Novel Notes Part 27

Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe. He puffed the tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then said:

"And the seed of all virtue also."

"Sit down and get on with your work," said MacShaughna.s.sy from the sofa where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're discussing the novel. Paradoxes not admitted during business hours."

Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood.

"Selfishness," he continued, "is merely another name for Will. Every deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness. We are charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world, to make ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of suffering. One man is kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel because cruelty pleases him. A great man does his duty because to him the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than would be the case resulting from avoidance of duty. The religious man is religious because he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness. Self- sacrifice itself is only a subtle selfishness: we prefer the mental exaltation gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative reward. Man cannot be anything else but selfish. Selfishness is the law of all life. Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for _Himself_: that is the universe."

"Have some whisky," said MacShaughna.s.sy; "and don't be so complicatedly metaphysical. You make my head ache."

"If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness," replied Brown, "then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness: and your bad selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are back where we started. I say selfishness--bad selfishness--is the root of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me."

"Not always," persisted Jephson; "I've known selfishness--selfishness according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term--to be productive of good actions. I can give you an instance, if you like."

"Has it got a moral?" asked MacShaughna.s.sy, drowsily,

Jephson mused a moment. "Yes," he said at length; "a very practical moral--and one very useful to young men."

"That's the sort of story we want," said the MacShaughna.s.sy, raising himself into a sitting position. "You listen to this, Brown."

Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite att.i.tude, with his elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence.

"There are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the wife's husband, and the other man. In most dramas of this type, it is the wife who is the chief character. In this case, the interesting person is the other man.

"The wife--I met her once: she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal for both statements. I remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a lovely little cottage. It was the sweetest place imaginable. I need not describe it. It was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in sentimental poetry. I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge, drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny cas.e.m.e.nts I saw, looking out at me, a face. It stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.

"That woman's face reminded me of the incident. It was an angel's face, until the woman herself looked out of it: then you were struck by the strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.

"That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt. Vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them. She had probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of pa.s.sion upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising and falling. On possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and from satiety had grown the desire for a new sensation.

"They were living at Cairo at the period; her husband held an important official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her own beauty and tact, her house soon became the centre of the Anglo-Saxon society ever drifting in and out of the city. The women disliked her, and copied her.

The men spoke slightingly of her to their wives, lightly of her to each other, and made idiots of themselves when they were alone with her. She laughed at them to their faces, and mimicked them behind their backs.

Their friends said it was clever.

"One year there arrived a young English engineer, who had come out to superintend some ca.n.a.l works. He brought with him satisfactory letters of recommendation, and was at once received by the European residents as a welcome addition to their social circle. He was not particularly good- looking, he was not remarkably charming, but he possessed the one thing that few women can resist in a man, and that is strength. The woman looked at the man, and the man looked back at the woman; and the drama began.

"Scandal flies swiftly through small communities. Before a month, their relations.h.i.+p was the chief topic of conversation throughout the quarter.

In less than two, it reached the ears of the woman's husband.

"He was either an exceptionally mean or an exceptionally n.o.ble character, according to how one views the matter. He wors.h.i.+pped his wife--as men with big hearts and weak brains often do wors.h.i.+p such women--with dog- like devotion. His only dread was lest the scandal should reach proportions that would compel him to take notice of it, and thus bring shame and suffering upon the woman to whom he would have given his life.

That a man who saw her should love her seemed natural to him; that she should have grown tired of himself, a thing not to be wondered at. He was grateful to her for having once loved him, for a little while.

"As for 'the other man,' he proved somewhat of an enigma to the gossips.

He attempted no secrecy; if anything, he rather paraded his subjugation--or his conquest, it was difficult to decide which term to apply. He rode and drove with her; visited her in public and in private (in such privacy as can be hoped for in a house filled with chattering servants, and watched by spying eyes); loaded her with expensive presents, which she wore openly, and papered his smoking-den with her photographs. Yet he never allowed himself to appear in the least degree ridiculous; never allowed her to come between him and his work. A letter from her, he would lay aside unopened until he had finished what he evidently regarded as more important business. When boudoir and engine- shed became rivals, it was the boudoir that had to wait.

"The woman chafed under his self-control, which stung her like a lash, but clung to him the more abjectly.

"'Tell me you love me!' she would cry fiercely, stretching her white arms towards him.

"'I have told you so,' he would reply calmly, without moving.

"'I want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice that trembled on a sob. 'Come close to me and tell it me again, again, again!'

"Then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood of pa.s.sionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an engineering problem at the exact point at which half an hour before, on her entrance into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it.

"One day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question: 'Are you playing for love or vanity?'

"To which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply: ''Pon my soul, Jack, I couldn't tell you.'

"Now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where it is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy.

"They continued to meet and to make love. They talked--as people in their position are p.r.o.ne to talk--of the beautiful life they would lead if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly paradise--or, maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--they would each create for the other, if only they had the right which they hadn't.

"In this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his literary faculties, which were considerable; the woman to her desires. Thus, his scenes possessed a grace and finish which hers lacked, but her pictures were the more vivid. Indeed, so realistic did she paint them, that to herself they seemed realities, waiting for her. Then she would rise to go towards them only to strike herself against the thought of the thing that stood between her and them. At first she only hated the thing, but after a while there came an ugly look of hope into her eyes.

"The time drew near for the man to return to England. The ca.n.a.l was completed, and a day appointed for the letting in of the water. The man determined to make the event the occasion of a social gathering. He invited a large number of guests, among whom were the woman and her husband, to a.s.sist at the function. Afterwards the party were to picnic at a pleasant wooded spot some three-quarters of a mile from the first lock.

"The ceremony of flooding was to be performed by the woman, her husband's position ent.i.tling her to this distinction. Between the river and the head of the cutting had been left a strong bank of earth, pierced some distance down by a hole, which hole was kept closed by means of a closely- fitting steel plate. The woman drew the lever releasing this plate, and the water rushed through and began to press against the lock gates. When it had attained a certain depth, the sluices were raised, and the water poured down into the deep basin of the lock.

"It was an exceptionally deep lock. The party gathered round and watched the water slowly rising. The woman looked down, and shuddered; the man was standing by her side.

"'How deep it is,' she said.

"'Yes,' he replied, 'it holds thirty feet of water, when full.'

"The water crept up inch by inch.

"'Why don't you open the gates, and let it in quickly?' she asked.

"'It would not do for it to come in too quickly,' he explained; 'we shall half fill this lock, and then open the sluices at the other end, and so let the water pa.s.s through.'

"The woman looked at the smooth stone walls and at the iron-plated gates.

"'I wonder what a man would do,' she said, 'if he fell in, and there was no one near to help him?'

"The man laughed. 'I think he would stop there,' he answered. 'Come, the others are waiting for us.'

"He lingered a moment to give some final instructions to the workmen.

'You can follow on when you've made all right,' he said, 'and get something to eat. There's no need for more than one to stop.' Then they joined the rest of the party, and sauntered on, laughing and talking, to the picnic ground.

"After lunch the party broke up, as is the custom of picnic parties, and wandered away in groups and pairs. The man, whose duty as host had hitherto occupied all his attention, looked for the woman, but she was gone.

"A friend strolled by, the same that had put the question to him about love and vanity.

"'Have you quarrelled?' asked the friend.

"'No,' replied the man.