IX

I shall never forget the impressions of that evening, nor the way, in

particular, the immediate effect of some of them was to merge the light

of my extravagant perceptions in a glamour much more diffused. I

remember feeling seriously warned, while dinner lasted, not to yield

further to my idle habit of reading into mere human things an interest

so much deeper than mere human things were in general prepared to

supply. This especial hour, at Newmarch, had always a splendour that

asked little of interpretation, that even carried itself, with an

amiable arrogance, as indifferent to what the imagination could do for

it. I think the imagination, in those halls of art and fortune, was

almost inevitably accounted a poor matter; the whole place and its

participants abounded so in pleasantness and picture, in all the

felicities, for every sense, taken for granted there by the very basis

of life, that even the sense most finely poetic, aspiring to extract the

moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of

the snub that affects--when it does affect--the uninvited reporter in

whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these

were scenes in which a transcendent intelligence had after all no

application, and that, in short, any preposterous acuteness might easily

suffer among them such a loss of dignity as overtakes the newspaper-man

kicked out. We existed, all of us together, to be handsome and happy, to

be really what we looked--since we looked tremendously well; to be that

and neither more nor less, so not discrediting by musty secrets and

aggressive doubts our high privilege of harmony and taste. We were

concerned only with what was bright and open, and the expression that

became us all was, at worst, that of the shaded but gratified eye, the

air of being forgivingly dazzled by too much lustre.

Mrs. Server, at table, was out of my range, but I wondered if, had she

not been so, I shouldn't now have been moved to recognise in her fixed

expressiveness nothing more than our common reciprocal tribute. Hadn't

everyone my eyes could at present take in a fixed expressiveness? Was I

not very possibly myself, on this ground of physiognomic congruity, more

physiognomic than anyone else? I made my excellence, on the chance, go

as far as it would to cover my temporary doubts. I saw Mrs. Brissenden,

in another frock, naturally, and other jewels from those of the evening

before; but she gave me, across the board, no more of a look than if she

had quite done with me. It struck me that she felt she _had_ done--that,

as to the subject of our discussion, she deemed her case by this time

so established as to offer comparatively little interest. I couldn't

come to her to renew the discussion; I could only come to her to make my

submission; and it doubtless appeared to her--to do her justice--more

delicate not to triumph over me in advance. The profession of joy,

however, reigned in her handsome face none the less largely for my not

having the benefit of it. If I seem to falsify my generalisation by

acknowledging that her husband, on the same side, made no more public

profession of joy than usual, I am still justified by the fact that

there was something in a manner decorative even in Brissenden's wonted

gloom. He reminded me at this hour more than ever of some fine old

Velasquez or other portrait--a presentation of ugliness and melancholy

that might have been royal. There was as little of the common in his

dry, distinguished patience as in the case I had made out for him.

Blighted and ensconed, he looked at it over the rigid convention, his

peculiar perfection of necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat, as some aged

remnant of sovereignty at the opera looks over the ribbon of an order

and the ledge of a box.

I must add, however, that in spite of my sense of his wife's indulgence

I kept quite aware of the nearer approach, as course followed course, of

my hour of reckoning with her--more and more saw the moment of the

evening at which, frankly amused at last at having me in a cleft stick,

she would draw me a little out of the throng. Of course, also, I was

much occupied in asking myself to what degree I was prepared to be

perjured. _Was_ I ready to pretend that my candour was still

unconvinced? And was I in this case only instinctively mustering my

arguments? I was certainly as sorry that Mrs. Server was out of my view

as if I proposed still to fight; and I really felt, so far as that went,

as if there might be something to fight for after the lady on my left

had given me a piece of news. I had asked her if she happened to know,

as we couldn't see, who was next Mrs. Server, and, though unable to say

at the moment, she made no scruple, after a short interval, of

ascertaining with the last directness. The stretch forward in which she

had indulged, or the information she had caused to be passed up to her

while I was again engaged on my right, established that it was Lord

Lutley who had brought the lovely lady in and that it was Mr. Long who

was on her other side. These things indeed were not the finest point of

my companion's communication, for I saw that what she felt I would be

really interested in was the fact that Mr. Long had brought in Lady

John, who was naturally, therefore, his other neighbour. Beyond Lady

John was Mr. Obert, and beyond Mr. Obert Mrs. Froome, not, for a wonder,

this time paired, as by the immemorial tradition, so fairly comical in

its candour, with Lord Lutley. Wasn't it too funny, the kind of

grandmotherly view of their relation shown in their always being put

together? If I perhaps questioned whether "grandmotherly" were exactly

the name for the view, what yet at least was definite in the light of

this evening's arrangement was that there did occur occasions on which

they were put apart. My friend of course disposed of this observation by

the usual exception that "proved the rule"; but it was absurd how I had

thrilled with her announcement, and our exchange of ideas meanwhile

helped to carry me on.

My theory had not at all been framed to embrace the phenomenon thus

presented; it had been precisely framed, on the contrary, to hang

together with the observed inveteracy of escape, on the part of the two

persons about whom it busied itself, from public juxtaposition of more

than a moment. I was fairly upset by the need to consider at this late

hour whether going in for a new theory or bracing myself for new facts

would hold out to me the better refuge. It is perhaps not too much to

say that I should scarce have been able to sit still at all but for the

support afforded me by the oddity of the separation of Lord Lutley and

Mrs. Froome; which, though resting on a general appearance directly

opposed to that of my friends, offered somehow the relief of a

suggestive analogy. What I could directly clutch at was that if the

exception did prove the rule in the one case it might equally prove it

in the other. If on a rare occasion one of these couples might be

divided, so, by as uncommon a chance, the other might be joined; the

only difference being in the gravity of the violated law. For which pair

was the betrayal greatest? It was not till dinner was nearly ended and

the ladies were about to withdraw that I recovered lucidity to make out

how much more machinery would have had to be put into motion

consistently to prevent, than once in a way to minimise, the

disconcerting accident.

All accidents, I must add, were presently to lose themselves in the

unexpectedness of my finding myself, before we left the dining-room, in

easy talk with Gilbert Long--talk that was at least easy for _him_,

whatever it might have struck me as necessarily destined to be for me. I

felt as he approached me--for he did approach me--that it was somehow

"important"; I was so aware that something in the state of my conscience

would have prevented me from assuming conversation between us to be at

this juncture possible. The state of my conscience was that I knew too

much--that no one had really any business to know what I knew. If he

suspected but the fiftieth part of it there was no simple spirit in

which he could challenge me. It would have been simple of course to

desire to knock me down, but that was barred by its being simple to

excess. It wouldn't even have been enough for him merely to ground it

on a sudden fancy. It fitted, in fine, with my cogitations that it was

so significant for him to wish to speak to me that I didn't envy him his

attempt at the particular shade of assurance required for carrying the

thing off. He would have learned from Mrs. Server that I was not, as

regarded them, at all as others were; and thus his idea, the fruit of

that stimulation, could only be either to fathom, to felicitate, or--as

it were--to destroy me. What was at the same time obvious was that no

one of these attitudes would go quite of itself. The simple sight of him

as he quitted his chair to take one nearer my own brought home to me in

a flash--and much more than anything had yet done--the real existence in

him of the condition it was my private madness (none the less private

for Grace Brissenden's so limited glimpse of it,) to believe I had

coherently stated. Is not this small touch perhaps the best example I

can give of the intensity of amusement I had at last enabled my private

madness to yield me? I found myself owing it, from this time on and for

the rest of the evening, moments of the highest concentration.

Whatever there might have been for me of pain or doubt was washed

straight out by the special sensation of seeing how "clever" poor Long

not only would have to be, but confidently and actually _was_; inasmuch

as this apprehension seemed to put me in possession of his cleverness,

besides leaving me all my own. I made him welcome, I helped him to

another cigarette, I felt above all that I should enjoy him; my response

to his overture was, in other words, quickly enough to launch us. Yet I

fear I can do little justice to the pleasant suppressed tumult of

impression and reflection that, on my part, our ten minutes together

produced. The elements that mingled in it scarce admit of

discrimination. It was still more than previously a deep sense of being

justified. My interlocutor was for those ten minutes immeasurably

superior--superior, I mean, to himself--and he couldn't possibly have

become so save through the relation I had so patiently tracked. He faced

me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound,

thought with another ease and understood with another ear. I should put

it that what came up between us was the mere things of the occasion,

were it not for the fine point to which, in my view, the things of the

occasion had been brought. While our eyes, at all events, on either

side, met serenely, and our talk, dealing with the idea, dealing with

the extraordinary special charm, of the social day now deepening to its

end, touched our companions successively, touched the manner in which

this one and that had happened to be predominantly a part of that charm;

while such were our immediate conditions I wondered of course if he had

not, just as consciously and essentially as I, quite another business

in mind. It was not indeed that our allusion to the other business would

not have been wholly undiscoverable by a third person.

So far as it took place it was of a "subtlety," as we used to say at

Newmarch, in relation to which the common register of that pressure

would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer. I had moreover

the comfort--for it amounted to that--of perceiving after a little that

we understood each other too well for our understanding really to have

tolerated the interference of passion, such passion as would have been

represented on his side by resentment of my intelligence and on my side

by resentment of his. The high sport of such intelligence--between

gentlemen, to the senses of any other than whom it must surely be

closed--demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain

amenity. Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder

at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport. He would

formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it

now. It was precisely the kind of high sport--the play of perception,

expression, sociability--in which Mrs. Server would a year or two before

have borne as light a hand. I need scarcely add how little it would have

found itself in that lady's present chords. He had said to me in our ten

minutes everything amusing she couldn't have said. Yet if when our host

gave us the sign to adjourn to the drawing-room so much as all this had

grown so much clearer, I had still, figuratively speaking, a small nut

or two left to crack. By the time we moved away together, however, these

resistances had yielded. The answers had really only been waiting for

the questions. The play of Long's mind struck me as more marked, since

the morning, by the same amount, as it might have been called, as the

march of poor Briss's age; and if I had, a while before, in the wood,

had my explanation of this latter addition, so I had it now of the

former--as to which I shall presently give it.

When music, in English society, as we know, is not an accompaniment to

the voice, the voice can in general be counted on to assert its pleasant

identity as an accompaniment to music; but at Newmarch we had been

considerably schooled, and this evening, in the room in which most of us

had assembled, an interesting pianist, who had given a concert the night

before at the near county town and been brought over during the day to

dine and sleep, would scarce have felt in any sensitive fibre that he

was not having his way with us. It may just possibly have been an

hallucination of my own, but while we sat together after dinner in a

dispersed circle I could have worked it out that, as a company, we were

considerably conscious of some experience, greater or smaller from one

of us to the other, that had prepared us for the player's spell.

Felicitously scattered and grouped, we might in almost any case have had

the air of looking for a message from it--of an imagination to be

flattered, nerves to be quieted, sensibilities to be soothed. The whole

scene was as composed as if there were scarce one of us but had a secret

thirst for the infinite to be quenched. And it was the infinite that,

for the hour, the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it

to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our

receptive attitudes and faces. Each of us, I think, now wore the

expression--or confessed at least to the suggestion--of some

indescribable thought; which might well, it was true, have been nothing

more unmentionable than the simple sense of how the posture of deference

to this noble art has always a certain personal grace to contribute. We

neglected nothing of it that could make our general effect ample, and

whether or no we were kept quiet by the piano, we were at least

admonished, to and fro, by our mutual visibility, which each of us

clearly, desired to make a success. I have little doubt, furthermore,

that to each of us was due, as the crown of our inimitable day, the

imputation of having something quite of our own to think over.

We thought, accordingly--we continued to think, and I felt that, by the

law of the occasion, there had as yet been for everyone no such

sovereign warrant for an interest in the private affairs of everyone

else. As a result of this influence all that at dinner had begun to fade

away from me came back with a rush and hovered there with a vividness. I

followed many trains and put together many pieces; but perhaps what I

most did was to render a fresh justice to the marvel of our civilised

state. The perfection of that, enjoyed as we enjoyed it, all made a

margin, a series of concentric circles of rose-colour (shimmering away

into the pleasant vague of everything else that didn't matter,) for the

so salient little figure of Mrs. Server, still the controlling image for

me, the real principle of composition, in this affluence of fine things.

What, for my part, while I listened, I most made out was the beauty and

the terror of conditions so highly organised that under their rule her

small lonely fight with disintegration could go on without the betrayal

of a gasp or a shriek, and with no worse tell-tale contortion of lip or

brow than the vibration, on its golden stem, of that constantly renewed

flower of amenity which my observation had so often and so mercilessly

detached only to find again in its place. This flower nodded perceptibly

enough in our deeply stirred air, but there was a peace, none the less,

in feeling the spirit of the wearer to be temporarily at rest. There was

for the time no gentleman on whom she need pounce, no lapse against

which she need guard, no presumption she need create, nor any suspicion

she need destroy. In this pause in her career it came over me that I

should have liked to leave her; it would have prepared for me the

pleasant after-consciousness that I had seen her pass, as I might say,

in music out of sight.

But we were, alas! all too much there, too much tangled and involved for

that; every actor in the play that had so unexpectedly insisted on

constituting itself for me sat forth as with an intimation that they

were not to be so easily disposed of. It was as if there were some last

act to be performed before the curtain could fall. Would the definite

dramatic signal for ringing the curtain down be then only--as a grand

climax and _coup de theatre_--the due attestation that poor Briss had

succumbed to inexorable time and Mrs. Server given way under a cerebral

lesion? Were the rest of us to disperse decorously by the simple action

of the discovery that, on our pianist's striking his last note, with its

consequence of permitted changes of attitude, Gilbert Long's victim had

reached the point of final simplification and Grace Brissenden's the

limit of age recorded of man? I could look at neither of these persons

without a sharper sense of the contrast between the tragedy of their

predicament and the comedy of the situation that did everything for them

but suspect it. They had truly been arrayed and anointed, they had

truly been isolated, for their sacrifice. I was sufficiently aware even

then that if one hadn't known it one might have seen nothing; but I was

not less aware that one couldn't know anything without seeing all; and

so it was that, while our pianist played, my wandering vision played and

played as well. It took in again, while it went from one of them to the

other, the delicate light that each had shed on the other, and it made

me wonder afresh what still more delicate support they themselves might

not be in the very act of deriving from their dim community. It was for

the glimmer of this support that I had left them together two or three

hours before; yet I was obliged to recognise that, travel between them

as my fancy might, it could detect nothing in the way of a consequent

result. I caught no look from either that spoke to me of service

rendered them; and I caught none, in particular, from one of them to the

other, that I could read as a symptom of their having compared notes.

The fellow-feeling of each for the lost light of the other remained for

me but a tie supposititious--the full-blown flower of my theory. It

would show here as another flower, equally mature, for me to have made

out a similar dim community between Gilbert Long and Mrs. Brissenden--to

be able to figure them as groping side by side, proportionately, towards

a fellowship of light overtaken; but if I failed of this, for ideal

symmetry, that seemed to rest on the general truth that joy brings

people less together than sorrow.

So much for the course of my impressions while the music lasted--a

course quite consistent with my being prepared for new combinations as

soon as it was over. Promptly, when that happened, the bow was unbent;

and the combination I first seized, amid motion and murmur and rustle,

was that, once more, of poor Briss and Lady John, the latter of whom had

already profited by the general reaction to endeavour to cultivate

afresh the vainest of her sundry appearances. She had laid on him the

same coercive hand to which I owed my having found him with her in the

afternoon, but my intervention was now to operate with less ceremony. I

chanced to be near enough to them for Brissenden, on seeing me, to fix

his eyes on me in silence, but in a manner that could only bring me

immediately nearer. Lady John never did anything in silence, but she

greeted me as I came up to them with a fine false alarm. "No, indeed,"

she cried, "you shan't carry him off this time!"--and poor Briss

disappeared, leaving us face to face, even while she breathed defiance.

He had made no joke of it, and I had from him no other recognition; it

was therefore a mere touch, yet it gave me a sensible hint that he had

begun, as things were going, to depend upon me, that I already in a

fashion figured to him--and on amazingly little evidence after all--as

his natural protector, his providence, his effective omniscience. Like

Mrs. Server herself, he was materially on my hands, and it was proper I

should "do" for him. I wondered if he were really beginning to look to

me to avert his inexorable fate. Well, if his inexorable fate was to be

an unnameable climax, it had also its special phases, and one of these I

_had_ just averted. I followed him a moment with my eyes, and I then

observed to Lady John that she decidedly took me for too simple a

person. She had meanwhile also watched the direction taken by her

liberated victim, and was the next instant prepared with a reply to my

charge. "Because he has gone to talk with May Server? I don't quite see

what you mean, for I believe him really to be in terror of her. Most of

the men here _are_, you know, and I've really assured myself that he

doesn't find her any less awful than the rest. He finds her the more so

by just the very marked extra attention that you may have noticed she

has given him."

"And does that now happen to be what he has so eagerly gone off to

impress upon her?"

Lady John was so placed that she could continue to look at our friends,

and I made out in her that she was not, in respect to them, without some

slight elements of perplexity. These were even sufficient to make her

temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her

consistency. "If you mean by 'impressing upon' her speaking to her, he

hasn't gone--you can see for yourself--to impress upon her anything;

they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of

sitting together without sound. I don't know," she laughed, "what's the

matter with such people!"

"It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some

warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way _you_ sit with

your friends. You steer admirably clear of every extravagance. I don't

see, at any rate, why Mrs. Server is a terror----"

But she had already taken me up. "If she doesn't chatter as _I_ do?" She

thought it over. "But she does--to everyone but Mr. Briss. I mean to

every man she can pick up."