Unless Philosophy can make a Juliet!’ etc., etc.
That’s the kind of thing you women like! The learning of the ages, the equipoise of the mind, the balance and calm reasoning powers of the brain, these all go for nothing—”
“In an attack of the gout?” she suggested.
He laughed and loosed his hold of her little white chin.
“Dry your eyes!” he said, masterfully. “I’m not dead yet! And in our instructive walk of to-day I have discovered one thing,—that you would be rather sorry if I were! That’s curious! And not altogether unpleasing! Now I wonder why—”
“And I wonder,” she interrupted, quickly, “whether you would be sorry if—”
“Now, now! Take care!” he exclaimed. “There are certain subjects I will not have mentioned—subjects which you women love to harp upon! I know exactly what you are going to say. Would I be sorry if you were resolved into your original exquisite atoms of matter? Yes—I should be sorry, because there would be a blank—” Here he suddenly stopped in his walk and looked up at the fair sky with its fleecy clouds lazily sailing along the blue. “There would be a decided blank,” he repeated slowly, “where there is just now a very great centre of interest—a subject for study and—er—contemplation—and—er—considerable entertainment!”
Their glances met, but flashed away from each other instantly,—and they continued their walk through the fields, leaving the buttercups and daisies in a glistening trail of gold and silver behind them as they passed.
CHAPTER III
“I CANNOT understand,” said Jack, irritably; “no, I cannot for my life understand what you see in him!”
She laughed a little.
“You dear, good Jack! Nor can I!”
They were sitting on a smooth thyme-scented bank close to the river—a lovely river meandering slowly under pale green tresses of willow, and gurgling softly among reeds and water-lilies,—and it was a perfect summer’s afternoon. She,—always the sentimentalist,—had been for some minutes lost in a reverie—a kind of waking dream of delight in all the exquisite things of nature about her—the ripple of the water, the swirl of the swaying leaves above her head, and the delicious blue of the sky. She was herself an exquisite thing, but she did not realise it. That was left to Jack.
“Well, if you can’t,” he pursued, “why on earth do you humour him in all his whims and fads—”
“He’s a very learned man!” she interrupted, demurely. “Most frightfully learned! He knows every thing!—or he thinks he knows!”
“Oh! That’s another story!” said Jack. “He thinks he knows! I might ‘think’ I know!—but I shouldn’t know for all that! I hate a human encyclopædia!”
“Then, he’s a Philosopher,” she went on, her smile dimpling the corners of her mouth in the most enchanting way. “He is never put out—never excited—takes everything as it comes quite calmly—”
“Except when it happens to hurt himself,” exclaimed Jack. “Then he can roar like the Biblical bulls of Bashan! I’ve heard him! Oh, yes, I grant you he’s never put out by other folks’ worries—he wouldn’t stir a finger to help any one out of a fix—not even you! Can’t you see how utterly selfish the man is?”
She considered,—resting her chin in the hollow of her little white hand. She looked very pretty in that attitude, and Jack was glad he had her company all to himself.
“Yes,” she said, at last, “I suppose—I’m afraid he is! But, you see, Jack, that’s because he’s such a philosopher! They are mostly all like that. Think of Diogenes in his tub!”
Jack laughed aloud.
“You dear, sweet, little girl!” he said, recklessly and with fervour. “You say such quaint, funny things! Diogenes was an old horror, of course!—and really, if you would only see him as he is, so is your—”
She held up a warning finger.
“Now, Jack! He’s not as bad as Diogenes! No! You can’t say that! It’s true that he’s often rude—and very indifferent to the happiness of others—and rough—and unkind—”
“To you!” cried Jack in sudden excitement.
“Well!—perhaps—sometimes! But I don’t mind!”
“I do!” declared Jack, with uncommon emphasis. “Let me catch him at it! Let me catch him, I say!—he’s years older than I am,—but I’ll—I’ll knock him down!”
She peeped at him from under the brim of her hat.
“You are a dear boy!” she said, patronisingly. “But you mustn’t think of such a thing!”
“Why not?”
“Well—why not?” She still smiled. “First, because he’s old. Yes—quite old, really. I dare say he’ll never see fifty again—”
“Too old to make love to you,” said Jack, loftily. “That’s certain!”
“He doesn’t make love to me,” she replied. “Oh, dear!—you won’t understand! He doesn’t make love at all!”
“Then what does he do?” demanded Jack. “I should jolly well like to know!”
“What does he do?” she repeated, musingly. Then she suddenly laughed joyously: “Oh, Jack!—I don’t believe I know! He reads the papers and smokes—and writes a little—then he wants to go for a walk and asks me to go with him—and we talk-and—and that’s all!”
“That’s all!” and Jack looked whole volumes of incredulity. “And just to read the papers and smoke and take walks with you he comes down here miles away from London to stay with you and your father whole weeks together! A regular sponge I call him! Yes!—a sponge!”
“Dad likes him,” she said, briefly.
“I daresay! Your Dad likes any one who’ll talk history and politics to him by the hour. But you!—you don’t want history and politics!”
“Don’t I?”—and her eyes sparkled prettily. Then I’m like the poet Keats—
Swart planet in the universe of deeds!’”
“Ah, that’s poetry,” said Jack. “I don’t care very much about it!”
“Nor does he!” she replied. “I quoted those lines to him the other day and he said Keats was honey and water.”
“Never mind what ‘he’ said,” and Jack’s voice took on a raspy tone. “I daresay you’ll think me an impertinent sort of chap but—but you know I’m very fond of you—”
She stretched out a little white hand towards him, and he took it tenderly in his own large strong palm.
“Yes, I do know!” she said, sweetly. “And—and it’s kind of you—”
“Kind!” echoed Jack. “Kind! There’s nothing kind about it! Nobody could help being fond of you—but I—I’m just a rough chap—and I’ve no settled position yet and no money—and it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to marry me”—here his clasp tightened involuntarily on the soft fingers he held—“but I want you to, all the same!”
“Do you? Really?” she queried, with a bewitching uplift of her pretty eyebrows. “Oh, Jack! Marriage is such a dreadful business! Just think of the married people we know! Take the Simmonses—”
Jack whistled,—a dismal, dubious whistle.
“What of them?” he said. “You could never be like Mrs. Simmons—and I’m sure I shall never be like Mr.!”
“And the Blakes, and the Foxes, and the Meedons,” she went on, enumerating the different names on her little white fingers. “They’re all married people, and they just bore one another to death! Now you and I—we’re not married—we’re not even engaged—we’re just the best friends in the world, and we don’t bore each other to death!”
“Nor likely to,” said Jack. “But I tell you who would bore you to death if you married him!—your old Philosopher!”
She nodded.
“Yes, I’m sure he would! He bores me often now! But—Jack—that’s just the fun of it! He thinks himself the wisest, wittiest, most wonderful man alive,—and he wants me to think it too. And then there’s another funny thing—oh, such a funny thing!”
“Well, what is it?” Jack demanded, rather gruffly.
“Don’t be snappy, Jack dear! The funny thing is that he feels he’s falling a little bit in love with me!—just a little bit!—and he doesn’t want to! That’s what amuses me!”
“Oh!” Jack looked slightly puzzled. “And how long is the game to last?”
Her eyes sparkled mischievously.
“I don’t know! It depends! The ‘game’ as you call it is more fun than getting married would be!”
Jack pulled a serious face.
“Look here!” he said. “You mustn’t play too much at that sort of thing! You’ll be getting ‘entangled’ with that selfish old brute, and he’ll wriggle out of everything that could compromise himself. He won’t bother about you. You see I’m an American—”
“Good for you!” she interpolated, smiling.
“Yes, I’m proud of it. But, being one, I shouldn’t allow any woman to do menial things for me. Your Philosopher does allow it. I’ve seen you run from one end of the garden to another to fetch a pipe which the lazy beggar has left lying about somewhere,—or to get him a chair—or find his hat and walking-stick—”
“He’s old,” she said.
“Old be hanged! He’s not decrepit. Does he ever do anything for you? Fetch you a chair? Help you to find anything? Try to give you any pleasure apart from his own dull company? Now, does he?”
She made a little pink bud of her mouth as she replied, meekly—
“I’m afraid he doesn’t! You see—you see he’s so absorbed in thought!”
“I’d absorb him if I had the chance!” said Jack. “Have you ever read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’?”
“Some of it,” she answered. “I couldn’t get through it all.”
“Nor could I,” he confessed. “But I remember old Casaubon. Dorothea married him because she thought he would be such a clever husband to have—and so he was! Too clever by half! Something like your Philosopher.”
“Not quite!” she demurred. “Casaubon had no sense of humour. My Philosopher has quite a humorous turn sometimes.”
“At other folks’ expense,” said Jack. “Oh, yes—I daresay! I’ve caught him sneering at me now and then!”
She laughed.
“That’s only because he’s jealous!”
“Jealous?”
“Yes. Jealous of you!”
Jack drew himself up and patted his own broad chest with a smile of self-satisfaction.
“That’s good news anyhow!” he said. “I’m glad I can irritate the old rascal—”
“Jack!”
“Mustn’t I call him an old rascal? All right, I won’t! But he is, you know! There are lots of his sort in London and in University towns. There are, really—only you won’t believe it—you’re a lovely lady of rose-gardens and country associations, and you don’t understand what these ‘philosophers’ are who moralise on life without having the pluck to live it!”
Her blue eyes lifted towards him with a look of surprise and questioning.
“Why, Jack, you talk quite nobly!” she exclaimed, and laughed. “Like a sort of hero in a book! But even a Philosopher who’ll never see fifty again must have ‘lived’ his life somehow?”
“On other people, no doubt,” said Jack. “The tedious old thing that comes down here so often and persuades you to make such a fuss about him and his learning has very little earning power in him I’ll swear! Besides—I could tell you a thing or two—only you won’t listen.”
“Yes, I will!” she answered, quickly. “Tell me!”
“Well, you ask him one day if he hadn’t a good old aunt, who, when he was a boy spoiled him to death, gave him all he wanted, and left him all her fortune,—a pretty decent one too. He led her an awful life I’ve heard—shook her in bed when she was dying like Queen Elizabeth shaking the woman who failed to give her Essex’s ring—and since he got the money has grown so mean that he can scarcely bear to part with sixpence. That’s why he lives on his friends and lets them pay for him.”
She looked vaguely amused.
“Jack, I think this is a yarn!” she said. “You are too brilliant, dear boy! You don’t know all this for a fact?”
“I don’t know it,” he answered. “But I’ve heard it, and I’m sure it’s true. Why, you can prove it for yourself! When you went with him the other day to the Cinema did he pay for your seat?”
She laughed.
“No, he didn’t! I paid for him and myself as well! But that was nothing!”
“Nothing?” Jack gave a short grunt of disgust. “No, it was nothing in the way of expenditure but it was something in the way of character! How he could let you pay! How you could pay for him!”
Her pretty dimples came into play again.
“Oh, well! He was very funny about it. He said he felt like a little boy being taken out by his governess for a treat. He really has a sense of humour!”
“I’m sure he has!” spluttered Jack. “By Jove! I should say he found it ‘humorous’ in the highest degree to have a woman pay for him! Suit him down to the ground!”
She stretched her rounded white arms above her head and gave a tiny yawn.
“Dear Jack, you are really exhausting!” she said. “Let’s talk of something else. Look at that dear little moor-hen!”
He followed her gaze and watched the dainty little bird breasting its way across the shining river, then said, moodily:
“I suppose he’s really a fixture just now?”
“The Philosopher? Oh, I hope not! He’s just staying with Dad. They’re doing a book together.”
“What sort of a book?”
“The sort of book that no one ever, ever reads,” she replied. “A work of such genius that it will never, never sell! The title is—let me see!—it’s so long and learned,—quite difficult to remember.”
“Then don’t bother to think about it,” said Jack.
“Oh, but I’d like to tell you!” She considered. “Yes!” she went on. “It’s this—‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilisation.’”
“Oh, Great Scott!” and Jack fell back on the grassy bank as though suddenly knocked flat.
She laughed, merrily.
“It is heavy, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s all about things that people don’t really care for,—for instance, how language gets spoilt by slang and ungrammatical expressions when people lose the sense of rectitude and honour—”
“Yes!” nodded Jack. “When they get to the low level of allowing women to pay for their amusements!”
She made a merry little grimace.
“There, Jack! You always turn the conversation back on personalities! Dear boy, it’s bad form! You should never be personal!”
He smiled. There was something so appealing in the sweet eyes uplifted to his, that the expression they conveyed gave him a sense of masterfulness, and he felt he must be very tolerant with this charming bit of wayward feminine feeling.
“Dear little lady,” he said, with quite a patronising air, “I won’t be anything you don’t want me to be! Only just try and think about commonplace facts now and then,—and don’t take your pretty ideals for realities. You have put a glamour on your old Philosopher—you think he’s so clever that he can’t afford to be anything else. But I tell you cleverness isn’t everything and most learned men are bores! Selfish bores, too—cynics and—whatd’ye-call-’em—iconoclasts. There’s a word for you!—such a mouthful!—it means—”
“Breakers of idols,” she said, softly and musingly. “Destroyers of hope and faith!—cruel mockers of noble effort—”
“That’s it!” and Jack got up from the grass, and stretched his supple, elegant figure of which he might have been proud,—but he wasn’t. “And you’ll find your Philosopher comes up to the scratch in all those particulars when you put him through his paces. ‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived’ is nothing to the Deterioration of a Man who thinks himself superior to all other men.”
She rose from her bank of moss and thyme and stood for a minute, looking at the river.
“How lovely it is here!” she said. “I should like to stay here for hours!”
“So should I,” agreed Jack, “with you!”
She laughed, and looking up at him, flushed a pretty rose-colour.
“You’re bold!” she said.
“As brass!” he responded, gaily. “I’m not a Philosopher!”
She lowered her eyes, and they began to walk homeward together. After a pause, Jack suddenly laid an entreating hand on her arm.
“You’ll not marry him?” he pleaded.
“He won’t ask me to!” she rejoined, with a smile.
“But—if he did?” persisted Jack.
“Oh, Jack! Can’t you see? He’s far too much of a Philosopher to marry! A wife would bore him to death!”
“And he’d bore a wife to death, that’s certain!” said Jack. “Well!—I suppose I must hope for the best! Anyway—you’ll try—yes, try to like me a little?”
“No need to try!” she answered, sweetly. “I like you very, very much! Oh, Jack, yes! We must always be the very best friends in the world! Swear it!”
She extended her pretty little ungloved hand, and Jack, moved by the spirit of the occasion, took off his hat, dropped on one knee and kissed it.
“I swear!” he said.
Her gay laughter rippled out on the air.
“Splendid! Like a knight in a fairy tale!”
“Fairy tales sometimes come true,” he said, as he sprang up from his chivalric attitude. “I’ve made a vow, and I mean to keep it!”
She peeped at him under her golden eyelashes.
“Good Jack!” she said. “You ought to be very, very rich,—oh, immensely rich!”
“Why?”
“Because you would do so many kind things with your money,” she answered. “You couldn’t help doing them!”
“True!” he declared, with a grandiloquent air. “I would even pay for you to go to a Cinema! I would!”
Her delightful laughter was like that of a happy child. They went on, pacing slowly over the warm short grass, a pretty pair to look at, such as Herrick might have sung of, or Shakespeare, when he carolled of “the ring-time and the spring-time” and of “sweet lovers” who love the spring. Only they were not lovers. The pretty Sentimentalist loved Love in the abstract, and feared disillusion in its reality.
CHAPTER IV
“I SAW him,” said the Philosopher, sternly. “I saw him kneeling at your feet! I saw him with my own eyes!”
She laughed.
“Really! Well, you could not see him with any one else’s eyes, could you?”
“That answer is merely flippant,” retorted the Philosopher. “Flippant—I might say rude!”
“Oh-h-h!” She made a little whistling round of her mouth, and her blue eyes flashed.
“Rude!” he repeated, rather raspily. “And I venture to say that in an open field, within a few yards of the public road, a man who is such a fool as to drop on one knee at a woman’s feet ought to be—ought to be”—here he waved one arm magisterially—“removed—forcibly removed to Hanwell or Colney Hatch! He is not responsible for his actions!”
“No,” she interposed, mischievously. “No man in love is!”
“In love!” The Philosopher snorted. “You call that love? To make a ridiculous exposure of himself and you in full view of spectators—”
She pointed a little finger at him.
“Only one spectator,—you!” she said. “And where were you?”
He gave another snort.
“I was—I was behind a tree,” he said. “I thought I saw you going towards the river—I imagined you were alone—”
“I was at first,” she said. “Jack came on later. So you must have been watching quite a long time! What a bore for you! Why did you do it?”
The Philosopher blinked his eyes and frowned.
“Why did I do it? Because—because”—he hesitated—“yes!—because I like to study the deceptive attributes of your sex and the pitfalls they prepare for unwary men! This Jack of yours is a perfect ass!”
“Why didn’t you say Jackass at once and have done with it?” she demanded, mirthfully. “You would have been nearly funny then!”
The Philosopher looked at her with what he meant to be a withering expression. She, however, did not wither.
“Nearly funny!” he echoed. “Silly child, do you really think I have not sufficient acumen to perceive an obvious play upon words, suggesting stupidity rather than humour?”
A smile dimpled her cheeks in one or two becoming places, but she said nothing.
“Am I to infer that you approved of the man’s attitude in the field?” he demanded.
The portentous air with which he put this question made her laugh outright.
“Yes!—yes, indeed!” she answered. “The man’s attitude in the field—oh, dear me!—was simply delightful!” And she clapped her hands ecstatically. “You see, he’s such a good figure!—and he can drop on one knee gracefully—really gracefully!—and he meant it as well!—he was swearing eternal friendship!”
“Eternal fiddlesticks!” snarled the Philosopher. “Where’s my pipe?”
They were in the library, a cosy room with a big window fronting the west where the last golden lines of the sunset were vanishing one by one,—and it wanted about an hour to dinner time. She moved away and went searching to and fro, on various tables and shelves, her light figure in its dainty evening attire of pale blue and white fluttering hither and thither like an embodied flower, till presently she came back towards him holding out, at a respectful distance from herself, a rather dirty briar.
“Come along, come along!” said the Philosopher, testily. “Make haste! It won’t bite you!”
“No,” and she handed him the repulsive looking object. “But it smells—horrid! If you had a wife she would not allow you to come near her with such a smell!”
“Oh, wouldn’t she?” And the Philosopher stuck the pipe between his teeth with a defiant air. “If I had a wife—which, thank God, I haven’t—”
“Yes, thank God you haven’t!” she interpolated, demurely.
He looked at her again in his “withering” way, but she only smiled.
“If I had a wife,” he continued, sucking the stem of his pipe somewhat noisily, “she would have to allow anything I pleased and be glad of the privilege! A man must be master in his own house,—and a wise woman knows how to keep her place.”
She sank gracefully into a low easy-chair, with the soft movement of a bird descending into its nest, and looked up at him with a tolerantly amused air.
“The days of Abraham are past!” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that the Lord doesn’t favour women-crushers so much as in the times of Moses and Aaron,” she murmured lazily. “You see, Abraham was such a ‘master in his own house’ that, after making all the use he could of Hagar, he turned her out into the wilderness to starve. Plenty of modern Abrahams would do the same thing with all the pleasure in life—but—it’s likely the modern Hagars are more than a match for them! And I’m glad—oh, so glad, that women are going to have their day—at last!”
The Philosopher had stuffed his pipe with tobacco while she spoke, and now prodded it in with a very yellow finger. He looked uneasily about him for matches, but she did not offer to find them. He discovered them presently and lit his ‘fragrant weed’ without asking her permission.
“Women are going to have their day!” he echoed, ironically. “What sort of a day do you suppose it will be? Confusion worse confounded!”
She was silent.
“Woman’s day,” he went on sententiously, “means Man. Man at morn,—man at noon,—man at night. Woman adores man,—licks his boots metaphorically whenever he gives her the chance. A Man and a new Hat—that’s enough for Woman’s day!”
She laughed.
“What a funny old person you are!” she exclaimed. “You have such fossil ideas!—positively fossil!—embedded in rock!—and they’ll never change! That’s the worst of being over-learned in one direction,—I’m sure it narrows the mind!”
He began to feel irritated,—yes, really irritated with this bunch of blue and white femininity seated opposite to him in such graceful ease.
“My mind is not narrow,” he said, stiffly. “And though it may please you to consider me a fossil—”
“I didn’t say you were a fossil,” she interposed. “I said you had fossil ideas—”
“It is the same thing,” he retorted. “A man and his ideas are one. I certainly have not a mind adapted to examine the trifling sentiments which affect your sex, but the opinions I have formed are based on long experience. You express a childish pleasure in the fancy that women are going to have their day,—now I maintain that they have always had it, to the fullest extent of their very limited capabilities. Any wider range of effort would bring them nothing but disaster.”
With this he clapped a misshapen old “Homburg” hat on his head, opened the window, which was really a glass door, and went out into the garden, puffing at his briar. He had not a good figure—it was inclined to be stumpy, but there was a certain pathetic droop of his shoulders which betrayed both weariness and age, and the pretty Sentimentalist, quick to observe this, was suddenly touched and compassionate. She sprang up and ran after him.
“Don’t be cross!” she said. “I’m sorry I called your ideas fossils! But—you know—fossils are really wonderful things!”
Her laughing blue eyes, her tossing fair hair, and the bewildering “frou-frou” of her dainty blue and white silk and chiffon garments made quite a stir in the calm evening silence of the garden,—and for the moment the self-centred, self-opiniated, self-styled “Philosopher” felt a sudden twinge of shamed conscience. In his own heart he knew he was what he would call “amusing himself” with a bright feminine creature who took the world on trust and accepted him at his own inflated valuation,—he found it convenient and agreeable to stay at her father’s house and enjoy the luxuries of a well-equipped home without paying for it—especially when he could talk to a pretty hostess and subtly insinuate a kind of love-making without any reality in it. Her mother was dead—she was alone to receive and entertain such guests as her pedantic father invited to flatter him on his personal belief in himself as a great philologist,—she was,—(in that undefended condition)—“fair game” to such a man as the Philosopher. There was Jack—Jack was certainly a bore—but after all he was merely a neighbour, the eldest son of what the Philosopher called a “doubtful” American, who had taken a small cottage some little way down the river for the fishing season. Jack really didn’t count for much. So the Philosopher smoothed his furrowed brow and pretended to be appeased, as he replied to the soft voice ringing in his ears—
“I’m not cross,” he said. “I’m never cross! I never quarrel! It’s you! You! You fly into a tantrum directly you are contradicted. You can’t bear to be contradicted. And you call me a fossil! Nice way to talk! Never mind!—I forgive you!”
With which grandiloquent assurance he took her hand and patted it. She withdrew it gently,—she felt he was unjust. She knew she had not “flown into a tantrum” and that what she had said was merely playful and without any thought of “quarrel.” She walked beside him in the glamour of the late after-glow for a few paces in silence,—and he was uncomfortably conscious that the delicate subtlety of her personality expressed an unspoken but nevertheless decisive lessening of her appreciation of him as a man.
“And so,” he said, presently, with a laboured attempt at lightness—“you approve of Jack as a modern Knight-errant swearing eternal fidelity?”
“I approve of Jack entirely—as Jack,” she answered, quietly. “He’s a good fellow, and very unselfish.”
The Philosopher gave her a blinking, side-long glance.
“Really! Has he managed to impress that favourable view of himself upon your credulous mind?”
“I don’t think he has tried to impress anything at all upon me,” she said. “Only I notice that he always considers the pleasure of other people more than his own.”
“Exceedingly quixotic,” commented the Philosopher, drily. “And all the merest affectation. The man who is always looking after the pleasure of other people attracts attention to himself—which is what he seeks. The man who looks after his own comfort passes without notice,—which is the right attitude. To call people’s attention to yourself by any action whatsoever is very bad form.”
She looked at him in wondering enquiry.
“The man,” pursued the Philosopher, hugging himself as it were in the wrapping of his own theories—“who persists in handing round bread-and-butter and cake at a tea-table instead of sitting still, is a nuisance. His plain business is to help himself, and let others take care of their own needs. It is not his business to see whether the women get their bread-and-butter and cake—in these days of female emancipation they can look after themselves. He is a much more sensible creature when he does not obtrude himself upon them by tiresome and needless attentions. The same rule should apply to door-opening. There are men who invariably disturb conversation by jumping up to open a door for a woman to pass out. Detestable! I have had many a good story of mine spoilt by this atrocious habit,—Americans always do it.”
“Americans are very kind to women,” she said. “I like their ways.”
He sniffed, as though offended by some noxious odour.
“You do, do you?” he retorted. “Well—I don’t.”
There was a pause. Presently—
“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there much more work to do?”
He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the stump of a tree.
“A great deal,” he replied. “A very great deal more! Our researches lead us deeper and deeper—into the most astonishing intricacies of language—indeed one can positively say that language makes history. Language creates dynasties and destroys them,—Language crowns kings and equally decapitates them—Language—”
The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.
“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”
“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that there was so little soup for so learned a man—still, learned as he was, he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather boresome on this particular evening,—the Philosopher and her father prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist, a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,—and wondered, a trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her father,—and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same bent of research,—and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a lonely little person,—and when the Philosopher first appeared on her limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy, because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage about the authors they both admired,—and she was certain he would have a splendid character—generous, noble, patient, kind—because—oh, well!—because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted him at the ideal valuation,—a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought—and he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,—though her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it. She was sorry for him too, in a way—he appeared to be a neglected sort of creature, albeit an authority on dull subjects in dull weekly journals and monthly magazines,—his coats were shabby, his shirt-cuffs frayed at the edges,—and he never at any time was what is called “well-groomed.” She did not realise that his generally unkempt condition was part of his particular “philosophic” manner,—a kind of advertised contempt for conventional cleanliness. He could be very agreeable when he chose,—almost lovable;—he could be amusing, entertaining and witty by turns; and when strangers first met him, they generally received a most favourable impression. The second meeting, however, unfortunately swamped the effect of the first,—and when he stayed on and on in a house, as he was doing now, there were times when his room was more desired than his company. But a kind of glamour,—a reflex glitter of genius in him,—had somewhat blinded the Sentimentalist to any clear perception of his true character as a man, apart altogether from his literary distinction,—and though she had begun to be uneasy and dubious as to his sincerity and good feeling, she would not give way to these thoughts, no matter how urgently they pressed upon her. And while she mused, and looked up at the stars, they seemed to look responsively down upon her in a winking, twinkling way of bright suggestiveness.
“What a quaint little soul it is!” so they might have expressed themselves in a couple of light-flashes. “Here it lives, tricking itself into thinking an egotist a great man! We know better!”
And they sparkled their emphatic meaning through the dark veil of air, while she, leaving her window-post of observation, took her embroidery and went down to the billiard-room there to sit in silent patience while her father and the Philosopher played a long game, as they did every night with an unwearying pertinacity till bed-time. They did not consider whether she was amused or bored by what to themselves was their own consummate skill in handling the cue, and she would gladly have stayed away but that her father expected her to act as “marker” if desired, and otherwise make herself useful. The whole business was frightfully dull as far as she was concerned—she was tired to death of the continuous click of the billiard balls, and sometimes heard them in her dreams, so incessantly were they rolled about night after night. The oddest thing to her mind was that the Philosopher never seemed tired of the game. He never spoke to her while engaged in it—or, for that matter, to her father except in monosyllables,—round and round the table he strutted, cue in hand, pipe in mouth, without a thought for anything or anybody but himself. He played more skilfully than his host, and never lost an opportunity of asserting the fact,—and sometimes when the gentle Sentimentalist saw her father getting redder and more congested in the face with suppressed annoyance at his various “misses” she was both sorry and anxious lest his restrained feeling should culminate in an attack of illness. However, it was no use for her to confide these fears to the Philosopher; he had the greatest contempt for illness that affected anybody but himself. But—after all!—she decided it was something of an advantage to know a man who could always get an article into the big “Reviews” provided it were only dull enough,—it was surely a privilege to associate with such a powerful personage!—and it was an understood thing that gifted men—Philosophers—were apt to become self-centred. Now Jack,—oh, Jack was not self-centred—but then he was not clever—he was—well!—he was just “Jack”!
CHAPTER V
ON a warm August morning it is not altogether unpleasant to recline on a long lounge chair in the deep soft shadow of full-foliaged trees and resign one’s self to meditation which may or may not be profitable. The Philosopher was in this condition of dolce far niente, and though he did not present an altogether elegant appearance in the recumbent attitude he was for the moment more concerned with inward comfort than exterior effect. He was in a thinking mood. He was taking himself seriously to task and considering whether he should marry. He was not really a marrying man, but it occurred to him now and then that he was no longer young, and that it might be necessary to have some one to take care of him. No one was so well adapted to “take care” of an ageing, gouty, grumpy man with a touch of intellectuality about him as a wife. A wife with a sufficiency of good looks to be agreeable to the eye,—a wife with a sufficiency of money in her own right to save her husband all extra exertion in the business of living. Now the Philosopher had just by chance found out that his little friend and hostess, the Sentimentalist, had or would have money. He thought, with pleasing placidity, of a college friend of his own, who had married a woman with money, and who had gleefully rejoiced in his position, with refreshing candour, saying,—“A Plum I tell you! A regular Plum! Ripe and ready!—fell into my mouth with a bang!”
The Philosopher was by no means certain that the Sentimentalist was a Plum. She was very kind to him,—she had pretty, docile, winsome ways, and seemed disposed to “play” with him as a kitten plays with a ball of wool,—she was evidently amused when he held her hand, or patted her shoulder,—but he felt more than positive that she would not “fall into his mouth with a bang!” Her father had confided to him that he meant to leave her a considerable fortune,—“and,” mused the Philosopher, dreamily,—“the old gentleman is getting very shaky. Memory going too,—sense of proportion quite lost.” He yawned, and drove off a bouncing bumble-bee that just then presumed to come too near his rather prominent nose,—then, stretching himself lazily half rose from his reclining attitude as he perceived a little white figure approaching him from the further garden, with a newspaper in its hand. He waited, a trifle impatiently.
“Dear me, what a time she is!” he complained sotto voce. “She doesn’t read newspapers as a rule. What’s in the wind now?”
For she had looked up suddenly, and seeing him, began to run. For a mere Sentimentalist she ran well,—gracefully and swiftly.
“Such news!” she cried, as she approached him. “Such terrible news! England has declared war with Germany!”
“Fiddlesticks!” said the Philosopher, emphatically. “I don’t believe a word of it!”
A little breathless with her run she swept some straying curls of gold from her eyes, and handed him the paper. There was the announcement sure enough—the brief, curt statement that was to drench Europe with blood. But the Philosopher was obstinate.
“All twaddle!” he declared. “Newspaper lies and twaddle!”
Her blue eyes rested upon him with something of wonder and sadness.
“You think so? I hope you may be right!” she said, earnestly. “Oh, I do hope you may be right!”
“Of course, I’m right,” he declared. “I’ve got some common sense. I know how these things are worked up I tell you! What’s it all about?” Here he scanned the newspaper again. “Belgium? What on earth have we got to do with Belgium! Nice muddle we make of everything! Belgium wants to protect France from invasion?—well, let her! There’s no need for us to put our fingers into the pie! Let them all settle their own affairs!”
“But—honour?—” she suggested.
“Honour? It depends on what’s called honour. A hundred years ago we were fighting the French at Waterloo—now we want to defend them. Why? We didn’t help them in the Franco-German war. We let them fight it out. So we should now. Twaddle, I tell you!—all twaddle!”
She smiled and sighed.
“Well, it seems to me very serious news,” she said. “It has quite spoilt the day for me.”
“Why should it spoil the day?” he demanded. “What have you got to do with it? Here you are in a nice garden,—lovely weather—and I believe you’ve got a new hat on. What else can any woman want?”
She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders, which implied that he was not worth the trouble of answering. He continued, pleased with his own remarks:
“Women know nothing about war or politics,” he said. “They are not expected to know. They have their homes and their home duties—”
“And their men,” she interposed. “Their husbands and brothers and lovers,—in war these have to go and fight—”
“Of course they have,” agreed the Philosopher. “Most of them are only fit for cannon-fodder.”
She flushed angrily.
“Oh! Do you mean that?” she exclaimed.
“Of course I mean it! Ordinary men are exceedingly stupid—they have just two predominating ideas, food and money. The world loses nothing when this sort of eating, spending microbes are cleared out by a big war—on the contrary things go on better without them after they are killed off.”
“And the women who loved them?” she asked, indignantly.
He smiled.
“You are a dear little goose!” he said, quite kindly. “You are always thinking about people who ‘love’ each other. How many of them do you suppose there are?”
She made no reply.
“Love,” went on the Philosopher, “is a rare thing. In fact it is so rare that it may be said not to exist,—except in romantic novels and poetry,—two very unreliable forms of literature. What is called ‘love’ is merely the attraction of opposite sexes—the ordinary procedure of the world of nature.” He paused. He was much inclined to discourse on the propagation of species, but somehow he found it difficult. The graceful little figure beside him hardly suited his ideas of intended comparison with the rest of the animal world. Strictly speaking, she was of course an animal of the female gender, as he was an animal of the male,—but he could not fit in his discourse on natural selection with a bunch of white frippery, fair hair and a winsome smile. “Love,” he concluded, lamely, “is a poet’s dream.”
“I wonder you admit it is as much as that!” she said,—and her eyes flashed. “I agree with you to some extent—but to me it is God’s dream of the world!”
He gazed at her, amused.
“Very far-fetched!” he said. “Did you get that out of a book? Of course you did! Well, all I can say is that if there is a God dreaming anything about the world, the dream is something of a nightmare. You’re a woman and you don’t think. Have you ever seen a London slum? No. Well, men and women herd there together like brutes, wives striking husbands and husbands kicking wives, while little sentimentalists like you live in the country among roses and talk about ‘love.’ Love! Fiddlesticks! Very young people—girls and boys,—imagine they ‘love’ like Romeo and Juliet,—but have you ever thought how Romeo and Juliet would have got on as Mr. and Mrs. Montagu?”
She laughed—she could not help laughing.
“No, indeed!” she answered. “I’ve never gone so far as that!”
“Gone so far!” echoed the Philosopher, ironically. “That’s not going far! That’s simply the plain commonplace line of conduct. To live together as Mr. and Mrs. Montagu would have entailed far more heroism than to swallow poison or stab one’s self with a dagger after a romantic soliloquy. Mrs. Montagu would have had to order the dinner and Mr. Montagu in his turn would have had to pay the bills. All the nonsense they talked out of window to each other would have been clean forgotten. He would have shown himself in slippers and she in a dressing gown. The silks and velvets they wore as two precocious young humbugs at old Capulet’s ball—or rather the silks and velvets the actors wear who impersonate them nowadays, would have had very little place in their wardrobe. They would have settled down to the plain routine of life,—perfect commonplace, without any sentiment.”
She stood, looking at him earnestly.
“I am sorry for you!” she said. “Your outlook is so very dreary! It’s like opening a window on a back-yard!”
He was not displeased.
“Back-yards are useful and necessary,” he observed, complacently. “So are dust-holes. Sentiment and silliness are not necessary.”
Suddenly she laughed merrily.
“I really think you ought to get married!” she said. “You are such an admirer of the commonplace that you ought to try matrimony!”
He smiled, a superior smile.
“Possibly I may try it,” he answered, “if circumstances are favourable! But I would never play a Romeo.”
Her laughter rang out again.
“I should think not!” she exclaimed. “You couldn’t! Oh, dear, no! Fancy you under a balcony ‘sighing like a furnace’ and saying: