MOMENTS.
At the little dinner which Lady Richard's absence rendered more easy
there were only the Benyon brothers (a wag had recently suggested that
they should convert themselves into Quisanté Limited), Mrs. Gellatly,
Morewood the painter, and the honoured guest. Morewood was there because
he was painting a kit-cat of Quisanté for the host (Heaven knew in what
corner Lady Richard would suffer it to hang), and Mrs. Gellatly because
she had expressed a desire to meet Lady May Gaston. Quisanté greeted May
with an elaborate air of remembrance; his handshake was so ornate as to
persuade her that she must always hate him, and that Dick Benyon was as
foolish as his wife thought him. This mood lasted half through dinner;
the worst of Quisanté was uppermost, and the exhibition depressed the
others. The brothers were apologetic, Mrs. Gellatly gallantly suave; her
much-lined, still pretty face worked in laborious smiles at every
loudness and every awkwardness. Morewood was so savage that an abrupt
conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had
previously decided that Mr. Quisanté would be much better in company,
was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when
alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and
ostentatious.
Just then came the change which transformed the party. Somebody
mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an
indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody,
it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you
got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the
criterion with his usual uncompromising aggressiveness. Then Quisanté
put his arms on the table, interrupted Morewood without apology, and
began to talk. May thought that she would not have known how good the
talk was--for it came so easily--had she not seen how soon Morewood
became a listener, or even a foil, ready and content to put his
questions not as puzzles but as provocatives. Yet Morewood was
proverbially conceited, and he was fully a dozen years Quisanté's
senior. She stole a look round; the brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs.
Gellatly looked almost frightened. Next her eyes scanned Quisanté's
face; he was not weaselly now, nor ostentatious. His subject filled him
and lit him up; she did not know that he looked as he had when he spoke
to old Maria of his Empress among women, but she knew that he looked as
if nothing mentally small, nothing morally mean, nothing that was not in
some way or other, for good or evil, big and spacious could ever come
near him from without or proceed out from him.
She was immensely startled when, in a pause, her host whispered in her
ear, "One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her
on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts. "His moments!" It
implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some
ancient prophet or mediæval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke
sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature.
The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it.
Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued
him for, what his believers attached their faith to, what must (if
anything could) outweigh all that piled the scales so full against him.
An intense curiosity then and there assailed her; she must know more of
the man; she must launch a boat on this unexplored ocean--for the
Benyons had not navigated it, they only stood gaping on the beach. Here
was scope for that unruly spirit of hers which Marchmont's culture and
Marchmont's fascination could neither minister to nor assuage.
She was gazing intently at Quisanté when she became conscious of Mrs.
Gellatly's eyes on her. Mrs. Gellatly looked frightened still;
accustomed tactfully to screen awkwardness, she was rather at a loss in
the face of naked energy. She sought to share her alarm with May Gaston,
but May was like a climber fronted by a mountain range.
"You may be right and you may be wrong," said Morewood. "At least I
don't know anybody who can settle the quarrel between facts and dreams."
"There isn't any quarrel."
"There's a little stiffness anyhow," urged Morewood, still unwontedly
docile.
"They'd get on better if they saw more of one another," suggested May
timidly. It was her first intervention. She felt its insignificance. She
would not have complained if Quisanté had followed Morewood's example
and taken no notice of it. He stopped, turned to her with exaggerated
deference, and greeted her obvious little carrying out of the metaphor
as though it were a heaven-sent light. Somehow in doing this he seemed
to fall all in an instant from lofty heights to depths almost beyond
eyesight. While he complimented her elaborately, Morewood turned away in
open impatience. Another topic was started, the conversation was killed;
or, to put it as she put it to herself, that moment of Quisanté's was
ended. Did his moments always end like that? Did they fade before a
breath, like the frailest flower? Did the contemptible always follow in
a flash on the entrancing?
Presently she found a chance for a whisper to Morewood.
"How are you painting him?" she asked.
"You must come and see," he replied, with a rather sour grin.
"So I will, but tell me now. You know the difference, I mean?"
"Oh, and do you already? Well, I shall do him making himself agreeable
to a lady."
"For heaven's sake don't!" she whispered, half-laughing yet not without
seriousness. The man was a malicious creature and might well caricature
what he was bound to idealise to the extreme limit of nature's
sufferance. Such a trick would be hardly honest to Dick Benyon, but
Morewood would plead his art with unashamed effrontery, and, if more
were needed, tell Dick to take his cheque to the deuce and go with it
himself.
The rest of the party was, to put it bluntly, a pleasant little
gathering in no way remarkable and rather spoilt by the presence of one
person who was not quite a gentleman. May struggled hard against the
mercilessness of the judgment contained in the last words; for it ought
to have proved quite final as regarded Alexander Quisanté. As a fact it
would not leave her mind, it established an absolutely sure footing in
her convictions; and yet it did not seem quite final in regard to
Quisanté. Perhaps Dick Benyon would maintain the proud level of his
remark about the genealogy, and remind her that somebody settled
Napoleon's claims by the same verdict. But one did not meet Napoleon at
little dinners, nor think of him with no countervailing achievements to
his name.
Her mind was so full of the man that when she joined her mother at a
party later in the evening, she had an absurd anticipation that
everybody would talk to her about him. Nobody did; that evening an
Arctic explorer and a new fortune-teller divided the attention of the
polite; men came and discussed one or other of these subjects with her
until she was weary. For once then, on Marchmont making an appearance
near her, her legs did not carry her in the opposite direction; she
awaited and even invited his approach; at least he would spare her the
fashionable gossip, and she thought he might tell her something about
Quisanté. In two words he told her, if not anything about Quisanté,
still everything that he himself thought of Quisanté.
"I met Mr. Quisanté at dinner," she said.
"That fellow!" exclaimed Marchmont.
The tone was full of weariness and contempt; it qualified the man as
unspeakable and dismissed him as intolerable. Was Marchmont infallible,
as Fanny had said? At least he represented, in its finest and most
authoritative form, the opinion of her own circle, the unhesitating
judgment against which she must set herself if she became Quisanté's
champion. It would be much easier, and probably much more sensible, to
fall into line and acquiesce in the condemnation; then it would matter
nothing whether the vulgar did or did not elect to admire Dick Benyon's
peculiar friend. Yet a protest stirred within her; only her sense of the
ludicrous prevented her from adopting Dick's word and asking Marchmont
if he had ever seen the fellow in one of his "moments." But it would be
absurd to catch up the phrase like that, and it was by no means certain
that even the moments would appeal to Marchmont.
Looking round, she perceived that a little space in the crowded room had
been left vacant about them; nobody came up to her, no woman, in passing
by, signalled to Marchmont; the constant give-and-take of companions was
suspended in their favour. In fine, people supposed that they wanted to
talk to one another; it would not be guessed that one of the pair wished
Quisanté to be the topic.
"He's got some brains," Marchmont went on, "though of rather a flashy
sort, I think. Dick Benyon's been caught by them. But a more impossible
person I never met. You don't like him?"
"Yes, I do," she answered defiantly. "At least I do every now and then."
"Pray make the occasions as rare as possible," he urged in his low lazy
voice, with his pleasant smile and a confidential look in his handsome
eyes. "And don't let them coincide with my presence."
"Really he won't hurt you; you're too particular."
"No, he won't hurt me, but I should feel rather as though he were
hurting you."
"What do you mean?"
"By being near you, certainly by being anything in the least like a
friend of yours."
"He'd defile me?" she asked, laughing.
"Yes," said he seriously; the next moment he smiled and shrugged his
shoulders; he did not withdraw his seriousness but he apologised for it.
"Oh, I'd better get under a glass-case at once," she exclaimed, laughing
again impatiently.
"Yes, and lock it, and----"
"Give you the key?"
He laughed as he said, "The most artistic emotions have some selfishness
in them, I admit it."
"It would make a little variety if I sent a duplicate to Mr. Quisanté!"
Here he would not follow her in her banter. He grew grave and even
frowned, but all he said was, "Really there are limits, you know." It
was her own verdict, expressed more tersely, more completely, and more
finally. There were limits, and Alexander Quisanté was beyond them; the
barrier they raised could not be surmounted; he could not fly over it
even on the wings of his moments.
"You above everybody oughtn't to know such people," Marchmont went on.
Now he was thinking of the type she was supposed to represent; that was
the fashion in which it was appropriate to talk to the type.
"I'm not in the very least like that really," she assured him. "If you
knew me better you'd find that out very soon."
"I'm willing to risk it."
Flirtation for flirtation--and this conversation was becoming one--there
could be no comparison between Marchmont's and Quisanté's; the one was
delightful, the other odious; the one combined charm with dignity; the
other was a mixture of cringing and presumption. May put the contrast no
less strongly than this as she yielded to the impulse of the minute and
gave the lie to Marchmont's ideal of her by her reckless acceptance of
the immediate delights he offered. The ideal would no doubt cause him to
put a great deal of meaning into her acceptance; whether such meaning
were one she would be prepared to indorse her mood did not allow her to
consider. She showed him very marked favour that evening, and in his
company contrived to forget entirely the puzzle of Quisanté and his
moments, and the possible relation of those moments to the limits about
which her companion was so decisive.
At last, however, they were interrupted. The interruption came from Dick
Benyon, who had looked in somewhere else and arrived now at the tail of
the evening. Far too eager and engrossed in his great theme to care
whether his appearance were welcome, he dashed up to May, crying out
even before he reached her, "Well, what do you say about him now? Wasn't
he splendid?"
Clearly Dick forgot his earlier apologetic period; for him the moment
was the evening. A cool question from Marchmont, the cooler perhaps for
annoyance, forced Dick into explanations, and he sketched in his summary
fashion the incident which had aroused his enthusiasm and made him look
so confidently for a response from May. Marchmont was unreservedly and
almost scornfully antagonistic.
"Oh, you're too cultivated to live," cried Dick. "Now isn't he too
elegant, May?"
"I'm not the least elegant," said Marchmont, with quiet confidence. "But
I'm--well, I'm what Quisanté isn't. So are you, Dick."
"Suppose we are, and by Jove, isn't he what we aren't? I'm primitive, I
suppose. I think hands and brains are better than manners."
"I'll agree, but I don't like his hands or his brains either."
"He'll mount high."
"As high as Haman. I shouldn't be the least surprised to see it."
"Well, I'm not going to give him up because he doesn't shake hands at
the latest fashionable angle."
"All right, Dick. And I'm not going to take him up because he's a dab at
rodomontade."
"And you neither of you need fight about him," May put in, laughing.
They joined in her laugh, each excusing himself by good-natured abuse of
the other.
There was no question of a quarrel, but the divergence was complete,
striking, and even startling. To one all was black, to the other all
white; to one all tin, to the other all gold. Was there no possibility
of compromise? As she sat between the two, May thought that a
discriminating view of Quisanté ought to be attainable, not an
oscillation from disgust to admiration, but a well-balanced stable
judgment which should allow full value to merits and to defects, and sum
up the man as a whole. Something of the sort she tried to suggest;
neither disputant would hear of it, and Marchmont went off with an
unyielding assertion that the man was a cad, no more and no less than a
cad. Dick looked after him with a well-satisfied air; May fancied that
opposition and the failure of others to understand intensified his
satisfaction in his own discovery. But he grew mournful as he said to
her,
"I shan't have a chance with you now. You'll go with Marchmont of
course. And I did want you to like him."
"Mr. Marchmont doesn't control my opinions."
They were very old friends; Dick allowed himself a significant smile.
"I know what you mean," she said, smiling. "But it's nonsense. Besides,
look at yourself and Amy! She hates him, and yet you----"
"Oh, she's only half-serious, and Marchmont's in deadly earnest under
that deuced languid manner of his. I tell you what, he's a very limited
fellow, after all."
May laughed; the limits were being turned to a new use now.
"Awfully clever and well-read, but shut up inside a sort of compartment
of life. Don't you know what I mean? He's always ridden first-class, and
he won't believe there's anybody worth knowing in the thirds."
"You think he's like that?" she asked thoughtfully.
"You can see it for yourself. There's no better fellow, no better
friend, but, hang it, an oyster's got a broader mind."
"I like broad minds."
"Then you'll like Quis----"
"Absolutely you shan't mention that name again. Find mother for me and
tell her to tell me that it's time to go home."
Going home brought with it a discovery. May was considered to have
invited the world to take notice of her preference for Marchmont. This
fact was first conveyed to her by Lady Attlebridge's gently affectionate
and congratulatory air; at this May was little more than amused.
Evidence of greater significance lay in Fanny's demeanour; she came into
her sister's room and talked for a while; before leaving, but after the
ordinary kiss of goodnight, she came back suddenly and kissed her again;
she said nothing, but the embrace was emphatic and eloquent. It seemed
to the recipient to be forgiving also; it meant "I want you to be happy,
don't imagine I think of anything else." If Fanny kissed her like that,
it was because Fanny supposed that she had made up her mind to marry
Weston Marchmont. She was fully conscious that the inference was not a
strange one to draw from her conduct that evening. But now the mood of
impulse was entirely gone; she considered the matter in a cool spirit,
and her talk with Dick Benyon assumed unlooked-for importance in her
deliberations. To marry Marchmont was a step entirely in harmony with
the ideal which her family and the world had of her, which Marchmont
himself most thoroughly and undoubtingly believed in. If she were really
what she was supposed to be, the match would satisfy her as well as it
would everybody else. But if she were quite different in her heart? In
that case it might indeed be urged that no marriage would or could
permanently satisfy her or the whole of her nature. This was likely
enough; to see how often something of that kind happened it was,
unfortunately, only necessary to run over ten or a dozen names which
offered themselves promptly enough from the list of her acquaintance.
Still to marry knowing you would not be satisfied was to drop below the
common fate of marrying knowing that you might not be; it gave up the
golden chance; it abandoned illusion just where illusion seemed most
necessary.
Oh for life, for the movement of life! It is perhaps hard to realise how
often that cry breaks from the hearts of women. No doubt the aspiration
it expresses is rather apt to end in antics, not edifying to the
onlooker, hardly (it may be supposed) comforting to the performer. But
the antics are one thing, the aspiration another, and they have the
aspiration strongest who condemn and shun the antics. The matter may be
stated very simply, at least if the form in which it presented itself to
May Gaston in her twenty-third year be allowed to suffice. Most girls
are bred in a cage, most girls expect to escape therefrom by marriage,
most girls find that they have only walked into another cage. She had
nothing to say, so far as her own case went, against the comfort either
of the old or of the new cage; they were both indeed luxurious. But
cages they were and such she knew them to be. Doubtless there must be
limits, not only to the tolerance of Weston Marchmont and of society,
but to everything else except infinity. But there are great expanses,
wide spaces, short of infinity. When she walked out of her first cage,
the one which her mother's careful fingers had kept locked on her, she
would like not to walk into another, but to escape into some park or
forest, not boundless, yet so large as to leave room for exploring, for
the finding of new things, for speculation, for doubt, excitement,
uncertainty, even for the presence of apprehension and the possibility
of danger. As she surveyed the manner in which she was expected to pass
her life, the manner in which she was supposed (she faced now the common
interpretation of her conduct this evening) already to have elected to
pass it, she felt as a speculator feels towards Consols, as a gambler
towards threepenny whist. It seemed as though nothing could be good
which did not also hold within it the potency of being very bad, as
though certainty damned and chance alone had lures to offer. She would
have liked to take life in her hand--however precious a thing, what use
is it if you hoard it?--and see what she could make of it, what usury
its free loan to fate and fortune would earn. She might lose it; youth
made light of the risk. She might crawl back in sad plight; the Prodigal
Son did not think of that when he set out. She found herself wishing she
had nothing, that she might be free to start on the search for anything.
Like Quisanté? Why, yes, just like Quisanté. Like that strange,
intolerable, vulgar, attractive, intermittently inspired creature, who
presented himself at life's roulette-table, not less various in his own
person than were the varying turns he courted, unaccountable as chance,
baffling as fate, changeable as luck. Indeed he was like life itself, a
thing you loved and hated, grew weary of and embraced, shrank from and
pursued. To see him then was in a way to look on at life, to be in
contact with him was to feel the throb of its movement. In her midnight
musings the man seemed somehow to cease to be odious because he ceased
to be individual, to be no longer incomprehensible because he was no
longer apart, because he became to her less himself and more the
expression and impersonation of an instinct that in her own blood ran
riot and held festivity.
"I'm having moments, like Mr. Quisanté himself!" she said with a sudden
laugh.