The house in Chelsea loomed large in the mind of the new generation. It was regarded as a citadel of sin, as the headquarters of a cult which gloried in its moral degeneracy. Alistair Stuart assumed the character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call themselves—poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. They waged war on the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its commercialism, but, above all, on its Puritanism.
In the eyes of this brotherhood of the unfit bankruptcy was rather meritorious than disgraceful, and the fifty thousand pounds which Stuart had spent without possessing represented so much spoil taken from the Philistines. Stuart’s own first proceeding after he had signed the warrant for his civil degradation had been to send forth invitations for a supper to celebrate the event.
His bankruptcy had been in one sense voluntary. Although he had cut himself off from intercourse with his family when he took the house in Chelsea, he knew that Trent would have helped him to make terms with his creditors. But he knew also that Trent would have required him to give up Molly Finucane. He had filed his petition with a light heart, in the belief that the disgrace would fall more heavily on his brother than on himself.
For the éclat resulting from his act he had been prepared, but not for the effect of the éclat on his own mind.
He had been on his way to a club in Piccadilly overlooking the Green Park, which served as a meeting-ground for those members of the cult who kept on terms with respectability. Almost on the club steps he was arrested by the sight of his name in large letters on a news-bill, bringing the sharp reminder that he had forfeited his right of entry.
It was a shock to him to find that his exploit had suddenly lost its charm. He bought a paper as he walked on, and read of his brother’s promotion to the Cabinet. The unforeseen coincidence intensified his discomfiture. This brother of his, whom he had always looked on as a dullard and a prig, whom he had so often sneered at among his own friends, was standing there crowned in front of the footlights, while he, Alistair, was being hissed off the stage. In a flash he saw the ruin he had made of his life, and was dismayed.
And as he wandered miserably through the streets the question that had risen and struggled for expression in his mind was—Why? Why had his brother so far surpassed him in the race? Why were the honours and rewards of life bestowed on some and not on others? Why had he, Alistair, steered his bark upon the rocks?
Standing there between that visible theatre of his brother’s triumph, on the north side of the river, and the unknown hooligan realm upon the south, with which there stole upon him a daunting sense of affinity, he pondered the question; and while he pondered it, the feeling grew upon him that it would not be answered by itself, that it was a part of a more tremendous issue, that the meaning of life was involved in it, and the eternal mystery of the world.
Alistair looked back for some clue to the tangled skein of his career; and by-and-by the vista of the past took on distinctness, like one of those marvellous canvases of Rembrandt from whose dingy surface there gradually peeps out a whole magical landscape charged with light.