Part 7

It was nearly one o’clock when he groped his way up the dim staircase of his own house. The bedroom looked bleak and uninteresting. It had never struck him before in quite that way. He had always liked his bedroom with its heavy mahogany furniture and red plush curtains, but somehow to-night the place seemed forlorn ... as though something was terribly lacking.

“You’re tired, old boy.”

He undressed and threw his clothes carelessly on chairs and tables. He got into bed and regarded the room, trying with his tired brain, to think what was wrong. His clothes ought not to have been thrown about like that, of course. He felt that they and he were out of place in the large room. A strange feeling of melancholy crept over him.

“It’s badly ordered ... it’s all badly ordered, old boy.”

He had a great desire to cry, so weak he felt. But no, a man mustn’t do that; a funny man certainly mustn’t. His mind wandered back to his old mother. He remembered the days when she had taught him to pray. He would give anything for the relief of prayer. But he couldn’t do that either. It didn’t seem exactly playing the game. He had put all that kind of thing by so long ago. He despised those people who led unvirtuous lives and then in the end turned religious. He wasn’t going to pretend. He turned out the light, and closed his eyes. He would neither weep nor pray, but he must express himself somehow. Perhaps he compromised between these two human frailties. Certainly his voice was very near a sob, and his accents vividly alive with prayer as he cried to the darkness:

“Charlie, old boy, be good to her.... For God’s sake be good to her.”

THE BEAUTIFUL, MERCILESS LADY

There are few men strong enough to withstand success. She is the beautiful, merciless lady.

At the first tap on the shoulder the victim of her favour rocks and staggers. She glances into his eyes, and unless he is a creature of superb control he loses his head. He plunges hither and thither, clutching at the golden aura in which she seems to float. He feels himself a thing apart, transcendent, impervious, invincible. The world of pigmy men around him are merely the drab background to a brilliant picture. He can do no wrong. The standards of morality and behaviour which these others have set up are not his standards. He is the darling of the gods, and he follows his mistress up and up, leaping from crag to crag on the slope of the sunlit mountain.

Whither?

He never puts this query to himself. He lives in a welter of exultation. All things are charged with the magic of a thousand revelations. The younger he is when she first meets him the more devastating are her allurements. Possibly this is why so many infant prodigies never emerge from the infant stage. She stifles them with a surfeit of her riches--the little bores! She likes men best in their early manhood, when she may flirt with them at her leisure. The old she seldom troubles about. They know her wiles and are frequently too cunning or too weary.

Oh, but the young man, still with beauty and health and clean, strong limbs!

It was such a one that she met in the person of my friend, Johnny Lydgate. She led him away and destroyed him as completely as the rose is destroyed by the breath of autumn winds.

There was no reason why he should have been destroyed, no exterior cause. He had a thousand friends and no enemy, except the one which she created in himself. Everything tended to produce in Johnny Lydgate a creature of gentle bearing, of sanity, and equipoise. His father was a delightful old gentleman, a librarian in a country town, who kept homing pigeons and compiled anthologies. His mother and sisters were charming and lovable women. They formed a united, devoted family.

It was at Stoneleigh College that I first met Lydgate. We were inseparable companions for nearly four years. My recollections of him there were those of a pleasant, companionable, almost negative schoolboy. He excelled at nothing and displayed no ambitions. He was affectionate, intelligent, and amusing, but at work and at sport he never rose above mediocrity.

We know a man’s body by the familiar regard of its movements and expressions. We know the quality of his mind as it is revealed to us through his opinions and observations, but it is strange how we may get to know a man’s soul by some instant of revelation. We may think we are entirely familiar with him. We may have known him intimately for twenty years or more, but one day we suddenly experience a scrap of recognition of something deeper. It may be a phrase that he employs, a gesture, an attitude, some queer telepathic message from his eyes; but in that instant we realize that we know our man for the first time. All our values concerning him become readjusted from that moment.

There came such a moment to me when Lydgate and I were in our last term at Stoneleigh. I remember the moment vividly. It was after our inter-house football match, in which Lydgate had played very well--far above his average. Our Housemaster, who was a very popular man, ran up and, slapping Johnny on the back, called out: “Bravo, Lydgate! Bravo, bravo!” As he turned away I saw my school chum look up at the sky and a queer expression came over his face, a kind of drunken egoism, and I suddenly thought to myself:

“So _that_ is Johnny Lydgate, after all! And I thought I knew----”

For a time after leaving school we lost touch with each other. Boys are very apt to make vows of eternal friendship, and then--well, other things happen along. Writing is such a fag.

Johnny went to Paris to study art, whilst I walked the hospitals. However, he had not been in Paris for a year--he only wrote to me once!--when his father died. As may be imagined, a man who specializes in homing pigeons and anthologies does not leave a fortune. The Lydgate family found themselves in distressed circumstances. Lydgate was recalled from Paris, and had to do something immediately to earn money.

He took the position manfully, and with that cheery good humour that was characteristic of him. He obtained a place as an assistant to a firm of decorative designers, hoping that his meagre training might be of some assistance. His remuneration was, naturally, quite nominal, but the firm held out prospects of advancement. He stayed with this firm for seven years and gave no evidence of special ability. He jogged along stolidly, learning to make pleasant, undistinguished designs for wallpapers, cretonnes, and furniture. He was very popular in the studio where he worked, on account of his unfailing good humour, unselfishness, and gift of fun. He distinguished himself most by making caricatures of his colleagues, and imitating their voices and mannerisms. He displayed no particular ambitions, other than to jog along, and have as good a time as his limited income would allow.

We saw each other occasionally, and when I at last got my degrees I bought a practice in West Kensington, not far from where Lydgate had his rooms. He was at that time earning three hundred a year.

The house I had taken was a tall, gaunt place in an inconspicuous street. I was unmarried, and the place was obviously too large for my requirements. So I had the inspiration to suggest to Lydgate that he should occupy the upper part, and pay me whatever he was paying for his diggings. He accepted my offer with alacrity. His mother and sisters were still living in the country.

The arrangement was full of promise. We had great fun arranging, furnishing, and decorating the rooms. Lydgate spent his evenings and Sundays doing all his own painting and decorating, and he also insisted on doing mine.

I was not convinced that the delicate scheme of grays which he evolved for my consulting-room, with its frieze of stencilled peacocks and yew trees, was quite in keeping with the dignity of my bold brass plate on the front door, but then I knew nothing about art, and Lydgate was so kind in the matter that I let it pass. I had a boy to open the door, and an old woman kept the place reasonably clean, and she used to cook us an evening meal, which we had together.

That was a very happy time for both of us, and it lasted some years. My brass plate did not seem to impress the neighbourhood as I should have liked. Sometimes when I opened the door to people they used to ask for the doctor. I once attended Lydgate when he had a feverish chill, and he said my bedside manners were appalling. But gradually it got about that young Doctor Berners was not such a fool as you might imagine. Some said that he was a fairly good, straight, sensible doctor, who took trouble with his patients. At the end of the first year the practice began to show signs of developing.

It was at this time that Lydgate had an affair with a married ballad-singer. I could never quite get to the root of the matter. Neither could I understand his infatuation. She was a fair, plump person, with magnificent neck and shoulders, a brilliantly clear but unsympathetic voice, and an almost unique gift of self-concentration. She had this wonderful voice, but she knew nothing, not even about music. She used to wear tiny paste diamonds early in the morning, and a shiny vegetable silk jumper which made her person appear even more capacious than it really was. Her name was Betty Brandt, and she had a husband who travelled in automobile accessories.

As I say, I do not know the details of this regrettable affair. I only know that it was very passionate, rather involved, and it went on for nearly six months. At the end of that time something happened. Whether they quarrelled, or whether the traveller in automobile accessories intervened, I cannot say. But Johnny Lydgate was desperately unhappy. He sulked and moped and would not go out, except backward and forward to his work. And then, one day, he did not even go to that. He told me surlily that he had left. He gave no reason. He sat about at home, and apparently drowned his sorrow in charcoal and water-colours. He sketched and drew all day, things which he said he never got an opportunity of doing at “that confounded shop.” I thought it as well to leave him alone. He paid his rent the first week and then he asked me for credit, which I naturally acceded.

One Sunday morning I went up to his room, and found the walls covered with drawings and sketches. In my poor opinion they seemed to be a brilliant advance on anything he had done before. I said so, and he seemed pleased, and announced that he was going to hawk his work around to editors, and try to start up on his own. I wished him the best of luck.

At the end of a fortnight his campaign had apparently met with a fair measure of success. He told me he had some commissions and he hoped soon to be able to let me have some money. The next morning he came into the dining-room. His face was crinkled with suppressed laughter, his eyes brilliant with exultant glee. He unfolded a drawing and held it up on the wall. It was a caricature of Betty Brandt!

It was the most brilliant and, at the same time, the cruelest thing I have ever seen. It was no portraiture, but you could not mistake it. I had never liked Betty Brandt, and I was on the point of protesting, and then the realization that this drawing, in any case, meant the end of the Betty affair, gave me such a feeling of relief that I laughed almost hysterically. Johnny and I stood side by side, laughing till the tears rolled down our cheeks. Poor Betty!

He seemed freer after that, and worked assiduously at the orders he had in hand. I am afraid they were not very remunerative. It was a long time before he proffered any further contribution toward the upkeep of our establishment, and when he did so, it was with many groans and apologies for the smallness of the amount. I told him that he was not to worry about it; my practice was beginning to pay fairly well, and it made a great difference to me to have a companion.

For a year I observed Lydgate’s grim struggle with his artistic conscience. The point was that for the work he wanted to do there was no demand. But there was work which he could do for which there was a demand. The latter gradually absorbed his energies. He refused to sponge on me. In eighteen months’ time he had wiped out all debts and was beginning to make headway. He appeared to have resigned himself to a life of steady toil. I found him particularly companionable at that time. I think the Betty Brandt affair had done him good. He was calmer, quicker in his sympathies, more tolerant and reflective. He still had his moments of gay fun; his capacity for fooling was enlarged, his perceptions and discernments were more incisive.

When I was thirty and Lydgate twenty-nine we both seemed to have settled down to a solid professional life. He was making five or six hundred a year, and had even saved a little. I was making rather more, and we had improved the conditions of our household. We now had a “general,” as well as a charwoman and a page-boy. On occasions we actually entertained, bought reserved seats for the theatre, and went away for week-end jaunts.

And then, without any ostentatious forewarning, Viola appeared on the scene. She glided into our lives with the inevitableness of a portent in a Greek drama. She had occupied her place upon the stage before we had realized the significance of her entrance. She was the daughter of an old fellow-practitioner, a Doctor Brayscott, with whom I had been on friendly terms, and who had been extremely kind to me when I started my practice. His wife was dead, but he and his daughter lived two streets away, and we indulged in those little social amenities which busy professional people always seem to find time for--occasional dinners, a game of bridge, a little music. Viola sang divinely. I was, of course, the first to meet her, and I sang her praises to such good purpose that Lydgate would not rest until he met her. And then, of course, our little trouble began.

There was never a gentler, fairer, more adorable woman than Viola Brayscott. She brought into a room a feeling of complete tranquillity, warmed with the sun-kissed humours of virginal youth, seeking for ever surprises and revelations, giving out love and sympathy and drawing it to herself.

I cannot tell you of the agony and ecstasy of those months that followed. She visited us sometimes with her father, sometimes alone. We visited her, sometimes together, sometimes alone. It took some weeks to realize that we both adored her. What was to happen? Well, I think we played the game fairly. Each knew of the other’s infatuation. It was a fair field and no favour. One does learn something, after all, at an English public school. We bore each other no animosity. We took no unfair advantages.

And what of Viola? For some time the pendulum appeared to swing backward and forward. There was no gainsaying the fact that she was really fond of both of us. But the pendulum of that tenderer passion does not swing backward and forward. It has a bias, a rhythm of its own. And we each knew that the day would come when the pendulum would not swing back to one of us.

Heigho! I need hardly tell you the outcome of this contest--you will have foreseen it already. In the social arena, when Lydgate chose to shine, I was no match for him. He had all the advantages of good looks, engaging manners, and that genius for always being at his best in her presence. He shone and sparkled and glowed, whilst I sat dumb and dour and angry with myself. I could not be surprised when the pendulum swung his way and did not return to me.

They got married the following spring, and after a honeymoon in Brittany, went to live in a flat at Barnes. We visited each other occasionally, and the complete success of their union emphasized the loneliness of my own dismal household. They were devoted to each other and bewilderingly happy.

When the possessive sense is outraged, work is our only friend and physician. I worked and worked and worked, and the practice grew. But, oh, the emptiness of those waking hours!

The following year they had a child, a boy, with those lustre-blue eyes of the father. Their happiness appeared complete. Lydgate was still doing reasonably well at what he called his “solid commercial stuff.” He seemed to have put all other ambitions behind him. As a social problem I would have wagered that there would be nothing more to solve concerning him--in short, that he was going to “settle down and live happily ever afterward.”

But the face of the Sphinx is inscrutable.

It all occurred so surprisingly suddenly. I believe its first inception came about through a caricature he did of Lord Balfour. Balfour is an easy person to caricature, and this was not one of Lydgate’s best; but the drawing was published in a weekly and attracted the attention of a well-known Jewish gentleman, who called himself Maurice Loffley, and who dealt in other people’s brains. He asked to see some of Lydgate’s work, and he admired it extravagantly, especially the caricature of Betty Brandt; but he said:

“My boy, it’s celebrities we want. Famous people. Do some, and I’ll place them for you.”

The outcome was not immediately successful. Lydgate did do some, and some of them were placed; but Mr. Loffley was not very satisfactory over his business arrangements, and Lydgate ended up by doing a caricature of Mr. Loffley himself, which was the best and cruelest thing he had turned out since Betty. It was published in another illustrated weekly, and caused joy to all of Mr. Loffley’s colleagues and rivals.

The success of this rapidly led to others. Apart from his skill as a draughtsman, Lydgate had a keen wit and an adroit gift of literary exposition. He worked out some wonderful gibes at various famous people. His drawings began to be talked about, and to be in demand by editors and publishers. Their commercial value rose in direct ratio.

Barely six months after the incident of Mr. Loffley--could his name possibly have been Moritz Loeffler?--Johnny Lydgate had a one-man show at the Regent Galleries. The exhibition was a most remarkable success. A publisher bought the copyright of the entire collection right out, and nearly all the originals were sold at high prices. The Press came out with headlines about the discovery of a new satirist. Artists and society people flocked to see the exhibition.

On the Saturday afternoon following the opening I was in the galleries, talking to Johnny and his wife and Mr. Burrows, the owner of the galleries. They were all flushed and excited, and Viola was looking proud and very pretty.

Suddenly Mr. Burrows dived across the room and returned with a tall, striking-looking girl. I did not hear Mr. Burrows introduce her, but, of course, I knew her well by sight. She was a very famous and intellectual woman, the daughter of one of His Majesty’s ministers. Her photograph was always gracing the illustrated papers. I saw her shake Johnny’s hand, and then I heard her deep contralto voice exclaim with feeling:

“Oh, Mr. Lydgate, I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance. I think your drawings are simply gorgeous!”

I could not hear Johnny’s reply. They talked for several minutes, and she passed on. And then I saw him stagger a few steps and look up at the skylight.

My mind immediately reverted to a certain fateful moment at Stoneleigh, on that spring day after the inter-house match, when he was congratulated on his fine play, and I saw upon his face the identical expression. He was like a man dazed and drunken with the riches of his own ego. Instead of the open field and the cheering boys, he was swaying under the narcotic of a more pervading flattery--brilliant and clever people, the faint perfume of a richly dressed woman, admiring and significant glances. “That is he! That’s Lydgate--Lydgate himself!”

The beautiful and merciless lady had begun to put her spell on him.

What astonished me was the rapidity with which the poison worked. Within a few months he became a celebrity. He was just thirty-three, at the very fullness of his powers. His popularity was no doubt greatly accelerated by the charm of his personality, his good looks, genial manners, and quaint humour.

He was immediately “taken up” by a certain Lady Stradling, a wealthy and adventurous American woman who adored lions. One invitation led to another. He was always out at some dinner or reception. He developed the club manner. He joined several Bohemian clubs, where he became extremely popular. He would give an entertainment at a drawing-board, making caricatures of people present and keeping up a running fire of most amusing chatter. He began to live extravagantly, but even then he was making more money than he could spend.

At first Viola entered with zest into these manifestations of social advancement. She accompanied him to many dinners and functions, but gradually they began to pall upon her, and she let him go by himself.

I remember meeting him one night the following winter at the Wombats Club. I was enormously impressed by the change in him. I was there when he arrived, and I saw him enter the room. He was still good looking, but his face had become looser, and a little coarser. He was greeted by cries of “Hallo, Johnny! Good old Johnny!” “Who is that?” “Don’t you know? That’s Lydgate--Johnny Lydgate!” He tried to appear impervious to these manifestations, but at the back of his eye I could detect the slow greedy satisfaction of the man whose cup of happiness is overflowing. He spoke to me pleasantly, but his eyes wandered, seeking distinguished names and faces. He was not particularly proud at being seen in conversation with a suburban doctor.

“Who is that? Ah, excuse me, old chap; I want a word with Edwin Wray. Hallo, Wray, old boy!”

Of course, Edwin Wray is familiar to you? You may see his picture on all the hoardings--the famous comedian.

Later, Johnny did one of his inimitable sketches--a huge success, a wonderful hit at Edwin Wray. Afterward he sat at a table near me, drinking rum and water. He had developed a rather affected style of dress, with a voluminous blue and white stock, and peg top trousers. Occasionally he made a note in a sketch-book, or flung an epigram at a neighbour.

The din of the club increased. It was difficult to see across the room for smoke. And suddenly I thought of Viola. Was he neglecting her? Was he cruel to her?

It was very late when I took my departure, and I was crazy to say something to him. I did indeed manage to mumble something to him about this kind of life being bad for one’s nervous energies. He took another sip of rum and said:

“It’s a lovely life, old boy--a lovely life!” I left him there.

The memory of that evening disturbed me. I felt that my position as an old friend justified me in indulging in some course of interference. A few days later I called, and found Viola alone. I thought she seemed a little abstracted and self-conscious with me. We talked of different things, and then I blurted out:

“I think Johnny is having too many late nights. He didn’t look well the other evening.”

She bit her lip and said nothing. Suddenly she rose, pressed my arm, and turned away. She was crying. I went up to her.

“Tell me, Viola, is anything wrong?”

She dabbed her eyes.

“No, no--oh, no; it’s only that he--it’s just what you say. Too many late nights, and sometimes he drinks too much, and has headaches and is sullen; there’s nothing else, Tom. He loves me as much as ever, I am certain. He hasn’t the strength, that’s all.”

Oh, the beautiful, merciless lady! She took nearly three years to destroy my friend. You may say that drink was the cause of his ultimate downfall. Drink certainly accelerated it, but it was not the basic cause. He was drunk before he began to drink--drunk with the rich wine of her charms.