“You agree with Helen.”
“If I err, I err then in the most delightful company in the world. Indeed, one might prefer to stray from the high road and the direct path with so entrancing a guide, though, of course, I cannot consent to underrate the enthralling prospect of marching breast-forward, my dear Thorley, with you. You see me in a quandary. Whichever course I adopt, I must be widowed of the most amiable of companions. To your secret eyes, then, there is no Dämmerung approaching, no brightness of youth ready to pounce on us from the dimness.”
“I cannot see it,” said Lord Thorley; “the political horizon, I am bound to say, seems to me very serene. I see no fresh bogies there, they are all the well-worn properties. A European war, a revolution in Ireland—I need not enumerate the old familiar faces. And, as regards the young, I see nothing more than I have always seen. Some clever boy from Oxford writes a book that makes a nine days’ wonder. Some clever group of artists evolves a new scheme of pictorial representation, and loads the walls of our exhibitions with crude and violent diagrams of a wholly puerile nature. Some excitable young women break shop windows and commit similar outrages in order to show us how fit they are to receive the franchise. But I must confess that I am unable to see any significance in such pranks. There are always, I am glad to say, clever young men and obstreperous young women keeping the world young. In a sense, of course, the future belongs to the young, because they will be alive when we are all dead. But when that not very regrettable day occurs, they will be no longer young. Emphatically, in my opinion, it is the middle-aged who matter.”
“A comfortable, a well-wadded and delightful doctrine,” exclaimed Mr. Bellingham. “But yet it seems to me that as with plastic clay the young are shaping the features of the future, each in his smock with slender finger-tips bedaubed with what we may call the materials of days yet unborn. We are being picked up, we older men—this at least to me is the secret lesson of which I am but learning the alphabet, and which in a sort of impotent babble I haltingly strive to express. In fact, in my own case I feel that the young just scoop me up like the lump of clay, and set me with pressing thumb and forefinger into the great image that grows beneath their hands. A very curious observer might possibly detect in that image a tuft of my already depleted hair, and say, ‘Surely this is a remnant, a capillary adjunct sadly grey and thin, of what once was Bellingham. Now with other past modes he is but a morsel of a rib or some other less honourable and expressive a portion of the entire anatomy.’”
He and Lord Thorley, an oddly contrasting pair, had strolled away from the loggia (leaving Mr. Bellingham’s provisions, all but the peach, unconsumed) across the lawn in front of the house. Bellingham’s sonorous voice fitted well with his thick-set form, his massive and powerful face; from that strong efficiency of body you might have conjectured a man of action, who dealt in practical matters and wielded a world that he had organized. Yet this was the artist, the dweller in visions, the discerner of nothing more material than the inward personality of his sitters, while the loose, languid man, who seemed to all bodily appearance to have but the slightest connection with the tangible things of the world, was the man of action who shaped the destinies of a nation. A stranger merely informed of the collective identities of the two must surely have given to each the name-label of the other, and yet the stranger who did so would have shown himself a person of imperfect perception. For Bellingham’s work was instinct with virile comprehension; he had the firmest of grasps upon the material world, while Lord Thorley, as he had always confessed, brought nothing of the brutal actuality of first-hand material considerations into his deft political weavings. He handled these with the delicate insight of a scholar brooding over obscure texts, the finesse and subtle observation of the philosopher in his study. Therein lay both his strength and weakness, for while the obscure seldom evaded his penetrative power, he was apt to overlook the obvious. It was by a great flaring torch, dripping with the pitch of humanity, and casting strong shadows and raising high lights, that Bellingham looked at the world he knew so well, and loved with all the veins and arteries that bucketed gallons of human blood through his body; it was almost with a grotesque appreciation of his kinship with it that he beheld it. But Lord Thorley, holding up his dry white light in his dry white hand, noted, like a doctor by a bedside, the less appreciable maladies of his patient.
They met friends on the terrace across the lawn, and the collective spirit of the party began to develop. Above all things, it was “up to date”; it dwelled, that is to say, with extraordinary vividness in the actual present moment, and cared as little for the past as it recked of the future. For most of them, a majority sufficient to form the prevailing note, the rose was now full-blown; it was enough to inhale the perfection of its fragrance without thought of the promise of its budding, or of the seeds that already were maturing in the womb from which the petals sprang. All appurtenances of extravagance and luxury were contained in the scent of it; so, too, was the sense that took all these things for granted. It was perfectly natural to those who assembled for dinner that Vandycks and Holbeins lived on the brocaded walls of the room, where they waited for the more tardy guests, that silk Persian rugs made feet noiseless, that Empire mirrors reflected the bare shoulders of beautiful women. That was how things “happened”; it was part of the indulgent constitution of the world that you moved quite naturally in so splendid a setting. It was natural also, a thing not to be considered, that a band played in the loggia with a discretion that did not mar conversation, that you ate off silver, that the masterpieces of Reynolds and Romney floated swimmingly on the walls.
Indeed, it was hardly remarked that about the middle of dinner the loud whirrings of an aeroplane sounded over the house, in a pause of the band, and that presently Lord Grote, who, from his seat at the end of the table, looked out on to the lawn, made the announcement than an aeroplane had landed there, and wondered, to the point of leaving his quail uneaten, who it could be, going out to ascertain. Naturally enough, it was Robin, who, instead of swimming from Cambridge, had been a passenger in a flight from Hendon. He came in, handsome and debonair, while the pilot was taken for refreshment somewhere else, since Robin explained that he would not at all like to come into the middle of a dinner-party. For himself he was frightfully hungry, and would like to start square with soup. Yes, it was quite exciting and jolly, great luck to have had the chance of going up. The pilot would start back again at sunrise: that was his plan. Robin was not sure if he would not fly back with him. He had hoped to arrive before dinner, when everyone was out on the lawn, and the leather coat was too hot now that one was down on earth again, and he really must take it off....
Below the leather coat was a thick woollen jersey, and Robin, in the midst of tiaras and satins, ate his belated dinner with as little a sense of embarrassment as he would have felt if he had been picking at a cold duck with Damon. But Mr. Bellingham could not quite leave these remarkable occurrences without comment.
“And you actually permitted yourself, my dear Robin,” he said, “to be whirled away among the inconstant breezes without a word of protest? For me I should have protested with all the violence of which my nature is capable. They would have had to bind me hand and foot before I embarked.”
Robin laughed.