CHAPTER IV

“I saw him,” said the Philosopher, sternly. “I saw him kneeling at your feet! I saw him with my own eyes!”

She laughed.

“Really! Well, you could not see him with any one else’s eyes, could you?”

“That answer is merely flippant,” retorted the Philosopher. “Flippant--I might say rude!”

“Oh-h-h!” She made a little whistling round of her mouth, and her blue eyes flashed.

“Rude!” he repeated, rather raspily. “And I venture to say that in an open field, within a few yards of the public road, a man who is such a fool as to drop on one knee at a woman’s feet ought to be--ought to be”--here he waved one arm magisterially--“removed--forcibly removed to Hanwell or Colney Hatch! He is not responsible for his actions!”

“No,” she interposed, mischievously. “No man in love is!”

“In love!” The Philosopher snorted. “You call that love? To make a ridiculous exposure of himself and you in full view of spectators--”

She pointed a little finger at him.

“Only one spectator,--you!” she said. “And where _were_ you?”

He gave another snort.

“I was--I was behind a tree,” he said. “I thought I saw you going towards the river--I imagined you were alone--”

“I was at first,” she said. “Jack came on later. So you must have been watching quite a long time! What a bore for you! Why did you do it?”

The Philosopher blinked his eyes and frowned.

“Why did I do it? Because--because”--he hesitated--“yes!--because I like to study the deceptive attributes of your sex and the pitfalls they prepare for unwary men! This Jack of yours is a perfect ass!”

“Why didn’t you say Jackass at once and have done with it?” she demanded, mirthfully. “You would have been nearly funny then!”

The Philosopher looked at her with what he meant to be a withering expression. She, however, did not wither.

“Nearly funny!” he echoed. “Silly child, do you really think I have not sufficient acumen to perceive an obvious play upon words, suggesting stupidity rather than humour?”

A smile dimpled her cheeks in one or two becoming places, but she said nothing.

“Am I to infer that you approved of the man’s attitude in the field?” he demanded.

The portentous air with which he put this question made her laugh outright.

“Yes!--yes, indeed!” she answered. “The man’s attitude in the field--oh, dear me!--was simply _de_lightful!” And she clapped her hands ecstatically. “You see, he’s such a _good_ figure!--and he can drop on one knee gracefully--really gracefully!--and he meant it as well!--he was swearing eternal friendship!”

“Eternal fiddlesticks!” snarled the Philosopher. “Where’s my pipe?”

They were in the library, a cosy room with a big window fronting the west where the last golden lines of the sunset were vanishing one by one,--and it wanted about an hour to dinner time. She moved away and went searching to and fro, on various tables and shelves, her light figure in its dainty evening attire of pale blue and white fluttering hither and thither like an embodied flower, till presently she came back towards him holding out, at a respectful distance from herself, a rather dirty briar.

“Come along, come along!” said the Philosopher, testily. “Make haste! It won’t bite you!”

“No,” and she handed him the repulsive looking object. “But it smells--horrid! If you had a wife she would not allow you to come near her with such a smell!”

“Oh, wouldn’t she?” And the Philosopher stuck the pipe between his teeth with a defiant air. “If I had a wife--which, thank God, I haven’t--”

“Yes, thank God you haven’t!” she interpolated, demurely.

He looked at her again in his “withering” way, but she only smiled.

“If I had a wife,” he continued, sucking the stem of his pipe somewhat noisily, “she would have to allow anything _I_ pleased and be glad of the privilege! A man must be master in his own house,--and a wise woman knows how to keep her place.”

She sank gracefully into a low easy-chair, with the soft movement of a bird descending into its nest, and looked up at him with a tolerantly amused air.

“The days of Abraham are past!” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that the Lord doesn’t favour women-crushers so much as in the times of Moses and Aaron,” she murmured lazily. “You see, Abraham was such a ‘master in his own house’ that, after making all the use he could of Hagar, he turned her out into the wilderness to starve. Plenty of modern Abrahams would do the same thing with all the pleasure in life--but--it’s likely the modern Hagars are more than a match for them! And I’m glad--oh, so glad, that women are going to have their day--at last!”

The Philosopher had stuffed his pipe with tobacco while she spoke, and now prodded it in with a very yellow finger. He looked uneasily about him for matches, but she did not offer to find them. He discovered them presently and lit his ‘fragrant weed’ without asking her permission.

“Women are going to have their day!” he echoed, ironically. “What sort of a day do you suppose it will be? Confusion worse confounded!”

She was silent.

“Woman’s day,” he went on sententiously, “means Man. Man at morn,--man at noon,--man at night. Woman adores man,--licks his boots metaphorically whenever he gives her the chance. A Man and a new Hat--that’s enough for Woman’s day!”

She laughed.

“What a funny old person you are!” she exclaimed. “You have such fossil ideas!--positively fossil!--embedded in rock!--and they’ll never change! That’s the worst of being over-learned in one direction,--I’m sure it narrows the mind!”

He began to feel irritated,--yes, really irritated with this bunch of blue and white femininity seated opposite to him in such graceful ease.

“My mind is _not_ narrow,” he said, stiffly. “And though it may please you to consider me a fossil--”

“I didn’t say _you_ were a fossil,” she interposed. “I said you had fossil ideas--”

“It is the same thing,” he retorted. “A man and his ideas are one. I certainly have not a mind adapted to examine the trifling sentiments which affect your sex, but the opinions I have formed are based on long experience. You express a childish pleasure in the fancy that women are going to have their day,--now I maintain that they have always had it, to the fullest extent of their very limited capabilities. Any wider range of effort would bring them nothing but disaster.”

With this he clapped a misshapen old “Homburg” hat on his head, opened the window, which was really a glass door, and went out into the garden, puffing at his briar. He had not a good figure--it was inclined to be stumpy, but there was a certain pathetic droop of his shoulders which betrayed both weariness and age, and the pretty Sentimentalist, quick to observe this, was suddenly touched and compassionate. She sprang up and ran after him.

“Don’t be cross!” she said. “I’m sorry I called your ideas fossils! But--you know--fossils are really wonderful things!”

Her laughing blue eyes, her tossing fair hair, and the bewildering “frou-frou” of her dainty blue and white silk and chiffon garments made quite a stir in the calm evening silence of the garden,--and for the moment the self-centred, self-opiniated, self-styled “Philosopher” felt a sudden twinge of shamed conscience. In his own heart he knew he was what he would call “amusing himself” with a bright feminine creature who took the world on trust and accepted him at his own inflated valuation,--he found it convenient and agreeable to stay at her father’s house and enjoy the luxuries of a well-equipped home without paying for it--especially when he could talk to a pretty hostess and subtly insinuate a kind of love-making without any reality in it. Her mother was dead--she was alone to receive and entertain such guests as her pedantic father invited to flatter him on his personal belief in himself as a great philologist,--she was,--(in that undefended condition)--“fair game” to such a man as the Philosopher. There was Jack--Jack was certainly a bore--but after all he was merely a neighbour, the eldest son of what the Philosopher called a “doubtful” American, who had taken a small cottage some little way down the river for the fishing season. Jack really didn’t count for much. So the Philosopher smoothed his furrowed brow and pretended to be appeased, as he replied to the soft voice ringing in his ears--

“_I’m_ not cross,” he said. “I’m _never_ cross! I _never_ quarrel! It’s _you_! You! You fly into a tantrum directly you are contradicted. You can’t bear to be contradicted. And you call me a fossil! Nice way to talk! Never mind!--I forgive you!”

With which grandiloquent assurance he took her hand and patted it. She withdrew it gently,--she felt he was unjust. She knew she had not “flown into a tantrum” and that what she had said was merely playful and without any thought of “quarrel.” She walked beside him in the glamour of the late after-glow for a few paces in silence,--and he was uncomfortably conscious that the delicate subtlety of her personality expressed an unspoken but nevertheless decisive lessening of her appreciation of him as a man.

“And so,” he said, presently, with a laboured attempt at lightness--“you approve of Jack as a modern Knight-errant swearing eternal fidelity?”

“I approve of Jack entirely--as Jack,” she answered, quietly. “He’s a good fellow, and very unselfish.”

The Philosopher gave her a blinking, side-long glance.

“Really! Has he managed to impress that favourable view of himself upon your credulous mind?”

“I don’t think he has tried to impress anything at all upon me,” she said. “Only I notice that he always considers the pleasure of other people more than his own.”

“Exceedingly quixotic,” commented the Philosopher, drily. “And all the merest affectation. The man who is always looking after the pleasure of other people attracts attention to himself--which is what he seeks. The man who looks after his own comfort passes without notice,--which is the right attitude. To call people’s attention to yourself by any action whatsoever is very bad form.”

She looked at him in wondering enquiry.

“The man,” pursued the Philosopher, hugging himself as it were in the wrapping of his own theories--“who persists in handing round bread-and-butter and cake at a tea-table instead of sitting still, is a nuisance. His plain business is to help himself, and let others take care of their own needs. It is _not_ his business to see whether the women get _their_ bread-and-butter and cake--in these days of female emancipation they can look after themselves. He is a much more sensible creature when he does not obtrude himself upon them by tiresome and needless attentions. The same rule should apply to door-opening. There are men who invariably disturb conversation by jumping up to open a door for a woman to pass out. Detestable! I have had many a good story of mine spoilt by this atrocious habit,--Americans always do it.”

“Americans are very kind to women,” she said. “I like their ways.”

He sniffed, as though offended by some noxious odour.

“You do, do you?” he retorted. “Well--I don’t.”

There was a pause. Presently--

“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there much more work to do?”

He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the stump of a tree.

“A great deal,” he replied. “A _very_ great deal more! Our researches lead us deeper and deeper--into the most astonishing intricacies of language--indeed one can positively say that language makes history. Language creates dynasties and destroys them,--Language crowns kings and equally decapitates them--Language--”

The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.

“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”

“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that there was so little soup for so learned a man--still, learned as he was, he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather boresome on this particular evening,--the Philosopher and her father prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist, a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,--and wondered, a trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her father,--and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same bent of research,--and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a lonely little person,--and when the Philosopher first appeared on her limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy, because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage about the authors they both admired,--and she was certain he would have a splendid character--generous, noble, patient, kind--because--oh, well!--because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted him at the ideal valuation,--a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought--and he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,--though her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it. She was sorry for him too, in a way--he appeared to be a neglected sort of creature, albeit an authority on dull subjects in dull weekly journals and monthly magazines,--his coats were shabby, his shirt-cuffs frayed at the edges,--and he never at any time was what is called “well-groomed.” She did not realise that his generally unkempt condition was part of his particular “philosophic” manner,--a kind of advertised contempt for conventional cleanliness. He could be very agreeable when he chose,--almost lovable;--he could be amusing, entertaining and witty by turns; and when strangers first met him, they generally received a most favourable impression. The second meeting, however, unfortunately swamped the effect of the first,--and when he stayed on and on in a house, as he was doing now, there were times when his room was more desired than his company. But a kind of glamour,--a reflex glitter of genius in him,--had somewhat blinded the Sentimentalist to any clear perception of his true character as a man, apart altogether from his literary distinction,--and though she had begun to be uneasy and dubious as to his sincerity and good feeling, she would not give way to these thoughts, no matter how urgently they pressed upon her. And while she mused, and looked up at the stars, they seemed to look responsively down upon her in a winking, twinkling way of bright suggestiveness.

“What a quaint little soul it is!” so they might have expressed themselves in a couple of light-flashes. “Here it lives, tricking itself into thinking an egotist a great man! _We_ know better!”

And they sparkled their emphatic meaning through the dark veil of air, while she, leaving her window-post of observation, took her embroidery and went down to the billiard-room there to sit in silent patience while her father and the Philosopher played a long game, as they did every night with an unwearying pertinacity till bed-time. They did not consider whether _she_ was amused or bored by what to themselves was their own consummate skill in handling the cue, and she would gladly have stayed away but that her father expected her to act as “marker” if desired, and otherwise make herself useful. The whole business was frightfully dull as far as she was concerned--she was tired to death of the continuous click of the billiard balls, and sometimes heard them in her dreams, so incessantly were they rolled about night after night. The oddest thing to her mind was that the Philosopher never seemed tired of the game. He never spoke to her while engaged in it--or, for that matter, to her father except in monosyllables,--round and round the table he strutted, cue in hand, pipe in mouth, without a thought for anything or anybody but himself. He played more skilfully than his host, and never lost an opportunity of asserting the fact,--and sometimes when the gentle Sentimentalist saw her father getting redder and more congested in the face with suppressed annoyance at his various “misses” she was both sorry and anxious lest his restrained feeling should culminate in an attack of illness. However, it was no use for her to confide these fears to the Philosopher; he had the greatest contempt for illness that affected anybody but himself. But--after all!--she decided it was something of an advantage to know a man who could always get anarticle into the big “Reviews” provided it were only dull enough,--it was surely a privilege to associate with such a powerful personage!--and it was an understood thing that gifted men--Philosophers--were apt to become self-centred. Now Jack,--oh, Jack was not self-centred--but then he was not clever--he was--well!--he was just “Jack”!