That evening--the evening of his return from Beauclere--he was conscious
of a keen desire to get away, to go abroad, to leave behind him the
little chatter his resignation would be sure to produce in an age of
publicity which never discriminated as to the quality of events. Then he
felt it decidedly better to stay, to see the business through on the
spot. Besides, he would have to meet his constituents--would a parcel of
cheese-eating burgesses ever have been "met" on so queer an
occasion?--and when that was over the incident would practically be
closed. Nick had an idea he knew in advance how it would affect him to
be pointed at as a person who had given up a considerable chance of
eventual "office" to take likenesses at so much a head. He wouldn't
attempt down at Harsh to touch on the question of motive; for, given the
nature of the public mind of Harsh, that would be a strain on his
faculty of exposition. But as regards the chaff of the political world
and of society he had a hope he should find chaff enough for retorts. It
was true that when his mother twitted him in her own effective way he
had felt rather flattened out; but then one's mother might have a
heavier hand than any one else. He had not thrown up the House of
Commons to amuse himself; he had thrown it up to work, to sit quietly
down and bend over his task. If he should go abroad his parent might
think he had some weak-minded view of joining Julia and trying, with
however little hope, to win her back--an illusion it would be singularly
pernicious to encourage. His desire for Julia's society had succumbed
for the present at any rate to a dire interruption--he had become more
and more aware of their speaking a different language. Nick felt like a
young man who has gone to the Rhineland to "get up" his German for an
examination--committed to talk, to read, to dream only in the new idiom.
Now that he had taken his jump everything was simplified, at the same
time that everything was pitched in a higher and intenser key; and he
wondered how in the absence of a common dialect he had conversed on the
whole so happily with Mrs. Dallow. Then he had aftertastes of
understandings tolerably independent of words. He was excited because
every fresh responsibility is exciting, and there was no manner of doubt
he had accepted one. No one knew what it was but himself--Gabriel Nash
scarcely counted, his whole attitude on the question of responsibility
being so fantastic--and he would have to ask his dearest friends to take
him on trust. Rather indeed he would ask nothing of any one, but would
cultivate independence, mulishness, and gaiety, and fix his thoughts on
a bright if distant morrow. It was disagreeable to have to remember that
his task would not be sweetened by a sense of heroism; for if it might
be heroic to give up the muses for the strife of great affairs, no
romantic glamour worth speaking of would ever gather round an Englishman
who in the prime of his strength had given up great or even small
affairs for the muses. Such an original might himself privately and
perversely regard certain phases of this inferior commerce as a great
affair; but who would give him the benefit of that sort of
confidence--except indeed a faithful, clever, exalted little sister
Biddy, if he should have the good luck to have one? Biddy was in fact
all ready for heroic flights and eager to think she might fight the
battle of the beautiful by her brother's side; so that he had really to
moderate her and remind her how little his actual job was a crusade with
bugles and banners and how much a grey, sedentary grind, the charm of
which was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an
emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you
could show--the end in view would seem so disproportionately small. Nick
put it to her that one really couldn't talk to people about the
"responsibility" of what she would see him pottering at in his studio.
He therefore didn't "run," as he would have said, to winged words any
more than he was forced to, having, moreover, a sense that apologetic
work (if apology it should be called to carry the war straight into the
enemy's country) might be freely left to Gabriel Nash. He laid the
weight of explanation on his commentators, meeting them all on the firm
ground of his own amusement. He saw he should live for months in a thick
cloud of irony, not the finest air of the season, and he adopted the
weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts
when every one else produces a cigar--he puffed the spasmodic, defensive
cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the
obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were
themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase
is, little out of him--he rose in his good humour so much higher than
the "rise" they had looked for--on his very first encounter with the
world after his scrimmage with his mother. He went to a dinner-party--he
had accepted the invitation many days before--having seen his
resignation, in the form of a telegram from Harsh, announced in the
evening papers. The people he found there had seen it as well, and the
wittiest wanted to know what he was now going to do. Even the most
embarrassed asked if it were true he had changed his politics. He gave
different answers to different persons, but left most of them under the
impression that he had strange scruples of conscience. This, however,
was not a formidable occasion, for there had happened to be no one
present he would have desired, on the old basis, especially to gratify.
There were real good friends it would be less easy to meet--Nick was
almost sorry for an hour that he had so many real good friends. If he
had had more enemies the case would have been simpler, and he was fully
aware that the hardest thing of all would be to be let off too easily.
Then he would appear to himself to have been put, all round, on his
generosity, and his deviation would thus wear its ugliest face.
When he left the place at which he had been dining he betook himself to
Rosedale Road: he saw no reason why he should go down to the House,
though he knew he had not done with that yet. He had a dread of behaving
as if he supposed he should be expected to make a farewell speech, and
was thankful his eminence was not of a nature to create on such an
occasion a demand for his oratory. He had in fact nothing whatever to
say in public--not a vain word, not a sorry syllable. Though the hour
was late he found Gabriel Nash established in his studio, drawn thither
by the fine exhilaration of having seen an evening paper. Trying it
late, on the chance, he had been told by Nick's servant that Nick would
sleep there that night, and he had come in to wait, he was so eager to
congratulate him. Nick submitted with a good grace to his society--he
was tired enough to go to bed, but was restless too--in spite of noting
now, oddly enough, that Nash's congratulations could add little to his
fortitude. He had felt a good deal, before, as if he were in this
philosopher's hands; but since making his final choice he had begun to
strike himself as all in his own. Gabriel might have been the angel of
that name, but no angel could assist him much henceforth.
Nash indeed was as true as ever to his genius while he lolled on a divan
and emitted a series of reflexions that were even more ingenious than
opportune. Nick walked up and down the room, and it might have been
supposed from his manner that he was impatient for his friend to
withdraw. This idea would have been contradicted, however, by the fact
that subsequently, after the latter had quitted him, he continued to
perambulate. He had grown used to Gabriel and must now have been
possessed of all he had to say. That was one's penalty with persons
whose main gift was for talk, however inspiring; talk engendered a sense
of sameness much sooner than action. The things a man did were
necessarily more different from each other than the things he said, even
if he went in for surprising you. Nick felt Nash could never surprise
him any more save by mere plain perpetration.
He talked of his host's future, talked of Miriam Rooth and of Peter
Sherringham, whom he had seen at that young woman's and whom he
described as in a predicament delightful to behold. Nick put a question
about Peter's predicament and learned, rather to his disappointment,
that it consisted only of the fact that he was in love with Miriam. He
appealed to his visitor to do better than this, and Nash then added the
touch that Sherringham wouldn't be able to have her. "Oh they've ideas!"
he said when Nick asked him why.
"What ideas? So has he, I suppose."
"Yes, but they're not the same."
"Well, they'll nevertheless arrange something," Nick opined.
"You'll have to help them a bit. She's in love with another man," Nash
went on.
"Do you mean with you?"
"Oh, I'm never another man--I'm always more the wrong one than the man
himself. It's you she's after." And on his friend's asking him what he
meant by this Nash added: "While you were engaged in transferring her
image to the tablet of your genius you stamped your own on that of her
heart."