II

“There was a cocktail for you,” said Hilary gloomily, “but I drank it,

in case it grew warm.” I thanked him politely for the idea. “It wasn’t

an idea, really,” said Hilary gloomily. “It was an impulse.”

It is not, therefore, impossible to understand how it came about that

there were not a few people, youngish people, who considered Mr.

Townshend to be a tiresome man. They said: “He is very nice, but

_frankly_, isn’t he rather tiresome?” I supposed he was rather tiresome.

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him,

he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with

him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that

is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I

believe, his age.

Hilary was a man who had convinced himself and every one else that he

had neither use nor time for the flibberty-gibberties of life. He

collected postage-stamps and had sat as Liberal Member for an Essex

constituency for fifteen years. To be a Liberal was against every one of

his prejudices, but to be a Conservative was against all his

convictions. He thought of democracy as a drain-pipe through which the

world must crawl for its health. He did not think the health of the

world would ever be good. When travelling he looked porters sternly in

the face and over-tipped them. His eyes were grey and gentle, and they

were suspicious of being amused. I think that Hilary treasured a belief

that his eyes were cold and ironic, as also that his face was of a stern

cast. His face was long, and the features somehow muddled. It was a kind

face.

Hilary is the last in direct line of the Townshends, who have held

Magralt, a Tudor manor on the Essex coast, since a Townshend deserted to

Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field. The Townshends of Magralt have always

been soldiers, “and that,” Guy, first and last, a soldier, will say, “is

the only reason one can see why Hilary is a politician by profession and

the foremost stamp-collector in Chesterfield Street by the sweat of his

brow.” But one has to report that Hilary was once, before witnesses,

perfectly beastly to an American gentleman who said that Blucher had

arrived in time for the Battle of Waterloo.

But it was on the question of marriage that the two friends would

indulge the sharpest difference of opinion; or rather, Hilary’s wasn’t

an opinion, it was a lurking Silence.

“Suppose you die,” said Guy de Travest. “You might. You are ten years

older than me in years alone. You may receive your call to higher things

at any moment. Look how I beat you at squash the other day! Let us

suppose, then, that you are as good as dead. Unmarried, childless. You

have done nothing. You are nothing. You leave nothing. Except, of

course, what was left to you----”

“Less,” said Hilary.

“Your memory, then, goes down as that of a sickening philatelist.

Whereas, had any one of your ancestors had a chance of a bit of war like

ours, he would have died a Major-General!”

“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the

reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other

service-family in England.” And so it would go on for ever, Guy

contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him

not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would

be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland,

where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and

all its fiefs.

Any one, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought

that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, any one

might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy,

it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife

except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning

towards his bath, when he said “Good-morning.” It was Lady de Travest

who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest

in her slow soft voice, “why one should for ever conceal the fact that

one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of,

is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of

movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a

public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the

hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud

laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many

intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a

man-like way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo,

M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she

would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave

one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could

endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two

ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de

Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or

divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very

catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the

earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of

Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not

seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a

little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly.

Hilary and Guy were friends. Inseparable, they were inimical. They

agreed on nothing, nor had they one taste in common. But maybe it is in

a similar tempering of a sense of conduct that Englishmen, regardless of

all overt differences, will find their deepest friendships. Conduct was

for Guy and Hilary one of three facts, the other two being birth and

death. And it is they and their opposites who must finally make the

storms of life. Warriors of conduct and enemies of conduct--there is the

issue that has still to find its final battlefield. Hilary’s Liberalism,

in that issue, would come crashing about his heart; of his head he would

take no account, for it is not by the head that one decides in ultimate

moments. Guy, tall as a tree, Guy the latter-day “thunder-god of

dandies,” would make a flaming figure, standing against the afterglow of

the fires of an old religion called aristocracy. But Guy was far from

being of those Tories, of whom Mr. Galsworthy has written with such

cruel sympathy in _Fraternity_ and _The Patrician_, who are obsessed by

an illusion of their own exclusive right to national captaincy. Guy did

not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his

caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born

of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life

and society by anything that any body of men could do. Men individually

must clean themselves within, questing for and grasping what cleanness

there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy’s eyes, and they were

very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever.

Those two men are for me symbols of an England that I love. I am not

sure that I can explain what that England is. I am not sure that I would

like to explain it even to myself, as, maybe for the same reason, I

would not like to read Jane Austen with a mental measure. I am not sure

that there ever was such an England. The soil, to be sure, is there, the

clouds across the sun, the teasing humours of the island seasons: the

halls, the parklands, the spacious rooms, they are there. But the

figures that sweep across them--are these that we see, all? Are there no

others, lost somewhere, calmly ready to show themselves--are these that

we see, all? These healthy, high-busted women with muscles like those of

minotaurs, these girls who are either stunned with health or pale with

the common vapours of common dancing-halls, these stout, graceless ones

here, those too slender, bloodless ones there, these things that have no

voice between a shout and a whisper, these things that have yielded to

democracy nothing but their dignity--are these that we see, all? These

rather caddish young men who have no vision between a pimply purity and

vice, who are without the grace with which to adorn ignorance or the

learning with which to make vulgarity tolerable, these peasant-minded

noblewomen, these matrons who appear to have gained in youth what they

have lost in dignity, these toiling dancers, these elderly gentlemen

with their ungallant vices--are these that we see, all? Or was there

never such an England? Were the parklands and the spacious rooms never

peopled but by nincompoops let loose by wealth among the graces of

learning and fashion? Was there never such an England as I myself once

saw in the magic of a spring morning in London? It was no more than the

passing picture of Guy de Travest walking by the sulky side of

Piccadilly, as he must always do to pass between his house in Belgrave

Square to his club in Saint James’s Street, to which a few gentlemen

will still absently resort. I saw Guy walking against the broken

sunlight of the Green Park, and then I did not see Guy. It was as though

from one step to another he had walked into a dimension wherein the

desires of his heart melted his person into the England of his heart,

and he was rendered invisible in the ambience of the Green Park and

against the ancient landscape of Saint James’s.