CHAPTER XVII
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.
