I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of
France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes. Mrs.
Meldrum, much edified by my report of the performances, as she called
them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora would soon be
on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices that
there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her breezy
cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light: she knew
so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever squeeze out
of my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting on system and
absolutely declined to be interfered with: her precious reasoning was
that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a
magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really
pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit; meanwhile the proper
use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keep
her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet her
match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia;
but it was Mrs. Meldrum's conviction that nothing was to be expected of
him but the most futile flirtation. The girl had a certain hold of him,
but with a great deal of swagger he hadn't the spirit of a sheep: he was
in fear of his father and would never commit himself in Lord Considine's
lifetime. The most Flora might achieve was that he wouldn't marry some
one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum's knowledge (I had told her
of the young man's visit) had attached himself on the way back from Italy
to the Hammond Synge group. My informant was in a position to be
definite about this dangler; she knew about his people; she had heard of
him before. Hadn't he been a friend of one of her nephews at Oxford?
Hadn't he spent the Christmas holidays precisely three years before at
her brother-in-law's in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himself
refused with derision by wilful Betty, the second daughter of the house?
Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her to
complain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as an
appendage of Flora's was one of those oft-cited proofs that the world is
small and that there are not enough people to go round. His father had
been something or other in the Treasury; his grandfather on the mother's
side had been something or other in the Church. He had come into the
paternal estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he had
let the place advantageously and was generous to four plain sisters who
lived at Bournemouth and adored him. The family was hideous all round,
but the very salt of the earth. He was supposed to be unspeakably
clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society and
of the idea of a political career. That such a man should be at the same
time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume of
Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations. I was soon to learn that
he was fonder of her than of all the other things together. Betty, one
of five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to
have dished herself by her perversity. Of course no one had looked at
her since and no one would ever look at her again. It would be eminently
desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty's fate.
I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptom on
our young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The one moral she saw
in anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr. Dawling,
smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing
gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London
again. I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was
profusely inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined
by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what had
gone before--a coincidence at all events superficially striking. At
Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he
had found himself at the table d'hote of his inn opposite to the full
presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dream
and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to
involve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with a
resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition. On the following,
with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters,
whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a
fate of which he had already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London,
very little later, drove him straight before it--drove him one Sunday
afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He marched in
other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him to pieces. But
three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (to
vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days was
firmly lashed to his back. I don't mean by this that Flora had been
persuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to the
unconditional snub which, as the event was to show, couldn't have been
bettered as a means of securing him. She hadn't calculated, but she had
said "Never!" and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged
patience. He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure
in the piece.
Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and
having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my
door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity so
huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it
bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the
light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken
his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently
lame. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him
left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the
literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man
at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
how effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for the
career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too
making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose
in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and his
chill, and the only thing he touched with judgment was this convenience
of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter
comes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of my
having had to put it together for him. He took it from me in this form
without a groan, and I gave it him quite as it came; he took it again and
again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if for the very purpose of
learning how idiotically he was in love. He told me I made him see
things: to begin with, hadn't I first made him see Flora Saunt? I wanted
him to give her up and lucidly informed him why; on which he never
protested nor contradicted, never was even so alembicated as to declare
just for the sake of the point that he wouldn't. He simply and
pointlessly didn't, and when at the end of three months I asked him what
was the use of talking with such a fellow his nearest approach to a
justification was to say that what made him want to help her was just the
deficiencies I dwelt on. I could only reply without gross developments:
"Oh if you're as sorry for her as that!" I too was nearly as sorry for
her as that, but it only led me to be sorrier still for other victims of
this compassion. With Dawling as with me the compassion was at first in
excess of any visible motive; so that when eventually the motive was
supplied each could to a certain extent compliment the other on the
fineness of his foresight.
After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and I
finally learned that she accused me of conspiring with him to put
pressure on her to marry him. She didn't know I would take it that way,
else she would never have brought him to see me. It was in her view a
part of the conspiracy that to show him a kindness I asked him at last to
sit to me. I dare say moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had
ended by attempting almost as many sketches of his beauty as I had
attempted of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand
that could so abase itself? My relation to poor Dawling's want of
modelling was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert
for the buried treasure of his soul.