AN ANYTHINGARIAN
Two hours later Gordon sat alone in the room, looking out on the
softening sun-glare of St. James Street. In the chastened light the
brilliant dark-auburn curls that clustered over his colorless face
showed a richer brown and under their long black lashes his eyes had
deepened their tint. Near-by, where Park Place opened, a fountain
played, on whose bronze rim dusty sparrows preened and twittered. The
clubs that faced the street were showing signs of life, and on the pave
a newsboy, for the benefit of late-rising west-end dandies, was crying
the papers.
Gordon was waiting for Hobhouse. They were to sup together this
last night. To-morrow he was to leave for Newstead Abbey and the
uncomfortable ministrations of his eccentric and capricious mother,
whom he had not yet seen. He had come back to his land and place to
find that enmity had been busy envenoming his absence, and the taste of
home had turned unsweet to his palate.
As he sat now, however, Gordon had thrust bitterness from his mood. He
was thinking with satisfaction of the copyhold he had transferred. He
had always declared that for what he wrote he would take no money. If
these verses--the first in which he felt he had expressed something
of his real self--if these brought recompense, it was a fitting
disposition he had made. He had paid an old debt to the man with the
worn waistcoat and kindly, studious face--almost the only debt of its
kind he owed in the world.
The words with which Dallas had left him recurred to him--“God bless
you!”
“Poor old plodding Dallas!” he mused reflectively. “It’s curious how a
man’s sense of gratitude drags up his religion--if he _has_ any to drag
up. He thinks now the Creator put into my heart to do that--doesn’t
give himself a bit of credit for it!”
He laughed reminiscently.
“I don’t suppose he has seen six hundred pounds to spend since he
bought that pony! He has had a hard row to hoe all his life, and
never did an ounce of harm to any living thing, yet at the first turn
of good luck, he fairly oozes thankfulness to the Almighty. He is a
churchman clear through. He believes in revealed religion--though no
religion ever _is_ revealed--and yet he doesn’t mistake theology for
Christianity. He positively doesn’t know the meaning of the word cant.
Ah--there goes another type!”
Gordon was looking at a square, mottle-faced man passing slowly on the
opposite side of the street, carrying a bundle of leaflets from which
now and then he drew to give to a passer-by. He was high-browed, with
eyes that projected like an insect’s and were flattish in their orbits.
He wore a ministerial cloak over his street costume.
“There’s Cassidy,” he said to himself. “Dr. James Cassidy, on shore
leave, distributing his little doctrinal tracts. I remember him well.
He is in the navy medical service, but it’s the grief of his life he
can’t be a parson. He talked enough pedantry over the ship’s table of
the _Pylades_, while I was coming home from Greece, to last me till
the resurrection. He is as ardent a predestinarian as any Calvinistic
dean in gaiters, and knows all the hackneyed catch-phrases of eternal
punishment. He has an itch for _propaganda_, and distributes his
tracts, printed at his own expense, on the street-corner for the glory
of theology. He is the sort of Christian who always writes damned
with a dash. And yet, I wonder how much real true Christianity he
has--Christianity like Dallas’, I mean. I remember that scar on his
cheek; it stands for a thrashing he got once at Bombay from a deserting
ensign named Trevanion--a youth I met in Greece afterward, and had
cause to remember, by the way!”
His eyes had darkened suddenly. His brows frowned, his firm white hand
ran over his curls as though to brush away a disagreeable recollection.
“Cassidy would travel half around the globe to find the deserter that
thrashed him and land him in quod. That man would deserve it richly
enough, but would Cassidy’s act be for the good of the king’s service?
No--for the satisfaction of James Cassidy. Is that Christianity? Dallas
never treasured an enmity in his life. Yet both of them believe the
same doctrine, worship the same God, read the same Bible. Does man make
his beliefs? Or do his beliefs make him? If his beliefs make man, why
are Dallas and Cassidy so different? If man makes his beliefs, why
should I not make my own? I will be an Anythingarian, and leave dreams
to Emanuel Swedenborg!”
His gaze, that had followed the clerical figure till it passed out of
sight, returned meditatively to the slaty white buildings opposite.
“Some people call me an atheist--I never could understand why, though I
prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments and Socrates to St. Paul,--the
two latter happen to agree in their opinion of marriage,--and I don’t
think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar
will make me an inheritor of Heaven. Dallas would tell me not to
reason, but to believe. You might as well tell a man not to wake but to
sleep. Neither Cicero nor the Messiah could ever have altered the vote
of a single lord of the bed-chamber! And then to bully with torments
and all that! The menace of hell makes as many devils as the penal
code makes villains. All cant--Methodistical cant--yet Dallas believes
it. And both he and Cassidy belong to the same one of the seventy-two
sects that are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord
and hatred of each other--the sects that call men atheists because
the eternal _why_ will creep into what they write. If it pleases the
Church--I except Dallas--to damn me for asking questions, I shall be
only one with some millions of scoundrels who, after all, seem as
likely to be damned as ever. As for immortality, if people are to
live, why die? And our carcases, are they worth raising? I hope, if
mine is, I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these
three-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into
Paradise!”
There was a knock at the door. He rose and opened it. It was Hobhouse.
Gordon caught up his hat and they left the hotel together.
As they crossed Park Place a woman, draggled and gin-besotted,
strayed from some Thames-side stews, sat on the worn stone base of
the fountain, leaning uncertainly against its bronze rim. Her swollen
lids hid her eyes and one hand, palm up, was thrown out across her
lap. Gordon drew a shilling from his pocket, and passing his arm in
Hobhouse’s, laid it in the outstretched hand. At the touch of the coin,
the drab started up, looked at him stupidly an instant, then with a
ribald yell of laughter she flung the shilling into the water and
shambled across the square, mimicking, in a hideous sort of buffoonery,
the lameness of his gait.
Gordon’s face turned ashen. He walked on without a word, but his
companion could feel his hand tremble against his sleeve. When he
spoke, it was in a voice half-smothered, forbidding.
“The old jeer!” he said. “The very riffraff of the street fling it at
me! Yet I don’t know why they should spare that taunt; even my mother
did not. ‘Lame brat!’ she called me once when I was a child.” He
laughed, jarringly, harshly. “Why, only a few days before I sailed from
England, in one of her fits of passion, she flung it at me. ‘May you
be as ill-formed in mind as you are in body!’ Could they wish me worse
than she?”
“Gordon!” expostulated the other. “Don’t!--”
He had no time to finish. A grizzled man in the dress of an upper
servant was approaching them, his rubicund face bearing an
unmistakable look of haste and concern.
“Well, Fletcher?” inquired Gordon.
“I thought your lordship had gone out earlier. I have been inquiring
for you at the clubs. This message has just come from Newstead.”
His master took the letter and read it. A strange, slow, remorseful
look overspread the passion on his face.
“No ill news, I hope,” ventured Hobhouse.
Gordon made no reply. He crushed the letter into his pocket, turned
abruptly and strode up St. James Street.
“His lordship’s mother died yesterday, Mr. Hobhouse,” said the valet in
a low voice.
“Good God!” exclaimed the other. “What a _contretemps_.”
* * * * *
A knot of loungers were seated under the chandeliers in the bow-window
of White’s Club as Gordon passed on his way to the coach. Beau
Brummell, _élégant_, spendthrift, in white great-coat and blue satin
cravat exhaling an odor of _eau de jasmin_, lifted a languid glass to
his eye.
“I’ll go something handsome!” cried he; “I thought he was in Greece!”
“He’s the young whelp of a peer who made such a dust with that Satire
he wrote,” Lord Petersham informed his neighbor. “Hero of the sack
story I told you. Took the title from his great-uncle, the madman who
killed old Chaworth in that tavern duel. House of Lords tried him for
murder, you know. Used to train crickets and club them over the head
with straws; all of them left the house in a body the day he died.
Devilish queer story! Who’s the aged party with the portmanteaus?
Valet?”
“Yes,” asserted some one. “The old man was here a while ago trying to
find Gordon--with bad news. His lordship’s mother is dead.”
“Saw her once at Newstead Abbey,” yawned Brummell, wearily, dusting
his cuffs. “Corpulent termagant and gave George no end of a row. He
used to call her his ‘maternal war-whoop.’ My own parents--poor good
people!--died long ago,” he added reflectively; “--cut their throats
eating peas with a knife.”