Privately, he had self-criticism and tried to stifle it. There was a miasma of disillusionment everywhere; there was the Peace that was mislaid by French pawnbrokers instead of being made by gentlemen; there was the impulse to forget the war on the part of the civilian population who now seemed so brutally in possession; there was the treatment of disbanded soldiery which, this time, was to have belied history, and didn’t. He strained to believe the current dicta of the minority mind and to find in them excuse for his lethargy.
He was, no doubt, tired; but whatever subtle infections of the soul might be distressing him, materially at any rate he was immune from the common aggravation of high prices. He made that explicitly one of his excuses. It wasn’t fair that he, who had all the money he needed, should take a job from a man who needed money. “There’s unpaid work,” thought Mary, but she did not say it. She thought he must sooner or later see it for himself.
He did see it and tried to blink at it. He was of the Hepplestalls, of a race who weren’t acclimatized to leisure, who found happiness in setting their teeth in work. He was born with a conscience and couldn’t damp it down. He was aware, at the back of behind, that it was hurting him to turn a deaf ear to the call of Staithley. He had done worse things than Staithley implied in the necessity of war, and there was also a necessity of peace. He felt nobly moral to let such sentiments find lodgment in his mind.
His father’s diffident comparison of the Hepplestalls with the Samurai came back to him. Yes, one ought to serve, but it wasn’t necessary to go to Staithley to be a Samurai. One could be a Samurai in London. He, decisively, was forced to be a Samurai in London because he had married Mary Arden and to wrench her from her vocation, to take her away from London, was unthinkable.
There was no hurry to set about discovering the place of a Samurai in modern London. Like everybody else he had, with superlative reason, promised himself a good time after the war, and if the good time had its unforeseen drawbacks, that was no ground for refusing to enjoy all the good there was. Mary was not the whole of the good time, but she was its center. He supposed he couldn’t—certainly he couldn’t; there were other things in life than a wife—concentrate indefinitely on Mary, but this world of the theater to which she belonged was so jolly, so strange to him, so unaccountably enthralling. He became expert in its politics and its gossip. He was obsessed by it through her who had never been obsessed. He was duped, as she had never been since Hugh Darley applied his corrective to her childish errors, by the terribly false perspective of the theater. He saw the theater, indeed, in terms of Mary; several times a week he sat through her scenes in a stall at the Galaxy, and when she scoffed at the idiotic pride he took in gleaning inside information, in knowing what so and so was going to do before the announcement appeared in the papers, and at being privileged to go to some dress-rehearsals, it was, he thought, only because she was used to it all while he came freshly to it. He might even find that a Samurai was needed in the theater. Would Mary like him to put up a play for her? He thought her reply hardly fair to the excellence of his intentions. But if she refused, incisively, to let him be a Samurai of the theater, she was troubled to see him continue his education of an initiate.
He was self-persuaded that his fussy loafing had importance, when it was, at most, a turbid retort to conscience. He was feeling his way, he was learning the ropes, he was meditating his plans, and there was no lack of flattering council offered to the husband of Mary Arden who was, besides, rich.=
````Big fleas have little fleas ````Upon their backs to bite ’em. ````These fleas have other fleas ````And so, ad infinitum.=
Morally, he was the little flea on Mary’s back, and he was collecting parasites on his own. Then William’s letter came, offering a clean cut from Staithley and an annihilating reply to his conscience.
He didn’t need Gertrude’s letter to show him exactly what William’s and William’s enclosure meant. He read clearly between the lines that William wobbled. “He’s on the fence,” he thought, “he doesn’t need a push to shove him over,—he needs a touch.” Then Rupert and William, acting together, must face a hostile Board of conservative Hepplestalls, and a nasty encounter he expected it to be. They wouldn’t spare words about his father’s son.
But that was a small price to pay for freedom; Rupert and William had the whip hand and the rest of the Hepplestalls could howl, they could—they would; he could hear them—shriek “Treachery” and “Blasphemy” at him, but it was only a case of keeping a stiff upper lip through an unpleasant quarter of an hour, and he was quit of the Service for ever. There would no longer be a Service.