncleanly as at first sight I had
imagined. A great many of them took notes. When I came to the end of
my dissertation on Henry VIII, I went among them, as I discovered the
custom to be, and chatted, answering questions, explaining difficulties,
and advising as to a course of reading. The atmosphere of trust and
friendliness compensated for the lack of material sweetness. Here were
young men pathetically eager to learn, grateful for every crumb of
information that came from my lips. They reminded me of nothing more
than the ragged class of scholars around a teacher in a mediaeval
university. Some had vague dreams of eventually presenting themselves
for examinations, the Science and Art Department, the College of
Preceptors, the Matriculation of the University of London. Others
longed for education for its own sake, or rather as a means of raising
themselves in the social scale. Others, bitten by the crude Socialism of
their class, had been persuaded to learn something of past movements
of mankind so as to obtain some basis for their opinions. All were
in deadly earnest. The magnetic attraction between teacher and taught
established itself. After one or two lectures, I looked forward to the
next with excited interest.
Other things Campion off-handedly put into my charge. I went on tours of
inspection round the houses of his competing housewives. I acted as his
deputy at the police court when ladies and gentlemen with a good record
at Barbara's got into trouble with the constabulary. I investigated
cases for the charity of the institution. In quite a short time
I realised with a gasp that I had become part of the machinery of
Barbara's Building, and was remorselessly and helplessly whirled hither
and thither with the rest of the force of the driving wheel which was
Rex Campion.
The amazing, the astounding, the utterly incredible thing about the
whole matter was that I not only liked it, but plunged into it heart and
soul as I had never plunged into work before. I discovered sympathies
that had hitherto lain undreamed of within me. In my electioneering days
I had, it is true, foregathered with the sons of toil. I had shaken the
horny hands of men and the soap-suddy hands of women. I had flattered
them and cajoled them and shown myself mighty affable, as a sensible and
aspiring Parliamentary candidate should do; but the way to their hearts
I had never found, I had never dreamed of seeking. And now it seemed as
if the great gift had been bestowed on me--and I examined it with a new
and almost tremulous delight.
Also, for the first time in all my life, I had taken pain to be the
companion of my soul. All my efforts to find Lola were fruitless. I
became acquainted with the heartache, the longing for the unattainable,
the agony of spirit. The only anodyne was a forgetfulness of self, the
only compensation a glimmer of a hope and the shadow of a smile in the
grey and leaden lives around me.
On Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my
way home from Waterloo Station, wet through, tired out, disappointed,
and looking forward to the dry, soft raiment, the warm, cosy room, the
excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat. I--with several others--had
been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young
hooligans. The weather, which had been perfect on Saturday, Sunday, and
when we had started, a gay and astonishing army, at seven o'clock, had
broken before ten. It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day
long. The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco.
I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill,
as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when
I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a
clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in
his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break. As the spectacle
of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat
remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was
genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an
exhausted manner on the bench beside him. He continued to sob. At last I
said, raising my voice:
“You seem to be pretty miserable. What's wrong?”
He turned bleared, yet honest-looking eyes upon me.
“The whole blasted show!” said he. “There's nothing right in it, s'welp
me Gawd.”
I gave a modified assent to the proposition and drew my coat-collar over
my eyes. “Being wet through doesn't make it any better,” said I.
“Who would ha' thought it would come down as it has to-day? Tell me
that. It's enough to make a man cut his throat!”
I was somewhat surprised. “You're not in such a great distress just
because it has been a rainy day!”
“Ain't I just!” he exclaimed. “It's been and gone and ruined me, this
day has. Look 'ere, guv'nor, I'll tell you all about it. I've been out
of work, see? I was in 'orspital for three months and I couldn't get
nothing regular to do when I come out. I'm a packer by trade. I did odd
jobs, see, and the wife she earned a little, too, and we managed to keep
things going and to scrape together five shillings, that's three months'
savings, against Whitsun Bank Holiday. And as the weather was so fine,
I laid it all out in paper windmills to sell to the kids on 'Amstead
'Eath. And I started out this morning with the basket full of them all
so fine and pretty, and no sooner do I get on the 'Eath than the rain
comes down and wipes out the whole blooming lot, before I could sell
one. Look 'ere!”
He drew a bedraggled sheet of newspaper from the clothes-basket and
displayed a piteous sodden welter of sticks and gaudy pulp. At the sight
of it he broke down again and sobbed like a child.
“And there's not a bite in the 'ouse, nor not likely to be for days;
and I daren't go home and face the missus and the kids--and I wish I was
dead.”
I had already seen many pitiful tragedies during my brief experience
with Campion; but the peculiar pitifulness of this one wrung my heart.
It taught me as nothing had done before how desperately humble are the
aspirations of the poor. I thought of the cosy comfort that awaited me
in my own home; the despair that awaited him in his.
I put my hand in my pocket.
“You seem to be a good chap,” said I.
He shrugged his shoulders. The consciousness of applauded virtue offered
no consolation. I drew out a couple of half-crowns and threw them into
the basket.
“For the missus and the kids,” said I.
He picked them out of the welter, and holding them in his hand, looked
at me stupidly.
“Can you afford it, guv'nor?”
At first I thought this remark was some kind of ill-conditioned sarcasm;
but suddenly I realised that dripping wet and covered with mud from head
to foot, with a shapeless, old, green, Homburg hat drooping forlornly
about my ears, I did not fulfil his conception of the benevolent
millionaire. I laughed, and rose from the bench.
“Yes. Quite well. Better luck next time.”
I nodded a good-bye, and walked away. After a minute, he came running
after me.
“'Ere,” said he, “I ain't thanked yer. Gawd knows how I'm going to do
it. I can't! But, 'ere--would you mind if I chucked a lot of the stuff
into the river and told the missus I had sold it, and just got back my
money? She's proud, she is, and has never accepted a penny in charity in
her life. It's only because it would be better for 'er.”
He looked at me with such earnest appeal that I saw that the saving of
his wife's pride was a serious matter.
“Of course,” said I, “and here's a few ha'pence to add to it, so as to
give colour to the story.”
He saw that I understood. “Thank you kindly, sir,” said he.
“Tell me,” said I, “do you love your wife?”
He gaped at me for a moment; obviously the question had never been put
to him either by himself or anybody else. Then, seeing that my interest
was genuine, he spat and scratched his head.
“We've been together twenty years,” he said, in a low voice, emotion
struggling with self-consciousness, “and I've 'ad nothing agin her all
that time. She's a bloomin' wonder, I tell you straight.”
I held out my hand. “At any rate, you've got what I haven't,” said I. “A
woman who loves you to welcome you home.”
And I went away, longing, longing for Lola's arms and the deep love in
her voice.
Now that I come to view my actions in some sort of perspective, it seems
to me that it was the underlying poignancy of this trumpery incident--a
poignancy which, nevertheless, bit deep into my soul, that finally
determined the current of my life.
A short while afterwards, Campion, who for some time past had found the
organisation of Barbara's Building had far outgrown his individual
power of control, came to me with a proposal that I should undertake the
management of the institution under his general directorship. As he knew
of my financial affairs and of my praiseworthy but futile efforts to
live on two hundred a year, he offered me another two hundred by way of
salary and quarters in the Building. I accepted, moved the salvage of my
belongings from Victoria Street to Lambeth, and settled down to the work
for which a mirth-loving Providence had destined me from my cradle.
When I told Agatha, she nearly fainted.