"That is the worst of dining with a man. You have to be civil next
morning. But surely, Eames, we two need not stand on ceremony? I am
particularly anxious for you to come to-night. Can't you really manage
it? I want you to meet Malipizzo and say a few nice words to him. You
are too aloof with that man. There is nothing like keeping on the right
side of the law."
"What do you mean by that?"
"The right side of the judge," said Keith. "It is so easy to be
polite to people, and so advisable in some cases. How would you like
to spend a week or two in gaol? He will have you there one of these
days, unless you have placed him under some kind of obligation. He
represents justice here. I know you don't like him. But what would
it cost you--just a friendly handshake?"
"He cannot touch me. I have nothing on my conscience."
"Conscience, my dear fellow, is a good servant but a bad master. Your
sentiments are English. They will never do in a country where the
personal element still counts for something."
"The personal element signifying favouritism and venality?" asked
Eames. "A pretty state of affairs!"
"The philosopher can only live under a venal government."
"I disagree with you altogether."
"You always disagree with me," answered Keith. "And you always find
yourself in the wrong. You remember how I warned you about that little
affair of yours? You remember what an ass you made of yourself?"
"What little affair?" enquired Eames, with a tinge of resignation in
his voice.
The other did not reply. Mr. Keith could be tactful, on occasions. He
pretended to be absorbed in cutting a cigar.
"What little affair?" insisted the bibliographer, fearful of what was
coming next.
It came.
"Oh, that balloon business...."
It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because
he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in
Richmond Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels--the
notorious Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club
scandal, that he was the local representative of an international gang
of white-slave traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of
the world, that he was not a man at all but an old boarding-house
keeper who had very good reasons for assuming the male disguise, that
he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist minister, a pawnbroker
out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had
had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent
period in connection with some East-End mission for reforming the boys
of Bermondsey and then, after pawning his mother's jewelry, writing
anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands
and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet Ministers and
tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale
of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an
exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he had
been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.
All these things, and a good many more, had been said. Eames knew it.
Kind friends had seen to that.
To contrive such stories was a certain lady's method of asserting her
personality on the island. She seldom went into society owing to some
physical defect in her structure; she could only sit at home, like
Penelope, weaving these and other bright tapestries--odds and ends of
servants' gossip, patched together by the virulent industry of her own
disordered imagination. It consoled Mr. Eames slightly to reflect that
he was not the only resident singled out for such aspersions; that the
more harmless a man's life, the more fearsome the legends. He suffered,
none the less. This was why he seldom entered the premises of the Alpha
and Omega Club where, quite apart from his objection to Parker's poison
and the loose and rowdy talk of the place, he was liable to encounter
the lady's stepbrother. Of course he knew perfectly well what he ought
to have done. He ought to have imitated the example of other people who
behaved like scoundrels and openly gloried in it. That was the only way
to be even with her; it took the wind out of her sails. Keith often put
the matter into a nutshell:
"The practical advantages of doing something outrageous must be clear
to you. It is the only way of stopping her mouth, unless you like to
have her poisoned, which might be rather expensive even down here,
though you may be sure I would do my best to smooth things over with
Malipizzo. But I am afraid you don't realize the advantages of
ruffianism as a mode of art, and a mode of life. Only think: a thousand
wrongs to every right! What an opening for a man of talent, especially
in a country like this, where frank and independent action still counts
its admirers. You have done nothing, of late, worthy to be recorded in
the CHRONIQUE SCANDALEUSE of Nepenthe. Twelve years ago, wasn't it,
that little affair of yours? Time is slipping by, and here you muddle
along with your old Perrelli, in a fog of moral stagnation. It is not
fair to the rest of us. We all contribute our mites to the gaiety of
nations. Bethink yourself. Bestir yourself. Man! Do something to show
us you are alive."
To such speeches Mr. Eames would listen with a smile of amused
indignation. He was incapable of living up to the ideals of a man like
Keith whose sympathy with every form of wrong-doing would have rendered
him positively unfit for decent society but for his flagrant good
nature and good luncheons. He suffered in silence.
He had good reason for suffering. That "little affair" of twelve years
ago was a ghost which refused to be laid. Every one on the island knew
the story; it was handed down from one batch of visitors to the next.
He knew that whenever his name was mentioned this unique indiscretion
of his, this toothsome morsel, would likewise be dished up. It would
never grow stale, though atoned for by twelve years of exemplary
conduct. He felt guilty. There was a skeleton in his cupboard. He
realized what people were saying.
"Know Eames? Oh, yes. That quiet man, who writes. One can't swallow
half those yarns about him; quite impossible to believe, of course. She
overdoes things, the good woman. All the same, there's no smoke without
fire. You know what actually did happen, don't you? Well; one really
doesn't quite know what to make of a fellow like that, does one?"
What had happened?
The bibliographer had fallen in love, after the fashion of a
pure-minded, gallant gentleman. It was his first and only experience of
this kind--an all-consuming passion which did much credit to his heart
but little to his head. So deeply were his feelings involved that
during those brief months of infatuation he neglected, he despised, he
derided his idol Perrelli. He put on a new character. While the dust
was accumulating on those piles of footnotes, Mr. Eames astonished
people by becoming a society man. It was a transfiguration. He appeared
in fancy ties and spats, fluttered about at boating parties and
picnics, dined at restaurants, perpetrated one or two classic jokes
about the sirocco. Nepenthe opened its eyes wide till the truth was
made manifest. After that, everybody said he might have discovered a
worthier object for his affection than the "BALLOON CAPTIF."
She was a native of the mainland to whose credit it must be said that
she did not pretend to be anything but what she was--an exuberant,
gluttonous dame, with volcanic eyes, heavy golden bracelets, the
soupcon of a moustache, and arms as thick as other people's thighs; an
altogether impossible person. Nobody but a man of genuine refinement,
scrupulous rectitude, delicate sense of honour and kindly disposition
would have risked being seen in the same street with such a horror;
nobody but a real gentleman could have fallen in love with her. Mr.
Eames ran after her like a dog. He made a perfect ass of himself,
heedless of what anybody though or said of him. The men declared he was
going mad--breaking up--sickening for an attack of G.P. "Miracles will
never cease," charitably observed the Duchess. Alone of all his lady
acquaintances, Madame Steynlin liked him all the better for this
gaucherie. She was a true woman-friend of all lovers; she knew the
human heart and its queer little vagaries. She received the couple with
open arms and entertained them royally, after her manner; gave them a
kind of social status. Under this friendly treatment Mr. Eames grew
thinner from day to day; he was visibly losing flesh. The dame
prospered. Piloted by the love-sick bibliographer she gradually waddled
her way--it was uphill work, for both of them--into the uppermost strata
of local society where, owing to the rarefied atmosphere, her appetite,
to say nothing of her person, soon gained notoriety. She was known, in
briefest space of time, as "the cormorant," as "prime streaky," as
"Jumbo," as "the phenomenon" and, by those who understood the French
language, as the "BALLON CAPTIF."
The "BALLON CAPTIF." ...
How things got about, on Nepenthe! Somehow or other, this odious
nickname reached her lover's ears. It embittered his existence to such
an extent that, long after the idyll was over, he had serious thoughts
of leaving the island and would doubtless have done so, but for his
re-kindled enthusiasm for Monsignor Perrelli. So sensitive did he
remain on this point that the mere mention of balloons, or even
aeroplanes, would make him wince and feel desirous of leaving the room;
he always thought that people introduced the subject with malicious
purpose, in order to remind him of this unforgettable peccadillo, the
"balloon business," his one lapse from perfect propriety. Mr. Keith,
who confessed to a vein of coarseness in his nature--prided himself upon
it and, in fact, cultivated insensitiveness as other people cultivate
orchids, pronouncing it to be the best method of self-protection in a
world infested with fools--Mr. Keith sometimes could not resist the
temptation of raking up the ashes surreptitiously, after an elaborate,
misleading preamble. He loved to watch his friend's meekly perplexed
face on such occasions.
Heaven knows how long the affair might have lasted but for the fact
that a husband, or somebody, unexpectedly turned up--a husky little man
with a cast in one eye, who looked uxorious to an alarming degree. He
carried her off in the nick of time to save Mr. Eames from social
ostracism, mental dotage, and financial ruin. Her mere appearance had
made him the laughing-stock of the place; her appetite had led him into
outlays altogether incompatible with his income, chiefly in the matter
of pastries, macaroons, fondants, ices, caramels, chocolates, jam
tartlets and, above all, meringues, to which she was fabulously
destructive.
It took some living down, that episode. He feared people would talk of
it to his dying day; he knew they would! He wished balloons had never
been invented. None the less he stuck it out bravely, threw himself
with redoubled zeal into Monsignor Perrelli and, incidentally, became
more of a recluse than ever.
"It has been a lesson," he reflected. "SEMPER ALIQUID HAEREBIT, I am
afraid...."
Ernest Eames was the ideal annotator. He was neither inductive nor
deductive; he had no axe to grind. His talent consisted in an ant--like
hiving faculty. He was acquisitive of information for a set purpose--to
bring the ANTIQUITIES up to date. Whatever failed to fit in with this
programme, however novel, however interesting--it was ruthlessly
discarded. In this and other matters he was the reverse of Keith, who
collected information for its own sake. Keith was a pertinacious and
omnivorous student; he sought knowledge not for a set purpose but
because nothing was without interest for him. He took all learning to
his province. He read for the pleasure of knowing what he did not know
before; his mind was unusually receptive because, he said, he respected
the laws which governed his body. Facts were his prey. He threw himself
into them with a kind of piratical ardour; took them by the throat,
wallowed in them, worried them like a terrier, and finally assimilated
them. They gave him food for what he liked best on earth:
"disinterested thought." They "formed a rich loam." He had an
encyclopaeic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a
lumber-room of useless information. He could tell you how many public
baths exited in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of
Mehemet Ali's whiskers, why the manuscript of Virgil's friend Gallius
had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year, and what
month, the decimal system was introduced into Finland. Such aimless
incursions into knowledge were a puzzle to his friends, but not to
himself. They helped him to build up a harmonious scheme of life--to
round himself off.
He had lately attacked, in Corsair fashion, the Greek philosophers and
had disembowelled Plato, Aristotle and the rest of them, to his
complete satisfaction, in a couple of months; at present he was up to
the ears in psychology, and his talk bristled with phrases about the
"function of the real," about reactions, reflexes, adjustments and
stimuli. For all his complexity there was something so childlike in his
nature that he never realized what an infliction he was, nor how
tiresome his conversation could become to people who were not quite so
avid of "disinterested thought." Living alone and spending too much
time in unprofitable studies, his language was apt to be professionally
devoid of humour--a defect he made heroic efforts to remedy by what he
called the "Falernian system." It was the fault of his mother, he said;
she was a painfully conscientious woman. A man's worst enemies are his
parents, he would add.
So far as was known, Mr. Keith had never written a book, a pamphlet, or
even a letter to the newspapers. He maintained a good deal of
correspondence, however, in different parts of the world, and the wiser
of those who were favoured with his epistles preserved them as literary
curiosities, under lock and key, by reason of the writer's rare faculty
of expressing the most atrocious things in correct and even admirable
English. Chaster than snow as a conversationalist, he prostituted his
mother-tongue, in letter-writing, to the vilest of uses. Friends of
long standing called him an obscene old man. When taxed with this
failing--by Mr. Eames, for instance, who shivered at what he called
PRAETEXTATA VERBA--he would hint that he could afford to pay for his
little whims, meaning, presumably, that a rich man is not to be judged
by common standards of propriety. Such language was particularly
galling to Mr. Eames, who held that the possession of wealth entails
not only privileges but obligations, and that the rich man should set
the example of purity in words and deeds, etc., etc., etc.
They were always disagreeing, anyhow.
"You exalt purity to a bad eminence," Keith would remark. "What did you
say about the book I lent you the other day? You said it was morbid and
indecent; you said that no clean-minded person would car to read it.
And yet, after an unnecessary amount of arguing, you were forced to
admit that the subject was interesting and that the writer dealt with
it in an interesting manner. What more can you expect from an author?
Believe me, this hankering after purity, this hypersensitiveness as to
what is morbid or immoral, is by no means a good sign. A healthy man
refuses to be hampered by preconceived notions of what is wrong or
ugly. When he reads a book like that the either yawns or laughs. That
is because he is sure of himself. I could give you a long list of
celebrated statesmen, princes, philosophers and prelates of the Church
who take pleasure, in their moments of relaxation, in what you would
call improper conversation, literature or correspondence. They feel the
strain of being continually pure; they realize that all strains are
pernicious, and that there is no action without its reaction. They
unbend. Only inveterate folks do not unbend. They dare not, because
they have no backbone. They know that if they once unbent, they could
not straighten themselves out again. They make a virtue of their own
organic defect. They explain their natural imperfection by calling
themselves pure. If you had a little money--"
"You are always harking back to that point. What has money to do with
it?"
"Poverty is like rain. It drops down ceaselessly, disintegrating the
finer tissues of a man, his recent, delicate adjustments, and leaving
nothing but the bleak and gaunt framework. A poor man is a wintry
tree--alive, but stripped of its shining splendour. He is always denying
himself this or that. One by one, his humane instincts, his elegant
desires, are starved away by stress of circumstances. The charming
diversity of life ceases to have any meaning for him. To console
himself, he sets up perverse canons of right and wrong. What the rich
do, that is wrong. Why? Because he does not do it. Why not? Because he
has no money. A poor man is forced into a hypocritical attitude towards
life--debarred from being intellectually honest. He cannot pay for the
necessary experience."
"There is something in what you say," Eames would assent. "But I fear
you are overstating your case."
"So did Demosthenes and Jesus Christ, and likewise Cicero and Julius
Caesar. Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious
to do something which he considers useful. I regard it as a real
grievance, Eames, not to be allowed to assist you financially. Having
never done a stroke of work in my life, I can talk freely about my
money. My grandfather was a pirate and slave-dealer. To my certain
knowledge, not a penny of his wealth was honestly come by. That ought
to allay your scruples about accepting it. NON OLET, you know. Let me
write you out a cheque for five hundred, there's a good fellow. Solely
as a means of smoothing over the anfractuosities of life and squeezing
all the possible pleasure out of it! What else is money made for? They
say you live on milk and salad. Why the Hell--"
"Thanks! I have all I want; sufficient to pay for the minor pleasures
of life."
"Such as?"
"A clean handkerchief now and then. I see no harm in dying poor."
"Where would I be, if my grandfather had seen no harm in it? Don't you
really believe that money sweetens all things, as Pepys says?"
The diarist was one of Keith's favourite authors. He called him a
representative Englishman and regretted that the type was becoming
extinct. Eames would reply:
"Your Pepys was a disgusting climber. He makes me ill with his
snobbishness and silver plate and monthly gloatings over his gains. I
wonder you can read the man. He may have been a capable official, but
he was not a gentleman."
"Have you ever seen a gentleman, except on a tailor's fashion-plate?"
"Yes. One, at all events; my father. However, we won't labour that
point; we have discussed it before, haven't we? Your money would
sweeten nothing for me. It would procure me neither health of body nor
peace of mind. Thanks all the same."
Mr. Keith, true to his ancestral tenacity, was not easily put off. He
would begin again:
"George Gissing was a scholar and a man of refinement, like yourself.
You know what he says? 'Put money in thy purse, for to lack the current
coin of the realm is to lack the privileges of humanity.' The
privileges of humanity: you understand, Eames?"
"Does he say that? Well, I am not surprised. I have sometimes noticed
gross, unhealthy streaks in Gissing."
"I will tell you what is unhealthy, Eames. Your own state of mind. You
derive a morbid pleasure from denying yourself the common emoluments of
life. It's a form of self-indulgence. I wish you would open your
windows and let the sun in. You are living by candlelight. If you
analysed yourself closely--"
"I don't analyse myself closely. I call it a mistake. I try to see
soberly. I try to think logically. I try to live becomingly."
"I am glad you don't always succeed," Keith would reply, with a
horrible accent on the word "always." "Heaven shield me from a
clean-minded man!"
"We have touched on that subject once or twice already, have we not?
Your arguments will never entangle me, though I think I can be fair to
them. Money enables you to multiply your sensations--to travel about,
and so forth. In doing so, you multiply your personality, as it were;
you lengthen your days, figuratively speaking; you come in contact with
more diversified aspects of life than a person of my limited means can
afford to do. The body, you say, is a subtle instrument to be played
upon in every variety of manner and rendered above all things as
sensitive as possible to pleasurable impressions. In fact, you want to
be a kind of Aeolian harp. I admit that this is more than a string of
sophisms; you may call it a philosophy of life. But it is not my
philosophy. It does not appeal to me in the least. You will get no
satisfaction out of me, Keith, with your hedonism. You are up against a
brick wall. You speak of my deliberately closing up avenues of
pleasure. They ought to be closed up, I say, if a man is to respect
himself. I do not call my body a subtle instrument; I call it a damned
nuisance. I don't want to be an Aeolian harp. I don't want my sensations
multiplied; I don't want my personality extended; I don't want my
outlook widened; I don't want money; I don't want aspects of life. I'm
positive, I'm literal. I know exactly what I want. I want to concern
myself with what lies under my hand. I want to be allowed to get on
with my work. I want to bring old Perrelli up to date."
"My dear fellow! We all love you for that. And I am delighted to think
you are not really clean-minded, in spite of all these lofty
protestations. Because you aren't, are you?"
If, after such discourse, the bibliographer still remained mulishly
clean-minded, Keith would return to the psychological necessity of
"appropriate reaction" and cite an endless list of sovereigns, popes,
and other heroes who, in their moments of leisure, were wise enough to
react against the persistent strain of purity. Then, via Alexander of
Macedon, "one of the greatest sons of earth," as Bishop Thirlwall had
called him--Alexander, with whose deplorable capacity for "unbending" a
scholar like Eames was perfectly familiar--he would switch the
conversation into realms of military science, and begin to expatiate
upon the wonderful advance which has been made since those days in the
arts of defensive and offensive warfare--the decline of the phalanx, the
rise of artillery, the changed system of fortifications, those modern
inventions in the department of land defences, sea defences and, above
all, aerial defences, parachutes, hydroplanes....
Whereupon a curious change would creep over the bibliographer's honest
face. He knew what this talk portended. His features would assume an
air of strained but polite attention, and he generally broke off the
conversation and took his departure at the earliest moment consistent
with ordinary civility. On such occasions he was wont to think his
friend Keith an offensive cad. Sadly shaking his head, he would say to
himself:
"NIHIL QUOD TETIGIT NON INQUINAVIT."