On the evening of the 20th of June, after the blinds had been
pulled down and the gas lighted, Sherman was playing chess in the
smoking-room, right hand against left. Howard had gone out with a
message to the Lelands. He would often say, ‘Is there any message I
can deliver for you? I know how lazy you are, and will save you the
trouble.’ A message was always found for him. A pile of books lent for
Sherman’s improvement went home one by one.
‘Look here,’ said Howard’s voice in the doorway, ‘I have been watching
you for some time. You are cheating the red men most villainously. You
are forcing them to make mistakes that the white men may win. Why, a
few such games would ruin any man’s moral nature.’
He was leaning against the doorway, looking, to Sherman’s not too
critical eyes, an embodiment of all that was self-possessed and
brilliant. The great care with which he was dressed and his whole
manner seemed to say: ‘Look at me; do I not combine perfectly the
zealot with the man of the world?’ He seemed excited to-night. He had
been talking at the Lelands, and talking well, and felt that elation
which brings us many thoughts.
‘My dear Sherman,’ he went on, ‘do cease that game. It is very bad
for you. There is nobody alive who is honest enough to play a game
of chess fairly out--right hand against left. We are so radically
dishonest that we even cheat ourselves. We can no more play chess than
we can think altogether by ourselves with security. You had much better
play with me.’
‘Very well, but you will beat me; I have not much practice,’ replied
the other.
They reset the men and began to play. Sherman relied most upon his
bishops and queen. Howard was fondest of the knights. At first Sherman
was the attacking party, but in his characteristic desire to scheme
out his game many moves ahead, kept making slips, and at last had to
give up, with his men nearly all gone and his king hopelessly cornered.
Howard seemed to let nothing escape him. When the game was finished
he leant back in his chair and said, as he rolled a cigarette: ‘You
do not play well.’ It gave him satisfaction to feel his proficiency
in many small arts. ‘You do not do any of these things at all well,’
he went on, with an insolence peculiar to him when excited. ‘You
have been really very badly brought up and stupidly educated in that
intolerable Ballah. They do not understand there any, even the least,
of the arts of life; they only believe in information. Men who are
compelled to move in the great world, and who are also cultivated,
only value the personal acquirements--self-possession, adaptability,
how to dress well, how even to play tennis decently--you would be not
so bad at that, by the by, if you practised--or how to paint or write
effectively. They know that it is better to smoke one’s cigarette with
a certain charm of gesture than to have by heart all the encyclopedias.
I say this not merely as a man of the world, but as a teacher of
religion. A man when he rises from the grave will take with him only
the things that he is in himself. He will leave behind the things that
he merely possesses, learning and information not less than money and
high estate. They will stay behind with his house and his clothes and
his body. A collection of facts will no more help him than a collection
of stamps. The learned will not get into heaven as readily as the
flute-player, or even as the man who smokes a cigarette gracefully.
Now, you are not learned, but you have been brought up almost as badly
as if you were. In that wretched town they told you that education was
to know that Russia is bounded on the north by the Arctic Sea, and
on the west by the Baltic Ocean, and that Vienna is situated on the
Danube, and that William the Third came to the throne in the year
1688. They have never taught you any personal art. Even chess-playing
might have helped you at the day of judgment.’
‘I am really not a worse chess-player than you. I am only more
careless.’
There was a slight resentment in Sherman’s voice. The other noticed it,
and said, changing his manner from the insolent air of a young beauty
to a self-depreciatory one, which was wont to give him at times a very
genuine charm: ‘It is really a great pity, for you Shermans are a deep
people, much deeper than we Howards. We are like moths or butterflies,
or rather rapid rivulets, while you and yours are deep pools in the
forest where the beasts go to drink. No! I have a better metaphor.
Your mind and mine are two arrows. Yours has got no feathers, and mine
has no metal on the point. I don’t know which is most needed for right
conduct. I wonder where we are going to strike earth. I suppose it
will be all right some day when the world has gone by and they have
collected all the arrows into one quiver.’
He went over to the mantelpiece to hunt for a match, as his cigarette
had gone out. Sherman had lifted a corner of the blind and was gazing
over the roofs shining from a recent shower, and thinking how on such
a night as this he had sat with Mary Carton by the rectory fire
listening to the rain without and talking of the future and of the
training of village children.
‘Have you seen Miss Leland in her last new dress from Paris?’ said
Howard, making one of his rapid transitions. ‘It is very rich in
colour, and makes her look a little pale, like Saint Cecilia. She is
wonderful as she stands by the piano, a silver cross round her neck.
We have been talking about you. She complains to me. She says you are
a little barbarous. You seem to look down on style, and sometimes--you
must forgive me--even on manners, and you are quite without small talk.
You must really try and be worthy of that beautiful girl, with her
great soul and religious genius. She told me quite sadly, too, that you
are not improving.’
‘No,’ said Sherman, ‘I am not going forward; I am at present trying to
go sideways like the crabs.’
‘Be serious,’ answered the other. ‘She told me these things with the
most sad and touching voice. She makes me her confidant, you know, in
many matters, because of my wide religious experience. You must really
improve yourself. You must paint or something.’
‘Well, I will paint or something.’
‘I am quite serious, Sherman. Try and be worthy of her, a soul as
gentle as Saint Cecilia’s.’
‘She is very wealthy,’ said Sherman. ‘If she were engaged to you and
not to me you might hope to die a bishop.’
Howard looked at him in a mystified way and the conversation dropped.
Presently Howard got up and went to his room, and Sherman, resetting
the chess-board, began to play again, and, letting longer and longer
pauses of reverie come between his moves, played far into the morning,
cheating now in favour of the red men, now in favour of the white.
V
The next afternoon Howard found Miss Leland sitting, reading in an
alcove in her drawing-room, between a stuffed parroquet and a blue De
Morgan jar. As he was shown in he noticed, with a momentary shock, that
her features were quite commonplace. Then she saw him, and at once
seemed to vanish wrapped in an exulting flame of life. She stood up,
flinging the book on to the seat with some violence.
‘I have been reading the “Imitation of Christ,” and was just feeling
that I should have to become a theosophist or a socialist, or go and
join the Catholic Church, or do something. How delightful it is to see
you again! How is my savage getting on? It is so good of you to try
and help me to reform him.’
They talked on about Sherman, and Howard did his best to console her
for his shortcomings. Time would certainly improve her savage. Several
times she gazed at him with those large dark eyes of hers, of which the
pupils to-day seemed larger than usual. They made him feel dizzy and
clutch tightly the arm of his chair. Then she began to talk about her
life since childhood--how they got to the subject he never knew--and
made a number of those confidences which are so dangerous because so
flattering. To love--there is nothing else worth living for; but then
men are so shallow. She had never found a nature deep as her own.
She would not pretend that she had not often been in love, but never
had any heart rung back to her the true note. As she spoke her face
quivered with excitement. The exulting flame of life seemed spreading
from her to the other things in the room. To Howard’s eyes it seemed as
though the bright pots and stuffed birds and plush curtains began to
glow with a light not of this world--to glimmer like the strange and
chaotic colours the mystic Blake imagined upon the scaled serpent of
Eden. The light seemed gradually to dim his past and future, and to
make pale his good resolves. Was it not in itself that which all men
are seeking, and for which all else exists?
He leant forward and took her hand, timidly and doubtingly. She did
not draw it away. He leant nearer and kissed her on the forehead. She
gave a joyful cry, and, casting her arms round his neck, burst out,
‘Ah! you--and I. We were made for each other. I hate Sherman. He is
an egotist. He is a beast. He is selfish and foolish.’ Releasing one
of her arms she struck the seat with her hand, excitedly, and went
on, ‘How angry he will be! But it serves him right! How badly he is
dressing. He does not know anything about anything. But you--you--I
knew you were meant for me the moment I saw you.’
That evening Howard flung himself into a chair in the empty
smoking-room. He lighted a cigarette; it went out. Again he lighted
it; again it went out. ‘I am a traitor--and that good, stupid fellow,
Sherman, never to be jealous!’ he thought. ‘But then, how could I
help it? And, besides, it cannot be a bad action to save her from a
man she is so much above in refinement and feeling.’ He was getting
into good-humour with himself. He got up and went over and looked
at the photograph of Raphael’s Madonna, which he had hung over the
mantelpiece. ‘How like Margaret’s are her big eyes!’