He dined at his club and wondered if it would be bad taste for so new a member to make a complaint to the committee. Afterwards he drifted into a music-hall, where quailing brutes who had been created to scamper on four legs were distorted to maintain a smirking brute who was unworthy to walk on two. The animals' sufferings diverted the audience vastly, and the applause sickened Conrad more than the club dinner.
And though his disappointment at Tooting may sound a very trivial matter, it continued to depress him. He was sad, not because one woman was different from what he had hoped to find her, but because the difference in the one woman typified so much that seemed pathetic to him in life. And to sneer at him as a sentimentalist absorbed by opal-tinted sorrows blown of indolence, would not be conclusive. It is, of course, natural that those of us who have to struggle should set up the Man of Leisure as a figure to be pelted with precepts—indeed, we pelt so hard at the silver spoon in his mouth that between the shies we might well reflect that Ethics is often an alias of Envy—but with Conrad the leisure was quite recent and the sentiment had ached for years. In his case wealth had not formed a temperament, wealth had simply freed it.
Let us accept him as he was. My business is to present, not to defend. Were tales tellable only when the "hero" fulfilled both definitions of the word, reviewers would have less to do. If I could draw, a frontispiece should enlist your sympathies for him: "Conrad and the Coquette;" for that is Youth—a laughing jilt showing us her heels, and tempting over her dimpled shoulder as she flies.
This is where you begin to think me insufferably dull. I see your fair brow clouding, I can see your beautiful lips shaping to say, "Oh, bother!" Be patient with me; we have arrived at a brief interval in which nothing particular happened. It is true that soon afterwards Conrad went to Monte Carlo, but details would not interest you in the least. Be gracious to me; yield to the book another finger-tip—I feel it slipping. Say, "Poor drivel as it is, a man has written it in the hope of pleasing me." For he has indeed. On many a fine morning I have plodded when I would rather have sunned myself where the band played; on many an evening I have wound my feet round the legs of the table and budged not, when the next room and a new novel—paid for and unopened—wooed me as with a siren song. And all to win a smile from You.
I have thought of you so often, and wanted to know you; you don't realise how I have longed to meet you—to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain—the poise of the head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed that you would recognise me; but you said no word—you passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are sitting you are just a charming woman, with "a local habitation and a name;" but to me you are not Miss or Madam, not M. or N., you are a Power, and I have sought you by a name you have not heard—you are my Public.
And O my Lady, I am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses, though you are far away, and I can't hear your answer. I do wrong to speak like this; I may be arraigned for speaking; I have broken laws for the honour of addressing you—among all the men who have worshipped you, has one done more?—and I will never offend again. But in this breathless minute while I dare, I would say: "Remember that overleaf, and in every line unto the end I shall be picturing you, working for you, trembling lest you frown." Unto the End. Forgive me. I have sinned, but I exult—it is as if I had touched your hand across the page.
CHAPTER VII
Conrad drifted from the Riviera with the rest, and lingered through June in Paris; not on the left bank this time—in the Paris of the Boulevards and the Bois, where he was a world away from the quarter where he had run to clasp the illusions of his youth, and stayed to mourn them. Although he was finding life pleasant, there were moments when he looked at the bridges, and felt wistful; but he never crossed one—he knew now that he could not walk over the Pont Neuf into the Past.
Nor was it with any definite purpose that he returned to London. Amusement, agreeable society had lulled that desire to revisit old scenes. And his experiments had been such failures: the endeavour to recapture his fervour as an art-student; the ludicrous attempt to revive in cynical adults the buoyant comradery of childhood; the interest in the little girl whom time had turned into the least interesting of women—it was with a mental blush that he recalled these follies. If he thought no less tenderly of his youth, he thought of it less often; if he was still liable to a sense of bereavement, he was now idling as conventionally as any other man of his class.