Between a junior resident master of twenty-one, and a backward lad of
fifteen, there yawns an impassable gulf. Between a struggling journalist
of one-and-thirty, and an M.D. of twenty-five, with a brilliant record
behind him, and a career of exceptional promise before him, a close
friendship is however permissible.
My introduction to Cyril Harjohn was through the Rev. Charles Fauerberg.
"Our young friend," said the Rev. Mr. Fauerberg, standing in the most
approved tutorial attitude, with his hand upon his pupil's shoulder, "our
young friend has been somewhat neglected, but I see in him possibilities
warranting hope--warranting, I may say, very great hope. For the present
he will be under my especial care, and you will not therefore concern
yourself with his studies. He will sleep with Milling and the others in
dormitory number two."
The lad formed a liking for me, and I think, and hope, I rendered his
sojourn at "Alpha House" less irksome than otherwise it might have been.
The Reverend Charles' method with the backward was on all fours with that
adopted for the bringing on of geese; he cooped them up and crammed them.
The process is profitable to the trainer, but painful to the goose.
Young Harjohn and myself left "Alpha House" at the end of the same term;
he bound for Brasenose, I for Bloomsbury. He made a point of never
coming up to London without calling on me, when we would dine together in
one of Soho's many dingy, garlic-scented restaurants, and afterwards,
over our bottle of cheap Beaune, discuss the coming of our lives; and
when he entered Guy's I left John Street, and took chambers close to his
in Staple Inn. Those were pleasant days. Childhood is an over-rated
period, fuller of sorrow than of joy. I would not take my childhood
back, were it a gift, but I would give the rest of my life to live the
twenties over again.
To Cyril I was the man of the world, and he looked to me for wisdom, not
seeing always, I fear, that he got it; while from him I gathered
enthusiasm, and learnt the profit that comes to a man from the keeping of
ideals.
Often as we have talked, I have felt as though a visible light came from
him, framing his face as with the halo of some pictured saint. Nature
had wasted him, putting him into this nineteenth century of ours. Her
victories are accomplished. Her army of heroes, the few sung, the many
forgotten, is disbanded. The long peace won by their blood and pain is
settled on the land. She had fashioned Cyril Harjohn for one of her
soldiers. He would have been a martyr, in the days when thought led to
the stake, a fighter for the truth, when to speak one's mind meant death.
To lead some forlorn hope for Civilisation would have been his true work;
Fate had condemned him to sentry duty in a well-ordered barrack.
But there is work to be done in the world, though the labour lies now in
the vineyard, not on the battlefield. A small but sufficient fortune
purchased for him freedom. To most men an assured income is the grave of
ambition; to Cyril it was the foundation of desire. Relieved from the
necessity of working to live, he could afford the luxury of living to
work. His profession was to him a passion; he regarded it, not with the
cold curiosity of the scholar, but with the imaginative devotion of the
disciple. To help to push its frontiers forward, to carry its flag
farther into the untravelled desert that ever lies beyond the moving
boundary of human knowledge, was his dream.
One summer evening, I remember, we were sitting in his rooms, and during
a silence there came to us through the open window the moaning of the
city, as of a tired child. He rose and stretched his arms out towards
the darkening streets, as if he would gather to him all the toiling men
and women and comfort them.
"Oh, that I could help you!" he cried, "my brothers and my sisters. Take
my life, oh God, and spend it for me among your people."
The speech sounds theatrical, as I read it, written down, but to the
young such words are not ridiculous, as to us older men.
In the natural order of events, he fell in love, and with just the woman
one would expect him to be attracted by. Elspeth Grant was of the type
from which the world, by instinct rather than by convention, has drawn
its Madonnas and its saints. To describe a woman in words is impossible.
Her beauty was not a possession to be catalogued, but herself. One felt
it as one feels the beauty of a summer's dawn breaking the shadows of a
sleeping city, but one cannot set it down. I often met her, and, when
talking to her, I knew myself--I, hack-journalist, frequenter of Fleet
Street bars, retailer of smoke-room stories--a great gentleman, incapable
of meanness, fit for all noble deeds.
In her presence life became a thing beautiful and gracious; a school for
courtesy, and tenderness, and simplicity.
I have wondered since, coming to see a little more clearly into the ways
of men, whether it would not have been better had she been less
spiritual, had her nature possessed a greater alloy of earth, making it
more fit for the uses of this work-a-day world. But at the time, these
two friends of mine seemed to me to have been created for one another.
She appealed to all that was highest in Cyril's character, and he
worshipped her with an unconcealed adoration that, from any man less high-
minded, would have appeared affectation, and which she accepted with the
sweet content that Artemis might have accorded to the homage of Endymion.
There was no formal engagement between them. Cyril seemed to shrink from
the materialising of his love by any thought of marriage. To him she was
an ideal of womanhood rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. His love for
her was a religion; it had no taint of earthly passion in its
composition.
Had I known the world better I might have anticipated the result; for the
red blood ran in my friend's veins; and, alas, we dream our poems, not
live them. But at the time, the idea of any other woman coming between
them would have appeared to me folly. The suggestion that that other
woman might be Geraldine Fawley I should have resented as an insult to my
intelligence: that is the point of the story I do not understand to this
day.
That he should be attracted by her, that he should love to linger near
her, watching the dark flush come and go across her face, seeking to call
the fire into her dark eyes was another matter, and quite comprehensible;
for the girl was wonderfully handsome, with a bold, voluptuous beauty
which invited while it dared. But considered in any other light than
that of an animal, she repelled. At times when, for her ends, it seemed
worth the exertion, she would assume a certain wayward sweetness, but her
acting was always clumsy and exaggerated, capable of deceiving no one but
a fool.
Cyril, at all events, was not taken in by it. One evening, at a Bohemian
gathering, the _entree_ to which was notoriety rather than character,
they had been talking together for some considerable time when, wishing
to speak to Cyril, I strolled up to join them. As I came towards them
she moved away, her dislike for me being equal to mine for her; a thing
which was, perhaps, well for me.
"Miss Fawley prefers two as company to three," I observed, looking after
her retreating figure.
"I am afraid she finds you what we should call an anti-sympathetic
element," he replied, laughing.
"Do you like her?" I asked him, somewhat bluntly.
His eyes rested upon her as she stood in the doorway, talking to a small,
black-bearded man who had just been introduced to her. After a few
moments she went out upon his arm, and then Cyril turned to me.
"I think her," he replied, speaking, as was necessary, very low, "the
embodiment of all that is evil in womanhood. In old days she would have
been a Cleopatra, a Theodora, a Delilah. To-day, lacking opportunity,
she is the 'smart woman' grubbing for an opening into society--and old
Fawley's daughter. I'm tired; let us go home."
His allusion to her parentage was significant. Few people thought of
connecting clever, handsome Geraldine Fawley with "Rogue Fawley," Jew
renegade, ex-gaol bird, and outside broker; who, having expectations from
his daughter, took care not to hamper her by ever being seen in her
company. But no one who had once met the father could ever forget the
relationship while talking to the daughter. The older face, with its
cruelty, its cunning, and its greed stood reproduced, feature for
feature, line for line. It was as though Nature, for an artistic freak,
had set herself the task of fashioning hideousness and beauty from
precisely the same materials. Between the leer of the man and the smile
of the girl, where lay the difference? It would have puzzled any student
of anatomy to point it out. Yet the one sickened, while to gain the
other most men would have given much.
Cyril's answer to my question satisfied me for the time. He met the girl
often, as was natural. She was a singer of some repute, and our social
circle was what is commonly called "literary and artistic." To do her
justice, however, she made no attempt to fascinate him, nor even to be
particularly agreeable to him. Indeed, she seemed to be at pains to show
him her natural--in other words, her most objectionable side.
Coming out of the theatre one first night, we met her in the lobby. I
was following Cyril at some little distance, but as he stopped to speak
to her the movement of the crowd placed me just behind them.
"Will you be at Leightons' to-morrow?" I heard him ask her in a low tone.
"Yes," she answered, "and I wish you wouldn't come."
"Why not?"
"Because you're a fool, and you bore me."
Under ordinary circumstances I should have taken the speech for
badinage--it was the kind of wit the woman would have indulged in. But
Cyril's face clouded with anger and vexation. I said nothing. I did not
wish him to know that I had overheard. I tried to believe that he was
amusing himself, but my own explanation did not satisfy me.
Next evening I went to Leightons' by myself. The Grants were in town,
and Cyril was dining with them. I found I did not know many people, and
cared little for those I did. I was about to escape when Miss Fawley's
name was announced. I was close to the door, and she had to stop and
speak to me. We exchanged a few commonplaces. She either made love to a
man or was rude to him. She generally talked to me without looking at
me, nodding and smiling meanwhile to people around. I have met many
women equally ill-mannered, and without her excuse. For a moment,
however, she turned her eyes to mine.
"Where's your friend, Mr. Harjohn?" she asked. "I thought you were
inseparables."