OTHER WORLDS
Elisha wore worthily the mantle of Elijah; nay, there were fresh vigour
and a new genius in the management of Muddock and Mead. The turn-over
grew, the percentage of working expenses decreased, the profits swelled;
the branches were reorganised and made thoroughly up to the needs of the
times; the big block in Buckingham Palace Road advanced steadily in
prestige. For all this the small, compact, trim man with the keen
pale-blue eyes had to be thanked. He had found a big place vacant; he
did not hesitate to jump up to it, and behold, he filled it! Moreover he
knew that he filled it; the time of promotion was over, the time of
command was come. His quieter bearing and a self-possession which no
longer betrayed incompleteness by self-assertion marked the change. He
did not now tell people that he made sovereigns while they were making
shillings. He could not give himself grace or charm, he could not help
being still a little hard, rather too brusque and decisive in his ways;
he could not help people guessing pretty accurately what he was and
whence he came; but the rough edges were filed and the sharpest points
rounded. Even Bowdon, who was for a number of reasons most prejudiced,
admitted that it was no longer out of the question to ask him to
dinner.
The business was to be turned into a company; this step was desirable on
many grounds, among them because it pleased Miss Minna Soames. She was
to marry Bob Muddock, now Sir Robert, and although she liked Bob and
Bob's money she did not care much about Bob's shop. Neither did Bob
himself; he did not want to work very hard, now that his father's hand
was over him no more, and he thought that a directorship would both give
him less to do and mitigate a relationship to the shop hitherto too
close for his taste. So the thing was settled, and Bertie Jewett, as
Managing Director, found himself in the position of a despot under forms
of constitutional government. For Bob did as he was told; and given that
a certain event took place, Bertie would control the larger part of the
ordinary shares in virtue of his own holding, his brother-in-law's, and
his wife's. Preference shares only had been offered to the public.
The event would take place. Nobody in the circle of the Muddocks'
acquaintance doubted that now, although perhaps it might not occur very
soon. For it was not the sort of thing which came with a rush; it
depended on no sudden tempest of feeling, it grew gradually into
inevitability. Union of interest, the necessity of constant meetings,
the tendency to lean one on the other, work slowly, but when they have
reached a certain point of advance their power is great. Bertie Jewett
had not spoken of marriage yet and not for some time would he; but he
had already entered the transaction on the credit side of his life's
ledger. Alice knew that he had; she did not run away. Here was proof
enough.
"It's not the least use your saying you hope it won't happen. It will,"
Lady Bowdon remarked to her husband; and he found it impossible to
argue that she was wrong. For there was no force to oppose the force of
habit, of familiarity, of what her family wanted, of what the quiet keen
little man wanted and meant to have. Alice was not likely to fall into a
sudden, new, romantic passion; her temper was not of the kind that
produces such things. She had no other wooers; men felt themselves
warned off. Was she then to live unmarried? This was a very possible end
of the matter, but under the circumstances not the more likely. Then she
would marry Bertie Jewett, unless the past could be undone and Ashley
Mead come again into her heart. But neither was her temper of the sort
that lets the past be undone; the registers of her mind were written in
an ink which did not fade. Besides he had no thought of coming back to
her.
But there was now, after Ora had gone off with her play and her part, a
revival of friendship between them, started by a chance encounter at the
Bowdons' and confirmed by a talk they had together when Ashley called in
Kensington Palace Gardens. He was not insensible, and thought that she
was not, to an element of rather wry comedy which had crept into their
relations. He was sorry for himself, as he had very good grounds for
being; he perceived that she was sorry for herself and, in view of the
dominance and imminence of Bertie Jewett, fully acknowledged the
soundness of her reasons. The comic side of the matter appeared when he
recognised that, side by side with this self-commiseration, there
existed in each of them an even stronger pity for the other, a pity that
could not claim to be altogether free from contempt, since it was
directed towards what each of them had chosen, as well as towards what
had chanced to befall them from outside. They had both been
unfortunate, but there was no need to dwell on that; the more notable
point was that whereas he had chosen to be of Ora Pinsent's party with
all which that implied, she was choosing to be of Bertie Jewett's party
with all which that implied. It was no slur on their own misfortunes
that each would now refuse to take the others place or to come over to
the others faction. The pity then which each had for the other was not
merely for a state of circumstances accidental and susceptible of
change, but for a habit of mind; they pitied one another as types even
while they came again to like one another as individuals. For naturally
they over-ran the mark of truth, he concluding that because she was
drifting towards Bertie she was in all things like Bertie, she that
because he had been carried off his feet by Ora Pinsent he was entirely
such as Ora was. There was certainly something of the comic in this
reciprocity of compassion; it made Ashley smile as he walked beside
Alice in the garden.
"So Bob's going to cut Buckingham Palace Road?" he asked.
"Hardly that. Oh, well, it'll come to something like that. Minna has
aristocratic instincts."
"I remember she had them about the theatre."
"She doesn't like the shop." Alice had been laughing, but grew grave now
as she added, "Do you know, I get to like the shop more and more. I
often go there and look on while they take stock or something of that
kind. One's in touch with a real life there, there's something being
done."
"I suppose there is," he admitted rather reluctantly. "I don't in the
least object to other people doing it. However you said from the
beginning that it wouldn't suit me."
"Yes, I know I did. I think so still." But whether her reasons were
quite the same was more doubtful than ever. "But I'm quite sure it suits
me admirably. I should like really to work at it."
"Sir James always relied on your opinion about it."
"I suppose he wasn't so wrong as he looked," she said with a little
laugh. "It's in our blood, and I seem to have a larger share of it than
Bob. Why should we try to get away from it? It's made us what we are."
"You didn't use to think that quite."
"No, and you didn't use to--"
"Be quite such a fool as I am? No, I don't think I did," said Ashley.
"Still--"
"Still you can't conceive how I can interest myself so much in the
business?"
"Something like that," he admitted. Her phrase went as near to candour
as it was possible for them to go together. They walked on in silence
for a little way, then Ashley smiled and remarked,
"I believe we get a lot of our opinions simply by disliking what we see
of other people's; we select their opposites."
"Reaction?"
"Yes; and then we feed what we've picked up till it grows quite strong."
They fell into silence again. Friendliness could not banish the sense of
distance between them; they could agree, more or less, as to how they
had come to be so far apart, but the understanding brought them no
nearer. Even agreeing to differ is still differing. Both were rather
sad, yet both were smiling faintly, as they walked side by side; it was
very absurd that they had ever thought of being so much to one another.
Yet it was a rather sorrowful thing that in future they were to be so
very little to one another. Beneath their differences they had just
enough of kinship to make them regret that the differences were so
great, and so imperative in the conditions they imposed. A sudden
impulse made Alice turn to him and say,
"I know you think I'm narrow; I hope you don't think I've been unkind or
unfriendly. I did try to put myself in your place as well as I could; I
never thought unkindly about you."
"How were you to put yourself in my place?" he asked, smiling at her. "I
know you tried. But you'd have had to put yourself in somebody else's
place as well."
"I suppose so," said Alice with a shake of her head; she certainly could
not put herself in Ora Pinsent's place.
"After all, people are best in their own places," he went on. He paused
for a moment, and added, "Supposing they can find out where their places
are. You've found yours?"
"Yes," she answered. "Mine is the shop."
He sighed and smiled, lifting his hands. "I wonder where mine is," he
said a moment later. For if his were not the shop, it had not seemed to
be by Ora Pinsent either. "Perhaps I haven't got one," he went on. "And
after all I don't know that I want one. Isn't it possible to keep moving
about, trying one after another, you know?" He spoke lightly, making a
jest of his question; but she had fallen into seriousness.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Work and labour truly to get mine own living. As for the rest, really I
haven't thought about it."
She wanted to ask him whether he still loved Ora Pinsent, whether he
were waiting for her to come back to him, and still made that the great
thing in his life. But she could find no words for these questions and
no right in herself to ask them. The unuttered thoughts served only to
check her sympathy for him; even if he did not look to Ora as the great
thing in his future life, yet she had been so great in his past as to
leave him not caring about the rest. "I'm hard at work, though," he said
an instant after; it sounded as if he were seeking to defend himself.
Alice said something rather commonplace about the advantages of hard
work; Ashley gave it the perfunctory assent it seemed to demand. Then
came silence, and to both of them a sense that there was no more to be
said between them.
In spite of this, perhaps because she would not acknowledge it, Alice
asked him to dinner the next night, to meet the Bowdons and Bertie
Jewett; he accepted with an odd sort of desire to make one of the family
circle once again. His interest was mainly in Bertie; they sat on either
side of Alice. Ashley's contempt for Bertie was now entirely for the
type, and even there not very severe, for power of any kind extorts
respect; it was in the main supplanted by the curiosity with which we
look on people who are doing what we might have done had we so chosen,
or been allowed by nature so to choose. There was a moment's pang when
he perceived that Alice was more at ease and more comfortable in talking
to Bertie; he was resigned to the change, but it was not very pleasant
to look on at it in full operation. Irene, on his other side, allowed
none of its significance to escape him; her glances pointed the moral;
why she did this he could not understand, not tracing how part of her
grudge against Ora attached to the man who had been so near and so much
to Ora, and now recalled her so vividly to memory. Bowdon was polite to
Lady Muddock, but far from gay. Merriment, animation, sallies of wit or
chaff, a certain amount of what a hostile critic might call noisiness,
had become habitual to Ashley in the society which he had recently
frequented; he found himself declaring this little party very dull,
overdone with good sense and sobriety, wanting in irresponsibility of
spirit. He hinted something of this feeling to Irene Bowdon.
"Oh, we don't go in for being brilliant," she said with a double touch
of malice; she meant to hit at Ora and Ora's friends, and also
perversely to include herself in his hinted depreciation of the company;
this she liked to do because the depreciation came, as she knew, from a
recollection of Ora and Ora's sort of society.
"Being brilliant isn't in itself a crime," pleaded Ashley; "even if it
were, it's so rare that there's no need for an exemplary sentence."
"Why don't you talk to Alice?" she whispered.
"She prefers to talk to Mr. Jewett."
"I'm glad it annoys you."
"Are you? I'm rather surprised it does. I don't know why it should, you
see."
Irene turned her shoulder on him with emphasised impatience. What right
had he to find it dull? Did Bowdon also find it dull? Then came the
worst irritation--the admission that it was dull. She turned back to
Ashley with a sudden twist.
"What right have you to expect to be always amused?" she demanded.
"None; but I suppose I may mention it when I'm not," said he.
"Do you know what you remind me of? You'll be angry if I tell you."
"Then I couldn't deprive you of the pleasure of telling me, Lady
Bowdon."
"You're like a drunkard put on lemonade," she said with a vicious little
laugh.
Ashley made no immediate answer; he looked at her with lifted brows;
then he also laughed.
"The metaphor's rather strong," said he, "but--if you like!"
"Well, you're very good-tempered," she conceded with a remorseful
glance. "I should feel better if you'd hit me back."
"I've no weapon."
"Yes, you have." Her tone was marked and significant; he looked straight
and attentively in her face; her eyes were not on his watching face but
on her husband whose head was bent in courteous attention to Lady
Muddock's doubtfully expounded platitudes.
"Look here, do you know anything?" he asked.
"Yes," said she without turning towards him.
He grew surer of his ground and hazarded his shot with confidence.
"About a thousand pounds?"
"Yes."
"Ah, married men, married men! It wasn't his secret. And why in heaven's
name did he tell you?"
"He was right to tell me. I like the truth."
"Oh, don't talk about truth! I'm fresh from a surfeit of it. I shouldn't
have thought it made you any more--" He paused, in difficulty how to say
enough and not too much.
"Any happier to know?"
"Well--if you like," said Ashley, again accepting her phrase.
"No, it doesn't," she said briefly. Then she added, "I promised not to
tell you; don't let him know I have."
"I'll try to prove a better confidant than he is," said Ashley. "And why
did you tell me?"
"You half guessed. I didn't tell. But--don't you think we might
sympathise a little?"
"We'll sympathise all we can," said Ashley with a laugh.
"We might almost all sympathise; she's made a difference to almost all
of us."
"Who has?"
"She--she--she," said Irene Bowdon, as she rose in answer to her
hostess' signal.
"Well, yes, she has," Ashley admitted, as he drew back the chairs. And
while she was still in earshot he added, "But it's all over now."
"Indeed it isn't, it never will be," said Irene over her shoulder, as
she swept away.
"How ready people are with these eternal negatives," he thought as he
sat down to his glass of wine.
Then he fell to speculating why Bowdon had told her about Jack Fenning
and the thousand pounds, and why she had revealed that Bowdon had told
her. To him the second question seemed the more difficult to answer, but
he found an explanation, partly in her desire to defend or apologise for
a certain bitterness towards Ora which she had betrayed, more perhaps in
the simple fact that she was brimming over with the thing and could not
restrain herself in the presence of one to whom her disclosure would be
so interesting and significant. She had been tempted to show him that
she knew more of the situation than he supposed, and must not be treated
as an outsider when Ora and her affairs came up for discussion. Anyhow
there the disclosure was, with its proof that, even although the eternal
negative might be rashly asserted, for the time at all events Ora had
very materially affected other lives than his own.
"Of course I never expected to be where I am; at any rate not till much
later."
Bertie Jewett was talking to Bowdon about his success and his new
position; he talked unaffectedly enough, although perhaps it could
hardly be said that he talked modestly. Perceiving that his remark had
roused Ashley to attention, he went on, "Among other things, I've got to
thank your dislike of a commercial life, Mead. That let me in, you see."
"Come, Ashley," laughed Bowdon, "here's something to your credit!"
"Really the exact train of circumstances that has resulted in putting me
practically at the head of the concern is rather curious to consider,"
pursued Bertie. Bowdon listened with a tolerant, Ashley with a malicious
smile. "It all seemed to be made so easy for me. I had only to wait, and
all the difficulties cleared out of the way. I can talk of it because I
had nothing to do with it, except taking what I was offered, I mean."
"Well, everybody's not equal to that, by any means," said Bowdon. "But
certainly fortune's treated you well."
It was on Ashley's lips to say "You owe it all to Ora Pinsent." But the
thing would have been absurd and quite inadmissible to say. Perhaps it
was also rather absurd to think; he knew the trick he had of magnifying
and extending his own whimsical view of events until it seemed to cover
the whole field. None the less, an intimate knowledge of the
circumstances, of the exact train of circumstances as Bertie put it,
forbade him to rob Miss Pinsent of all credit for the result on which he
and Bowdon were congratulating Mr. Jewett. Why should not poor Ora,
towards whom so many people were bearing a grudge, have gratitude when
she deserved it?
"The fact is," said Bowdon, tugging his moustache, "things happen very
queerly in this world."
"After that startling observation, let's go into the garden and smoke,"
said Ashley, rising with a laugh.
In the garden Ashley talked to Lady Muddock, and had the opportunity of
observing how a seventh heaven of satisfaction might be constructed
without a single scrap of material which seemed to him heavenly. Such a
spectacle should serve as a useful corrective for a judgment of the way
of the world too personal and relative in character; it had on Ashley
the perverse effect of increasing his discontent. If happiness were so
easy a thing and placidity so simply come by, if nothing extraordinary
were needed for them and nothing dazzling essential, why, what fools
were people who went after the extraordinary and the dazzling, and yet
in the end failed completely in their quest! And that you were a fool by
your very nature was no comfort, but rather increased the hopelessness
of the position.
"I can't help thinking how wonderfully everything has happened for the
best," said Lady Muddock, her eyes resting on Alice and Bertie who were
walking side by side, a few paces behind Bowdon and his wife.
"You're rather too optimistic for me," said Ashley with a laugh. "I
think we do the world rough justice if we admit that most things happen
for the second-best."
"We are taught--" Lady Muddock began.
"Yes, but, my dear Lady Muddock, we're most of us shocking bad pupils."
Lady Muddock made a few efforts to convert him to the creed of the best,
in distinction from that of the second-best; but Ashley would not be
persuaded. The idea of the second-best gained on him. What had happened
to the little circle about him was certainly not ideal, yet it was not
calamity; it could hardly claim to be tragedy, yet you were in danger of
being brought up short by some sudden pang if you tried to laugh at it.
It wanted then a formula to express its peculiar variety, its halting
midway between prosperity and misfortune, between what one would have
wished and what one might have had to take. The formula of the
second-best seemed to suit it very well. Even his own individual
position, of which he had not taken a sanguine view, fitted itself into
the formula with just a little pressing and clipping and management. His
life was not ruined; he found himself left with too many interests and
ambitions, with too keen an appreciation of all that was going on about
him, to yield to the hysteria of such a sentimental conclusion; but it
was not, and now would not be, quite what he had once dreamed and even
lately hoped. He took courage and decided that he need not fall below
the formula of the second-best. And what of Ora? Would she also and her
life fit into the formula? She had never fitted into any formula yet;
here lay her charm, the difficulty and the hopelessness of her. But then
the new formula was very elastic. She might find a second-best for
herself, or accept one if it were offered to her.
In the notion that he has learnt or begun to learn the ways of the world
and how to take it there lies a subtle and powerful appeal to a man's
vanity. There is a delicate flavour in the feeling, surpassing the more
obvious delights which may be gained from the proof of intellectual
superiority or the consciousness of personal charm. It is not only that
the idea makes him seem wiser than his fellows, for the conviction of
greater wisdom would not appear to carry much pleasure; it makes him
feel better-tempered, better-mannered, better-bred--if it may so be put,
more of a gentleman. He is no longer one of the pushing jostling throng,
eager to force a way into the front places, to have the best view of the
show or the largest share of the presents which are to be distributed;
he stands on the outskirts in cool leisureliness, smiling rather
superciliously, not exactly happy, but convinced that any effort would
turn his negative condition into a positive discomfort. Or the old
metaphor of the banquet comes back into his mind; when the dish goes
round he does not snatch at it; if it is long in coming, he feels and
betrays no impatience; if it is finished before it reaches him, he waits
for the next course, and meanwhile engages in polite conversation; he
does not call out, nor make gestures, nor abuse the waiters (they are
great folk in disguise). The rest of the company, who do all these
things, commit gross breaches of taste; and although he may go home
hungry he will be fed and warmed by the satisfaction of his graceful
attitude and the glow of his suavity. Of course graceful attitudes are a
little tiring and suavity is always more or less of a mask, but here it
is that good-breeding finds its field and rewards him who displays it
with its peculiar guerdon. Perhaps he would have liked the presents or
the dishes, and he has not got them; but then his coat is not torn, his
shirt is not crumpled, his collar is not limp. The successful betray all
these unbecoming signs of a triumph in reality disgraceful; how have
they the audacity to exhibit themselves red-faced, puffing, perspiring,
hugging their prizes to their breasts and casting round furtive
suspicious glances, fearful that they may still be robbed? Surely the
vulgarity of the means sticks to the end and soils that also?
Here were very ingenious arguments to prove that the second-best was in
a true view the best; so treated and managed, the formula should surely
assume new attractions?
But if a man be very hungry? The argument is not fairly put. He gets
fed, though not on his favourite delicacy. But if he cannot eat rough
fare? Well, in that case, so much the worse for him; he should not have
a dainty stomach.
It is a long way from Kensington Palace Gardens to Charing Cross; there
is time for many philosophical reflexions as a man walks from one to the
other on a fine night. But at the end, when he has arrived, should his
heart beat and his hand dart out eagerly at the sight of an envelope
bearing an American postage stamp? Does such a paradox impugn his
conclusions or merely accuse his weakness? Human nature will crop out,
and hunger is hunger, however it may be caused. Perhaps these
backslidings must be allowed; they come only now and then; they will not
last, will at least come more seldom. The emptiness will not always vent
angry abuse on the good manners which are the cause of it.
The letter was a long one, or looked long because it covered many
pages--it was understamped, a circumstance prettily characteristic--but
Ora wrote large, and there was not really a great deal in it. What there
was was mostly about the play and the part, the flattering reception,
the killing work, the unreasonableness of everybody else. All this was
just Ora, Ora who was neither to be approved of, nor admired, nor
imitated, but who was on no account to be changed. Ashley read with the
same smile which had shewn itself on his face when he commended the
formula of the second-best to Lady Muddock's candid consideration. He
came near the end. Would there be no touch of the other Ora, of his own
special secret Ora, the one he knew and other people did not? There was
hardly a touch; but just on the last page, just before the "yours, Ora,"
there came, "Oh, my dear, if only you were with me! But I seem to have
got into another world. And I'm lonely, Ashley dear."
The great clock down at Westminster struck one, the hum of the town ran
low, the little room was quiet. Perhaps moments like these are not the
fittest for the formula of the second-best. Does it not, after all, need
an audience to smile pleased and appreciative applause of it? Is it as
independent, as grandly independent, as it sounds? Does it comfort a man
when he is quite alone? Is it equal to fighting the contrasts between
what is and what might have been?
"I seem to have got into another world. And I'm lonely, Ashley dear."
Heavens, how many worlds were there, that all his friends should be
getting into others and leaving him alone in his?