Part Two
In which other interested parties, notably one Buck MacGinnis and
a trade rival, Smooth Sam Fisher, make other plans for the Nugget's
future. Of stirring times at a private school for young gentlemen.
Of stratagems, spoils, and alarms by night. Of journeys ending in
lovers' meetings. The whole related by Mr Peter Burns, gentleman
of leisure, who forfeits that leisure in a good cause.
Peter Burns's Narrative
Chapter 1
I
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a
man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning.
The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it
may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an
uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be
looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth
and optimism.
This thought came to me as I returned to my rooms after the
Fletchers' ball. The dawn was breaking as I let myself in. The air
was heavy with the peculiar desolation of a London winter morning.
The houses looked dead and untenanted. A cart rumbled past, and
across the grey street a dingy black cat, moving furtively along
the pavement, gave an additional touch of forlornness to the
scene.
I shivered. I was tired and hungry, and the reaction after the
emotions of the night had left me dispirited.
I was engaged to be married. An hour back I had proposed to
Cynthia Drassilis. And I can honestly say that it had come as a
great surprise to me.
Why had I done it? Did I love her? It was so difficult to analyse
love: and perhaps the mere fact that I was attempting the task was
an answer to the question. Certainly I had never tried to do so
five years ago when I had loved Audrey Blake. I had let myself be
carried on from day to day in a sort of trance, content to be
utterly happy, without dissecting my happiness. But I was five
years younger then, and Audrey was--Audrey.
I must explain Audrey, for she in her turn explains Cynthia.
I have no illusions regarding my character when I first met Audrey
Blake. Nature had given me the soul of a pig, and circumstances
had conspired to carry on Nature's work. I loved comfort, and I
could afford to have it. From the moment I came of age and
relieved my trustees of the care of my money, I wrapped myself in
comfort as in a garment. I wallowed in egoism. In fact, if,
between my twenty-first and my twenty-fifth birthdays, I had one
unselfish thought, or did one genuinely unselfish action, my
memory is a blank on the point.
It was at the height of this period that I became engaged to
Audrey. Now that I can understand her better and see myself,
impartially, as I was in those days, I can realize how indescribably
offensive I must have been. My love was real, but that did not
prevent its patronizing complacency being an insult. I was King
Cophetua. If I did not actually say in so many words, 'This
beggar-maid shall be my queen', I said it plainly and often in my
manner. She was the daughter of a dissolute, evil-tempered artist
whom I had met at a Bohemian club. He made a living by painting
an occasional picture, illustrating an occasional magazine-story,
but mainly by doing advertisement work. A proprietor of a patent
Infants' Food, not satisfied with the bare statement that Baby
Cried For It, would feel it necessary to push the fact home to the
public through the medium of Art, and Mr Blake would be commissioned
to draw the picture. A good many specimens of his work in this vein
were to be found in the back pages of the magazines.
A man may make a living by these means, but it is one that
inclines him to jump at a wealthy son-in-law. Mr Blake jumped at
me. It was one of his last acts on this earth. A week after he
had--as I now suspect--bullied Audrey into accepting me, he died
of pneumonia.
His death had several results. It postponed the wedding: it
stirred me to a very crescendo of patronage, for with the removal
of the bread-winner the only flaw in my Cophetua pose had
vanished: and it gave Audrey a great deal more scope than she had
hitherto been granted for the exercise of free will in the choice
of a husband.
This last aspect of the matter was speedily brought to my notice,
which till then it had escaped, by a letter from her, handed to me
one night at the club, where I was sipping coffee and musing on
the excellence of life in this best of all possible worlds.
It was brief and to the point. She had been married that morning.
To say that that moment was a turning point in my life would be to
use a ridiculously inadequate phrase. It dynamited my life. In a
sense it killed me. The man I had been died that night, regretted,
I imagine, by few. Whatever I am today, I am certainly not the
complacent spectator of life that I had been before that night.
I crushed the letter in my hand, and sat staring at it, my pigsty
in ruins about my ears, face to face with the fact that, even in a
best of all possible worlds, money will not buy everything.
I remember, as I sat there, a man, a club acquaintance, a bore
from whom I had fled many a time, came and settled down beside me
and began to talk. He was a small man, but he possessed a voice to
which one had to listen. He talked and talked and talked. How I
loathed him, as I sat trying to think through his stream of words.
I see now that he saved me. He forced me out of myself. But at the
time he oppressed me. I was raw and bleeding. I was struggling to
grasp the incredible. I had taken Audrey's unalterable affection
for granted. She was the natural complement to my scheme of
comfort. I wanted her; I had chosen and was satisfied with her,
therefore all was well. And now I had to adjust my mind to the
impossible fact that I had lost her.
Her letter was a mirror in which I saw myself. She said little,
but I understood, and my self-satisfaction was in ribbons--and
something deeper than self-satisfaction. I saw now that I loved
her as I had not dreamed myself capable of loving.
And all the while this man talked and talked.
I have a theory that speech, persevered in, is more efficacious in
times of trouble than silent sympathy. Up to a certain point it
maddens almost beyond endurance; but, that point past, it soothes.
At least, it was so in my case. Gradually I found myself hating
him less. Soon I began to listen, then to answer. Before I left
the club that night, the first mad frenzy, in which I could have
been capable of anything, had gone from me, and I walked home,
feeling curiously weak and helpless, but calm, to begin the new
life.
Three years passed before I met Cynthia. I spent those years
wandering in many countries. At last, as one is apt to do, I
drifted back to London, and settled down again to a life which,
superficially, was much the same as the one I had led in the days
before I knew Audrey. My old circle in London had been wide, and I
found it easy to pick up dropped threads. I made new friends,
among them Cynthia Drassilis.
I liked Cynthia, and I was sorry for her. I think that, about that
time I met her, I was sorry for most people. The shock of Audrey's
departure had had that effect upon me. It is always the bad nigger
who gets religion most strongly at the camp-meeting, and in my
case 'getting religion' had taken the form of suppression of self.
I never have been able to do things by halves, or even with a
decent moderation. As an egoist I had been thorough in my egoism;
and now, fate having bludgeoned that vice out of me, I found
myself possessed of an almost morbid sympathy with the troubles of
other people.
I was extremely sorry for Cynthia Drassilis. Meeting her mother
frequently, I could hardly fail to be. Mrs Drassilis was a
representative of a type I disliked. She was a widow, who had been
left with what she considered insufficient means, and her outlook
on life was a compound of greed and querulousness. Sloane Square
and South Kensington are full of women in her situation. Their
position resembles that of the Ancient Mariner. 'Water, water
everywhere, and not a drop to drink.' For 'water' in their case
substitute 'money'. Mrs Drassilis was connected with money on all
sides, but could only obtain it in rare and minute quantities. Any
one of a dozen relations-in-law could, if they had wished, have
trebled her annual income without feeling it. But they did not so
wish. They disapproved of Mrs Drassilis. In their opinion the Hon.
Hugo Drassilis had married beneath him--not so far beneath him as
to make the thing a horror to be avoided in conversation and
thought, but far enough to render them coldly polite to his wife
during his lifetime and almost icy to his widow after his death.
Hugo's eldest brother, the Earl of Westbourne, had never liked the
obviously beautiful, but equally obviously second-rate, daughter
of a provincial solicitor whom Hugo had suddenly presented to the
family one memorable summer as his bride. He considered that, by
doubling the income derived from Hugo's life-insurance and
inviting Cynthia to the family seat once a year during her
childhood, he had done all that could be expected of him in the
matter.
He had not. Mrs Drassilis expected a great deal more of him, the
non-receipt of which had spoiled her temper, her looks, and the
peace of mind of all who had anything much to do with her.
It used to irritate me when I overheard people, as I occasionally
have done, speak of Cynthia as hard. I never found her so myself,
though heaven knows she had enough to make her so, to me she was
always a sympathetic, charming friend.
Ours was a friendship almost untouched by sex. Our minds fitted so
smoothly into one another that I had no inclination to fall in
love. I knew her too well. I had no discoveries to make about her.
Her honest, simple soul had always been open to me to read. There
was none of that curiosity, that sense of something beyond that
makes for love. We had reached a point of comradeship beyond which
neither of us desired to pass.
Yet at the Fletchers' ball I asked Cynthia to marry me, and she
consented.
* * * * *
Looking back, I can see that, though the determining cause was Mr
Tankerville Gifford, it was Audrey who was responsible. She had
made me human, capable of sympathy, and it was sympathy,
primarily, that led me to say what I said that night.
But the immediate cause was certainly young Mr Gifford.
I arrived at Marlow Square, where I was to pick up Cynthia and her
mother, a little late, and found Mrs Drassilis, florid and
overdressed, in the drawing-room with a sleek-haired, pale young
man known to me as Tankerville Gifford--to his intimates, of whom
I was not one, and in the personal paragraphs of the coloured
sporting weeklies, as 'Tanky'. I had seen him frequently at
restaurants. Once, at the Empire, somebody had introduced me to
him; but, as he had not been sober at the moment, he had missed
any intellectual pleasure my acquaintanceship might have afforded
him. Like everybody else who moves about in London, I knew all
bout him. To sum him up, he was a most unspeakable little cad,
and, if the drawing-room had not been Mrs Drassilis's, I should
have wondered at finding him in it.
Mrs Drassilis introduced us.
'I think we have already met,' I said.
He stared glassily.
'Don't remember.'
I was not surprised.
At this moment Cynthia came in. Out of the corner of my eye I
observed a look of fuddled displeasure come into Tanky's face at
her frank pleasure at seeing me.
I had never seen her looking better. She is a tall girl, who
carries herself magnificently. The simplicity of her dress gained
an added dignity from comparison with the rank glitter of her
mother's. She wore unrelieved black, a colour which set off to
wonderful advantage the clear white of her skin and her pale-gold
hair.
'You're late, Peter,' she said, looking at the clock.
'I know. I'm sorry.'
'Better be pushing, what?' suggested Tanky.
'My cab's waiting.'
'Will you ring the bell, Mr Gifford?' said Mrs Drassilis. 'I will
tell Parker to whistle for another.'
'Take me in yours,' I heard a voice whisper in my ear.
I looked at Cynthia. Her expression had not changed. Then I looked
at Tanky Gifford, and I understood. I had seen that stuffed-fish
look on his face before--on the occasion when I had been
introduced to him at the Empire.
'If you and Mr Gifford will take my cab,' I said to Mrs Drassilis,
'we will follow.'
Mrs Drassilis blocked the motion. I imagine that the sharp note in
her voice was lost on Tanky, but it rang out like a clarion to me.
'I am in no hurry,' she said. 'Mr Gifford, will you take Cynthia?
I will follow with Mr Burns. You will meet Parker on the stairs.
Tell him to call another cab.'
As the door closed behind them, she turned on me like a many-coloured
snake.
'How can you be so extraordinarily tactless, Peter?' she cried.
'You're a perfect fool. Have you no eyes?'
'I'm sorry,' I said.
'He's devoted to her.'
'I'm sorry.'
'What do you mean?'
'Sorry for her.'
She seemed to draw herself together inside her dress. Her eyes
glittered. My mouth felt very dry, and my heart was beginning to
thump. We were both furiously angry. It was a moment that had been
coming for years, and we both knew it. For my part I was glad that
it had come. On subjects on which one feels deeply it is a relief
to speak one's mind.
'Oh!' she said at last. Her voice quivered. She was clutching at
her self-control as it slipped from her. 'Oh! And what is my
daughter to you, Mr Burns!'
'A great friend.'
'And I suppose you think it friendly to try to spoil her chances?'
'If Mr Gifford is a sample of them--yes.'
'What do you mean?'
She choked.
'I see. I understand. I am going to put a stop to this once and
for all. Do you hear? I have noticed it for a long time. Because I
have given you the run of the house, and allowed you to come in
and out as you pleased, like a tame cat, you presume--'
'Presume--' I prompted.
'You come here and stand in Cynthia's way. You trade on the fact
that you have known us all this time to monopolize her attention.
You spoil her chances. You--'
The invaluable Parker entered to say that the cab was at the door.
We drove to the Fletchers' house in silence. The spell had been
broken. Neither of us could recapture that first, fine, careless
rapture which had carried us through the opening stages of the
conflict, and discussion of the subject on a less exalted plane
was impossible. It was that blessed period of calm, the rest
between rounds, and we observed it to the full.
When I reached the ballroom a waltz was just finishing. Cynthia, a
statue in black, was dancing with Tanky Gifford. They were
opposite me when the music stopped, and she caught sight of me
over his shoulder.
She disengaged herself and moved quickly towards me.
'Take me away,' she said under her breath. 'Anywhere. Quick.'
It was no time to consider the etiquette of the ballroom. Tanky,
startled at his sudden loneliness, seemed by his expression to be
endeavouring to bring his mind to bear on the matter. A couple
making for the door cut us off from him, and following them, we
passed out.
Neither of us spoke till we had reached the little room where I
had meditated.
She sat down. She was looking pale and tired.
'Oh, dear!' she said.
I understood. I seemed to see that journey in the cab, those
dances, those terrible between-dances ...
It was very sudden.
I took her hand. She turned to me with a tired smile. There were
tears in her eyes ...
I heard myself speaking ...
She was looking at me, her eyes shining. All the weariness seemed
to have gone out of them.
I looked at her.
There was something missing. I had felt it when I was speaking. To
me my voice had had no ring of conviction. And then I saw what it
was. There was no mystery. We knew each other too well. Friendship
kills love.
She put my thought into words.
'We have always been brother and sister,' she said doubtfully.
'Till tonight.'
'You have changed tonight? You really want me?'
Did I? I tried to put the question to myself and answer it
honestly. Yes, in a sense, I had changed tonight. There was an
added appreciation of her fineness, a quickening of that blend of
admiration and pity which I had always felt for her. I wanted with
all my heart to help her, to take her away from her dreadful
surroundings, to make her happy. But did I want her in the sense
in which she had used the word? Did I want her as I had wanted
Audrey Blake? I winced away from the question. Audrey belonged to
the dead past, but it hurt to think of her.
Was it merely because I was five years older now than when I had
wanted Audrey that the fire had gone out of me?
I shut my mind against my doubts.
'I have changed tonight,' I said.
And I bent down and kissed her.
I was conscious of being defiant against somebody. And then I knew
that the somebody was myself.
I poured myself out a cup of hot coffee from the flask which
Smith, my man, had filled against my return. It put life into me.
The oppression lifted.
And yet there remained something that made for uneasiness, a sort
of foreboding at the back of my mind.
I had taken a step in the dark, and I was afraid for Cynthia. I
had undertaken to give her happiness. Was I certain that I could
succeed? The glow of chivalry had left me, and I began to doubt.
Audrey had taken from me something that I could not recover--poetry
was as near as I could get to a definition of it. Yes, poetry.
With Cynthia my feet would always be on the solid earth. To the
end of the chapter we should be friends and nothing more.
I found myself pitying Cynthia intensely. I saw her future a
series of years of intolerable dullness. She was too good to be
tied for life to a battered hulk like myself.
I drank more coffee and my mood changed. Even in the grey of a
winter morning a man of thirty, in excellent health, cannot pose
to himself for long as a piece of human junk, especially if he
comforts himself with hot coffee.
My mind resumed its balance. I laughed at myself as a sentimental
fraud. Of course I could make her happy. No man and woman had ever
been more admirably suited to each other. As for that first
disaster, which I had been magnifying into a life-tragedy, what of
it? An incident of my boyhood. A ridiculous episode which--I rose
with the intention of doing so at once--I should now proceed to
eliminate from my life.
I went quickly to my desk, unlocked it, and took out a photograph.
And then--undoubtedly four o'clock in the morning is no time for a
man to try to be single-minded and decisive--I wavered. I had
intended to tear the thing in pieces without a glance, and fling
it into the wastepaper-basket. But I took the glance and I
hesitated.
The girl in the photograph was small and slight, and she looked
straight out of the picture with large eyes that met and
challenged mine. How well I remembered them, those Irish-blue eyes
under their expressive, rather heavy brows. How exactly the
photographer had caught that half-wistful, half-impudent look, the
chin tilted, the mouth curving into a smile.
In a wave all my doubts had surged back upon me. Was this mere
sentimentalism, a four-in-the-morning tribute to the pathos of the
flying years, or did she really fill my soul and stand guard over
it so that no successor could enter in and usurp her place?
I had no answer, unless the fact that I replaced the photograph in
its drawer was one. I felt that this thing could not be decided
now. It was more difficult than I had thought.
All my gloom had returned by the time I was in bed. Hours seemed
to pass while I tossed restlessly aching for sleep.
When I woke my last coherent thought was still clear in my mind.
It was a passionate vow that, come what might, if those Irish eyes
were to haunt me till my death, I would play the game loyally with
Cynthia.
