Oliver’s criticism on Nature’s mistakes, because the room had been
furnished and decorated in accordance with his tastes, and with one
exception was completely a woman’s room. Everything in it was soft and
shaded and screened sideways and draped. But in one corner was a
turning-lathe with an unshaded electric light directly over it.
Oliver walked across to an easy-chair by the fireplace, and took down an
embroidered bag that hung on a painted screen there. It contained a
quantity of coloured wools, and an embroidery tambour. He was employed
just now on making a chair-back in _petit point_, and could easily fill
in areas of uniform colour by electric light, though daylight was
necessary for matching shades of wool. The design was a perfectly unreal
rustic scene with a cottage and a tree and a lamb and a blue sky and a
slightly lighter blue lake. It realized completely to him what the
country ought to be like, and what the country never was like. Instead
of the lamb there was in real life a barking dog and a wasp; instead of
a blue lake a marsh, which oozed with mud and dirtied your boots;
instead of a clean white cottage, a pig-sty or a cowshed where stupid
animals breathed heavily through their noses at you. Oliver hated the
country in consequence, and never left town unless it was to immure
himself from Saturday till Monday in a very comfortable house with
central heating, or to spend a few weeks in some other town; but it was
delightful to sit in his own pleasant room, and with coloured wools make
a picture of what the country should be. In the foreground of his piece
were clumps of daffodils, which he copied from those that stood on a
table near him, for there ought always to be daffodils in the
foreground.
Alice occupied herself for half an hour or so with an active foot on the
treadle of her lathe, and made loud buzzing noises with steel tools and
boxwood. Then, as usual, she went to bed very early, after a short
struggle to read the evening paper, and left Oliver to himself. These
were the hours which he liked best of all the day, for there was no
chance of being interrupted and no prospect of having to go out of doors
or perform any action in which he would come in contact with real life
in any form. Alice’s lathe was silent, and all round him were soft,
shaded objects and his piece of needlework. But though he disliked the
rough touch of life more than anything in the world, there was nothing
he liked better than to imagine himself in the hubbub and excitement of
adventure without stirring from his chair.
Sometimes, as he had done this afternoon, he would read a story of the
sea, and thus, without terror of shipwreck or qualms of nausea, listen
to the crash of menacing waves and the throb of the racing screw.
Sometimes he would spend an hour in the country, while his unerring
needle made daffodils and lambs; or, with a strong effort of the
imagination, travel across France to the delightful shores of the
Riviera with a vividness derived from the Continental Bradshaw. A sniff
at the lemon brought in with a tray of wafer biscuits and a siphon could
give him the effect of a saunter through the lemon groves outside Nice,
and the jingle of money in his pocket recalled the Casino at Monte
Carlo, where he saw himself amassing a colossal fortune in a single
night, and losing it all again. As a matter of fact, he never set foot
in the real Temple of Chance, because there were so many bold females
there who looked at his handsome face with such friendly, if not
provocative, glances. For though in imagination he was a perfect Don
Juan, the merest glance of interest from a female eye would send him
scurrying back like a lost lamb to the protective austerity of Alice.
To-night it seemed to him that the habits and instincts of years came
about him in crowds, asking him to classify them and construct a
definite theory about them for use in practical life, and suddenly, in a
flash of illumination, he saw the cohering principle on which he had
acted so long without consciously formulating it. He had always hated
real people, real experiences, the sun, the wind, the rain, but equally
had he loved the counterfeits of them as presented by Art in its various
forms, and by the suggestions that a lemon or a continental Bradshaw or
a piece of wool-work could give him. The theory that held all these
things together was that life for him consisted of imagination, not of
experience, and the practical application of that was to study and soak
himself in the suggestions that gave him the sting of experience,
without any sordid contact with life. To make a fortune (or lose one) at
Monte Carlo would have implied setting cheek to jowl with bold, bad
people, and risking a great deal of money. It was infinitely better to
study the time-table of the trains to Monte Carlo, sniff a lemon, and
jingle his money in his pocket; while if he wanted the sense of the
hot, smoke-laden, scent-heavy atmosphere, he must smoke a cigarette and
sprinkle his handkerchief with musk or frangipane. A pack of cards
thrown about the table would assist the illusion, and he could say,
“_Faites vos jeux, messieurs et mesdames_,” in the chanting monotone of
the croupiers.
From that night his horizons began to expand, and he wondered at himself
for the blindness in which he had hitherto spent his life. The London
streets, in spite of the wind and the sun and the rain and the fog, woke
into a teeming life of their own, and pelted suggestions at him as the
crowd pelted confetti at mi-carême. He began not to dislike the crowded
pavements, for he no longer took any notice of the real people who were
there, so absorbing had become the shop windows which gave him the
material which he translated into dreams. Hitherto, when he had passed a
fish shop he had held his breath, so that the objectionable smell of it
might not vex him; now, he inhaled it with a gusto as adding to the
vividness of M. Pierre Loti’s “Pêcheur d’Islande,” He would stand before
a fish shop for five minutes at a time, and be no longer in Bond Street,
but in the hold of his boat or on the quay at Paimpol. Even the boy in
the shop who went out with a flat tray on his shoulder was _mon frère
Yves_, and Oliver almost spoke to him in French. Next door was a shop
filled with Japanese screens and carved jade and branches of paper
cherry-blossom, and lo! his fishing experiences were whisked away, and
he was living in the land of _Madame Chrysanthème_.
But it was only for a short while that the shop windows were, so to
speak, coloured illustrations in books written by other men, for he soon
discarded these second-hand canvases, and constructed out of them and
the wealth of suggestive material that lay broadcast round him new and
amazing adventures of his own. His senses, and in particular his sense
of smell, grew every day more acute, for daily he was keenly on the look
out for a sight or sound, a touch or smell, that would be to him a hint
out of which he could evolve some fantastic imagination that lived
henceforth in his brain as the memory of an actual experience lives in
the brain of those who, like his sister, must know that a thing has
happened to them before they can call it their own.
But of all the senses, that of smell supplied him with the vividest
hints: the aromatic odour, for instance, that came out of the door of a
chemist’s shop would launch him on a brain adventure which lasted the
whole length of a stroll down Piccadilly, in which he felt himself
suffering from some acute and mysterious disease that baffled the skill
of doctors, and led them to administer all manner of curious drugs in
the hope of bringing him alleviation. Then when he had soaked the honey
from this painful experience--for however disagreeable such an illusion
would have been in real life, it had in those vivid unrealities the
thrill and excitement of such without any of its inconveniences--the
sight of a jeweller’s window blazing with gems would scatter the clouds
of his approaching demise, and muffle the sound of his own passing bell
with the strains of a ball-room band. He would spring from his
death-bed, and, experiencing a new incarnation and a change of sex,
would be the central figure, queen in her own right, of some great State
ball.
She--he, that is to say--was unmarried, and as she wove the chain of the
royal quadrille, the hands of half a dozen aspirants to be her
prince-consort communicated their hopes in the pressure of finger-tips.
A tiara to which the one in the shop window supplied the clue was on her
golden-haired head, ropes of pearls clinked as she moved, a great
diamond four times the size of the solitary splendour that winked on the
dark blue velvet there, scintillated on her breast, and to each of her
lovers, the Grand Duke Peter, the Archduke Francis, the Prince Ignatius,
she gave the same mysterious little smile, that, while she disdained
their passion, yet expressed some faint vibrating response. All men
seemed rather alike to her, and she gave a little sigh, half
contemptuous of their adoration, half curious about the desire that made
them so divinely discontent. To-night she had determined to choose one
of them, for, queen though she was, she must conform to the usage of
the world, and besides--besides, the thought of bearing a child of her
own made some secret nerve ecstatically ache within her. She must
choose....
Then, even while Oliver was hesitating between the Archduke Francis and
Prince Ignatius, he would catch sight of a flower-seller by the fountain
in Piccadilly Circus, and straightway he would be in the country of his
_petit point_ again, where lambs were white and lakes blue; or the sight
of a draped model with a waxwork head would switch him off into a new
amorous adventure with a lady in an orange-coloured dress, just like
that, and the point of an infinitesimal shoe peeping seductively from
below its hem.
By degrees, this particular figure, standing in royal state alone behind
the plate-glass window in Regent Street, began to exercise a controlling
influence on his imagination, and he would hurry by the rows of shops
which lay on his route without constructing independent romances out of
the hints they gave him, and only glancing at them to see what
suggestions they supplied as regards _Her_. He gave her, for instance,
the tiara which he had worn when he was queen in his own right; he
presented her with some lemon-coloured gloves that reached to her elbow;
he bought her daffodils from Piccadilly Circus; and, rather more
tentatively, he endowed her with a black hat with Gloire-de-Dijon roses
in it; and standing there in front of her, he would hold up to his nose
the handkerchief on which he had poured wallflower scent, which he was
sure she would use, and inhale a sweetness that really seemed to come
from her through the plate-glass window. All other shops which could not
contribute to her embellishment became uninteresting again, and once
more he would hurry with held breath past the fishmonger, for if was
clearly unsuitable to present her with kippers, raw salmon, or even live
lobsters. Then, standing a little sideways, not directly in front of
her, her eyes met his, and though usually they seemed lost in reverie,
occasionally they would meet his own in a way that sent his heart
thumping in his throat. Always she wore the same faint, unfathomable
smile, reminding him of Leonardo’s “Monna Lisa,” and it seemed to him
that the reason for which Nature had brought him into the world was that
he should penetrate into the thoughts that set that red mouth so
deliciously ajar. It must surely be on his own lips that it would
close.... Her loveliness, while she was kind, made the whole world
lovely to him, and his whole nature seemed to awake.
His constant day-long walks about London had wonderfully improved his
health; he no longer feared the sun and the wind, and got quite bronzed
in complexion. Still more remarkable was, so to speak, the psychical
bronzing of his mind, the suntan of virility that overspread it;
everything was shot with interest for him, and he even got Alice to
show him how to work the lathe. For this was no pining and lovelorn
affection; it was quite a hopeful affair, and though, when alone, he
might sigh and turn over and back again on his bed, the brilliance and
upright carriage of the object of his adoration stung him into a manly
robustness. She would not like him to go sighing and sheltering himself
about the world.
It was no wonder that Alice noticed and applauded the change in him.
“Something has happened to you, Oliver,” she said one night at dinner,
while they were cracking walnuts together, for he had aspired to that
accomplishment, though it hurt his soft hands very much. “Something has
happened to you. I wonder if I can guess what it is?”
He felt quite secure of the secrecy of his passion, and cracked two
walnuts.
“I’m quite certain you can’t,” he said. “Lord, that did hurt!”
“Well, I shall do no harm then if I try,” said she. “I believe you’ve
fallen in love.”
The convoluted kernels dropped from Oliver’s fingers.
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“My dear, it’s obvious to a woman’s eyes. I always told you that what
you needed was to fall in love. You don’t do wool-work any more; you
walk instead of sitting in an easy-chair. Some day, if you go on like
this, you will play golf.”
“Gracious! Am I as bad as that?” exclaimed he, startled into an irony
that gave his case away.
Alice clapped her hands delightedly.
“Ah! I am right then!” she cried. “My dear, do tell me who she is? Shall
I go and call on her? Have I ever seen her?”
Oliver felt a curious diplomatic pleasure in giving true information
which he knew would deceive.
“Yes; I feel sure you have seen her,” he said, remembering that Alice
had her dresses made at the shop where his divinity deified the window.
“I can’t say that you know her.”
“Oh, who is she?” cried Alice. “Is she a girl? Is she a woman? Will she
marry you?”
“No; I don’t suppose so,” said he.
Alice’s face fell.
“Is she somebody else’s wife, then?” she asked. “I hope not. But I don’t
know that it matters. It is the fact of your having fallen in love which
has improved you so immensely. I’ve noticed that an unhappy romance is
just as good for people as a humdrum success which ends in christening
mugs and perambulators.”
Oliver got up.
“You are rather coarse sometimes, dear Alice,” he observed.
Oliver’s romance and his growing robustness lasted for some few days
after Alice had guessed his secret, and then an end came to it more
horrible than any that his wildest imaginations could have suggested to
him. One day he had seen in a celebrated furrier’s a sable stole that
would most delightfully protect his lady’s waxen neck from the
inclemencies of a shrewd May morning, and he hurried along, while that
was still vivid to his eye, in order to visualize it round her neck.
There was a crowd of women in front of her window, and he edged his way
in with eyes downcast, as was his wont, so that she might burst
splendidly upon him at short range. Then, full of devotion and sable
stole, he raised them.
She was not there. In her place was a bold-faced creature in carmine,
with lustful, wicked eyes like the females at Monte Carlo. His healthy
outdoor life stood him in good stead at that moment, for he did not
swoon or address shrill ejaculations to his Maker. He just staggered
back one step, as if he had received a blow in the chest, then rallied
his failing forces again....
All day he walked from dressmaker to dressmaker, seeking to find her;
and when he was too much fatigued to pursue his way on foot any longer,
he went to his club, and by the aid of a London directory ascertained
the addresses of a couple of dozen more shops farther afield where she
might possibly be found. These he visited in a taxi, but without
success, and returned home to his flat a quarter of an hour before
dinner, where, utterly exhausted, he went to sleep in his chair.
Naturally, he dreamed about her, in a vague nightmarish manner, and she
seemed to be in trouble.
He awoke with a start, and for a moment thought that, like Pygmalion, he
had brought his Galatea to life, for there she stood in front of him in
the dusk. At least, her orange dress stood there.
“My dear Oliver,” said Alice’s voice, “aren’t you ready for dinner yet?
Make me some compliment on my new tea-gown....”
After that miserable adventure he resolved to have no more to do with
the serious or emotional side of life, and in the words of one of our
modern bards “he held it best in living to take all things very
lightly.” He had consecrated all the power of his imagination on one
great passion, and now his dream was exploded and Alice had got the
tea-gown! Almost worse than that was that the divine orange vesture of
his beloved had begun to multiply in a most unseemly manner in the shops
of quite inferior dressmakers, and half a dozen times a day he could
feel his breath catch in his throat as for a moment he thought he saw in
some other window the wraith of her who was for ever lost to him. But
while this stung and wounded him, it yet probably helped to cure him,
and a few weeks later he was immersed again in the minor joys of life,
visiting Capri and the Bay of Naples, when he saw the cages of quails in
the poulterers’ shops, going again to Court balls opposite the
jeweller’s, tossing with the fishing fleet on moonlit nights off the
Cornish coast opposite the fishmonger’s, or spending hours in the
country over his embroidery frame.
One day a smart shower drove him into the portals of Micklethwait’s
Stores in Knightsbridge, where the most exotic of purchasers can find
their curious wants supplied, and all at once it struck him that these
incessant peregrinations of the streets made up a very diluted form of
life. Here all possible fountains of desire and adventure scintillated
under one roof, and you had but to take a step out of the Arctic winter
of the fur department to find yourself in the hot summer weather of
straw hats, or playing a match against the heads of the profession in
the room where billiard balls and tables were sold.
Though he would never fall seriously in love again, he could have some
pleasant flirtations in the ladies’ underwear department, or, if his
mood was Byronic, he would go to the games department and think of the
nursery he would have furnished for his growing family if the beloved in
the orange dress had remained faithful to him, and not given her
tea-gown to Alice, whom it strangely misbecame. With a stifled groan he
would tear himself away from that, and, surrounded by paper and
envelopes and red-tape and sealing-wax, spend an hour as Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs, conducting abstruse diplomatic operations
with the perfidious Turk, and worsting him at every turn in the tangled
game.
So underneath those lofty roofs and terra-cotta cupolas, he began to
live a life of which the variety and extravagance baffles description. A
chance shower had originally taken him there (for on such small
accidents does our destiny depend), but now rain or fine, hot or cold,
he was the first in the morning to pass through the swing doors and,
with a couple of hurried intervals for meals, the last to leave in the
evening. Whether August burned the torrid pavements outside, or whether
the fog gripped the town in its grimy hand, there was always the same
warm, calm atmosphere inside laden with a hundred aromatic scents and
teeming with rich suggestions of love and athletics and chemistry and
travel. Often in the morning he would be tempted to go straight to the
department of tea-gowns and other more intimate feminine apparel, but he
kept a firm hold on himself and transacted business in the stationery
department, or spent a studious hour in the book-room first.
Nor did he neglect his exercise, and in the games department he knocked
up a hundred runs at cricket, or had a brisk game of hockey, or played a
round of golf, a pursuit to which he was now passionately attached owing
to the strange suggestive forms of niblicks and brassies. Or,
artistically inclined, he would wander among paint-boxes, palettes, and
sketching umbrellas by the shore of some windless sea, and then hurry
away to a counter behind which were discreet bathing costumes for both
sexes, and spend a pleasant quarter of an hour in mixed bathing. This
always gave him an appetite, and he tripped off to the cooked foods
department, popping in at the bakery on the way, and had a delicious
lunch off crisp country bread, with a pot of caviare and a couple of
slices of galantine, washed down with a glass of Chablis from the wine
department. Then perhaps after a whiff of roasting coffee from the
grocery department, he would put on some clean ducks with a grey silk
tie (haberdashery), in which he put a pear-shaped pearl pin (jewellery),
and then, fresh and cool, spent a half-hour of airy badinage with the
agreeable ladies, “whose presence,” as he recollected Mr. Pater saying,
“so strangely rose” beside the chiffon and millinery. His constant
passage through the various departments provoked no suspicion in the
minds of the shop-walkers and attendants that he was one of the
light-fingered brigade, for from time to time he made small purchases
and always paid ready cash, and it occurred to no one that here was an
opportunity of studying, first-hand, the rapid development of one of the
strangest and most harmless monomaniacs who had ever pursued his
innocent way outside the protective walls of a lunatic asylum.
After such a delicious lunch it was no wonder that when he went back to
his flat he could make but small pretence at eating, for in imagination
he had fared so delicately and well that the lumps of muscular mutton
and robust beef provided by Alice’s catering made no appeal to him. She
might wonder at the smallness of his appetite, but she could not feel
the slightest anxiety about that, so bright of eye and alert of limb was
he under the spell of the happy busy life crowded with incident, that
now was his.
After lunch he would sit with her a little, talking in the most vivid
and interesting manner on the topics of the moment, and then, looking at
his watch, would silently remind himself that he was giving a pianoforte
recital at three, and, if he was already a little late, would call a
taxi to take him back to the Stores, while he suppled and gave massage
to his fingers as he drove.
He was by this time in an advanced state of his agreeable insanity, for
he had lost all control over his imagination, the workings of which were
entirely in the hands of the suggestions that external objects made to
it. It was just in this that the completeness of his enjoyment of life
lay. It was in this, too, that there lay such discomfort and suffering
as was his. The sight of a “dental case” in a window, with its rows of
gleaming teeth and rose-coloured gums and palates, was sufficient to
give him a violent stab of pain in his teeth, for the suggestion implied
that he would have to get them all taken out before he attained to the
acquisition of those foreign splendours. But he had learned by this
time the position of all the shops between his flat and the Stores which
displayed these and similar dolorous exhibitions, and his eye would
instinctively avert itself from doctors’ door-plates or shops where were
sold ear-trumpets, and pitch, with the precision of a bird on a twig, on
cheerful and harmonious windows. He no longer, in fact, lived a
self-governing life of his own, but was no more than thistledown in a
wind before the suggestions that the outside world made to his
disordered senses. And then, as was bound to happen sooner or later,
came the crash.
* * * * *