She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose
and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple
that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the
outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear
lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real
thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.
I don’t think nature had meant her to be “intellectual;” but what can a
poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly
six months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather’s
edition of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the
creditors?
Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in
blank verse on “The Fall of Man;” one of her aunts was dean of a girls’
college; another had translated Euripides--with such a family, the poor
child’s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband’s
debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after
some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was
unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.
They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her
she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden
china and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their
spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies
assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was “doing it
for the baby,” and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper
lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to
listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art
was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as
walking down a museum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses
and Apollos. All the later complications--the archaic and archaistic
conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting
attributions and the wrangles of the erudite--still slumbered in the
bosom of the future “scientific critic.” Greek art in those days began
with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could
travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way.
Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory,
and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not
remember--wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers
of rhetoric that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly
critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had
translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the [Greek: ais] and [Greek:
ois] that she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself,
of course, with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase),
struck awe to the hearts of ladies whose only “accomplishment” was
French--if you didn’t speak too quickly.
I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months
later I came upon her again in the New England university town where the
celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus,
with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on
the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her
husband’s death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her
father’s lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot,
thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced
in a snug hollow of the Parnassian slope.
After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs.
Amyot. From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who
were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs.
Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt
whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was
ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment,
of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to
enjoy. Even at the opening of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender
eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture
to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be handed on.
She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her
life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was, and when, just
as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was
in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with
a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson’s line--wasn’t it
Emerson’s?--that beauty is its own excuse for _seeing_, and that had
made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one
_saw_ beauty more vividly than she--as a child she used to sit for hours
gazing at an Etruscan vase on the bookcase in the library, while her
sisters played with their dolls--and if _seeing_ beauty was the only
excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make
allowances and not be _too_ critical and sarcastic, especially if, as
she thought probable, I had heard of her having lost her poor husband,
and how she had to do it for the baby.
Being abundantly assured of my sympathy on these points, she went on to
say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures.
Of course, one subject wasn’t enough (this view of the limitations of
Greek art as a “subject” gave me a startling idea of the rate at which
a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe); she must find
others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of
Tennyson--didn’t I _love_ Tennyson? She _worshipped_ him so that she was
sure she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a
“course” on Raphael or Michelangelo--or on the heroines of Shakespeare?
There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael’s Madonnas and of the
Sistine ceiling in her mother’s library, and she had seen Miss Cushman
in several Shakespearian _rôles_, so that on these subjects also she
felt qualified to speak with authority.
When we reached her mother’s door she begged me to come in and talk the
matter over; she wanted me to see the baby--she felt as though I should
understand her better if I saw the baby--and the dimple flashed through
a tear.
The fear of encountering the author of “The Fall of Man,” combined with
the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this
appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the morrow, I
left too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I
saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.
My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to
another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it
was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other’s path.
It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston,
I learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon
as the meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.
“On Greek art?” I suggested.
“Oh, you’ve heard her then? No, this is one of the series called ‘Homes
and Haunts of the Poets.’ Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake
Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful
creature--all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course,
that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on ‘The Fall
of Man’; N.P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of
Mrs. Amyot’s aunts has translated Eurip--”
“And is she as pretty as ever?” I irrelevantly interposed.
My hostess looked shocked. “She is excessively modest and retiring. She
says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she
only does it for the baby.”
Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall
full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a
favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and
as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting
forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them
with seats.
Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the
back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once
able to establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to
the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my
earlier recollections.
Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious
discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her
theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which
she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the
shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that,
for her purpose, the bull’s-eye was everywhere, so that there was no
need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated
the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick
analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white
paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives
she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and
discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject
with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size.
To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in
her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential
manner--so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place
in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes’s
book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically
exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children’s
socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure,
to this personal accent--the moral equivalent of her dimple--that Mrs.
Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of
transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared
her to her feminine listeners.
To any one not in search of “documents” Mrs. Amyot’s success was hardly
of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with
the growing conviction that the “suffering” entailed on her by public
speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had
reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately
manipulating her public; and there must indeed have been a certain
exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means involving
so little conscious effort. Mrs. Amyot’s art was simply an extension of
coquetry: she flirted with her audience.
In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my
hostess’s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs.
Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday
evenings, and one met “thoughtful” people there, my hostess explained:
it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained
distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and
intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot
in the street.
She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I
not come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and
it had frightened her--yes, really, almost as much as years ago in
Hillbridge. She never _could_ get over that stupid shyness, and the
whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do?
There was the baby--he was a big boy now, and boys were _so_ expensive!
But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why
wouldn’t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly
what I had thought of the lecture? She had plenty of flattery--people
were _so_ kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby--but
what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating
criticism like mine--oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating!
I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her
Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked
it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating
length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been
taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the
itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had
reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and
to hunt cats with the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry
were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot’s irrepressible coquetry.
But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother’s love for him was. It
justified everything--the lectures _were_ for the baby, after all. I had
not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot
carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she
should--Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no
use, of course, in being “discriminating.” I preserved sufficient reason
to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested “subjects” and made lists of
books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated
the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men
might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a
hostage and escaped by the afternoon train.
The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so
fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at
her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and
hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was
perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to
support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin)
was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the
throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late,
dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves
in the study of each other’s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with
warmth, but she evidently represented a social obligation like going to
church, rather than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that
every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure
that none of the others were coming.
Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between
herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become
a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing
warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but
it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed
far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and
her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities
of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her
hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her
of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was
sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of
her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must
be receiving a liberal education.
I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I
found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot’s side. The dimple came out at my
greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the
same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty
demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a
moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.
Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat,
with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of
expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful.
It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot’s account. Lancelot had been
sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well
and people didn’t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard
afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat
in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her
now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more
automatic: she had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had
disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over
her. She had been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no
one seemed to know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the
oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had
so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that
had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of
my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not
to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed
to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a
gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the
line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the
first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I
made no excuse for following her.
She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with
her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the
guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last
seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well
and that for the present she was not lecturing--she was tired and her
doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she
paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps
if I were in Boston again--the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out
and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase.
Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from
her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been
unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and
could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which--. A few days
later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had
happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on
for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had
more rivals than formerly--younger women, she admitted, with a smile
that could still afford to be generous--and then her audiences had
grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing--as she
understood it--used to be simple enough. You chose your topic--Raphael,
Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar
“subject”--and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the
Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it
appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired
of familiar “subjects”; it was the fashion to be interested in things
that one hadn’t always known about--natural selection, animal magnetism,
sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the
demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold
had introduced the habit of studying the “influence” of one author on
another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well
as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious
influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of
Shakespeare on English literature; but such investigations had soon lost
all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either
that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that
there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of
the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer
established a relation between two people who had probably never heard
of each other, much less read each other’s works. A pretty Miss Williams
with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success
on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while
somebody else had given a “course” on the influence of St. Thomas
Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say
that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her
grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea
of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to
her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as
well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what
became of “The Fall of Man” in the light of modern exegesis?
The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no
longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as
for the managers, they wouldn’t look at her. She had tried her luck all
through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of
no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects--or, better
still, of some new audiences--she must simply go out of the business.
That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot
would have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming
tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be
a genius. He had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had
“literary gifts”; he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his
mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a
velvet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer.
Lancelot’s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains;
but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted
was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I
managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems
reminded me of Swinburne--and so they did, as well as of Browning,
Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply young authors
with original inspirations.
This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means
his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of
a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with
counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was
to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of
intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of
a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear
contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood
prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had
promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half
pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science
and religion.
In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered
my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the
murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph
celebrating Mrs. Amyot’s last brilliant lecture on the influence of
something upon somebody; and her own letters--she overwhelmed me with
them--spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by
the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of
Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured
me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I
winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery
of fraud that I had set in motion. All over my native land, men of
hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with me in urging their
friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the reconciliation of
science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number
of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the
defense of his convictions.
None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years
later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing
in Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas.
The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the
light of recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an
ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot’s triumphs with the
impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind
at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a
mother to educate her son.
The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home
the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of
those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves
visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer
heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of
memory.
A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst
punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who
pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in
the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and
my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast
and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man
at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory
interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my
fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I
clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance
I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown
beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses,
imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was
nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and
though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably
from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that
under different conditions his discursive history of successful business
ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner
of a lullaby.
Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a
self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as
though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied
itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark
of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied
with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty)
deep-sunk in conjugal content.
He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his
eldest boy’s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive,
paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is
the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.
“Won’t you take a ticket?” she said sweetly.
Of course I would take a ticket--but for what? I ventured to inquire.
“Oh, that’s _so_ good of you--for the lecture this evening. You needn’t
go, you know; we’re none of us going; most of us have been through it
already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I’ve given
away my tickets to some new people who’ve just come from the North, and
some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room.”
“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”
“Oh, I thought you knew--to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all
over the South this winter; she’s simply _haunted_ me ever since I left
New York--and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One
has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her
son--to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and
talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is
sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope
that boy’s nearly educated!”
“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she _still_ educating her
son?”
“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some
comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor
thing will be able to take a rest--and give us one!”
She laughed and held out her hand.
“Here’s your ticket. Did you say _tickets_--two? Oh, thanks. Of course
you needn’t go.”
“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”
“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I
can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”--in a
well-directed aside--“if your friend--?”
I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too
recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked
her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and
to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to
go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.
The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor,
who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the
conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to
himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.
“Much obliged--I have a ticket,” he said abruptly.
This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he
who spoke next.
“Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs.
Amyot’s?”
“I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the
pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too--”
“To pay for her son’s education?”
“I believe so.”
“Well--see you later.”
He got up and walked into the house.
In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling
of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a
sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity
to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for
it would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to
command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at
him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.
The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended
by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would _scream_ if
we had the lecture on Ibsen--she had heard it three times already that
winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in
the lecturer’s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the
Cosmogony.
After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved
its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door
opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!
Some one said “Hush!”, the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she
began.
It was like looking at one’s self early in the morning in a cracked
mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have
a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced
across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was
looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our
glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was
Lancelot_.
I don’t remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of
them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot’s
eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had
sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be
done about it.
The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my
companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and
the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who
had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded
stranger at my elbow.
We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.
“I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs.
Amyot’s?” he began awkwardly.