to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the
inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the
Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no
exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in
the morning."
Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack
was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed
before the _London News_ began to print off. The dissolution would only
cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare
Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.
"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and
we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim
to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no
good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father
telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer
word."
"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing
reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you?
Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam'
sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny
criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."
Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared
plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was
ever one who could not create.
"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not
quite what I hoped, though."
Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by
himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at
Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had
contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic
forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was
bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in
readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married,
but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric
enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought
with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the
instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained
a day dream.
"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked
Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in
shirt and trousers.
"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every
room.... And I loathe strangers as much as you do."
Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal
terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare
excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the
Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his
apprenticeship to the _London News_, he had won the friendship of Martin
Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of
five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he
succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a
careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When
Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not
yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget
what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and
whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is--and dialogue--and
technique--and characterization. You could write a _successful_ play
to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two.
You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of
bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want
to kill theatricality--which is what I've tried to do all my life--you
must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of
a lot, if I had time.... When I'm gone, fire in your application for my
berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough
margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels.
Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man
finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea
on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a
sketch-book with society smatterers alone."
Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the
faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few
hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had
come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation.
They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own.
So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of
poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists--and all who came humbly to her
for a chance of meeting them--she shut her eyes to her husband's
excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new
literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly
shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no
longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with
Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers"
wanted him to write up a charity _matinée_ or the amateur performance of
a Restoration comedy.
Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van,
Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street
and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were
occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.
"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and
brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't
speak to a woman from one year's end to another----"
"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his
case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.
"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking
with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.
"Some people don't know when they're well off. I _can't_ dance and I've
nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an
answer I can never make out. I suppose you _like_ women, Eric. Every
time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or
pearls or eyes--honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm
beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady
Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on
them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of
bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not
ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two,
with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of
spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day.... However, they're
all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence
and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"
He ran down the stairs and hailed a taxi at the top of Middle Temple
Lane. Since the downfall of Draycott, the Phoenix Club dinners had lost
their old strict form and were no longer confined to members of the
club. As Jack entered the hall, Valentine Arden, a satirical
consumptive, was divesting himself of a violet-lined cloak, smoothing
his long straight hair back from his forehead, patting the tie that
wound twice round his collar and adjusting the straps of his trousers
under his insteps. There were other friends of a younger generation whom
Loring had acquired in his easy-going progress, but the older members
were meagrely represented.
The first arrivals were already in the library, exchanging fragmentary
news of the absentees, when their host appeared with a preoccupied frown
and a jejune apology for his lateness.
"Where's Pentyre?" he asked, as he looked round the room. "Here, my
friend, you'll get yourself into hot water, if you give any more parties
like your last one."
"What's the row?" asked Pentyre in surprise.
"Well, I won't mention names," Loring answered, "but one of your guests
has come to grief as the result of your last little gathering at
Croxton. I don't say that it's _your_ fault," he added, "except that you
ought to exercise more general control in your own house. There was a
certain amount of gambling, wasn't there? Some fairly big sums of money
changed hands? One man lost who couldn't afford to lose, I believe. It
may have been absence of mind or it may have been the only way out of
the difficulty, but the man in question signed his father's name on a
cheque instead of his own. The son is now on his way to one of those
'thoughtful islands where warrants never come.' D'you mean this is all
news to you?"
Pentyre tugged at his moustache and shook his head in wide-eyed wonder.
The only sign of discord that he could remember had occurred between his
mother and Loring's own cousin, Barbara Neave. On the first night she
had stayed up after Lady Pentyre had shepherded the women of the party
to bed. In the morning there had been a gentle reprimand, but Lady
Barbara ignored it and persisted in staying up as long as any one would
stay up with her. She or one of the men--Pentyre could not remember--had
started poker, which they played until two or three o'clock in the
morning.
"I've never heard a word of it," he said. Less than a year had passed
since he succeeded to his father's title and the ownership of Croxton
Hall. The social life of the county had been brightened; but there had
been one or two regrettable mishaps, and Loring always seemed to hear of
them. "How did you get hold of the story?" he asked with a touch of
bluster.
"From the man's father in the first place; then from my cousin Barbara.
We're supposed to be responsible for her, and I tackled her about it.
She won nearly five hundred pounds from this wretched boy. Of course, I
made her disgorge it; but the fellow may be ruined for life. I told her
so pretty plainly, and she seemed to take it as an enormous compliment."
"Who was the man?" asked Pentyre.
"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer;
they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now.
Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house.... That
girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on
his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in
charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different
schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning _séance_ in her bedroom
after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do
with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's
have some dinner and forget all about her."
The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the
dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family
councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into
factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on
earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved
himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just
as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has,--and they'll
discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if
Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least
sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a
dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one
else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen,
you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes
were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to
his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life
with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and
banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused
and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it
was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.
"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to
dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own
cousin in order."
"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and
Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the
life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland,
Erckmann----"
"You're so infernally narrow-minded."
"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who
try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody
else."
A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work,
and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies
of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded
unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there
had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a
tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not
know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential
and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and
the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an
ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the
world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class,
excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an
artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir
Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with
the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and
reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs.
Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.
In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation.
Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to
subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced
to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club,
because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his
too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a
Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had
excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the
battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were
not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring
their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique
of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of
their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be
fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common
ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes,
and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.
"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they _are_
alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."
Arden assumed non-moral detachment and explained that the novelist, like
the sanitary inspector, entered all houses with professional
impartiality.
"They've no sense of responsibility and not much feeling for decency. I
don't want to make too much of this business," said Loring, as acrimony
slipped out of control and threatened the peace of the dinner. "But I
was thoroughly stirred up over that wretched boy and I felt it was time
to make a stand."
"What are you going to do?" demanded Pentyre.
"Well, I've been knocking about in London for half a dozen years,
watching these gentry, and I can see that _we're_ not assimilating
_them_. The egregious Pennington, that young swine Webster----"
"Both of whom I've met in this house," interposed Pentyre.
"I know. One gets roped in. Some one dragged me along to their parties,
so I had to invite them back. But I don't go any more. The danger _now_
is that they'll assimilate us. I went through my mother's book a short
time ago and put a mark against certain names; and in future those
people will not be invited or admitted to the house. No doubt they'll
get on very happily without me, but so much mud is thrown at us in the
ordinary way of business that I can't afford to put up gratuitous
targets for the amusement of the gutter-press. Honestly, Pentyre, you'd
feel rather small, if the _Sunday Budget_ or _Morton's Weekly_ came out
with a 'Society Gambling Scandal.' Wouldn't you?"
Pentyre adroitly evaded the question and continued his own bombardment.
"Is your cousin's name in the condemned list?" he asked.
"It will be, if I have any trouble from her again. What I can't get
people to see is that we're hanging on by our eyelids to such position
as we've got. A hundred years ago we were a class apart and above
criticism; nobody thought the worse of us, if we appeared at the theatre
with a notorious cocotte or drank ourselves gently under the table. Our
present accursed democracy was unborn. But, when once that came into
existence, we could only keep ourselves from proscription by saying very
loudly that we were still a class apart and were setting a standard.
Democracy's too lazy and snob-ridden to be very exacting, but it's had
its eye on us. George and his friends are conspiring to hamstring the
poor, decent House of Lords; and, if they succeed, the rot won't stop
there. I find life very pleasant, and it isn't worth a tremendous
upheaval simply for the amusement of behaving like a Bank Holiday
crowd.... Let's go and smoke in the library."
Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his
good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a
short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but
Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in
the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way
of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to
those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range
and freshness of gossip.
"You're _too_ provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an
embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not
fair to tell a story without giving all the names."
"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.
"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being
so tiresome."
Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment
which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself
where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards.
There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had
decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make
Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared
nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in
contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified
curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously
refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the
interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the
material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to
explore the domestic dissension at first hand.
"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as
they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out
social system."
"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim
said. I'm too busy to go out much, but _some_ of the people I meet....
My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated.
But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money.... Of
course, the girl just wants slapping."
"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the
introduction."
"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.
The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which,
he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara
was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he
planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at
last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of
his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her
years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of
forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender
and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found
her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her
tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in
his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was
harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had
already given her an advantage.
"I've read all your books. Witty, but very artificial," she said, as
they were introduced. "The French do that sort of thing more easily, but
you've not read much French, have you? There are several things I want
to discuss with you. A play I've written." She drew off her gloves
jerkily, splitting the thumb of one. "Did you come to see me or Aunt
Kathleen? And you know Jim, of course. I want your opinion of him."
"_He_ knows _me_," Arden distinguished, as he watched her carelessly
calculated movements. Within sixty seconds she had shewn herself
full-face and in profile, with a hat and again with two tapering hands
smoothing a mass of wayward hair. He had seen her wistful and tired, as
she came into the room, and again alert and galvanised at finding him
there. Yet she had certainly noticed his hat in the hall; probably she
had read the name and thought out her attack as she came upstairs. He
was charmed by her conscientious artifice.
"You talk just like Fatty Webster's imitations of you! That's so clever
of you! But why do you do it? You've arrived. There's no need to be
eccentric now. But perhaps you've grown into your own pose? In that case
you're right to express yourself in your own medium. Life is simply
self-expression, isn't it? The discovery of the Ego, the refinement of
the Ego, the presentation of the Ego." She nodded quickly at a portrait
of her father in Garter robes. "It would never do to be submerged by
that kind of thing. I'm always so sorry for Royalty."
As he hesitated for an answer, she put her hands to her throat,
unclasped her necklace and threw it out of the window. Arden sprang
across the room and looked down into the street to make sure that he had
seen aright. A District Messenger-boy approached, whistling; he explored
the necklace with his foot and finally picked it up.
"My dear, what _are_ you doing?" cried Lady Knightrider in amazement.
"I went flying to-day," Lady Barbara answered, as she poured herself out
a cup of tea.
"Flying!"
"Yes, I didn't tell you beforehand, because I was afraid of a scene.
Besides, I should have done it, whatever you said. Johnnie Gaymer
promised to take me up. I haven't been near Hurlingham. Don't bother,
Mr. Arden."
"But why----?" Valentine began, startled out of his invertebrate
placidity by a sensationalist more original than himself.
"Because I wasn't killed. I love that necklace more than anything in
the world. It was given me when I was recovering from typhoid and every
one thought I _must_ die.... The engine stopped in mid-air, and I made
sure I was going to be killed. Johnnie thought so, too. I felt I owed
something to Nemesis.... I've known you by sight all this season, Mr.
Arden. You weren't at the Poynters last night, by any chance? I couldn't
go, because I was in disgrace. And Lord Poynter sent his car this
morning with a wreath of lilies, because he was afraid I must be dead."
The short, disjointed sentences, flung out rapidly as she helped herself
to cake, demanded all Arden's attention and left her aunt far behind.
Lady Knightrider hurried belatedly to the window and then stretched her
hand to the bell. Lady Barbara took her arm soothingly and led her back
to her chair.
"Your disgrace was our diversion," said Arden.