Lady Maria Wenman grew to be extremely fond of Sanchia, really as fond of her as she was capable of becoming of anybody. She had been good to travel with, and was good to live with. She found her so reasonable, she said. One could discuss anything without shocking her, or without fear of being made uncomfortable by seeing her discomfort. Lady Maria, in fact, being entirely without prejudice, experienced the little luxury of being able to express herself without trampling.
On her side also, Sanchia sincerely liked her old protectress, and found Charles Street agree with her. There was a primordial air about it, which made habits seem like laws of Nature; an absence of fuss which soothed her nerves, and did much better than slay her monsters for her, when it exposed them for no monsters at all, but simple, everyday, rather tiresome concomitants of our makeshift existence.
“You will, of course, marry Nevile Ingram,”—thus Lady Maria disposed of the most dread of all monsters—“because it is, on the whole, more agreeable to avoid scandal, and because it is certainly more decent to pay one's bills. Long credit is a mistake; but you found it a convenience, I suppose; and now you are in funds, you will, of course, get out of debt. If only that you may run into it again at need, you will draw a cheque. Now, you had eight years of it at Wanless, you tell me? Very well, my dear, that must be written off Society's books. Meanwhile, the more you see of amusing, emancipated people like Alexis Morosine the better.”
This man was understood to be a Pole in exile, though his title to that distinction could only have been on the side of the distaff, since his father's descent from a ducal family of Venice was not denied; but neither nationality nor expatriation was very obvious upon him. At first sight you would have supposed him a sallow Englishman, spare of flesh and too narrow in the chest; you might have put down his dead complexion and his leanness to India or Jamaica, and been inclined to attribute his dry cynicism to the same superfervent experience. But presently you would be alive to his hungry mind, to his hungry, raging air, his restless habit and large way of looking at circumstance—as if by no possibility could it be any concern of his. And then the trick he had of considering our people as Europeans, of dividing the races of the world by continents rather than kingdoms; and that other of judging all cases, including yours and his own, upon their merits—such traits, to an experienced mind, would have established him for a foreigner, one of a people who had had too much elbowing for breath to have time or space for prejudice or minute classification. Superficially, to be sure, he was English enough—from his speech to his tailoring; and his phlegm (of which we boast) was unassailable. Nobody knew much of his history; Bill Chevenix used to say that he was born whole, and thirty, out of an egg dropped upon our coasts by a migratory roc; that he stepped out, exquisitely dressed, and ordered a whisky and Apollinaris at the nearest buffet. This, said Chevenix, was his ordinary breakfast. When Sanchia objected that he might have stepped out in the afternoon, he replied that it also formed his usual tea, and, so far as he knew, was the staple of all his meals. “And cigarettes,” he added. “But he would have had those with him. I bet you what you like he came out smoking.”
It was certain that he had been to Eton and to Oxford, and was member of two good clubs. He was extremely rich, and he was by profession, said Chevenix, a prince. He had no territory, and was not apparently scheming to get any, either of his own or other people's. Nobody at the Foreign Office believed that he corresponded with any intransigent; he used to go there often and exchange urbane gossip with under-secretaries. He lodged in Duke Street, gave dinner-parties at the Bachelors, had a large visiting-list, and was, as they say, always “about.” One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea-parties, and at Lambeth Palace. Chevenix swore that he had met him at a Church Congress—and the only answer to that was that if Chevenix had truly been there to see, Morosine might well have been there to be seen. But this catholicity of experience was characteristic of the man; his attraction to the nice observer lay precisely in that, that he was a nomad, unappeased and unappeasable, ranging hungrily. There was a probability, too, that below a surface exquisitely calm there lurked corrosive tooth and claw. Here are sufficient elements of danger to draw any woman; so Sanchia found herself presently drawn.
He came to Charles Street one evening late in November, to what Lady Maria called a little party. There was an autumn session that year, and London full. To her little party, then, came a solid wedge of three hundred people into rooms capable of holding with comfort fifty.
Chevenix was by Sanchia's side at the top of the stair, chatting pleasantly about every new-comer, when he suddenly stopped. “Hulloa,” he said, “here's Morosine, as smooth as a glass stiletto. He'll amuse you. I'll introduce him.”
Sanchia followed the leading of his eyes. She saw a tall and slim young man, inordinately thin, slightly bald, with a moustache like a rake, and heavy-browed, mournful eyes, pushing his way slowly upstairs. Without effort, his hands behind his back, working from the shoulders, he made room for himself, but so quietly that nobody seemed to observe how aggressively he was at it. Occasionally some ousted dowager turned redly upon him, or it might be some pushing gentleman smothered an oath as he faced the attack. But Morosine's mournful eyes gazed calmly their fill, seemed to be communing beyond the surging guests, beyond the wall, with the eternal stars, and, without faltering, the narrow frame glided forward into the space which indignation had cleared. Sanchia, above him, and out of the game, was highly amused.
“He's very selfish, your friend. He takes care of himself; but no one seems to know it.”
Chevenix chuckled. “That's the beauty of Alexis. But, as he asks, whom else should he take care of? It's not queer if the Poles have learned that lesson.”
“Oh,” said Sanchia. “Is he a Pole?” Jack Senhouse had been in Poland.
“Half of him is hungry Pole. The other part is bad Italian—pampered Italian, fed for generations on oil and polenta. He's always dining out, but he eats nothing because the Pole is feeding on the Venetian all day.” Then he told her about the miraculous birth, the whisky and Apollinaris, and concluded, “Oh, he'll amuse you vastly. Stay where you are. I'll net him at the top.”
Presently after she saw the process. It consisted in violent effort on Chevenix's part, languid attention from the other. Morosine dreamed over the speaker as if he were a lost soul. Then, his consideration being caught, he looked about him, and presently fixed upon her his melancholy eyes. She felt a little shiver, the sensation of goose-flesh in the spine—not unpleasantly. It was as if a light wind had ruffled her blood. Shortly afterwards Morosine was bowing before her. In this, perhaps, he betrayed himself; his hat covered his heart, he inclined from the hips, and his head bent with his body. An Englishman bows with the head only, and does not nowadays carry his hat upstairs.
He began to talk quietly and at once, and maintained a perfectly even flow of comment, reflection, anecdote, reminiscence, and sudden, flashing turns of inference. He seemed always to be searching after general principles, cosmic laws, and to be always jumping at them, testing them, finding them not comprehensive enough, and letting them drift behind him as he pursued his search. She remarked on this afterwards to Lady Maria, who said that principles were the last thing to interest Morosine. He had none! at all, said Lady Maria, unless his own immediate gratification was a principle; and perhaps with men you might almost say that it was.
Chevenix remained, chuckling and interjecting here and there an exclamation, just (as he told her later) to “start the chap on his meander,” and presently betook himself elsewhere. It was then to be observed that Morosine allowed himself to drift into the discussion of matters not usually subjects of ordinary conversation; but he did so without consciousness, and therefore without offence. Sanchia neither disapproved nor felt uncomfortable. They were, moreover, interesting, and rather material.
It began with Poland, a country which, the less it existed politically, he said, was the better to live in, and be of. We live by our emotions, the beasts by their appetites—a material distinction. Now, the condition of the Poles was perfectly adapted to the quickening of the emotional parts. Shorten time, you make love a precious ecstasy; restrict liberty, freedom is a lust—none the worse for being lawful. No Pole knows how long he may have to live: Russia or phthisis will have him late or soon. What he pursues, then, must be fleeting—imagine with what rapture he takes it to his breast! with what frenzy he guards it, never knowing when it will be required of him again. Feverish? (This was upon a remark from her.) Yes, and why not? Are not dreams more vivid than waking life? Can you gallop your material horse as your courser of the mind? Better to burn than to rust. That's the secret of life—which all the laws of bureaucrats are directed to destroy. The establishments want to see us as fixed as themselves. They are tentacled, stationary creatures, feeding at ease. They would have us handy of access, falsely secure, so that they can fasten on us one by one and suck our juices. But the world is changing, thrones and churches are slackening in their hold. Men are discovering how short a time they have to live, and that eternity is more than questionable. A mild Epicureanism is gaining ground. Instincts founded on the patriarchal system must give way to that. “Have you ever considered,” he asked abruptly, “that the flocks and herds of the Semitic patriarch are the sole cause of the moral code which we still profess? Thou shalt not steal. Why not? Because you injure the patriarch. Not murder? You might attack one of his family. You have the habit in England of tracing prejudices to the Feudal System: believe me, there is hardly anything in Europe so modern. I should date at 4000 B.C. nearly all our present conventions, from the British Sunday to the law of conspiracy. So long as you say that property is sacred, you uplift the Patriarch and lose sight of the man.”
Sanchia, reminded of Senhouse—a Senhouse with his tongue dipped in vinegar—objected that society may have demanded some of these laws in defiance of the engrossing patriarch; but Morosine shook his head. “Society is the patriarch's weapon. Society is a syndicate of patriarchs who cannot live unless all men are enslaved. Man is not by nature gregarious; he's solitary, like all the nobler beasts. Wolves and dogs hunt in herds, but not the great cats; oxen and buffaloes, but not elephants; rooks, but not eagles; bream, never salmon. And the time is not so very far when man will discover why it is that he is herded and marshalled hither and thither by police, legislatures, and monstrous assemblies called armies or fleets. He has but to know it to abolish these things; they fade like dreams in the morning. But hitherto everything has been banded to make his sleep secure—his religion, his cupidity, his timidity, his affections. Religion tells him it is wrong to love without the Church; patriotism, that it is glorious to bleed in making other men bleed; timidity, that property keeps the wolf from the door; appetite, that under cover of the law you may devour your neighbour and fear no indigestion. Finally, there are the affections of a man which have been so guided that they see the aged more venerable than the young, the old thing more sacred than the new 'Woodman, spare that tree,' they cry: 'it dates from at least 2000 B.C.' Because old wine is good, they argue, old laws must needs be. As well might a man say, Because I relish old wine, I will love only old women. And so we go on!” He shrugged and broke off—to talk shrewdly of books. They got to Leopardi, from him to Dante; he heard of her studies at the British Museum, and hoped he might meet her there. She reads there often? Mostly in the afternoons? The light was bad: he usually devoted his mornings to what work he had there. He was studying Persian, he said, but fitfully, as the mood took him.
So far he had scarcely looked at her, but had talked out his monologue as if he had been alone, clasping one thin ankle, staring wide-eyed over the heads of guests, occasionally, when he was vehement, throwing his head up, shooting his words at the ceiling as if they had been Greek fire. Now, as he got up to leave her, his eyes dwelt earnestly on her. “It will be a pleasure, to which I shall aspire—that of meeting you again. There or elsewhere.”
She thanked him as she gave him her hand. Excitement made her eyes bright, mantled her cheeks. She felt that she was communing with Senhouse at third hand.
“Then—it is understood—we meet again,” he concluded. He bowed over her hand, on a second thought kissed her fingers, then left her ascertained to have left the house at once.
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