Edith Allbutt went to her room that night feeling that she had passed a
very pleasant but slightly astounding evening, and that she did not feel
in the least sleepy or at all inclined to go to bed. And the astounding
part of the evening, in the main, had been Hugh. All through dinner he
and Peggy had fireworked away out of sheer good spirits and a matchless
joy of living, and after dinner he had been very insistent on the
necessity either of going on the river in a punt or playing ghosts in
the garden. His huge high spirits were quite clearly natural to him--all
the fireworking was quite obviously the direct result of that, and in no
way at all a social duty. These squibs and rockets were as much part of
him as his slight, slender frame, his quickness of movement and gesture,
his thatch of thick, close-cropped hair, his vivid, handsome face, with
its dark eyes and clear white skin. But all dinner-time that was all
there was of him: he was just a boy with excellent health and an almost
unlimited capacity for enjoying himself; and at the end of dinner she
felt that she knew hardly more about him than she had at the beginning.
She felt, however, though but dimly, and she was afraid rather
ungratefully, for he had been really very entertaining, and it must have
been a sour nature, which hers was not, to feel otherwise than
exhilarated by the presence of so alert a vitality, that if he was
always like that he would become rather fatiguing. Then at once she told
herself that she was an old woman, and if she could not be young herself
it should be a matter of rejoicing, not of fatigue, that other people
could be. But that playing Indians with the children before dinner was a
characteristic much more to her mind. That, too, he had not done, she
felt, from any direct wish to amuse the children; he had done it because
he enjoyed it so much himself. And though the first motive would have
been the more altruistic and therefore, she must suppose, the more
admirable, she liked the second one best.
Then after dinner had begun the surprises. The boats were locked up.
Lord Rye had gone indoors, Peggy refused to play ghosts, and it was
clearly impossible for her to play ghosts alone with Hugh. They had
strolled, all three of them, up to the veranda outside the drawing-room,
and Hugh had caught sight of the new Steinway grand over which Peggy
had, as she explained, just ruined herself.
Then Hugh had said:
“I’ll sing to you if you like.”
And Peggy had thanked him almost reverently.
Edith remembered with extreme distinctness what she thought of this.
There was something of the coxcomb about it; young men ought not to
offer to sing however well they knew their hostess. It was just a little
like Stephen Guest, and for that moment she wondered whether the
fireworks after all partook, though ever so slightly, of the nature of
“showing-off.” But Hugh went in at once, and as she and Peggy sat down
in chairs on the veranda close to the open window she had said to her:
“Does he sing well?”
“Yes, fairly well,” said Peggy; and Edith thought she heard a little
tremor of laughter in her voice.
Edith wondered as she sat down what he would sing. She was herself
intensely musical, but rather seriously so, and she expected something
of “Geisha” kind--a species of song with which she was not much in
sympathy. Perhaps even it would be worse than that, more directly comic,
which would be harder to bear. And she waited for the inevitable running
up and down of the hands over the keyboard which usually precedes the
melody of those who offer to sing. But it did not come. Instead there
came the one bar of Introduction to Schumann’s “Widmung,” played with
the quiet restraint of a real accompanist, and played quite simply and
perfectly. And then he sang.
The song was perhaps just a shade low for him, for his voice was not
that which so often does duty for a tenor--namely, a baritone, screwed
up, as it were, and nailed firmly to its new pitch, but a real tenor,
soft on its high notes, and with the intense purity of tone that is
seldom heard except in a boy’s unbroken voice. But here there was the
passion of the adult voice, passion in all its simplicity and noble
sincerity. Also, so she knew instantly, that voice, so wonderful in
itself, had been trained to the utmost pitch of perfection. Years of
work, years of patient learning under some supreme teacher had gone to
the making of it. All this she perceived almost at once, for the fine
mind and the cultivated taste require but little on which to found their
judgment; and then she thought no more either of the voice or the singer
or the wonderful accompaniment so easily and surely handled. It was just
the song that filled her: its first fine careless rapture, its more
meditative sequel, its whole-hearted cry of love and devotion at the
end. And on “Mein gute Geist, mein besseres Ich!” she just laughed;
laughed aloud for the pure pleasure of it. Since the beginning of the
scarred and maimed years she had not laughed quite like that. And from
inside Hugh heard her laugh, and that pleased him enormously. He knew he
was singing to some one who understood, and no applause, no words of
thanks and praise could have spoken to him so directly.
And when he had finished, Edith sat still, saying nothing, for really
there was nothing to say, her mouth smiling from that laugh, her eyes a
little dim. And Peggy’s “Oh, Hugh!” which was all she said, was nearly
as appreciative as her sister’s silence.
He sang a couple more songs, one by Brahms and the short one-versed “Am
Jordan” from the “Meistersingers,” and then came and joined them on the
veranda.
“And that’s the end of my parlour tricks this evening,” he said. “I
promised Reuss not to sing much on days when I smoked much. And I have
smoked much, and will now smoke more.”
“I wonder if you enjoyed it as much as I did?” said Edith.
“Oh, more probably, because it is such fun doing things oneself!” said
he.
“You must have worked very hard. Did Reuss teach you entirely?”
At this moment the children’s nurse appeared in the drawing-room, and
Peggy went in to see what she wanted. The interview seemed not to be
satisfactory, for she went upstairs with her, leaving the other two
alone.
“Yes, and the brute says he won’t give me any more lessons. Oh, not
because I don’t need any more--he made that delightfully clear, though,
of course, one knew it--but because I won’t take it up professionally!”
He lit his cigarette and turned around to Edith.
“Why should I?” he said. “We really had rather a row; he says it isn’t
fair on him.”
Edith felt so keenly on this point that before she answered she had to
remind herself that she had met this young man for the first time that
evening.
“Ah, I see his point of view, I must say!” she said. “No voice is, as we
both know, worth anything till it is trained. You owe him a good deal;
everyone who hears you sing owes him a good deal.”
“But I don’t want to,” said Hugh, as if that quite settled the matter.
He paused a moment.
“Do let me consult you,” he said, “if it doesn’t bore you. You see, what
has happened is that the Opera Syndicate have asked him if I would take
an engagement for next year. That’s what we had a row about.”
“Did you definitely say you would not?”
“Yes, but he refused to take any answer until I had thought about it. He
said I must take a fortnight to consider it.”
“And what were you to sing in?”
Hugh laughed again.
“Really it sounds quite ridiculous,” he said, “but they suggested
‘Tristan,’ ‘Meistersingers,’ and ‘Lohengrin.’ Of course, I have studied
those particular parts though I should have to work hard all autumn and
winter. I imagine Reuss told them that. In fact, I imagine he worked the
whole thing.”
Edith looked at him gravely, and across her brain there came so vividly
the impression of how he would look in the blue and silver of Lohengrin,
of how that silken voice would sound in that dead silence of Lohengrin’s
entry, when he turns to the swan with the “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber
Schwan,” that it had almost the effect of actual hallucination. Again
she had to remember that he was but a stranger to her, so intimate in
that quarter of an hour when he sang had his voice made him.
“I don’t think it sounds ridiculous, Mr. Grainger,” she said. “Of
course, it is your business and yours only whether you say ‘Yes’ or
‘No.’ But--but I think we should all come and hear you,” she added.
“Then if you were me----”
“Ah, if I were you I should, of course, do whatever you do. But not
being you, I can’t understand you refusing.”
She got up.
“Good gracious!” she said. “Haven’t you any desire, any instinct to make
yourself felt? I have it so strongly. I should so love to impress myself
on the world, to know that there were hundreds of people listening to
me, to make them laugh or cry, to make them beside themselves with
happiness or mute from pure misery.”
She paused a moment.
“You have consulted me, you know,” she said, “and so it is your own
fault. I do see also Reuss’s point of view.”
Then suddenly she burst out laughing.
“And here am I advising you as to your career when a few hours ago I had
never seen you!” she said.
Hugh went straight off on this tack.
“Oh, but it’s such dreadful waste of time getting to know people!” he
said. “Either one knows a person in a couple of hours or so, or else one
never knows him at all.”
Peggy came down again at this moment, looking as if she had been trying
anyhow to be severe.
“Edith, it’s really bedtime,” she said. “Besides, I’m going to talk to
you in your bedroom probably for hours.”
Edith got up.
“Nothing wrong, Peggy?” she asked. “Are the children all right?”
“Yes, only Daisy has announced her firm determination to sit up in bed
and not go to sleep. That child can when she chooses be naughtier than
all the rounds of the Inferno.”
“What does Daisy want?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, she heard you singing, and demanded that you should come up and
sing to her, otherwise she was going to sit up in bed until morning!”
“That doesn’t sound a very good plan,” he observed.
“It’s a remarkably bad one, but her own. Daisy has great strength of
character, and I’m sure I don’t know where she gets it from. Good night!
Put the lights out, won’t you, when you come upstairs?”
It was a very hot night, and Hugh stood at the window for a minute or
two, thinking over the evening. He felt somehow rather stirred and
excited by his two-minute talk with Mrs. Allbutt, for it had literally
not occurred to him at all to think of his decision as affecting anybody
but himself, and the idea that he and his actions could affect other
people meant an attitude of mind, egoistic, that was quite alien to him.
Then close on the heels of that came the thought that upstairs, sitting
up in bed, with firm determination on her features, was Daisy, waiting
till he came to sing to her. That honestly seemed to matter much more
than any operatic career, and he put out the lights, as he had been
desired to do, and went upstairs.
The night nursery, as he knew, was just beyond his own room, which was
opposite Mrs. Allbutt’s. She had turned into her sister’s bedroom on
her way to her own to get a book, and so it happened that Hugh passed on
to his room while she was still there. Just beyond was the door of the
nursery, wide open, like its windows, for Lady Rye was of the
open-window school, and Hugh, with a backward glance as if he were
rather guilty, went into it. A night-light was burning, and dimly he saw
a little night-shirted figure sitting straight as a grenadier up in bed,
in performance of her vow. She hailed him with a little coo of delight.
“Oh, Hughie, have you come to sing?” she said. “How long you have been!
And I am so sleepy!”
“Sitonim, you little brute,” said Hugh, “you really are too naughty! Why
can’t you go to sleep properly like Chopimalive?”
“If you have come to scold me, like mummy,” announced Daisy, with
dignity, “you needn’t have come at all I thought”--and her voice
quivered a little with tired fretfulness--“I thought you had come to
sing to me. I shall sit up just like this until you do, because I said
so. And I am so sleepy!”
Mrs. Allbutt had found the book she wanted and was going to her room
close by, when she heard the pipe of the childish treble. At that,
though she was an honourable woman, she deliberately stopped and
listened.
“But I’m sleepy too,” said Hugh.
A little suppressed sob was the answer.
“You’re not as sleepy as me,” said Daisy. “Nobody could be. And I must
sit up because I said I would.”
The bed creaked, and Mrs. Allbutt guessed that Hugh had sat down on it.
“Won’t it do if I tell you a story?” he asked. “Or if I sit and wait
here till you go to sleep? I’m tired too, and I don’t want to sing.”
“Then I shall go on sitting up,” said Daisy. “And I do so want to lie
down!”
“Well, if I sing, will you promise to go to sleep properly every evening
for--for ten years?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, yes--twenty!”
“Well, then, shall I shut the door? It might disturb mummy.”
“I don’t care,” said Daisy viciously. “Besides, she’s at the other end
of the passage.”
“Well, then, lie down, and I’ll sing.”
Daisy gave a little chuckle of delight.
“Oh, Hughie, I do love you!” she said. “Now lie down by me and put your
head on the pillow, same as if you were going to sleep. Oh, I told
everybody--nurse, mummy, and everybody--that you would come. And they
said you wouldn’t, and I said, ‘Oh, stuff!’”
“That wasn’t polite,” said Hugh.
“Well, they weren’t p’lite. Yes, put your head right down, like that.
I’m afraid you’re too long for my bed, but it doesn’t matter. Oh, isn’t
it comfortable? It was awful sitting up. You needn’t sing much you know,
if you’re tired.”
“Thank you,” said Hugh.
“Now you’re horrid again. Oh, no, Hughie, you’re not! But I think being
tired makes me cross.”
“And what’s it to be?” asked Hugh.
This roused Daisy again; her point was gained and her Hughie was going
to sing, but at this she became an epicure.
“Oh, please, the--the ‘Shepherd’s Song’! Just the last verse. Because I
don’t think I should be awake if you sing it all, and I like the last
best.”
“How does it begin?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, you silly! ‘Sleep, baby, sleep.’ Though I’m not a baby.”
Mrs. Allbutt could not help it: she deliberately spied. There was a big
chink in the hinge of the nursery door, and she looked through. Hugh was
lying with his black head on the pillow, close to Daisy’s, but, as she
had said, the bed was not big enough, and one foot was on the floor and
the other leg thrown over it. Jim had not been awakened, it appeared, by
Daisy’s deviltry, and the little yellow head on the pillow of his bed
was sunk in sleep. Daisy had dropped the grenadier attitude and was
lying down in her bed; her two pale little hands grasped one of Hugh’s.
“Just the last verse, then,” said Hugh--“‘Sleep, baby, sleep!’”
“Yes.”
Hugh turned a little, so that he could sing with the open throat, but
softly. And he sang--
Sleep, baby, sleep,
Our Saviour watch doth keep:
He is the Lamb of God on high,
Who for our sake came down to die;
Sleep, baby, sleep.
The tune was exquisite and simple, simple and exquisite were the words.
And Hugh sang, as the artist always sings, as if this particular song
was the one that he had longed and lived to sing. There was the same
perfection as he had shown downstairs, and there was no more perfection
possible.
“And now you’ll go to sleep, Sitonim?” he said.
“I couldn’t help it,” said Daisy.
At that Mrs. Allbutt went swiftly and silently to her room, and closed
the door craftily.
It was all this she thought over, expecting the hair-brushing visit from
Peggy. She could have given no precise account of why it should have so
taken possession of her mind, except in so far that to the musical soul
the marvel of a beautiful voice is a wonder that is ever new. But it was
not Hugh’s singing alone that had so stirred her; more than all it was
this little vignette seen through the chink of the nursery door of this
radiant youth, with his radiant voice, lying with his head on Daisy’s
pillow, singing in order to free this very obstinate child from her vow
of sitting up until he sang to her, while all the time he knew quite
well that he ought not to sing at all, even if the Pope asked him
to--nor probably in the latter case would he have done so. And, like an
artist, he had not mumbled or whispered, though he was only singing to
one small girl by the illumination of a night-light; he had sung as if
all the world was listening, as if his career hung on each note. Yet the
same boy had rather turned up his nose at the idea of singing Walter,
Tristan, and Lohengrin at Covent Garden; it appeared to be much better
worth while, even in defiance of his master’s orders, to sing Daisy to
sleep.
Peggy followed soon after, having peeped in at the nursery door and seen
that Daisy was already fast asleep.
“Nurse doesn’t know how to manage that child,” she said, with an air of
extreme superiority. “I went up and just said she had to go to sleep,
and that there was no question of Hugh coming to sing to her. It’s what
they call suggestion.”
Edith could not help laughing.
“But he did go and sing to her,” said she. “I heard and saw him.”
“Oh! The suggestion plan rather falls to the ground then. He oughtn’t to
have done it, but it’s quite exactly like him. He wouldn’t sing any
more for us, but Daisy is a different matter. He can sing fairly well,
can’t he?”
“I feel rather the reverse of Daisy,” said Edith. “I feel as if I shan’t
go to sleep because he sang. Oh, Peggy, if you have any influence with
him, do use it and make him go on the stage! I really think that there
is a moral duty attaching to a gift like that, just as there is a moral
duty attaching to great wealth. Mr. Grainger can’t have been given that
just to sing to you and me and Daisy.”
“I know, but the worst of it is that that is just the argument one
cannot use to Hugh. It would make me blush purple to say that to him.”
“But why?”
“Because, whatever else he is, he is absolutely free from
self-consciousness. And your argument, though undoubtedly a true one,
suggests self-consciousness. Oh, I hate the word duty even! To say that
a thing is one’s duty implies one is thinking about oneself, though no
doubt from most excellent motives and for the sake of other people. But
when you get a boy like Hugh, whose huge kindly instincts take the place
of duty, it would be really like corrupting him to suggest that he had
duties, or that talents were given him for reasons.”
Edith walked up and down the room considering this.
“Do you remember Comte’s remark when the doctors told him he was dying?
He said ‘_Quel per te irréparable_,’” continued Peggy. “There’s the
opposite of Hugh.”
“All the same, it was an irreparable loss,” said Edith, “and so are the
years in which Mr. Grainger remains a private nightingale. He told me
this evening that he had been asked whether he would sing in three
Wagner operas next year. Oh, make him, Peggy! Or hasn’t he got stern
parents of any description, or musical uncles who will cut him off with
a penny if he doesn’t?”
“Well, we’ll try. I didn’t know they had made him a definite offer. But
though you might not think it, Hugh is wonderfully obstinate. People
clatter and shriek all around him, and he sits in the middle, brilliant
and smiling and patient till they have quite finished. And then he goes
on exactly as before.”
“He might do worse,” said Mrs. Allbutt. “By the way, will you ask him to
the box for the first night of ‘Gambits’? You haven’t asked anybody else
yet have you?”
“No; I didn’t know whether you wanted anybody in particular. I think
three will be enough. Four in a box usually means that the two men are
frigidly polite to one another; and both sit at the very back of the box
and see nothing whatever. It’s much better to be three, so that we can
all put our elbows on the cushion. Were you at the rehearsal to-day?”
“Oh, yes; I went to see a little more of my grave dug! From the way
things are getting on, it should be quite ready for me to lie down in on
Thursday night.”
“My dear, what nonsense! Besides, every manager likes rehearsals to go
badly. Good rehearsals mean a bad first night. Bad rehearsals give a
sort of courage of despair, which is far the most efficient sort. Oh,
Edith, it’s good too, and you know it! Dear Andrew Robb! What a name to
have chosen! Anyhow, I don’t think a soul has guessed who wrote it.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have,” said Edith. “Nobody knows except
you and Mr. Jervis, and I never speak to him in the theatre. He always
comes to see me afterwards, and we make what we can out of the rather
undecipherable notes I have scribbled.”
Again she moved restlessly up and down the room.
“But whatever happens,” she said, “I shall never regret having written
it. It really kept me alive and sane, Peggy, during the first two years
after Dennis’s death. I think I must have gone mad otherwise. But the
bringing to birth of that child of one’s brain kept me alive; and
whether it proves to be a miserable little deformed cripple or a healthy
baby is another question.”
Peggy rose to go.
“Ah, you darling!” she said, kissing her. “And it is all healed now, is
it not?”
Edith smiled at her.
“Yes, I think it is healed,” she said. “But you know things can’t be
quite the same; it can never be quite as if those years had never
happened. If one has had a wound, a burn, though the skin grows over it
and the doctors say it has healed perfectly, yet it isn’t soft and
smooth like other skin. It is hard, as if Nature instinctively gave an
extra protection over the place that had been hurt. And this was over my
heart, dear.”
Peggy sighed.
“I know you think like that,” she said, “but you won’t always. Think how
much you have regained of yourself in these three years. How much of you
there is again, when a year or two ago, dear Edith, there was so little
of anything. Make it complete again some day.”
“Marry, do you mean?” asked she.
“Why, of course. No woman is herself until she finds her man. And
really, dear, you are beginning to sit up and take notice, as they say
of children. Do find him!”
“At the age of forty-two it requires a good deal of search,” said
Edith.
“You are not forty-two. People don’t have any age until they cease to
matter. You matter immensely. Why, supposing I were to go about London
saying you were forty-two, people would say that I must be fifty! No
woman is any age until people cease to care about her.”
Edith shook her head.
“Oh, Peggy, if one suffers, then certain things become unrecapturable!
One begins some day to acquiesce in one’s limitations. When one is
really young everything is possible; when one is old most things are
inconceivable.”
“Now you are talking like Andrew Robb,” remarked Peggy.
“Of course, because I am. One’s age is measured by what one expects from
life. And to be quite candid, dear, I expect very little. I hope on my
own account to continue being moderately agreeable, and quite patient,
and quite pleased that other people should enjoy themselves. But as for
the heart-beat, the long breath--why, that is finished.”
“That is the ridiculous heresy that women only love once,” said Peggy.
“I have known heaps of women who have loved heaps of times. They have
told me so themselves.”
“Go to bed, Peggy, because you are getting flippant. You don’t
understand. Pleasures? Good gracious, yes, I hope to have lots of them.
I shall go mad with pleasure if Andrew Robb proves successful; I shall
look forward even for a whole year to seeing Mr. Grainger play
Lohengrin, just as for a whole year I shall look forward to seeing
whether the Delphiniums you sent me will do well at Mannington. I
shall----”
“Oh, darling, you shall shut up!” said Peggy decisively. “You may call
me flippant, but you are cynical, whether I call it you or not, when
you speak of expecting nothing more from life. And I would sooner be
anything than cynical--even a dentist. Where will you breakfast? And why
_my_ Mr. Grainger? Answer categorically, please, and don’t argue,
because it is late.”
Edith laughed.
“Categorically then, it is your Mr. Grainger because you introduced him
to me: I will breakfast in my room, and I want two eggs. Otherwise I
don’t get through the morning.”
“Indeed? What happens instead?”
“It is interminable, of course.”
“You shall have three,” said Peggy.
No sort of grass, not even the commonest varieties, ever grew under
Peggy’s feet, and thus having promised to see what could be done with
regard to inducing Hugh to accept this offer of the Opera Syndicate, she
laid her plans next morning without loss of time, and instead of going
to church as she ought to have done, sent Toby there with Chopimalive
and Sitonim--who had slept till morning--and announced to Hugh that the
whole duty of this particular man was to take her out in a punt.
“And Mrs. Allbutt?” he asked.
“Will lunch with us at one-thirty,” said Peggy.
This was in the nature of an ultimatum, and Hugh, when it was thus put
firmly before him, behaved like the Sultan of Turkey and did as he was
told. But Peggy was not quite sure that there was not, so to speak, a
good deal of Moslem-fanaticism smouldering below this apparent docility.
However, she established herself comfortably on a heap of cushions, and,
remarking on the beauty of the view, put up a huge contadina umbrella
that extinguished it for miles round.
“Now, we won’t go far,” she said, “because you will get so dreadfully
hot punting. Simply broiling, isn’t it? Oh, Hugh, how beautifully you do
it! I’m sure you would win all the punt-races if you went in for them.”
Hugh put his head on one side, as if listening very carefully; then,
having considered this remark in all its bearings, he put his tongue in
his cheek. His face, however, was hidden from Peggy by the expanse of
the red umbrella, and she went guilelessly on.
“You do such a lot of things so nicely,” she went on, “but you never do
anything with them. I’m sure you could write a beautiful fairy-story
just like ‘Alice through the Looking-Glass.’”
“You mean ‘In Wonderland,’ I suppose?” said Hugh.
“I dare say. Or you could win punting races.”
Hugh removed his tongue from his cheek merely because he wanted it for
the purposes of speech. Figuratively, it was there still.
“I am writing a volume of fairy-tales--several, in fact,” he said; “and
I am going in for the punting championship of Northern Europe.”
“Oh, how can you tell such stories?” said Peggy.
“Easily. There’s not the slightest difficulty about it. You had better
put down your parasol a moment. I am going to tie up underneath those
trees.”
“Oh, but we’ve hardly gone a hundred yards!” said she.
“No; but it is clearly your purpose to argue with me. I can’t argue
while I’m punting. If you like, we will drift down mid-stream, but there
are a good many excursion steamers about.”
They tied up accordingly just below Odney Weir, and since Peggy intended
to begin arguing at once, it did not seem worth while to disclaim the
intention of doing so.
“You sing so well too,” she said. “Surely you ought to do something with
some of those things? Now, don’t interrupt; as you insist on it, I did
come out to argue with you.”
“But the argument is to be conducted without any interruption from me?”
asked Hugh.
“Yes. You see, you are twenty-four, aren’t you?--which is really
middle-age nowadays, when everybody is past everything at forty, and
it’s time you did something. It doesn’t really matter much what you do,
as long as you do something. ‘Men must work,’ as Mr. Kingsley said.”
Dead silence from Hugh, according to instructions. Peggy wanted to argue
the question on general lines and make him suggest singing as a
profession, since she did not officially know of this offer of the Opera
Syndicate. Hence she continued with glorious generalisations.
“You see, it is a necessity to work,” she said, “for all of us, though I
think Mr. Kingsley said that women only had to weep, but I cease at this
point to use him as an authority. Good heavens, how dull I should find
London if I only went to luncheon and dinner and balls and concerts!
Life is simply idiotic unless you do something. And doing things is much
more necessary for men than for women, because men are not naturally
frivolous; they are only frivolous because women ask them to play about,
like--like the flower-maidens and Parsifal.”
Hugh gave a little explosion of laughter.
“I beg your pardon!” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Then don’t, because I am going on until I have finished. Good gracious,
I think that one of the saddest sights that the world has to show is an
unoccupied bachelor, who is always ready to go out to tea, or make the
fourteenth, when there would otherwise be thirteen! I have been in a
good many slums and factories and shelters, but I have never seen
anything quite so sad as that.”
“You must have been reading the works of President Roosevelt!” said
Hugh.
“Not one line, but I have occasionally driven up and down St. James’s
Street and looked at the row of bald heads, back to the windows in
clubs. Those wretches read the _Times_, or more probably the _Daily
Mail_, all morning, and totter out to lunch. They read some pink or
green paper all afternoon, and totter out to dinner. Then they go to
bed, and close their weary eyes till late on in the following morning.
Hugh, you will become like them if you don’t take care.”
“May I speak?” asked he.
“No. I am much older than you, because I am thirty-eight, though I don’t
look it, and you needn’t say that. And all through those fourteen years
which separate us I have been always learning one thing--that happiness
lies in being busy. Years----”
Then the romantic, the picturesque, that always beats in Celtic
blood--and she was half Irish--came to her tongue.
“The years, or time, whatever it is, are like a golden river that flows
round us,” she said. “You may just sit in it, as you are doing, and
watch the golden iridescent stream flowing and combing round you. That
is letting it run to waste. But use your brain, Hughie, and let your
brain talk to your fingers, and let your fingers pull a bit of the water
into your grasp, and that which you thought was only just water, just
the passage of time in this heavenly world, is a real tangible thing, a
golden thing, and your fingers will make a golden something--a book or a
statue or a song--out of it. You must mould and carve this bit of time,
and when it is finished you will let it float down again on the golden
river of time, and those who come after will see it and handle it.”
He did not want to interrupt now. Peggy, as he well knew, was “doing”
something for more hours in the day and for more days in the year than
any one he knew, and it was not often that this vein of romance surged
to the surface. She had quite forgotten, it must be confessed, the
missionary enterprise on which she had set out an hour ago at her
sister’s suggestion. Just now she was speaking not from another’s wish,
but out of her own heart.
“Oh, we ought all to be so busy!” she said, “grasping at the golden time
and moulding it, every drop of it, into golden images! Also, when we do
that, we are not only using time, we are saving it. It is all ours, and
it is only spent and wasted when we let it go by. Whatever we make of it
is invested; it becomes things of gold that float down on the golden
river. Ah, don’t you see, Hughie?”
He was grave, too, now.
“Then do I waste time when I tell the children fairy-stories and sing to
you?” he asked.
“No, you dear; but make bigger things. Write your book of fairy-stories,
which you said you were writing--only I didn’t believe you! Or win a
punt race even--only I didn’t believe you! Take hold of the world
somehow, sing to it, or--or do anything to it,” she added, afraid she
had betrayed her knowledge.
Hugh was extremely susceptible, using that word not in the confined
sense of being easily influenced by a woman, but in the larger meaning
of being quick to be caught by an idea. To be a weather-cock is a phrase
that has had attached to it a sense, if not opprobrious, at any rate a
little depreciatory; but in reality to be fitted with that simile is the
highest praise, since it implies the wonderful sensitiveness of the
temperament that is never other than artistic. To catch and to record
the faintest breeze that blows is a better gift than to stand
four-square like a tower and defy the winds of heaven. It is not denied
that the four-square towers are eminently useful, and, as far as
usefulness of this sort is concerned, the weather-cock is not in any way
comparable to them. Yet the blowing and breathing of the winds is
perhaps worth record, and the towers do not show it. And if Hugh was
obstinate, as Peggy had declared he was, he was obstinate perhaps with
the deadly obstinacy of weather-cocks, which, however much the world in
general shouts “Northeast!” will continue to register southwest if it
seem to them that the wind is coming from that quarter. There may be
clattering and screaming, as she had said, but the weather-cock goes on
exactly as before. On this occasion Hugh, perhaps because he had
received commands, did not argue and even when Peggy said “Well, what
have you got to say?” only pleaded her original command in defence. But
his tongue had been in his cheek before, and as he punted her back again
for lunch it again came out.
“I want to ask you one question,” he said. “But pray don’t answer it
unless you wish. Did Mrs. Allbutt tell you that the Opera Syndicate had
made me a certain offer? Mind, I don’t draw any conclusions if you
refuse to answer.”
Peggy had put up the huge red umbrella again, but at this she put it
down with a snap.
“Hughie, I will never tell you not to talk again,” she said, “for I
believe you guess best when you are silent. When did you guess?”
“Oh, I guessed right at the beginning!” he said.
“But I did it very well,” she said.
“Quite beautifully. And you used beautiful language about the golden
river. But----”
“Well?” asked Peggy.
“Oh, nothing particular! I was only going to suggest that it would have
been simpler to have advised me at once to accept their offer; or at any
rate, to have asked me whether I intended to, instead of suggesting that
I should go in for punt-racing. Mrs. Allbutt also advises me to accept.
But I have practically made up my mind not to. Here we are again at
home; what a pleasant morning.”