“I saw him,” said the Philosopher, sternly. “I saw him kneeling at your
feet! I saw him with my own eyes!”
She laughed.
“Really! Well, you could not see him with any one else’s eyes, could
you?”
“That answer is merely flippant,” retorted the Philosopher. “Flippant--I
might say rude!”
“Oh-h-h!” She made a little whistling round of her mouth, and her blue
eyes flashed.
“Rude!” he repeated, rather raspily. “And I venture to say that in an
open field, within a few yards of the public road, a man who is such a
fool as to drop on one knee at a woman’s feet ought to be--ought to
be”--here he waved one arm magisterially--“removed--forcibly removed to
Hanwell or Colney Hatch! He is not responsible for his actions!”
“No,” she interposed, mischievously. “No man in love is!”
“In love!” The Philosopher snorted. “You call that love? To make a
ridiculous exposure of himself and you in full view of spectators--”
She pointed a little finger at him.
“Only one spectator,--you!” she said. “And where _were_ you?”
He gave another snort.
“I was--I was behind a tree,” he said. “I thought I saw you going
towards the river--I imagined you were alone--”
“I was at first,” she said. “Jack came on later. So you must have been
watching quite a long time! What a bore for you! Why did you do it?”
The Philosopher blinked his eyes and frowned.
“Why did I do it? Because--because”--he hesitated--“yes!--because I like
to study the deceptive attributes of your sex and the pitfalls they
prepare for unwary men! This Jack of yours is a perfect ass!”
“Why didn’t you say Jackass at once and have done with it?” she
demanded, mirthfully. “You would have been nearly funny then!”
The Philosopher looked at her with what he meant to be a withering
expression. She, however, did not wither.
“Nearly funny!” he echoed. “Silly child, do you really think I have not
sufficient acumen to perceive an obvious play upon words, suggesting
stupidity rather than humour?”
A smile dimpled her cheeks in one or two becoming places, but she said
nothing.
“Am I to infer that you approved of the man’s attitude in the field?” he
demanded.
The portentous air with which he put this question made her laugh
outright.
“Yes!--yes, indeed!” she answered. “The man’s attitude in the field--oh,
dear me!--was simply _de_lightful!” And she clapped her hands
ecstatically. “You see, he’s such a _good_ figure!--and he can drop on
one knee gracefully--really gracefully!--and he meant it as well!--he
was swearing eternal friendship!”
“Eternal fiddlesticks!” snarled the Philosopher. “Where’s my pipe?”
They were in the library, a cosy room with a big window fronting the
west where the last golden lines of the sunset were vanishing one by
one,--and it wanted about an hour to dinner time. She moved away and
went searching to and fro, on various tables and shelves, her light
figure in its dainty evening attire of pale blue and white fluttering
hither and thither like an embodied flower, till presently she came back
towards him holding out, at a respectful distance from herself, a rather
dirty briar.
“Come along, come along!” said the Philosopher, testily. “Make haste! It
won’t bite you!”
“No,” and she handed him the repulsive looking object. “But it
smells--horrid! If you had a wife she would not allow you to come near
her with such a smell!”
“Oh, wouldn’t she?” And the Philosopher stuck the pipe between his teeth
with a defiant air. “If I had a wife--which, thank God, I haven’t--”
“Yes, thank God you haven’t!” she interpolated, demurely.
He looked at her again in his “withering” way, but she only smiled.
“If I had a wife,” he continued, sucking the stem of his pipe somewhat
noisily, “she would have to allow anything _I_ pleased and be glad of
the privilege! A man must be master in his own house,--and a wise woman
knows how to keep her place.”
She sank gracefully into a low easy-chair, with the soft movement of a
bird descending into its nest, and looked up at him with a tolerantly
amused air.
“The days of Abraham are past!” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the Lord doesn’t favour women-crushers so much as in the
times of Moses and Aaron,” she murmured lazily. “You see, Abraham was
such a ‘master in his own house’ that, after making all the use he could
of Hagar, he turned her out into the wilderness to starve. Plenty of
modern Abrahams would do the same thing with all the pleasure in
life--but--it’s likely the modern Hagars are more than a match for them!
And I’m glad--oh, so glad, that women are going to have their day--at
last!”
The Philosopher had stuffed his pipe with tobacco while she spoke, and
now prodded it in with a very yellow finger. He looked uneasily about
him for matches, but she did not offer to find them. He discovered them
presently and lit his ‘fragrant weed’ without asking her permission.
“Women are going to have their day!” he echoed, ironically. “What sort
of a day do you suppose it will be? Confusion worse confounded!”
She was silent.
“Woman’s day,” he went on sententiously, “means Man. Man at morn,--man
at noon,--man at night. Woman adores man,--licks his boots
metaphorically whenever he gives her the chance. A Man and a new
Hat--that’s enough for Woman’s day!”
She laughed.
“What a funny old person you are!” she exclaimed. “You have such fossil
ideas!--positively fossil!--embedded in rock!--and they’ll never change!
That’s the worst of being over-learned in one direction,--I’m sure it
narrows the mind!”
He began to feel irritated,--yes, really irritated with this bunch of
blue and white femininity seated opposite to him in such graceful ease.
“My mind is _not_ narrow,” he said, stiffly. “And though it may please
you to consider me a fossil--”
“I didn’t say _you_ were a fossil,” she interposed. “I said you had
fossil ideas--”
“It is the same thing,” he retorted. “A man and his ideas are one. I
certainly have not a mind adapted to examine the trifling sentiments
which affect your sex, but the opinions I have formed are based on long
experience. You express a childish pleasure in the fancy that women are
going to have their day,--now I maintain that they have always had it,
to the fullest extent of their very limited capabilities. Any wider
range of effort would bring them nothing but disaster.”
With this he clapped a misshapen old “Homburg” hat on his head, opened
the window, which was really a glass door, and went out into the garden,
puffing at his briar. He had not a good figure--it was inclined to be
stumpy, but there was a certain pathetic droop of his shoulders which
betrayed both weariness and age, and the pretty Sentimentalist, quick to
observe this, was suddenly touched and compassionate. She sprang up and
ran after him.
“Don’t be cross!” she said. “I’m sorry I called your ideas fossils!
But--you know--fossils are really wonderful things!”
Her laughing blue eyes, her tossing fair hair, and the bewildering
“frou-frou” of her dainty blue and white silk and chiffon garments made
quite a stir in the calm evening silence of the garden,--and for the
moment the self-centred, self-opiniated, self-styled “Philosopher” felt
a sudden twinge of shamed conscience. In his own heart he knew he was
what he would call “amusing himself” with a bright feminine creature who
took the world on trust and accepted him at his own inflated
valuation,--he found it convenient and agreeable to stay at her father’s
house and enjoy the luxuries of a well-equipped home without paying for
it--especially when he could talk to a pretty hostess and subtly
insinuate a kind of love-making without any reality in it. Her mother
was dead--she was alone to receive and entertain such guests as her
pedantic father invited to flatter him on his personal belief in himself
as a great philologist,--she was,--(in that undefended condition)--“fair
game” to such a man as the Philosopher. There was Jack--Jack was
certainly a bore--but after all he was merely a neighbour, the eldest
son of what the Philosopher called a “doubtful” American, who had taken
a small cottage some little way down the river for the fishing season.
Jack really didn’t count for much. So the Philosopher smoothed his
furrowed brow and pretended to be appeased, as he replied to the soft
voice ringing in his ears--
“_I’m_ not cross,” he said. “I’m _never_ cross! I _never_ quarrel! It’s
_you_! You! You fly into a tantrum directly you are contradicted. You
can’t bear to be contradicted. And you call me a fossil! Nice way to
talk! Never mind!--I forgive you!”
With which grandiloquent assurance he took her hand and patted it. She
withdrew it gently,--she felt he was unjust. She knew she had not “flown
into a tantrum” and that what she had said was merely playful and
without any thought of “quarrel.” She walked beside him in the glamour
of the late after-glow for a few paces in silence,--and he was
uncomfortably conscious that the delicate subtlety of her personality
expressed an unspoken but nevertheless decisive lessening of her
appreciation of him as a man.
“And so,” he said, presently, with a laboured attempt at lightness--“you
approve of Jack as a modern Knight-errant swearing eternal fidelity?”
“I approve of Jack entirely--as Jack,” she answered, quietly. “He’s a
good fellow, and very unselfish.”
The Philosopher gave her a blinking, side-long glance.
“Really! Has he managed to impress that favourable view of himself upon
your credulous mind?”
“I don’t think he has tried to impress anything at all upon me,” she
said. “Only I notice that he always considers the pleasure of other
people more than his own.”
“Exceedingly quixotic,” commented the Philosopher, drily. “And all the
merest affectation. The man who is always looking after the pleasure of
other people attracts attention to himself--which is what he seeks. The
man who looks after his own comfort passes without notice,--which is the
right attitude. To call people’s attention to yourself by any action
whatsoever is very bad form.”
She looked at him in wondering enquiry.
“The man,” pursued the Philosopher, hugging himself as it were in the
wrapping of his own theories--“who persists in handing round
bread-and-butter and cake at a tea-table instead of sitting still, is a
nuisance. His plain business is to help himself, and let others take
care of their own needs. It is _not_ his business to see whether the
women get _their_ bread-and-butter and cake--in these days of female
emancipation they can look after themselves. He is a much more sensible
creature when he does not obtrude himself upon them by tiresome and
needless attentions. The same rule should apply to door-opening. There
are men who invariably disturb conversation by jumping up to open a door
for a woman to pass out. Detestable! I have had many a good story of
mine spoilt by this atrocious habit,--Americans always do it.”
“Americans are very kind to women,” she said. “I like their ways.”
He sniffed, as though offended by some noxious odour.
“You do, do you?” he retorted. “Well--I don’t.”
There was a pause. Presently--
“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there
much more work to do?”
He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the
stump of a tree.
“A great deal,” he replied. “A _very_ great deal more! Our researches
lead us deeper and deeper--into the most astonishing intricacies of
language--indeed one can positively say that language makes history.
Language creates dynasties and destroys them,--Language crowns kings and
equally decapitates them--Language--”
The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.
“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every
one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more
dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”
“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to
avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from
him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite
her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the
soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might
concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he
always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there
was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not
ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that
there was so little soup for so learned a man--still, learned as he was,
he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that
there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather
boresome on this particular evening,--the Philosopher and her father
prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now
and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as
the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in
his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of
prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you
listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and
satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his
nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness
of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be
imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist,
a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when
she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet
room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the
bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,--and wondered, a
trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early
childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her
father,--and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately
he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study
of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same
bent of research,--and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this
distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a
lonely little person,--and when the Philosopher first appeared on her
limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy,
because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She
pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage
about the authors they both admired,--and she was certain he would have
a splendid character--generous, noble, patient, kind--because--oh,
well!--because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he
was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted
him at the ideal valuation,--a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism
which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is
so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side
of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he
had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to
the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought--and
he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find
so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,--though
her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it. She
was sorry for him too, in a way--he appeared to be a neglected sort of
creature, albeit an authority on dull subjects in dull weekly journals
and monthly magazines,--his coats were shabby, his shirt-cuffs frayed at
the edges,--and he never at any time was what is called “well-groomed.”
She did not realise that his generally unkempt condition was part of
his particular “philosophic” manner,--a kind of advertised contempt for
conventional cleanliness. He could be very agreeable when he
chose,--almost lovable;--he could be amusing, entertaining and witty by
turns; and when strangers first met him, they generally received a most
favourable impression. The second meeting, however, unfortunately
swamped the effect of the first,--and when he stayed on and on in a
house, as he was doing now, there were times when his room was more
desired than his company. But a kind of glamour,--a reflex glitter of
genius in him,--had somewhat blinded the Sentimentalist to any clear
perception of his true character as a man, apart altogether from his
literary distinction,--and though she had begun to be uneasy and dubious
as to his sincerity and good feeling, she would not give way to these
thoughts, no matter how urgently they pressed upon her. And while she
mused, and looked up at the stars, they seemed to look responsively down
upon her in a winking, twinkling way of bright suggestiveness.
“What a quaint little soul it is!” so they might have expressed
themselves in a couple of light-flashes. “Here it lives, tricking itself
into thinking an egotist a great man! _We_ know better!”
And they sparkled their emphatic meaning through the dark veil of air,
while she, leaving her window-post of observation, took her embroidery
and went down to the billiard-room there to sit in silent patience while
her father and the Philosopher played a long game, as they did every
night with an unwearying pertinacity till bed-time. They did not
consider whether _she_ was amused or bored by what to themselves was
their own consummate skill in handling the cue, and she would gladly
have stayed away but that her father expected her to act as “marker” if
desired, and otherwise make herself useful. The whole business was
frightfully dull as far as she was concerned--she was tired to death of
the continuous click of the billiard balls, and sometimes heard them in
her dreams, so incessantly were they rolled about night after night. The
oddest thing to her mind was that the Philosopher never seemed tired of
the game. He never spoke to her while engaged in it--or, for that
matter, to her father except in monosyllables,--round and round the
table he strutted, cue in hand, pipe in mouth, without a thought for
anything or anybody but himself. He played more skilfully than his host,
and never lost an opportunity of asserting the fact,--and sometimes when
the gentle Sentimentalist saw her father getting redder and more
congested in the face with suppressed annoyance at his various “misses”
she was both sorry and anxious lest his restrained feeling should
culminate in an attack of illness. However, it was no use for her to
confide these fears to the Philosopher; he had the greatest contempt for
illness that affected anybody but himself. But--after all!--she decided
it was something of an advantage to know a man who could always
get anarticle into the big “Reviews” provided it were only dull
enough,--it was surely a privilege to associate with such a powerful
personage!--and it was an understood thing that gifted
men--Philosophers--were apt to become self-centred. Now Jack,--oh, Jack
was not self-centred--but then he was not clever--he was--well!--he was
just “Jack”!