We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the
club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. It was
always a cosey place, whether you found yourself in it with cigars and
coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you
preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after
you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the
three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and
it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other
spot in the club.
Our rather limited little down-town dining-club was almost a celibate
community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch;
but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in
an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare
what we liked. Some dozed away in the intervening time; some read the
evening papers or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the
Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these
sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be
Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to
interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either
the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now, seeing the
three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who
made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar
sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and
he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the
psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I
was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then
intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were
privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher
range of thinking.
"I shouldn't have supposed, somehow," he said, with a knot of
deprecation between his fine eyes, "that he would have had the pluck."
"Perhaps he hadn't," Minver suggested.
Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in
toleration. "You mean that she--"
"I don't see why you say that, Minver," Rulledge interposed,
chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.
"I didn't say it," Minver contradicted.
"You implied it; and I don't think it's fair. It's easy enough to build
up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all
that any outsider can have in the case."
"So far," Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, "as any such edifice
has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn't think you
would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,"
and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head,
"on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where
Acton is, Rulledge."
"It would be great copy if it were true," I owned.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the
scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture
offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might
be from the personal appeal. "It is curious how little we know of such
matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the
inquiry of the poets and novelists." He addressed himself in this turn
of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with
the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.
"Yes," Minver said, facing about towards me. "How do you excuse yourself
for your ignorance in matters where you're always professionally making
such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought
about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they
are brought about in life?"
"No, I can't," I admitted. "I might say that a writer of fiction is a
good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing
why."
"No, you couldn't, my dear fellow," the painter retorted. "It's part of
your swindle to assume that you _do_ know why. You ought to find out."
Wanhope interposed concretely, or as concretely as he could: "The
important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the
confession, tacit or explicit, began with."
"Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the
question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from
nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and
asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent
out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don't you do it,
Acton?"