IV
MRS. BUNDY
A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father, Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom. He went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till long past midnight. The causes of his silence were, as usual, inscrutable. Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding, wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence never came. Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won. But in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest. It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions could be predicated from any precedent experience.
Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever. I'll tell you when I want you," and the boy said no more. His sister had gone away to spend some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.
It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to the society of such friends as were available. Among these was Hilary Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking. He walked with him occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the house. Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly, cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman. She was a person of extraordinary slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right. Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and optimistic friend. Over such youths she exercised a directorship as complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.
"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious land-ladies. Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours. But to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.
Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs. Her whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of sudden fortune. He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned in wrong directions. At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal, nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil which he soon contrived to lose again. Most women would have tired of these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not disconcert her. When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it lasted. When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy. He always came back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his return was sometimes dramatic—as, for instance, when he appeared at midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she could not pay.
"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the Bundy star was in eclipse. And then she would sit down and tell him wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes he had had of being a multimillionaire. Just now, it appeared, he was engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as England. And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter, which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her with a clouded brow.
"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to prosper," she would remark. "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at home. You don't get any fun out of life that way."
Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her lot that he never said it. On the contrary, there was sown in his mind a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.
She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot through his veins at the prophecy.
"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.
"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times too. But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and he'd live the same life again if he had the choice. And so would I, for that matter."
And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as something to be greatly envied.
He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he learned to love her. She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.
One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans for him.
"He wants me to enter the business," he said.
"And why not, laddie?"
"Frankly, I don't like it."
"That's neither here nor there. You've got to live, and as long as a business is honest, one business is as good as another."
"But is it honest?"
He had not meant to ask the question. It came from him unawares. It was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.
"What is dishonest in it?"
"I can't quite tell. But I do know that my father buys land for speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."
"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he has not strawed.' But he's a strong man, is your father. There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.
"Strong, but is he good? I mean, is his way of life right?"
"I canna' tell about that, laddie. But if I was you, I think I wouldn't ask that question about my father. There's a lot of goodness in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they know how to be. There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of gold. He never cheated any man knowingly. He's lost himself much more than men have lost by him. And he'd always give away his last penny to the poor."
"Ah, but that's not the point. I know my father is good in that way. Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense for people who had no legal claim at all on him. But it's his business, it's the method of it. And I must find an answer, for I must join him in the business or refuse it."
"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie. Not that I'll say you're wise, nor even right. Fathers have some claims on their sons after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes. Only if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say so at once."
"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice. And then he added, "There's another trouble, too. How am I to get my living?"
"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with hunger," she said with a laugh.
"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can do. I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."
"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied. "There's very few men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how to do other things that are just as important. There's Bundy, now; you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married him."
"Well, what?"
"A clergyman."
Arthur laughed profanely. The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.
"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."
She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.
"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses, and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a fine bedside manner," she continued. "But my belief is that a man who can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."
"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."
"It isn't a faith, it's a fact. It's just a question of ability. The worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."
Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he knew that it was true. For was not he London bred? Had not his path been made easy for him? And how could that happen without some emasculation of nature? To grow up in streets, carefully paved and graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from offence, provided for without exertion—ah, how different that life from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of will and strength! For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity. For the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in daring. It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to him. He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew conventionally rather than really. Strangely enough, it came to him now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of her husband's hazardous adventures.
"The strong man makes a place for himself"—it was sound doctrine and indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong? The question hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which disturbed and sometimes tortured him. Youth is always a little ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in its capacity for taking itself seriously. Life seems such an immensely solemn business at one-and-twenty. Later on we discover that the decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same whatever we do or say.
Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age. Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great vision to attain.
"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts poor."
"How do you make that out?"
"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she replied. "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but after he becomes rich, nothing happens."
"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"
"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.
As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into wealth.
"Bundy was really rich that time," she remarked. "He'd struck oil in Texas, and had only to sit still and let the oil work for him. It was good fun at first. We took a big house at Kensington, and Bundy spent his time getting cheated over horses, and I spent mine being cheated over sham Sheraton furniture, and when we tired of that we bought pictures, until at last the house was so full of things we couldn't get another stick into it. 'What shall we do now?' says Bundy. 'Let us try being fashionable,' says I." [She uttered the word "fash-ee-on-abell," with an indescribable drawling accent of contempt.] "So we tried that, too, and drove in the Park, and gave dinner-parties, and Bundy had to wear dress-clothes, though he never could make out how to tie his white tie, and made more fuss than enough of it. We got plenty of folk to eat our dinners, but a duller lot I never met. The men all wanted to talk oil, and the women couldn't talk of anything but dress, and men and women alike hung round Bundy, and let him know as plainly as they dared that all they came for was to see if they could get any oil-shares out of him. After a time we grew tired of being fashionable, and Bundy says, 'I think we'll have a yacht.' So we bought a yacht, though neither of us liked the sea, and we made out a summer that way. And all the while the oil was pouring out of those wells in Texas, and the money was pouring in, and we saw no end to it. Then Bundy tried being a philanthropist, and that was really interesting while it lasted. There wasn't a crank in London—nor, one would suppose, in Europe, from the look of his mail-bag—that didn't find him out. They sat upon his doorstep to catch him coming out, and hunted him down the street, and all the men he'd ever known anywhere claimed him as an old friend, so that the poor man lived the life of a partridge on the mountains, as the saying is. He grew quite old-looking, and lost his sleep, and after a time he didn't even read what the papers said about him, which is a pretty bad sign in a man."
"Poor Mr. Bundy!" said Arthur, in mock commiseration.
"Ah! you may well say it, laddie, and poor Mrs. Bundy, too, for I'd never been so miserable in my life. You see, it was the dullness of the thing that made us miserable. When you can get everything you want, you don't want anything after a time."
"And how did it end?"
"Well, one morning I lay a-bed late, for there was nothing particular to get up for, and I could hear Bundy in his dressing-room, opening and shutting drawers, as though he couldn't make up his mind what clothes he wanted to wear. There came a knock on the outer door, and I heard a crumpling of paper, and then he whistled.
"'What is it?' I called out.
"He didn't answer, but I heard him rampaging round. So I jumped out of bed, and ran into the dressing-room, and there stood Bundy laughing to himself, and upon my word he looked happier than I had seen him for twelve months or more.
"'What is it?' I says again.
"And then he looked at me mighty solemn and queer, and says, 'Can ye bear it?'
"'Bear what?' says I.
"'Oh! nothing much,' says he, 'only we're bust. The oil's given out.'
"'Then we're poor?' says I.
"'Poor we are,' says he—'poor as Job. For, you see, I've been spending everything as it came, thinking that that oil would last for ever, and now we're bust.'
"'Hallelujah!' says I. 'That's the best news I've heard a long time.'
"He looked at me a minute, kind of doubtful, and then he burst out laughing, and says, 'I rather think I feel that way myself.'
"'I knew you would,' says I. And then I put my arms round him, and we danced round the room, and I give you my word that was the happiest hour I ever spent in that big house at Kensington. You see, we'd both been dying of dullness, though neither of us liked to say it. We'd got where there weren't any adventures; and that's why life didn't seem worth living."
She looked at Arthur with humorous eyes, in which also there was the gleam of motherly affection and solicitude.
"You're dreadfully afraid of being poor, aren't you, my dear?" she concluded. "London makes men feel like that. And it's because men get afraid of life that they take the first comfortable groove that offers, and then all the fun is over for them. Well, don't you be like that. If I was you, I'd live my life, and let the question of getting a living shift for itself. And remember what I say, for it's true—the only people who really enjoy life are the poor, because they're the only people who have lots to look forward to."