Paths of Judgement

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.

Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his sentiments towards this significant young relative, “I don’t like her. She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn’t ask her here any more.”

Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela’s fortune to back him, Geoffrey’s career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive seemed forthcoming.

She died before seeing that Angela’s affections were centred on Maurice Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey’s, who had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him the barrier to her hopes.

At present, three years after his mother’s death, Geoffrey’s position in the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them, and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real supremacy.

The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston, the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed. Ingrained in Geoffrey’s nature was the sense that power was his, and that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him—though Geoffrey did not appeal to these dubious sanctions—that in a great man’s ends the world also found its best.

He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never blinded by this motive’s various disguises—idealistic, aesthetic, or philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation’s interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended that each should survive to the best of its ability.

So far only outer circumstances had opposed him—and been walked through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares for him.

Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, most exquisitely furbelowed—he granted her good taste in spiritual trappings—he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.

Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art was Maurice’s object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the arabesque in moments of leisure.