II
WITHOUT present prejudice to the question of his innermost personality, Val was at least a triumph of externals. Perhaps I should say of non-essentials—of things which a man might not have, and yet be intrinsically as good a man—but, having which, he was, for all outside and foreign purposes, a man far more efficient. Val was, as I shall indicate in a moment, a bit of a philosopher himself, so he could not with reason object to being thus philosophically considered. Birth had been his discreet friend—a friend in setting him in the inner ring, among the families which survive, peaks of aristocracy, above the flood of democracy, and are more successful than Canute was in cajoling the waves; discreet in so ordering descent that, unless a robust earl, his uncle, died prematurely, Val had time to lead the House of Commons (or anything of that sort) before suffering an involuntary ascension, which might or might not be, at the political moment, convenient. He had money, too—a competence without waiting for his uncle’s shoes. He had no need to hunt a fortune: it was merely advisable for him, and natural too, to annex one under temptations not necessarily unromantic. Nobody could call Miss Constantine necessarily unromantic.
So much for birth, with all the extraordinary start it gives—a handicap of no less than fifteen years, one might be inclined to say, roughly generalising on a comparison of the chances of the “born” and of the bourgeois. Now, about brains. If you come to think of it, brains were really a concession on Val’s part; he could have achieved the Cabinet without them—given a clever Prime Minister, at least. But he had them—just as splendid shop-window brains as his birth was flawless under the most minute Heralds’ College inspection. There was, indeed, a lavishness about his mental endowment. He ventured to have more than one subject—a dangerous extravagance in a rising statesman. North Africa was his professional subject—his foreign affairs subject. But he was also a linguist, an authority on French plays, and a specialist on the Duc de Reichstadt. Also he had written a volume of literary essays; and, finally, to add a sense of solidity to his intellectual equipment, he was a philosopher. He had written, and Mr Murray had published, a short book called “The Religion of Primitive Man.” This work he evolved on quiet evenings in his flat off Berkeley Square in two months of an early winter in London. All that can be said about it is that it sounded very probable, and set forth in exceedingly eloquent language what primitive man ought to have believed, even if he did not, because it led to a most orthodox, if remote, conclusion. Whether he did or not, Val, and most other people, had neither time nor inclination to discover. That would, in fact, have needed a lot of reading. After all, Val might plead the example of some eminent metaphysicians.
Birth, brains—now comes the rarest of Val’s possessions, one that must be handled most delicately by one who would do Val justice at any cost. I mean Val’s beauty. Val himself bore it lightly, with a debonair depreciation which stopped only, but definitely, short of unconsciousness. He had hereditary claims to it; a grandmother had attracted—and by a rarer touch of distinction repelled—royalty. But Val made it all his own. A slim figure, bordering on six feet; aquiline features, a trifle ruddy in hue; hands long and slender; above all, perhaps, a mass of black hair touched with white—ever so lightly silver-clad. The greyness proclaimed itself premature, and brought contrast to bear on the youthfulness of the face beneath—a face the juvenility of which survived the problems of North Africa and his triumphs in the à priori. Add to this, a fine tradition of schoolboy and university athletics, and—well, a way with him of which women would talk in moments of confidence.
Speaking quite seriously, I cannot suppose that such a fascinating person has often appeared; never, surely, a more decorative? And it was “all but settled”! Why, then, those glances toward our end of the table? Because they were not for me, as I have already acknowledged. Kirby? The bullet-head, with its close-cropped wire-thick hair? Could that draw her eyes from the glories of Val’s sable-silver crown? These things are unaccountable; such really appeared to be the case.