CHAPTER X
l0th July.
Judith and I have had our day in the country. We know a wayside
station, on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half
from town, where we can alight, find eggs and bacon at the
village inn and hayricks in a solitary meadow, and where we can
chew the cud of these delights with the cattle in well-wooded
pastures. Judith has a passion for eggs and bacon and hayricks.
My own rapture in their presence is tempered by the philosophic
calm of my disposition.She wore a cotton dress of a forget-me-not
blue which suits her pale colouring. She looked quite pretty.
When I told her so she blushed like a girl. I was glad to see
her in gay humour again. Of late months she has been subject to
moodiness, emotional variability, which has somewhat ruffled the
smooth surface of our companionship. But to-day there has been
no trace of "temperament." She has shown herself the pleasant,
witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry
thrown in on her own account. She even spoke amiably of
Carlotta. I have not had so thoroughly enjoyable a day with
Judith for a long time.
I don't think she set herself deliberately to please me. That I
should resent. I know that women in order to please an
unsuspecting male will walk weary miles by his side with blisters
on their feet and a beatific smile on their faces. But Judith
has far too much commonsense.
Another pleaisng feature of the day's jaunt has been the absence
of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially
since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This
idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested
by an intellectual interest. One of her great friends is
Willoughby, the economic statistician, who in his humorous
moments, writes articles for popular magazines, illustrated by
scale diagrams. He will draw, for instance, a series of men
representing the nations of the world, and varying in bulk and
stature according to the respective populations; and over against
these he will set a series of pigs whose sizes are proportionate
to the amount of pork per head eaten by the different
nationalities. To these queer minds that live on facts (I myself
could as easily thrive on a diet of egg-shells) this sort of
pictorial information is peculiarly fascinating. But Judith, who
like most women has a freakish mental as well as physical
digestion, delights in knowing how many hogs a cabinet minister
will eat during, a lifetime, and how much of the earth's surface
could be scoured by the world's yearly output of scrubbing-
brushes. I don't blame her for it any more than I blame her for
a love of radishes, which make me ill; it is not as if she had no
wholesome tastes. On the contrary, I commend her. Now,
Willoughby, it seems, has found the public appetite so great for
these thought-saving boluses of knowledge--unpleasant drugs, as
it were, put up into gelatine capsules--that he needs assistance.
He has asked Judith to devil for him, and I have to-day persuaded
her to accept his offer. It will be an excellent thing for the
dear woman. It will be an absorbing occupation. It will divert
the current of her thoughts from the sentimentality that I
deprecate, and provided she does not serve up hard-boiled facts to
me at dinner, she will be the pleasanter companion.
The only return to it was when I kissed her at parting.
"That is the first, Marcus, for twelve hours," she said; very
sweetly, it is true--but still reproachfully.
But Sacred Name of a Little Good Man! (as the depraved French
people say), what is the use of this continuous osculation
between rational beings of opposite sexes who set out to enjoy
themselves? If only St. Paul, in the famous passage when he says
there is a time for this and a time for that, had mentioned
kissing, he would have done a great deal of practical good.
July 13th.
To-night, for the first time since I came into the family estates
(such as they are), I feel the paralysis of aspiration occasioned
by poverty. If I were very rich, I would buy the two next
houses, pull them down and erect on the site a tower forty foot
high. At the very top would be one comfortable room to be
reached by a lift, and in this room I could have my being, while
it listed me, and be secure from all kinds of incursions and
interruptions. Antoinette's one-eyed cat could not scratch for
admittance; Antoinette herself could not enter under pretext of
domestic economics and lure me into profitless gossip; and I
could defy Carlotta, who is growing to be as pervasive as the
smell of pickles over Crosse & Blackwell's factory. She comes in
without knocking, looks at picture-books, sprawls about doing
nothing, smokes my best cigarettes, hums tunes which she has
picked up from barrel-organs, bends over me to see what I am
writing, munching her eternal sweetmeats in my ear, and laughs at
me when I tell her she has irremediably broken the thread of my
ideas. Of course I might be brutal and turn her out. But
somehow I forget to do so, until I realise--too late--the havoc
she has made with my work.
I did, however, think, when Miss Griggs mounted guard over
Carlotta, and Antoinette and her cat were busied with luncheon
cook-pans, that my solitude was unimperilled. I see now there is
nothing for it but the tower. And I cannot build the tower; so I
am to be henceforward at the mercy of anything feline or feminine
that cares to swish its tail or its skirts about my drawing-room.
I was arranging my notes, I had an illuminating inspiration
concerning the life of Francois Villon and the contemporary court
of Cosmo de' Medici; I was preparing to fix it in writing when
the door opened and Stenson announced:
"Mrs. Ordeyne and Miss Ordeyne."
My Aunt Jessica and Dora came in and my inspiration went out. It
hasn't come back yet.
My aunt's apologies and Dora's draperies filled the room. I must
forgive the invasion. They knew they were disturbing my work.
They hoped I didn't mind.
"I wanted mamma to write, but she would come," said Dora, in her
hearty voice. I murmured polite mendacities and offered chairs.
Dora preferred to stand and gaze about her with feminine
curiosity. Women always seem to sniff for Bluebeardism in a
bachelor's apartment.
"Why, what two beautiful rooms you have. And the books! There
isn't an inch of wall-space!"
She went on a voyage of discovery round the shelves while my aunt
explained the object of their visit. Somebody, I forget who, had
lent them a yacht. They were making up a party for a summer
cruise in Norwegian fiords. The Thingummies and the So and So's
and Lord This and Miss That had promised to come, but they were
sadly in need of a man to play host--I was to fancy three lone
women at the mercy of the skipper. I did, and I didn't envy the
skipper. What more natural, gushed my aunt, than that they
should turn to me, the head of the house, in their difficulty?
"I am afraid, my dear aunt," said I, "that my acquaintance with
skipper-terrorising hosts is nil. I can't suggest any one."
"But who asked you to suggest any one?" she laughed. "It is you
yourself that we want to persuade to have pity on us."
"I have--much pity," said I, "for if it's rough, you'll all be
horribly seasick."
Dora ran across the room from the book-case she was inspecting.
"I would like to shake him! He is only pretending he doesn't
understand. I don't know what we shall do if you won't come with
us."
"You can't refuse, Marcus. It will be an ideal trip--and such a
comfortable yacht--and the deep blue fiords--and we've got a
French chef. You will be doing us such a favour."
"Come, say 'Yes,'" said Dora.
I wish she were not such a bouncing Juno of a girl. Large,
athletic women with hearty voices are difficult for one to deal
with. I am a match for my aunt, whom I can obfuscate with words.
But Dora doesn't understand my satire; she gives a great, healthy
laugh, and says, "Oh, rot!" which scatters my intellectual
armoury.
"It is exceedingly kind of you to think of me," I said to my
aunt, "and the proposal is tempting--the prospect is indeed
fascinating--but--"
"But what?"
"I have so many engagements," I answered feebly.
My Aunt Jessica rose, smiling indulgently upon me, as if I were a
spoilt little boy, and took me on to the balcony, while Dora
demurely retired to the bookshelves in the farther room.
"Can't you manage to throw them aside? Poor Dora will be
inconsolable."
I stared at her for a moment and then at Dora's broad back and
sturdy hips. Inconsolable? I can't make out what the good lady
is driving at. If she were a vulgar woman trying to squeeze her
way into society and needed the lubricant of the family
baronetcy, I could understand her eagerness to parade me as her
appanage. But titles in her drawing-room are as common as
tea-cups. And the inconsolability of Dora
"If I did come she would be bored to death," said I.
"She is willing to risk it."
"But why should she seek martyrdom?"
"There is another reason," said my aunt, ignoring my pertinent
question, but glancing at me reassuringly "there is another
reason why it would be well for you to come on this cruise with
us." She sank her voice. "You met Miss Gascoigne in the park
last week--"
"A very charming and kind young lady," said I.
"I am afraid you have been a little indiscreet. People have been
talking."
"Then theirs, not mine, is the indiscretion."
"But, my dear Marcus, when you spring a good-looking young
person, whom you introduce as your Mohammedan ward, upon London
society, and she makes a scene in public--why--what else have
people got to talk about?"
"They might fall back upon the doctrine of predestination or the
price of fish," I replied urbanely.
"But I assure you, Marcus, that there is a hint of scandal
abroad. It is actually said that she is living here."
"People will say anything, true or untrue," said I.
My aunt sighfully acquiesced, and for a while we discussed the
depravity of human nature.
"I have been thinking," she said at last, "that if you brought
your ward to see us, and she could accompany us on this cruise to
Norway, the scandal would be scotched outright."
She glanced at me very keenly, and beneath her indulgent smile I
saw the hardness of the old campaigner. It was a clever trap she
had prepared for me.
I took her hand and in my noblest manner, like the exiled vicomte
in costume drama, bent over it and kissed her finger-tips.
"I thank you, my dear aunt, for your generous faith in my
integrity," I said, "and I assure you your confidence is well
founded."
A loud, gay laugh from the other room interrupted me.
"Are you two rehearsing private theatricals?" cried Dora. As I
was attired in a remarkably old college blazer and a pair of
yellow Moorish slippers bought a couple of years ago in Tangier,
and as my hair was straight on end, owing to a habit of passing
my fingers through it while I work, my attitude perhaps did not
strike a spectator as being so noble as I had imagined. I took
advantage of the anti-climax, however, to bring my aunt from the
balcony to the centre of the room, where Dora joined us.
"Well, has mother prevailed?"
"My dear Dora," said I, politely, "how can you imagine it could
possibly be a question of persuasion?"
"That might be taken two ways," said Dora. "Like Palmerston's
'Dear Sir, I'll lose no time in reading your book.'"
Dora is a minx.
"I fear," said I, "that my pedantic historical sense must venture
to correct you. It was Lord Beaconsfield."
"Well, he got it from Palmerston," insisted Dora.
"You children must not quarrel," interposed my aunt, in the fond,
maternal tone which I find peculiarly unpleasant. "Marcus will
see how his engagements stand, and let us know in a day or two."
"When do you propose to start?" I asked.
"Quite soon. On the 20th.
"I will let you know finally in good time," said I.
As I accompanied them downstairs, I heard a door at the end of
the passage open, and turning I saw Carlotta's pretty head thrust
past the jamb, and her eyes fixed on the visitors. I motioned
her back, sharply, and my aunt and Dora made an unsuspecting
exit. The noise of their departing chariot wheels was music to
my ears.
Carlotta came rushing out of her sitting-room followed by Miss
Griggs, protesting.
"Who those fine ladies?" she cried, with her hands on my sleeve.
"Who _are_ those ladies?" I corrected.
"Who _are_ those ladies?" Carlotta repeated, like a demure
parrot.
"They are friends of mine."
Then came the eternal question.
"Is she married, the young one?"
"Miss Griggs," said I, "kindly instil into Carlotta's mind the
fact that no young English woman ever thinks about marriage until
she is actually engaged, and then her thoughts do not go beyond
the wedding."
"But is she?" persisted Carlotta.
"I wish to heaven she was," I laughed, imprudently, "for then she
would not come and spoil my morning's work."
"Oh, she wants to marry you," said Carlotta.
"Miss Griggs," said I, "Carlotta will resume her studies," and I
went upstairs, sighing for the beautiful tower with a lift
outside.
July 14th.
Pasquale came in about nine o'clock, and found us playing cards.
He is a bird of passage with no fixed abode. Some weeks ago he
gave up his chambers in St. James's, and went to live with an
actor friend, a grass-widower, who has a house in the St. John's
Wood Road close by. Why Pasquale, who loves the palpitating
centres of existence, should choose to rusticate in this
semi-arcadian district, I cannot imagine. He says he can think
better in St. John's Wood.
Pasquale think! As well might a salmon declare it could sing
better in a pond! The consequence of his propinquity, however,
has been that he has dropped in several times lately on his way
home, but generally at a later hour.
"Oh, please don't move and spoil the picture," he cried. "Oh,
you idyllic pair! And what are you playing? Cribbage! If I had
been challenged to guess the game you would have selected for
your after-dinner entertainment, I should have sworn to
cribbage!"
"An excellent game," said I. Indeed, it is the only game that I
remember. I dislike cards. They bore me to death. So dus
chess. People love to call them intellectual pastimes; but,
surely, if a man wants exercise for his intellect, there are
enough problems in this complicated universe for him to worry his
brains over, with more profit to himself and the world. And as
for the pastime--I consider that when two or more intelligent
people sit down to play cards they are insulting one another's
powers of conversation. These remarks do not apply to my game
with Carlotta, who is a child, and has to be amused. She has
picked up cribbage with remarkable quickness, and although this
is only the third evening we have played, she was getting the
better of me when Pasquale appeared.
I repeated my statement. Cribbage certainly was an excellent
game. Pasquale laughed.
"Of course it is. A venerable pastime. Darby and Joan have
played it of evenings for the last thousand years. Please go
on."
But Carlotta threw her cards on the table and herself on the sofa
and said she would prefer to hear Pasquale talk.
"He says such funny things."
Then she jumped from the sofa and handed him the box of
chocolates that is never far from her side. How lithe her
movements are!
"Pasquale says you were his schoolmaster, and used to beat him
with a big stick," she remarked, turning her head toward me,
while Pasquale helped himself to a sweet.
He was clumsy in his selection, and the box slipped from
Carlotta's hand and the contents rolled upon the floor. They
both went on hands and knees to pick them up, and there was much
laughing and whispering.
It is curious that I cannot recall Pasquale having alluded, in
Carlotta's presence, to our early days. It was on my tongue to
ask when he committed the mendacity--for in that school not only
did the assistant masters not have the power of the cane, but
Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was
exempt from corporal punishment--when they both rose flushed from
their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from
Pasquale put the question out of my head.
All this is unimportant. The main result of Pasquale's visit
this evening is a discovery.
Now, is it, after all, a discovery, or only the non-moral
intellect's sinister attribution of motives?
"A baby in long clothes would have seen through it," said
Pasquale. "Lord bless you, if I were in your position I would go
on board that yacht, I'd make violent love to every female there,
like the gentleman in Mr. Wycherley's comedy, I'd fill a salmon
fly-book with samples of their hair, I'd make them hate one
another like poison, and at the end of the voyage I'd announce my
engagement to Carlotta, and when they all came to the wedding I'd
make the fly-book the most conspicuous of wedding presents on the
table, from the bridegroom to the bride. By George! I'd cure
them of the taste for man-hunting!"
I wonder what impelled me to tell Pasquale of the proposed
yachting cruise? We sat smoking by the open window, long after
Carlotta had been sent to bed, and looking at a full moon sailing
over the tops of the trees in the park; enveloped in that
sensuous atmosphere of a warm summer night which induces a
languor in the body and in the will. On such a night as this
young Lorenzo, if he happens to have Jessica by his side, makes a
confounded idiot of himself, to his life's undoing; and on such a
night as this a reserved philosopher commits the folly of
discussing his private affairs with a Sebastian Pasquale.
But if he is correct in his surmise, I am much beholden to the
relaxing influences of the night. I have been warned of perils
that encompass me: perils that would infest the base and
insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that
man could build on the edge of the Regent's Park. A woman with a
Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by
balloon to my turret window. Is it not my Aunt Jessica's design
melodramatically to abduct me in a yacht?
"Once aboard the pirate lugger, and the man is ours!" she cries.
But the man is not coming aboard the pirate lugger. He is going
to keep as far as he possibly can from the shore. Neither is he
to be lured into bringing his lovely Mohammedan ward with him, as
an evidence of good faith and unimpeachable morals. They can
regard her as a Mohammedan ward or a houri or a Princess of
Babylon, just as they choose.
Pasquale must be right. A hundred remembered incidents go to
prove it. I recollect now that Judith has rallied me on my
obtuseness.
The sole end of all my Aunt Jessica's manoeuvring is to marry me
to Dora, and Dora, like Barkis, is willing. Marry Dora! The
thought is a febrifuge, a sudorific! She would be thumping
discords on my wornout strings all day long. In a month I should
be a writhing madman. I would sooner, infinitely sooner, marry
Carlotta. Carlotta is nature; Dora isn't even art. Why, in the
name of men and angels, should I marry Dora? And why (save to
call herself Lady Ordeyne) should she want to marry me? I have
not trifled with her virgin affections; and that she is
nourishing a romantic passion for me of spontaneous growth I
decline to believe. For aught I care she can be as inconsolable
as Calypso. It will do her good. She can write a little story
about it in _The Sirens' Magazine_.
I am shocked. For all her bouncing ways and animal health and
incorrect information, I thought Dora was a nice-minded girl.
Do nice-minded girls hunt husbands?
Good heavens! This looks like the subject of a silly-season
correspondence in _The Daily Telegraph_.
