CHAPTER VI
The man to whom he gave his ticket at the station of Balham and Upper Tooting told him that he could walk to Hyperion Terrace in about ten minutes. He perceived that he would reach the house too early if he proceeded there at once, so he strolled awhile in the opposite direction. The pavements were dry, and he was thankful, for he had seen no cab when he came down the station stairs, and he would have been chagrined to present himself in muddy boots.
When he estimated that he would arrive at Beau Séjour none too soon to be welcome, he retraced his steps, and now anticipation warmed his blood once more. After all, she was the woman who had been Mary Page—it was a piece of his boyhood that awaited him. Indeed he was repentant that he had cavilled at minor defects. By dint of inquiries he found the way to Hyperion Terrace. It was new, and red, and all that a man who could call a street "Hyperion Terrace" would naturally create.
A very small servant, wearing a very pretentious cap, showed him at once to the drawing-room, where "The Soul's Awakening" met his distressed view, on a pink and gold wall-paper. He heard flying footsteps overhead, sounds of discomposure; there are houses at which a visitor always arrives too early. His nerves were tremulous while he sat alone. But Mary's home would have pleased him better if it had been no more than a single room, with a decent etching over a bed masquerading as a sideboard, and half-a-dozen shilling classics on a shelf.
"Mr. Warrener? How d' ye do?"
She advanced towards him with a wide smile, a large and masculine woman wearing a vivid silk blouse, and an air of having dressed herself in a hurry. She wore also—with a droll effort at deception—a string of "pearls" which, if it had been real, would have been worth more than the street. For an instant his heart seemed to drop into his stomach; and in the next an overwhelming compassion for her swept him. He could have shed tears for her, as he took her hand, and remembered that she had once been a dainty child.
"Mrs. Barchester-Bailey—so good of you to let me call."
"Oh, I'm sure it was very kind of you to come!" she said. "Won't you sit down? ... How very odd that you should have been living in Mowbray Lodge, isn't it? Quite a coincidence."
"Yes," he said, "yes. I wanted a place there, and Mowbray Lodge happened to be to let for a few months. It was the first time I had been to Sweetbay since that summer.... Your old house looks just the same—the outside at least; I've not been in it."
"Really?" she said. "Yes—does it?"
"Yes.... And the lane looks just the same too, until you get to the field; and then—then there isn't one. But perhaps that had vanished before you left?"
"No, there was no change when I was down there last, but that's a long while ago! Horrid old place! I'm very glad there's nothing to take me there any more."
"Didn't you like it?" he asked, pained.
"Oh, it was so slow! I wonder how I put up with it as long as I did. Didn't you find it slow? I must have gaiety. People tell me I'm a regular gadabout, but—" She laughed—"one's only young once, Mr. Warrener; I believe in having a good time while I can. I say I shall have plenty of time to be on the shelf by-and-by."
She was very, very plain. It was while he was thinking how plain she was, how ruthless the years had been to her, that the sudden pity for himself engulfed him—the pathetic consciousness that she must be reflecting how hard the years had been on him.
"It can't be difficult for you to have a good time," he returned, labouredly light.
"Well, I don't think it is," she declared; she tossed her large head, and rolled colourless eyes at him archly. "People tell me I've quite woke Tooting up since I've been here, and I must say I've done my best. I must lead. I mean to say if I'd been a man I should have liked to be a great politician, or a great general, you know."
"You could be nothing more potent than Mrs. Barchester-Bailey."
"Oh now that's very sweet of you!" she said. "But I mean to say I must lead. I started the Tooting 'Thursdays.' You mustn't think I'm just a frivolous little woman who cares for nothing but pleasure—I'm—I'm very interested in literature too. At the 'Thursdays' we have literary discussions. Next week the subject is Miss Verbena's novels. Now which do you think is Miss Verbena's greatest novel?"
He could only assume that she never saw a comic paper. "I—I'm afraid I haven't read any of them," he owned.
"Oh! Oh, you surprise me. Oh, but you must: they're enormously clever. Ettie Verbena is quite my favourite novelist, excepting perhaps that dear man who writes those immensely clever books that never offend in any way. So pure they are, such a true religious spirit in them! You know, Mr. Warrener, I'm a curious mixture. People tell me that I seem to enjoy myself just as much talking to a very clever man as when I'm romping through a barn-dance. And it's true you know; that is me. But I suppose you're more interested in stocks and shares, and things like that, than in books?"
"Well, I—I shouldn't describe myself as widely-read," answered Conrad; "still books do interest me."
"Oh well, then, you must come on one of my At-Home days next time," she said graciously; "one of the ladies you'll meet writes for 'Winsome Words,' and you'll meet several people you'll like."
"I should be charmed," he said.
The servant bustled in, and carried a bamboo table to the hearth. As she threw the teacloth over it, a cold wind blew through his hair.
"Do your cousins live in London?" inquired Mrs. Barchester-Bailey, with the tail of a worried eye on the maid's blunders.
"Yes," he said, "yes, they do. But I haven't seen them since I came back. I'm not sure whether they're in town."
"Are they married?"
"Yes," he said again. "Oh yes, they're married—both of them."
"Where are they?" she asked; "anywhere this way?"
"No; unfortunately they're a long way off. That's the drawback to town, isn't it? Everybody lives at such a distance from everybody else."
"Oh, I don't know," she said; "one can get about so quickly nowadays. What part are they in?"
"Nina lives in Regent's Park," he replied, "where the mists are."
"Oh, really? Regent's Park?" She seemed impressed. "I was wondering whether she would care to join our Thursday debates—we want to get as many members as we can. Two of the ladies come over from Wandsworth, but from Regent's Park it would be a drag certainly. Shall I put in sugar and milk?"
"Please." He took the cup, and sat down again—and knew that he had entered on that grade of society where there are no more men and women, and they all become "ladies" and "gentlemen."
"And the other one—'Gina?" she continued.
He felt very uncomfortable; he wouldn't say "Mayfair."
"'Gina lives further west," he murmured. "No, I won't have any cake, thank you."
"Then your cousins are quite high up?" she exclaimed.
"'High up?'"
"They're quite swells?"
"Oh!" he shrugged his shoulders. "No, I don't think I should call them that. Too swell for me, rather, but then I'm half a Colonial, and the other half a bohemian. I haven't been Home long—it's all strange to me; until I came out here to-day I had no idea London could be so picturesque. How glorious your Common must be in the summer!"
"So healthy!" she said promptly; "the air is so fine. We moved here from the West-end for the children's sake."
"You have children?"
"Oh!" she rolled her eyes again. "Four, Mr. Warrener. My eldest boy is getting quite big—people tell me they wouldn't believe he was mine at all, but it makes me feel quite old sometimes, to look at him. I think it's cruel of children to grow up, don't you?"
He stifled a sad assent. "Sometimes they grow up still more charming," he said.
"Oh, now, that's very sweet of you! Now really that's very pretty. But I mean to say I think it's cruel to us when they shoot up so fast. You're not married yourself yet, eh?"
"No, I hate asking favours."
"What a modest way of putting it! But you should. A good wife would be the making of you, and give you something to think about. Don't you know that?"
"I'm sure of it. A man can have no greater blessing than a good wife—excepting none," he concluded mentally. "Shall I be allowed to see them before I go?"
"The children? Would you like to? Dudley is out, but the others are just going to have tea in the next room. My husband isn't back from the city yet, of course. Oh, the city! What a hold it does get on you men. As if it really mattered whether you made an extra thousand pounds one month or not!" A trayful of crockery rattled, and the footsteps of the little servant thudded through the passage.
"You're quite right," said Conrad. "What does it matter, when one comes to think of it?"
"Not but what Herbert's the best of boys," she added. "If it weren't that——" She hesitated, she endeavoured to look confused. "The fact is, he's—he's jealous, he's a very jealous man. Not that he has any reason to be—not exactly. Of course I'm awfully fond of him; he's a dear old silly! But I mean to say I can't help it when men want to talk to me—now can I? If I get half-a-dozen men round me, even though we're only talking about the simplest thing, he doesn't like it. Of course it makes it awfully awkward for me socially."
"It must," responded Conrad; "yes, I can understand that."
"I tell him he should have married a different woman." She giggled.
"Ah, but how unreasonable of you!" he said. "Then—if they won't mind being disturbed—I am really to see your children?"
"Oh, they won't mind at all, but I'm afraid you'll find them very untidy—they've just been having high jinks."
She led him to them presently, and slammed the door behind her. It shook his thoughts to the clergyman's description of Mrs. Page. Heredity again, perhaps. Two girls of about twelve or fourteen years of age and a boy in a pinafore were sitting at a table. At their mother and the visitor's entrance, they all took their hands off the cloth and stared.
"And so this is the family?" cried Conrad, trying to sound enthusiastic. "How do you do? And will you say 'how do you do' to me, my little man?"
Three limp hands flopped to him in turn, and he stood contemplating the group, while the lady cooed silly questions to them, and elicited dull, constrained replies. They were not attractive children; they were indeed singularly uninteresting children—even for other people's, whose virtues seldom strike us vividly. To Conrad, who failed to allow sufficiently for their shyness, they appeared stupidity personified. "Yes," and "No," they answered; and their eyes were round, and their mouths ajar. Like all children, from the lower to the middle classes inclusive, they proclaimed instantaneously the social stratum of their parents. With a monosyllable a child will do this. It is by no means impossible for a man to exchange remarks with a girl from a show-room, and at the end of five minutes to be still uncertain to what class she belongs. But when the intrusive little cub in the sailor suit romps up to her, he betrays the listless beauty's entourage with the first slovenly words he drops.
"Have your cousins any children, Mr. Warrener?"
"Yes," he said, "oh yes, they have three or four each." He was speculating what individuality lay concealed behind the vacant fronts. Their mother had been no older than the eldest when he was sick with romance for her—oh, positively "romance," although its expression had been ludicrous in that period. Was it possible that these meaningless little girls also had precocity and sweethearts? Appalling thought—had Mary been so unpleasant? Had he idealised a dirty mouth?
"I should like to see them. I wish Nina and—er—'Gina would come over one morning to lunch." Her tone was painfully eager. "Or I might look them up. Do you know their 'days'?"
"No," he murmured, "I can't say I do. I——"
"Perhaps they'll come with you next time?"
"I hope you'll see them sooner; it's more than likely I go back to Paris in a day or two—I only left a few weeks ago. I may remain there through the year."
"Oh, really?" she exclaimed. "Then you have no business in London? Mary," she broke off impatiently, "what is it? What is Ferdie fidgeting about for—what does he want?"
"Jam, ma," said the plainer of the girls in a whisper.
"What do you say? Do speak up, dear."
"Jam, ma," repeated her daughter; "he wants jam on the first piece."
"Well, give him it then. Only this once, now, darling. You shouldn't tease him so, Mary—remember he's a very little boy."
Mary minor leant towards him, and Conrad thought she muttered "Little pig!"
"Then you have nothing to do in London?" resumed the lady, as he followed her from the room.
"Quite all that I hoped to do in London I have done this afternoon," he smiled. "As a matter of fact, I don't suppose I shall call on anybody else before I leave." But he saw clearly that she wanted to know the women who were "high up," and he was self-reproachful. Distressed, he wished that he had made no reference to them in his letter.
"Sha'n't you even go to see your cousins?" she persisted. "But you say you're not sure if they're in town? If they are, any day would suit me. If they would drop me a line——"
"No," he said, "I'm not sure; I haven't heard from either of them since they left Sweetbay." He was at the point of mentioning Nina's address; he reminded himself that he had a duty to Nina too.
Yet a moment later he succumbed. The remembrance of what he had written, even civility itself, prevented his parrying so keen an aim as Mrs. Barchester-Bailey's. He mentioned the address, and he said how pretty the plain children were, and regretted that her husband was not in. He sat smiling at boredom for five minutes longer, and when he escaped at last he had the reward of knowing that she thought he admired her very much. He had owed her that.
As he felt the air in his lungs he thanked heaven. Well, he would explain the occurrence to Nina, who would consider him an idiot, and tell her to expect a speedy visit. The rest lay with the visitor herself—with her powers to please. For his own part, never, never did he want to see her again. He walked fast, her image still pursuing him. What an exhausting woman!
He dined at his club and wondered if it would be bad taste for so new a member to make a complaint to the committee. Afterwards he drifted into a music-hall, where quailing brutes who had been created to scamper on four legs were distorted to maintain a smirking brute who was unworthy to walk on two. The animals' sufferings diverted the audience vastly, and the applause sickened Conrad more than the club dinner.
And though his disappointment at Tooting may sound a very trivial matter, it continued to depress him. He was sad, not because one woman was different from what he had hoped to find her, but because the difference in the one woman typified so much that seemed pathetic to him in life. And to sneer at him as a sentimentalist absorbed by opal-tinted sorrows blown of indolence, would not be conclusive. It is, of course, natural that those of us who have to struggle should set up the Man of Leisure as a figure to be pelted with precepts—indeed, we pelt so hard at the silver spoon in his mouth that between the shies we might well reflect that Ethics is often an alias of Envy—but with Conrad the leisure was quite recent and the sentiment had ached for years. In his case wealth had not formed a temperament, wealth had simply freed it.
Let us accept him as he was. My business is to present, not to defend. Were tales tellable only when the "hero" fulfilled both definitions of the word, reviewers would have less to do. If I could draw, a frontispiece should enlist your sympathies for him: "Conrad and the Coquette;" for that is Youth—a laughing jilt showing us her heels, and tempting over her dimpled shoulder as she flies.
This is where you begin to think me insufferably dull. I see your fair brow clouding, I can see your beautiful lips shaping to say, "Oh, bother!" Be patient with me; we have arrived at a brief interval in which nothing particular happened. It is true that soon afterwards Conrad went to Monte Carlo, but details would not interest you in the least. Be gracious to me; yield to the book another finger-tip—I feel it slipping. Say, "Poor drivel as it is, a man has written it in the hope of pleasing me." For he has indeed. On many a fine morning I have plodded when I would rather have sunned myself where the band played; on many an evening I have wound my feet round the legs of the table and budged not, when the next room and a new novel—paid for and unopened—wooed me as with a siren song. And all to win a smile from You.
I have thought of you so often, and wanted to know you; you don't realise how I have longed to meet you—to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain—the poise of the head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed that you would recognise me; but you said no word—you passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are sitting you are just a charming woman, with "a local habitation and a name;" but to me you are not Miss or Madam, not M. or N., you are a Power, and I have sought you by a name you have not heard—you are my Public.
And O my Lady, I am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses, though you are far away, and I can't hear your answer. I do wrong to speak like this; I may be arraigned for speaking; I have broken laws for the honour of addressing you—among all the men who have worshipped you, has one done more?—and I will never offend again. But in this breathless minute while I dare, I would say: "Remember that overleaf, and in every line unto the end I shall be picturing you, working for you, trembling lest you frown." Unto the End. Forgive me. I have sinned, but I exult—it is as if I had touched your hand across the page.