_Wherein Egoism begins to Suspect that there is a Bottom to the Pint
Pot_
“Please, mum,” Victoria’s untidy head appeared round the edge of the
door, whispering hoarsely: “A gentleman as calls hisself Pangbutt is on
the hall mat downstairs.”
Caroline raised her head inquiringly:
“Mr. Paul Pangbutt?” she asked in frank surprise.
Victoria May Alice nodded violently:
“That’s the gent, mum--he said as you’d know his name.”
“Say I am not at home to visitors.”
“I did, mum--but he says as I was to say as he is partic’lar anxious to
see you. He called before--but he was that blimey gloomy I sent him off
for a walk--said as you wouldn’t be in for an hour--Lord ’elp me.”
Caroline hesitated.
“Wait,” she said. “Show Mr. Pangbutt upstairs, Victoria.”
Victoria May Alice dropped her dust-pan and brush with a rattle of
surprise:
“Oh!--you _will_ see him.... Bless yer, _I_ thought he’d be a gloomy
nuisance--he’s that solemn. I told him he hadn’t a charnce. He rather
calls for a sunshiny day to show him off, does Pangbutt.” She came in
and leaned forward toward Caroline: “Don’t yer hesitate to say a hint,
mum--I’d lie like Sapphira, if yer tips the wink. I was a-putting of
him off anyway--I’ve been a-hinting as you was in your bath, mum, but,
of course, if yer _want_ to see him, I’ll tell him it was all shine and
on second thoughts you ain’t a-goin’ to have one to-day.”
The girl went to the head of the stairs, rattled the tin dust-pan
against the brush handle to call the visitor’s attention down below,
and cried shrilly over the balustrade:
“Hi! mister--you can come up all right--it’s all off about the bath.”
She put her untidy head in at the door:
“He’s a-comin’ up, lidy,” she said; and, shutting the door, departed.
Caroline sighed wearily:
“I wish we could suppress that child,” she said....
The door opened and Victoria May Alice, in the gloom beyond the lamp,
cried, as a dark figure entered the room:
“The gentleman as says he’s Mr. Pangbutt, marm!”
A burst of laughter came from the group about the bed at some passing
sally from Noll.
Paul Pangbutt, blinking at the lamp-light, looked dazedly round the
room.
Caroline rose from her seat:
“Ah, Mr. Pangbutt!”
She bowed to him formally, and added airily:
“So the river of life brings us together again in strange places!”
He came to meet her haltingly:
“I particularly wished to see you--alone,” he said in a low tone and
with some embarrassment.
She bowed:
“We have drifted along such different ways,” she said coldly, “that I
could scarcely believe the little servant when she told me so.”
“I came to see if I could be of any help,” he said, almost in a whisper.
She laughed lightly:
“Help?”
Her voice rose in gay surprise.
“I heard you needed help,” he said, “nearly a month ago.”
“Thank you--no. But won’t you be seated?”
He went to the stove and gazed at it--rebuffed--perplexed.
Caroline resumed her seat:
“So you are settled in London at last!” she said. “I hear nearly a year
now.... You see you are quite a celebrity----”
A burst of laughter from the group about the bed made him start--and he
glanced suspiciously over his shoulder.
But they were oblivious of him.
“Come, Caroline,” he said hoarsely, “you needn’t wound me more than my
own miserable thoughts have been doing for these many days.”
“Then let us have no talk of help,” she said, dropping her voice also.
“Anthony has got some night-work on the papers at last. We are at the
end of the siege. Besides--how do you know I am not on the eve of
another masterpiece?” She laughed--a little sadly. “You mustn’t judge
me too closely by my gowns--they are a little out of the fashion,
beyond a doubt, but we may blossom again next spring.”
He drew a chair, a poor rickety piece of furniture, before the stove,
and sat down upon it.
She smiled as it struck her how, unconsciously, he had, even in a
troubled state of mind, taken the warmest place in the room. He sat for
some while, gazing drearily into the furnace.
She wished he would say his say, and let her get back to her work.
At last he spoke in a low voice:
“Ah, Caroline, you and Anthony are the true artists--I only a
fair-weather one.... I have always dreaded the attic. I never could put
aside discomfort.... Anthony was quite right--I am painting the most
soulless things.... They pay.”
She felt relieved. Anthony had evidently not gone with his hat in his
hand.
“Well--we do not yearn for the attic heights precisely,” she said drily.
He let the flippancy pass. He was too interested in himself to trouble
about their tastes.
“I am too successful,” he said.
She smiled:
“I am not sure it isn’t best so,” she said--“for you can help the
struggling ones to live----”
“Don’t stab me with that weapon”--he winced--“it is just exactly what I
have forgotten to do.” And he added half to himself: “Fame has been my
very God.”
Loud laughter filled the room.
Noll yawned drowsily at the far end of the attic.
“But how _do_ you tickle a trout?” he asked.
Caroline repressed a desire to laugh.
She shrugged her shoulders:
“Ah, Paul--you still worship at the old shrine--Fame, Posterity, and
all the Clap-Trap!... After all, the ages have their own intellectuals?”
“I do not think we should wholly neglect posterity,” he said largely.
He was deft in throwing the catchpenny. “We ought, if we paint a great
picture, to paint it with colours that will not decay.”
She smiled sadly, flipped over some proofs, and read:
“_All language dies, giving birth to other. Colour fades--paint
perishes, marble crumbles, the statue falls in the grass, the glowing
harmonies pass into blackness and are no more, the rains wash the
hand’s craft from the hardest stone--the cathedral, the masonry
of which, splendidly upspringing to the clouds, reaches towards
the swinging skies, crumbles at last and falls and sinks into the
gutter--is carried grain by grain in drainage of runnels to the
water-brook, or by babbling brook in rounded pebbles into the sea
of obliterate things. That literary works die, as all human effort
dies, is a part of the pathos of the unattainable--a part of the grim
tribute of Life to Death. In the life of the world, Homer is but of the
day before yesterday, and he is dead except to a few scholars; even
Shakespeare himself, who is but of yesterday, is read and known by how
few of those who utter so glibly the fragments of his wisdom! There
is no finality in literature--no end to art. The sweetest love-lyric
will one day sound scholastic, pattered by lips that, for all their
essaying, cannot taste its native tenderness--sounded in ears that
will be deaf to some subtle accent of it--heard by alien minds that
must strain by grammar and rule of thumb to catch its meaning, which
the very shepherds of its living day could grasp at its mere uttering.
But noble work, even though it pass away, gives birth to nobler, as
the heroic act ceases at the breathing of a breath, yet lives in the
remembering; and we should be content indeed to enrich and strengthen
the spirit of our age._”
He sat for awhile, after her voice had ceased; and, with puckered
brows, stared at the light:
“I have worked only for Fame,” he said. “I have shut out the
world--turned a deaf ear to its pain and cry--toiled and striven for
Fame alone. And I have won it.”
“Then you have found a pretty dry biscuit to feed your heart upon,” she
said.
He nodded:
“I have awaked to find myself alone.”
There was laughing applause by the bed.
Caroline smiled sadly:
“So you have been a little lonely, eh, Paul?”
“I am finding myself more and more alone.”
There was another gust of laughter from the group about the bed.
Pangbutt looked round uneasily.
The sphinx smile came to Caroline’s lips; she saw his uneasiness.
“Paul,” she said--“there are too many ghosts in your house.”
“Ghosts?” he asked moodily. He nodded after awhile:
“Perhaps there _are_ ghosts,” he said bitterly.
She leaned forward:
“Yes, Paul--when the twilight comes, and the day’s work is set aside,
all the colours turn to drab--and the ghosts of dead friendships and
dead follies come out and walk.”
He uttered a low bitter laugh:
“And yet there are they that are jealous because I am famous.”
Laughter burst into the room.
Pangbutt moved uneasily:
“How oddly those men laugh!” he said.
“You are grown suspicious, Paul--they are not even thinking of us....
Every nudge at the elbow is not Envy.”
Pangbutt sighed, and turned his eyes inwards again towards the man who
interested him most:
“I begin to think,” said he, “that I have been living in a fools’
paradise.”
Caroline’s eyes hardened:
“There are worse things than a fools’ paradise,” she said. “The man
who lives for himself alone may awake one day to find himself in a
mad-house--one with all the other ghosts that flit about his prison--a
shadow amongst shadows, seeking shadows.”
“A shadow?”
She nodded:
“A shadow, Paul.... There is no woman in your life--no child--no care
but for self. What does a childless, mateless man know of life? He has
not taken up its most initial gifts. He avoids its responsibilities,
its risks, its pains, its debt to God and man. Why should he expect, or
even hope for, the joys of life? Who can know real delight who shirks
the winning--or who shall find happiness that shrinks from sorrows?”
He shrugged his shoulders impatiently:
“Why should I become a part of the crowd?” he asked with contempt.
“You cannot turn your back on your fellows--unless you are to grow an
orchard of dead-sea apples,” she said.
He sat silent for awhile.
He gazed perplexedly at his ambitions:
“I have made a career--have won its prizes. Until to-night I considered
myself an object of envy.... I _am_ an object of envy.”
“Tush!” she said. “Better be a microbe than a loveless man.”
She laughed--but at the sight of his wrecked self-esteem falling about
his wretched hunched shoulders the laughter left her eyes.
She leaned forward:
“Listen,” she said.... “As I sat here some days ago, I could have
shrieked with terror--lest I should lose my boy. But I would rather go
mad with such fear than never have known the possibility of it--than
be as you are.... And for what? What is this Fame? Who gives it? Who
are these demi-gods who award it?... They don’t even know their own
minds for a generation--sometimes not for a year.... Supposing this
Fame, then, to which you are giving your life, be _nothing_ at all!”
She laughed sadly. “But we are getting quite serious,” she said; and
rising to her feet she put her hand on his stooped shoulders: “Paul,”
she said--“you are in love with a sad flirt--I should be ungallant, and
break off the engagement. A woman could treat you no worse.”
Paul rose, realizing his dismissal:
“Ah, well, Caroline, old friend,” said he--“it is very late--I must
be going.... You make me think of the old days when you kept us all
in order in Paris.... Good-night! It is so long since anybody took
sufficient interest in me to rate me.... Good-night!”
He moved towards the door, saying as he went:
“I must go and sit with my ghosts.... They never scold me--are never
angry with me, beyond pulling an ugly face now and again--only they are
so infernally dull.”
She saw him to the door:
“Good-night, Paul!” she said--and added, laughing: “Get you a wife--and
learn to play with children.”
She shut the door and went back to her task.
“Heigho! the man has quite forgiven himself for a life full of
meannesses,” she yawned.
She sat down wearily in her chair by the stove, and as she got out her
proofs to correct for the press, she sighed:
“Thank heaven, the last page!... Heigho! I am weary....”
She sank back in her chair; and as her eyes closed, her hand upon the
last corrected page, she fell fast asleep.
When Caroline awoke in the greying dawn, the small Betty was sitting in
a chair near the boy’s bed, solemnly reading by the guttering candle.
The child had set a kettle to boil; and tea-cups and an old brown
teapot of the kind that is called toby shone invitingly on the little
table whereon the candle feebly struggled against the cold light of the
coming day.
Caroline roused, and, walking to the child, she stroked the dainty
little head.
Betty rose, fetched the kettle that purred on the stove, and filled the
teapot; and, when she had let it stand for a spell, she drew off a cup
of tea.
She looked round.
Caroline was kneeling by the bed of the sleeping boy, her head buried
in her arms.
Betty slipped quietly from the room.