TOBY
Lord Evelyn Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird was not usually
known as all or any of this, but as Toby. It would have been a difficult
matter, requiring a faith of the most preposterous sort, to have stood
in front of him and seriously said, "I believe you to be Lord Evelyn
Ronald Anstruther D'Eyncourt Massingbird," and the results of so doing
might have been quite disconcerting. But having been told he was Toby,
it would have been impossible to forget or to doubt it. The most vivid
imagination could not conceive a more obvious Toby; the identity might
almost have been guessed by a total stranger or an intelligent
foreigner. He was about twenty-four years old (the usual age of Tobys),
and he had a pleasantly ugly face, with a snub nose, slightly freckled.
Blue eyes, in no way beautiful, but very white as to the white and blue
as to the blue, looked honestly out from under a typically
unintellectual forehead, above which was a shock head of sandy hair,
which stood up like a terrier's coat or a doormat, and on which no brush
yet invented had been known to exert a flattening tendency. He was about
five foot ten in height, and broad for that. His hat had a tendency to
tilt towards the back of his head, and he had big, firm hands, callous
on their insides with the constant use of weapons made for the violent
propulsion of balls. He always looked comfortable in his clothes, and
whether he was adorning the streets of London, immaculately dressed and
hot and large, or trudging through heather in homespun, he was never
anything but Toby.
A further incredible fact about him, in addition to his impossible
baptismal name, was that he was Jack Conybeare's younger brother, and
Kit's brother-in-law. Nature, that exquisite humorist who turns so many
dissimilar little figures out of the same moulds, had never shown
herself a more imaginative artist than when she ordained that Jack and
Toby should have the same father and mother. The more you considered
their relationship, the stranger that relationship appeared. Jack, slim,
aquiline, dark, with his fine, taper-fingered hands and the unmistakable
marks of breeding in face and form, was sufficiently remote to all
appearance from Toby--fair, snub-nosed, squat, with his big gloves and
his big boots, and his chair-filling build; but in character they were,
considered as brothers, perfectly irreconcilable. The elder had what we
may call a spider-mind. It wove a thread invisible almost to the eye,
but strong enough to bear the weight of what it was meant to bear.
Obvious issues, the natural consequences of things, Jack passed by in
the manner of an express rushing through a wayside station, and before
Toby, to continue the metaphor, had drawn up, flushed and panting, at
the platform, and read the name on the station board, Jack would be a
gray streamer of smoke on the horizon. But Toby's grasp of the obvious
was as sure as Jack's keen appreciation of subtleties, and though he
made no dragon-fly dartings through the air, nor vanished unaware on
horizon points, he went very steadily along, right in the middle of the
road, and was never in any danger of falling into obvious ditches, or
colliding with anyone who did not unquestionably get in his way, or
where he might be expected to go.
Toby was a person who got continually slapped on the back--a lovable
habit, but one which no amount of diplomacy or thread-spinning will
produce. To slap Jack on the back, for instance, must always, from his
earliest years, have been an impossibility. This was lucky, for he would
have resented it. That nobody ever quarrelled with either of them
appears at first sight a point in common; in reality it illustrates
their dissimilarity. It was dangerous to quarrel with Jack; it was
blankly impossible to quarrel with Toby. You dare not try it with the
one; it was useless to try it with the other.
At the present moment his sister-in-law was trying her utmost to do so,
and failing pitiably. Kit was not accustomed to fail or to be pitiable,
and it irritated her.
"You have no sense, Toby," she was saying. "You cannot see, or you will
not, where your interest lies--yes, and your duty, too."
Now, when Kit talked about duty Toby always smiled. When he smiled his
eyes wrinkled up till they closed, and he showed a row of strong, clean,
useful teeth. Strength, cleanliness, and utility, in fact, were his most
salient features.
Kit leaned back in her chair, waiting for his answer, for Toby got
confused unless you gave him time. They were sitting in the tented
balcony of the Hungarian Embassy, and from within came the rhythm of
dance music and a delicious murmur of voices. It was the evening of the
day of the bazaar, and Kit felt that she had earned her ball. The night
was hot, and as she attempted the hopeless task of quarrelling with Toby
she fanned herself, partly, no doubt, for the sake of the current of
air, but to a psychologist, judging by her face, not without the
intention of fanning the embers of her wrath. She had sat out this dance
with him on purpose, and she was beginning to think that she was wasting
her time.
Toby's smile broadened.
"When did you last do your duty, Kit?" he asked.
"My duty?" said Kit sharply. "We are talking about yours."
"And my duty is----"
"Not to go to that vulgar, stupid music-hall to-morrow night with that
loutish friend of yours from Oxford, but to dine with us, and meet Miss
Murchison. You seem to forget that Jack is your elder brother."
"My duty towards Jack----" began Toby irreverently.
"Don't be profane. You are Jack's only brother, and I tell you plainly
that it is no fun being Lord Conybeare unless you have something to be
Lord Conybeare with. Putting money into the estate," said Kit rather
unwisely, "is like throwing it down a well."
Toby became thoughtful, and his eyes opened again. His mind worked
slowly, but it soon occurred to him that he had never heard that his
brother was famed for putting money into the estate.
"And taking money out of the estate is like taking it out of a well," he
remarked at length, with an air of a person who is sure of his facts,
but does not mean to draw inferences of any kind whatever.
Kit stared at him a moment. It had happened once or twice before that
she had suspected Toby of dark sayings, and this sounded remarkably like
another of them. He was so sensible that sometimes he was not at all
stupid. She made a mental note of how admirable a thing is a perfectly
impenetrable manner if you wish to make an innuendo; there was nothing
so telling.
"Well?" she said at length.
Toby's face expressed nothing whatever. He took off a large eight and
lit a cigarette.
"That's all," he said--"nothing more."
Kit decided to pass on.
"It's all very well for you now," she said, "for you have six or seven
hundred a year, and you happen to like nothing so much as hitting round
balls with pieces of wood and iron. It is an inexpensive taste, and you
are lucky to find it amusing. In your position at present you have no
calls upon you and no barrack of a house to keep up. But when you are
Lord Conybeare you will find how different it is. Besides, you must
marry some time, and when you marry you must marry money. Old bachelors
are more absurd, if possible, than old spinsters. And goodness knows how
ridiculous they are!"
"My sister-in-law is a mercenary woman," remarked Toby. "And aren't we
getting on rather quick?"
"Quick!" screamed Kit. "I am painfully trying to drag you a few steps
forward, and you say we are getting on quick! Now, Toby, you are
twenty-five----"
"Four," said Toby.
"Oh, Toby, you are enough to madden Job! What difference does that
make? I choose that you should be twenty-five! All your people marry
early; they always did; and it is a most proper thing for a young man to
do. Really, young men are getting quite impossible. They won't
dance--you aren't dancing; they won't marry--you aren't married; they
spend all their lazy, selfish lives in amusing themselves and--and
ruining other people."
"It's better to amuse yourself than not to amuse yourself," said Toby.
This, as he knew, was a safe draw. If Kit was at home, out she came.
"That is your view. Thank goodness there are other views," said Kit,
with extraordinary energy. "Why, for instance, do you suppose that I
went down to the wilds of Kensington and opened a bazaar, as I did this
afternoon?"
"I can't think," said Toby. "Wasn't it awfully slow?"
He began to grin again.
"Slow? Yes, of course it was slow; but it is one's duty not to mind what
is slow," continued Kit rapidly, pumping up moral sentiments with
surprising fluency. "Why do you suppose Jack goes to the House whenever
there is a Church Bill on? Why do I come and argue with you and quarrel
with you like this?"
Toby opened his blue eyes as wide as Kit's bazaar.
"Are you quarrelling with me?" he asked. "I didn't know. Try not, Kit."
Kit laughed.
"Dear Toby, don't be so odious and tiresome," she said. "Do be nice. You
can behave so nicely if you like, and the Princess was saying at the
bazaar this afternoon what a dear boy you were."
"So the bazaar wasn't so slow," thought Toby, who knew that Kit had a
decided weakness, quite unaccountable, for Princesses. But he was wise
enough to say nothing.
"And I've taken all the trouble to ask Miss Murchison to dinner just
because of you," continued Kit quickly, seeing her partner out of the
corner of her eye careering wildly about in search of her. "She's
perfectly charming, Toby, and very pretty, and you always like talking
to pretty girls, and quite right, too; and the millions--oh, the
millions! You have no one to look after you but Jack and me, and Jack is
a City man now; and what will happen to the Conybeares if you don't
marry money I don't know. You want money; she wants a Marquis. There it
is!"
"Did you ask her?" said Toby parenthetically.
"No, darling, I did not," said Kit, with pardonable asperity. "I left
that to you."
Toby sighed.
"You go so quick, Kit," he said. "You marry me to a person I've never
yet seen."
Kit drew on her gloves; the partner was imminent.
"Come and see her, Toby--come and see her. That is all I ask. Oh, here
you are, Ted; I've been waiting for you for ages. I thought you had
thrown me over. Good-bye, Toby; to-morrow at half-past eight, and I'll
promise to order iced asparagus, which I know you like."
The two went off, leaving Toby alone. Conversation of this kind with Kit
always reduced him to a state of breathless mental collapse. She caught
him up, so to speak, and whirled him along through endless seas of
prospective alliances, to drop him at the end, a mere lifeless lump, in
unknown localities, with the prospect of iced asparagus as a
restorative. This question of his marriage was not a new one between
them. Many times before Kit had snatched him up like this, and plumped
him down in front of some extraordinarily eligible maiden. But either he
or the extraordinarily eligible maiden, or both, had walked away as soon
as Kit's eye was turned, and made themselves disconcerting to her
schemes. But to-night Kit had shown an unusual vigour and directness.
Selfish and unscrupulous as she was, she had, like everybody else, a
soft spot for Toby, and she could honestly think of nothing more
conducive to his highest advantage than to procure him a wealthy wife.
Wealth was the _sine quâ non_--no other need apply; but in Miss
Murchison she thought she had found very much more. The girl was a
beauty--a real beauty; and though she was not of the type that appealed
personally to Kit, she might easily appeal immensely to Toby. She had
only come out that season, and Kit had met her but once or twice before;
but a very much duller eye than Kit's could have seen that in all
probability she would not be on view in the eligible department very
long. She was American by origin, but had been brought up entirely in
England; and her countrymen observed with pain, and the men of her
adopted country with that patronizing approval over which our
Continental neighbours find it so hard to keep calm, that no one would
have guessed her nationality. Of her father little was known, but that
little was good, for he was understood to be wealthy beyond the dreams
of avarice, having made a colossal pile in some porky or oily manner,
and to have had the good taste not to beget any other children. She and
her mother had been at the bazaar that afternoon, where they had run
across the pervasive Kit, who suddenly saw in her impulsive way that
here at last was the very girl for Toby, wondered at her blindness in
not seeing it before, and engaged them to dine next evening.
Now, Mrs. Murchison had long sighed and pined for an invitation from
Kit, whom she considered to be the topmost flower of the smartest plant
in the pleasant garden of society. At last her wish was fulfilled.
Princes had drunk her champagne, and danced or sat out to her fiddles,
and made themselves agreeable under her palms; but a small and
particular set in society in which Kit most intimately moved had
hitherto had nothing to say to her, and she accepted the invitation with
effusion, though it meant an excuse or a subterfuge to a Countess. But
Mrs. Murchison had picked up the line of London life with astonishing
swiftness and great perspicuity. Her object was to get herself and her
daughter, not into the cleverest or the most amusing, or, as she styled
it, the "ducalest set," in London, but into what she and others, for
want of a better name, called "the smart set," and she had observed, at
first with surprise and pain, but unerringly, that rank counted for
nothing there. She could not have told you, nor perhaps could they, what
did count there, but she knew very well it was not rank.
"Why, we might play kiss-in-the-ring with the Queen and Royal Family,"
she had observed once to her daughter, "but we should be no nearer for
that."
A year ago she would have hoarded a Countess as being a step in the
ladder she proposed to get to the top of, but now she knew that no
Countess, _quâ_ Countess, mattered a straw in the attainment of the goal
for which she aimed; and this particular one, whom she had already
thrown over for Kit, might as well have been a milkmaid in Connecticut
for all the assistance she could give her in her quest. The smart set
was the smart set, here was her creed; Americans had got there before,
and Americans, she fully determined, should get there again. What she
expected to find there she did not know; whether it would be at all
worth the pains she did not care, and she would not be at all
disappointed if it was exactly like everything else, or perhaps duller.
It would be sufficient for her to be there.
In many ways Mrs. Murchison was a remarkable woman, and she had a kind
and excellent heart. She had been the very pretty daughter of a man who
had made a fair fortune in commerce, and had let his children grow up
and get educated as God pleased; but from very early years this daughter
of his had made up her mind that she was not going to revolve for the
remainder of her life in commercial circles, and she had divided her
money fairly evenly between adornments for the body and improvements for
the mind. Thus she had acquired a great fluency in French, and an accent
as remarkable as it was incorrect. In the same way she had read a great
deal of history, and the classical literature of both English tongues;
and though she seldom managed to get her names quite right, both she and
those who heard her were easily able to guess to whom she referred.
Thus, when she alluded to Richard Dent de Lion, though the name sounded
like a yellow flower with a milky stem, there could be no reasonable
doubt that she was speaking of the Crusader; or when she told you that
her husband was as rich as Croesum, those who had ever heard of
Croesus could not fail to see that they were hearing of him now. She
was fond of allusions, and her conversation was as full of plums as a
cake; but as she held the sensible and irrefutable view that
conversation is but a means of making oneself understood, she was quite
satisfied to do so.
Mrs. Murchison was now a big handsome woman of about forty, fresh, of
high colour, and beautifully dressed. In spite of her manifest
absurdities and the surprising nature of her conversation, she was
eminently likeable, and to her friends lovable. There was no mistaking
the honesty and kindliness of her nature; she was a good woman, and in
ways a wise one. Lily, her daughter, who found herself on the verge of
hysterics twenty times a day at her inimitable remarks, had the
intensest affection for her mother, blindly reciprocated; and the
daughter, to whom the wild chase after the smart set seemed perfectly
incomprehensible, was willing that all the world should think her heart
was in it sooner than that her mother should suspect it was not. Mrs.
Murchison herself had begun to forget her French and history a little,
for she was a mere slave to this new accomplishment, social success, and
found it demanded all her time and attention. She worked at it from
morning till night, and from night to morning she dreamed about it. Only
the night before she had thought with extraordinary vividness in her
sleep that her maid had come to her bedside with a note containing a
royal command to sing duets with the Queen quite quietly at 11.30 that
morning, and she had awoke with a pang of rapturous anxiety to find the
vision unsubstantial, and that she need not get up to practise her
scales. She made no secret of her ambitions, but rather paraded them,
and told her dream to the Princess Frederick at the bazaar with huge
_naïveté_. And to see Lily married into the smart set would have caused
her to say her Nunc Dimittis with a sober and grateful heart.
But the smart set was a terribly baffling Will-o'-the-Wisp kind of
affair, or so it had hitherto been to her. A married daughter, an
unmarried daughter even, so she observed, might be steeped in the smart
set, while the mother was, figuratively speaking, in Bloomsbury. You
might robe yourself from head to foot in Balas rubies, you might be a
double Duchess, you might dance a cancan down Piccadilly, you might be
the most amiable of God's creatures, the wittiest, the most corrupt, or
the most correct of the daughters of Eve, and yet never get near it; but
here was Mrs. Lancelot Gordon, who never did anything, was not even an
Honourable, dressed rather worse than Mrs. Murchison's own maid, and yet
was a pivot and centre of that charmed circle. Mrs. Murchison racked her
brain over the problem, and came to the conclusion that no
accomplishment could get you into it, no vice or virtue keep you out.
That was a comfort, for she had no vices. But to-day Kit had asked her
to dinner; the mystic doors perhaps were beginning to turn on their
hinges, and her discarded Countess might continue to revolve on her
unillumined orbit in decent and dull obscurity with her belted Earl.