OF THE GLORY AND GOODNESS AND THE EVIL THAT GO TO THE MAKING OF LOVE.
During my time of struggle I had avoided all communication with old
Hasluck. He was not a man to sympathise with feelings he did not
understand. With boisterous good humour he would have insisted upon
helping me. Why I preferred half starving with Lott and Co. to selling
my labour for a fair wage to good-natured old Hasluck, merely because
I knew him, I cannot explain. Though the profits may not have been so
large, Lott and Co.'s dealings were not one whit more honest: I do not
believe it was that which decided me. Nor do I think it was because he
was Barbara's father. I never connected him, nor that good old soul,
his vulgar, homely wife, in any way with Barbara. To me she was a being
apart from all the world. Her true Parents! I should have sought them
rather amid the sacred groves of vanished lands, within the sky-domed
shrines of banished gods. There are instincts in us not easily
analysed, not to be explained by reason. I have always preferred the
finding--sometimes the losing--of my way according to the map, to the
surer and simpler method of vocal enquiry; working out a complicated
journey, and running the risk of never arriving at my destination,
by aid of a Continental Bradshaw, to putting myself into the hands
of courteous officials maintained and paid to assist the perplexed
traveller. Possibly a far-off progenitor of mine may have been some
morose “rogue” savage with untribal inclinations, living in his
cave apart, fashioning his own stone hammer, shaping his own flint
arrow-heads, shunning the merry war-dance, preferring to caper by
himself.
But now, having gained my own foothold, I could stretch out my hand
without fear of the movement being mistaken for appeal. I wrote to old
Hasluck; and almost by the next post received from him the friendliest
of notes. He told me Barbara had just returned from abroad, took it upon
himself to add that she also would be delighted to see me, and, as I
knew he would, threw his doors open to me.
Of my boyish passion for Barbara never had I spoken to a living soul,
nor do I think, excepting Barbara herself, had any ever guessed it. To
my mother, though she was very fond of her, Barbara was only a girl,
with charms but also with faults, concerning which my mother would
speak freely; hurting me, as one unwittingly might hurt a neophyte by
philosophical discussion of his newly embraced religion. Often, choosing
by preference late evening or the night, I would wander round and round
the huge red-brick house standing in its ancient garden on the top
of Stamford Hill; descending again into the noisome streets as one
returning to the world from praying at a shrine, purified, filled with
peace, all noble endeavour, all unselfish aims seeming within my grasp.
During Barbara's four years' absence my adoration had grown and
strengthened. Out of my memory of her my desire had evolved its ideal; a
being of my imagination, but by reason of that, to me the more real,
the more present. I looked forward to seeing her again, but with no
impatience, revelling rather in the anticipation than eager for the
realisation. As a creature of flesh and blood, the child I had played
with, talked with, touched, she had faded further and further into the
distance; as the vision of my dreams she stood out clearer day by day. I
knew that when next I saw her there would be a gulf between us I had
no wish to bridge. To worship her from afar was a sweeter thought to me
than would have been the hope of a passionate embrace. To live with her,
sit opposite to her while she ate and drank, see her, perhaps, with her
hair in curl-papers, know possibly that she had a corn upon her foot,
hear her speak maybe of a decayed tooth, or of a chilblain, would have
been torture to me. Into such abyss of the commonplace there was no fear
of my dragging her, and for this I was glad. In the future she would be
yet more removed from me. She was older than I was; she must be now a
woman. Instinctively I felt that in spite of years I was not yet a man.
She would marry. The thought gave me no pain, my feeling for her was
utterly devoid of appetite. No one but myself could close the temple
I had built about her, none deny to me the right of entry there. No
jealous priest could hide her from my eyes, her altar I had reared too
high. Since I have come to know myself better, I perceive that she stood
to me not as a living woman, but as a symbol; not a fellow human being
to be walked with through life, helping and to be helped, but that
impalpable religion of sex to which we raise up idols of poor human
clay, alas, not always to our satisfaction, so that foolishly we fall
into anger against them, forgetting they were but the work of our own
hands; not the body, but the spirit of love.
I allowed a week to elapse after receiving old Hasluck's letter before
presenting myself at Stamford Hill. It was late one afternoon in early
summer. Hasluck had not returned from the City, Mrs. Hasluck was out
visiting, Miss Hasluck was in the garden. I told the supercilious
footman not to trouble, I would seek her there myself. I guessed where
she would be; her favourite spot had always been a sunny corner, bright
with flowers, surrounded by a thick yew hedge, cut, after the Dutch
fashion, into quaint shapes of animals and birds. She was walking there,
as I had expected, reading a book. And again, as I saw her, came back
to me the feeling that had swept across me as a boy, when first outlined
against the dusty books and papers of my father's office she had flashed
upon my eyes: that all the fairy tales had suddenly come true, only
now, instead of the Princess, she was the Queen. Taller she was, with
a dignity that formerly had been the only charm she lacked. She did not
hear my coming, my way being across the soft, short grass, and for a
little while I stood there in the shadow of the yews, drinking in the
beauty of her clear-cut profile, bent down towards her book, the curving
lines of her long neck, the wonder of the exquisite white hand against
the lilac of her dress.
I did not speak; rather would I have remained so watching; but turning
at the end of the path, she saw me, and as she came towards me held out
her hand. I knelt upon the path, and raised it to my lips. The action
was spontaneous, till afterwards I was not aware of having done it. Her
lips were smiling as I raised my eyes to them, the faintest suggestion
of contempt mingling with amusement. Yet she seemed pleased, and her
contempt, even if I were not mistaken, would not have wounded me.
“So you are still in love with me? I wondered if you would be.”
“Did you know that I was in love with you?”
“I should have been blind if I had not.”
“But I was only a boy.”
“You were not the usual type of boy. You are not going to be the usual
type of man.”
“You do not mind my loving you?”
“I cannot help it, can I? Nor can you.”
She seated herself on a stone bench facing a sun-dial, and leaning hack,
her hands clasped behind her head, looked at me and laughed.
“I shall always love you,” I answered, “but it is with a curious sort of
love. I do not understand it myself.”
“Tell me,” she commanded, still with a smile about her lips, “describe
it to me.”
I was standing over against her, my arm resting upon the dial's stone
column. The sun was sinking, casting long shadows on the velvety grass,
illuminating with a golden light her upturned face.
“I would you were some great queen of olden days, and that I might be
always near you, serving you, doing your bidding. Your love in return
would spoil all; I shall never ask it, never desire it. That I might
look upon you, touch now and then at rare intervals with my lips your
hand, kiss in secret the glove you had let fall, the shoe you had flung
off, know that you knew of my love, that I was yours to do with as you
would, to live or die according to your wish. Or that you were priestess
in some temple of forgotten gods, where I might steal at daybreak and at
dusk to gaze upon your beauty; kneel with clasped hands, watching your
sandalled feet coming and going about the altar steps; lie with pressed
lips upon the stones your trailing robes had touched.”
She laughed a light mocking laugh. “I should prefer to be the queen.
The role of priestess would not suit me. Temples are so cold.” A slight
shiver passed through her. She made a movement with her hand, beckoning
me to her feet. “That is how you shall love me, Paul,” she said,
“adoring me, worshipping me--blindly. I will be your queen and treat
you--as it chooses me. All I think, all I do, I will tell you, and you
shall tell me it is right. The queen can do no wrong.”
She took my face between her hands, and bending over me, looked long
and steadfastly into my eyes. “You understand, Paul, the queen can do
no wrong--never, never.” There had crept into her voice a note of
vehemence, in her face was a look almost of appeal.
“My queen can do no wrong,” I repeated. And she laughed and let her
hands fall back upon her lap.
“Now you may sit beside me. So much honour, Paul, shall you have to-day,
but it will have to last you long. And you may tell me all you have been
doing, maybe it will amuse me; and afterwards you shall hear what I have
done, and shall say that it was right and good of me.”
I obeyed, sketching my story briefly, yet leaving nothing untold, not
even the transit of the Lady 'Ortensia, ashamed of the episode though I
was. At that she looked a little grave.
“You must do nothing again, Paul,” she commanded, “to make me feel
ashamed of you, or I shall dismiss you from my presence for ever. I must
be proud of you, or you shall not serve me. In dishonouring yourself you
are dishonouring me. I am angry with you, Paul. Do not let me be angry
with you again.”
And so that passed; and although my love for her--as I know well she
wished and sought it should--failed to save me at all times from the
apish voices whispering ever to the beast within us, I know the desire
to be worthy of her, to honour her with all my being, helped my life as
only love can. The glory of the morning fades, the magic veil is rent;
we see all things with cold, clear eyes. My love was a woman. She lies
dead. They have mocked her white sweet limbs with rags and tatters, but
they cannot cheat love's eyes. God knows I loved her in all purity! Only
with false love we love the false. Beneath the unclean clinging garments
she sleeps fair.
My tale finished, “Now I will tell you mine,” she said. “I am going to
be married soon. I shall be a Countess, Paul, the Countess Huescar--I
will teach you how to pronounce it--and I shall have a real castle in
Spain. You need not look so frightened, Paul; we shall not live there.
It is a half-ruined, gloomy place, among the mountains, and he loves it
even less than I do. Paris and London will be my courts, so you will
see me often. You shall know the great world, Paul, the world I mean to
conquer, where I mean to rule.”
“Is he very rich?” I asked.
“As poor,” she laughed, “as poor as a Spanish nobleman. The money I
shall have to provide, or, rather, poor dear Dad will. He gives me
title, position. Of course I do not love him, handsome though he is.
Don't look so solemn, Paul. We shall get on together well enough.
Queens, Paul, do not make love matches, they contract alliances. I have
done well, Paul; congratulate me. Do you hear, Paul? Say that I have
acted rightly.”
“Does he love you?” I asked.
“He tells me so,” she answered, with a laugh. “How uncourtier-like you
are, Paul! Do you suggest that any man could see me and not love me?”
She sprang to her feet. “I do not want his love,” she cried; “it would
bore me. Women hate love they cannot return. I don't mean love like
yours, devout little Paul,” she added, with a laugh. “That is sweet
incense wafted round us that we like to scent with our noses in the air.
Give me that, Paul; I want it, I ask for it. But the love of a hand, the
love of a husband that one does not care for--it would be horrible!”
I felt myself growing older. For the moment my goddess became a child
needing help.
“But have you thought--” I commenced.
“Yes, yes,” she interrupted me quickly, “I have thought and thought till
I can think no more. There must be some sacrifice; it must be as little
as need be, that is all. He does not love me; he is marrying me for my
money--I know that, and I am glad of it. You do not know me, Paul. I
must have rank, position. What am I? The daughter of rich old Hasluck,
who began life as a butcher in the Mile End Road. As the Princess
Huescar, society will forget, as Mrs.”--it seemed to me she checked
herself abruptly--“Jones or Brown it would remember, however rich
I might be. I am vain, Paul, caring for power--ambition. I have my
father's blood in me. All his nights and days he has spent in gaining
wealth; he can do no more. We upstarts have our pride of race. He has
done his share, I must do mine.”
“But you need not be mere Mrs. anybody commonplace,” I argued. “Why not
wait? You will meet someone who can give you position and whom at the
same time you can love. Would that not be better?”
“He will never come, the man I could love,” she answered. “Because,
my little Paul, he has come already. Hush, Paul, the queen can do no
wrong.”
“Who is he?” I asked. “May I not know?”
“Yes, Paul,” she answered, “you shall know; I want you to know, then you
shall tell me that I have acted rightly. Do you hear me, Paul?--quite
rightly--that you still respect me and honour me. He could not help me.
As his wife, I should be less even than I am, a mere rich nobody, giving
long dinner-parties to other rich nobodies, living amongst City men,
retired trades-people; envied only by their fat, vulgarly dressed wives,
courted by seedy Bohemians for the sake of my cook; with perhaps an
opera singer or an impecunious nobleman or two out of Dad's City list
for my show-guests. Is that the court, Paul, where you would have your
queen reign?”
“Is he so commonplace a man,” I answered, “the man you love? I cannot
believe it.”
“He is not commonplace,” she answered. “It is I who am commonplace. The
things I desire, they are beneath him; he will never trouble himself to
secure them.”
“Not even for love of you?”
“I would not have him do so even were he willing. He is great, with a
greatness I cannot even understand. He is not the man for these times.
In old days, I should have married him, knowing he would climb to
greatness by sheer strength of manhood. But now men do not climb; they
crawl to greatness. He could not do that. I have done right, Paul.”
“What does he say?” I asked.
“Shall I tell you?” She laughed a little bitterly. “I can give you his
exact words, 'You are half a woman and half a fool, so woman-like you
will follow your folly. But let your folly see to it that your woman
makes no fool of herself.'”
The words were what I could imagine his saying. I heard the strong ring
of his voice through her mocking mimicry.
“Hal!” I cried. “It is he.”
“So you never guessed even that, Paul. I thought at times it would be
sweet to cry it out aloud, that it could have made no difference, that
everyone who knew me must have read it in my eyes.”
“But he never seemed to take much notice of you,” I said.
She laughed. “You needn't be so unkind, Paul. What did I ever do for
you much more than snub you? We boys and girls; there is not so much
difference between us: we love our masters. Yet you must not think so
poorly of me. I was only a child to him then, but we were locked up in
Paris together during the entire siege. Have not you heard? He did take
a little notice of me there, Paul, I assure you.”
Would it have been better, I wonder, had she followed the woman and not
the fool? It sounds an easy question to answer; but I am thinking of
years later, one winter's night at Tiefenkasten in the Julier Pass. I
was on my way from San Moritz to Chur. The sole passenger, I had just
climbed, half frozen, from the sledge, and was thawing myself before the
stove in the common room of the hotel when the waiter put a pencilled
note into my hand:
“Come up and see me. I am a prisoner in this damned hole till the
weather breaks. Hal.”
I hardly recognised him at first. Only the poor ghost he seemed of the
Hal I had known as a boy. His long privations endured during the Paris
siege, added to the superhuman work he had there put upon himself, had
commenced the ruin of even his magnificent physique--a ruin the wild,
loose life he was now leading was soon to complete. It was a gloomy,
vaulted room that once had been a chapel, lighted dimly by a cheap,
evil-smelling lamp, heated to suffocation by one of those great
green-tiled German ovens now only to be met with in rare out-of-the-way
world corners. He was sitting propped up by pillows on the bed, placed
close to one of the high windows, his deep eyes flaring like two
gleaming caverns out of his drawn, haggard face.
“I saw you from the window,” he explained. “It is the only excitement
I get, twice a day when the sledges come in. I broke down coming across
the Pass a fortnight ago, on my way from Davos. We were stuck in a drift
for eighteen hours; it nearly finished my last lung. And I haven't even
a book to read. By God! lad, I was glad to see your frosted face ten
minutes ago in the light of the lantern.”
He grasped me with his long bony hand. “Sit down, and let me hear
my voice using again its mother tongue--you were always a good
listener--for the last eight years I have hardly spoken it. Can you
stand the room? The windows ought to be open, but what does it matter? I
may as well get accustomed to the heat before I die.”
I drew my chair close to the bed, and for awhile, between his fits
of coughing, we talked of things that were outside our thoughts, or,
rather, Hal talked, continuously, boisterously, meeting my remonstrances
with shouts of laughter, ending in wild struggles for breath, so that I
deemed it better to let him work his mad mood out.
Then suddenly: “What is she doing?” he asked. “Do you ever see her?”
“She is playing in--” I mentioned the name of a comic opera then running
in Paris. “No; I have not seen her for some time.”
He laid his white, wasted hand on mine. “What a pity you and I could not
have rolled ourselves into one, Paul--you, the saint, and I, the satyr.
Together we should have made her perfect lover.”
There came back to me the memory of those long nights when I had lain
awake listening to the angry voices of my father and mother soaking
through the flimsy wall. It seemed my fate to stand thus helpless
between those I loved, watching them hurting one another against their
will.
“Tell me,” I asked--“I loved her, knowing her: I was not blind. Whose
fault was it? Yours or hers?”
He laughed. “Whose fault, Paul? God made us.”
Thinking of her fair, sweet face, I hated him for his mocking laugh. But
the next moment, looking into his deep eyes, seeing the pain that dwelt
there, my pity was for him. A smile came to his ugly mouth.
“You have been on the stage, Paul; you must have heard the saying often:
'Ah, well, the curtain must come down, however badly things are going.'
It is only a play, Paul. We do not choose our parts. I did not even
know I was the villain, till I heard the booing of the gallery. I even
thought I was the hero, full of noble sentiment, sacrificing myself for
the happiness of the heroine. She would have married me in the beginning
had I plagued her sufficiently.”
I made to speak, but he interrupted me, continuing: “Ah, yes, it might
have been better. That is easy to say, not knowing. So, too, it might
have been worse--in all probability much the same. All roads lead to
the end. You know I was always a fatalist, Paul. We tried both ways. She
loved me well enough, but she loved the world also. I thought she
loved it better, so I kissed her on her brow, mumbled a prayer for her
happiness and made my exit to a choking sob. So ended the first act.
Wasn't I the hero throughout that, Paul? I thought so; slapped myself
upon the back, told myself what a fine fellow I had been. Then--you know
what followed. She was finer clay than she had fancied. Love is woman's
kingdom, not the world. Even then I thought more of her than of myself.
I could have borne my share of the burden had I not seen her fainting
under hers, shamed, degraded. So we dared to think for ourselves,
injuring nobody but ourselves, played the man and woman, lost the world
for love. Wasn't it brave, Paul? Were we not hero and heroine? They had
printed the playbill wrong, Paul, that was all. I was really the hero,
but the printing devil had made a slip, so instead of applauding you
booed. How could you know, any of you? It was not your fault.”
“But that was not the end,” I reminded him. “If the curtain had fallen
then, I could have forgiven you.”
He grinned. “That fatal last act. Even yours don't always come right, so
the critics tell me.”
The grin faded from his face. “We may never see each other again, Paul,”
he went on; “don't think too badly of me. I found I had made a second
mistake--or thought I had. She was no happier with me after a time than
she had been with him. If all our longings were one, life would be easy;
but they are not. What is to be done but toss for it? And if it come
down head we wish it had been tail, and if tail we think of what we have
lost through its not coming down head. Love is no more the whole of a
woman's life than it is of a man's. He did not apply for a divorce: that
was smart of him. We were shunned, ignored. To some women it might not
have mattered; but she had been used to being sought, courted, feted.
She made no complaint--did worse: made desperate effort to appear
cheerful, to pretend that our humdrum life was not boring her to death.
I watched her growing more listless, more depressed; grew angry with
her, angrier with myself. There was no bond between us except our
passion; that was real enough--'grand,' I believe, is the approved
literary adjective. It is good enough for what nature intended it, a
summer season in a cave. It makes but a poor marriage settlement in
these more complicated days. We fell to mutual recriminations, vulgar
scenes. Ah, most of us look better at a little distance from one
another. The sordid, contemptible side of life became important to us. I
was never rich; by contrast with all that she had known, miserably poor.
The mere sight of the food our twelve-pound-a-year cook put upon the
table would take away her appetite. Love does not change the palate,
give you a taste for cheap claret when you have been accustomed to dry
champagne. We have bodies to think of as well as souls; we are apt to
forget that in moments of excitement.
“She fell ill, and it seemed to me that I had dragged her from the soil
where she had grown only to watch her die. And then he came, precisely
at the right moment. I cannot help admiring him. Most men take their
revenge clumsily, hurting themselves; he was so neat, had been so
patient. I am not even ashamed of having fallen into his trap; it was
admirably baited. Maybe I had despised him for having seemed to submit
meekly to the blow. What cared he for me and my opinion? It was she was
all he cared for. He knew her better than I, knew that sooner or later
she would tire, not of love but of the cottage; look back with longing
eyes towards all that she had lost. Fool! Cuckold! What was it to him
that the world would laugh at him, despise him? Love such as his made
fools of men. Would I not give her back to him?
“By God! It was fine acting; half into the night we talked, I leaving
him every now and again to creep to the top of the stairs and listen to
her breathing. He asked me my advice, I being the hard-headed partner of
cool judgment. What would be the best way of approaching her after I was
gone? Where should he take her? How should they live till the nine days'
talk had died away? And I sat opposite to him--how he must have longed
to laugh in my silly face--advising him! We could not quite agree as
to details of a possible yachting cruise, and I remember hunting up an
atlas, and we pored over it, our heads close together. By God! I envy
him that night!”
He sank back on his pillows and laughed and coughed, and laughed and
coughed again, till I feared that wild, long, broken laugh would be his
last. But it ceased at length, and for awhile, exhausted, he lay silent
before continuing.
“Then came the question: how was I to go? She loved me still. He was
sure of it, and, for the matter of that, so was I. So long as she
thought that I loved her, she would never leave me. Only from her
despair could fresh hope arise for her. Would I not make some sacrifice
for her sake, persuade her that I had tired of her? Only by one means
could she be convinced. My going off alone would not suffice; my reason
for that she might suspect--she might follow. It would be for her sake.
Again it was the hero that I played, the dear old chuckle-headed hero,
Paul, that you ought to have cheered, not hooted. I loved her as much as
I ever loved her in my life, that night I left her. I took my boots
off in the passage and crept up in my stockinged feet. I told him I
was merely going to change my coat and put a few things into a bag. He
gripped my hand, and tears were standing in his eyes. It is odd that
suppressed laughter and expressed grief should both display the same
token, is it not? I stole into her room. I dared not kiss her for fear
of waking her; but a stray lock of her hair--you remember how long it
was--fell over the pillow, nearly reaching to the floor. I pressed my
lips against it, where it trailed over the bedstead, till they bled. I
have it still upon my lips, the mingling of the cold iron and the warm,
soft silken hair. He told me, when I came down again, that I had been
gone three-quarters of an hour. And we went out of the house together,
he and I. That is the last time I ever saw her.”
I leant across and put my arms around him; I suppose it was un-English;
there are times when one forgets these points. “I did not know! I did
not know,” I cried.
He pressed me to him with his feeble arms. “What a cad you must have
thought me, Paul,” he said. “But you might have given me credit for
better taste. I was always rather a gourmet than a gourmand where women
were concerned.”
“You have never seen him either again?” I asked.
“No,” he answered; “I swore to kill him when I learnt the trick he had
played me. He commenced the divorce proceedings against her the very
morning after I had left her. Possibly, had I succeeded in finding
him within the next six months, I should have done so. A few newspaper
proprietors would have been the only people really benefited. Time is
the cheapest Bravo; a little patience is all he charges. All roads lead
to the end, Paul.”
But I tell my tale badly, marring effects of sunlight with the memory
of shadows. At the time all promised fair. He was a handsome,
distinguished-looking man. Not every aristocrat, if without disrespect
to one's betters a humble observer may say so, suggests his title; this
man would have suggested his title, had he not possessed it. I suppose
he must have been about fifty at the time; but most men of thirty would
have been glad to exchange with him both figure and complexion. His
behaviour to his _fiancee_ was the essence of good taste, affectionate
devotion, carried to the exact point beyond which, having regard to the
disparity of their years, it would have appeared ridiculous. That he
sincerely admired her, was fully content with her, there could be no
doubt. I am even inclined to think he was fonder of her than, divining
her feelings towards himself, he cared to show. Knowledge of the world
must have told him that men of fifty find it easier to be the lovers of
women young enough to be their daughters, than girls find it to desire
the affection of men old enough to be their fathers; and he was not the
man to allow impulse to lead him into absurdity.
From my own peculiar point of view he appeared the ideal prince consort.
It was difficult for me to imagine my queen in love with any mere man.
This was one beside whom she could live, losing in my eyes nothing of
her dignity. My feelings for her he guessed at our first interview. Most
men in his position would have been amused, and many would have shown
it. For what reason I cannot say, but with a tact and courtesy that left
me only complimented, he drew from me, before I had met him half-a-dozen
times, more frank confession than a month previously I should have
dreamt of my yielding to anything than my own pillow. He laid his hand
upon my shoulder.
“I wonder if you know, my friend, how wise you are,” he said. “We all of
us at your age love an image of our own carving. Ah, if only we could be
content to worship the white, changeless statute! But we are fools. We
pray the gods to give her life, and under our hot kisses she becomes a
woman. I also loved when I was your age, Paul. Your countrymen, they
are so practical, they know only one kind of love. It is business-like,
rich--how puts it your poet? 'rich in saving common sense.' But there
are many kinds, you understand that, my friend. You are wise, do not
confuse them. She was a child of the mountains. I used to walk three
leagues to Mass each day to worship her. Had I been wise--had I so left
it, the memory of her would have coloured all my life with glory. But
I was a fool, my friend; I turned her into a woman. Ah!”--he made a
gesture of disgust--“such a fat, ugly woman, Paul, I turned her into. I
had much difficulty in getting rid of her. We should never touch things
in life that are beautiful; we have such clumsy hands, we spoil whatever
we touch.”
Hal did not return to England till the end of the year, by which time
the Count and Countess Huescar--though I had her permission still to
call her Barbara, I never availed myself of it; the “Countess” fitted my
mood better--had taken up residence in the grand Paris house old Hasluck
had bought for them.
It was the high-water mark of old Hasluck's career, and, if anything,
he was a little disappointed that with the dowry he had promised her
Barbara had not done even better for herself.
“Foreign Counts,” he grumbled to me laughingly, one day, “well, I hope
they're worth more in Society than they are in the City. A hundred
guineas is their price there, and they're not worth that. Who was that
American girl that married a Russian Prince only last week? A million
dollars was all she gave for him, and she a wholesale boot-maker's
daughter into the bargain! Our girls are not half as smart.”
But that was before he had seen his future son-in-law. After, he was
content enough, and up to the day of the wedding, childishly elated.
Under the Count's tuition he studied with reverential awe the Huescar
history. Princes, statesmen, warriors, glittered, golden apples, from
the spreading branches of its genealogical tree. Why not again! its
attenuated blue sap strengthened with the rich, red blood, brewed
by toil and effort in the grim laboratories of the under world. In
imagination, old Hasluck saw himself the grandfather of Chancellors, the
great-grandfather of Kings.
“I have laid the foundation, you shall raise the edifice,” so he told
her one evening I was spending with them, caressing her golden hair with
his blunt, fat fingers. “I am glad you were not a boy. A boy, in all
probability, would have squandered the money, let the name sink back
again into the gutter. And even had he been the other sort, he could
only have been another business man, keeping where I had left him.
You will call your first boy Hasluck, won't you? It must always be
the first-born's name. It shall be famous in the world yet, and for
something else than mere money.”
I began to understand the influences that had gone towards the
making--or marring--of Barbara's character. I had never guessed he had
cared for anything beyond money and the making of money.
It was, of course, a wedding as ostentatious as possible. Old Hasluck
knew how to advertise, and spared neither expense nor labour, with the
result that it was the event of the season, at least according to the
Society papers. Mrs. Hasluck was the type of woman to have escaped
observation, even had the wedding been her own; that she was present at
her daughter's, “becomingly dressed in grey veiling spotted white, with
an encrustation of mousseline de soie,” I learnt the next day from the
_Morning Post_. Old Hasluck himself had to be fetched every time he
was wanted. At the conclusion of the ceremony, seeking him, I found him
sitting on the stairs leading to the crypt.
“Is it over?” he asked. He was mopping his face on a huge handkerchief,
and had a small looking-glass in his hand.
“All over,” I answered, “they are waiting for you to start.”
“I always perspire so when I'm excited,” he explained. “Keep me out of
it as much as possible.”
But the next time I saw him, which was two or three days later, the
reaction had set in. He was sitting in his great library, surrounded
by books he would no more have thought of disturbing than he would of
strumming on the gorgeous grand piano inlaid with silver that ornamented
his drawing-room. A change had passed over him. His swelling rotundity,
suggestive generally of a bladder inflated to its extremest limits by
excess of self-importance, appeared to be shrinking. I put the idea
aside as mere fancy at the time, but it was fact; he became a mere bag
of bones before he died. He was wearing an old pair of carpet slippers
and smoking a short clay pipe.
“Well,” I said, “everything went off all right.”
“Everybody's gone off all right, so far,” he grunted. He was crouching
over the fire, though the weather was still warm, one hand spread
out towards the blaze. “Now I've got to go off, that's the only thing
they're waiting for. Then everything will be in order.”
“I don't think they are wanting you to go off,” I answered, with a
laugh.
“You mean,” he answered, “I'm the goose that lays the golden eggs. Ah,
but you see, so many of the eggs break, and so many of them are bad.”
“Some of them hatch all right,” I replied. The simile was becoming
somewhat confused: in conversation similes are apt to.
“If I were to die this week,” he said--he paused, completing mental
calculations, “I should be worth, roughly speaking, a couple of million.
This time next year I may be owing a million.”
I sat down opposite to him. “Why run risks?” I suggested. “Surely you
have enough. Why not give it up--retire?”
He laughed. “Do you think I haven't said that to myself, lad--sworn
I would a dozen times a year? I can't do it; I'm a gambler. It's the
earliest thing I can recollect doing, gambling with brace buttons. There
are men, Paul, now dying in the workhouse--men I once knew well; I think
of them sometimes, and wish I didn't--who any time during half their
life might have retired on twenty thousand a year. If I were to go to
any one of them, and settle an annuity of a hundred a year upon him, the
moment my back was turned he'd sell it out and totter up to Threadneedle
Street with the proceeds. It's in our blood. I shall gamble on my
death-bed, die with the tape in my hand.”
He kicked the fire into a blaze. A roaring flame made the room light
again.
“But that won't be just yet awhile,” he laughed, “and before it does,
I'll be the richest man in Europe. I keep my head cool--that's the
great secret.” Leaning over towards me, he sunk his voice to a whisper,
“Drink, Paul--so many of them drink. They get worried; fifty things
dancing round and round at the same time in their heads. Fifty questions
to be answered in five minutes. Tick, tick, tick, taps the little devil
at their elbow. This going down, that going up. Rumor of this, report
of that. A fortune to be lost here, a fortune to be snatched there.
Everything in a whirl! Tick, tick, tick, like nails into a coffin. God!
for five minutes' peace to think. Shut the door, turn the key. Out comes
the bottle. That's the end. All right so long as you keep away from
that. Cool, quick brain, clear judgment--that's the secret.”
“But is it worth it all?” I suggested. “Surely you have enough?”
“It means power, Paul.” He slapped his trousers pocket, making the
handful of gold and silver he always carried there jingle musically. “It
is this that rules the world. My children shall be big pots, hobnob
with kings and princes, slap them on the back and call them by their
Christian names, be kings themselves--why not? It's happened before.
My children, the children of old Noel Hasluck, son of a Whitechapel
butcher! Here's my pedigree!” Again be slapped his tuneful pocket.
“It's an older one than theirs! It's coming into its own at last! It's
money--we men of money--that are the true kings now. It's our family
that rules the world--the great money family; I mean to be its head.”
The blaze died out, leaving the room almost in darkness, and for awhile
we sat in silence.
“Quiet, isn't it?” said old Hasluck, raising his head.
The settling of the falling embers was the only sound about us.
“Guess we'll always be like this, now,” continued old Hasluck. “Old
woman goes to bed, you see, immediately after dinner. It used to be
different when _she_ was about. Somehow, the house and the lackeys and
all the rest of it seemed to be a more natural sort of thing when _she_
was the centre of it. It frightens the old woman now she's gone. She
likes to get away from it. Poor old Susan! A little country inn with
herself as landlady and me fussing about behind the bar; that was always
her ambition, poor old girl!”
“You will be visiting them,” I suggested, “and they will be coming to
stop with you.”
He shook his head. “They won't want me, and it isn't my game to hamper
them. I never mix out of my class. I've always had sense enough for
that.”
I laughed, wishing to cheer him, though I knew he was right. “Surely
your daughter belongs to your own class,” I replied.
“Do you think so?” he asked, with a grin. “That's not a pretty
compliment to her. She was my child when she used to cling round my
neck, while I made the sausages, calling me her dear old pig. It didn't
trouble her then that I dropped my aitches and had a greasy skin. I was
a Whitechapel butcher, and she was a Whitechapel brat. I could have kept
her if I'd liked, but I was set upon making a lady of her, and I did it.
But I lost my child. Every time she came back from school I could see
she despised me a little more. I'm not blaming her; how could she help
it? I was making a lady of her, teaching her to do it; though there were
moments when I almost hated her, felt tempted to snatch her back to me,
drag her down again to my level, make her my child again, before it was
too late. Oh, it wasn't all unselfishness; I could have done it. She
would have remained my class then, would have married my class, and her
children would have been my class. I didn't want that. Everything's got
to be paid for. I got what I asked for; I'm not grumbling at the price.
But it ain't cheap.”
He rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe. “Ring the bell, Paul, will
you?” he said. “Let's have some light and something to drink. Don't take
any notice of me. I've got the hump to-night.”
It was a minute or two before the lamp came. He put his arm upon my
shoulder, leaning upon me somewhat heavily.
“I used to fancy sometimes, Paul,” he said, “that you and she might have
made a match of it. I should have been disappointed for some things. But
you'd have been a bit nearer to me, you two. It never occurred to you,
that, I suppose?”