AWAY WITH THE RIBBONS!
Few things make the natural man, a being who still occupies a large
apartment in the soul of each of us, more impatient than to find people
refusing to conform to his idea of the way in which they ought to seek
and find happiness. So far as sane and sensible folk are
concerned--there is no need to bring the Asylums into the argument--his
way is the way; deviations from it, whether perversely deliberate or
instinctive and unreasoned, are so many wanderings from the only right
track. He likes money--then only fools omit to strive for it. Stability
of mind is his ideal--what more wretched than to be tossed from mood to
mood? A regular life is the sole means of preserving health in stomach
and brain--it is melancholy to see persons preferring haphazard and
ill-regulated existences. Nay, it makes this natural man rather vexed if
we do not like his furniture, his favourite vegetable, his dentist, and
so forth; his murmured "_De gustibus_" has a touch of scorn in it. He
conceives a grudge against us for upsetting established standards of
excellence in matters of life, conduct, upholstery, and the table. Our
likings for people in whom he sees nothing puzzle and annoy him equally;
the shrug with which he says, of a newly married couple for instance,
"They seem very happy," adds quite clearly, "But on no reasonable
grounds have they a right to be, and in my heart I can't quite believe
they are."
Sir James Muddock--once again the occasion of generalisations--had never
been able to understand why Ashley Mead did not jump at the chance of
Alice Muddock's hand and a share in Buckingham Palace Road. The lad was
poor, his prospects were uncertain, at the best they could not yield
wealth as Sir James had learnt to count it; the prejudice against trade
is only against trade on a small scale; any ambitions, social or
political, would be promoted, not thwarted, by his entry into the firm.
As for Alice, she was the best girl in the world, clever, kind,
trustworthy; she was very fond of him; he was fond of her and
appreciated her company. Ashley was turned thirty; he was not asked to
surrender the liberty of early youth. He had had his fling, and to
sensible men this fling was a temporary episode, to be enjoyed and done
with. It was time for him to get into harness; the harness offered was
very handsome, the manger well filled, the treatment all that could be
desired. When Sir James summed up the case thus, he had no suspicion of
what had passed during one Sunday in the country; it is fair to add that
it would have made no difference in his ideas, if he had known of it.
The day in the country with Ora Pinsent would have been ticketed as part
of the fling and thus relegated to after-dinner memories. Sir James did
not understand people to whom the fling was more than an episode, to
whom all life went on being a series of flings of ever-changing dice,
till at last and only in old age the box fell from paralysed fingers.
Therefore he did not understand all that was in the nature of Ashley
Mead; he would have understood nothing at all of what was in Ora
Pinsent's.
Ashley's decision had taken itself, as it seemed, without any help or
effort on his part. Here was the warrant of its inevitability. He
thought, when he first read the old man's summons, that he was in for a
great struggle and faced with a hard problem, with an anxious weighing
of facts and a curious forecast of possibilities, that he must sit down
to the scrutiny in idleness and solemnity. But somehow, as he slept or
dressed or breakfasted, between glances at his paper and whiffs of his
pipe, he decided to refuse many thousands a year and to ignore the
implied offer of Alice Muddock's hand. In themselves thousands were
good, there was nothing to be said against them; and of Alice he had
been so fond and to her so accustomed that for several years back he had
considered her as his most likely wife. She and the thousands were now
dismissed from his life--both good things, but not good for him. He
sighed once with a passing wish that he could be different; but being
what he was he felt himself hopelessly at war with Sir James' scheme as
a whole, and with every part of it. Contrast it with the moods, the
thoughts, the atmosphere of life which had filled his yesterday! And
yesterday's was his native air; thus it seemed to him, and he was so
infected with this air that he did not ask whether but for yesterday his
decision would have been as easy and unfaltering.
The old man was hurt, grieved, and, in spite of previous less direct
rebuffs, bitterly disappointed; he had not thought that his offer would
be refused when expressly made; he had not looked to see his hints about
his daughter more openly ignored the more open they themselves became.
His anger expressed itself in an ultimatum; he flung himself back in his
elbow chair, saying,
"Well, my lad, for the last time, take it or leave it. If you take it,
we'll soon put you through your facings, and then you'll be the best
head in the business. But if you won't have it, I must take in somebody
else."
"I know, Sir James. Don't think I expect you to go on giving me
chances."
"If it's not you, it's got to be Bertie Jewett." Bertie Jewett was
Herbert, son of Peter Jewett who had served through all the changes and
lately died as Manager in Buckingham Palace Road. "He won't refuse,
anyhow." The tone added, "He's not such a fool."
"No, he's not such an ass as I am," said Ashley, answering the tone and
smiling at poor Sir James with an appealing friendliness.
"That's your word, not mine; but I'm not going to quarrel with it," said
Sir James without a sign of softening. "What you're after I can't see.
What do you want?"
Ashley found himself unable to tell the Head of the Firm what he wanted.
"I can get along," he said lamely. "I make a bit writing for the papers,
and there's a brief once in a blue moon; and of course I've got a
little; and this secretaryship helps for the time."
This beggarly catalogue of inadequate means increased Sir James' scorn
and bewilderment.
"Are you above it?" he asked with sudden heat.
"Good God, sir, don't think me a snob as well as an ass," prayed Ashley.
"Then I don't know what you do want."
Matters seemed to have reached a standstill. But Sir James had a last
shot in his locker.
"Go up and lunch in Kensington Palace Gardens," he said. "Talk it over
with the ladies, talk it over with Alice."
Ashley wanted to refuse; on this day he had no desire to see Alice. But
refusal seemed impossible.
"All right, Sir James, I will," he said.
"Take a week, take a week more. If you say no then, it's Bertie
Jewett--and your chance is gone for ever. For Heaven's sake don't make a
fool of yourself." Affection mingling with wrath in the entreaty made it
harder to resist.
Ashley walked off with the last words ringing in his ears; they recalled
Lord Bowdon and the Athenæum corner. After reflexion and against
inclination Bowdon had determined not to make a fool of himself, and had
intrenched his resolution with apparent security against the possibility
of a relapse into a less sensible course. Here was Ashley's example; but
he shied at it.
"And how the devil am I to talk to Alice about it?" he exclaimed
petulantly, as he struck across the front of Buckingham Palace and
headed up Constitution Hill. There had been a general impression that he
would marry Alice Muddock, and a general impression about us assumes to
ourselves a vaguely obligatory force. We may not justify it, but we feel
the need for some apology if we refuse. Besides Ashley had, up to a
certain point, shared the impression, although in a faint far-off way,
regarding the suggested alliance not as the aim of his life but as a
possible and not unacceptable bourn of his youth. His entrance into the
firm was a topic so closely connected that he felt much awkwardness in
discussing it with Alice Muddock. Of her feelings he thought less than
of his own; he was not by nature a selfish man, but he had now fallen
into the selfishness of a great pre-occupation. The smallest joy or the
lightest sorrow for Ora Pinsent would have filled his mind. It is
difficult to feel in anything like this way towards more than one person
at a time. His sympathy for Alice Muddock was blunted and he excused its
want of acuteness by an affected modesty which questioned her concern in
him.
It chanced that Lady Kilnorton was at lunch. She seemed in high spirits
and talked vigorously. Her theme was the artistic temperament; she
blamed its slavishness to the moment. Lady Muddock showed an anxiety to
be furnished with details for purposes of increased disapproval; Alice
was judicial. One man among three women, Ashley would have been content
to listen, but, when appealed to, he defended the aspersed disposition.
He felt the conversation approaching Ora Pinsent, step by step; she was
in all their minds; the only case in point known to Lady Muddock, the
instance most interesting to Alice, an unwelcome persistent presence to
Irene, to him a subject to be neither encouraged nor avoided without
risk of self-betrayal. It was curious how she had come into the circle
of their lives, and having entered seemed to dominate it. But presently
he grew sure of his face and, for the rest, preferred that they should
abuse her rather than not speak of her; he grudged every abstraction of
his thoughts which banished her image.
The discussion brought its trials. Irene's well-restrained jealousy and
Lady Muddock's inquisitive disapproval were merely amusing; it was
Alice's judicial attitude which stirred him to resentment. To assess and
assay with this cold-blooded scientific accuracy seemed inhuman, almost
from its excess of science unscientific, since it was a method so
unsuited to the subject.
"Now take Ora," said Irene, at last grasping the nettle. "There's
nothing she wouldn't do for you at one moment, the next she wouldn't do
anything at all for you."
"For her acquaintances, you mean?" Alice asked.
"Oh, no, my dear. For anybody, for her best friend. You can't call her
either good or bad. She's just fluke, pure fluke."
"Well, I know it's the thing to pretend not to like flukes--" Ashley
began. The thin jocularity served for a shield.
"Oh, what's the use of asking a man? He just sees her face, that's all.
Nobody's denying her looks." Lady Kilnorton seemed petulant.
"Of course a life like hers," observed Lady Muddock, "is very
demoralising."
"My dear Lady Muddock, why?" asked Ashley, growing exasperated.
"Well, I only know what Minna Soames says, and--"
"Mother dear, Minna Soames is a goose," Alice remarked. Ashley was
grateful, but still with reservations as to the judicial tone.
Irene Kilnorton, engaged in her secret task of justifying herself and
taking a rosy view of Bowdon's feelings, talked more for her own ends
than for those of the company.
"That sort of people suit one another very well," she went on. "They
know what to expect of each other. Harm comes only when people of a
different sort get entangled with them."
"You're vague," said Ashley. "What different sort?" He had partly
fathomed her mood now, and his eyes were mischievous as he looked at
her.
"Sensible people, Mr. Mead." There was a touch of asperity in the brief
retort, which made a thrust from him seem excusable.
"Suppose Lord Bowdon had never seen you," he said with plausible
gravity, "and, being in that state of darkness, had fallen in love with
Miss Pinsent; would it have been so very surprising?"
"Very," said Irene Kilnorton.
"And dreadful?"
"Well, bad for him. He'd never have got on with her and--"
"There's Mr. Fenning," interposed Alice with a quiet laugh. A moment's
pause ensued. Ashley had been startled at the introduction of the name,
but he recovered himself directly.
"Oh, well," he said, "of course there's Mr. Fenning. I'd forgotten him.
But he's quite accidental. Leave him out. He's not part of the case."
"But there's so often a Mr. Fenning," Alice persisted. "Can he be
considered quite accidental?"
Ashley had made much the same remark in different words to Irene
Kilnorton a few weeks before; but remarks do not bear transplanting.
"Isn't that rather a traditional view?" he asked.
"You mean a prejudiced one?"
"Well, yes."
"I suppose so. But prejudices start somehow, don't they?" Her smile was
very gentle, but still, to his mind, horribly aloof and judicial. Could
she not understand how a woman might be carried away, and blunder into a
Mr. Fenning, _per incuriam_ and all in a minute (so to speak)? In such a
case was it to be expected that the Mr. Fenning in question should be
all in all to her? In some ways perhaps she must acknowledge his
existence; but at any rate she needn't Darby-and-Joan it with him!
"Poor dear Ora!" said Irene Kilnorton after a pause. Yet she was not
naturally malicious any more than Ashley Mead was naturally selfish. If
we are responsible for the moods we raise in others Miss Pinsent's
account was mounting up. Ashley allowed himself the retort of a laugh
as Lady Muddock rose from the table.
"I came to talk to you," he said to Alice, as she passed him.
"Then drink your coffee quick, and come into the garden," she answered
with her usual frank kindness. When she looked at him her aspect and air
became less judicial.
In the garden he opened the subject of Sir James' proposal; his eyes
were set straight in front of him, hers on the ground. Her answer would
have dismayed Sir James, and it surprised Ashley. She was energetically,
almost passionately, opposed to his entering the business.
"It's not your line, or your taste, or your proper work," she said.
"What's the good of being rich if you're doing what you hate all the
time?"
"I felt just like that," he said gratefully, "but I was afraid that I
felt like it because I was a fool."
"You can make your own way. Don't sell yourself to the business."
He glanced at her stealthily; her colour had risen and her lip trembled.
Did she think of anything besides the business when she bade him not
sell himself? A moment later she laughed uneasily, as, with a reference
to the conversation at lunch, she said,
"You've too much of the artistic temperament for Buckingham Palace
Road."
"I? I the artistic temperament?" He accepted the trite phrase as a
useful enough symbol of what they both meant.
"Yes," she answered steadily. "A good deal of it."
"Then I come under Irene Kilnorton's censures?"
"Under a good many of them, yes."
Something in her manner again annoyed and piqued him. She was judging
again, and judging him. But she was interesting him also. She spoke of
him; she knew him well: and just now he was in some doubt about himself.
"I don't know what you mean," he said, seeking to draw her out.
"Oh, things carry you away; and you like it. You don't want to get to a
comfortable place and stay there. I'm not saying anything you mind?"
"No. I don't think so, at least."
She glanced at him full for a moment as she said,
"I never think anything you'd mind, Ashley." Then she went on hastily.
"But you must be prepared to see Bertie Jewett in great prosperity--a
big house and so on--and to know it might all have been yours."
"I'm prepared for that," he said absently. He did not at all realise the
things he was abandoning.
"But of course you'll get on. You'll be something better than rich."
"Perhaps, if I don't--don't play the fool."
"You keep calling yourself a fool to-day. Why do you? You're not a
fool."
"It's only a way of speaking and not quite my own way, really," he
laughed. "It means if I don't enjoy life a little instead of spoiling it
all by trying to get something that isn't particularly well worth
having; it means, in fact, if I don't allow scope to my artistic
temperament." It meant also if he did not spend more days in the country
with Ora Pinsent; for though he did not (as he had hinted) call that
folly to himself, he was now on his defence against a world which would
call it folly with no doubtful voice, and would exhort him earnestly to
imitate Lord Bowdon's decisive measures of self-protection. It was in
the power of this clear-sighted girl thus to put him on his defence,
even in the full swing of his attraction towards Ora Pinsent; better
than anyone, she could shew him the other side of the picture. He fell
into a silence occupied with puzzled thoughts. She grew grave, except
for a sober little smile; she was thinking that it was easy to be wise
for others, for all the world except herself; while she was playing the
judicial prudent friend to him, the idea of another part was in her
head. There may be hope without expectation; it would not have been
human in her to hope nothing from this talk in the garden, to build no
fancies on it. But she rebuked her imagination; whatever it was that
filled his mind--and his occasional air of distraction had caught her
notice--she had little share in it, she knew that well.
"The talk at lunch was _à propos_," she said presently. "I'm going to
call on Miss Pinsent this afternoon."
"You're going to call--?" The surprise was plain in his voice. This
sudden throwing of the two together seemed an odd trick of
circumstances! His tone brought her eyes quickly round to him and she
looked at him steadily.
"Why not? She asked me. I told you so," she said. Ashley could not deny
it; he shrugged his shoulders. "Shan't I like her?"
"Everybody must like her, I think," he answered, awkward, almost
abashed. But then there came on him a desire to talk about Ora, not so
much to justify himself as to tell another what she was, to exhibit her
charm, to infect a hearer with his own fever. He contrived to preserve a
cool tone, aiming at what might seem a dispassionate analysis of a
fascination which everybody admitted to exist; but he was at once too
copious and too happy in his description and his images. The girl beside
him listened with that little smile; it could not be merry, she would
not let it grow bitter, but schooled it to the neutrality of polite
attention. She soon saw the state of his mind and the discovery was hard
for her to bear. Yet it was not so hard as if he had come to tell her of
an ordinary attachment, of a decorous engagement to some young lady of
their common acquaintance, and of a decorous marriage to follow in due
course. Then she would have asked, "Why her and not me?" With Ora
Pinsent no such question was possible. Neither for good nor for evil
could any comparison be drawn. And another thought crept in, although
she did not give it willing admittance. Ora was not only exceptional;
she was impossible. Impossibility might be nothing to him now, but it
could not remain nothing forever. The pain was there, but the disaster
not irrevocable. Among the somewhat strange chances which had marked the
life of Mr. Fenning there was now to be reckoned a certain shamefaced
comfort which he all unwittingly afforded to Alice Muddock. But Alice
was not proud of the alliance.
Ashley broke off in a mixture of remorse and embarrassment. His
description could not be very grateful to its hearer; it must have come
very near to betraying its utterer. Alice did not pretend that it left
her quite in the dark; she laughed a little and said jokingly:
"One would think you were in love with her. I suppose it's that artistic
temperament again. Well, this afternoon I'll look and see whether she's
really all you say. The male judgment needs correction."
As their talk went on he perceived in her a brightening of spirits, a
partial revival of serenity, a sort of relief; they came as a surprise
to him. The lightness with which she now spoke of Ora appeared, to a
large degree at least, genuine. He did not understand that she
attributed to him, in more sincerity than her manner had suggested, the
temper which had formed the subject of their half-serious half-jesting
talk. Her impression of him did not make him less attractive to her; he
was not all of the temper she blamed and feared; he had, she persuaded
herself, just enough of it to save him from the purely ribbon-selling
nature and (here came the point to which she fondly conducted herself)
to give her both hope and patience in regard to her own relations with
him. She could not help picturing herself as the fixed point to which he
would, after his veerings, return in the end; meanwhile his share of the
temperament excused the veerings. Lady Kilnorton had forced the game
with entire apparent success, but Alice's quick eyes questioned the real
completeness of that victory. She would play a waiting game. There was
no question of an orthodox marriage with the young lady from over the
way or round the corner, an arrangement which would have been odious in
its commonplace humiliation and heart-breaking in its orderly finality.
But Ora Pinsent was not a finality, any more than she was the embodiment
of an orderly arrangement. That fortunate impossibility which attached
to her, by virtue of Jack Fenning's existence, forbade despair, just as
her fascination and her irresistibility seemed to prevent humiliation
and lessen jealousy. The thing was a transient craze, such as men fell
into; it would pass. If she joined her life to Ashley Mead's she was
prepared (so she assured herself) for such brief wanderings of
allegiance, now and then; as time went on, they would grow fewer and
fewer, until at last she conquered altogether the tendency towards them.
"And she must be ten years older than I am," her reflections ended; that
the real interval was but seven did not destroy the importance of the
point.
Having offered Ashley a lift to Piccadilly, she went off to get ready,
and presently Bowdon, who had called to pick up Irene, strolled into the
garden for a cigarette.
"Hullo, what are you doing here? You ought to be making your living," he
cried good-humouredly.
"I've been throwing it away instead," said Ashley. "Should you like to
be a partner in Muddock and Mead?"
"A sleeping one," said Bowdon with a meditative pull at his moustache.
Ashley explained that he would have been expected to take an active
part. Bowdon evidently thought that he ought to have been glad to take
any part, and rebuked him for his refusal.
"Take the offer and marry the girl," he counselled. "She'd have you all
right, and she seems a very good sort."
"I don't feel like settling down all of a sudden," said Ashley with a
smile.
They walked side by side for a few paces; then Bowdon remarked,
"Depend upon it, it's a good thing to do, though."
"It's a question of the best date," said Ashley, much amused at his
companion. "Now at your age, Lord Bowdon--"
"Confound you, Ashley, I'm not a hundred! I say it's a good thing to do.
And, by Jove, when it means a lump of money too!"
A pause followed; they walked and smoked in silence.
"Good creatures, women," remarked Bowdon.
Ashley did not find the remark abrupt; he traced its birth. Alice had
left much the same impression behind her in his mind.
"Awfully," he answered; there was in his voice also a note of remorse,
of the feeling that comes when we cannot respond to a kindness so
liberally as it deserves.
"Of course they aren't all alike, though," pursued Bowdon, as though he
were reasoning out an intricate subject and coming on unexpected
conclusions. "In fact they differ curiously, wonderfully."
His thoughts had passed, or were passing, from Irene Kilnorton to Ora
Pinsent; obedient to this guidance Ashley's followed in a parallel track
from Alice Muddock to Ora Pinsent.
"They're charming in different ways," said he with a slight laugh.
Bowdon shewed no signs of mirth; he was frowning a little and smoked
rather fast.
"And men are often great asses," he observed a few moments later. Again
Ashley had kept pace, but his face was more doubtful than his
companion's and there was hesitation in his voice as he replied,
"Yes, I suppose they are."
This subterranean conversation, shewing above ground only faint
indications of what it really meant to each of the talkers, had carried
them to the end of the garden. Turning round at the fence, they saw
Irene and Alice walking towards them, side by side. Both ladies were
well dressed, Irene rather brilliantly, Alice with quiet, subdued good
taste; both seemed attractive, Irene for her bright vivacity and merry
kindness, Alice for her strength of regard and a fine steady
friendliness. A man who was fortunate enough to gain either of them
would win a wife of whom he might justly be proud when he talked with
the enemy in the gate, and moreover would enjoy an unusually good
prospect of being happy in his own house. The man who had won one, and
the man who could, if he would, win the other, approached them in a slow
leisurely stroll.
"Yes, great asses," repeated Bowdon in a reflective tone.
"I didn't say we weren't," protested Ashley Mead with an irritated
laugh.
They would have found a most heartfelt endorsement of the view which
they reluctantly adopted, had Sir James Muddock known how small a share
of Ashley's visit had been honestly devoted to a consideration of the
advantages of a partnership in Muddock and Mead, and how much larger a
part had been given to a subject concerning which Sir James could have
only one opinion.