Toward the end of April, there came an afternoon on which Christian
seemed to himself to wake up of a sudden as from a harassed sleep.
He had been in England for over six months, when all at once he became
conscious of this queer sensation: the experiences of his half year put
themselves together before his mental eye in the aspect of a finished
volume--of something definitely over and done with.
There was warm spring in the London air, and at first the vague feeling
of unrest impressed him as a part of the general vernal effect. The
device of taking a stroll through the parks, to note the early flowers
and the wonderful infancy of leafage among the trees, seemed at the
outset to fit this new mood that was upon him. Then abruptly he wearied
of nature and turned his back upon it, driving in a hansom to his club.
Here there was no one whom he knew, or at least cared to speak with. He
sat for a time in the billiard-room, watching with profound inattention
the progress of a game he knew nothing about. From this he wandered into
the library, where some fierce-faced old gentlemen slept peacefully in
armchairs about the alcoves. The sound of their breathing vexed him;
he pretended to himself that otherwise he would have found solace in a
book. The whim seized him to go home to his chambers, and have tea there
comfortably in gown and slippers, and finish a novel Lady Milly Poynes
had induced him to begin weeks before.
Once in his own easy-chair, the romance lying opened beside him, he put
back his head, stretched his feet and yawned. He left untasted the tea
which Falkner brought in; with fingers interlaced behind his neck
he stared up at the blue of the sky through his window in formless
rumination.
His earlier glimpses of London were dim enough memories now. The town
had been described by his cousin Lingfield as empty when he arrived, and
after a few days of desultory sight-seeing, he had been carried off to
the earl of Chobham’s place in Derbyshire. Here, among people who
behaved like kindly kinsmen to the young new-comer, yet failed to arouse
much interest in his mind, he learned to shoot well enough to escape
open protests by the autocratic head gamekeeper, and to keep his seat in
the saddle after a fashion of his own. These acquirements stood him in
good stead at the four or five other country houses to which the amiable
Lingfield in due course led him. Without them, meager as they were, he
would have been in a sorry plight indeed. They provided him with a
certain semblance of justification for his presence among people who
seemed incapable of amusing themselves or their guests in any other way.
There were always ladies, it was true, and it was generally manifest to
him that he might spend his time with them if he chose, but after a few
tentative experiments he fell back upon the conviction that he did not
know how to talk to English ladies. He drifted somehow through these
months of hospitable entertainment, feeling that he had never known
before what loneliness could mean.
When, at Christmas, he went to spend another fortnight with Emanuel, he
had it in his heart to confess to disappointment, and even depression.
He had not thus far fitted at all into the place which had been prepared
for him, and he looked forward, with wistful eagerness, as he journeyed
westward, to the balm of sympathy and tender comprehension with which
Kathleen and Emanuel, dear people that they were, would soothe and heal
his wounded self-consciousness. Somehow, the opportunity of unburdening
his troubled mind, however, did not come to him. There were other
guests, including Lord Julius, and such exceptional attention was
devoted on the estates to elaborating the holiday festivities of the
various villages, that no individual could hope to secure consideration
for his own private emotions. It was sometimes suspected that Emanuel
made so much of Christmas in his System, unconsciously no doubt, because
the Jewish side of him felt the need of ostentation in its disavowal of
theological prejudices. For whatever reason, the festival was observed
here in a remarkable spirit. The little churches were embowered in holly
and mistletoe, and were the scenes of numerous ornate services. There
were processions, merry-makings, midnight visitations of the “waits,”
concerts and dances throughout the week, and only the strictly necessary
work of the community was performed meanwhile. On New Year’s Day the
rejoicings culminated in a children’s carnival from one end of the
property to the other, with big trees laden with lights and gifts in the
German fashion, and exhibitions of the magic lantern, and other juvenile
delights. The fortnight passed, and Christian returned to London, as
has been said, without having anything like the intimate talk he had
expected. Both Kathleen and Emanuel had seemed pleased with him; they
had noted with approving comment his progress in the use of idiomatic
English, and his rapid assimilation of the manners and bearing of those
about him; they had heard none but welcome reports of him from outside,
and made clear to him their gratification at the fact. Their smile for
him was as affectionate, their display of pleasure in his presence
as marked, as ever, but he had the sense, none the less, of something
altered. Lord Julius bore him company on his journey to London, and
after a brief halt, took him away again for another fortnight, this time
at Brighton. He was no more successful with the father, in the matter of
helpful confidences, than he had been with the son. It was impossible
to tell the strong, big, redoubtable old gentleman of what he felt to be
his weaknesses. A kind of desponding pride possessed him, and closed his
lips. He was not happy, as he had supposed he would be, and he could not
bring himself to feel that at any point the fault was his. It was the
position that was incongruous. Yet how could he complain, or avow his
discontent, without seeming an ingrate to the benefactors whose heart
had been in the work of shaping and gilding that position for him?
Parliament met this year in January, and Christian saw now a London
which he had not imagined to himself--for which nothing, indeed, had
prepared him. There came all at once a great many invitations, and the
young man, surprised and not a little dismayed, called Lord Lingfield
to his assistance. The prospect unfolded to him by this accomplished
professor of the proprieties was terrifying enough. At the end of a week
Christian cried out that the reality was too much. But Lingfield could
see no alternative to going on. “You will get used to it soon enough,
now that you have once taken the plunge,” he assured him. “There are
certain things that a fellow has to do, you know, when he’s in London
in the season, or even now, in what you may call the half season,
unless he’s going to chuck the thing altogether.” Christian replied with
excitement that this was precisely what he wished to do. In his own mind
he had already reached the point of debating whether he could honorably
go on using the money placed to his credit at the bank, most of which
was still there, if he fled from London, and even England.
Lord Lingfield was a fine young man, irreproachable in attire and
manners, who expected to do something in politics, and who regarded his
duty both to the future which he hoped to create for himself, and to
the immediate present which had been created for him, with conscientious
gravity. He had never thought of lightening or evading the tasks set
before him; he had no perception whatever of the possibility of
making such things easier for others. He assured Christian with
gentle solemnity that desertion was not to be mentioned, and that even
mitigation was undesirable. “It has all been arranged for you,” he
urged. “Upon my word, you are very lucky. You have been to two houses
already where I never get asked except to luncheon, and here is a card
here which I could hardly believe my eyes to see To trifle with such
chances would be simple madness. You will get to have all London at your
fingers’ ends, your very first season. Such a start as you’re likely to
have, I’ve never seen in my life. My dear fellow--you don’t understand
what it means.”
“But I’m tired to death!” groaned Christian. “No doubt they are
excellent people, but they weary me to the bone. The dinners, the calls,
the receptions, the dances--I have no talent whatever for these things.
It is very kind of these people--but I know I am ridiculous in it all. I
give them no pleasure, and God knows I receive none. Then why must it go
on? For whose benefit is it? I swear to you, I would not mind the labor
and fatigue, if it was any good that I was doing. Emanuel, for example,
toils like a slave, but then his work has great results. But this of
mine----!”
“Ah, yes,” interposed Lingfield, smilingly. “But Emanuel could never have
made much running in London. He disputes with people too much, don’t you
know. They don’t like that. And I think you make much too hard work of
it all. There’s no need for _you_ to talk, you know. It isn’t expected
of you. And I don’t see why you can’t move quietly along, going
everywhere, being seen at the right places, and being civil to
everybody, and not worry yourself at all. That’s what you need, my dear
boy--repose! Let the other people do the worry. Now, of course, in a
case like Dicky Westland’s it’s different. He has to be amusing and
useful, or he wouldn’t get asked. But you are not on all fours with him
at all. To tell the truth--no doubt it’ll sound strange to you, but it
is the truth all the same--it’s better form for you not to be amusing,
or brilliant, or that sort of thing. Fellows in your place don’t go in
for it, you know.”
Christian sighed, and chafing at the necessity of submission, still
submitted.
Now, as he lay back in his chair, the retrospect was augmented by six
other weeks, in which he had passively yielded to what Lingfield had
assured him was the inevitable. He had dined out almost every-night,
and had made countless calls. It seemed to him that he must have
met everybody in this huge metropolis who had a pair of shoulders or
possessed a dress coat. He yawned at the thought of them.
Was he not himself to blame for this? At Christmas time he had been
quite confident in answering “no” to this question; now he did not feel
so sure about it. At one place or another he had come into contact
with most of the members of the government, and with many of those
distinguished statesmen on the opposite bench who, by the grace of the
genial British electorate, would be ministers next time. He had talked
with eminent artists, eminent scientists, eminent writers, eminent
soldiers and sailors, and watched them and listened to them as they sat
over their cigars, or moved about among the ladies in the drawing-rooms.
Hostesses whose cordial good will toward him seemed equaled only by
their capable control over others, had said to him time and time again:
“If there is any one you want to know, tell me.” The phrase lingered in
his mind as a symbol of his position. He had merely to mention his wish,
like some lucky person of the fables who possessed a talisman. It could
not be said that he had used his magic power foolishly or perversely. He
had followed in dutiful, painstaking solicitude the path marked out for
him by his advisers. He had done the best that was in him to do; he had
gone wherever Lingfield bade him go; he had loyally kept awake late
at night; he had smiled and bowed and spoken affable words; he had
fulfilled punctually all the engagements imposed upon him. What was
more, he could no longer pretend that he made a failure of the thing; it
was known to him that he had created a pleasant impression upon London,
and that people liked him.
For all that, he could not feel that in turn he liked these people.
Among those of whom he had seen the most, was there any whom he
profoundly desired ever to see again? He passed some random figures in
mental review, and suffered them to vanish without thrusting forth any
tentacle of thought to detain them. They had not entered his real life;
they meant nothing to him. Positively he was as much alone in London
to-day as he had been when he first set foot in it. Indeed, was he not
the poorer to-day by all those lost illusions and joyous, ardent hopes
now faded to nothingness? In return for these departed treasures, he had
only empty hands to show--and a jaded, futilely mutinous, empty mind as
well.
The soft, equable tinkle of the door-bell caught his ear, but scarcely
arrested his attention. Perhaps unconsciously the sound served to
polarize his thoughts, for suddenly it became apparent to him that
he was in revolt. All this intolerable social labor was ended for
him--definitely and irrevocably ended. He would not dine at another
house; he would burn forthwith his basket of cards, and the little book
with its foolish record of ladies’ days “at home.”
He sat up and sipped at his lukewarm tea, with the glow of a new resolve
on his face.
Falkner--a smooth-mannered, assiduous, likable man of middle age whom
Emanuel had given him from his own household--entered the room to
announce a caller. A brisk, alert tread on the polished hall floor
behind him cut into his words, so that Christian did not catch them. He
rose, and looked inquiringly.
For an instant, he felt that he was not glad to see the person who came
in. It was a young man of about his age, tall and fair, and handsome
in a buoyant, bright-faced way of his own. His blue eyes sparkled
cheerfully into Christian’s doubtful glance, and he held out a hand as
he advanced. Everybody in the world called him Dicky Westland, and for
this opening moment Christian thought of him as preeminently typical of
all the vanities and artificialities he was on the point of forswearing.
“Not seedy, I hope?” the new-comer said in comment upon the other’s
loose attire--and perhaps upon his dubious countenance as well. His
voice had a musical vivacity in it which seemed to lighten the room.
Christian, as he took the hand and shook his head, smiled a little. It
began to occur to him that really he did like this young man.
“No,” he replied, with a gesture toward a chair. “I’m all right. Only
the whim seized me--to come home and read a book. I got homesick, I
think.”
This statement, once in the air, seemed funny to the young men, and
Dicky Westland laughed aloud. Christian, sitting down opposite his
visitor, felt himself sharing his animation. ‘“It was good of you to
come,” he declared, with a refreshed tone. “The truth is, I’m tired out.
I am up too late. I run about too much.”
“Yes, a fellow does get hipped,” assented Dicky. “But you are so
tremendously regular, it doesn’t do you any harm. A days’ rest now and
then, and you’re right as a trivet again.”
“Regular,” Christian repeated, musingly. He formed his lips to utter
some reflection upon the theme, and then closed them again. “Will you
have a cup of tea?” he asked, with the air of thinking of something
else.
The other shook his head, and preserved a posture of vivacious
anticipation, as if Christian had made a literal promise to unburden
his mind. The suggestion was so complete that Christian accepted it as a
mandate.
“I am glad you came,” he said, “because--well, because I have come to
a conclusion in my mind, and I should like to put it into words for
you--so that I can also hear it myself. I am resolved to go away--to
leave London.”
Dicky lifted his brows in puzzled interrogation. “How do you mean?” he
asked.
“I do not like it,” Christian replied, speaking more readily now,
and enforcing his words with eager hands. Lingfield had cautioned him
against this gesticulatory tendency, but the very consciousness that he
was in rebellion brought his hands upward into the conversation. “It
is not what I care for. I come into it too late, no doubt, to
understand--appreciate it, properly. The people I meet--I have no
feeling for them. It seems a waste of my time to sit with them, to stand
and talk, to go about from one of their houses to another. At the end
of it all, there is nothing. They have all thick shells on, and they
are not going to let me get inside of them. And, moreover, if I did get
inside, who can be sure there would be anything of value there? It does
not often look so to me, from the outside. But it is a waste of time and
labor, and it does not amuse me in the least, and why should I pursue
it?”
“Quite right!” said Dicky.
“Then you agree with me?--you approve?” asked Christian, not concealing
his surprise.
“Of course I do. It’s awful rot,” the other affirmed. He observed his
host silently for a space, and meanwhile, by a quite visible process,
the familiar external elasticity, not to say flippancy, of his manner
seemed to fall away from him. “With me, of course,” he went on, almost
gravely, “I have to do it. I must get my secretaryship, or I can’t live.
My relations could put me into the swim, but they can’t support me there
indefinitely. I have only two aunts, you know--dear old things, they
are--and they keep me going, but they have only life interests, and I
fancy they have to scrape a little as it is.
“So you see,” pursued Dicky Westland, “I must help myself, and it’s only
by knowing the right people, and being seen at the right places, that
a fellow can bring anything off. For example, now: Lady Winsey is a
distant cousin of mine, and she’s promised the aunts, you know, and
there’s an old Sir Hogface Something-or-Other dodging about the place,
who’s going to get a West Indian governorship in May, and Lady Winsey
has not only had him at her house to dinner, where he could see me, but
has contrived to throw me at him at three other houses. Next week I’m
to go down to a closing meet in Berkshire, just because he’s to be
there--and that she arranged, too. And it’s all to get a place worth
perhaps three hundred a year, with yellow fever thrown in--if it comes
to anything at all.”
“Three hundred a year,” commented Christian, knitting his brows. “I
still make pounds into francs to know what a sum means,” he explained,
smilingly, after a moment. “Once I would have thought that a great
fortune--and only a few months ago, too, at that.”
“Well, you see how it is,” said Dicky. “I mustn’t let any chance slip
by. But if I stood in your shoes, dear God! how I would chuck it all!”
“But what would you do instead?” Christian propounded this question
sitting back in his chair, with the tips of his fingers joined, and a
calm twinkle in his eye. He discovered himself feeling as if it were his
companion who had made confessions and craved sympathy.
Dicky looked into his hat, and pouted his lips in whimsical indecision.
“What I mean is,” he explained at last--“my point was this--I hate the
whole thing, and if I didn’t have to do it, why then I wouldn’t do it,
d’ye see? I’d go about with nobody except the people I really cared
about--my right-down, intimate friends. That’s the idea.”
“Ah--friends!” said Christian. “That is the word that sings in my ears!”
He rose impulsively, and began walking about the room with a restless
step. Now and again he halted briefly to look down upon his companion,
to enforce with eyes as well as gesture some special thing in his
talk. “Yes, friends!” he cried. “Tell me, you Dicky Westland, where are
friends to be found? Have you some, perhaps? Then where did you come
upon them? It is what I should like very much to know. Listen to me!
I have been in England six months. I possess in England, say
two--three--no, five friends--and all these came to me in my first week
here. All but one belong to my family, so they were here, ready-made for
me. But since that time, now that I am for myself, I have not gained one
friend. Is there then something strange--what do I say--forbidding in
me? Or no--it is nonsense for me to say that. It is the other way about.
I have seen nobody who awakened voices within me. There has been no one
who appealed to me as a friend should appeal. I live among a thousand
rich and fine people who are as good to me as they know how to be--and
yet I am as if I lived in a desert. And it is very cold--and lonely--and
heartbreaking in this desert of mine!”
Westland looked at him, as he stood now in the pathetic abandonment of
his peroration, with a contemplative squint in one eye.
“I see what you mean,” he remarked finally. “You’ve been looking for
flesh and blood, and you find only gun-metal.” He thrust out his lips a
little, and gave further consideration to the problem. “There isn’t any
need for you to go away, you know,” he added after a pause. “You can
have any kind of life you like in London. It is all here, if you want
it. But what is it that you do want?”
Christian threw himself sidewise into his chair, and bent his head with
a sigh. Then, with a new light in his eyes, he looked up. “You yourself
said it”--he exclaimed--“to see only my true friends. That is my idea
of life: To have a small circle of people whom I love very much, and to
make constant opportunities to be with some of them--talking as we like
to talk, going about together, making life happy for one another as we
go along. All my youth, I envied rich people, because I thought that
they used their wealth to command this greatest of delights. I imagined
that if one had much money, then one could afford to spend his time
only with his close, dear friends. But what I discover is that they do
something entirely different. They seem not to let friendship come into
their lives at all. They desire only acquaintances, and of these the
more they have the better, if they bear the proper cachet.”
“It is the women,” said Dicky, sententiously.
“They like the crowd, and the new faces. And what they like, of course
they have. They run the whole show.”
Christian nodded comprehension--then put out a hand to signalize a
reservation. “I know women--here in England--who have a higher idea than
this,” he declared, softly.
“Of course, so we all do,” assented Westland. “There are a million
splendid women, if one could only get at them. But it’s a sort of trades
union, don’t you know. You don’t take the workmen you want, on your own
terms; you take those the society gives you, and the terms are arranged
for you. It’s like that with women. You meet some awfully jolly girls
now and then, but they are not in the least degree their own masters.
If you try to get to know them well, either they’re frightened, and pull
back into their shells, or you’re headed off by their mothers. But,” he
added upon reflection--“of course it’s different with you.”
“At least I am not interested,” said Christian, wearily. The advice of
Kathleen had produced upon his mind an even greater effect, perhaps,
than he imagined. He had encountered, by the dozen, extremely beautiful
and engaging girls, whose charm should have been enhanced in his eyes by
the dignity and even grandeur of their surroundings. But an impalpable
yet efficient barrier had stood always between them and him. If they
exhibited reserve, he was too shy for words. If they expanded toward
him with smiles or any freedom of demeanor, he recalled instantly the
warning of Emanuel’s wife, and that was fatal. “I have not cared for any
of them,” he reaffirmed.
“Oh!” cried Westland of a sudden, his comely, boyish face beaming with
the thought that had come to him. “How stupid of me! I’d forgotten what
I came for--and I’m not sure it doesn’t precisely fill the bill. Are you
doing anything to-night? Will you come with me to the Hanover Theater at
midnight? It’s the five-hundredth performance of ‘Pansy Blossoms’--and
there’s to be supper on the stage and a dance. I don’t think you’ve seen
much of that sort of thing, have you?”
Christian shook his head, and regarded his companion doubtfully.
“Nothing at all of it,” he said, slowly. “But it does not attract me
very much, I’m afraid. You would better take some one else. I should
be a fish out of water there. The people of the theaters--they are not
congenial to me--that is, I do not think they would be.”
“But, hang it all, man, how do you know till you’ve tried?” Dicky put
a little worldly authority into his tone as he proceeded. “You mustn’t
mind my saying it to you--it is you who make your own desert, as you
call it, for yourself. If you say in advance that you know you won’t
like this sort of person, or that, how are you ever going to form any
friendships?”
Christian received the remonstrance with meekness. “You do not quite
understand me,” he said, amiably enough. “I have some work to do in the
world, and I don’t think that actresses and actors would help me much to
do it. The young men who run after them do not seem, somehow, to do
much else. It is only a prejudice I have; it applies only to myself. If
others feel differently, why, I have not a word to say.”
“No, you must come!” Westland declared, rising. “It’s nonsense for you
not to see that side of things. My dear fellow, it’s as respectable as
the Royal Academy--or Madame Tussaud’s. Are you dining anywhere? Then
I’ll run home and dress, and I’ll drive round here for you. We’ll dine
together, and then look in at some of the halls. Shall I say seven? It
gives us more time over our dinner.”
Christian accepted, with a rueful little smile, his committal to the
enterprise. “You must not mind if I come away early,” he said, getting
to his feet in turn.
The other laughed at him. “My dear man, you’ll never want to come away
at all. But no, seriously--it’s just the kind of thing you want. It’ll
amuse you, for one thing--and deuce take it, you’ll be young only once
in your life. But more than that--here you are swearing that you’ll do
no more social work at all, and you don’t know in the least what other
resources are open to you. It isn’t alone actresses that you meet at a
place like this, but all sorts of clever people who know how to get what
there is out of life. That is what you yourself want to do, isn’t it?
Well, it’ll do you no harm, to say the least, to see how they go about
it.”
“Very likely,” Christian replied, as the other turned. “I will be ready
at seven.” He followed him to the door, and into the hallway. “Mind,”
he said, half jokingly, half gravely, as he leaned over the banister, “I
have not altogether promised. When midnight comes, I may lose my courage
altogether.”
“Ah, it’s that kind of timidity that storms every fortress in its path,”
Dicky called up to him from the stairway.