Gregory walked at a brisk pace from Mrs. Forrester's house in Wilton
Crescent to Hyde Park Corner, and from there, through St. James's Park,
to Queen Anne's Mansions where he had a flat. He had moved into it from
dismal rooms when prosperity had first come to him, five or six years
ago, and was much attached to it. It was high up in the large block of
buildings and its windows looked over the greys and greens and silvers
of the park, the water shining in the midst, and the dim silhouettes of
Whitehall rising in stately significance on the evening sky. Gregory
went to the balcony and overhung his view contemplatively for a while.
The fog had lifted, and all London was alight.
The drawing-room behind him expressed an accepted convention rather than
a personal predilection. It was not the room of a young man of conscious
tastes. It was solid, cheerful and somewhat _naif_. There was a great
deal of very clean white paint and a great deal of bright wall-paper.
There were deep chairs covered with brighter chintz. There were blue and
white tiles around the fireplace and heavy, polished brass before. On
the tables lay buff and blue reviews and folded evening papers, massive
paper-cutters and large silver boxes. Photographs in silver frames also
stood there, of female relatives in court dress and of male relatives in
uniform. Behind the photographs were pots of growing flowers; and on the
walls etchings and engravings after well-known landscapes. It was the
room of a young man uninfluenced by Whistler, unaware of Chinese screens
and indifferent to the rival claims of Jacobean and Chippendale
furniture. It was civilised, not cultivated; and it was thoroughly
commonplace.
Gregory thought of himself as the most commonplace of types;--the
younger son whose father hadn't been able to do anything for him beyond
educating him; the younger son who, after years of uncongenial drudgery
had emerged, tough, stringy, professional, his boyish dreams dead and
his boyish tastes atrophied; a useful hard-working, clear-sighted member
of society. And there was truth in this conception of himself. There was
truth, too, in Madame von Marwitz's probe. He had more than the normal
English sensitiveness where ideals were concerned and more than the
normal English instinct for a protective literalness. He didn't intend
that anybody should lay their hand on his heart and tell him of lofty
aims that it would have made him feel awkward to look at by himself; his
fastidiousness was far from commonplace, and so were his disdains; they
made cheap successes and cheap ambitions impossible to him. He would
never make a fortune out of the law; yet already he was distinguished
among the younger men at the bar. With nothing of the air of a paladin
he brought into the courts a flavour of classic calm and courtesy. He
was punctiliously fair. He never frightened or bullied or confused. His
impartiality could become alarming at times to his own clients, and
shady cases passed him by. Everybody respected Gregory Jardine and a
good many people disliked him. A few old friends, comrades at Eton and
Oxford, were devoted to him and looked upon him, in spite of his
reputation for almost merciless common-sense, as still potentially
Quixotic. As a boy he had been exceptionally tender-hearted; but now he
was hard, or thought himself so. He had no vanity and looked upon his
own resolution and dignity as the heritage of all men worth their salt;
in consequence he was inclined to theoretic severity towards the
worsted. The sensitiveness of youth had steeled itself in irony; he was
impatient of delusions and exaltations, and scornful of the shambling,
shame-faced motives that moved so many of the people who came under his
observation.
Yet, leaning on the iron railing, his gaze softening to a grave,
peaceful smile as he looked over the vast, vaporous scene, laced with
its moving and motionless lines of light, it was this, and its
mysteries, its delicacies, its reticent radiance, that expressed him
more truly than the commonplaces of the room behind him, accurately as
these symbolized the activities of his life. The boy and youth,
emotional and poetic, dreamy if also shrewdly humorous, still survived
in a sub-conscious region of his nature, an Atlantis sunken beneath the
traffic of the surface; and, when he leaned and gazed, as now, at the
lovely evocations of the evening, it was like hearing dimly, from far
depths, the bells of the buried city ringing.
He was thinking of nothing as he leaned there, though memories, linked
in their associated loveliness, floated across his mind--larch-boughs
brushed exquisitely against a frosty sky on a winter morning in
Northumberland, when, a boy, with gun and dogs, he had paused on the
wooded slopes near his home to look round him; or the little well of
chill, clear water that he had found one summer day gushing from a mossy
source under a canopy of leaves; or the silver sky, and hills folded in
greys and purples, that had surrounded him on a day in late autumn when
he had walked for miles in loneliness and, again, had paused to look,
receiving the scene ineffaceably, so that certain moods always made it
rise before him. And linked by some thread of affinity with these
pictures, the face of the young girl he had met that afternoon rose
before him. Not as he had just seen her, but as he had seen her, for the
first time, the night before at the concert. Her face came back to him
with the larch-boughs and the spring of water and the lonely hills,
while he looked at London beneath him. She touched and interested him,
and appealed to something sub-conscious, as music did. But when he
passed from picturing her to thinking about her, about her origin and
environment and future, it was with much the same lucid and unmoved
insight with which he would have examined some unfortunate creature in
the witness-box.
Miss Woodruff seemed to him very unfortunate. For her irregular birth he
had contempt and for her haphazard upbringing only pity. He saw no place
in a well-ordered society for sculptors who ran away with other men's
wives and lived on chestnuts and left their illegitimate children to be
picked up at the roadside. He was the type of young man who,
theoretically, admitted of and indeed admired all independences in
women; practically he preferred them to be sheltered by their male
relatives and to read no French novels until they married--if then. Miss
Woodruff struck him as at once sheltered and exposed. Her niche under
the extended wing of the great woman seemed to him precarious. He saw no
real foothold for her in her present _milieu_. She only entered Mrs.
Forrester's orbit, that was evident, as a tiny satellite in attendance
on the streaming comet. In the wake of the comet she touched, it was
true, larger orbits than the artistic; but it was in this accidental and
transitory fashion, and his accurate knowledge of the world saw in the
nameless and penniless girl the probable bride of some second-rate
artist, some wandering, dishevelled musician, or ill-educated,
ill-regulated poet. Girls like that, who had the aristocrat's assurance
and simplicity and unconsciousness of worldly lore, without the
aristocrat's secure standing in the world, were peculiarly in danger of
sinking below the level of their own type.
He went in to dress. He was dining with the Armytages and after thinking
of Miss Woodruff it was indeed like passing from memories of larch-woods
into the chintzes and metals and potted flowers of the drawing-room to
think of Constance Armytage. Yet Gregory thought of her very contentedly
while he dressed. She was well-dowered, well-educated, well-bred; an
extremely nice and extremely pretty young woman with whom he had danced,
dined and boated frequently during her first two seasons. The Armytages
had a house at Pangbourne and he spent several week-ends with them every
summer. Constance liked him and he liked her. He was not in love with
her; but he wondered if he might not be. To get married to somebody like
Constance seemed the next step in his sensible career. He could see her
established most appropriately in the flat. He could see her beautifully
burnished chestnut hair, her pretty profile and bright blue eyes above
the tea-table; he could see her at the end of the dinner-table presiding
charmingly at a dinner. She would be a charming mother, too; the
children, when babies, would wear blue sashes and would grow up doing
all the proper things at the proper times, from the French _bonne_ and
the German _Fräulein_ to Eton and Oxford and dances and happy marriages.
She would continue all the traditions of his outer life, would fulfil it
and carry it on peacefully and honourably into the future.
The Armytages lived in a large house in Queen's Gate Gardens. They were
not interesting people, but Gregory liked them none the less for that.
He approved of the Armytage type--the kind, courageous, intolerant old
General who managed to find Gladstone responsible for every misfortune
that befell the Empire--blithe, easy-going Lady Armytage, the two sons
in the army and the son in the navy and the two unmarried girls, of whom
Constance was one and the other still in the school-room. It was a small
dinner-party that night; most of the family were there and they had
music after it, Constance singing very prettily--she was taking
lessons--the last two songs she had learned, one by Widor and one by
Tosti.
Yet as he drove home late Gregory was aware that Constance still
remained a pleasant possibility to contemplate and that he had come no
nearer to being in love with her. It might be easier, he mused, if only
she could offer some trivial trick or imperfection, if she had been
freckled, say, or had had a stammer, or prominent teeth. He could
imagine being married to her so much more easily than being in love with
her, and he was a little vexed with himself for his own
insusceptibility.
Constance was the last thing that he thought of before going to sleep;
yet it was not of her he dreamed. He dreamed, very strangely, of the
little cosmopolitan waif whom he had met that afternoon. He was walking
down a road in a forest. The sky above was blue, with white clouds
heaving above the dark tree-tops, and it was a still, clear day. His
mood was the boyish mood of romance and expectancy, touched with a
little fear. At a turning of the road he came suddenly upon Karen
Woodruff. She was standing at the edge of the forest as if waiting for
him, and she held a basket of berries, not wild-strawberry and not
bramble, but a fairy-tale fruit that a Hans Andersen heroine might have
gathered, and she looked like such a heroine herself, young, and
strange, and kind, and wearing the funny little dress of the concert,
the white dress with the flat blue bows. She held out the basket to him
as he approached, and, smiling at each other in silence, they ate the
fruit with its wild, sweet savour. Then, as if he had spoken and she
were answering him, she said: "And I love you."
Gregory woke with this. He lay for some moments still half dreaming,
with no surprise, conscious only of a peaceful wonder. He had forgotten
the dream in the morning; but it returned to him later in the day, and
often afterwards. It persisted in his memory like a cluster of
unforgettable sensations. The taste of the berries, the scent of the
pine-trees, the sweetness of the girl's smile, these things, rather than
any significance that they embodied, remained with him like one of the
deep impressions of his boyhood.