I ventured for a few days to keep the light which chance had shed for
me upon Armour’s affairs to myself. The whole thing considered in
connection with his rare and delicate talent, seemed too derogatory and
disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury
in the mere statement. But there came a point when I could no longer
listen to Dora Harris’s theories to account for him, wild idealizations
as most of them were of any man’s circumstances and intentions. ‘Why
don’t you ask him point-blank?’ I said, and she replied, frowning
slightly, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. It would destroy something--I don’t
know what, but something valuable--between us.’ This struck me as
an exaggeration, considering how far, by that time, they must have
progressed towards intimacy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me
without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she
was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The
touch of comedy I gave the whole thing--surely I was justified in
that!--fell flat, and I extracted from her muteness a sense of rebuke;
one would think I had been taking advantage of the poor devil.
At last, having broken the lead of her pencil three times, she turned a
calm, considering eye upon me.
‘You have known this for a fortnight?’ she asked. ‘That doesn’t seem
somehow quite fair.’
‘To whom?’ I asked, and her answer startled me.
‘To either of us,’ she said.
How she advised herself to that effect is more than I can imagine, but
the print of her words is indelible, that is what she said.
‘Oh, confound it!’ I exclaimed. ‘I couldn’t help finding out, you know.’
‘But you could help keeping it to yourself in that--in that base way,’
she replied, and almost--the evening light was beginning to glimmer
uncertainly through the deodars--I could swear I saw the flash of a tear
on her eyelid.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she went on a moment later, ‘but I do hate having
to pity him. It’s intolerable--that.’
I picked up a dainty edition of Aucassin and Nicolette with the
intention of getting upon ground less emotional, and observed on the
flyleaf ‘D.H. from I.A. In memory of the Hill of Stars.’ I looked
appreciatively at the binding, and as soon as possible put it down.
‘He was not bound to tell me,’ Dora asserted presently, in reply to my
statement that the mare had somehow picked up a nail in the stable, and
was laid up.
‘You have been very good to him,’ I said. ‘I think he was.’
‘His reticence was due,’ she continued, as if defying contradiction, ‘to
a simple dislike to bore one with his personal affairs.’
‘Was it?’ I assented. My tone acknowledged with all humility that she
was likely to know, and I did not deserve her doubtful glance.
‘He could not certainly,’ she went on, with firmer decision, ‘have been
in the least ashamed of his connection with Kauffer.’
‘He comes from a country where social distinctions are less sharp than
they are in this idiotic place,’ I observed.
‘Oh, if you think it is from any lack of recognition! His sensitiveness
is beyond reason. He has met two or three men in the Military Department
here--he was aware of the nicest shade of their patronage. But he does
not care. To him life is more than a clerkship. He sees all round people
like that. They are only figures in the landscape.’
‘Then,’ I said, ‘he is not at all concerned that nobody in this Capua
of ours knows him, or cares anything about him, or has bought a scrap of
his work, except our two selves.’
‘That’s a different matter. I have tried to rouse in him the feeling
that it would be as well to be appreciated, even in Simla, and I think
I’ve succeeded. He said, after those two men had gone away on Sunday,
that he thought a certain reputation in the place where he lived would
help anybody in his work.’
‘On Sunday? Do you mean between twelve and two?’
‘Yes, he came and made a formal call. There was no reason why he
shouldn’t.’
‘Now that I think of it,’ I rejoined, ‘he shot a card on me too, at the
Club. I was a little surprised. We didn’t seem somehow to be on those
terms. One doesn’t readily associate him with any conventionality.’
‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t,’ said Dora again, and with this
vague comment we spoke of something else, both of us, I think, a little
disquieted and dissatisfied that he had.
‘I think,’ Dora said as I went away, ‘that you had better go up to the
studio and tell him what you have told me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter
much, but I can’t bear the thought of his not knowing.’
‘Come to Kauffer’s in the morning and see the pictures,’ I urged; but
she turned away, ‘Oh, not with you.’
I found my way almost at once to Amy Villa, not only because I had been
told to go there. I wanted, myself, certain satisfactions. Armour was
alone and smoking, but I had come prepared against the contingency of
one of his cigars. They were the cigars of the man who doesn’t know what
he eats. With sociable promptness I lighted one of my own. The little
enclosed veranda testified to a wave of fresh activity. The north light
streamed in upon two or three fresh canvases, the place seemed full of
enthusiasm, and you could see its source, at present quiescent under the
influence of tobacco, in Armour’s face.
‘You have taken a new line,’ I said, pointing to a file of camels, still
half obscured by the dust of the day, coming along a mountain road
under a dim moon. They might have been walking through time and through
history. It was a queer, simple thing, with a world of early Aryanism in
it.
‘Does that say anything? I’m glad. It was to me articulate, but I didn’t
know. Oh, things have been going well with me lately. Those two studies
over there simply did themselves. That camp scene on the left is almost
a picture. I think I’ll put a little more work on it and give it a
chance in Paris. I got in once, you know. Champ de Mars. With some
horses.’
‘Did you, indeed?’ I said. ‘Capital.’ I asked him if he didn’t
atrociously miss the life of the Quarter, and he surprised me by saying
that he never had lived it. He had been en pension instead with a dear
old professor of chemistry and his family at Puteaux, and used to go in
and out. A smile came into his eyes at the remembrance, and he told
me one after the other idyllic little stories of the old professor and
madame. Madame and the omelet--madame and the melon--M. Vibois and the
maire; I sat charmed. So long as we remained in France his humour was
like this, delicate and expansive, but an accidental allusion led us
across the Channel when he changed. He had no little stories of the
time he spent in England. Instead he let himself go in generalizations,
aimed, for they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and
character, particularly as these appear in English society. I could
not believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of
English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had the
flavour of Radical Sunday papers. The only original element was the
feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation instantly
clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and how far the
result of painful contact. He himself, he said, though later of
the Western States, had been born under the British flag of British
parents--though his mother was an Irishwoman she came from loyal
Ulster--and he repeated the statement as if it in some way justified his
attitude towards his fellow countrymen and excused his truculence in the
ear of a servant of the empire which he had the humour to abuse. I heard
him, I confess, with impatience, it was all so shabby and shallow, but
I heard him out, and I was rewarded; he came for an illustration in
the end to Simla. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘at what they call their “Government
House list”; and look at Strobo, Signor Strobo. Isn’t Strobo a man of
intelligence, isn’t he a man of benevolence? He gave ten thousand rupees
last week to the famine fund. Is Strobo on Government House list? Is he
ever invited to dine with the Viceroy? No, because Strobo keeps a hotel!
Look at Rosario--where does Rosario come in? Nowhere, because Rosario is
a clerk, and a subordinate. Yet Rosario is a man of wide reading and a
very accomplished fellow!’
It became more or less necessary to argue then, and the commonplaces
with which I opposed him called forth a wealth of detail bearing most
picturesquely upon his stay among us. I began to think he had never
hated English rigidity and English snobbery until he came to Simla,
and that he and Strobo and Rosario had mingled their experiences in one
bitter cup. I gathered this by inference only, he was curiously watchful
and reticent as to anything that had happened to him personally; indeed,
he was careful to aver preferences for the society of ‘sincere’
people like Strobo and Rosario, that seemed to declare him more than
indifferent to circles in which he would not meet them. In the end our
argument left me ridiculously irritated--it was simply distressing to
see the platform from which he obtained so wide and exquisite a view of
the world upheld by such flimsy pillars--and my nerves were not soothed
by his proposal to walk with me to the Club. I could hardly refuse it,
however, and he came along in excellent spirits, having effected the
demolition of British social ideals, root and branch. His mongrel dog
accompanied, keeping offensively near our heels. It was not even an
honest pi, but a dog of tawdry pretensions with a banner-like tail
dishonestly got from a spaniel. On one occasion I very nearly kicked the
dog.