Chapter 5

"I suppose Ibsen is responsible for a good deal," Mrs. Windsor said rather vaguely. Luncheon always rendered her rather vague, and after food her intellect struggled for egress, as the sun struggles to emerge from behind intercepting clouds.

"I believe Mr. Clement Scott thinks so," said Amarinth; "but then it does not matter very much what Mr. Clement Scott thinks, does it? The position of the critics always strikes me as very comic. They are for ever running at the back of public opinion, and shouting 'come on!' or 'go back!' to those who are in front of them. If half of them had their way, our young actors and actresses would play in Pinero's pieces as Mrs. Siddons or Charles Kean played in the pieces of Shakespeare long ago. A good many of them found their claims to attention on the horrible fact that they once knew Charles Dickens, a circumstance of which they ought rather to be ashamed. They are monotonous dwellers in an unenlightened past like Mr. Sala, who is even more commonplace than the books of which he is for ever talking. Mr. Joseph Knight is their oracle at first nights, and some of them even labour under the wild impression that Mr. Robert Buchanan can write good English, and that Mr. George R. Sims--what would he be without the initial?--is a minor poet."

"Dear me! I am afraid we are all wrong," said Mrs. Windsor, still rather vaguely; "but do you know, we ought really to be thinking of our walk up Leith Hill. It is a lovely afternoon. Will you attempt it, Madame Valtesi?"

"No, thank you. I think I must have been constructed, like Providence, with a view to sitting down. Whoever thinks of the Deity as standing? I will stay at home and read the last number of 'The Yellow Disaster.' I want to see Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's idea of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has drawn him sitting in a wheelbarrow in the gardens of Lambeth Palace, with underneath him the motto, 'J'y suis, j'y reste.' I believe he has on a black mask. Perhaps that is to conceal the likeness."

"I have seen it," Mrs. Windsor said; "it is very clever. There are only three lines in the whole picture, two for the wheelbarrow and one for the Archbishop."

"What exquisite simplicity!" said Lord Reggie, going out into the hall to get his straw hat.

In the evening, when they assembled in the drawing-room for dinner, it was found that both Mrs. Windsor and Madame Valtesi had put on simple black dresses in honour of the curate. Lady Locke, although she never wore widow's weeds, had given up colours since her husband's death. As they waited for Mr. Smith's advent there was an air of decent expectation about the party. Mr. Amarinth looked serious to heaviness. Lord Reggie was pale, and seemed abstracted. Probably he was thinking of his anthem, whose tonic and dominant chords, and diatonic progressions, he considered most subtly artistic. He would like to have written in the Lydian mode, only he could not remember what the Lydian mode was, and he had forgotten to bring any harmony book with him. He glanced into the mirror over the fireplace, smoothed his pale gold hair with his hand, and prepared to be very sweet to the curate in order to obtain possession of the organ on the ensuing Sunday.

"Mr. Smith," said one of the tall footmen, throwing open the drawing-room, and a tall, thin, ascetic looking man, with a shaved, dark face, and an incipient tonsure, entered the room very seriously.

"Dinner is served."

The two announcements followed one upon the other almost without a pause. Mrs. Windsor requested the curate to take her in, after introducing him to her guests in the usual rather muddled and perfunctory manner. When they were all seated, and Mr. Amarinth was beginning to hold forth over the clear soup, she murmured confidentially to her companion--

"So good of you to take pity upon us. You will not find us very gay. We are really down here to have a quiet, serious week--a sort of retreat, you know. Mr. Amarinth is holding it. I hope nobody will have a fit this time. Ah! of course you did not come last year. Do you like Chenecote? A sweet village, isn't it?"

"Very sweet indeed, outwardly. But I fear there is a good deal to be done inwardly; much sweeping and scouring of minds before the savour of the place will be quite acceptable on high."

"Dear me! I am sorry to hear that. One can never tell, of course."

"I have put a stop to a good deal already, I am thankful to say. I have broken up the idle corners permanently, and checked the Sunday evening rowdyism upon the common."

"Indeed! I am so glad. Mr. Smith has broken up the idle corners, Madame Valtesi. Is it not a mercy?"

Madame Valtesi looked enigmatical, as indeed she always did when she was ignorant. She had not the smallest idea what an idle corner might be, nor how it could be broken up. She therefore peered through her eyeglasses and said nothing. Mr. Amarinth was less discreet.

"An idle corner," he said. "What a delicious name. It might have been invented by Izaac Walton. It suggests a picture by George Morland. I love his canvases, rustics carousing----"

But before he could get any further, Reggie caught his eye and formed silently with his lips the words, "Remember my anthem."

"He idealises so much," Amarinth went on easily. "Of course a real carouse is horribly inartistic. Excess always is, although Oscar Wilde has said that nothing succeeds like it."

"Excess is very evil," Mr. Smith said rather rigidly. "Excess in everything seems to be characteristic of our age. I could wish that many would return to the ascetic life. No wine, thank you."

"Indeed, yes," said Mrs. Windsor, "that is what I always think. There is something so beautiful in not eating and drinking, and not marrying, and all that; but at least we must acknowledge that celibacy is quite coming into fashion. Our young men altogether refuse to marry nowadays. Let us hope that is a step in the right direction."

"If they married more and drank less, I don't fancy their morals would suffer much," Madame Valtesi remarked with exceeding dryness, looking at Mr. Smith's budding tonsure through her tortoise-shell eyeglass.

"The monastic life is very beautiful," said Lord Reggie. "I always find when I go to a monastery, that the monks give me very excellent wine. I suppose they keep all their hair shirts for their own private use."

"That is the truest hospitality, isn't it," said Lady Locke.

"The high church party are showing us the right way," Mr. Amarinth remarked impressively, with a side-anthem glance at Lord Reggie which spoke volumes. "They understand the value of æstheticism in religion. They recognise the fact that a beautiful vestment uplifts the soul far more than a dozen bad chants by Stainer, or Barnby, or any other unmusical Christian. The average Anglican chant is one of the most unimaginative, unpoetical things in the world. It always reminds me of the cart-horse parade on Whit Monday. A brown Gregorian is so much more devotional."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Smith, who had been listening to these remarks with acquiescence, but who now manifested some obvious confusion.

"A brown Gregorian," Mr. Amarinth repeated. "All combinations of sounds convey a sense of colour to the mind. Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta."

"I think the Bishops are beginning to understand Gregorian music a little better. No plover's eggs, thank you," said Mr. Smith, who was totally without a sense of melody, but who assumed a complete musical authority, based on the fact that he intoned in church.

"The Bishops never go on understanding anything," said Mr. Amarinth. "They conceal their intelligence, if they have any, up their lawn sleeves. I once met a Bishop. It was at a garden party at Lambeth Palace. He took me aside into a small shrubbery, and informed me that he was really a Buddhist. He added that nearly all the Bishops were."

"Is it true that Mr. Haweis introduced his congregation to a Mahatma in the vestry after service last Sunday?" said Madame Valtesi. "I heard so, and that he has persuaded Little Tich to read the lessons for the rest of the season. I think it is rather hard upon the music halls. There is really so much competition nowadays!"

"I know nothing about Mr. Haweis," said Mr. Smith, drinking some water from a wineglass. "I understood he was a conjurer, or an entertainer, or something of that kind."

"Oh no, he is quite a clergyman," exclaimed Mrs. Windsor. "Quite; except when he is in the pulpit, of course. And then I suppose he thinks it more religious to drop it."

"Since I have been away there has been a great change in services," said Lady Locke. "They are so much brighter and more cheerful."

"Yes, Christians are getting very lively," said Madame Valtesi, helping herself to a cutlet in aspic. "They demand plenty of variety in their devotional exercises, and what Arthur Roberts, or somebody, calls 'short turns.' The most popular of all the London clergymen invariably has an anthem that lasts half-an-hour, and preaches for five minutes by a stop watch."

"I scarcely think that music should entirely oust doctrine," began Mr. Smith, refusing an entrée with a gentle wave of his hand.

"The clergyman I sit under," said Mrs. Windsor, "always stops for several minutes before his sermon, so that the people can go out if they want to."

"How inconsiderate," said Mr. Amarinth; "of course no one dares to move. English people never dare to move, except at the wrong time. They think it is less noticeable to go out at a concert during a song than during an interval. The English labour under so many curious delusions. They think they are respectable, for instance, if they are not noticed, and that to be talked about is to be fast. Of course the really fast people are never talked about at all. Half the young men in London, whose names are by-words, are intensely and hopelessly virtuous. They know it, and that is why they look so pale. The consciousness of virtue is a terrible thing, is it not, Mr. Smith?"

"I am afraid I hardly caught what you were saying. No pudding, thank you," said that gentleman.

"I was saying that we moderns are really all much better than we seem. There is far more hypocrisy of vice nowadays than hypocrisy of virtue. The amount of excellence going about is positively quite amazing, if one only knows where to look for it; but good people in Society are so terribly afraid of being found out."

"Really! Can that be the case?"

"Indeed, it can. Society is absolutely frank about its sins, but absolutely secretive about its lapses into goodness, if I may so phrase it. I once knew a young nobleman who went twice to church on Sunday--in the morning and the afternoon. He managed to conceal it for nearly five years, but one day, to his horror, he saw a paragraph in the _Star_--the _Star_ is a small evening paper which circulates chiefly among members of the Conservative party who desire to know what the aristocracy are doing--revealing his exquisite secret. He fled the country immediately, and is now living in retirement in Buenos Ayres, which is, I am told, the modern equivalent of the old-fashioned purgatory."

"Good gracious! London must be in a very sad condition," said Mr. Smith, in considerable excitement. "No, thank you, I never touch fruit. Things used to be very different, I imagine, although I have never been in town except for the day, and then merely to call upon my dentist."

"Yes, this is an era of change," murmured Lord Reggie, who had spoken little and eaten much. "Good women have taken to talking about vice, and, in no long time, bad men will take to talking about virtue."

"I think you are wronging good women, Lord Reggie," said Lady Locke rather gravely.

"It is almost impossible to wrong a woman now," he answered pensively. "Women are so busy in wronging men, that they have no time for anything else. Sarah Grand has inaugurated the Era of women's wrongs."

"I am so afraid that she will drive poor, dear Mrs. Lynn Linton mad," said Mrs. Windsor, drawing on her gloves--for she persisted in believing that the presence of Mr. Smith constituted a dinner party. "Mrs. Linton's articles are really getting so very noisy. Don't you think they rather suggest Bedlam?"

"To me they suggest nothing whatever," said Amarinth wearily. "I cannot distinguish one from another. They are all like sheep that have gone astray."

"I must say I prefer them to Lady Jeune's," said Mrs. Windsor.

"Lady Jeune catches society by the throat and worries it," said Madame Valtesi.

"She worries it very inartistically," added Lord Reggie.

"Ah!" said Amarinth, as the ladies rose to go into the drawing-room; "she makes one great mistake. She judges of Society by her own parties, and looks at life through the spectacles of a divorce court judge. No wonder she is the bull terrier of modern London life."

Mrs. Windsor paused at the dining-room door and looked back.

"We are going to have coffee in the garden," she said. "Will you join us there? Don't stay too long over your water, Mr. Smith," she added, with pious archness.

"No; but I never take coffee, thank you," he answered solemnly.

VIII.

Esmé Amarinth was generally amusing and whimsical in conversation, but, like other men, he had his special moments, and the half-hour after dinner, when the ladies, longing to remain as invisible listeners, had retired to the bald deserts of feminine society, was usually his time of triumph. His mental stays were then unfastened. He could breathe forth his stories freely. His wittiest jokes, nude, no longer clad in the shadowy garments of more or less conventional propriety, danced like bacchanals through the conversation, and kicked up heels to fire even the weary men of society. He expanded into fantastic anecdote, and mingled many a _bon mot_ with the blue spirals of his mounting cigarette smoke. But to-night Mr. Smith's gentle, "I never smoke, thank you," reminded him that the fate of Lord Reggie's anthem was hanging in the balance. He resolved to tread warily among clerical prejudices, so, lighting a cigarette, and pushing the claret away from him with one plump hand, he drew his chair slowly towards Mr. Smith's, and a sweet smile spread deliberately over his rather large and intelligent face.

"I was very much interested in your remark about doctrine and music at dinner," he began in his most carefully modulated voice, "and I wanted to pursue the subject a little farther, only the minds of ladies are so curious and unexpected, that I thought it better to refrain. Have you noticed that many women make a kind of profession of being shocked?"

"Surely no," said Mr. Smith, sipping his water with an inquiring air.

"Yes, positively it is so, especially if a truth about religion is uttered. They are apt to think that all truths about religion are blasphemous. It is wonderful how ready good women are to find blasphemy where it is not, and to confuse reasoning with ribaldry."

"Ah!" said the curate, looking the more ascetic because he was slightly confused in mind.

"Now you spoke of music ousting doctrine. Do you not think that the truest, the most poignant doctrine, speaks, utters itself through the arts. Music has its religion and its atheism, painting its holiness and its sin. A statue, in its white and marble stillness, may suggest to us dreams in which the angels walk, or visions that I will not characterise in the presence of an ordained priest. Even architecture may incline us to worship, and a few broken fragments of stone to faith. Have you ever been in Greece?"

"I have never been out of my own country," said Mr. Smith, "except once, when I spent a week in Wales."

"I have never made an exhaustive study of Welsh art," said Amarinth, "but I believe Mr. Gladstone thinks it gallant, while others prefer to call it little. But the point I wanted to suggest was merely this, that we can draw doctrine from the music and the painting of men, as well as from literature and sermons."

"I have never thought of it before," said Mr. Smith doubtfully.

"Mozart and Bach have given me belief that not even the subversive impotencies of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the terribly obvious 'mysteries' of Dr. A. C. Mackenzie, have been able to take from me," murmured Lord Reggie.

"Ah! Reggie, each decade has its poet Bunn," remarked Amarinth. "We have our Bunn in Mr. Joseph Bennett, but where are his plums? Religion dwells in the arts, Mr. Smith, as irreligion so often, unhappily, lurks in the sciences."

"Indeed I have no opinion of science," the curate said with authoritative disapproval.

"Science is too often a thief. Art is a prodigal benefactor. She provides for us an almshouse in which we can take refuge when we are old and weary. And in music especially--in good music--all doctrine is crystallised. The man who has genius gathers together all his highest thoughts and aspirations, all his beliefs, his trust, his faith, and gives them forth in his art, in his music, or in his picture. Lord Reginald, for instance, would convert more men to Christianity by his exquisite and purple anthem than most preachers by all their sermons."

"Indeed, has Lord Reginald composed an anthem?" asked the curate, gazing upon Reggie with a priestly approval.

"He has, and one that Roman Catholics have delighted in. Forgive my allusion to an alien faith, but the Romanists, with all their mistakes, are not unmusical."

"I see much good in Rome," said Mr. Smith solemnly, "although it is mingled with many errors. No, not any nuts, thank you; I never touch nuts. I should like to hear this anthem."

"I could play it to you with pleasure," Reggie said, drooping his fair head slightly, "but of course it is all wrong on a piano. It requires the organ and sweet boys' voices."

"We have anthems in the church here," said Mr. Smith. "We have even done masses."

"How exquisite!" said Amarinth. "A village mass. There is something beautifully original in the notion. Ah! Mr. Smith, if your boys could have done Lord Reggie's anthem they would have learnt the doctrine of music."

"Perhaps they--would it be possible--on Sunday?" Mr. Smith said, glowing gently.

Amarinth got up, dropping his cigarette end into his finger bowl.

"Reggie, we have found a true artist in Chenecote," he said. "Play Mr. Smith your purple notes, and I will go and take my coffee on the lawn. The moon washes the night with silver, and, thank Heaven! there are no nightingales to ruin the music of the stillness with their well-meant but ill-produced voices. Nature's songster is the worst sort of songster I know."

He walked with an ample softness into the little hall, and passed out through the French windows of the drawing room into the shadowy garden.

On the lawn he found Lady Locke sitting alone, sipping her coffee in a basket chair. Madame Valtesi and Mrs. Windsor had strolled into the scented rose garden to discuss the inner details of a forthcoming divorce case. The murmur of their voices, uttering names of co-respondents, was faintly heard now and then as they passed up and down the tiny formal paths.

Esmé Amarinth sank down into a chair by Lady Locke and sighed heavily.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"You have a beautiful soul," he said softly, "and I have a beautiful soul too. Why should there not be a sympathy between us? Lady Locke, I am the victim of depression. I am suffering from the malady of life. I usually have an attack of it in the morning, but it flies when the stars come out and leaves me brilliant. What can be the matter with me to-night? I ask myself the question with the most poignant anxiety, I can assure you."

She glanced at his large and solemn face, at his ample cheeks and loose mouth, and smiled slightly.

"Some circumstances have been unkind to you, perhaps?" she said.

"That could not hurt me," he answered, "for, thank Heaven! I am no philosopher, and never take facts seriously. Circumstances, my dear Lady Locke, are the lashes laid into us by life. Some of us have to receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on a coat--that is the only difference."

"Are you a pessimist?" she asked.

"I hope so. I look upon optimism as a most quaint disease, an eruption that breaks out upon the soul, and destroys all its interest, all its beauty. The optimist dresses up the amazing figures of life like Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and pipes a foolish tune--the Old Hundredth or some such thing--for them to dance to. We cannot all refuse to see anything but comic opera peasants around us."

"Yet we need not replace them with pantomime demons."

"Demons, as you call them, are much more interesting. Nothing is so unattractive as goodness, except, perhaps, a sane mind in a sane body. Even the children find the fairies monotonous, I believe. An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the other suggests a thousand."

"Every one of them sinister."

"Why not? Where would be the drama without the crime? The clash of swords is the music of the world. People talk so much to me about the beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. The Apostle Thomas was artistic up to a certain point. He appreciated the value of shadows in a picture. To be on the alert is to live. To be lulled in security is to die."

"But if you pushed that amusing theory to its limits you would arrive at the contradiction in terms--to be happy is to be miserable."

"Certainly. To be what is commonly called happy is a mental complaint demanding careful treatment. The happy people of the world have their value, but only the negative value of foils. They throw up and emphasise the beauty, and the fascination of the unhappy. Scarlet and black are the finest of all the colours. And to cease to doubt is to despair--for a really talented man or woman. That is why people become sceptics. They desire to save themselves from intellectual annihilation."

"Yet the mental pleasure of proving a case may be keen."

"But it cannot be lasting. You do not see the delight that must attend upon conjecture. Let me put it to you in another way. Can you conceive loving a man whom you felt you understood?"

"Certainly. Especially if he were difficult for other people to understand."

"Ah! you begin to appreciate the value of doubt. We often begin by desiring others to enjoy what we shall eventually want for ourselves. The moment we understand a human being, our love for that human being spreads his wings preparatory to flying out of the window."

Lady Locke, who had begun to look earnest, seemed to recollect herself with an effort, and dispelled the gravity that was settling over her face with a smile.

"You go very far in your admirable desire to amuse," she said.

"I think not," he answered, putting down her cup with an elaborate serenity. "One must perpetually doubt to be faithful. Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this while men did not, and so women once ruled the world. But men are awakening from their mental slumber, and are becoming incomprehensible. Lord Reggie is an instance of what I mean. The average person finds him exquisitely difficult to comprehend. He fascinates by being sedulously unexpected. Listen to his anthem. He is beginning to play it. How unexpected it is. It always does what the ear wants, and all modern music does what the ear does not want. Therefore the ear always expects to be disappointed, and Lord Reggie astonishes it by never disappointing it."

The faint music of the piano now tinkled out into the night, and numerous simple harmonies and full closes fell melodiously upon their hearing.