I don’t think I like your being here,” Frances remarked to the young
man after a brief frowning inspection. She spoke slowly, and with a
deliberate gravity and evenness of tone.
Christian’s wide-open eyes continued to gaze up at her with that
disconcerting look which had in it both remote abstraction and something
very intimately personal. His glance expressed a tender pleasure as it
maintained itself against hers.
“Oh, but I like it so very much!” he murmured, with a pleading smile.
Then, by a sudden movement, he sat up, flushing in a novel
embarrassment. “I beg you to pardon me,” he urged, faltering over his
words. “I was not wholly awake, I think; or I was trying to persuade
myself that it was still a dream. Do not think me so rude, I pray you!”
She signified by a gesture and momentary facial relaxation that this
particular detail of the situation need not detain them.
“But”--she began, in her stiffest and least amiable voice, and then
hesitated. She put her knee again upon the chair, and, resting her hand
on its back, looked dubiously at him. “I hardly know what to say,” she
started once more, and stopped altogether.
“Oh, but it is I who must say everything,” he broke in, eagerly. “I am
quite awake now--I see, of course, it is all absurd, meaningless in your
eyes, till I explain it to you.” He rose to his feet and put forth his
hand as if to offer it in greeting. No responsive token being visible on
her set face, or in her rigid posture, as she confronted him, he waved
both hands in a deprecatory movement over the table laden with flowers
between them. “These are my peace-offering,” he said, with less
confidence. “I hoped they would say some things for me--some things
which I feel within me, and cannot easily put into speech. That is what
I expected they would surely do. But”--he finished with dejection, after
another glance into her face--“evidently they are as tongue-tied as I
am. I see it was not a happy thought in me to bring them--or to come
myself!”
She had followed his words with rapt attentiveness--but at the end
seemed to remember only one of them. “The ‘thought,’” she said, coldly.
“Yes, that is what I do not understand. What was the thought?”
He regarded her with some perplexity. “What was the thought--my
thought?” he repeated. “Oh--since it does not explain itself, what good
is there in talking about it? Let us say that there was no ‘thought’ at
all. I will make my compliments and apologies--and say good-morning--and
nothing at all will have happened.”
“No,” she answered reflectively. “That would be stupid. You have been to
expense, and evidently to some inconvenience as well, to do this thing.
On second thoughts,” she went on, with an apparent effort to modify the
asperities of her tone and manner, “I dare say that I haven’t behaved
quite nicely to you. If you remember, I told you a long time ago that
bad manners was a failing of mine.”
“I remember every little word that you spoke,” said Christian softly.
Frances hardened her voice on the instant. “But that doesn’t help me to
understand why--what this is all about.”
He responded slowly, searching for his words as he went along. The
rattle of machines in the next room for the first time came into the
conversation, and forced him to lift his voice. “You were my last friend
in France--my first friend in England,” he began. “I said I would not
forget you, and you have been always in my mind--always somewhere secure
and fresh and sweet in my mind. It was only last night that I learned
where I might find you. You will remember that when I begged you to tell
me, you laughed and would not. I must not make you believe that I did
not very soon find out your name or that I could not have learned your
whereabouts much earlier. All I say is that I did not forget--and that
last night, when the chance came naturally to me, I asked and learned
what I desired to know. And then--why, then--this knowledge spread
upward to be of more importance than all the other things I knew. I went
home--but never to think of sleeping, but only to change my clothes and
hasten out again, to get some new morning flowers for you, and to
come to you at the earliest moment. I did not know that London rose
so late--I arrived before the time, and, so it seems, waiting for your
coming, I fell asleep. That is the entire story. You see it is not very
complicated--it is by no means extraordinary.”
Frances had listened with a dreamy gentleness in her gray eyes. She
started slightly when he stopped, and gave him a keen, cool glance. “The
entire story?” she queried. “I think you have forgotten to mention that
it was my sister who told you about me, and gave you my address.”
Her prescience in no wise astonished Christian. Imagination had thrown
round the Minerva-like figure which personified her in his thoughts,
such a glamour of intellectual radiancy, that it seemed quite a natural
thing for her to divine the obscure, and comprehend the mysterious. He
smiled at her as he shrugged his shoulders. “It did not occur to me as
important,” he exclaimed. “It is true, however, that she told me. She
did not know the address when I asked her, but later she procured it
for me from her brother. It was at a supper at the Hanover Theater.
Afterward there was dancing on the stage. I fear it would have been
rather tiresome for me if I had not met your sister. She is a very
friendly lady, and she talked a great deal to me.”
“About me?” demanded Frances, sharply.
“Oh, no--about you only a few pleasant words; not more. It seems you do
not meet very often.”
He spoke with such evident frankness that she hesitated over the further
inquiry her mind had framed. At last she put it in altered form.
“Then you would not say that she sent you here---that she told you to
come--and to come by way of Covent Garden, and buy these flowers?” The
question, as she uttered it, was full of significant suggestion about
the nature of the reply desired. Its tone, too, carried the welcome
hint of a softened mood, under the influence of which Christian’s face
brightened with joy.
“Why, not at all!” he cried, lifting his voice gaily above the
typewriters’ clatter. “She did speak of Covent Garden, and the show of
flowers there in the early morning, but it was not in the least with
reference to you. It was my own idea long after she had gone. Oh, no one
would be more surprised than that good sister of yours to know that I am
here!”
Frances, with a puzzling smile which ended in a long breath of relief,
took up some of the roses and held them to her face.
“Sit down again,” she bade him, with a pleasant glow in the eyes
regarding him over the blossoms; “sit down, and let us talk. Or does
that noise bore you?”
“Oh, I am too glad!” he assured her, beamingly. “If it were cannon
firing in the next room, it would be nothing to me.” Then, as he
continued to gaze with delight at her, an inspiration came to him. “Or
is it possible for you to come out? Would you walk a little while,
perhaps on the Embankment?”
“I am not particularly busy this morning,” she made indirect answer.
Then a digression occurred to her. “But I am rather surprised,” she
observed, “to find that England hasn’t made more changes in your speech.
I would have expected a perfect Piccadilly accent, but you talk exactly
as you did on the train and the boat.”
He laughed and clapped his hands for glee. “It is wholly because I am
with you again,” he declared. “Everybody has said for months that the
foreign traces had quite vanished from my tongue--but the first glimpse
of you--ah! they come instantly back! It is the association of ideas,
beyond doubt--that very sweet association,” he added, with trembling
softness, “of oh! such fond ideas.”
She had taken up her hat. “We will go out for a little, if you like,”
she remarked rather abruptly.
“And I am altogether forgiven?” he demanded in high spirits, as he rose.
“You consent to accept the flowers?”
“Heaven only knows what I shall do with them,” she answered, with a
grimace of mock despair. “But it was ever so nice of you to get them,
and I thank you very much. Oh, I must tell Connie to sprinkle them
before I go.”
She moved to the inner door, and as she opened it turned. “Wouldn’t you
like to come and see the factory at work?” she inquired, and he joined
her with alacrity. “It isn’t much to see at the moment,” she explained,
as they entered the large room. “We have nine machines, but only four
of them are needed just now. Until after the Jubilee, I’m afraid things
will be very dull with publishers and playwrights. However, one must
take the lean with the fat.”
Christian looked somewhat nervously about him, while his friend stepped
aside to confer with the girl whom he remembered from the early morning.
Both this young lady and the three at their machines made a rapid, and
as it seemed to him, perfunctory survey of their mistress’s guest,
and bent their attention upon their duties again as if his presence
signified nothing whatever to them. He suspected that in reality they
were plunged in furious speculation concerning him; and this embarrassed
him so much that he turned and strolled back toward the open door and
even entered the office before Frances rejoined him.
When she came back to him, she took from the table a couple of pale,
half-opened tea-rose buds, gave one to him to fix in his lapel and
pinned the other to the breast of her fawn-gray frock. “If you are
ready,” she said, smilingly, and led the way to the staircase. As she
descended before him, he noted the intelligent simplicity of this dress
she wore--how it fitted her as gracefully and as artistically as Poole
ever fitted Dicky Westland. About her hat, the carriage of her head and
shoulders, the free decision of her step, there was something individual
which appealed directly to him--a charm which would not be duplicated by
any other person in the world. He looked at his watch as he went down,
and found with surprise that it was nearly eleven.
He stepped to her side at the street doorway, with a meaning gesture.
“Do you remember,” he said, gently--“on the boat you took my arm?”
“I think London is a little different,” she answered, decisively enough,
yet with the effect to his ears of unreserved camaraderie.
They walked slowly down to the end of the street. “Do you mind which way
we go?” she asked him, and turned eastward. “I haven’t seen the city in
an age,” she remarked, as if the choice needed explanation. Sauntering
along, they found little to say to each other at the outset. What words
they exchanged were about the mild, sunless sky of the London April, and
the wonderful pencilings and rubbings of soot upon the silver-gray of
London’s stone walls. Learning that he was a stranger to the Temple, she
led the way through the gate and lane, and then, by turnings which it
surprised him to find her knowing so well, to the curious little church.
The door in the sunken porch was ajar, and they went in. She pointed to
the circle of freestone Crusaders looking complacently up from the floor
at the Oriental dome which had caught their traveled fancy ages before,
and it occurred to her to say: “Is it not interesting to you to think
that there were Torrs who were friends and companions of these very
Magnavilles and Mareschalls, six hundred years ago?”
He thrust out his lips a little. “I have not much interest in anything
concerning the Torrs,” he answered.
She looked up at him with curiosity, but offered no comment. They left
the church, and she led him round to the spot where, amid the cracked
old flags from forgotten graves, Oliver Goldsmith’s tomb now finds
itself. A crumbling wreath of natural flowers showed that some kindly
soul had remembered the date of the poet’s death, three weeks before.
Christian displayed scarcely more interest here. “I have not read his
‘Vicar of Wakefield,’” he confessed to her. “I had always the intention
to do so, but it--it never came off.”
“That brings me to one thing I wanted to ask you,” she said, as they
retraced their steps. “What books have you been reading--since you came
to England? I am anxious to know?”
“Not many,” he admitted with an attempted laugh which ended rather
shamefacedly. “Reading did not fit itself very readily into my time. At
Lord Chobham’s I read in some old books, and at Emanuel’s too, but
it was all about our own people--the Barons’ War, and the Wars of the
Roses, and the Civil War. I know something about these and about the
old families of the West, but not much else. I should have read more, I
know, but there was really not much opportunity. But you--I saw at your
office what serious books you read. It is what I should like to do,
too--sometimes. But there has been no one to talk with about any kind of
books.”
They had come out again to the Embankment, and made their pace now even
more deliberate. “I have been thinking a great deal about you, and your
future, since we met,” she remarked, after a pause. “It has made me
wonder what you would do, when the opportunity came to you--and what it
would be open for you to do. That is why I began reading the books that
I take it you have in mind--but afterward I read them for their own
value. At the beginning”--she went on slowly, studying the sky-line in
an abstracted way as she walked--“at the beginning I thought I should
see you again sometime, and I had the idea that I wanted to be able to
advise--or no, not that, but to talk to you, and try to interest you in
the right sort of things. But it did not take me long to see how foolish
that was.”
“No, no!” urged Christian; without, however, any convincing display of
enthusiasm. “There is no one in the world from whom I will so gladly
take advice as you.”
She smiled fleetingly at him. “And there is no one in the world,” she
replied, “more firmly resolved not to offer you any.”
“Ah, but if I beg it! You may not offer--but will you refuse to give?”
“What is the good?” she broke forth in a louder tone, speaking as if in
annoyed reproof to herself. “No person can think or feel or decide for
another! It is nonsense to pretend otherwise. A man must think his own
thoughts, follow his own nature! We can ask nothing finer of a man than
to honestly be himself. I get so angry at all these ceaseless attempts
to run people all into one mold, to make everybody like everybody
else--and then, here I was, solemnly starting out to do the very trick
myself!” She laughed in ironical self-depreciation at the thought.
Christian drew closer to her side. “I have very many things to say to
you,” he began gravely. “But I am in one way sorry that we went into the
churchyard, because it has made us melancholy, and I was going to tell
it all to you in the highest good spirits. We were both laughing like
merry children when we left your place--and now we are sad. I like
Emanuel’s idea--he will have no tombs to be seen upon his estate. Death
will come there as elsewhere, without doubt, but he will not be allowed
to remain hanging about, thrusting his ugly presence upon happy people
each time they walk in the street. At Emanuel’s there is cremation--and
that is the end of it. That is the portion of his System which pleases
me most. It is the best thing in it.”
She looked into his face. “Then you are not wildly in love with his
whole System?” she asked.
“Me? I grieve to say not. It is no doubt very admirable indeed--but--how
shall I say?--it does not appeal to me. You are displeased with me for
confessing it--but--”
“Displeased?” she interrupted him, with a meaning laugh. “Nothing could
displease me less!”
“Oh, you do not love the System?” he cried, with dancing eyes.
“I hate it!” she answered, briefly.
“Capital!” He halted, to shake her by the hand with gay effusion. “Let
us abuse it together! You shall say it all, however, because I only
dislike it, and cannot give any reasons why--but you will know them
every one. Oh, this is splendid! I had the right instinct when I came to
you! I have a great deal to tell you--but first you must tell me: what
do you say about my cousin’s System? I am burning to hear that.”
It was impossible to evade the contagion of his sparkling face. She
laughed in turn.
“Oh, it would be too long a story,” she half protested. “But to put
it briefly, this is my idea. Emanuel seems to me to be a magnificent
character, with one extraordinary limitation. I think it must be a
Jewish limitation--for I have seen it pointed out that they do not
invent things. That is Emanuel’s flaw; he has not an original thought
in his head. He merely carries to a mathematical point of expansion and
development the ready-made ideas which he finds accepted all about him.
What you see in him is a triumph of the Semitic passion for working a
problem out to its ultimate conclusion. When you consider it, what
has he done? Merely discovered, by tremendous labor and energy, the
smoothest possible working arrangement of the social system which his
class regards as best for itself, and hence for all mankind--the system
which exalts a chosen few, and keeps all the rest in subjection. My dear
sir, things do not rise higher than their source! How did the Torrs come
by their estates? By stealing the birthright of thousands of dumb human
beasts of burden, and riveting the family collar round their necks with
no more regard for their wishes or their rights than as if they had
been so many puppies or colts. And what was the origin of the Ascarel
fortune? The most frightful and bloodstained human slavery in the
poisonous jungles of the Dutch East Indies--that, and an ancient family
business of international usury, every dirty penny in which if you
followed it far enough, meant the flaying alive of a peasant, or the
starvation of his little children. These are the things which your
cousin inherits. He is fine enough to be ashamed of them, but he is not
broad enough to repudiate them. He makes himself believe that they
were wrong only in degree. He will admit that the Torrs were too brutal
toward their serfs, the Ascarels too selfish with their millions. That
is all. And he sets himself to proving that with the right kind of chief
at their head these systems of theirs can be made not only respectable,
but even profitable to the slaves as well as the master. He does not see
that the systems themselves are crimes! ”
“Yes, I am glad that I came to you,” said Christian, in low, earnest
tones, in the pause which followed. The girl, breathing deeply under
the fervor of her mood, looked fixedly before her toward the copper-haze
above Paul’s dome. He watched the noble immobility of her profile and
thrilled at its suggestion of strength.
“To do him justice,” she went on, musingly, “he does not pretend that it
is progress. He is honest, and he describes it as reaction--a long
step backward. It is just that kind of honesty and devotion, plus
wrong-headedness, which keeps us all at sixes and sevens. If we agree
that there is no better-intentioned man alive than Emanuel--still he
would do more harm than the most atrocious blackguard, if he had his way
with the world. But fortunately, he will not have it. A vastly greater
and loftier Jew has said that you cannot pour new wine into old
bottles.”
They walked on for a little in silence. “Have you been to Emanuel’s
place then?” Christian asked at last.
“No; I know it only from hearsay, and from his books. A woman novelist
for whom I do work has been there, and she has told me a good deal about
it. She is going to use it in a book, and would you believe it? she is
crazy with enthusiasm about the whole thing. I tried to point out to her
what she was doing, but you might as well talk to the east wind. The
way women run after the hand that smites them, and beslaver it with
kisses--that is the thing that enrages me most of all. Why, the very
corner-stone of Emanuel’s System is the perpetual enslavement of women.
I am always surprised, when I hear about his mediæval arrangements, that
he hasn’t set up a ducking-stool for his women-folk. I’m sure it’s a
pure oversight on his part. Well, what are you to expect when cultivated
women like Mrs. Sessyl-Trant turn up as frantic admirers of that sort of
thing? However, thank goodness, women are not forever to be sold out by
the fools of their own sex. It is impossible not to see that the tide
has turned at last. There _is_ a change--and I think something genuine
and lasting is going to come out of it. I really think it!”
“Ah, that is what I feel,” put in Christian, with confused eagerness.
“I have no clear thoughts about it, but it is my deep feeling
that--that--what shall I say?--we are most at fault in the matter of the
women.”
Frances pursued her thought, in frowning meditation. “It is the new
professional class, who earn their own living, who will help us out.
These women, who have come through the mill of self-responsibility, will
not accept the old nonsense invented for them, and imposed upon them by
the women parasites. The younger women who take care of themselves have
all begun to ask questions: ‘Why should I do this?’ ‘Why shouldn’t I
do that?’ ‘And whose business but my own is it if I do the other?’
Unfortunately, they are too ready to accept the first answer that comes
to them. Oh, that is the woeful trouble! Men have slowly built up for
themselves a good deal of machinery by which they can find out what
is true. I don’t say they are not continually deceived, or that they
invariably recognize the truth when they see it, but still they have
certain facilities for protecting themselves against falsehoods. But
women have practically none at all. They are systematically lied to
from their cradle to their grave. They read so hard!--they are _the_
consumers of novels, religious books, weekly newspapers, magazines, and
the rest of it--but never a word of actual truth is allowed to reach
them out of it all. Wherever they turn to inquire about themselves,
about their rights and their duties in this world that they have been
born into, they encounter this vast, unbroken conspiracy of liars. That
is the gravest of all the disadvantages they labor under. Why, take even
the ‘New Woman’ fiction of a few years ago. There was a great hullabaloo
raised over certain novels; at last, they cried, the truth was
being-revealed by women, for women, of women. But what nonsense! It
turned out not to be the truth at all, but only the old falsehood,
disguised in hysterics and some shocking bad manners. There seems no
escape for women anywhere. They are lied to by their parents, their
parsons, their doctors, their authors--and of course they lie to
one another. They have a whole debased currency of insincerities and
flattering falsehoods which they pass among themselves, keeping straight
faces all the while as if it were honest money.--But as I said, I think
a change is coming. However, don’t let’s talk any more about it. I get
too angry!”
“I like you to be angry--only not with me,” commented Christian with
a sprightly smile. Then he added, more gravely, “Oh, I can see how the
women who work will make a change. It was very curious to me to see
those girls at the machines in your office. It was one of them who let
me in, before you came. She was quite different from any of the English
women I have been meeting. One saw that she had thoughts of her own--an
atmosphere of her own. I should not like to tell lies to her; I think
she would detect them more rapidly than I could get them out.”
“Oh, Connie,” laughed Frances. “Yes, she has a head on her shoulders.
They are all fairly bright girls, and they get on together extremely
well. It’s quite their own idea to divide up the work equally among the
lot, and when there is not much doing to take turns in working alternate
days. I think it was rather fine of them.”
“Ah, that is the class of women one would like to help,” he declared.
“That is what I will devote myself to.”
“But it is the class which prefers to help itself,” she explained
quietly. “I see no way in which you could ‘help’ them, as you call it.
They don’t want any help. Men in their position might take tips, but
these girls won’t.” As he received the rebuff in silence, she changed
the subject. “I am meeting now some other young women who would interest
you. They are doing newspaper work--and doing it on its merits, too,
and not by the favoritism of editors and proprietors--and one or two
evenings a week we all get together at my office and talk things over.
Sometimes there are as many as twenty of us, including my girls. In a
year or two, perhaps it will run to a club-room of our own. I don’t know
that I told you--I am getting into newspaper work myself. If I saw how
to combine it with my office business, I could have a place on a regular
daily staff. I’m puzzling a good deal to find some way of making the two
things go together.”
“Oh, I envy you!” broke in Christian, impulsively. “You have work to do!
You are interested in your work! You find in it not only occupation, but
the opportunities of being useful to others, and of making your life,
and other people’s lives, worth living. But think of me! I have nothing
in the wide world to do, except wait for a very strong old man to die.
And when he dies, then still I have nothing to do worth doing. Don’t
you see that it is the most miserable of existences? I am filled with
disgust for it. I cannot bear it another day. And that is what I was
going to tell you. I have decided to leave it all--and go away.”
Frances paused for a moment to scrutinize, with slightly narrowed
eyes, the excited face he turned to her. “How will going away improve
matters?” she asked him, upon reflection.
He put out his lips, and shrugged his shoulders. “At least I shall be a
free man,” he affirmed.
Unconsciously she imitated his gesture in turn: “It does not follow that
a deserter is necessarily a free man.”
He pushed and winced visibly under the words, and turned away biting his
lips. Then, the vexation clearing from his face, he wheeled again, and
regarded her with calm gravity.
“There is no one else who could say that to me and not injure me,” he
answered, simply. “But that is the characteristic of you--when you say
such a thing to me, then it becomes a thing that should have been said.
Yet perhaps it is not the final word, after all. Ask yourself what it
is that I am deserting! Consider whether I should give up or gain
something. Here in England it is possible for me to be one of two
things--the conventional person of position like all the others, or the
exceptional kind of being which Emanuel desires to make of me. I have
been at school for half a year learning what it is that society in
general expects a man in my situation to do. Now that I have learned
it, frankly it makes me sick at heart. But then I have been at another
school for a month, observing and studying what it is that Emanuel
wishes me to undertake. We have agreed that that is not to be thought
of, either. Then what am I to do?”
“But how does running away solve the difficulty?” She put the question
to him with gentle persistency.
“Ah, but, you see,” he rejoined, argumentatively, “it is not alone a
moral difficulty. There are practical questions, too. When I announce to
Emanuel that I reject his plans for my future, then I am left to myself
to be that most ridiculous of objects--a man with a great station and
no money to keep it up. That is what I must be here in England. But in
other countries, that will not be the case. There will always be enough
money for me to live like a prince upon--so long as I travel about, in
my own yacht if I like, or reside simply and happily in the beautiful
places of the earth, here and there, as the fancy possesses me. Thus I
can put to use the prestige of my title, when it is of advantage to do
so--but only in so far as it is needful at the moment--and at the
same time it does not become a burden to me in any degree. Now think
carefully of this--is it not the wisest course for me?” She seemed
not to pause for thought at all. “Oh, that depends upon how you define
wisdom,” she replied, promptly. “There is the wisdom of the serpent,
but fortunately there are many other kinds. No, I must say, you haven’t
convinced me in the least. However, you mustn’t think that is of
importance. You are under no obligation to convince me, surely!”
“Ah, but that is everything to me,” he insisted. “There are
reasons--which I wish to explain to you.”
He could not keep a new meaning out of the glance with which he enforced
this assurance. They had strolled round to Ludgate Circus, and come to a
halt on the corner, with their backs turned upon a window full of droll
phrenological charts and symbols. He consulted his watch once more. “I
breakfasted so lightly, and so early,” he said--“it is not luncheon time
quite, but that will give us a table to ourselves. You will come across
with me, will you not? There are truly important things which have not
been said--which I much wish to say.”
After a moment’s reflection she nodded her assent.