The other day, while looking through a limbo of a drawer wherein have been cast from time to time a medley of maimed, half-soiled, abortive things, too unfitted for the paradise of publication, and too good (so my vanity will have it) for the damnation of the waste-paper basket, I came across, at the very bottom, the manuscript of the preceding autobiographical narrative, the last words of which I wrote at Mustapha Superieur three years ago. At first I carried it about with me, not caring to destroy it and not knowing what in the world to do with it until, with the malice of inanimate things, the dirty dog's-eared bundle took to haunting me, turning up continually in inconvenient places and ever insistently demanding a new depository. At last I began to look on it with loathing; and one day in a fit of inspiration, creating the limbo aforesaid, I hurled the manuscript, as I thought, into everlasting oblivion. I had no desire to carry on the record of my life any further, and there, in limbo, it has remained for three years. But the other day I took it out for reference; and now as I am holiday-making in a certain little backwater of the world, where it is raining in a most unholiday fashion, it occurs to me that, as everything has happened to me which is likely to happen (Heaven knows I want no more excursions and alarums in my life's drama), I may as well bring the narrative up to date. I therefore take up the thread, so far as I can, from where I left off.
Lola, having nothing to do in Algiers, which had grown hateful to us both, accompanied me to London. As, however, the weather was rough, and she was a very bad sailor, I saw little of her on the voyage. For my own part, I enjoyed the stormy days, the howling winds and the infuriated waves dashing impotently over the steamer. They filled me with a sense of conflict and of amusement. It is always good to see man triumphing over the murderous forces of nature. It puts one in conceit with one's kind.
At Waterloo I handed Lola over to her maid, who had come to meet her, and, leaving Rogers in charge of my luggage, I drove homeward in a cab.
It was only as I was crossing Waterloo Bridge and saw the dark mass of the Houses of Parliament looming on the other side of the river, and the light in the tower which showed that the House was sitting, that I began to realise my situation. As exiles in desert lands yearn for green fields, so yearned I for those green benches. In vain I represented to myself how often I had yawned on them, how often I had cursed my folly in sitting on them and listening to empty babble when I might have been dining cosily, or talking to a pretty woman or listening to a comic opera, or performing some other useful and soul-satisfying action of the kind; in vain I told myself what a monument of futility was that building; I longed to be in it and of it once again. And when I realised that I yearned for the impossible, my heart was like a stone. For, indeed, I, Simon de Gex, with London once a toy to my hand, was coming into it now a penniless adventurer to seek my fortune.
The cab turned into the Strand, which greeted me as affably as a pandemonium. Motor omnibuses whizzed at me, cabs rattled and jeered at me, private motors and carriages passed me by in sleek contempt; policemen regarded me scornfully as, with uplifted hand regulating the traffic, they held me up; pavements full of people surged along ostentatiously showing that they did not care a brass farthing for me; the thousands of lights with their million reflections, from shop fronts, restaurants, theatres, and illuminated signs glared pitilessly at me. A harsh roar of derision filled the air, like the bass to the treble of the newsboys who yelled in my face. I was wearing a fur-lined coat—just the thing a penniless adventurer would wear. I had a valet attending to my luggage—just the sort of thing a penniless adventurer would have. I was driving to the Albany—just the sort of place where a penniless adventurer would live. And London knew all this—and scoffed at me in stony heartlessness. The only object that gave me the slightest sympathy was Nelson on top of his column. He seemed to say, “After all, you can't feel such a fool and so much out in the cold as I do up here.”
At Piccadilly Circus I found the same atmosphere of hostility. My cab was blocked in the theatre-going tide, and in neighbouring vehicles I had glimpses of fair faces above soft wraps and the profiles of moustached young men in white ties. They assumed an aggravating air of ownership of the blazing thoroughfare, the only gay and joyous spot in London. I, too, had owned it once, but now I felt an alien; and the whole spirit of Piccadilly Circus rammed the sentiment home—I was an alien and an undesirable alien. I felt even more lost and friendless as I entered the long, cold arcade (known as the Ropewalk) of the Albany.
I found my sister Agatha waiting for me in the library. I had telegraphed to her from Southampton. She was expensively dressed in grey silk, and wore the family diamonds. We exchanged the family kiss and the usual incoherent greetings of our race. She expressed her delight at my restoration to health and gave me satisfactory tidings of Tom Durrell, her husband, of the children, and of our sister Jane. Then she shook her head at me, and made me feel like a naughty little boy. This I resented. Being the head of the family, I had always encouraged the deferential attitude which my sisters, dear right-minded things, had naturally assumed from babyhood.
“Oh, Simon, what a time you've given us!”
She had never spoken to me like this in her life.
“That's nothing, my dear Agatha,” said I just a bit tartly, “to the time I've given myself. I'm sorry for you, but I think you ought to be a little sorry for me.”
“I am. More sorry than I can say. Oh, Simon, how could you?”
“How could I what?” I cried, unwontedly regardless of the refinements of language.
“Mix yourself up in this dreadful affair?”
“My dear girl,” said I, “if you had got mixed up in a railway collision, I shouldn't ask you how you managed to do it. I should be sorry for you and feel your arms and legs and inquire whether you had sustained any internal injuries.”
She is a pretty, spare woman with a bird-like face and soft brown hair just turning grey; and as good-hearted a little creature as ever adored five healthy children and an elderly baronet with disastrous views on scientific farming.
“Dear old boy,” she said in milder accents, “I didn't mean to be unkind. I want to be good to you and help you, so much so that I asked Bingley”—Bingley is my housekeeper—“whether I could stay to dinner.”
“That's good of you—but this magnificence——?”
“I'm going on later to the Foreign Office reception.”
“Then you do still mingle with the great and gorgeous?” I said.
“What do you mean? Why shouldn't I?”
I laughed, suspecting rightly that my sisters' social position had not been greatly imperilled by the profligacy of their scandal-bespattered brother.
“What are people saying about me?” I asked suddenly.
She made a helpless gesture. “Can't you guess? You have told us the facts, and, of course, we believe you; we have done our best to spread abroad the correct version—but you know what people are. If they're told they oughtn't to believe the worst, they're disappointed and still go on believing it so as to comfort themselves.”
“You cynical little wretch!” said I.
“But it's true,” she urged. “And, after all, even if they were well disposed, the correct version makes considerable demands on their faith. Even Letty Farfax—”
“I know! I know!” said I. “Letty Farfax is typical. She would love to be on the side of the angels, but as she wouldn't meet the best people there, she ranges herself with the other party.”
Presently we dined, and during the meal, when the servants happened to be out of the room, we continued, snippet-wise, the inconclusive conversation. Like a good sister Agatha had come to cheer a lonely and much abused man; like a daughter of Eve she had also come to find out as much as she possibly could.
“I think I must tell you something which you ought to know,” she said. “It's all over the town that you stole the lady from Dale Kynnersley.”
“If I did,” said I, “it was at his mother's earnest entreaty. You can tell folks that. You can also tell them Madame Brandt is not the kind of woman to be stolen by one man from another. She is a thoroughly virtuous, good, and noble woman, and there's not a creature living who wouldn't be honoured by her friendship.”
As I made this announcement with an impetuosity which reminded me (with a twinge of remorse) of poor Dale's dithyrambics, Agatha shot at me a quick glance of apprehension.
“But, my dear Simon, she used to act in a circus with a horse!”
“I fail to see,” said I, growing angry, “how the horse could have imbued her with depravity, and I'm given to understand that the tone of the circus is not quite what it used to be in the days of the Empress Theodora.”
A ripple passed over Agatha's bare shoulders, which I knew to be a suppressed shrug.
“I suppose men and women look at these things differently,” she remarked, and from the stiffness of her tone I divined that the idea of moral qualities lurking in the nature of Lola Brandt occasioned her considerable displeasure.
“I hope——” She paused. There was another ripple. “No. I had better not say it. It's none of my business, after all.”
“I don't think it is, my dear,” said I.
Rogers bringing in the cutlets ended the snippet of talk.
It was not the cheeriest of dinners. I took advantage of the next interval of quiet to inquire after Dale. I learned that the poor boy had almost collapsed after the election and was now yachting with young Lord Essendale somewhere about the Hebrides. Agatha had not seen him, but Lady Kynnersley had called on her one day in a distracted frame of mind, bitterly reproaching me for the unhappiness of her son. I should never have suspected that such fierce maternal love could burn beneath Lady Kynnersley's granite exterior. She accused me of treachery towards Dale and, most illogically, of dishonourable conduct towards herself.
“She said things about you,” said Agatha, “for which, even if they were true, I couldn't forgive her. So that's an end of that friendship. Indeed, it has been very difficult, Simon,” she continued, “to keep up with our common friends. It has placed us in the most painful and delicate position. And now you're back, I'm afraid it will be worse.”
Thus under all Agatha's affection there ran the general hostility of London. Guilty or not, I had offended her in her most deeply rooted susceptibilities, and as yet she only knew half the imbroglio in which I was enmeshed. Over coffee, however, she began to take a more optimistic view of affairs.
“After all, you'll be able to live it down,” she said with a cheerful air of patronage. “People soon forget. Before the year is out you'll be going about just as usual, and at the General Election you'll find a seat somewhere.”
I informed her that I had given up politics. What then, she asked, would I do for an occupation?
“Work for my living,” I replied.
“Work?” She arched her eyebrows, as if it were the most extraordinary thing a man could do. “What kind of work?”
“Road-sweeping or tax-collecting or envelope-addressing.”
She selected a cigarette from the silver box in front of her, and did not reply until she had lit it and inhaled a puff or two.
“I wish you wouldn't be so flippant, Simon.”
From this remark I inferred that I still was in the criminal dock before this lady Chief Justice. I smiled at the airs the little woman gave herself now that I was no longer the impeccable and irreproachable dictator of the family. Mine was the experience of every fallen tyrant since the world began.
“My dear Agatha, I've had enough shocks during the last few weeks to knock the flippancy out of a Congregational minister. In November I was condemned to die within six months. The sentence was final and absolute. I thought I would do the kind of good one can't do with a lifetime in front of one, and I wasted all my substance in riotous giving. In the elegant phraseology of high society I am stone-broke. As my training has not fitted me to earn my living in high-falutin ways, I must earn it in some humble capacity. Therefore, if you see me call at your house for the water rate, you'll understand that I am driven to that expedient by necessity and not by degradation.”
Naturally I had to elaborate this succinct statement before my sister could understand its full significance. Then dismay overwhelmed her. Surely something could be done. The fortunes of Jane and herself were at my disposal to set me on my feet again. We were brother and sisters; what was theirs was mine; they couldn't see me starve. I thanked her for her affection—the dear creatures would unhesitatingly have let me play ducks and drakes with their money, but I explained that though poor, I was still proud and prized the independence of the tax-collector above the position of the pensioner of Love's bounty.
“Tom must get you something to do,” she declared.
“Tom must do nothing of the kind. Let me say that once and for all,” I returned peremptorily. “I've made my position clear to you, because you're my sister and you ought to be spared any further misinterpretation of my actions. But to have you dear people intriguing after billets for me would be intolerable.”
“But what are you going to do?” she cried, wringing her hands.
“I'm going for my first omnibus ride to-morrow,” said I heroically.
Upon which assertion Rogers entered announcing that her ladyship's carriage had arrived. A while later I accompanied her downstairs and along the arcade.
“I shall be so miserable, thinking of you, poor old boy,” she said affectionately, as she bade me good-bye.
“Don't, I am going to enjoy myself for the first time in my life.”
These were “prave 'orts,” but I felt doleful enough when I re-entered the chambers where I had lived in uncomplaining luxury for fourteen years.
“There's no help for it,” I murmured. “I must get rid of the remainder of my lease, sell my books and pictures and other more or less expensive household goods, dismiss Rogers and Bingley, and go and live on thirty shillings a week in a Bloomsbury boarding-house. I think,” I continued, regarding myself in the Queen Anne mirror over the mantelpiece, “I think that it will better harmonise with my fallen fortunes if I refrain from waxing the ends of my moustache. There ought to be a modest droop about the moustache of a tax-collector.”
The next morning I gave my servants a months' notice. Rogers, who had been with me for many years, behaved in the correctest manner. He neither offered to lend me his modest savings nor to work for me for no wages. He expressed his deep regret at leaving my service and his confidence that I would give him a good character. Bingley wept after the way of women. There was also a shadowy housemaidy young person in a cap who used to make meteoric appearances and whom I left to the diplomacy of Bingley. These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, the auctioneer so delighted at the chance of selling my effects, that I felt myself forthwith turned neck and crop out of doors. It was a bright morning in early spring, with a satirical touch of hope in the air. London, no longer to be my London, maintained its hostile attitude to me. If any one had prophesied that I should be a stranger in Piccadilly, I should have laughed aloud. Yet I was.
Walking moodily up Saint James's street I met the omniscient and expansive Renniker. He gave me a curt nod and a “How d'ye do?” and passed on. I felt savagely disposed to slash his jaunty silk hat off with my walking-stick. A few months before he would have rushed effusively into my arms and bedaubed me with miscellaneous inaccuracies of information. At first I was furiously indignant. Then I laughed, and swinging my stick, nearly wreaked my vengeance on a harmless elderly gentleman.
It was my first experience of social ostracism. Although I curled a contumelious lip, I smarted under the indignity. It was all very well to say proudly “io son' io”; but io used to be a person of some importance who was not cavalierly “how d'ye do'd” by creatures like Renniker. This and the chance encounters of the next few weeks gave me furiously to think. I knew that in one respect my sister Agatha was right. These good folks who shied now at the stains of murder with which my reputation was soiled would in time get used to them and eventually forget them altogether. But I reflected that I should not forget, and I determined that I should not be admitted on sufferance, as at first I should have to be admitted, into any man's club or any woman's drawing-room.
One day Colonel Ellerton, Maisie Ellerton's father, called on me. He used to be my very good friend; we sat on the same side of the House and voted together on innumerable occasions in perfect sympathy and common lack of conviction. He was cordial enough, congratulated me on my marvellous restoration to health, deplored my absence from Parliamentary life, and then began to talk confusedly of Russia. It took a little perspicacity to see that something was weighing on the good man's mind; something he had come to say and for his honest life could not get out. His plight became more pitiable as the interview proceeded, and when he rose to go, he grew as red as a turkey-cock and began to sputter. I went to his rescue.
“It's very kind of you to have come to see me, Ellerton,” I said, “but if I don't call yet awhile to pay my respects to your wife, I hope you'll understand, and not attribute it to discourtesy.”
I have never seen relief so clearly depicted on a human countenance. He drew a long breath and instinctively passed his handkerchief over his forehead. Then he grasped my hand.
“My dear fellow,” he cried, “of course we'll understand. It was a shocking affair—terrible for you. My wife and I were quite bowled over by it.”
I did not attempt to clear myself. What was the use? Every man denies these things as a matter of course, and as a matter of course nobody believes him.
Once I ran across Elphin Montgomery, a mysterious personage behind many musical comedy enterprises. He is jewelled all over like a first-class Hindoo idol, and is treated as a god in fashionable restaurants, where he entertains riff-raff at sumptuous banquets. I had some slight acquaintance with the fellow, but he greeted me as though I were a long lost intimate—his heavy sensual face swagged in smiles—and invited me to a supper party. I declined with courtesy and walked away in fury. He would not have presumed to ask me to meet his riff-raff before I became disgustingly and I suppose to some minds, fascinatingly, notorious. But now I was hail-fellow-well-met with him, a bird of his own feather, a rogue of his own kidney, to whom he threw open the gates of his bediamonded and befrilled Alsatia. A pestilential fellow! As if I would mortgage my birthright for such a mess of pottage.
So I stiffened and bade Society high and low go packing. I would neither seek mine own people, nor allow myself to be sought by Elphin Montgomery's. I enwrapped myself in a fine garment of defiance. My sister Jane, who was harder and more worldly-minded than Agatha, would have had me don a helmet of brass and a breastplate of rhinoceros hide and force my way through reluctant portals; but Agatha agreed with me, clinging, however, to the hope that time would not only reconcile Society to me, but would also reconcile me to Society.
“If the hope comforts you, my dear Agatha,” said I, “by all means cherish it. In the meantime, allow me to observe that the character of Ishmael is eminently suited to the profession of tax-collecting.”
During these early days of my return the one person with whom I had no argument was Lola. She soothed where others scratched, and stimulated where others goaded. The intimacy of my convalescence continued. At first I acquainted her, as far as was reasonably necessary, with my change of fortune, and accepted her offer to find me less expensive quarters. The devoted woman personally inspected every flat in London, with that insistence of which masculine patience is incapable, and eventually decided on a tiny bachelor suite somewhere in the clouds over a block of flats in Victoria Street where the service is included in the rent. Into this I moved with such of my furniture as I withdrew from the auctioneer's hammer, and there I prepared to stay until necessity should drive me to the Bloomsbury boarding-house. I thought I would graduate my descent. Before I moved, however, she came to the Albany for the first and only time to see the splendour I was about to quit. In a modest way it was splendour. My chambers were really a large double flat to the tasteful furnishing of which I had devoted the thought and interest of many years. She went with me through the rooms. The dining-room was all Chippendale, each piece a long-coveted and hunted treasure; the library old oak; the drawing-room a comfortable and cunning medley. There were bits of old china, pieces of tapestry, some rare prints, my choice collection of mezzotints, a picture or two of value—one a Lancret, a very dear possession. And there were my books—once I had a passion for rare bindings. Every thing had to me a personal significance, and I hated the idea of surrender more than I dared to confess even to myself. But I said to Lola:
“Vanity of vanities! All things expensive are vanity!”
Her eyes glistened and she slipped her arm through mine and patted the back of my hand.
“If you talk like that I shall cry and make a fool of myself,” she said in a broken manner.
It is not so much the thing that is done or the thing that is said that matters, but the way of doing or saying it. In the commonplace pat on the hand, in the break in the commonplace words there was something that went straight to my heart. I squeezed her arm and whispered:
“Thank you, dear.”
This sympathy so sure and yet so delicately conveyed was mine for the trouble of mounting the stairs that led to her drawing-room in Cadogan Gardens. She seemed to be watching my heart the whole time, so that without my asking, without my knowledge even, she could touch each sore spot as it appeared, with the healing finger. For herself she made no claims, and because she did not in any way declare herself to be unhappy, I, after the manner of men, took her happiness for granted. For lives there a man who does not believe that an uncomplaining woman has nothing to complain of? It is his masculine prerogative of density. Besides, does not he himself when hurt bellow like a bull? Why, he argues, should not wounded woman do the same? So, when I wanted companionship, I used to sit in the familiar room and make Adolphus, the Chow dog, shoulder arms with the poker, and gossip restfully with Lola, who sprawled in her old languorous, loose-limbed way among the cushions of her easy chair. Gradually my habitual reserve melted from me, and at last I gave her my whole confidence, telling her of my disastrous pursuit of eumoiriety, of Eleanor Faversham, of the attitude of Society, in fact, of most of what I have set down in the preceding pages. She was greatly interested in everything, especially in Eleanor Faversham. She wanted to know the colour of her eyes and hair and how she dressed. Women are odd creatures.
The weeks passed.
Besides ministering to my dilapidated spirit, Lola found occupation in looking after the cattery of Anastasius Papadopoulos, which the little man had left in the charge of his pupil and assistant, Quast. This Quast apparently was a faithful, stolid, but unintelligent and incapable German who had remained loyally at his post until Lola found him there in a state of semi-starvation. The sum of money with which Anastasius had provided him had been eked out to the last farthing. The cats were in a pitiable condition. Quast, in despair, was trying to make up his dull mind whether to sell them or eat them. Lola with superb feminine disregard of legal rights, annexed the whole cattery, maintained Quast in his position of pupil and assistant and informed the landlord that she would be responsible for the rent. Then she set to work to bring the cats into their proper condition of sleekness, and, that done, to put them through a systematic course of training. They had been thoroughly demoralised, she declared, under Quast's maladministration, and had almost degenerated into the unhistrionic pussies of domestic life. As for Hephaestus, the great ferocious tom, he was more like an insane tiger than a cat. He flew at the gate over which he used to jump, and clawed and bit it to matchwood, and after spitting in fury at the blazing hoop, sprang at the unhappy Quast as if he had been the contriver of the indignities to which he was being subjected. These tales of feline backsliding I used to hear from Lola, and when I asked her why she devoted her energies to the unproductive education of the uninspiring animals, she would shrug her shoulders and regard me with a Giaconda smile.
“In the first place it amuses me. You seem to forget I'm a dompteuse, a tamer of beasts; it's my profession, I was trained to it. It's the only thing I can do, and it's good to feel that I haven't lost my power. It's odd, but I feel a different woman when I'm impressing my will on these wretched cats. You must come one of these days and see a performance, when I've got them ship-shape. They'll astonish you. And then,” she would add, “I can write to Anastasius and tell him how his beloved cats are getting on.”
Well, it was an interest in her life which, Heaven knows, was not crowded with exciting incidents. Now that I can look back on these things with a philosophic eye, I can imagine no drearier existence than that of a friendless, unoccupied woman in a flat in Cadogan Gardens. At that time, I did not realise this as completely as I might have done. Because her old surgeon friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield, now and then took her out to dinner, I considered she was leading a cheerful if not a merry life. I smiled indulgently at Lola's devotion to the cats and congratulated her on having found another means whereby to beguile the tedium vitae which is the arch-enemy of content.
“I wish I could find such a means myself,” said I.
I not only had the wish, but the imperative need to so do. To stand like Ajax defying the lightning is magnificent, but as a continuous avocation it is wearisome and unprofitable, especially if carried on in a tiny bachelor suite, an eyrie of a place, at the top of a block of flats in Victoria Street. Indeed, if I did not add soon to the meagre remains of my fortune, I should not be able to afford the luxury of the bachelor suite. Conscious of this, I left the lightning alone, after a last denunciatory shake of the fist, and descended into the busy ways of men to look for work.
Thus I entered on the second stage of my career—that of a soldier of Fortune. At first I was doubtful as to what path to glory and bread-and-butter I could carve out for myself. Hitherto I had been Fortune's darling instead of her mercenary, and she had most politely carved out my paths for me, until she had played her jade's trick and left me in the ditch. Now things were different. I stood alone, ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort, yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end. What could I do?
It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth, while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's “Real Property,” and Austin's “Jurisprudence,” were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays. The law was as closed to me as medicine. I had no profession. I therefore drifted into the one pursuit for which my training had qualified me, namely, political journalism. I had written much, in my amateur way, during my ten years' membership of Parliament; why, I hardly know—not because I needed money, not because I had thoughts which I burned to express, and certainly not through vain desire of notoriety. Perhaps the motive was twofold, an ingrained Puckish delight in the incongruous—it seemed incongruous for an airy epicurean like myself to spend stodgy hours writing stodgier articles on Pauper Lunacy and Poor Law Administration—and the same inherited sense of gentlemanly obligation to do something for one's king and country as made my ancestors, whether they liked it or not, clothe themselves in uncomfortable iron garments and go about fighting other gentlemen similarly clad, to their own great personal danger. At any rate, it complemented my work at St. Stephen's, and doubtless contributed to a reputation in the House which I did not gain through my oratory. I could therefore bring to editors the stock-in-trade of a fairly accurate knowledge of current political issues, an appreciation of personalities, and a philosophical subrident estimate of the bubbles that are for ever rising on the political surface. I found Finch of The Universal Review, James of The Weekly, and one or two others more than willing to give me employment. I put my pen also at the disposal of Raggles. It was as uplifting and about as mechanical as tax-collecting; but it involved less physical exertion and less unpleasant contact with my fellow creatures. I could also keep the ends of my moustache waxed, which was a great consolation.
My sister Agatha commended my courage and energy, and Lola read my articles with a glowing enthusiasm, which compensated for lack of exact understanding; but I was not proud of my position. It is one thing to stand at the top of a marble staircase and in a debonair, jesting fashion to fling insincere convictions to a recipient world. It is another to sell the same worthless commodity for money. I began, to my curious discomfort, to suspect that life had a meaning after all.
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