It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired
of Paul’s ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes
found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational
theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul
any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had
been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport absolute and
complete. Paul and his angel had lived on terms of so much intimacy that
they had earned the right to be acidulous with each other upon occasion.
Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an
atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of
fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was
practically abandoned. There was a good deal of verse-turning done, and
an anonymous volume of sonnets entitled ‘Dialogues of the Soul’ made a
momentary splash on the surface of the literary deep, and then sank like
a pebble to the bottom. The book distilled a faint odour of eroticism,
a scent of the epicene; but the degenerates, sniffing it, thought poorly
of it because of its want of downright rancidity, and the people of
whom crowds are made misliked it for a better reason. Paul, with a
diminishing exchequer, found himself aware of the first flat literary
failure of his lifetime.
The exchequer failed rapidly, and there were several contributory
reasons. In the first place, the Baroness had any amount of money to
spend, and it was essential that anyone who aspired to follow her about
the capitals of Europe on equal terms should live at a high rate. Then,
Annette had proclaimed her rights of freedom, and had escaped from
Laurent and his forces, and had run up bills in Paris, and in London,
and elsewhere. The most successful of comedies will pass out of vogue.
To be idle, to be extravagant in one’s own person, and to be milked
perpetually by the extravagance of another--could better ways to ruin be
discovered?
The two had their first real tiff at Naples on a Christmas Eve. Gertrude
had set up a sheep-dog in the person of one Mrs. Diedrich, a sour and
sallow remnant of New England fashion and beauty, a lady who both on her
husband’s side and her own claimed all the splendours of Knickerbocker
descent. The husband was dead, the fortune--except for a meagre bone or
two with little meat thereon--was eaten all away. Mrs. Diedrich and the
sympathetic Gertrude’s mother had been friends. There was nothing more
natural or more befitting than that the wealthy Baroness de Wyeth should
find an asylum for this superannuated slave of fortune, though Paul knew
perfectly well that she was no more than a buckler against scandal at
the first. But reasonable as he was compelled to admit such a precaution
to be, he was not very long in discovering that the impoverished lady
was a buckler against himself, and that she was used to prevent that
old familiar laying of heads together, and the old familiar communion of
hearts, in which, by dint of careful manoeuvring, a bare sixty seconds
might sometimes he snatched for a solitude of two.
There should have been a drive that afternoon--Gertrude and Paul, with
Mrs. Diedrich to play gooseberry--and Mrs. Diedrich had fallen ill. Paul
presented himself at the appointed hour, and no Gertrude was there to
meet him. Instead of the Presence a note couched in the chilliest terms:
‘Dear Friend,
‘Mrs. Diedrich is shockingly unwell to-day, and I cannot leave her.
Profoundest regrets for a lost pleasure.
‘Sincerely, ‘G. de W.’
‘My luck!’ said Paul bitterly to himself; for he had been more than once
disappointed of late. But he found grace enough to express his sorrow,
send his compliments and good wishes, and to withdraw. He went strolling
about in unknown ways, with all manner of unpleasant things to think of.
He not only made his momentary disappointment the greatest of them all,
but strove to make it so. And yet the others would intrude. Here was a
letter from Darco expressing grave disappointment with the end of the
second act of their latest piece. Darco coughing up his stammering
gutturals as a speaker of English was one man, and Darco with a pen in
his hand was another.
‘It crumbles,’ wrote the critic, ‘at the very instant at which it should
triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for
six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap,
when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of
well-worked marble. I do not know whether you are well or ill, whether
you desire to continue the work or no. All of which I am certain is that
the piece is wanted for March, and that we cannot work together at
this distance. I will meet you where you like--Paris, Brussels, Vienna,
London, Hong Kong. It is all one to me so long as I get you back to work
in time. But, for whatever reason, this second act is so written that
it will not do. And I cannot wait I am a poet, but I am a poet without
a language. If you will not be my interpreter, I must find another. Is
friendship friendship, or is business business? In the name of both I
ask you to meet me and to work with me.’
Look at it how he would, and distort his own perspective as he might,
Darco’s angry and outspoken appeal was larger than anything his duty to
Gertrude might ask of him. But, to tell the whole truth, his sense
of duty was his curse, because the sense itself had grown distorted.
Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true
to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his
career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude--oh yes, Gertrude was
impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now,
he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was
all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or
his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practised _femme de feu_ and
_femme de glace_ in one--always born to be fooled, frustrated, enticed
to the throwing away of real passion and of real power.
And over and above all these, arrange them in what imaginary perspective
he might choose, the sordid side of things, the bills--bills from
lodging-house keepers of the better sort, from hotels, from milliners,
and from modistes--and the shrinking exchequer, which barely, when all
claims were satisfied, would leave him so much as two hundred and fifty
pounds.
What had his year and a half of dalliance brought him? A dream of
pleasure, a desert ache of hunger, an occasional delirious spur to
appetite. Now, what in the name of common-sense is the good of it
all? And is Gertrude any better, after all, than an innocent Delilah,
trapping no Samson, but a fool unmuscled, who has no strength to break
the weakest of her withes? Innocent Delilah! He never profaned her in
his thought.
But in this mood--with his conscience, literary-artistic and simply
human, entirely endorsing old Darco’s reproof of his work and his
evasions; with a financial crevasse at his feet, and Annette chopping
away his standing-place, and his own extravagances melting his foothold
like butter in the sun; with a barren future staring him in the face--he
was disposed alike to remorse and penitence.
The city in which he rambled was strange to him, and, according to his
fashion when absorbed in thought, he took any turning which suggested
itself, and lost himself in a labyrinth of byways. He had done the same
kind of thing in a hundred towns and cities without any result worth
mentioning, but just for once he was destined to find a purpose wrapped
up in the folds of this simple habit.
He was plodding along miserably enough, and did not know whether he were
at Naples or the North Pole, when a familiar voice awoke him from his
bitter reveries, and he looked about him to discover that he was between
a high wall and & hedge of aloes on a strip of grass which had no
pathway on it, and apparently led nowhere. He had a vague idea that he
had set out in this direction upon a footpath more or less distinct, and
making a _volte-face_, he saw that the path had come to a termination at
a door in the high wall a wicket’s length behind him.
The voice he had heard was the voice of Gertrude, and the words it had
spoken were: ‘Ah! but my dear friend, that inevitable, that unceasing
isolation of the mind!’
A swift pang of jealousy ran through him, and he listened with an almost
fierce anxiety. There was nothing in his nature to induce him to play
the eavesdropper, but he could not have refrained from listening just
then had it been to save his soul. Some deep undetermined murmur of a
voice in answer seemed to reach his ears, but they were drumming so to
the startled music of his heart that his sense failed to record it.
He went back swiftly and stealthily to the spot at which the pathway
terminated, and there he found an old green-painted door in a small
archway in the wall. It half drooped upon its rusty hinges, and across
the gap it left between its own rim and the postern, he had view enough
to tell him whither his rambling footsteps had led him. He was looking
at the terraced gardens in the rear of the Baroness’s hotel, and whilst
he looked Gertrude herself floated into sight. Some trifle of a lace
mantilla was thrown over her head, and in her right hand she balanced
a parasol daintily between thumb and finger. Her companion was a man
apparently of middle age, frock-coated, silk-hatted, booted and gloved
as if for Rotten Row. He bore himself with an air of distinction, and
the looker-on saw the gloved hand caress a big moustache of sweeping
silver. The owner of the moustache was bending over the Baroness with
an unmistakable air of gallant attention, and Paul’s blood boiled
within him. He had no real sense of the impulse which moved him, and no
calculation as to what might happen; but he pushed the door aside, and,
entering the garden, walked along the gravelled main path which led to
the hotel. He made a feint of holding his head straight, and of looking
neither to left nor right, but he watched Gertrude and her companion
with a keen sidelong glance. His brisk footstep set a pebble rolling
in the pathway, and a second later he heard his own name called. A
low-growing orange-tree, all lustrous with globes of green and gold and
shiny leafage, had intercepted his view of the pair for just the instant
which intervened between the sound and the call.
‘Mr. Armstrong,’ said Gertrude’s voice, ‘Mr. Armstrong!’ He turned in a
pretence of amazement, and, hat in hand, crossed a small space of turf.
‘I had just sent round to you,’ said the smiling little lady, ‘at your
hotel.’ She transferred the parasol to her left hand, and held out the
right in an almost effusive greeting. ‘I suppose you have not been back
yet?’
‘No,’ Paul answered. ‘I have been walking and had lost myself, until I
recognised the garden through the open door yonder. Then I made sure of
myself again, and thought I might secure a short-cut home.’
‘How fortunate!’ said Gertrude, smiling; ‘and how curious, too!’ she
added. ‘At the very moment at which I caught sight of you your name
was in my mind. Are you a believer in the Aura, Colonel Brunton--the
something which envelops personality and diffuses itself in such a
manner that you recognise a friend’s presence before you are made aware
of it by sight or hearing? Don’t you recognise the reality of those
things? But, oh, I forgot! You gentlemen are, I am afraid, strangers
to each other. This is Colonel Brunton, our great traveller in the
Himalayas and Thibet, and this is Mr. Paul Armstrong, the author of
I dare not say how many charming books and comedies--Mr. Darco’s
collaborateur.’
‘Whose work,’ said Colonel Brunton in a voice typically American, but
profoundly deep, ‘I have, bafore my trip to Asia, seen performed with a
splendid eclaw both in London and New York. I am proud to meet you, Mr.
Armstrong.’
He was a rugged man, brown as a sun-burned brick, with a cascading
moustache of silver, jet-black eyebrows, and eyes which danced defiance
at his gray hairs and wrinkles. Paul could do no less than accept the
hearty hand he offered, and Gertrude set herself to soothe him.
‘You know,’ she said, laying her finger-tips upon his arm, ‘you are a
very inattentive cavalier, Mr. Armstrong. Poor Mrs. Diedrich was taken
ill so suddenly and alarmingly that I had time to do no more than just
to scribble that little hasty note to you. You might at least have
paused to make inquiry.’
‘That would never have done,’ said Paul ‘One does not inquire into a
lady’s decision at any moment.’
He spoke with a capital assumption of gaiety, but to the keen instinct
of that experienced trifler with hearts it was an assumption only,
and Gertrude turned the question with the easy skill of a woman of the
world.
‘Those geological researches now,’ she said, with a charming air of
mocking schoolgirl ignorance about such matters. ‘Do you really mean
to tell me that right away in the Himalayas you found the same little
protozoic blot in the same limestone that you find in our own Andes? Has
that little creature really built the mountains of the world? Why, it is
the story of the Coral Islands over again; but on what an enormous scale,
‘Dear me, what creatures of a day we are!’
Colonel Brunton, who, as it appeared, was a member of many learned
societies, and a most indefatigable besieger of the world’s inaccessible
places, turned out to be a man of so much simplicity, sincerity, and
charm, and Gertrude drew him to his best so skilfully, that it was not
easy to be sulky for a long time together in his society. It was Paul’s
cue to disguise himself as far as possible, and this delightful American
helped him greatly. He could barely think of the man as a rival; he was
so very upright, downright complimentary.
‘Why, Lord!’ he said once in the course of that afternoon’s talk, ‘when
you were in short frocks, and I was over head and ears in love with
you----’
The Baroness snatched a fan which girdled her, and tapped him with it
reprovingly.
‘Well,’ he said, twinkling, ‘when all is said and done, habit is the
conqueror. I got into that habit when you were a baby: twenty years ago,
I’ll swear, though it’s not legitimate, I know, to guess a lady’s age.
I’ve found a new habit since--a Satanic habit--of going to and fro about
the earth, and roaming up and down on it, but I have never forgotten the
old one.’
The Baroness laughed and made fun of this proclamation, which was
accompanied by certain old-fashioned bows and flourishes of deportment.
‘But now,’ she said, ‘I must really run away and look after my patient,
and must leave you, gentlemen, to console each other for my loss. I left
Mrs. Diedrich asleep, and could just afford to snatch half an hour for
so old a friend as you, Colonel If you care to come back and have tea
with me at six, I shall be glad to meet you, if I may dare run away
again. But if I _should_ be compelled to send down my excuses, you will
understand.’
She had already started a movement towards the hotel, and the two men
sauntered along with her, one on either side. She left them in the
flower-perfumed dimness of the shaded hall, and the whole business of
the afternoon had by this time so explained and reconciled itself to
Paul’s mind that he would have been a brute to fret about it longer.
‘I say,’ said the Colonel, ‘I have been for three years outside
civilization, and I should like a John Collins. I came here last night
by the Messagerie Maritime. They are good people, and they cook as well
as anybody can be expected to cook outside the United States, but
their ideas of drink are curiously simple. Can you be my guide, Mr.
Armstrong?’
‘Need I guide you farther?’ asked Paul ‘I should fancy that your
materials are to be found here in an absurd plenty, and if you have a
skilful hand----’
‘Sir,’ said the Colonel, with a burlesque flourish, interrupting him,
‘there is not a man from Marble Head to the Golden Gate who can make a
John Collins to compare with mine.’
Paul knew the house, and led his new acquaintance to a shady veranda
where a polyglot waiter chipped his ice to his fancy, found him lemon,
pounded sugar, fresh mint, square-faced Hollands, and syphon-water, and
left the Colonel compounding in a high state of content.
‘This is like home,’ he said, ‘bar the celestial straw, the use of which
these blahsted Continentals have not learned. This is quite like home.
Three years I have been roughing it, up hill and down dale, camp and
field Seen a little bit o’fightin’ on the Burmah side ‘long of your
British troops.
Mr. Armstrong; better boys I do _not_ want to meet And here’s to them
and you, sir. But, Lord!’--he caressed his tumbler with a lean brown
hand, and looked contemplatively into space--‘I must smoke. Try a
Burmese cigarette, sir. Lord ‘I land here last night after three years.
I just break my journey on the way to London, and I run against the
little girl that broke my heart when I was fifteen years of age, and
broke it again when I was one-and-twenty, and would just go on breaking
it for the mere fun of the thing for the next million years, if she and
me could only live as long.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Paul, in a cold insolence which made him
hot to think of a thousand times later, ‘have you been drinking?’
‘Well, I guess,’ said Mr. Brunton, and, leaning back in his deck-chair,
drew a great volume of smoke into his lungs, expelled it in a cloud, and
laughed; ‘after a three years’ drought, the man who is not game to
drink deserves to go dry. But, by Heaven, sir, to strike up against that
mighty little flirt after a space of fifteen years--to come across it
all again by accident! Look here! I land out of the _Grande Marie de
Luxembourg_ at Naples, with no more idea of revivin’ old times than of
escapin’ into the next century, and who’s the first person that I
meet but little Gertie, and what’s the first word that I hear but the
isolation of the soul!’
Paul sat in a chill, tense agony.
‘I was,’ said the Colonel, growing more and more clearly articulate in
accordance with his needs, ‘about as full up as any Christian need be
when I landed, and I was going to bed like a clean Christian gentleman.
Then I ran up against Gertie. I have been Turkish bathed, I have been
sluiced and washed and shaved and perfumed, and I can stand and talk
straight. What do you say? What would you have said about me amongst
the oranges and lemons in the garden there?’ He sat up in a momentary
fierceness. ‘Am I intoxicated, or, at least, was I till I turned
the lock-gate winch and set the waters foaming? No, sir, but in that
profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will
have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.
He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir--he
brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make
observations of the present case, _I_ am brimming over, sir.’
The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his
original place in Paul’s mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to
support its own weight. He slipped at the chin, at the mouth, at
the base of the nostril, at the eyebrow, and yet, in spite of these
deflections from the original, he appeared to recover himself with
an extraordinary swiftness at moments, and to be again the alert,
adventurous creature of the woods and wilds his extraordinary career
proclaimed him.
It was in a moment of supreme sobriety that he touched Paul’s arm and
said:
‘I’ll tell you all about little Gertie right away.’