“Ah, that’s the trouble. We’re all far too complex nowadays.”
“We live in a complex age,” I returned profoundly.
“True, very true,” he replied, and twisted the ribbon of his eyeglass
round one finger. “Very little is left that is simple and primitive and
beautiful.”
I favoured him with the cosmic shrug of his cult, and said nothing
eloquently. The understanding was complete.
Cicely Vicars’s “evening” was ground I had not hitherto explored, and I
had marked for my own at once the young man drooping mincingly over the
piano. He was smooth and fair, inclined to premature stoutness, and
looked remotely. Mrs. Vicars informed me that he was a playwright, a
dramatic critic, and a Fashion; that he promised brilliant things, and
that the name under which he wrought was Eleanor Macquoid. She added
that he had intuition beyond his years.
Now people went to Mrs. Vicars’s “evening” for intellectual intercourse
and the exchange of ideas--an object in which they would not be balked.
Carrie had said as much to me.
“You ought to come, Rol,” she had remarked on one occasion. “It’s
so--it’s awfully new, Rol, really.”
“Indeed?” I had said. “In what way is it particularly--pardon me--up to
date?”
“Oh,” she replied, “it’s so _real_, Rollo.” Then, reassuringly, “They
don’t talk about the soul, you know--you needn’t be afraid of that.
It’s--it’s instinct. The soul is quite too old, you know.”
“A full season behind,” I assented gravely. “And so the soul, _chez_
Mrs. Vicars, is superseded in favour of the dilettante animal? Is that
so, my sister?”
“Yes,” she agreed doubtfully, and added, “Of course there are
outsiders.”
It turned out, as Caroline had said, to be Instinct, Primal Sanity, and
the Elemental Paganism, and very prettily put I heard it. No one was
_blasé_. They said so. They were enthusiastic. My young man declared it
with an animation that brought him near to spilling the liqueur
carefully poised on his knee. He spoke of the keen joy of living,
delicately and epigrammatically, digressing to observe that he preferred
Indian cigarettes to Brazilian, and adding that after all there was
nothing like the great rough kindnesses of the Mother Earth. Cicely
Vicars’s gathering was indisputably in the vanguard of the latest cry.
Mr. Eleanor Macquoid seemed to take to me, for he spoke almost
immediately of “people who understand.” I was evidently admitted on
sight to the mystery, and improved the occasion accordingly. I examined
my finger nails--I had seen him do so--and dropped my pearls of wisdom
nonchalantly, as not expecting they would be gathered up.
He was talking softly, and almost sleepily, on the picturesqueness of
Mass and Brute Bulk.
“There is something quite Titanic,” he said, “in the conception of a
world where nothing was as yet ruled and squared out for us; where
everything was vague and shifting.”
“It is an especially gigantic thought,” I replied appreciatively. “The
insistence nowadays of the Social Nexus----”