ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for
an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining
verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and
no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel
but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due.
He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have
crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised
himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and
was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and
realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already
he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things.
He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers,
actors, painters--all the people who did things and did them well. As a
rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner,
and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said
because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal
incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an
old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of
Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
Carey always declared that he was that _rara avis_ an atheist, and that
he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than
this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can
believe in a child atheist.
Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy
and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It
had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many
respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for
languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning.
He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was
not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind
became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change,
in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be
understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome
and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian
connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the
average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually
in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a _malade
imaginaire_. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it
were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on
being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid.
In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the
matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that
poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor
Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a
martyr--to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or
did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There
are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking
baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an
“after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the
autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except
his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as
a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician,
Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power
of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he
was adored by the caricaturists.
Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each
other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and
self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who
sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is
essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess
at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been
explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments
when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme
attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had
proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He
admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which
had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her,
the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large--including
Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes
in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in
a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the
eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not
speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden
woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a window of
exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which she was
condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would
the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through
unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there
to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be
there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more
understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt
to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin
thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well
to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he
was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic
self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that
would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself
that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion
came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present
chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that
comes from enforced repose.
Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before
her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all
relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place.
But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known
to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless;
singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was
difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully
open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule,
however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there
seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided
and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He
had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was
uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began
to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it.
Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
“My heart wants to be drowned.”
Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour,
which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which
perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the
chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris
as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme,
however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers--or joys
by the way--to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else,
though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance
and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who
were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty
and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one
with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She
was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and
solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a
clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery
ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out
of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.
Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not “her
type.” Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy
and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to
become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin’s affection for her, and
the peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing
her obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she
laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her
Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished
to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was
right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart.
The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the
idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the
ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double
share of charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including
herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim
and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
incense.
She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was
a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her
voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang
she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly
men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to
some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of
gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
Was it the _milieu_ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in
her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
unintelligent genius?
There were some who wondered.
In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to
pity, not to place high.
She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She
spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito
uttering its midnight grace before meat.
Which was the real Venice?
Which was the real woman?