Maud Wrexham was sitting in her mother’s room one morning, towards the
end of July, after breakfast, telling Lady Chatham her engagements for
the day. This piece of ritual was daily and invariable, and her mother
spent the succeeding three-quarters of an hour in trying “to work things
in,” as she called it--in other words, to manage that one carriage
should drop two people in different parts of London, and call for them
both again at the hour they wanted. These manœuvres usually ended in
both parties concerned taking hansoms, after waiting a considerable time
for the carriage to pick them up, and driving home separately, while the
empty carriage, with the coachman, who was always sceptical about such
arrangements, returned home gloomily about half an hour later.
“I think I shall go to Victoria and meet Arthur,” Maud was just saying;
“he will catch the first boat from Calais, and his train gets in about
five.”
“Dear Arthur!” exclaimed Lady Chatham with effusion, “I hope he won’t be
dreadfully relaxed. Athens is so relaxing; I wish he could have stopped
at Berlin.”
Arthur Wrexham had just spent his first year at Athens, as third
Secretary to the Legation, and was coming home for two months’ leave.
“He’ll have a lot of luggage, mother,” went on Maud; “you’d far better
let me take a hansom, and then he and I can come back in one, and send
his luggage by a four-wheeler.”
Lady Chatham examined her engagement-book with avidity.
“No, Maud, it’s the easiest thing in the world. What a coincidence! I’ve
got to pick your father up at Victoria Mansions at a quarter-past five.
I will drop you at Victoria, and then go on. If we are there by ten
minutes past, it will do perfectly; the boat is sure to be late.”
“It will be rather stupid if I miss him,” said Maud.
“You’ll be in plenty of time--or if you like, I will start five minutes
earlier, and go round to see--no, I can’t do that. Then, as you say, you
can take a hansom. No, you needn’t do that. If I take the landau we can
all come back together. Five minutes for getting to Victoria Mansions,
and five minutes back. He’ll take ten minutes getting his luggage out.
How much luggage will he have?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Because we might take the lighter things--I needn’t take a footman--and
send the heavier ones home by Carter and Paterson.”
“I think it would be safer to get a cab, wouldn’t it?”
“I’ll think about it, and tell you at lunch. Dear Arthur! Well, what
else are you going to do?”
“We’re going to the Ramsdens’ dance this evening, and dining there
first.”
“Then the other carriage can take us, and if Arthur cares to go to the
dance--they didn’t know he’d be back, but I’m sure they want him to
come--Lady Ramsden told me so, if he was back by any chance--it can come
back here, and take him on again at ten. Then you and I will come back
in it, when you’ve had enough, and if Arthur wants to stop, I’m afraid
he must find his own way back. Is that all?”
“I’m lunching with the Cornishes.”
“Well, then, I’ll leave a note for you about Arthur’s luggage, as I
shan’t see you at lunch. Where do the Cornishes live?”
“In Pont Street.”
“Then it’s the most convenient thing in the world. I’m going to my
dentist at half-past twelve, and I shall be back by two. Then the
carriage can take you on at once.”
“They lunch at two, I’m afraid, mother.”
“Well, dear, you’ll only be a few minutes late. It will save you the
bother of taking a hansom, or walking.”
“Oh, never mind! I shall be out, I expect, and shall go there straight.”
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, shopping.”
“Well, then, I might drop you on my way to the dentist’s wherever you
liked. If you will be ready at twelve I will take you. Or five minutes
to twelve, if you are going out of my way.”
Maud got up.
“No, start at twelve as you intended, and if I’m in, and ready, I’ll
come with you. Don’t wait for me, mother.”
“If you’d only tell me exactly where you want to go, and when, Maud,
I’ve no doubt I could work it in.”
“I’ve got to go to Houghton and Gunn’s first.”
“Very well, then,” said her mother, triumphantly, “nothing can be
simpler. I drop you there, and go to the dentist’s. Then I send the
carriage back for you, and you do anything else you want, and come back
to the dentist’s at half-past one. Then we drive straight to Pont
Street, and I drop you again, and go home.”
Maud’s chief object at this moment, it must be confessed, was to get out
of the room. So she assented with fervour.
“That’s beautiful, mother. How clever of you to work it all in!”
Lady Chatham heaved a sigh of well-earned satisfaction. “Yes, I think
everything is provided for. Ring the bell, darling, will you? I must
send word to the stables at once.”
Lady Chatham felt that she had really deserved a painless visit to the
dentist. She was always regretting that her time was so dreadfully taken
up with little things, and that she never could do anything she really
wanted to do, though what that was is quite unknown. It is to be
suspected that in addition to her daily arrangements, she spent much
time in making plans for Maud’s future, which included far more than the
ordinary maternally matrimonial plans include. She intended, for
instance, to send her out to Athens for a few months during the winter,
where she would live with her brother, and see a little foreign life.
Foreign life, she considered, was something very mysterious, but very
broadening in its effects on the human mind. The fact that you no longer
had meat breakfast at half-past nine, and lunch at two, but _café au
lait_ at eight and _déjeûner_ at twelve or half-past, was apparently the
door to whole vistas of widening experiences. Breakfast at half-past
nine and lunch at two were parts of the organism of life, and the
substitution of other hours instead of those was a change the importance
of which could not be overlooked. She had spent six months in Rome when
she was a girl, with an uncle, who was ambassador there, and she always
looked back to that six months as having been something very
revolutionary and startling. It had made, she often said, the whole
difference to her.
To-day, however, the arrangements, owing to a distinct intervention of
Providence, who roughened the seas, and made the train late, went off
more satisfactorily than usual, and as they drove to the Ramsdens in the
evening, Lady Chatham felt that the dentist really had hurt her more
than he should have been allowed to do, and hoped that she would have a
pleasant dinner to make up for it.
The Ramsdens lived in one of the few houses in London which do not
remind one of barracks, and Lady Ramsden’s parties had the reputation,
among those who were asked, of being very smart, while those who were
not considered her a pushing woman. Four or five times a year her
dinners had a little paragraph all to themselves in the _Morning Post_,
beginning with a Royal Highness and ending with Colonels in attendance,
on the page that announced the movements of nations and the quarrels of
kings. Lady Ramsden always snipped these out, and pasted them in an
extract book. There was a certain monotony about them, but you cannot
have too much of a good thing. But this was not one of her really smart
parties; originally it was to have been, but the Highness had been
unable to come, and she had to have recourse, not only to mere
Honourables, but even a plain Mr., in the shape of Tom Carlingford.
Tom had already arrived when Lady Chatham got there, and Maud was quite
surprised to find how glad she was to see him again. Apparently, her
mission of being nice to people had been successful in this instance,
for he was evidently equally glad to see her. He took her in to dinner,
and as Tom’s custom was, began exactly where they had left off.
“I’m going out to Greece in October,” he was saying. “I’ve finished with
Cambridge.”
“I remember your telling me you were going out,” said Maud. “I’m going
too; did you know that? My brother is at the Legation there.”
“Oh, but how nice!” said Tom. “Are you going soon?”
“Well, about the beginning of December, for a month or two. You’ll see
my brother to-night. He’s coming to the dance afterwards. Have you taken
your degree? By the way, I saw that your friend Mr. Markham had got a
Fellowship. I was so pleased. I nearly wrote to congratulate him.”
“Why didn’t you quite?” asked Tom.
“Surely it was sufficiently shocking that I nearly did. Are you going to
get a Fellowship too?”
Tom grinned.
“Well, it’s not imminent.”
“Why, aren’t you ambitious? It’s a pity for a man not to be ambitious.”
“My ambitions don’t lie in those lines. Besides, I’m a fool. Every one
has told me so scores of times.”
Later on in the evening the two were sitting out in a charming little
courtyard in the centre of the house, open to the air, and walled with
banks of flowers. The place was lit up by small electric lights among
the flowers, and the air was deliciously cool and dim after the hot
glare of the ball-room. The steady hum of a London night came to them
clearly in the stillness, that noise of busy people, which never is
quiet. The place was nearly deserted, and Maud was fanning herself
lazily.
“There, do you hear it?” she said; “that’s the noise I love. I like to
know that I am in the middle of millions of people.”
Tom smiled.
“Ah! you like it too, do you?” he said. “It’s the finest thing in the
world. But I always want to get at it, to make its heart beat quicker or
slower as I wish. That’s a modest ambition, isn’t it?”
Maud stopped fanning herself, and dropped her hands into her lap.
“Yes; how is one to do it? I’m going to do it too, you know. We shall
have to send word to each other whether its heart is to go quick or
slow, else there will be trouble. I feel so dreadfully small in London.
I suppose it is good for one, but it’s very unpleasant.”
“No, it’s not good for one, except that if you know you are small, you
are already half-way to being big,” said Tom. “At any rate, one can
never be big without the consciousness of being small.”
Maud sat still for a moment, saying nothing.
“Why did you care nothing about what you did at Cambridge, then?” she
asked. “Surely you could have made a beginning there.”
“I got a third in my Tripos,” remarked Tom. “Have you ever done Greek
grammar, or Thucydides?”
“No, never; why?”
“It’s the sort of thing a parrot could be taught to do.”
“And because you are not a parrot, they couldn’t teach you. Is that it?”
Tom laughed.
“Well, you needn’t believe it unless you like, but I believe I could
have done well if I had wanted to enough. I really didn’t want to.
There’s not time for that sort of thing.”
“What did you do instead?”
“I enjoyed myself. I’ve had my holiday, and now I’m going to work.
Here’s your brother coming to look for you.”
Arthur Wrexham was a slight, delicate-looking man, who apparently
suffered from extreme languor; he was very well dressed, and had weak
blue eyes, which looked only a quarter awake. He had already roused
Tom’s wrath by confessing, in answer to certain questions, that he had
never been into any of the museums.
“There’s such a lot to do, you know,” he explained. “One has to go to
the Legation every day to see if there are any letters to be written,
and then one has to take some exercise, you know, and go out to dinner.
Then there are cigarettes to smoke.”
“Perhaps you don’t care about art?” Tom had said charitably.
“Oh dear, yes, I’m devoted to it! I mean to let all the museums burst
upon me some day.”
“They won’t burst upon you unless you go there,” Tom had replied.
Just now, Arthur was peculiarly gentle and _piano_; he dangled his hands
weakly before him, and wore an expression of appreciative languor.
“Oh, here you are!” he said. “I wish you’d come home, Maud. I think I
shall go, in any case. Do you think there’s a hansom about anywhere?”
Maud laughed.
“Poor dear, shall I go and call one for you?”
“I suppose there’s sure to be one somewhere in the street, isn’t there?
Delightful party it’s been, hasn’t it? No, I haven’t danced, but it’s so
nice to be in London again. I shall go and sit in the Park to-morrow, on
a little civilized green chair. There are no green chairs in Athens, you
know, and no parks either. It really is a barbarous place; I can’t think
why you want to go there, Maud.”
“Why don’t you take a little civilized green chair with you, Arthur,”
she said, “and put it in the garden? That would do for the park.”
“Yes, it’s so good of you to suggest that; but it wouldn’t do at all.
It’s not only the little green chair, it’s the civilization generally,
and the grey sky, and sirloins of beef one wants.”
“I thought you hated beef,” said Maud. “I’m sure I’ve heard you say that
it was barbarous food.”
“Oh yes, I know it is; but I like to know that it’s there. I don’t want
to eat it, but there always ought to be some on the sideboard. Well,
won’t you come, Maud?”
“No, I’m not coming yet.”
Tom grew exasperated.
“Can’t you find your way home alone?” he asked.
Arthur Wrexham looked at him for a moment with mild and slightly piteous
surprise.
“Oh yes, I shall be all right,” he said, “if I can only get a hansom! I
suppose there’s a man who will call a hansom for me if I give him a
shilling. Good night, Maud.”
He went very quietly away, bestowing a nod and a tired smile on Tom.
“It’s so funny that he should be my brother,” said Maud, when he was out
of hearing; “and all he wants to do is to read little French books, and
sit in the Park, and have tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. I
wonder he didn’t mention that.”
“I dare say he’ll do it in a day or two, when he gets less tired,” said
Tom; “he evidently means to begin gently.”
Maud drew on her gloves again.
“Here’s my partner coming to look for me,” she said. “I must go. Mind
you come and see us. You are in London for a time, are you not?”
“Oh yes, till the end of July, or nearly. I don’t suppose I ever spent a
whole week in London before, but father has at last consented to take a
house for a couple of months. He even came to Henley this year, though I
must say he was much bored by it, and almost perfectly silent, except
once when a lot of dabchicks came swimming round, and he looked up and
said, ‘The very dabchicks come about me unawares, making mouths at me.’
He likes sitting in the Park, too, and observing the weaknesses of the
human race.”
“He must have his hands full. Doesn’t he observe their strong points as
well?”
“No, I don’t think he does,” said Tom. “He likes them weak.”
Tom, fool though he might be, was wise enough to know that there are a
great many interesting things to see in London, and had deliberately set
himself to see them, with the result that in two or three weeks he knew
more about the town than most Englishmen, and nearly as much as most
Americans. Though he meant to specialize in sculpture, he had an
“all-round eye,” as the saying is, and a great power of reducing what he
saw to mental pictures and little dramatic vignettes, and he found food
for imagination scattered broadcast. Its extraordinary crude contrasts
struck him most, and he often went rather early to theatres or to the
opera, in order to stand for a few minutes at the street corner and
watch the upper classes going to have their emotions tickled, while the
grimy crowd round them hustled and pushed along in a never-ending
stream. On one of these occasions a sturdy beggar asked him for money,
and Tom, seized by a sudden impulse, showed him half-a-sovereign and
asked him what he would do with it if he gave it him. The man’s eyes
glistened, and he looked Tom full in the face.
“I should be drunk for a week, sir,” he said.
Tom broke into a roar of appreciative laughter, and gave it him.
The action was wholly indefensible from every point of view, but it was
thoroughly characteristic. Love of life, in any form and in any guise,
was stronger in him than the whole world beside. Anything which gave the
genuine ring of life, whether made of gold or the basest of alloys, was
worth the most valuable metals if they had no currency.
At other times he would go to the British Museum, which is quite worth a
visit, and look at the Elgin marbles till his head ached. But he usually
came away feeling rather helpless and dispirited. There was often a
large number of young men and women copying them in chalks or oils, and
Tom had sudden revulsions of feelings when he gazed at these. There was
one girl in particular, with a frizzy fringe of seaweed-coloured hair
and spectacles, who was making an admirable copy of the Olympos figure.
She was dressed in a velveteen body, rather short in the sleeves, a
badly cut skirt of green cloth, and wore very high-heeled shoes of
antique patent leather. Somehow the combination of such an artist with
such a subject confirmed the impression he had received at Cambridge
when looking at the Discobolus figure. The thing was no longer possible.
Beautiful nude youths did not now sit on lion-skins at street-corners,
any more than Queen Victoria ate Homeric meals like Agamemnon. The grand
style was obsolete. And on such occasions Tom would leave the Elgin room
with a sigh. If the world was to be conquered it must be conquered with
modern weapons of war; no amount of spears and slings would be a match
for Martini rifles, field-guns, and cordite. Spears and slings were more
beautiful, no doubt, but they were out of date. Just now that meant a
good deal to Tom.
But if the Elgin marbles were out of date, still more out of date was
Cambridge with its deliberative subjunctives. He thought with something
like horror of the dull steady life there; of the long mornings when
decorous isolation was observed throughout the college; when men sat
with dictionaries and notebooks in front of them, and discreetly
analysed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war. That was more
hopelessly obsolete than the Elgin marbles, for the latter were in the
vanguard of their times, whereas Cambridge was painfully crawling back
to times long past, and thinking throughout the tedious process that it
was in the forefront of thought and advancement. It was the classical
branches of that eminent university which seemed to him so woefully
retrograde in their tendencies--for the medical, scientific, and even
mathematical schools he felt, if not sympathy, at any rate no impatient
condolence. “And then they marched two parasangs and came to the River
Amaspis ... and after having dinner there and marching two more
parasangs, they encamped for the night.” The old sentences came back to
him, as a Wagnerian may remember bars of Donizetti or Rossini heard in
the unregenerate days.
And Markham? Markham came up to town for a few days in July, and worked
at manuscripts in the British Museum. He was collating texts of an
obscure Greek author, and explaining to a limited section of society how
certain glosses crept in. It appeared that the copyist of the thirteenth
century had taken unwarrantable liberties with the text, and that he had
also frequently copied a word into a line he was writing, either from
the preceding or the subsequent line, and this naturally led to a great
deal of unnecessary confusion. One of the most vital results of this
carelessness, as it appeared to Tom, lay in the fact that a sensible man
like Markham should be spending the best years of his life in
determining where this deplorable scribe had not taken the trouble to
copy exactly what lay before him. And as no earlier copy of the work was
extant, there was a field for the most various and lively conjectures,
the truth of which would for ever remain in pleasing uncertainty.
Markham, of course, was staying with Tom, and one evening the latter
waxed quite hot on the subject, to his father’s great amusement.
“Did I tell you of that beggar I gave half a sovereign to one night?” he
asked. “Well, I consider him to be infinitely your superior. When the
Judgment day comes, he will know much more about his fellow-men than you
ever will, and, according to all creeds, he will be in a better position
than you when the accounts are settled.”
“If you mean that to get drunk for a week is knowing about your
fellow-men,” said Markham, “I agree with you. But that sort of knowledge
doesn’t seem to me worth much.”
“Oh, Teddy, I really wish you would get drunk once or twice, or be
disreputable in some way! It would be the making of you. You are without
charity; you don’t even know what it means. You have never known what it
is to make allowances for anybody.”
“On the contrary, I am employed just now in making allowances for my
thirteenth-century copyist, whom you gird at so.”
“No, you don’t make allowances for him in the least,” said Tom; “you
note down in a cold critical way just where he goes obviously wrong. You
gloat over his mistakes because they enable you to make brilliant--I
suppose you are brilliant--guesses at what he should have written. You
don’t think of the poor old man having to copy out dull Greek iambics by
the yard, and getting very sleepy over the process. There would be some
interest in that; what you do is to rob everything of all the human
interest it ever possessed.”
Mr. Carlingford had spent his life from the age of fourteen to
fifty-eight in learning how to acquire money and in proceeding to do so,
and had existed entirely for the business house which he had founded
and raised to an important and safe position. But his work had never
been a passion to him, and at the latter age he had retired, leaving the
management of affairs in the hands of his old partner and his son, who
had a few years afterwards been also taken into the business. Mr.
Carlingford on retiring had not left his capital merely as a deposit in
the business, but remained a partner, though he took no part whatever in
the management of the affairs. In his elder partner he felt as much
confidence as it was in his nature to feel towards any one, and as,
since his retiring, his income had shown no signs of falling off, his
confidence had rapidly flowered into a total indifference to all such
concerns. His fortune, in fact, was sufficiently large to enable him to
feel a profound contempt for money, bred from familiarity with it, and
he did not put the slightest opposition in the way of Tom becoming a
sculptor or adopting any profession, except that of a clergyman, however
unremunerative.
Tom very soon got known and even discussed in a certain section of
London society. He was extremely presentable, he made himself uniformly
agreeable, except to Markham, and he had the incidental advantage of
being the heir of an exceedingly rich man. Lady Chatham in the intervals
of arranging about carriages congratulated herself on having previously
settled for Maud to go out with her brother to Athens that winter. She
even went so far as to allude to it once to her husband, who always saw
the darker side of any scheme.
“Well, my dear, I think it very rash of you to encourage their
intimacy,” he said; “Mr. Carlingford has no land, and even land is worth
nothing now.”
Lady Chatham was rather horror-struck at this very unveiled way of
stating the objection to a subject she had introduced so cautiously.
“Tom Carlingford is just as nice as he can be,” she replied, “and very
well connected, and what investments and land have to do with the
question, Chatham, I really don’t know.”
“But you were saying only the other day that you hoped Maud would marry
well.”
“I have my only daughter’s real advantage at heart, and that only,” she
replied with finality.
Lord Chatham overlooked the finality, and continued--
“Then did you only mean that you hoped she would marry a nice man, when
you said you hoped she would marry well?”
“Of course it is an advantage to marry a man who can keep her in boots
and gloves,” said Lady Chatham, stung into innocuous sarcasm.
“Oh, well, I dare say Tom Carlingford could do that, even if his
father’s business smashed altogether. Mind you send the carriage back
for me punctually, dear; I’ve got another meeting to go to after the
House, and if it isn’t ready I shall have to take a cab, and the
carriage perhaps will wait half an hour or more, and we shall be late
for dinner.”