No allusion was made to our absence when we returned to the others. Gerald was still playing, but he got up as soon as we entered, and strolled over to the window, where he stood beside Owen, looking out.
“There should be white peacocks here,” he murmured idly. “I’ve always longed to live in a house where there were white peacocks. They are the most poetic creatures in the world. They come over the lawn in the moonlight, delightful fowls, and knock with their beaks against the windows to be fed. They love moonlight. They’re extraordinarily morbid and decadent. Their only quite healthy taste is that they want to be fed. Shouldn’t you like them, Miss Dick?”
Miss Dick, to whom all Gerald’s words were pearls of wisdom, listened to these with close attention. “I’ll speak to Mrs. Carroll about them,” she said. “It would be nice to have them.”
Gerald smiled sweetly, and Owen moved away from him, an expression on his face of mingled contempt and disgust, which, had I not been so miserable, I should have found highly comic. There was nothing, I knew, irritated him more than this kind of talk, which Gerald manufactured with extreme ingenuity, principally for Owen’s benefit. For Owen’s sake he would talk in a world-weary fashion of the “colour” of life, and ever since he had discovered that the word “Philistine” was peculiarly exasperating, it had figured more frequently than any other in his conversation. He dragged it in at every turn, nearly always with absolute irrelevancy. He began to talk of Philistines now, à propos of some concert at which he declared he had been asked to play—a concert he had probably invented for the occasion.
Owen stood with his back against the chimney-piece, his eyes bright, his cheeks red. “There is one class, at any rate, that is a good deal more disgusting than your Philistines—the people who imagine themselves superior to them.”
But Gerald could keep perfectly cool. “These people you mention,” he began in his most elaborate manner, “I strongly suspect to be only the commanders of the Philistine hosts—their Tolstoys, their chief-priests and scribes. It is the Philistine who imagines himself superior to other Philistines. This is the one flight his imagination is capable of. The artist may be superior, but that, I think, is not what you mean?”
“You’re right,” said Owen, fiercely, “it’s not what I mean. And I suppose you are an artist?”
“My dear Gill, it is apparent.”
“I’m not your dear Gill,” said Owen, who had lost his temper.
“Shut up, Owen,” I interrupted. “What’s the use of taking everything so seriously?”
“Because everything is serious. You may say a lot of chatter about white peacocks and Philistines doesn’t mean anything if you like, but it does. It is a mask for other things that are real enough—for selfishness, and immorality.”
We all gazed at him in silence, almost open-mouthed, Gerald with a faint smile on his handsome face. Miss Dick alone found it incumbent upon her to say something, and she remarked that the Charity Organization Committee to which she belonged had been able to do a great deal, and that the lecture with lime-light views had brought in over three pounds—she meant even after all expenses had been paid.
These observations could not fill up the breach. Nobody, indeed, took any notice of them. Katherine had laid down her work, and her eyes were fixed on Owen’s angry face, with, I thought, an expression of admiration and sympathy.
“What has morality to do with art?” Gerald asked calmly. “Peter supports you because he is not an artist, but only a person of taste, who likes to listen to my playing. I am an artist, and I know. You not being even a person of—I beg your pardon—you being a person of different tastes from Peter, and uninterested in art, naturally are at a disadvantage when you discuss it. I do not mean that rudely; I say it merely in self-defence. Is anyone coming down in the direction of the station?”
He went out, but nobody offered to accompany him.