I
I SHOULD never have thought it of a man not only called John Robinson, but who looked the name so completely. True, he had been born abroad in a land of mystery, but with that he had nothing to do. Owing to a series of circumstances over which Robinson exerted no control whatever, he first saw daylight on a Thibetan tableland, and, what is more, did not return to his mother-country until he was one-and-twenty years of age; but there was little to suggest these facts about him. He had the most purely British middle-class manners, instincts, appetites and mould of mind that ever I saw. For ten years I knew him intimately, and never guessed that anything in the least uncommon lurked beneath his fat exterior. I even respected him. He dwelt alone with an unmarried sister but little older than himself and he went to business in the City daily. After travelling upon the same omnibus with him every morning, winter and summer, for five years, the English reserve of the man thawed, and we grew acquainted. He was a giant in stature, I am undersized; he had an extraordinary amount of physical courage, I possess none; he, indeed, differed from me in a thousand ways, and that was doubtless the reason why we became such firm friends. Our political opinions, moreover, were tinged by the same morning journal, and when similar views on great questions of the day bind men together, it often happens that warm if not lasting friendships are the result. Of course, I never asked for the key of Robinson’s mystery; I did not so much as dream that he had a mystery. Once only might I have read some indication of a side to his character that I had not guessed at; but I never really grasped the significance of certain remarks uttered by him on his way to town one morning, though they surprised me at the time. Having read, with some interest, a leading article on occult theosophy—which approached that belief in a disrespectful spirit—Robinson spoke.
“What fools men are!” he said. “How can this poor penny-a-liner possibly know what he is talking about? Just listen: ‘Mahatmas are a figment to bolster a cause which human wisdom has agreed to pronounce unsound.’ There’s bosh for you!”
I recollected his early life in Thibet.
“You, who dwelt in a Mahatma country, ought to know,” I said.
“I do,” he answered. “Mahatmas may not be as common as rabbits, but they exist, and what’s more, they can do a great many remarkable things.”
“But,” I said, “nothing to the purpose?”
“On the contrary,” he answered, “they achieve much good in a quiet way. The secrets of Nature are in their grasp. It argues something in their favour that they have not turned the world upside down years ago. Their self-control is the most remarkable thing about them.”
“You astound me, Robinson,” I replied. “Is it possible that you harbour friendly opinions towards esoteric Buddhism and kindred fantastic conceits of vain men?”
“Nothing fantastic or vain about it,” he answered. “I am an esoteric Buddhist myself.”
I nearly fell off the omnibus from sheer surprise. Robinson had all the outward appearance of a churchwarden or sidesman. You might have wagered money that he wore a frock-coat on Sundays, and got the people nicely seated in some place of modern worship, and handed round a plate or a bag at the appointed time. And yet he turned out to be an esoteric Buddhist.
“You never told me this,” I said.
“Why should I?” he asked, very reasonably. “Wise men don’t blaze abroad their opinions for nothing. I don’t know what you are for that matter, and I don’t want to.”
Nevertheless, I told him, and he said that I might as well pursue that idea as any other. Then he resumed his newspaper.
Time passed, and I forgot the matter, and was contented to feel that Robinson had high morals and even refined instincts for such a large man. I came to know him well and went home with him to tea and made the acquaintance of his sister. He told me privately that she was a saintly woman who had seen sorrow and just missed matrimony by a hair’s breadth.
“But,” he said, “I am anxious to see her married. She is only hovering on forty now and will make a good man happy yet.”
For my part I doubted it. Miss Robinson was a painfully plain person, and so abundantly proportioned in every direction physically, that I was conscious of cutting a figure almost ludicrous when sitting beside her. Personally, though Robinson always declared that she “hovered near forty,” my opinion rather inclined me to suspect that she was fluttering past forty-five and that rapidly. She wanted a husband and hope was not dead. I saw nothing saintly in her myself. She struck me as being a trifle vulgar. I could not imagine a man was living in London or the suburbs who would have married her in cold blood.
After I had visited at their little house near Regent’s Park on two or three occasions, Robinson came to smoke a pipe with me at my bachelor diggings. During that evening our friendship advanced by leaps and bounds. We were both communicative and emptied a bottle of whisky and called each other by our Christian names for the first time, and gave each other a great deal of sound advice. By the way, can an esoteric Buddhist have a Christian name?
“You should marry,” said Robinson.
It wanted only fifteen minutes of midnight when he said it. I laughed.
“Bless you, John,” I said, “such good things are not for me. Why, I’m nearer fifty than you’d guess, and a confirmed bachelor, sir!”
“What’s your opinion of Primrose?” he asked abruptly.
Primrose was his sister. I think I never heard of a woman with a more unsuitable name. It made me uncomfortable to observe how Robinson thus coupled the suggestion of my taking a wife with this question as to my opinion of his sister.
“You are fortunate to have such a sister,” I said.
You cannot tell the truth to a comparative stranger about his sister, unless the truth is polite.
“I’m glad you think so,” answered Robinson. “I happen to know she entertains a very genuine admiration for you. She marvelled only yesterday at tea that no woman had ever won you. She said you must have made a good many hearts ache in your time.”
As a matter of fact I was refused, unconditionally, by a stock-jobber’s second daughter when I was thirty-two, and that is the only glimmer of romance which ever crossed my path. But I did not tell Robinson this. I merely said that his sister was a kind soul.
“Can you picture her a wife?” asked Robinson.
“Very easily,” I answered, which was untrue.
“Can you picture her your wife?” asked Robinson.
The bad taste of such a question appears upon the surface of it.
“No,” I said, and then added like a fool, “Miss Robinson will aspire to a younger cavalier, and one worthier of her than I. She’d never look at an old fossil like Thomas Tarver.”
“Yes, she would,” said Robinson, winking. “Faint heart never won fair lady, you know. Go in and win, my son!”
I attributed it to the whisky, for Robinson was usually refined up to a certain point. To fling his own sister down another man’s throat in this way struck me as being not nice.
I fought to change the conversation, and ultimately succeeded. Presently he went home, and on the following day asked me if I would meet him that evening with his sister at the Zoological Gardens. We often went thither in summer-time to drink a cup of tea and gaze upon the various wonders of animal creation gathered there.
“The Lion House at six-thirty,” said Robinson, and I replied that I would not fail him.
How little I foresaw my evening’s amusement! How far from the wildest nightmare flights of my imagination was the nature of that entertainment which the man John Robinson arranged for me at the Zoological Society’s Gardens.