The two young men dined at the Café Royal. “It’s as good a kitchen as
there is in London, and in the matter of people it isn’t such a tiresome
repetition of those one meets everywhere else as Willis’s or the
Prince’s. To see the same shoulders and the same necks, night after
night--a fellow gets tired of it.”
To this explanation by Dicky of his choice, as they rolled forward in
their hansom, Christian made no direct response. After a little he said:
“Very soon now, I am going to do something that seems to have been in my
mind for months. Perhaps I have only thought of it since this afternoon:
I cannot be sure. But I am going to do it--I am going to know for myself
what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen
in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses
and feathers in their hair--all thinking and talking about themselves
and their own little affairs--that does not mean London. And a few large
houses in the country, where these same people spend a few months riding
after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with
idle, sleepy talk--that does not represent England.”
“Doesn’t it!” cried Westland. “I should say that’s just what it did,
worse luck!”
“No, no!” protested Christian. “I don’t want to be told that it
does--for then I should want to go away altogether. No--there is the
other thing, and I am going to find it out, and see it and know it.
When all those years of my boyhood and youth I was so proud of being an
Englishman, it was not this empty, valueless life of the West End, or
the chase of foxes and birds in the country, that I longed for, and
nourished pride in.”
“Oh, but they do other things, you know,” laughed Dicky. “They are in
Parliament, some of them, or they are at the bar, or in the Services,
or they manage estates or are directors in companies, and that sort
of thing. And some of them go in a lot for charities, and work on
committees and organize things, you know. You’d hardly believe how much
of that most of the women let themselves in for.”
“That is not what I mean,” said the other, rather abruptly. “To me all
that is not worth the snap of a finger,” and he emphasized his words by
a gestured with the hand which rested on the door of the hansom.
At an advanced stage of the dinner, the young men came to the subject
again. In reply to a random inquiry Christian said that his grandfather,
the duke, as far as he knew, was neither worse nor better in health
than he had been all winter. “I have not been to Caermere since my first
visit,” he went on. “I am really living upon a programme arranged for
me, I should think, by a committee of my relations. Lord Lingfield is
my active bear-leader. He conducts me, or sends me, wherever it has been
decided that I shall go. It was not deemed important that I should go to
Caermere again--and so I have not gone. Voilà tout! If I had been free
to myself, I think I should have gone.”
“It must be an awfully jolly place, from the pictures I’ve seen of it,”
said Westland.
“Jolly!” cried Christian. “My dear creature, it is a grave, a mausoleum,
a place of skulls and dead men’s bones! You have never seen such a
family vault in all your days. When I even begin to think of undertaking
the task of brightening it into life again, I grow dizzy. The immensity
of the work unnerves me. And now I do not know if I shall ever put my
hand to it. The country-gentleman idea--which you make so much of in
England--it does not appeal to me. It is too idle--too purposeless. Of
course my cousin Emanuel, he makes a terrible toil of it--and does some
wonderful things, beyond doubt. But after all, what does it come to?
He helps people to be extremely fine who without him would only be
tolerably fine. But I have the feeling that one should help those who
are not fine at all--who have never had the chance to be fine, who do
not know what it means. Emanuel’s wife--oh, a very lovely character--she
said to me that they disliked coming up to town, the sight of the London
poor distressed them so much. Well, that is the point--if I am to
help anybody at all, it is the London poor that I should try to help.
Emanuel’s plan is to give extra bones, and teach new tricks, to dogs
already very comfortable. My heart warms to the dogs without collars,
the homeless and hungry devils who look for bones in the gutters.”
“Oh, you’re going in for settlements and that sort of thing,” commented
Dicky. “I hear that is rather disappointing work. If you don’t take the
sporting papers at the reading-room they say the men won’t come at all.
Slingsby Chetwynd was awfully keen on the thing. He went down to stop
a whole week--at Shoreditch or Houndsditch or the Isle of Dogs, or
somewhere like that--and a woman smashed his hat in, and he fell into a
cellar--and he was jolly glad to get back again the same night.”
Christian was pursuing thoughts of his own. The wine was admirable--as
indeed it should have been considering the pains Dicky had been at, with
pursed lips and lifted eyebrows, in the selection of it--and Christian
had found an unaccustomed pleasure in its aromatic, sub-acid taste. He
had drunk rather freely of it, and was satisfied with himself for
having done so. He leaned back in his chair now, and watching the golden
fountain of bubbles forever streaming upward in his glass, mused upon
welcome new impulses within him toward the life of a free man.
“None the less,” he remarked, indifferent to the irrelevancy of his
theme, “I should have liked to go to Caermere during the winter. I am
annoyed with myself now that I did not go--whether it was arranged for
me or not. There is a lady there for whom I felt great sympathy. I had
expected to be of service to her long before this--but I am of service
to no one. She is a cousin--no doubt you know her--Lady Cressage.”
“But she is in London,” put in Westland. “I only know her a little, but
Lady Selton used to be by way of seeing a good deal of her. She told me
last week that she was in town--taken a little flat somewhere--Victoria
Street way, I think. She doesn’t go in for being very smart, you know.
Why--yes--of course she’s your cousin by marriage. Awfully pretty woman
she was. Gad! how well I remember her season! All the fellows went quite
off their heads. How funny--that she should be your cousin!”
Christian took no note of his companion’s closing words, or of the tone
in which they had been uttered. He scowled at the playful bubbles in his
glass, as he reflected that the news of her arrival in London ought not
to have come to him in this roundabout, accidental way. Why did none
of his own people tell him? Or still more to the point, why had not
she herself told him? He really had given her only an occasional and
sporadic thought, during these past four or five months. Now, as he
frowned at his wine, it seemed to him that his whole winter had been
burdened with solicitude for her. Or no, “burdened” was an ungracious
word, and false to boot. He would say “mellowed” or “enriched” instead.
“You must find out for me”--he began, and then, upon a second
thought born of pique, checked himself. “Or do not mind--it is of no
consequence. I shall hear as a matter of course.” He called for the bill
with a decision in his voice which seemed full of warning that the topic
was exhausted.
Westland could not help observing the fat roll of crackling white notes
which the other drew from his pocket. If they were all of the smallest
denomination, they must still represent something like his whole year’s
allowance. The general understanding that Christian’s unfamiliarity
with English ways excused, and even invited, wise admonition from his
friends, prompted him to speak.
“That’s rather a lot to carry about with you, old man,” he said, in
gentle expostulation.
“Oh, I like it!” Christian declared, with shining eyes. He snapped the
elastic band about the roll, with an air of boyish delight in the sound,
as he returned it to his pocket. “If you knew the years in which I
counted my sous!”.
It was nearly ten o’clock when they left. Beginning with the Pavilion,
they went to four or five music halls, only to find that there were no
seats to be had. “Why, of course it’s the boat-race,” exclaimed Dicky at
last. “Stupid of me to have forgotten it. I say, I ought to have come
for you this morning, and taken you up the river to see it. It’s worth
seeing--for once. I wonder Lingfield did not arrange it for you.”
“Oh, several people asked me to join their parties,” Christian replied.
“But it did not attract me. The athletics here--they rather annoy me.
It is as if people thought of nothing else. And to have students at the
universities consumed with the idea--that is specially unpleasant to my
mind. You must remember--I am a teacher by profession.”
“We’ll go back to the Empire,” Westland decided. “Ever been there? Well,
it’s worth seeing, too--perhaps more than once. The Johnnies’ll be out
in extraordinary force, I’m afraid, but then you ought to see them too,
I suppose. It takes all sorts to make a world--and the world is what
you’ve come out to look at. Let me get the tickets--or, well, if you
insist--ask for the promenade.” It was indeed a novel spectacle, which
smote and confused his eyes, rather than revealed itself to them, when
Christian found himself inside. The broad, low, rounded promenade was
so crowded with people that at first sight walking about seemed wholly
impracticable, but Dicky stepped confidently into the jumbled throng and
began moving through it, apparently with ease, and the other followed
him. They made their way to the end, where a man in uniform guarded a
staircase; then, turning, they elbowed along back to the opposite end
of the half-circle. This gained, there was nothing in Dicky’s thoughts,
seemingly, but to repeat the performance indefinitely. Their progress
was of a necessity slow. On the inner side a dense wall of backs and
high hats rendered hopeless any notion of seeing the stage below.
Christian, struggling after his guide, wondered what else there was to
see.
After a time it became obvious to him that the women who formed so large
an element of the lazily shifting crowd were also the occasion of its
being. They walked about, looking the men in the face with a cold, free,
impassive scrutiny upon which, even if he had never seen it before,
intuition would have fixed a label for him. Other women, from the plush
seats on the outer edge of the circle, bent upon the whole moving mass
of promenaders the same stoical, inscrutable gaze. The range of age
among them did not seem extended to his uninformed glance. In years they
were apparently all about alike. Some, indeed, had fresher faces and
smoother skins than others, but when the eyes were considered a certain
indefinable equality was insisted upon in them all. Their toilets were
often striking in effect, and especially their hats--exaggerating both
in breadth of brim, and in the height and bulk of the edifice of plumes
above, the prevalent fashion in such matters--were notable to the
spectator; but Christian found himself, upon consideration, more
interested in their eyes than in anything else.
A certain stony quality in this stereotyped gaze of theirs suggested a
parallel to his memory; he had seen precisely that same cool, unruffled,
consciously unconscious stare in princesses who had looked at him
without beholding him in the far-away days of his life about the hotels
of the Riviera. It was very curious, he thought--this incongruous
resemblance. But a little closer analysis showed that the likeness was
but partial. These ladies of the promenade could look about them with
the imperturbability of princesses, it was true, but only so long as
they saw nothing which concerned them immediately. Nay, now he could
discern beneath the surface of this passionless perlustration a couched
vigilance of attention, which ever and again flashed uppermost with
electric swiftness. When this mercurial change came, one saw the
temperament mapped out like a landscape under the illumination of
lightning. There gleamed forth expectancy, dread, joy, irritability,
fun, dislike or wistful hope--whatever the mood of the instant
yielded--with a force of intensity almost startling. Then, as quickly
as it came, the look might vanish; even if it flickered on, the briefest
interval of repose brought back again the watchful, dispassionate,
hardened regard.
“Have you had enough of this?” Dicky asked, with an implication of
weariness in his tone.
Christian, halting, took slow and bewildered cognizance of the fact that
he had been going from one end of the promenade to the other for a very
long time. Insensibly, at some period of the experience, he had taken
the lead from his companion, and had been dragging him about in his
wake.
“It is very interesting,” was the vague excuse he offered to Dicky, and
even more to himself.
A sofa just beside them was for the moment unoccupied. Christian seated
himself with the air of one physically tired out. “Ought we not to
order drinks?” he asked his companion, who stood over him, looking down
somewhat doubtfully.
“Oh, dear, no--not here!” Dicky replied, with conviction. “It’s nearly
closing time--and we’ll go over to the club for half an hour--where we
know our tipple. Shall we run along now?”
“No--sit down here,” said Christian. He spoke with the authority of
a profound emotion, that glowed in his eyes and quivered on his lips.
Westland obeyed him, pretending to a nonchalance which his mistrustful
glance belied.
“This is all very extraordinary to me,” Christian continued, in a low,
strenuous voice. He spoke with even more than his wonted fluency.
“It catches hold of me. It fills my mind with new thoughts. There is
something in the very air here--”
“Musk and cigarette smoke,” interposed Dicky, lightly. Then he saw that
levity struck a false note.
“Pah!” the other jerked forth, impatiently. “Don’t talk like that! It
is the most terrible, the most touching, the most inspiring thing I
have seen in my life. I breathe in a new ambition here, out of this
atmosphere. We were talking of the London poor. I thought they made the
loudest appeal--but they are nothing beside _this!_” He spread his thin,
nervous hand out as he spoke, and swept it in a comprehensive gesture
over the spectacle before them. “These are my sisters--my unhappy and
dishonored sisters, scorned and scornful--oh, yes, they are all my
sisters!”
“But fortunately they don’t know it,” urged Dicky, surveying the ladies
with pouting lips and half-closed eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t mention
it to them.”
Christian turned round, with one knee on the sofa, and claimed his
companion’s attention. “I wanted to be able to add you to my very little
list of friends,” he said, gravely. “All the evening I have had that in
my mind--and it may be something else, too. But if you cannot understand
me, now, when I tell you how all this moves me--and if you only care to
mock at what I say--why, then, it is not needful to say more.”
Dicky faced about in turn, and regarded him with a puzzled glance,
from which he was at pains to exclude all signs of frivolity. “But you
haven’t told me _how_ it moves you at all,” he said, vaguely.
“Oh, how,” repeated Christian with hesitation. “It is not easy to say
just how. But I am devoured by a great compassion. I could weep tears
at the heart-misery I see here. They shout in the papers and wring their
hands over the massacre of Armenians--but right here--this thing--is
it not more cruel and dreadful still? Here there is no question of race
hatreds and religious hatreds, but just the cold, implacable pressure of
poverty on human souls, crushing them and sinking them in shame.”
“Oh, that’s only a part of the story--not such a deuce of a big part
either,” urged the other, gently. “Don’t get so excited about it, my
dear fellow. It is by no means a new thing. And wait till you know more
about it, and have thought it over--and then, if you feel that there is
anything you can do, why, take my word for it, it will still be here. It
won’t disappear in the meanwhile. You’ll still be in time.”
Christian regarded him wistfully, and with a mild, faint smile. “You
would never enter into my feelings about this,” he said, softly. “We are
made differently. It strikes you as strange, does it not, that a young
man, coming into contact with this for the first time, should be filled
only with the yearning to help these poor girls, and do good to them? It
surprises you? It is something new to you, n’est ce pas?”
Dicky grinned within decorous limits. “My dear boy,” he declared,
confidentially, “so far from being new, it’s the oldest thing in the
world. Every young fellow worth his salt that I have ever known, or that
anybody’s ever known, has swelled himself out with precisely these same
reform sentiments. In this very promenade here I have witnessed at least
a dozen attacks like yours. And don’t think I am jeering at the thing.
It is a very beautiful and generous spirit indeed, and I admire it
awfully, I assure you--only--only, as one gets to know his way about
a trifle better, he sees that there isn’t so much in it as he thought
there was. And that’s what I was trying to say to you. Don’t let your
first impulses run away with you. If the subject interests you, appeals
to you, very well; get to understand it. You will find that it is more
complicated, perhaps, than you think. But when you know it all, why,
then you can do what you like.”
Some of the light seemed to have been turned out. A definitive blare
rolled up from the orchestra below; the throng of promenaders, though
still informed by the most leisurely of moods, was converging upon the
door of exit. The two young men arose.
Christian suddenly yawned. “I am tired--and depressed,” he said,
wearily. “I think I will ask you to let me go home.”
“Nonsense!” said Dicky, promptly. “We’ll go to the club, and get a
pick-up, and then you shall see something that won’t depress you. I
grant you this _is_ rather melancholy. God knows why we came.”
An hour or more later, emerging from a confusing sequence of narrow
passages and winding ascents and descents, Christian followed Westland
out through a groove of painted canvas to the stage of the Hanover
Theater.
He had never seen a theater from this point of view, and the first few
minutes of his scrutiny--here where he stood at the wings, while Dicky
looked after the coats and hats--were full of pleased interest. The huge
dusky space of the galleries overhead, strange and formidable in its
dark bulk like some giant balloon, was very impressive. By contrast,
the stage itself seemed to give out light. A long riband of a table
stretched across the back, and down the two sides, and about this
clustered many people; shining shirt-fronts and bald heads, pale
shimmering dresses and white shoulders, the glitter of napery and plates
and glasses--all was radiant under the powerful electric glow from
above. He could see now, in the halfshadows down beyond the footlights,
two or three rows of heads of people sitting in the front stalls. To
his fancy these detached heads appeared to belong to an order of beings
quite distinct from those on the stage. He wondered if actors felt their
audiences to be thus remote and aloof from themselves.
“We can push our way in at the other end--there’s less of a crush
there,” he heard Dicky say to him. He followed his guide across the
stage, through groups of conversing guests who had brought out their
sandwiches and glasses from the throng, and came eventually to the table
itself. Some one held out a bottle toward him, and he lifted a glass to
be filled. From under some other stranger’s arm he extricated a plate,
containing something in gelatine, he knew not what. In straightening
himself he pushed against a person unexpectedly close behind him.
Half turning, with the murmur of an apology upon his lips, his eyes
encountered those of a lady, who seemed to know him, and to be smiling
at him.
“How d’ye do?” this lady said to him. There could be no doubt about
the cordiality of her tone. Her left hand was occupied with a champagne
glass and a fan, but her right was being lifted to him, almost against
his breast, in greeting. He gazed at her in smiling perplexity, the
while he signed that both his own hands were filled.
“You don’t know me from Adam,” she said to him, cheerfully. “But I’m
your cousin--Cora Torr, you know.”