JOHN MAKES A DISCOVERY
YET, in spite of what might be called a good beginning, the dinner
party was not a success. John was certain it hadn’t been a success. He
reviewed it, walking home with Corin in the starlight; he continued to
review it sitting in an armchair with a pipe, since he was in little
mood for sleep.
And yet, wherein precisely did its failure lie?
It did not lie with Lady Mary; nor with Rosamund; nor with Father
Maloney; nor, he was certain, with himself. (Corin, as already
mentioned, he left outside the category.) They had each and all of
them been courteous, friendly, charming. They had kept the ball of
conversation tossing lightly from one to the other; they had given
David his full share of the game. Certainly the fault did not lie with
any of the four. He could not, also, have said precisely that there
was any fault at all. Outwardly, at least, there was none. Yet there
had been a subtle atmosphere, an indefinable hint of something lacking.
They had discussed books--standard authors--with which David was well
acquainted. They had mentioned classical composers, with whom he was
certainly less familiar. They had talked of flowers, birds, animals,
sunsets, storms, and ships, and here he was in his element.
He had talked well. John had received a vivid impression of a land hot
beneath the noonday sun, of wine-red sunsets, the atmosphere aglow
with palpitating colour, the on-stealing of the darkly purple night,
the stars big and luminous looking down with ever-watchful eyes upon
the lonely veldt. He saw the vivid reds of the flame-coloured heaths
and everlasting flowers, the brilliant blue of the lobelias, the waxen
whiteness of the arum lilies. He heard the countless voices of the
grasshoppers, the low booming note of the frogs, the muffled beating
of the buzzards’ wings. And above all he felt the vast illimitable
spaces, the great loneliness of the veldt. David had talked of
Muizenberg, and the white sands stretching for forty miles towards
the mountains,--mountains gold and orange in the sunshine, blue in
the evening twilight, the green sea bordering the sands, emerald set
against pearl.
He had talked of Cape Town,--of the Malay men with their great baskets
of flowers, of Table Mountain with its silver-leaved trees, with
the rolling cloth of white cloud covering it. But here he touched
civilization; his speech was less fluent than when he held them in the
vast solemnity of the lonely veldt.
And here John made a discovery. He perceived all at once, not merely
the loneliness of the veldt, but the lonely spirit of the man who had
dwelt on it. It was that which had caused the subtle incongruity in the
atmosphere. He no more belonged to his surroundings than did a hermit
to a London Club; and, so thought John, carrying his discovery further,
he--David--was, in a measure, aware of that fact himself. He had been a
fish out of water, and however kindly, however charmingly, landsmen may
treat it, a fish on land is certainly in an element in which it cannot
by any possibility be at ease. It is true that this particular fish
had entered the element of its own free will; but, so surmised John,
it is equally true that he was not at home in it. And yet, so John
perceived with a fine subtlety of perception, it was not the material
surroundings alone which were at the root of the mischief. It lay
deeper; it was in the mental atmosphere that the uneasiness lay.
Now, he also perceived, or thought he perceived, that while David was
aware of the incongruity of the situation, he had not fully recognized
it to lie, as John saw it to lie, in this same mental atmosphere. This
fact in itself increased the man’s loneliness. He was not only isolated
in mind from those with whom he found himself, but he was isolated
from himself, because he did not understand himself. It is the most
bewildering kind of loneliness. It is almost useless to attempt to
describe it in terms of speech. There are no precise words for it. I,
at least, can find none, and John could not, though it is certain that
he recognized it in a measure.
And then by one of those sudden flashes of inspiration which come
to all men at times, or which come, at all events, to those given
to a certain quality of mental analysis, John saw that the more
material drama, of which he was at present an audience, sank into
insignificance before the mental drama he had perceived. The man had
come, so he believed, into his material birthright, but, regarding his
mental birthright, he was utterly ignorant. How, in what fashion would
he find it? if, indeed, he ever found it at all.
I do not say that John said all this to himself in words, even in
the somewhat clumsy manner in which I have tried to express it. He
perceived it vaguely that night. The actual articulation of his
thoughts did not, I fancy, come till later.