TOWARDS "THE CROSS-ROADS"
It was the beginning of the hunting season, and with the hunting season
Louis Stanistreet reappeared on the scene. He stayed at Thorneytoft as
usual. Tyson had just bought a new hunter, a remarkable animal. It fell
away suddenly in the hind-quarters; it had a neck like a giraffe and legs
like a spider; but it could jump, if not very like a horse, very like a
kangaroo. This creature struck wonder and terror into the soul of the
hunt. At the first meet of the season Stanistreet, the Master, and Sir
Peter drew up by one accord to watch the antics of Tyson and his
kangaroo.
"By Jove! where does your friend pick up his hunters?" asked the Master.
"If you ask me," said Stanistreet, "I should say he buys them by the
yard."
Sir Peter smiled. The Master stroked his mustache and meditated. There
was a malignity about Stanistreet's humor conceivable enough--if there
was any truth in history. It struck Stanistreet that his feeble jest
met with an amount of attention out of all proportion to its merits. Sir
Peter was the first to recover himself.
"Your friend may buy his horses by the yard, but he doesn't ride like a
tailor. He rides like a man. Look at him--look at him!"
This was generous of Sir Peter, considering what Tyson had said about
_his_ riding. But for all his love of gossip Sir Peter was a gentleman,
and that goose weighed heavily on his conscience. The reproof he had just
administered to Stanistreet relieved him wonderfully.
Stanistreet was at a loss to understand the old fellow's caustic tone.
Over billiards that night Tyson enlightened him.
Louis had been in a good temper all day; and his high spirits had
infected Mrs. Nevill Tyson, a fact which, you may be sure, was not set
down to her credit by those who noticed it.
"I heard your riding praised this morning, Ty," said he, beaming with
beneficence. They were alone.
"Ha!" said Tyson, "did you?"
"Rather. Binfield was asking where you picked your hunters up--got his
eye on the kangaroo, I fancy. I ventured to suggest, in my agreeable way,
that you bought them by the yard."
Tyson looked furious. Louis went on, unconscious of his doom. "Old Morley
went for me like a lunatic--said you didn't ride like a tailor, you rode
like a _man_. Queer old buffer, Morley--couldn't think what was the
matter with him."
Tyson laid down his cue and held Stanistreet with a leveling gaze.
"Look here, Stanistreet," said he, "I've stood a good deal, but if you
think I'm going to stand that, you're a greater fool than I took you for.
What the hell do you mean by telling everybody about my private affairs?"
"My dear Tyson, a man who rides to hounds regularly on a kangaroo has no
private affairs, he is, _ipso facto_, a public character." He threw back
his head and shouted his laughter. "You've built yourself an everlasting
name."
"Oh, no doubt. If Morley knows it everybody knows it. You might just as
well confide in the town-crier." He sat down and pressed his hands to his
forehead.
"This," he said bitterly, "accounts for everything."
Stanistreet stared at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What _is_ the matter
with you?"
"Nothing. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. I only ask you, so
long as you are in it, to mind your own business."
"I can't. I haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than
the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite
fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there
with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I
don't say much, Stanistreet, but I think a damned deal."
"My dear Orlando Furioso, surely a harmless jest--"
"So you think it funny, do you, to tell these people that my father was
a tailor? It wouldn't be funny if it was false; but as it happens to be
true, it's simply stupid."
"I never said your father was a tailor."
"Don't trouble yourself to lie about it. He _was_ a tailor. The
minuteness of his business only added to the enormity of his crime. He
was born in an attic on a pile of old breeches. He was a damned
dissenter--called himself a Particular Baptist. He kept a stinking
slopshop in Bishopsgate Street, and a still more stinking schism-shop in
Shoreditch."
("Why the devil shouldn't he?" murmured Louis.)
"Salvation free, gratis, for nothing, and five per cent, discount for
ready money."
Louis was amused, but profoundly uncomfortable. This particular detail of
Tyson's biography was not one of the things he knew; if it had been, he
would naturally have avoided the most distant allusion to it. As it
happened, in his ignorance he seemed to have been perpetually blundering
up against the circumstance. He went on clumsily enough--"If it was, I
didn't know it, and if I had known it, it wouldn't have interested me in
the least. _You_ interest me; you are, and always will be, unique."
"You're an awful fool, Stanistreet. By your own admission Morley is
acquainted with this _charming romance_."
"What if he is?"
"The inference is obvious. You told him."
"Good God! If I did, do you suppose that Morley or any one else would
care? Does anybody care what another fellow's father was? As a matter of
fact I neither knew nor cared. But for your own genius for autobiography
I should never have heard of it."
"That's odd, considering that you've made capital out of it ever since
I knew you. It supplied the point of all your witticisms that weren't
failures. I assure you your delicate humor was not lost on me."
"Considering that I've known you for at least twenty years, those
jokes must have worn a little--er--threadbare. I'm extremely sorry for
these--these breaches of etiquette. I shall do my best to repair them.
That's a specimen of the thing you mean, I imagine?" From sheer
nervousness Louis did what was generally the best thing to do after
any little squabble with Tyson. He laughed.
Unfortunately this time Tyson was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian
was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint;
this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud
of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of
his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an
insignificant episode in the long roll of his epic past. Now for the
first time for years it was recalled to him with a rude shock.
How real it was too! As he thought of it he was back in the stifling
little shop. Faugh! How it reeked of shoddy! Back in the whitewashed
chapel, hot with the fumes of gas and fervent humanity. He heard the
hymn sung to a rollicking tune:--
"I am so glad that my Father in heaven
Tells of His love in the book He has given.
"I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me,
I am so glad that Jesus loves me," etc.
The hateful measure rang in his ears, racking his nerves and brain. He
could feel all the agony of his fierce revolting youth. The very torment
of it had been a spur to his ambition. He swore (young Tyson was always
swearing) that he would raise himself out of all that; he would
distinguish himself at any cost. (As a matter of fact the cost was borne
by the Baptist minister.) The world (represented then by his tutor and a
few undergraduates), the world that he suspected of looking down on him,
or more intolerable still, of patronizing him, should be compelled to
admire him. And the world, being young and generous, did admire him
without any strong compulsion. At Oxford the City tailor's son scribbled,
talked, debated furiously; the excited utterance of the man of the
people, naked and unashamed, passed for the insolence of the aristocrat
of letters. He crowned himself with _kudos_. How the beggars shouted when
he got up to speak! He could hear them now. How they believed in him!
Young Tyson was a splendid fellow; he could do anything he chose--knock
you off a leading article or lead a forlorn hope. In time he began to be
rather proud of his origin; it showed up his pluck, his grit, the stuff
he was made of. He owed everything to himself.
And that last year when he let himself go altogether--there again
his origin told. He had flung himself into dissipation in the spirit
of dissent. His passions were the passions of Demos, violent and
revolutionary. Tyson the Baptist minister had despised the world,
vituperated the flesh, stamped on it and stifled it under his decent
broadcloth. If it had any rights he denied them. Therefore in the person
of his son they reasserted their claim; and young Tyson paid it honorably
and conscientiously to the full. In a year's time he knew enough of the
world and the lust of it to satisfy the corrupt affections of generations
of Baptist ministers, with the result that his university career was
suddenly, mysteriously cut short. He had made too many experiments with
life.
After that his life had been all experiments, most of them failures. But
they served to separate him forever from his place and his people, from
all the hateful humiliating past. He could still say that he owed
everything to himself.
Then his uncle's death gave him the means of realizing his supreme
ambition. By that time he had forgotten that he ever had an uncle. His
family had effaced itself. Backed by an estate and a good income, there
was no reason why its last surviving member should not be a conspicuous
social success. Well, it seemed that he was a conspicuous social failure.
He owed that to Stanistreet, curse him! curse him! His brain still
reeled, and he roused himself with difficulty from his retrospective
dream. When he spoke again it was with the conscious incisiveness of a
drunken man trying hard to control his speech.
"Would you mind telling me who you've told this story to? Lady Morley,
for one. My wife," he raised his voice in his excitement, "my wife, I
suppose, for another?"
Stanistreet had every reason for not wanting to quarrel with Tyson. He
liked a country house that he could run down to when he chose; he liked
a good mount; he liked a faultless billiard-table; and oddly enough, with
all his faults he liked Nevill Tyson. And he had a stronger motive now.
Consciously or unconsciously he felt that his friendship for Tyson was a
safeguard. A safeguard against--he hardly knew what. But the idea of Mrs.
Nevill Tyson was like fire to his dry mood. His brain flared up all in a
moment, though his tongue spoke coolly enough.
"I swear I never did anything of the sort. I haven't seen your wife
for ages--till to-night. We don't correspond. If we did"--he stopped
suddenly--"if I did that sort of thing at all Mrs. Tyson is the very last
person--"
"Oblige me by keeping her name out of it."
Tyson's voice carried far, through the door and across the passage,
penetrating to Pinker in his pantry.
"I didn't introduce it."
"All right. I'm not asking you to lie again. No doubt everybody knows the
facts by this time. I'm going to turn the lights out."
Stanistreet pulled himself together with a shrug. If any other man had
hinted to him, in the most graceful and allegorical manner, that he lied,
it would have been better for that man if he had not spoken. But he
forgave Tyson many things, and for many reasons, one of these, perhaps,
being a certain shamefaced consciousness touching Tyson's wife.
"By the way," said he, "are you going to keep this up very much longer?
It's getting rather monotonous."
Tyson turned and paused with his hand on the door-knob. He snarled,
showing his teeth like an angry cur, irritated beyond endurance.
"If you mean, am I going to take your word for that--frankly, I am not."
He flung the door open and strode out.
Stanistreet followed him.
"I think, Tyson," said he, "if I want to catch that early train
to-morrow, I'd better take my things over to 'The Cross-Roads' to-night."
"Just as you like."
So Stanistreet betook himself to "The Cross-Roads."