CHAPTER X—SYLVESTER DOES BATTLE
Loss of faith in all through the faithlessness of one is a common and a tragic phenomenon. It is vain for the robust-minded to prove the illogic of the conclusion, which is one arrived at more from the emotional than the logical faculties of the brain. The phenomenon occurs only in men of a certain temperament. They are endowed with powers of intense individual passion, but lack that universality of sympathy which makes for breadth of judgment. To narrow the proposition to a particular case, they take one woman, not after long and patient deliberation,—that is the supreme pity of it,—but haphazard, on the impulse of a great emotion, and glorify her as the queen of all women. She becomes inevitably the test of a sex. The poor human touchstone fails, and a whole sex is condemned. To the commoner sort this loss of faith matters little, for the nobility of a great faith was never in them; they cultivate an easy-going cynicism, and that is all. But the men whose lives are broken, who feel within them the horrible weight of a dead ideal, are of nobler mould, and therein lies the piteousness of the tragedy.
Sylvester walked slowly homewards from his partner's house in St. John's Wood, where he had been dining. For Dr. Frodsham, who had ample means and a large family, had taken the opportunity of moving from the house in Weymouth Street into the purer air of the N. W. district, on Sylvester's entrance into partnership, and only retained a consulting-room, where he attended at certain hours. The sense of his loss hung heavy upon Sylvester. He had left a home that glowed with a happiness for ever beyond his reach. He had seen love, trust, sympathy, reflected from face to face of husband and wife. The house was glad with the laughter of youth. The somewhat intellectual atmosphere was softened by an indescribable tenderness of human relation. Faith in themselves as men and women, in humanity in general, gave a largeness to their social intercourse. And he had sat there recognising, wondering; envying, until the door had closed behind him and he was left to his loneliness on the silent pavement.
A boy and girl of the lower class passed slowly by, she with her head on his shoulder, he with his arm round her waist. They were saying nothing, probably were maintaining a half-hour's silence, but they were undeniably happy, and, for the moment, Sylvester envied them. Vulgar as may have been their affection, they, like the Frodshams, possessed that which he had lost for ever,—faith. And faith meant love and love meant life. He had seldom felt so keenly the abomination of his desolation, and the craving for a woman's touch grew to a pang like hunger. And yet his whole nature rejected the idea of fulfilment. He shuddered as he walked, and strove to turn his thoughts into another channel. But the elemental dominates a man's will. Unconsciously he returned to the subject. Ella had been much in his mind since Roderick's announcement. Her yielding to such a lover had strengthened his conviction of the contemptibility of a woman's nature. Cynically he congratulated himself on his escape. He set down nothing in extenuation. He only saw, on the one side, a woman of apparent refinement whom he had once thought worthy of being his wife, on the other side a blatant, sensual, mercenary cad. The refined woman had thrown herself into the cad's arms. What was the need of looking further? Any woman would have done the same. The so-called virtuous were merely the untempted. The kindly matron at whose table he had been dining had only maintained her position by a series of lucky accidents. And what living soul could tell whether she had been true to Frodsham? But he envied Frodsham his unclouded faith and the happiness that love brought to his hearth.
Thus Sylvester walked homewards, his thoughts revolving in a vicious circle. At Baker Street Station he passed through a crowd that was gathering around two fringed and feathered coster-girls shrieking and biting and cursing in a policeman's grip. They were too much for one man, for your coster-girl in drink is a she-devil, and possessed of extraordinary activities. One escaped, and as her companion was struggling with the constable, she rushed at his face with a gigantic hat-pin held dagger-wise.
In an instant Sylvester had dropped his light coat and had seized the fury by the arms from behind. And there he held her pinioned. She kicked, she butted, she poured out torrents of filth, she struggled, she tried to lie down, to the great excitement of the crowd, who, out of respect for the hat-pin, kept at a reasonable distance off, and expected to see a battle royal in which the slight man in evening dress would get the worst of it. But they were not prepared for such an exhibition of sheer strength on the part of the slight man. He stood like a figure of bronze, holding the foul and frenzied Amazon almost at arm's length, lifting her like a child when she tried to fall, forcing her down when she tried to leap into the air. The tussle, as far as Sylvester was concerned, did not last long; for two policemen, forcing their way through the throng, speedily relieved him of his charge and the lady of the hat-pin. Whereupon Sylvester, cheered by the crowd, coolly took his overcoat from a man who was holding it, and walked away down Baker Street.
The incident, although not tending to raise the Eternal Feminine in his esteem, broke the train of his morbid imaginings. He glowed with the sense of victory and chuckled quietly to himself. The successful application of one's own brute force brings exultation to the primitive savage in a man.
“I'm not in such bad training, after all,” he said to himself pleasantly.
So he sprang up the steps of the house in Weymouth Street in a much healthier frame of mind than that in which he had descended them some hours before. The sudden stirring of the blood had done him good.
“Mr. Lanyon is here, sir,” said a servant, meeting him in the hall. “He said he would wait until you came home.”