THE WAY OF SALVATION
Holderness leaned back in his worn leather chair and shouted with laughter. He treated with absolute indifference the white anger in Macheson’s face.
“Victor,” he cried, “don’t look at me as though you wanted to punch my head. Down on your knees, man, and pray for a sense of humour. It’s the very salt of life.”
“That’s all very well,” Macheson answered, “but I can’t exactly see——”
“That’s because you’re deficient,” Holderness shouted, wiping the tears from his eyes. “I haven’t laughed so much for ages. Here you come from the East to the West, with all the world’s tragedy tearing at your heart, flowing from your lips, a flagellator, a hater of the people to whom you speak, seeking only to strike and to wound, and they accept you as a new sensation! They bare their back to your whip! They have made you the fashion! Oh! this funny, funny world of ours!”
Macheson smiled grimly.
“I’ll grant you the elements of humour in the situation,” he said, “but you can scarcely expect me to appreciate it, can you? I never came here to play the mountebank, to provide a new sensation for these tired dolls of Society. Dick, do you think St. Paul could have opened their eyes?”
Holderness shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he declared. “They’re a difficult class—you see, they have pluck, and a sort of fantastic philosophy which goes with breeding. They’re not easily scared.”
Macheson thought of his friend’s words later in the afternoon, when he stood on the slightly raised platform of the fashionable room where his lectures were given. Not a chair was empty. Macheson, as he entered, gazed long and steadily into those rows of tired, distinguished-looking faces, and felt in the atmosphere the delicate wave of perfume shaken from their clothes—the indescribable effect of femininity. There were men there, too, mostly as escorts, correctly dressed, bored, vacuous, from intent rather than lack of intelligence. Macheson himself, carelessly dressed from design, his fine figure ill-clad, with untidy boots and shock hair, felt his anger slowly rising as he marked the stir which his coming had caused. He to be the showman of such a crowd! It was maddening! That day he spoke to them without even the ghost of a smile parting his lips. He sought to create no sympathy. He cracked his whip with the cool deliberation of a Russian executioner.