Part 6

Luckily this treasonable utterance was unheard by the Eton boys, with whom sentiment and cricket hung in highly disproportionate balance. I was satisfied, at least, that if it came to the worst she would be sorry for Ted.

Now, Eton batted first, and there was little talk in our strongly prejudiced quarter. Ted Carmichael, I gathered from my neighbours, was to go in “third wicket down.” He had made a last visit--this time from a different entrance--but had avoided Nell, sitting next to Bassishaw instead, who had not tried to talk to him. Then he had disappeared.

* * * * *

I knew in my soul what was going to happen. Ted’s nervousness at his first match, and the condescending interest of Miss Nellie Bassishaw, could only have one result; and I was so busy speculating on the mysteries of this dread fatality that hems us so remorselessly about, that I forgot the scene for a moment, and was startled back by the juvenile clamour. The inevitable had happened.

“Oh!” “Oh, I say!” “What a trimmer!” “Just on the bails!” “First ball!” “--broke from the off!” “It didn’t--it was a straight ball.” “Four for fifty-three.”

Ted was out, for a duck.

I glanced at the slender white figure trailing a fruitless bat towards the pavilion, and adjusted the knees of my trousers. I commented mentally on the pattern, and waited.

She did not speak, but absently pulled off a glove. The Carmichaels behind slowly resumed their talk, and the Eton boys, after marking their scoring cards, took up the current of the game. True liberals, with them the issue transcended the individual.

Still she did not speak, but folded and unfolded the gloves. I glanced up, and that eminently becoming hat did not seem the same, so inseparably had it been connected with the lurking ambuscade of eyes. Miss Nell was visibly shaken.

I leaned towards her.

“It’s only a game, Nellie----” I began. She interrupted me with a look.

“Please don’t be mean, Mr. Butterfield. I know what you think--you think it’s all my fault.”

I was silent for Ted’s sake, and she continued slowly:

“I don’t see why men should think so much of cricket. It makes them so----”

“So unbearable when they come off,” I replied. “But he must have been very nervous, Nellie, whether or no. You couldn’t help that. Your encouragement would probably have disturbed him just as much as your--as not. That is the double influence of woman on the man of action--neither her smiles nor her frowns help him in the least. Her approval is pleasant when it’s all over, but I’m afraid the presence of the Queen of Love and Beauty has unhorsed many a gallant youth before to-day. He makes the mistake in----”

“In having anything to do with them?” she queried with pretty cynicism.

I leaned back.

“No. In being a man of action,” I returned.

There was a sudden turn and hush among the Eton boys. Ted reappeared, and they were awed in the presence of a great grief. He sat down next to me with the hard look of one who asks no sympathy, folded his hands, and stared at his shoes. The Eton boys whispered.

“And they play me for my batting,” he said, so softly that I scarcely heard. “I’m a bat--a bat. I’m here to make runs.”

The Weltschmerz had sunk into his soul. I was about to say something, but checked myself as Nellie bent forward.

“Ted,” she said, “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”

I folded my arms, looking before me. Ted did not move an inch.

“I was horrid,” she continued, “and I pretended----”

She stopped, conscious of the significance of what she was about to say. She had pretended to be unconscious of her empire over his heart, and was now retracting. Miss Nellie is the modern girl, with whom proposal is unnecessary.

Ted cut her short with the brutality of male desperation.

“All right, Nellie,” he said curtly. “It’s not your fault. I drank brandy.”

This was a surprise to me. Brandy steadies the nerves, but it is a remedy not recommended by the captains of cricket elevens, and his boyish devilry, as training, was as reprehensible as it was in the spirit of the comedy. But Nellie saw further than Ted.

“Oh, Ted,” she said humbly, “and that is my fault too. I made you angry. Will you forgive me?”

It has always seemed to me that when a pretty, half-tearful creature asks you if you will forgive her, the question is beside the mark, the forgiveness not depending on whether you will or not. You are not willing; you would much rather not; but--you do precisely as Ted did; he squeezed her ungloved hand across my knee, and an Eton boy sniggered.

I don’t know why I should have experienced a sensation as near akin to jealousy as I can locate it. I pursued the moral labyrinth for a time, and, getting no nearer, was fain to come to earth.

“And the next innings, Ted----” Nellie was saying.

Alas! What then? What, in Ted’s words, had women, even Queens of Love and Beauty, to do with cricket? More subtle in their influence than the forbidden brandy, why do not the captains demand that their followers shall be bachelors unattached? Ted was too blessedly happy to know; certainly too happy to be let alone. I spoke for his own good.

“The next innings,” I remarked, “will exemplify the second stage of the female relation to the man of action.”

I don’t think either of them took the trouble to understand.

XII

A MODERN SABINE

“Ah, that’s the trouble. We’re all far too complex nowadays.”

“We live in a complex age,” I returned profoundly.

“True, very true,” he replied, and twisted the ribbon of his eyeglass round one finger. “Very little is left that is simple and primitive and beautiful.”

I favoured him with the cosmic shrug of his cult, and said nothing eloquently. The understanding was complete.

Cicely Vicars’s “evening” was ground I had not hitherto explored, and I had marked for my own at once the young man drooping mincingly over the piano. He was smooth and fair, inclined to premature stoutness, and looked remotely. Mrs. Vicars informed me that he was a playwright, a dramatic critic, and a Fashion; that he promised brilliant things, and that the name under which he wrought was Eleanor Macquoid. She added that he had intuition beyond his years.

Now people went to Mrs. Vicars’s “evening” for intellectual intercourse and the exchange of ideas--an object in which they would not be balked. Carrie had said as much to me.

“You ought to come, Rol,” she had remarked on one occasion. “It’s so--it’s awfully new, Rol, really.”

“Indeed?” I had said. “In what way is it particularly--pardon me--up to date?”

“Oh,” she replied, “it’s so _real_, Rollo.” Then, reassuringly, “They don’t talk about the soul, you know--you needn’t be afraid of that. It’s--it’s instinct. The soul is quite too old, you know.”

“A full season behind,” I assented gravely. “And so the soul, _chez_ Mrs. Vicars, is superseded in favour of the dilettante animal? Is that so, my sister?”

“Yes,” she agreed doubtfully, and added, “Of course there are outsiders.”

It turned out, as Caroline had said, to be Instinct, Primal Sanity, and the Elemental Paganism, and very prettily put I heard it. No one was _blasé_. They said so. They were enthusiastic. My young man declared it with an animation that brought him near to spilling the liqueur carefully poised on his knee. He spoke of the keen joy of living, delicately and epigrammatically, digressing to observe that he preferred Indian cigarettes to Brazilian, and adding that after all there was nothing like the great rough kindnesses of the Mother Earth. Cicely Vicars’s gathering was indisputably in the vanguard of the latest cry.

Mr. Eleanor Macquoid seemed to take to me, for he spoke almost immediately of “people who understand.” I was evidently admitted on sight to the mystery, and improved the occasion accordingly. I examined my finger nails--I had seen him do so--and dropped my pearls of wisdom nonchalantly, as not expecting they would be gathered up.

He was talking softly, and almost sleepily, on the picturesqueness of Mass and Brute Bulk.

“There is something quite Titanic,” he said, “in the conception of a world where nothing was as yet ruled and squared out for us; where everything was vague and shifting.”

“It is an especially gigantic thought,” I replied appreciatively. “The insistence nowadays of the Social Nexus----”

I paused, and he nodded comprehendingly at the cue.

“Yes,” he replied, “that also is true. Ah, if it were only possible to escape from the bewildering system into the clean fields and the rain-washed heather----”

“To evade the ever-present Self, and to take refuge in the great unhewn passions?” I queried gently.

“Exactly,” he replied, again carefully contemplating his nails, “to know again the crude and volcanic life. Everything is tertiary in these days--we have no primaries. Nothing rude or red.”

I forbore to challenge the remark as to rudeness, and agreed that from my observation it hardly appeared to be an age of epics. He approved, passing his hand over his sleek, clean hair.

“And yet,” he continued, judicially weighing each word, and turning to the nails of the other hand, “and yet--why? Why should we, the heirs of the centuries, be in reality the slaves of them? Why should we not love, for instance, as the rugged, forgotten ones loved? Why should we love through the post-office and by chaperonage--through engagements and marriages? Why should we not----”

He forbore to say what, and sighed, apparently for the days when he might have loved with a stone axe in untracked forests and through rivers in flood. I offered him a cigarette.

He lighted it, and gazing before him as though he were culling a nascent thought from the smoke, went on slowly and prophetically.

“Nevertheless,” he said, more softly than ever, “the strong man shall come; and when he shall appear--the man for whom we are waiting--the man who shall break the bonds and go back--back----”

It was a characteristic of most of his sentences that he finished them by watching the films of smoke before him. This time he made a remarkably perfect smoke ring. I thought of Caroline, and wondered what she was doing in such a _milieu_.

I was fain to speak.

“And what form of creative expression do you adopt, Mr. Macquoid?” I asked gracefully.

He replied with a modest diffidence:

“The drama. One is but a mouthpiece--a medium; yet the speech from living lips with the living person before the eyes----”

“You are doubtless right,” I replied; “words are unconvincing; things must be seen to be believed.”

He noticed nothing, and proceeded to speak of the modern French chansonette.

Now Caroline, I remembered, had, before her engagement, accounted for a large portion of her time in putting together the materials for a comedy, which, however, she had since discontinued under the somewhat exclusive demands of courtship. I had never been privileged to see the work in question, but understood that a knotty proposal scene had, coincidentally, been abandoned precisely at the time that she could, had she wished, have given it an autobiographical interest. Bassishaw’s love, besides interrupting the course of art, bade fair to cut it off altogether just when it would have given the true note that the stage, it is declared, is aching for. But even young authors have scruples in making their own affairs public, and so Caroline had willed it.

Nevertheless, it could do Caroline no harm to meet Mr. Eleanor Macquoid; and Mr. Macquoid himself could do no less than accept resignedly the latter-day limitations of love in the presence of my sister. After all, Mrs. Vicars’s salon was for the interchange of ideas.

“My sister,” I remarked, “is interested in the drama, and has herself half-realised aspirations in the way of comedy.”

Mr. Macquoid would be charmed; and I presented him. I was called away for a few moments by Mrs. Vicars. By the time I returned Mr. Macquoid was talking, his remarks being apparently directed to the point at which Caroline’s comedy had been relinquished.

“It is difficult,” he observed, with a polite interest, “to know what to do with one’s young leads nowadays. I suppose they must love--the Philistine still clings to the conventional love-theme--but it is all so stale. In the old days it was different.”

From the angle of Caroline’s chin I saw that it was anything but stale to her, and that the remark was unfortunate. She was evidently of opinion that the subject of love, however much used, had had anything but adequate treatment, and that in one or two important respects she was in a position to direct a new light on the literary treatment of it.

“What do you mean, Mr. Macquoid?” she asked.

“Merely,” he replied casually, “that there is so little dash and--and high-handedness about our modern methods of love-making. You get your couples together, and they talk in the same weary way--the same old flat talk, talk, talk----”

I smiled at the description as applied to Bassishaw, whose fluency was not remarkable, and Caroline looked coldly before her.

“You refer to the stage, Mr. Macquoid?” she asked.

“I refer to modern love-making,” he replied rashly. “We have no romantic methods left. It has become a business and a bore. When we do get it out it’s one kiss and thank Heaven it’s over.”

Caroline looked emphatic contradiction. I interposed.

“The Roman soldiery, it is related,” I said, “being once in want of wives----”

Caroline interrupted me quickly.

“I think, Mr. Macquoid,” she returned, “that people love just as passionately nowadays as they ever did.”

He might have seen what was the matter, but he was on his own subject, and went blindly at it.

“True,” he replied, “true. But the surroundings, the circumstances, the littleness of everyday life--they crush it out. We love by rule and etiquette, at social functions and in gas-lit drawing-rooms.”

I looked at Caroline for a confirmation of Bassishaw’s methods, but the personal equation was too much for her contemplation of the artistic side of the question.

“Of course we do, Mr. Macquoid,” she returned, waiving, it seemed to me, the part that had to do with the gas. “What else can we do?”

Eleanor Macquoid raised his eyebrows and shoulders in a deferential gesture that was supposed to explain the way.

“The wind still blows,” he said, “the rain, the open air----”

“The parks,” I suggested, “are already----”

“--but,” he continued, “we wear frock-coats and carry umbrellas. We marry, and our children resume the same hopeless round. There is no romance, no poetry, no heroism in it. We become engaged for a certain period to please our friends, and marry out of consideration for one another. We have no impulse, no real instinct. We have no--no militant love.”

He seemed to receive a fresh start from the last phrase, and, alas! ruined himself irretrievably.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “even those to whom we might look for a vigorous expression of it--those who lead lives of adventurous excitement--our soldiers and sailors--are just as bad. As you remarked, Mr. Butterfield, the Roman soldiers----”

The social system might be attacked, disintegrated, and shown wanting in the eyes of amateur modern paganism; the spirit of the age might be arraigned and condemned by twenty juries of the advanced salons; modish culture might stalk hock-deep in the wreckage of civilisation; but--to Caroline the prestige of the army was vested in the person of Bassishaw. Bassishaw’s mode of love-making had been compared to its disfavour with the practices of Roman legions.

She raised her head disdainfully without glancing at the unconscious Mr. Eleanor Macquoid, spoke half over her shoulder, and condemned a great nation in Bassishaw’s defence.

“I don’t think very highly, Mr. Macquoid, of the Romans. I think that when they--that on that occasion at least--they were horrid, and--and--unnecessarily rough, and that nice people would never have done it. It may make good pictures, but one would rather be a pleasant person than an unpleasant picture. And I don’t care a bit what anybody says; soldiers are just as good as--anybody else.”

And better, beyond comparison better, her shoulders seemed to say as she turned away. Macquoid shifted his other elbow to the piano, and then looked at me.

“I am afraid, Mr. Butterfield, that I have not been able to help your sister much in the play. After all, the real impulse must come from within.”

“It is,” I replied, “a pleasing reticence when the real impulse stays there. The self-sacrifice imposed by art is not necessarily a sacrifice of one’s self.”

“Very true,” he answered approvingly, and took coffee.

XIII

POT LUCK

“Do you know, Butterfield,” Bassishaw said, “I don’t know how you get along--that is--get along, you know--as you do.”

The remark didn’t seem particularly illuminating, but he had been silent for ten minutes, and this appeared to be the result of his cogitation.

“No?” I said encouragingly.

“Well, you know what I mean,” he replied. “I mean how you manage--in the way you do, you know; never to--you’ve never--hang it, Butterfield, why don’t you get married?”

“Oh!” I answered, “I see. Of course. I didn’t quite catch the idea at first. Of course. Why don’t I get married.”

“Yes,” he replied, much relieved. “You--you should, you know. It’s the finest thing in the world--being engaged, that is. You’ve no idea, really, Butterfield.”

He seemed quite eager about it. I put my feet comfortably on the fender, and waited for him to expand. He kept his eyes on the fire.

“You know,” he went on slowly, “you’ll feel awfully lonely and all that--soon, that is--when Caroline goes, I mean.”

Matchmaking is never a man’s line; he draws back at the very intimate point he should press home. Arthur did his best. Mrs. Loring had probably been talking to him.

“I shall miss her very much,” I replied, “very much indeed; but to whom do you propose to marry me?”

He seemed rather abashed, and a trifle impatient.

“Don’t be an ass,” he said.

I could not be certain, owing to the firelight, that he blushed, but I chanced it. I didn’t object to these palpable attempts to marry me to Millicent Dixon; but it was disparaging to my intelligence that I should be supposed not to notice them. Anyway, the male element was a new feature in the alliance.

“And do you think that she and I would be a well-matched pair?” I asked.

He professed a hypocritical ignorance as to whom I meant. I laughed.

“Mrs. Loring,” I answered, “can give you points, Arthur. You would apparently marry me on general principles. She particularises.”

We were waiting for Caroline and Millicent. Millicent and Bassishaw were dining with us that evening, and Bassishaw had lately, I knew, been a good deal perturbed on my account. More than once he had timidly suggested that a woman’s hand in a place made all the difference, you know, and I had caught him glancing round my rooms with something of a disparaging valuation of their contents when he should take Caroline away. His friendly concern, in itself, was deserving of my gratitude--but with this qualification, that I don’t believe he was above suspecting that I should take to drink in the imminent solitude of my bereft apartments.

I was extracting from him the fervent declaration that I couldn’t imagine how splendid It--being engaged--made you feel, and that to know that there was One upon whom et-cetera et-cetera For Ever, when Millicent and Caroline entered. We rose to greet them.

“How do you do, Millicent?” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Heaven!” she replied, “let me come near the fire. I’m as cold as a seminary breakfast. How do you do, Arthur? What a blessed blaze! Don’t go away, Arthur.”

Bassishaw had gone over to the table, where Caroline was making the last unnecessary arrangements, and was having his flower pinned on.

“Oh! his circulation’s all right,” I remarked. “We were once like that,” and Millicent, looking over her shoulder, laughed at me, and said:

“The dear infants!”

Dinner was served, and we took our places. I faced Caroline, while Millicent, who was still chilly, and didn’t mind the fire at her back, looked over the flowers at Bassishaw; an arrangement as can be diagrammatically proved, offering facilities for between-deck pressing of feet on a diagonal plan, and which appeared to suit my young sister admirably. I gave her an amused glance, which Millicent intercepted, and Carrie tried, unsuccessfully, to look as if she hadn’t done it.

“Never mind him, Carrie,” Millicent said reassuringly. “He’s an envious old man, who’s wasted his youth, and he’s getting cynical. His failing years won’t permit him to do such things himself, and his conscience begins to hurt him.”

This was the woman without whom, in Bassishaw’s opinion, my abode fell short of completeness.

“My failing years, Miss Dixon,” I returned, “bring with them a certain charity; nevertheless, allow me to point out your reason for condoning such practices.”

“Which is----?” she queried.

“That you are quite capable of doing the same thing yourself.”

She laughed, and Bassishaw looked puzzled.

“Oh, I’m not tottering to my fall yet,” she retorted. “I have all sorts of little surprises in my blood.”

“You forbid reply, Miss Dixon,” I answered. “You take refuge in a position where man can only maintain a respectful and incredulous silence. A woman’s years----”

“----are----?” she challenged.

“----and an income-tax return----”

“I am beneath your roof, Mr. Butterfield,” she replied, with the dignity of St. James’s comedy.

Caroline evidently disapproved strongly. She caught my eye.

“I don’t think you’re a bit nice this evening, Rollo,” she said. “If I were Millicent”--she straightened her back--“I wouldn’t dine with you. Don’t take any notice of him, Millie dear.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “the disparity in years is too great. Think so, Bassishaw?”

I looked round the flowers at him. He seemed rather embarrassed, and said nothing. I filled Millicent’s glass, and turned to her.

“What do you think Bassishaw was saying to me just before you came in?”

I received a kick. Bassishaw, behind the flowers, was very red indeed.

“Heaven forbid that I should guess!” Millicent replied. “Men are frail creatures.”

“He was speaking,” I continued, “of women as a domestic institution. No home, he said, was complete without one. Considered decoratively, she gave an air of brightness----”

Bassishaw must have been as busy in his pedipulations as an organist, for Caroline peremptorily held out her glass to be replenished. I continued:

“As a companion, he said, much could be forgiven her. And she had admirable managing gifts.”

Millicent bowed across the flowers.

“The sex thanks you, Arthur,” she said. “It is quite the proper point of view for a young man. As for this belated bachelor,”--myself--“he never did, nor ever will, think rightly on the subject.”

Bassishaw looked at me reproachfully.

“I didn’t mean--what you think I meant,” he said uncomfortably.

“Forgive me. You meant much more than I say I think you meant.”

“I meant--I meant----” he replied; and then, apologetically, “well, you _are_ getting on, you know, and you’ve missed so much, really, Rollo. If you _like_ being alone----A man who’s never--you don’t mind my saying it?--well, he doesn’t know, that’s all.”

Bassishaw subsided rather incoherently, but applied himself to his plate with conviction. I looked at Millicent, who glanced sidelong fun under her lids.

“What you say is perfectly convincing as a proposition, Arthur,” she remarked. “The man who’s Never--never does know; but the application is another matter. From report, there were hopes for Rollo Butterfield that he has failed to justify. He flirted notoriously.”

“Thank you, gracious lady,” I replied complacently, leaning back at my ease. “That is the name the world gives it.”

“Your conduct with Dolly Hemingway was shameless.”

“Marriage would certainly have been an illogical conclusion,” I admitted.

“And Violet Mellish told me herself----”