Hadria tried to avoid Professor Theobald, but he was not easily avoided.
She frequently met him in her walks. The return of spring had tempted
her to resume her old habit of rising with the sun. But she found, what
she had feared, that her strength had departed, and she was fatigued
instead of invigorated, as of yore. She did not regard this loss in a
resigned spirit. Resignation was certainly not her strong point. The
vicar's wife and the doctor's wife and the rest of the neighbours
compared their woes and weariness over five o'clock tea, and these
appeared so many and so severe that Hadria felt half ashamed to count
hers at all. Yet why lower the altars of the sane goddess because her
shrine was deserted? Health was health, though all the women of England
were confirmed invalids. And with nothing less ought reasonable
creatures to be satisfied. As for taking enfeeblement as a natural
dispensation, she would as soon regard delirium tremens in that light.
She chafed fiercely against the loss of that blessed sense of well-being
and overflowing health, that she used to have, in the old days. She
resented the nerve-weariness, the fatigue that she was now more
conscious of than ever, with the coming of the spring. The impulse of
creative energy broke forth in her. The pearly mornings and the birds'
songs stirred every instinct of expression. The outburst did not receive
its usual check. The influences of disenchantment were counteracted by
Professor Fortescue's presence. His sympathy was marvellous in its
penetration, brimming the cold hollows of her spirit, as a flooded
river fills the tiniest chinks and corners about its arid banks. He
called forth all her natural buoyancy and her exulting sense of life,
which was precisely the element which charged her sadness with such a
fierce electric quality, when she became possessed by it, as a cloud by
storm.
Valeria too was roused by the season.
"What a parable it all is, as old as the earth, and as fresh, each new
year, as if a messenger-angel had come straight from heaven, in his
home-spun of young green, to tell us that all is well."
If Hadria met Professor Theobald in her rambles, she always cut short
her intended walk. She and Valeria with Professor Fortescue wandered
together, far and wide. They watched the daily budding greenery, the
gleams of daffodils among their sword-blades of leaves, the pushing of
sheaths and heads through the teeming soil, the bursts of sunshine and
the absurd childish little gushes of rain, skimming the green country
like a frown.
"Truly a time for joy and idleness."
"If only," said Hadria, when Professor Theobald thus grew enthusiastic
on the subject, "if only my cook had not given a month's notice."
She would not second his mood, be it what it might. Each day, as they
passed along the lanes, the pale green had spread, like fire, on the
hedges, caught the chestnuts, with their fat buds shining in the sun,
which already was releasing the close-packed leaflets.
Hadria (apparently out of sheer devilry, said Professor Theobald) kept
up a running commentary on the season, and on her hapless position,
bound to be off on the chase for a cook at this moment of festival. Nor
was this all. Crockery, pots and pans, clothes for the children, clothes
for herself, were urgently needed, and no experienced person, she
declared, could afford to regard the matter as simple because it was
trivial.
"One of the ghastliest mistakes in this trivial and laborious world."
Valeria thought that cooks had simply to be advertised for, and they
came.
"What _naïveté!_" exclaimed Hadria. "Helen was persuaded to cross the
seas from her Spartan home to set Troy ablaze, and tarnish her fair
fame, but it would take twenty sons of Priam to induce a damsel to come
over dry land to Craddock Dene, to cook our dinners and retain her
character."
"You would almost imply that women don't so very much care about their
characters," said Valeria.
"Oh, they do! but sometimes the dulness that an intelligent society has
ordained as the classic accompaniment to social smiles, gets the better
of a select few--Helen _par exemple_."
It frequently happened that Hadria and Miss Du Prel came across Lady
Engleton and her guests, in the Priory garden. From being accidental,
the meetings had become intentional.
"I like to fancy we are fugitives--like Boccaccio's merry company--from
the plague of our daily prose, to this garden of sweet poetry!" cried
Miss Du Prel.
They all kindled at the idea. Valeria made some fanciful laws that she
said were to govern the little realm. Everyone might express himself
freely, and all that he said would be held as sacred, as if it were in
confidence. To speak ill or slightingly of anyone, was forbidden. All
local and practical topics were to be dropped, as soon as the moss-grown
griffins who guarded the Garden of Forgetfulness were passed.
Hadria was incorrigibly flippant about the banishment of important local
subjects. She said that the kitchen-boiler was out of order, and yet she
had to take part in these highly-cultivated conversations and smile, as
she complained, with that kitchen-boiler gnawing at her vitals. She
claimed to be set on a level with the Spartan boy, if not above him.
Valeria might scoff, as those proverbially did who never felt a wound.
Hadria found a certain lack of tender feeling among the happy few who
had no such tragic burdens to sustain.
Not only were these prosaic subjects banished from within the cincture
of the gentle griffins, but also the suspicions, spites, petty
jealousies, vulgar curiosities, and all the indefinable little darts and
daggers that fly in the social air, destroying human sympathy and
good-will. Each mind could expand freely, no longer on the defensive
against the rain of small stabs. There grew up a delicate, and
chivalrous code among the little group who met within the griffins'
territory.
"It is not for us to say that, individually, we transcend the average of
educated mortals," said Professor Theobald, "but I do assert that
collectively we soar high above that depressing standard."
Professor Fortescue observed that whatever might be said about their own
little band, it was a strange fact that bodies of human beings were able
to produce, by union, a condition far above or far below the average of
their separate values. "There is something chemical and explosive in
human relationships," he said.
These meetings stood out as a unique experience in the memory of all who
took part in them. Chance had brought them to pass, and they refused to
answer to the call of a less learned magician.
Lady Engleton and Mrs. Temperley alternately sent tea and fruit to the
terrace, on the days of meeting, and there the little company would
spend the afternoon serenely, surrounded by the beauties of the garden
with its enticing avenues, its chaunting birds, its flushes of bloom,
and its rich delicious scents.
"Why do we, in the nineteenth century, starve ourselves of these
delicate joys?" cried Valeria. "Why do we so seldom leave our stupid
pre-occupations and open our souls to the sun, to the spring, to the
gentle invitations of gardens, to the charm of conversation? We seem to
know nothing of the serenities, the urbanities of life."
"We live too fast; we are too much troubled about outward things--cooks
and dressmakers, Mrs. Temperley," said Professor Theobald.
"Poor cooks and dressmakers!" murmured Professor Fortescue, "where are
_their_ serenities and urbanities?"
"I would not deprive any person of the good things of life," cried
Valeria; "but at present, it is only a few who can appreciate and
contribute to the delicate essence that I speak of. I don't think one
could expect it of one's cook, after all."
"One is mad to expect anything of those who have had no chance," said
Professor Fortescue. "That nevertheless we consistently do,--or what
amounts to the same thing: we plume ourselves on what chance has enabled
us to be and to achieve, as if between us and the less fortunate there
were some great difference of calibre and merit. Nine times in ten,
there is nothing between us but luck."
"Oh, dear, you _are_ democratic, Professor!" cried Lady Engleton.
"No; I am merely trying to be just."
"To be just you must apply your theory to men and women, as well as to
class and class," Valeria suggested.
"_Mon Dieu!_ but so I do; so I always have done, as soon as I was
intellectually short-coated."
"And would you excuse all our weaknesses on that ground?" asked Lady
Engleton, with a somewhat ingratiating upward gaze of her blue eyes.
"I would account for them as I would account for the weaknesses of my
own sex. As for excusing, the question of moral responsibility is too
involved to be decided off-hand."
The atmosphere of Griffin-land, as Professor Theobald called it, while
becoming to his character, made him a little recklessly frank at times.
He admitted that throughout his varied experience of life, he had found
flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had
never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which
had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners
of Lord Beaconsfield's famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate
woman, "plain as a pike-staff," who had become his benefactress, in
consequence of a discreet allusion to the "power of beauty" and a
well-placed sigh.
"The woman must have been a fool!" said Joseph Fleming.
"By no means; she was of brilliant intellect. But praises of that were
tame to her; she knew her force, and was perhaps tired of the solitude
it induced." Professor Theobald laughed mightily at his own sarcasm.
"But when the whisper of 'beauty' came stealing to her ear (which was by
no means like a shell) it was surpassing sweet to her. I think there is
no yearning more intense than that of a clever woman for the triumphs of
mere beauty. She would give all her powers of intellect for the smallest
tribute to personal and feminine charm. What is your verdict, Mrs.
Temperley?"
Mrs. Temperley supposed that clever women had something of human nature
in them, and valued overmuch what they did not possess.
Professor Theobald had perhaps looked for an answer that would have
betrayed more of the speaker's secret feelings.
"It is the fashion, I know," he said, "to regard woman as an enigma.
Now, without professing any unusual acuteness, I believe that this is a
mistake. Woman is an enigma certainly, because she is human, but that
ends it. Her conditions have tended to cultivate in her the power of
dissimulation, and the histrionic quality, just as the peaceful ilex
learns to put forth thorns if you expose it to the attacks of devouring
cattle. It is this instinct to develop thorns in self-defence, and yet
to live a little behind the prickly outposts, that leads to our notion
of mystery in woman's nature. Let a man's subsistence and career be
subject to the same powers and chances as the success of a woman's life
now hangs on, and see whether he too does not become a histrionic
enigma."
Professor Fortescue observed that the clergy, at times, developed
qualities called feminine, because in some respects their conditions
resembled those of women.
Theobald assented enthusiastically to this view. He had himself entered
the church as a young fellow (let not Mrs. Temperley look so
inconsiderately astonished), and had left it on account of being unable
to conscientiously subscribe to its tenets.
"But not before I had acquired some severe training in that sort of
strategy which is incumbent upon women, in the conduct of their lives.
Whatever I might privately think or feel, my office required that I
should only express that which would be more or less grateful to my
hearers. (Is not this the woman's case, in almost every position in
life?) Even orthodoxy must trip it on tiptoe; there was always some
prejudice, some susceptibility to consider. What was frankness in others
was imprudence in me; other men's minds might roam at large; mine was
tethered, if not in its secret movements, at least in its utterance; and
it is a curious and somewhat sinister law of Nature, that perpetual
denial of utterance ends by killing the power or the feeling so held in
durance."
Hadria coloured.
"That experience and its effect upon my own nature, which has lasted to
this day," added Theobald, "served to increase my interest in the
fascinating study of character in its relation to environment."
"Ah!" exclaimed Hadria, "then _you_ don't believe in the independent
power of the human will?"
"Certainly not. To talk of character overcoming circumstance is to talk
of an effect without a cause. Yet this phrase is a mere commonplace in
our speech. A man no more overcomes his circumstance than oxygen
overcomes nitrogen when it combines with it to form the air we breathe.
If the nitrogen is present, the combination takes place; but if there is
no nitrogen to be had, all the oxygen in the world will not produce our
blessed atmosphere!"
Joseph Fleming caused a sort of anti-climax by mentioning simply that he
didn't know that any nitrogen was required in the atmosphere. One always
heard about the oxygen.
Professor Theobald remarked, with a chuckle, that this was one of the
uses of polite conversation; one picked up information by the wayside.
Joseph agreed that it was wonderfully instructive, if the speakers were
intelligent.
"That helps," said the Professor, tapping Joseph familiarly on the
shoulder.
"When shall we have our next meeting?" enquired Lady Engleton, when the
moment came for parting.
"The sooner the better," said Valeria. "English skies have Puritan
moods, and we may as well profit by their present jocund temper. I never
saw a bluer sky in all Italy."
"I certainly shall not be absent from the next meeting," announced
Theobald, with a glance at Hadria.
"Nor I," said Lady Engleton. "Such opportunities come none too often."
"I," Hadria observed, "shall be cook-hunting."
Professor Theobald's jaw shut with a snap, and he turned and left the
group almost rudely.