"I beg your pardon, Pentland," said Leah, using his title to mark the far recoil. "I took you for a man: you are nothing but a society gramophone."
Jim would have resented this contemptuous description, but that she gave him no time to formulate an idea in his slow-thinking brain. With swift steps she left the room and ascended to her boudoir; there, after locking the door, with a strength which disordered the lock, she flung herself face downward on the sofa, and cried quietly, passionately, with that suppressed anger and grief and rage which rends the body and brain so terribly. Jim could not, would not understand. He was what he always had been--the sole Gadarene pig into which a devilkin had not entered.
"Can I never put fire into that clay?" sobbed Leah, savagely.
Only God could have done that, and she did not believe in God. But the fetish was in her pocket.
[ CHAPTER XXXI]
Leah made no farther attempt to decivilise Jim. He was too engrossed in Egyptian flesh-pots to set out for the Promised Land of splendid adventure and Elizabethan enterprise. In his clay there did lurk a spark of that Promethean fire which, melting meaner aims into one passionate purpose to explore the world and exploit the world, has made England great. Unfortunately, it could not be fanned into anything resembling a flame. The cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, and the garlic of civilisation appealed to him insistently, and even if he did betake himself to roaming unfenced wastes, he certainly would not number a wife amongst his luggage. Moreover--and this she knew by instinct--his basic qualities were markedly those of the homing kind. This being so, a few months of tent and road would be used by him as a relish to increased appreciation of the cedar chambers and painted halls wherein his cradle had been rocked. It was clearly impossible to make a silken purse out of this particular sow's ear, so Jim drowsed very contentedly beside the fire, while his wife, out of sheer ennui, chased Piccadilly butterflies, or sat in her ducal niche to be bored with social adoration.
But one thing rendered life endurable to Leah Pentland at this juncture, and that was her coming opportunity to exhaust the enjoyable. Now that the days of compulsory sorrow were ended she had plenty to do, and ample funds for the doing. At Firmingham the new king and queen celebrated Christmas, new style, with celebrants who were but doubtfully informed as to the why and wherefore of the festival. Certainly, Jim and his Comus-rout invaded church on the holy-day, and yawned impatiently through liturgy and sermon; but this was a concession to county prejudices. Leah would tolerate no Santa Claus tree, no Druidical decorations, and no modernised mumming of the Middle Ages. These out-of-date enjoyments were replaced by political and poetical tableaux, by amateur renderings of smart French and dismal Russian plays, and by the kitchen lancers when riotous cake-walks palled. Imported musicians, in an incorrect foreign uniform, played Greig's melodies, Tschaikowsky's weird sound-poems, and that nerve-exhausting music of the present by Herr Wagner which has now arrived at its future. For the uncouth carol of innocent Victorian days was substituted Sousa's clanging marches, comic songs, clean but inane, and catchy airs from the newest vaudeville, miscalled musical-comedy. Out-of-door sports included skating on artificial ice--since it was a green Christmas--motor-car races, attempts at golf and polo-playing, riding, driving, and sauntering flirtations, while bridge circulated the guests' money at odd moments. It was truly wonderful to see how completely these nominal Christians had substituted a heathen festival of some sort for the orthodox pleasures of tradition. The participants in the orgie were all smart and all blasés, perfectly dressed and triumphantly selfish. With that careful avoidance of spoken appreciation which marks the modern trifler, they took leave of the Duchess with the remark that her notion of what Yule-tide should be was not half bad. A week of dull Sundays, so to speak, had been got through capitally.
"Nothing frumpish about the thing," pronounced Mrs. Penworthy, who had been asked to gratify Jim, and who had been found woefully wanting in snap. "Every one was quite up to scratch. Leah Pentland did simply ripping off her own."
The little woman was not talking an unknown language, for the latest successor to Algy understood her excellently well. She spoke the gibberish of those in a hurry, which she had taken some pains to acquire. The very few words in the dictionary used by the fashionable were dropped into the melting-pot, and came out in ungrammatical lumps of misused adjectives and verbs with a paucity of pronouns and prepositions. Mrs. Penworthy, whose sense of humour was strong, had proposed that Lionel should translate the Bible into this time-saving vernacular, so that its spiritual meaning could be arrived at by those who thought the verse of Milton and the prose of Bacon starchy.
"Wouldn't hear of it," said she, to Algy's latest successor, while munching American sweets in the up-going train. "Told him it would be spiffing to fetch the psalms up to mark, but he didn't catch on somehow. Wonder the Duchess can stand him, with his horrid correctness. She's fond of doing herself well."