Some ten years later found Leonard Greenleaf once more--but this time
with only a brougham and a footman to meet him--on his way to stay in
a country house. He had been left penniless by his attempts to start
co-operative workshops: and overwork and worry had made him far too weak
to be a tolerable artisan; so, after having given up his pottery, those
long years ago, because it ministered exclusively to rich men's luxury,
he had been obliged to swallow the bitterness of perfecting rich men's
dwellings in the capacity of Messrs. Boyce & Co.'s chief decorator; and
now he was bent upon one of these hated errands.
Time, and the experience of many failures, had indeed perplexed poor
Greenleaf's socialistic schemes a little, and had left him doubtful
how to hasten the millennium, except by the slow methods of preaching
morality and thrift; but time had rather exasperated his hatred of the
idleness and selfishness of the privileged classes, to whose luxury
he now found himself a minister. And, as he looked out of his window
while dressing for dinner (those evening clothes, necessary for such
occasions, had become a badge of servitude in his eyes), he felt that
old indignation arise with unaccountable strength, and choke him with
his own silence. It was a long, low house, the lawn spread, with
scarcely any fall, down to the river brink; a wide band of green, then a
wide band of shimmering, undecided blue and grey, reflecting the coppery
clouds and purple banks of loose-strife, and then beyond and higher up
in the picture, flat meadows, whose surface was beginning to be veiled
in mist, and whose boundary elms were growing flat and unsubstantial,
like painted things. There were birds twittering, and leaves rustling:
a great sense of peacefulness, for the family and guests were doubtless
within doors busy dressing. Suddenly, there was a plash of oars, and a
peal of laughter; and, after a minute, two men and a woman came hurrying
up the green lawn, against whose darkening slopes their white clothes
made spots of unearthly whiteness in the twilight. They were noisy, and
Greenleaf hated their laughter; but suddenly the lady stopped short a
moment, and said to her companions in a tone of boredom and irritation:
"Oh, shut up; can't you let one look about and listen to things once in
a way?"
There was more laughter, and they all disappeared indoors. Greenleaf
leaned upon his window, wondering where he had heard that voice
before--that voice, or rather one different, but yet very like it.
Downstairs, after a few civil speeches about the pleasure of having the
assistance of so great an artistic authority, and sundry contradictory
suggestions about styles of furniture and architecture, Greenleaf's host
and hostess requested him to join in a little game devised for the
removal of precedence in the arrangement of places at table. The game,
which had been suggested that very moment by one of the various tall,
blond and moustached youths hanging about the drawing-room, consisted
in hiding all the men behind a door curtain, whence projected, as sole
clue to their identity, their more or less tell-tale feet, by which the
ladies were to choose their partners. The feet, so Greenleaf said to
himself, were singularly without identity; he saw in his mind's eye
the row of projecting, pointed-toed, shining pumps, cut low upon the
fantastic assortment of striped, speckled, and otherwise enlivened silk
stockings. Among them all there could only be a single pair betraying
the nature of their owner, and it was his. They said, or would say, in
the mute but expressive language of their square-toedness (Greenleaf
felt as if they might have elastic sides even, although his democratic
views had always stopped short before that), that their owner was the
curate, the tutor, the house-decorator, in fine, the interloper. He
wondered whether, as good nature to himself and consideration for the
other guests must prompt, those feet would be immediately selected
by the mistress of the house, or whether they would be left there
unclaimed, when all the others had marched cheerfully off.
But his suspense was quickly converted into another feeling, when among
the laughter and exclamations provoked by the performance, a voice came
from beyond the curtain, saying slowly: "I think I'll have this pair."
The voice was the same he had heard from the lawn, the same he had heard
years ago in the British Museum, and on the banks of the Tweed--the same
which once or twice since, but at ever-increasing intervals, he had
tried in vain to recall to his mind's hearing. The voice--but grown
deeper, more deliberate and uniformly weary--of Val Flodden.
Greenleaf heard vaguely the introductory interchange of names performed
by his hostess; and felt in his back the well-bred smile of amusement
of the couples still behind, as the lady took his unprepared arm and
walked him off in the helter-skelter move to the dining-room; and it
was as in a dream that he heard his name pronounced, with the added
information, on the part of his companion, that it was a long time since
they had last met.
"Yes," answered Greenleaf, as the servant gently pushed him and his
chair nearer the table; "it must be quite a lot of years ago. I have
come here," he added, he scarce knew why--but with a vague sense of
protest and self-defence--"about doing up the house."
"Yes, to be sure--it is all going to be overhauled and made beautiful
and inappropriate," replied the lady, with a faint intonation of
insolence, Greenleaf thought, in her bored voice.
"It is not always easy, is it," rejoined Greenleaf, "to make things
appropriate?"
"And beautiful? I suppose not. We aren't any of us very appropriate to a
river-bank, with cows lowing and scythes being whetted and all that sort
of thing, when one comes to think of it."
"Oh, I do think cows are such interesting creatures--don't you?" put in
the charming voice of a charming, charmingly dressed, innocent looking
woman opposite, who was evidently the accredited fool of the party.
"Sir Robert took us to see a lot of his--all over the dairies, you
know--this afternoon, while you were punting."
Another lady, also very charming and charmingly dressed, but neither
innocent nor foolish, made some comment on this speech to the man next
to her; he said something in his turn, there was a general suppressed
laugh, and the innocent looking lady laughed too; but protesting they
oughtn't to say such things.
Greenleaf's mind, little accustomed to the charms of innuendoes
and slippery allusions, had not followed the intricacies of the
conversation. An astonishing girl, beautiful with the beauty of a
well-bred horse, sat next to him, and tried to perplex him with sundry
questions which she knew he could not follow; but she speedily found
there was no rise to be got out of him, and bestowed elsewhere her
remarks, racy in more senses than one. So Greenleaf sat silent, looking
vaguely at the pools of light beneath the candle-shades, in which the
rose petals strewn about, the roses lying loosely, took warm old ivory
tints, and the silver--the fantastic confusion of chased salt-cellars
and menu-holders and spoons and indescribable objects--flashed blue
and lilac on its smooth or chiselled surfaces. From the table the
concentrated, shaded light led upwards to the opal necklace of the lady
opposite, the blue of the opals changing, with the movement of her head,
to green, burning and flickering into fiery sparks; then Greenleaf
noticed, sometimes modelled into roundness and sometimes blurred into
flatness in the shadow, the black sleeves of the men, the arms of the
women, ivory like the rose petals where they advanced beneath the
candle-shades; and behind, to the back of the shimmer of the light
stuffs and the glare of white shirt-fronts, the big footmen, vague,
shadowy, moving about. A man opposite, with babyish eyes and complexion,
was telling some story about walking from a punt into the water, which
raised the wrath of the girl near Greenleaf; others added further
details, which she laughingly tried to deny; there was something about
having fastened her garter with a diamond star, and the river having to
be dragged for it. Another man, gaunt and languid, said something about
not hiding old damask under rose-leaves; but being unnoticed by his
hostess, went on about "Parsifal" to his neighbour, the lady interested
in cows. There were also allusions to the other Cowes, the place, and
to yachting; and a great many to various kinds of sport and to gambling
and losing money; indeed, it was marvellous how much money was lost and
bankruptcy sustained (technically called _getting broke_).
The men were mostly more good-looking than not; the women, it seemed
to Greenleaf, beautiful enough, each of them, to reward a good month's
search. There was a smell, cool and white and acute, of gardenias, from
the buttonholes, and a warmer, vaguer one of rose petals; the mixture of
black coats and indescribable coloured silk, and of bare arms and necks,
the alternations of concentrated light and vague shadow, the occasional
glint and glimmer of stones, particularly that warm ivory of roses among
the silver, struck Greenleaf, long unaccustomed to even much slighter
luxury, as extraordinarily beautiful, like some Tadema picture of Roman
orgies. And the more beautiful it seemed to him, with its intentional,
elaborate beauty, the more did it make him gnash his teeth with the
sense of its wickedness, and force him, for his own conscience' sake, to
conjure up other pictures: of grimy, gaslit London streets, and battered
crowds round barrows of cheap, half-spoilt food.
The lady who had once been called Val Flodden, and whose name--and he
fancied he had heard it before--was now Mrs. Hermann Struwe, addressed
him with the necessary politeness, and asked him one or two questions
about his work and so forth, in a conventional, bored tone. But,
although the knowledge that this was his old acquaintance, and the
recognition, every now and then, of the fact, put his feelings into a
superficial flutter, Greenleaf's mind kept revolving the fact that this
woman was really quite a stranger to him; and the apparently somewhat
contradictory fact that this was what, after all, he had known she would
end in. He noted that among these beautiful and self-satisfied women,
with their occasional cleverness and frequent unseemliness of word and
allusion, the former Val Flodden was in a way conspicuous, not because
she was better looking, but because she was more weary, more reckless,
because one somehow expected her to do more, for good or bad, than the
others.
"I don't see exactly which of the party could have reported the case,"
said the woman with the opals, "at least, the crucifix could scarcely
have done so ... well, well."
There was a great deal of laughter, as the hostess gave the signal
for rising; but over it and the rustle and crackle of the ladies'
frocks, the voice of Mrs. Hermann Struwe was heard to say in languid,
contemptuous tone: "I think your story is a little bit beastly, my dear
Algy."
Fortunately for Greenleaf, the men did not stay long at table, as
smoking was equally allowed all over the house and in the ladies'
presence. For Greenleaf, whose conversation with other men had for years
turned only on politics, philosophy, or business, was imbued, much as a
woman might have been, with a foregone conviction that as soon as idle
men were left to themselves they began to discuss womankind. And there
was at the table one man in particular, a long, black, nervous man, with
a smiling, jerky mouth, an odd sample of Jewry acclimatised in England,
a horrid, half-handsome man, with extraordinarily bland manners and
an extraordinarily hard expression, obstinate and mocking, about whom
Greenleaf felt that he positively could not sit out any of _his_
conversation on women, and, of course, _his_ conversation _would_ turn
on women; partly, perhaps, because the fellow had been introduced as Mr.
Hermann Struwe.
Her husband--_that_ was her husband! Greenleaf kept repeating to
himself, as he answered as best he could his host's remarks about
Elizabethan as against Queen Anne. It was only now when he thought of
her in connection with this man that Greenleaf realised that he was
really a little upset by this meeting with his old acquaintance. And
the thought went on and on, round and round, in his head, when he had
followed the first stragglers who went to smoke their cigarettes with
the ladies, and answered the interrogations of the aesthetic man who had
talked about old damask and Wagner. The man in question, delighted to
lay hold of so great an authority as Greenleaf, had also noticed that
Greenleaf had known Mrs. Hermann Struwe at some former period. He had
evidently been snubbed a little by the lady, and partly from a desire to
hear her artistic capacities pooh-poohed by a professional (since every
amateur imagines himself the only tolerable one), and partly from a
natural taste for knowing what did not concern him, he had set very
artfully to pump poor Greenleaf, who, at best, was no match for a wily
man of the world.
"Miss Flodden had a good deal of talent--quite a remarkable talent--as a
draughtsman, had she only studied seriously," he answered emphatically,
seeing only that the fellow wished for some quotable piece of running
down. "It is, in fact, a pity"--but he stopped. He was really not
thinking of that. The long drawing-room opened with all its windows on
to the lawn, and you could see, at the bottom of that, the outlines of
trees and boats in the moonlight, and Chinese lanterns hanging about the
flotilla of moored punts and canoes and skiffs, to which some of the
party had gone down, revealing themselves with occasional splashings,
thrummings on the banjo, and little cries and peals of laughter. Nearer
the house a couple was walking up and down on the grass, the light of
the drawing-room lamps catching their faces with an odd, yellow glow
every now and then, and making the woman's white frock shimmer like
silver against the branches of the big cedars. "It appears Lady Lilly
told her mother she was going to try on a frock, but somehow on the way
there she met Morton's coach, so she thought she'd get on to it and have
some change of air and she changed the air so often that by the evening
she had contrived to win sixty pounds at Sandown," said one of the
promenading couples, pausing in the stream of light from the window.
"Oh, bless your soul, she doesn't mind it's being told; she thinks it
an awful joke, and so it was."
That man--that Val Flodden should have married that man--Greenleaf kept
repeating to himself, and the recollection of her words about never
getting married, about a world where there would be no diamonds and no
stepping horses, and also, as she expressed it, no marrying and giving
in marriage, filled Greenleaf's mind as with some bitter, heady dram.
And he had thought of her as a sort of unapproachable proud amazon, or
Diana of Hippolytus, incapable of any feeling save indignation against
injustice and pity for weak and gentle things. Oh Lord, oh Lord! It was
horrible, horrible, and at the same time laughable. And just that man,
too--that narrow, obstinate looking creature with the brain and the
heart (Greenleaf knew it for a certainty) of a barn-door cock! And yet,
was he any worse than the others, the others who, perhaps, had a little
more brains and a little more heart, and who all the same lived only to
waste the work of the poor, to make debts, to gamble, to ruin women, and
to fill the world with filthy talk and disbelief in better things? Was
he worse than all the other manly, well-mannered, accomplished, futile,
or mischievous creatures? Was he worse than _she_?
"Ah, well, of course; you have known her so much more than I have,"
said the aesthetic man, puffing at his cigarette, opposite to Greenleaf.
"But now, I should have thought there would have always been something
lacking in anything that woman would do. A certain--I don't know what
to call it--but, in short, proper mental balance and steadiness. I
consider, that for real artistic quality, it is necessary that one
should possess some sort of seriousness, of consistency of character--of
course you know her so much better, Mr. Greenleaf--but now I can't
understand a really artistic woman--after refusing half a dozen other
fellows who were at least gentlemen, suddenly choosing a tubbed Jew like
that--and apparently not seeing that he is only a tubbed Jew," the
aesthetic man stopped, disappointed in not getting a rise from Greenleaf,
but Greenleaf was scarcely listening.
A man had sat down to the piano and was singing, on the whole, rather
well. Some of the people were standing by him, others were in little
groups, men and women nearly all smoking equally, scattered about the
big white room with the delicate blue china, and the big stacks of pale
pink begonias. Mrs. Hermann Struwe was standing near the piano, leaning
against the long, open window, the principal figure in a group of two
other women and a man. In her fanciful, straight-hanging dress of
misty-coloured crape, her hair, elaborately and tightly dressed, making
her small head even smaller, and her strong, slender neck, with the
black pearls around it, drawn up like a peacock's, she struck Greenleaf
as much more beautiful than before, and even much taller; but there
had been a gentleness, a something timid and winning, in her former
occasional little stoop, which was now quite gone. She looked young, but
young in quite another way; she was now very thin, and her cheeks were
hollowed very perceptibly.
The bland, blurred man at the piano was singing with all his might,
and with considerable voice and skill; but the music, of his own
composition, was indecorously passionate as he sang it, at least taken
in connection with the words, culled from some decadent French poet, and
which few people would have deliberately read out aloud. The innocent
lady who had talked about cows even made some faint objection, to
which the singer answered much surprised, by blandly pointing out the
passionate charm of the words, and assuring her that she did not know
what real feeling was. And when he had finished that song, and begun
another, one of the two other women actually moved away, while the
other buried her head in a volume of _Punch_; there was a little murmur,
"Well, I think he is going a little too far." But Mrs. Hermann Struwe
never moved.
"I can't make out that woman," remarked Greenleaf's new acquaintance,
the aesthetic man; "she's usually by ways of being prudish, and has a
way of shutting up poor Chatty when he gets into this strain. Only
yesterday, she told him his song was beastly, and it wasn't half as
bad as this one. I expect she's doing it from cussedness, because her
husband was bored at her being too particular yesterday; because, of
course, he'll be bored by her not being particular enough to-day."
Greenleaf walked up to a picture, and thence slunk off to the door. As
he was leaving the room, he looked back at the former Miss Flodden: she
was still standing near the piano, listening composedly, but he thought
that her thin face bore an expression of defiance.
He was so excited that he opened his room door too quickly to give
effect to a practical joke, consisting of a can of water balancing on
its angle as it stood ajar, and intended to tumble on his head while
he was passing in; a delicate jest which the girl who had sat next to
him--she of the punt, diamond garter and coach adventures--occasionally
practised on the new inmates of what she technically called "houses."