From _The Atlantic Monthly_.
I
Havelock the Dane settled himself back in his chair and set his feet
firmly on the oaken table. Chantry let him do it, though some
imperceptible inch of his body winced. For the oak of it was neither
fumed nor golden; it was English to its ancient core, and the table had
served in the refectory of monks before Henry VIII decided that monks
shocked him. Naturally Chantry did not want his friends' boots havocking
upon it. But more important than to possess the table was to possess it
nonchalantly. He let the big man dig his heel in. Any man but Havelock
the Dane would have known better. But Havelock did as he pleased, and
you either gave him up or bore it. Chantry did not want to give him up.
Chantry was a feminist; a bit of an æsthete but canny at affairs;
good-looking, and temperate, and less hipped on the matter of sex than
feminist gentlemen are wont to be. That is to say, while he vaguely
wanted _l'homme moyen sensuel_ to mend his ways, he did not expect him
to change fundamentally. He rather thought the women would manage all
that when they got the vote. You see, he was not a socialist: only a
feminist.
Havelock the Dane, on the other hand, was by no means a feminist, but
was a socialist. What probably brought the two men together--apart from
their common likableness--was that each, in his way, refused to "go the
whole hog." They sometimes threshed the thing out together, unable to
decide on a programme, but always united at last in their agreement that
things were wrong. Havelock trusted Labor, and Chantry trusted Woman;
the point was that neither trusted men like themselves, with a little
money and an inherited code of honor. Havelock wanted his money taken
away from him; Chantry desired his code to be trampled on by innumerable
feminine feet. But each was rather helpless, for both expected these
things to be done for them.
Except for this tie of ineffectuality, they had nothing special in
common. Havelock's life had been adventurous in the good old-fashioned
sense: the bars down and a deal of wandering. Chantry had sown so many
crops of intellectual wild oats that even the people who came for
subscriptions might be forgiven for thinking him a mental libertine,
good for subscriptions and not much else. Between them, they boxed the
compass about once a week. Havelock had more of what is known as
"personality" than Chantry; Chantry more of what is known as "culture."
They dovetailed, on the whole, not badly.
Havelock, this afternoon, was full of a story. Chantry wanted to listen,
though he knew that he could have listened better if Havelock's heel had
not been quite so ponderous on the sæcular oak. He took refuge in a
cosmic point of view. That was the only point of view from which
Havelock (it was, by the way, his physical type only that had caused him
to be nicknamed the Dane: his ancestors had come over from England in
great discomfort two centuries since), in his blonde hugeness, became
negligible. You had to climb very high to see him small.
"You never did the man justice," Havelock was saying.
"Justice be hanged!" replied Chantry.
"Quite so: the feminist slogan."
"A socialist can't afford to throw stones."
The retorts were spoken sharply, on both sides. Then both men laughed.
They had too often had it out seriously to mind; these little insults
were mere convention.
"Get at your story," resumed Chantry. "I suppose there's a woman in it:
a nasty cat invented by your own prejudices. There usually is."
"Never a woman at all. If there were, I shouldn't be asking for your
opinion. My opinion, of course, is merely the rational one. I don't
side-step the truth because a little drama gets in. I am appealing to
you because you are the average man who hasn't seen the light. I
honestly want to know what you think. There's a reason."
"What's the reason?"
"I'll tell you that later. Now, I'll tell you the story." Havelock
screwed his tawny eyebrows together for a moment before plunging in.
"Humph!" he ejaculated at last. "Much good anybody is in a case like
this--What did you say you thought of Ferguson?"
"I didn't think anything of Ferguson--except that he had a big brain for
biology. He was a loss."
"No personal opinion?"
"I never like people who think so well of themselves as all that."
"No opinion about his death?"
"Accidental, as they said, I suppose."
"Oh, 'they said'! It was suicide, I tell you."
"Suicide? Really?" Chantry's brown eyes lighted for an instant. "Oh,
poor chap; I'm sorry."
It did not occur to him immediately to ask how Havelock knew. He trusted
a plain statement from Havelock.
"I'm not. Or--yes, I am. I hate to have a man inconsistent."
"It's inconsistent for any one to kill himself. But it's frequently
done."
Havelock, hemming and hawing like this, was more nearly a bore than
Chantry had ever known him.
"Not for Ferguson."
"Oh, well, never mind Ferguson," Chantry yawned. "Tell me some anecdote
out of your tapestried past."
"I won't."
Havelock dug his heel in harder. Chantry all but told him to take his
feet down, but stopped himself just in time.
"Well, go on, then," he said, "but it doesn't sound interesting. I hate
all tales of suicide. And there isn't even a woman in it," he sighed
maliciously.
"Oh, if it comes to that, there is."
"But you said--"
"Not in it exactly, unless you go in for _post hoc, propter hoc_."
"Oh, drive on." Chantry was pettish.
But at that point Havelock the Dane removed his feet from the refectory
table. He will probably never know why Chantry, just then, began to be
amiable.
"Excuse me, Havelock. Of course, whatever drove a man like Ferguson to
suicide is interesting. And I may say he managed it awfully well. Not a
hint, anywhere."
"Well, a scientist ought to get something out of it for himself.
Ferguson certainly knew how. Can't you imagine him sitting up there,
cocking his hair" (an odd phrase, but Chantry understood), "and deciding
just how to circumvent the coroner? I can."
"Ferguson hadn't much imagination."
"A coroner doesn't take imagination. He takes a little hard, expert
knowledge."
"I dare say." But Chantry's mind was wandering through other defiles.
"Odd, that he should have snatched his life out of the very jaws of
what-do-you-call-it, once, only to give it up at last, politely, of his
own volition."
"You may well say it." Havelock spoke with more earnestness than he had
done. "If you're not a socialist when I get through with you, Chantry,
my boy--"
"Lord, Lord! don't tell me your beastly socialism is mixed up with it
all! I never took to Ferguson, but he was no syndicalist. In life _or_
in death, I'd swear to that."
"Ah, no. If he had been! But all I mean is that, in a properly regulated
state, Ferguson's tragedy would not have occurred."
"So it was a tragedy?"
"He was a loss to the state, God knows."
Had they been speaking of anything less dignified than death and genius,
Havelock might have sounded a little austere and silly. As it
was--Chantry bit back, and swallowed, his censure.
"That's why I want to know what you think," went on Havelock,
irrelevantly. "Whether your damned code of honor is worth Ferguson."
"It's not my damned code any more than yours," broke in Chantry.
"Yes, it is. Or, at least, we break it down at different
points--theoretically. Actually, we walk all round it every day to be
sure it's intact. Let's be honest."
"Honest as you like, if you'll only come to the point. Whew, but it's
hot! Let's have a gin-fizz."
"You aren't serious."
Havelock seemed to try to lash himself into a rage. But he was so big
that he could never have got all of himself into a rage at once. You
felt that only part of him was angry--his toes, perhaps, or his
complexion.
Chantry rang for ice and lemon, and took gin, sugar, and a siphon out of
a carved cabinet.
"Go slow," he said. He himself was going very slow, with a beautiful
crystal decanter which he set lovingly on the oaken table. "Go slow," he
repeated, more easily, when he had set it down. "I can think just as
well with a gin-fizz as without one. And I didn't know Ferguson well;
and I didn't like him at all. I read his books, and I admired him. But
he looked like the devil--_the_ devil, you'll notice, not _a_ devil.
With a dash of Charles I by Van Dyck. The one standing by a horse. As
you say, he cocked his hair. It went into little horns, above each
eyebrow. I'm sorry he's lost to the world, but it doesn't get me. He
may have been a saint, for all I know; but there you are--I never cared
particularly to know. I am serious. Only, somehow, it doesn't touch me."
And he proceeded to make use of crushed ice and lemon juice.
"Oh, blow all that," said Havelock the Dane finally, over the top of his
glass. "I'm going to tell you, anyhow. Only I wish you would forget your
prejudices. I want an opinion."
"Go on."
Chantry made himself comfortable.