CHAPTER XXII
THE INARTICULATE KNIGHT
I
Philip departed from Tite Street, Chelsea, without having invited Peggy to go with him. Getting married, except in the case of the very young, is not such a simple business as it appears. The difficulty lies in the fact that a man's conception of the proper method of wooing is diametrically opposed to that of a maid; and since the maid has the final word in the matter, it stands to reason that the campaign must ultimately be conducted upon her lines and not her swain's. Hence Romeo usually finds himself compelled, at the very outset, to abandon a great many preconceived and cherished theories, and adapt himself to entirely unfamiliar conditions of warfare, and he usually suffers a good deal in the process.
On paper, the contest should be of the most one-sided description; for the defending force (as represented by the lady) is at liberty to choose its own ground and precipitate or ward off an assault as it pleases, while the invader has to manœuvre clumsily and self-consciously in the open, exposed to shafts of ridicule, fiery days of humiliation, and frosty nights of indifference. He marches and countermarches, feeling sometimes tender, sometimes fierce, not seldom ridiculous; but never, never, never sure of his ground. Truly it is a one-sided business—on paper. But woman has no regard for paper. Under the operation of a mysterious but merciful law of nature, it is her habit, having placed herself in an absolutely impregnable position, to abandon her defences without warning or explanation—not infrequently, at the moment when the dispirited lover at her gates is upon the point of striking camp and beating a melancholy retreat, marching out, bag and baggage, into the arms of her dazed and incredulous opponent.
But Philip, being unversed in the feminine instinct of self-defence, did not know this. To him, from a distance, Love had appeared as a Palace Beautiful standing on the summit of a hill—a fairy fabric of gleaming minarets, slender lines, and soft curves—a haven greatly to be desired by a lonely pilgrim. Now that he had scaled the height and reached his destination he found nothing but frowning battlements and blank walls. In other words, he had overlooked the difference between arrival and admission. To sum up the situation in the language which would undoubtedly have been employed by that master of terse phraseology, Mr. Timothy Rendle, Philip was "up against it."
There is nothing quite so impregnable as the reserve of a nice-minded girl. The coquette and the sentimental miss are easy game: there is never any doubt as to what they expect of a man; and man, being man, sees to it that they are not disappointed. But to make successful love to a girl who is neither of these things calls for some powers of intuition and a thick skin. It is the latter priceless qualification which usually pulls a man through. Philip possessed rather less than the average male equipment of intuition, and his skin was deplorably thin. Peggy meant so much to him that he shrank from putting everything to the touch at once. Like all those who have put all their eggs in one basket, he feared his fate too much. So he temporised: he hung back, and waited. If Peggy had ever given him an opening he would have set his teeth and plunged into it, blindly and ponderously; but she never did. She was always kind, always cheerful, always the best of companions; but she kept steadily to the surface of things and appeared to be entirely oblivious of the existence of the suppressed volcano which sighed and rumbled beneath her feet.
Philip became acquainted, too, with the minor troubles of the love-lorn. If a letter lay on Peggy's plate at breakfast he speculated gloomily as to the sex of the sender. He sat through conversations in the course of which his Lady appeared to make a point of addressing every one present but himself. He saw what Mr. Kipling calls "Christian kisses" wasted upon other girls and unresponsive babies. He would pass from the brief rapture of having his invitation to a drive in the Park accepted to the prolonged bitterness of having to take the drive in company with a third party, casually coöpted into the expedition by Peggy at the last moment. He purchased little gifts, and kept them for days, not venturing to offer them for fear of a rebuff. Once or twice he embarked upon carefully prepared conversational openings of an intimate character, only to have these same caught up, tossed about, and set aside with unfeeling frivolity by the lady to whom they were addressed. He sometimes wondered what had become of the Pegs he had once known—the wistful, dreamy, confiding little girl with whom he had discussed all things in heaven and earth under the wintry skies of Hampstead Heath. Mental myopia is a common characteristic of young men in Philip's condition.
So he departed from Tite Street without having delivered himself, and returned to his own place. And yet not even that. For the garret in Wigmore Street was no more. One day during his convalescence he had desired certain books and papers, so Peggy and Miss Leslie made an expedition to fetch them.