Everybody laughed; but after the little gentleman was gone, the subject cropped up again.
“If I wake sufficiently early,” remarked one, “I shall find an excuse to look in myself at eight o’clock. Jong’s face will certainly be worth seeing.”
“Rather rough both on him and Sir George,” observed another.
“Oh, he hasn’t really done anything of the kind,” chimed in old Deleglise in his rich, sweet voice. “He made that all up. It’s just his fun; he’s full of humour.”
“I am inclined to think that would be his idea of a joke,” asserted the first speaker.
Old Deleglise would not hear of it; but a week or two later I noticed an addition to old Deleglise’s studio furniture in the shape of a handsome old carved cabinet twelve feet high.
“He really had done it,” explained old Deleglise, speaking in a whisper, though only he and I were present. “Of course, it was only his fun; but it might have been misunderstood. I thought it better to put the thing straight. I shall get the money back from him when he returns. A most amusing little man!”
Old Deleglise possessed a house in Gower Street which fell vacant. One of his guests, a writer of poetical drama, was a man who three months after he had earned a thousand pounds never had a penny with which to bless himself. They are dying out, these careless, good-natured, conscienceless Bohemians; but quarter of a century ago they still lingered in Alsatian London. Turned out of his lodgings by a Philistine landlord, his sole possession in the wide world, two acts of a drama, for which he had already been paid, the problem of his future, though it troubled him but little, became acute to his friends. Old Deleglise, treating the matter as a joke, pretending not to know who was the landlord, suggested he should apply to the agents for position as caretaker. Some furniture was found for him, and the empty house in Gower Street became his shelter. The immediate present thus provided for, kindly old Deleglise worried himself a good deal concerning what would become of his friend when the house was let. There appeared to be no need for worry. Weeks, months went by. Applications were received by the agents in fair number, view cards signed by the dozen; but prospective tenants were never seen again. One Sunday evening our poet, warmed by old Deleglise’s Burgundy, forgetful whose recommendation had secured him the lowly but timely appointment, himself revealed the secret.
“Most convenient place I’ve got,” so he told old Deleglise. “Whole house to myself. I wander about; it just suits me.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” murmured old Deleglise.
“Come and see me, and I’ll cook you a chop,” continued the other. “I’ve had the kitchen range brought up into the back drawing-room; saves going up and down stairs.”
“The devil you have!” growled old Deleglise. “What do you think the owner of the house will say?”
“Haven’t the least idea who the poor old duffer is myself. They’ve put me in as caretaker – an excellent arrangement: avoids all argument about rent.”
“Afraid it will soon come to an end, that excellent arrangement;” remarked old Deleglise, drily.
“Why? Why should it?”
“A house in Gower Street oughtn’t to remain vacant long.”
“This one will.”
“You might tell me,” asked old Deleglise, with a grim smile; “how do you manage it? What happens when people come to look over the house – don’t you let them in?”
“I tried that at first,” explained the poet, “but they would go on knocking, and boys and policemen passing would stop and help them. It got to be a nuisance; so now I have them in, and get the thing over. I show them the room where the murder was committed. If it’s a nervous-looking party, I let them off with a brief summary. If that doesn’t do, I go into details and show them the blood-spots on the floor. It’s an interesting story of the gruesome order. Come round one morning and I’ll tell it to you. I’m rather proud of it. With the blinds down and a clock in the next room that ticks loudly, it goes well.”
Yet this was a man who, were the merest acquaintance to call upon him and ask for his assistance, would at once take him by the arm and lead him upstairs. All notes and cheques that came into his hands he changed at once into gold. Into some attic half filled with lumber he would fling it by the handful; then, locking the door, leave it there. On their hands and knees he and his friends, when they wanted any, would grovel for it, poking into corners, hunting under boxes, groping among broken furniture, feeling between cracks and crevices. Nothing gave him greater delight than an expedition of this nature to what he termed his gold-field; it had for him, as he would explain, all the excitements of mining without the inconvenience and the distance. He never knew how much was there. For a certain period a pocketful could be picked up in five minutes. Then he would entertain a dozen men at one of the best restaurants in London, tip cabmen and waiters with half-sovereigns, shower half-crowns as he walked through the streets, lend or give to anybody for the asking. Later, half-an-hour’s dusty search would be rewarded with a single coin. It made no difference to him; he would dine in Soho for eighteenpence, smoke shag, and run into debt.
The red-haired man, to whom Deleglise had introduced me on the day of my first meeting with the Lady of the train, was another of his most constant visitors. It flattered my vanity that the red-haired man, whose name was famous throughout Europe and America, should condescend to confide to me – as he did and at some length – the deepest secrets of his bosom. Awed – at all events at first – I would sit and listen while by the hour he would talk to me in corners, telling me of the women he had loved. They formed a somewhat large collection. Julias, Marias, Janets, even Janes – he had madly worshipped, deliriously adored so many it grew bewildering. With a far-away look in his eyes, pain trembling through each note of his musical, soft voice, he would with bitter jest, with passionate outburst, recount how he had sobbed beneath the stars for love of Isabel, bitten his own flesh in frenzied yearning for Lenore. He appeared from his own account – if in connection with a theme so poetical I may be allowed a commonplace expression – to have had no luck with any of them. Of the remainder, an appreciable percentage had been mere passing visions, seen at a distance in the dawn, at twilight – generally speaking, when the light must have been uncertain. Never again, though he had wandered in the neighbourhood for months, had he succeeded in meeting them. It would occur to me that enquiries among the neighbours, applications to the local police, might possibly have been efficacious; but to have broken in upon his exalted mood with such suggestions would have demanded more nerve than at the time I possessed. In consequence, my thoughts I kept to myself.
“My God, boy!” he would conclude, “may you never love as I loved that woman Miriam” – or Henrietta, or Irene, as the case might be.
For my sympathetic attitude towards the red-haired man I received one evening commendation from old Deleglise.
“Good boy,” said old Deleglise, laying his hand on my shoulder. We were standing in the passage. We had just shaken hands with the red-haired man, who, as usual, had been the last to leave. “None of the others will listen to him. He used to stop and confide it all to me after everybody else had gone. Sometimes I have dropped asleep, to wake an hour later and find him still talking. He gets it over early now. Good boy!”
Soon I learnt it was characteristic of the artist to be willing – nay, anxious, to confide his private affairs to any one and every one who would only listen. Another characteristic appeared to be determination not to listen to anybody else’s. As attentive recipient of other people’s troubles and emotions I was subjected to practically no competition whatever. One gentleman, a leading actor of that day, I remember, immediately took me aside on my being introduced to him, and consulted me as to his best course of procedure under the extremely painful conditions that had lately arisen between himself and his wife. We discussed the unfortunate position at some length, and I did my best to counsel fairly and impartially.
“I wish you would lunch with me at White’s to-morrow,” he said. “We can talk it over quietly. Say half-past one. By the bye, I didn’t catch your name.”
I spelt it to him: he wrote the appointment down on his shirt-cuff. I went to White’s the next day and waited an hour, but he did not turn up. I met him three weeks later at a garden-party with his wife. But he appeared to have forgotten me.
Observing old Deleglise’s guests, comparing them with their names, it surprised me the disconnection between the worker and the work. Writers of noble sentiment, of elevated ideality, I found contained in men of commonplace appearance, of gross appetites, of conventional ideas. It seemed doubtful whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise’s kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried to compete with others who to the public were comparatively unknown. After a time I ceased to confound the artist with the man, thought no more of judging the one by the other than of evolving a tenant from the house to which circumstances or carelessness might have directed him. Clearly they were two creations originally independent of each other, settling down into a working partnership for purposes merely of mutual accommodation; the spirit evidently indifferent as to the particular body into which he crept, anxious only for a place to work in, easily contented.
Varied were these guests that gathered round old Deleglise’s oak. Cabinet Ministers reported to be in Homburg; Russian Nihilists escaped from Siberia; Italian revolutionaries; high church dignitaries disguised in grey suitings; ex-errand boys, who had discovered that with six strokes of the pen they could set half London laughing at whom they would; raw laddies with the burr yet clinging to their tongues, but who we knew would one day have the people dancing to the music of their words. Neither wealth, nor birth, nor age, nor position counted. Was a man interesting, amusing; had he ideas and thoughts of his own? Then he was welcome. Men who had come, men who were coming, met there on equal footing. Among them, as years ago among my schoolmates, I found my place – somewhat to my dissatisfaction. I amused. Much rather would I have shocked them by the originality of my views, impressed them with the depth of my judgments. They declined to be startled, refused to be impressed; instead, they laughed. Nor from these men could I obtain sympathy in my disappointment.
“What do you mean, you villain!” roared Deleglise’s caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. “How dare you waste your time writing this sort of stuff?”
He had a copy of the paper containing my “Witch of Moel Sarbod” in his hand – then some months old. He screwed it up into a ball and flung it in my face. “I’ve only just read it. What did you get for it?”
“Nothing,” I answered.
“Nothing!” he screamed. “You got off for nothing? You ought to have been whipped at the cart’s tail!”
“Oh, come, it’s not as bad as that,” suggested old Deleglise.
“Not bad! There isn’t a laugh in it from beginning to end.”
“There wasn’t intended to be,” I interrupted.
“Why not, you swindler? What were you sent into the world to do? To make it laugh.”
“I want to make it think,” I told him.
“Make it think! Hasn’t it got enough to think about? Aren’t there ten thousand penny-a-liners, poets, tragedians, tub-thumpers, long-eared philosophers, boring it to death? Who are you to turn up your nose at your work and tell the Almighty His own business? You are here to make us laugh. Get on with your work, you confounded young idiot!”
Urban Vane was the only one among them who understood me, who agreed with me that I was fitted for higher things than merely to minister to the world’s need of laughter. He alone it was who would listen with approval to my dreams of becoming a famous tragedian, a writer of soul-searching books, of passion-analysing plays. I never saw him laugh himself, certainly not at anything funny. “Humour!” he would explain in his languid drawl, “personally it doesn’t amuse me.” One felt its introduction into the scheme of life had been an error. He was a large, fleshy man, with a dreamy, caressing voice and strangely impassive face. Where he came from, who he was, nobody knew. Without ever passing a remark himself that was worth listening to, he, nevertheless, by some mysterious trick of manner I am unable to explain, soon established himself, even throughout that company, where as a rule men found their proper level, as a silent authority in all contests of wit or argument. Stories at which he listened, bored, fell flat. The bon mot at which some faint suggestion of a smile quivered round his clean-shaven lips was felt to be the crown of the discussion. I can only conclude his secret to have been his magnificent assumption of superiority, added to a sphinx-like impenetrability behind which he could always retire from any danger of exposure. Subjects about which he knew nothing – and I have come to the conclusion they were more numerous than was suspected – became in his presence topics outside the radius of cultivated consideration: one felt ashamed of having introduced them. His own subjects – they were few but exclusive – he had the knack of elevating into intellectual tests: one felt ashamed, reflecting how little one knew about them. Whether he really did possess a charm of manner, or whether the sense of his superiority with which he had imbued me it was that made any condescension he paid me a thing to grasp at, I am unable to say. Certain it is that when he suggested I should throw up chorus singing and accompany him into the provinces as manager of a theatrical company he was then engaging to run a wonderful drama that was going to revolutionise the English stage and educate the English public, I allowed myself not a moment for consideration, but accepted his proposal with grateful delight.
“Who is he?” asked Dan. Somehow he had never impressed Dan; but then Dan was a fellow to impress whom was slow work. As he himself confessed, he had no instinct for character. “I judge,” he would explain, “purely by observation.”
“What does that matter?” was my reply.
“What does he know about the business?”
“That’s why he wants me.”
“What do you know about it?”
“There’s not much to know. I can find out.”
“Take care you don’t find out that there’s more to know than you think. What is this wonderful play of his?”
“I haven’t seen it yet; I don’t think it’s finished. It’s something from the Spanish or the Russian, I’m not sure. I’m to put it into shape when he’s done the translation. He wants me to put my name to it as the adaptor.”
“Wonder he hasn’t asked you to wear his clothes. Has he got any money?”
“Of course he has money. How can you run a theatrical company without money?”
“Have you seen the money?”
“He doesn’t carry it about with him in a bag.”
“I should have thought your ambition to be to act, not to manage. Managers are to be had cheap enough. Why should he want some one who knows nothing about it?”
“I’m going to act. I’m going to play a leading part.”
“Great Scott!”
“He’ll do the management really himself; I shall simply advise him. But he doesn’t want his own name to appear.
“Why not?”
“His people might object.”
“Who are his people?”
“How do I know? What a suspicious chap you are.”
Dan shrugged his shoulders. “You are not an actor, you never will be; you are not a business man. You’ve made a start at writing, that’s your proper work. Why not go on with it?”
“I can’t get on with it. That one thing was accepted, and never paid for; everything else comes back regularly, just as before. Besides, I can go on writing wherever I am.”
“You’ve got friends here to help you.”
“They don’t believe I can do anything but write nonsense.”
“Well, clever nonsense is worth writing. It’s better than stodgy sense: literature is blocked up with that. Why not follow their advice?”
“Because I don’t believe they are right. I’m not a clown; I don’t mean to be. Because a man has a sense of humour it doesn’t follow he has nothing else. That is only one of my gifts, and by no means the highest. I have knowledge of human nature, poetry, dramatic instinct. I mean to prove it to you all. Vane’s the only man that understands me.”
Dan lit his pipe. “Have you made up your mind to go?”
“Of course I have. It’s an opportunity that doesn’t occur twice. ‘There’s a tide in the affairs – ”
“Thanks,” interrupted Dan; “I’ve heard it before. Well, if you’ve made up your mind, there’s an end of the matter. Good luck to you! You are young, and it’s easier to learn things then than later.”
“You talk,” I answered, “as if you were old enough to be my grandfather.”
He smiled and laid both hands upon my shoulders. “So I am,” he said, “quite old enough, little boy Paul. Don’t be angry; you’ll always be little Paul to me.” He put his hands in his pockets and strolled to the window.
“What’ll you do?” I enquired. “Will you keep on these rooms?”
“No,” he replied. “I shall accept an offer that has been made to me to take the sub-editorship of a big Yorkshire paper. It is an important position and will give me experience.”
“You’ll never be happy mewed up in a provincial town,” I told him. “I shall want a London address, and I can easily afford it. Let’s keep them on together.”
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be the same thing,” he said.
So there came a morning when we said good-bye. Before Dan returned from the office I should be gone. They had been pleasant months that we had spent together in these pretty rooms. Though my life was calling to me full of hope, I felt the pain of leaving them. Two years is a long period in a young man’s life, when the sap is running swiftly. My affections had already taken root there. The green leaves in summer, in winter the bare branches of the square, the sparrows that chirped about the window-sills, the quiet peace of the great house, Dan, kindly old Deleglise: around them my fibres clung, closer than I had known. The Lady of the train: she managed it now less clumsily. Her hands and feet had grown smaller, her elbows rounder. I found myself smiling as I thought of her – one always did smile when one thought of Norah, everybody did; – of her tomboy ways, her ringing laugh – there were those who termed it noisy; her irrepressible frankness – there were times when it was inconvenient. Would she ever become lady-like, sedate, proper? One doubted it. I tried to picture her a wife, the mistress of a house. I found the smile deepening round my mouth. What a jolly wife she would make! I could see her bustling, full of importance; flying into tempers, lasting possibly for thirty seconds; then calling herself names, saving all argument by undertaking her own scolding, and doing it well. I followed her to motherhood. What a joke it would be! What would she do with them? She would just let them do what they liked with her. She and they would be a parcel of children together, she the most excited of them all. No; on second thoughts I could detect in her a strong vein of common sense. They would have to mind their p’s and q’s. I could see her romping with them, helping them to tear their clothes; but likewise I could see her flying after them, bringing back an armful struggling, bathing it, physicking it. Perhaps she would grow stout, grow grey; but she would still laugh more often than sigh, speak her mind, be quick, good-tempered Norah to the end. Her character precluded all hope of surprise. That, as I told myself, was its defect. About her were none of those glorious possibilities that make of some girls charming mysteries. A woman, said I to myself, should be a wondrous jewel, hiding unknown lights and shadows. You, my dear Norah – I spoke my thoughts aloud, as had become a habit with me: those who live much alone fall into this way – you are merely a crystal, not shallow – no, I should not call you shallow by any mans, but transparent.
What would he be, her lover? Some plain, matter-of-fact, business-like young fellow, a good player of cricket and football, fond of his dinner. What a very uninteresting affair the love-making would be! If she liked him – well, she would probably tell him so; if she didn’t, he would know it in five minutes.
As for inducing her to change her mind, wooing her, cajoling her – I heard myself laughing at the idea.
There came a quick rap at the door. “Come in,” I cried; and she entered.
“I came to say good-bye to you,” she explained. “I’m just going out. What were you laughing at?”
“Oh, at an idea that occurred to me.”
“A funny one?”
“Yes.”
“Tell it me.”
“Well, it was something in connection with yourself. It might offend you.”
“It wouldn’t trouble you much if it did, would it?”
“No, I don’t suppose it would.”
“Then why not tell me?”
“I was thinking of your lover.”
It did offend her; I thought it would. But she looked really interesting when she was cross. Her grey eyes would flash, and her whole body quiver. There was a charming spice of danger always about making her cross.
“I suppose you think I shall never have one.”
“On the contrary, I think you will have a good many.” I had not thought so before then. I formed the idea for the first time in that moment, while looking straight into her angry face. It was still a childish face.
The anger died out of it as it always did within the minute, and she laughed. “It would be fun, wouldn’t it. I wonder what I should do with him? It makes you feel very serious being in love, doesn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
I hesitated for a moment. Then the delight of talking about it overcame my fear of being chaffed. Besides, when she felt it, nobody could be more delightfully sympathetic. I determined to adventure it.
“Yes,” I answered, “ever since I was a boy. If you are going to be foolish,” I added, for I saw the laugh before it came, “I shan’t talk to you about it.”
“I’m not – I won’t, really,” she pleaded, making her face serious again. “What is she like?”
I took from my breast pocket Barbara’s photograph, and handed it to her in silence.
“Is she really as beautiful as that?” she asked, gazing at it evidently fascinated.
“More so,” I assured her. “Her expression is the most beautiful part of her. Those are only her features.”
She sighed. “I wish I was beautiful.”
“You are at an awkward age,” I told her. “It is impossible to say what you are going to be like.”
“Mamma was a lovely woman, everybody says so; and Tom I call awfully handsome. Perhaps I’ll be better when I’m filled out a bit more.” A small Venetian mirror hung between the two windows; she glanced up into it. “It’s my nose that irritates me,” she said. She rubbed it viciously, as if she would rub it out.
“Some people admire snub noses,” I explained to her.
“No, really?”
“Tennyson speaks of them as ‘tip-tilted like the petals of a rose.’”
“How nice of him! Do you think he meant my sort?” She rubbed it again, but in a kinder fashion; then looked again at Barbara’s photograph. “Who is she?”
“She was Miss Hasluck,” I answered; “she is the Countess Huescar now. She was married last summer.”
“Oh, yes, I remember; you told us about her. You were children together. But what’s the good of your being in love with her if she’s married?”
“It makes my whole life beautiful.”
“Wanting somebody you can’t have?”
“I don’t want her.”
“You said you were in love with her.”
“So I am.”
She handed me back the photograph, and I replaced it in my pocket.
“I don’t understand that sort of love,” she said. “If I loved anybody I should want to have them with me always.
“She is with me always,” I answered, “in my thoughts.” She looked at me with her clear grey eyes. I found myself blinking. Something seemed to be slipping from me, something I did not want to lose. I remember a similar sensation once at the moment of waking from a strange, delicious dream to find the sunlight pouring in upon me through an open window.
“That isn’t being in love,” she said. “That’s being in love with the idea of being in love. That’s the way I used to go to balls” – she laughed – “in front of the glass. You caught me once, do you remember?”
“And was it not sweeter,” I argued, “the imagination? You were the belle of the evening; you danced divinely every dance, were taken in to supper by the Lion. In reality you trod upon your partner’s toes, bumped and were bumped, were left a wallflower more than half the time, had a headache the next day. Were not the dream balls the more delightful?”
“No, they weren’t,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “One real dance, when at last it came, was worth the whole of them. Oh, I know, I’ve heard you talking, all of you – of the faces that you see in dreams and that are ever so much more beautiful than the faces that you see when you’re awake; of the wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. I don’t believe a word of it. It’s tommyrot!”
“I wish you wouldn’t use slang.”
“Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it me.”
“I suppose you mean cant,” I suggested.
“No, I don’t. Cant is something that you don’t believe in yourself. It’s tommyrot: there isn’t any other word. When I’m in love it will be with something that is real.”
I was feeling angry with her. “I know just what he will be like. He will be a good-natured, commonplace – ”
“Whatever he is,” she interrupted, “he’ll be alive, and he’ll want me and I shall want him. Dreams are silly. I prefer being up.” She clapped her hands. “That’s it.” Then, silent, she looked at me with an expression of new interest. “I’ve been wondering and wondering what it was: you are not really awake yet. You’ve never got up.”
I laughed at her whimsical way of putting it; but at the back of my brain was a troubled idea that perhaps she was revealing to me the truth. And if so, what would “waking up,” as she termed it, be like? A flash of memory recalled to me that summer evening upon Barking Bridge, when, as it had seemed to me, the little childish Paul had slipped away from me, leaving me lonely and bewildered to find another Self. Was my boyhood in like manner now falling from me? I found myself clinging to it with vague terror. Its thoughts, its feelings – dreams: they had grown sweet to me; must I lose them? This cold, unknown, new Self, waiting to receive me: I shrank away from it with fear.
“Do you know, I think you will be rather nice when you wake up.”
Her words recalled me to myself. “Perhaps I never shall wake up,” I said. “I don’t want to wake up.”
“Oh, but one can’t go on dreaming all one’s life,” she laughed. “You’ll wake up, and fall in love with somebody real.” She came across to me, and taking the lapels of my coat in both her hands, gave me a vigorous shake. “I hope she’ll be somebody nice. I am rather afraid.”
“You seem to think me a fool!” I was still angry with her, without quite knowing why.
She shook me again. “You know I don’t. But it isn’t the nice people that take best care of themselves. Tom can’t. I have to take care of him.”
I laughed.
“I do, really. You should hear me scold him. I like taking care of people. Good-bye.”
She held out her hand. It was white now and shapely, but one could not have called it small. Strong it felt and firm as it gripped mine.