"He is dining out to-night," I replied. "I do not think he will come."
She laughed. I think it was the worst part about the woman, her laugh;
it suggested so much cruelty.
"I think he will," she said.
It angered me into an indiscretion. She was moving away. I stepped in
front of her and stopped her.
"What makes you think so?" I asked, and my voice, I know, betrayed the
anxiety I felt as to her reply. She looked me straight in the face.
There was one virtue she possessed--the virtue that animals hold above
mankind--truthfulness. She knew I disliked her--hate would be, perhaps,
a more exact expression, did not the word sound out of date, and she made
no pretence of not knowing it and returning the compliment.
"Because I am here," she answered. "Why don't you save him? Have you no
influence over him? Tell the Saint to keep him; I don't want him. You
heard what I said to him last night. I shall only marry him for the sake
of his position, and the money he can earn if he likes to work and not
play the fool. Tell him what I have said; I shan't deny it."
She passed on to greet a decrepit old lord with a languishing smile, and
I stood staring after her with, I fear, a somewhat stupid expression,
until some young fool came up grinning, to ask me whether I had seen a
ghost or backed a "wrong 'un."
There was no need to wait; I felt no curiosity. Something told me the
woman had spoken the truth. It was mere want of motive that made me
linger. I saw him come in, and watched him hanging round her, like a
dog, waiting for a kind word, or failing that, a look. I knew she saw
me, and I knew it added to her zest that I was there. Not till we were
in the street did I speak to him. He started as I touched him. We were
neither of us good actors. He must have read much in my face, and I saw
that he had read it; and we walked side by side in silence, I thinking
what to say, wondering whether I should do good or harm, wishing that we
were anywhere but in these silent, life-packed streets, so filled with
the unseen. It was not until we had nearly reached the Albert Hall that
we broke the silence. Then it was he who spoke:
"Do you think I haven't told myself all that?" he said. "Do you think I
don't know I'm a damned fool, a cad, a liar! What the devil's the good
of talking about it?"
"But I can't understand it," I said.
"No," he replied, "because you're a fool, because you have only seen one
side of me. You think me a grand gentleman, because I talk big, and am
full of noble sentiment. Why, you idiot, the Devil himself could take
you in. _He_ has his fine moods, I suppose, talks like a saint, and says
his prayers with the rest of us. Do you remember the first night at old
Fauerberg's? You poked your silly head into the dormitory, and saw me
kneeling by the bedside, while the other fellows stood by grinning. You
closed the door softly--you thought I never saw you. I was not praying,
I was trying to pray."
"It showed that you had pluck, if it showed nothing else," I answered.
"Most boys would not have tried, and you kept it up."
"Ah, yes," he answered, "I promised the Mater I would, and I did. Poor
old soul, she was as big a fool as you are. She believed in me. Don't
you remember, finding me one Saturday afternoon all alone, stuffing
myself with cake and jam?"
I laughed at the recollection, though Heaven knows I was in no laughing
mood. I had found him with an array of pastry spread out before him,
sufficient to make him ill for a week, and I had boxed his ears, and had
thrown the whole collection into the road.
"The Mater gave me half-a-crown a week for pocket-money," he continued,
"and I told the fellows I had only a shilling, so that I could gorge
myself with the other eighteenpence undisturbed. Pah! I was a little
beast even in those days!"
"It was only a schoolboy trick," I argued, "it was natural enough."
"Yes," he answered, "and this is only a man's trick, and is natural
enough; but it is going to ruin my life, to turn me into a beast instead
of a man. Good God! do you think I don't know what that woman will do
for me? She will drag me down, down, down, to her own level. All my
ideas, all my ambition, all my life's work will be bartered for a smug
practice, among paying patients. I shall scheme and plot to make a big
income that we may live like a couple of plump animals, that we may dress
ourselves gaudily and parade our wealth. Nothing will satisfy her. Such
women are leeches; their only cry is 'give, give, give.' So long as I
can supply her with money she will tolerate me, and to get it for her I
shall sell my heart, and my brain, and my soul. She will load herself
with jewels, and go about from house to house, half naked, to leer at
every man she comes across: that is 'life' to such women. And I shall
trot behind her, the laughing stock of every fool, the contempt of every
man."
His vehemence made any words I could say sound weak before they were
uttered. What argument could I show stronger than that he had already
put before himself? I knew his answer to everything I could urge.
My mistake had been in imagining him different from other men. I began
to see that he was like the rest of us: part angel, part devil. But the
new point he revealed to me was that the higher the one, the lower the
other. It seems as if nature must balance her work; the nearer the
leaves to heaven, the deeper the roots striking down into the darkness. I
knew that his passion for this woman made no change in his truer love.
The one was a spiritual, the other a mere animal passion. The memory of
incidents that had puzzled me came back to enlighten me. I remembered
how often on nights when I had sat up late, working, I had heard his
steps pass my door, heavy and uncertain; how once in a dingy quarter of
London, I had met one who had strangely resembled him. I had followed
him to speak, but the man's bleared eyes had stared angrily at me, and I
had turned away, calling myself a fool for my mistake. But as I looked
at the face beside me now, I understood.
And then there rose up before my eyes the face I knew better, the eager
noble face that to merely look upon had been good. We had reached a
small, evil-smelling street, leading from Leicester Square towards
Holborn. I caught him by the shoulders and turned him round with his
back against some church railings. I forget what I said. We are strange
mixtures. I thought of the shy, backward boy I had coached and bullied
at old Fauerberg's, of the laughing handsome lad I had watched grow into
manhood. The very restaurant we had most frequented in his old Oxford
days--where we had poured out our souls to one another, was in this very
street where we were standing. For the moment I felt towards him as
perhaps his mother might have felt; I wanted to scold him and to cry with
him; to shake him and to put my arms about him. I pleaded with him, and
urged him, and called him every name I could put my tongue to. It must
have seemed an odd conversation. A passing policeman, making a not
unnatural mistake, turned his bull's-eye upon us, and advised us sternly
to go home. We laughed, and with that laugh Cyril came back to his own
self, and we walked on to Staple Inn more soberly. He promised me to go
away by the very first train the next morning, and to travel for some
four or five months, and I undertook to make all the necessary
explanations for him.
We both felt better for our talk, and when I wished him good-night at his
door, it was the real Cyril Harjohn whose hand I gripped--the real Cyril,
because the best that is in a man is his real self. If there be any
future for man beyond this world, it is the good that is in him that will
live. The other side of him is of the earth; it is that he will leave
behind him.
He kept his word. In the morning he was gone, and I never saw him again.
I had many letters from him, hopeful at first, full of strong resolves.
He told me he had written to Elspeth, not telling her everything, for
that she would not understand, but so much as would explain; and from her
he had had sweet womanly letters in reply. I feared she might have been
cold and unsympathetic, for often good women, untouched by temptation
themselves, have small tenderness for those who struggle. But her
goodness was something more than a mere passive quantity; she loved him
the better because he had need of her. I believe she would have saved
him from himself, had not fate interfered and taken the matter out of her
hands. Women are capable of big sacrifices; I think this woman would
have been content to lower herself, if by so doing she could have raised
him.
But it was not to be. From India he wrote to me that he was coming home.
I had not met the Fawley woman for some time, and she had gone out of my
mind until one day, chancing upon a theatrical paper, some weeks old, I
read that "Miss Fawley had sailed for Calcutta to fulfil an engagement of
long standing."
I had his last letter in my pocket. I sat down and worked out the
question of date. She would arrive in Calcutta the day before he left.
Whether it was chance or intention on her part I never knew; as likely as
not the former, for there is a fatalism in this world shaping our ends.
I heard no more from him, I hardly expected to do so, but three months
later a mutual acquaintance stopped me on the Club steps.
"Have you heard the news," he said, "about young Harjohn?"
"No," I replied. "Is he married?"
"Married," he answered, "No, poor devil, he's dead!"
"Thank God," was on my lips, but fortunately I checked myself. "How did
it happen?" I asked.
"At a shooting party, up at some Rajah's place. Must have caught his gun
in some brambles, I suppose. The bullet went clean through his head."
"Dear me," I said, "how very sad!" I could think of nothing else to say
at the moment.