The Duchess of Wrexe Part 91

He chuckled; then sitting back in his chair, his little eyes on the ceiling, he said almost to himself--"Once, years ago, when I was very, very young and romantic--almost--just for a year or two I loved your Sh.e.l.ley. He was everything--I could quote him by the page.... He's gone from me now, or most of him has, but there was one line that seemed to me then the most romantic thing I had ever read and has remained with me always. It went--'And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's wood'--It's in the letter to Maria Gisborne, I think--I've quite forgotten what the context is now--it's all pretty trivial and unimportant, but those were the days when I made pictures--I saw it!

Lord, Christopher, how it comes back! The wood, very thick, very large, very black, no sun--very still, and the great house behind it, huge and white, with long gardens and green lawns and peac.o.c.ks, and the Grand Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little dried-up yellow face.

"Then the rabble--dirty, smelling, ill-conditioned fellows--breaking through the silence, tearing up the Wood, knocking down the palace, hanging the Grand Duke from a tree, last of all, setting the whole thing into the most splendid blaze!... Oh! of course that wasn't Sh.e.l.ley's context--_his_ was all about boiling a kettle or something--but that's the way I saw it--just like that." Nothing stirred Brun like the sound of his own voice and now he was getting very excited indeed and was waving his hands.

"Yes," said Christopher placidly. "Very dramatic. What does it all mean?"

"Well, this. It seems to me that that's just what's been happening over here. Your d.u.c.h.ess is dead and instead there is to-night's crowd. The Grand Duke is gone and all that was his--now for the fires!"

Christopher, filling his pipe, paused, and then, his voice grave and serious: "Romantics aside, Brun, for a minute. Do you remember your Tiger idea you delivered to me once? I've often thought of it since. You said then that the reason why the d.u.c.h.ess and her times--the Grand Duke and his wood--had got to go was because their policy had been to give the Tigers of the world no liberty--to pretend indeed that they weren't there, and that now the time had come when every man should declare his Tiger, should give it liberty and, whether he restrained it or no, acknowledge its existence.... Well, now--what I want to know is this.

What to your thinking is going to come of it all? I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned. I like the old settled laws and customs and the rest of it, and yet I'm not afraid of this new Individualism; but what I expect and what you expect to come of it all are sure to be mightily different things."

"They are," said Brun, laughing. "You see, Christopher, as I've often said to you before, you're a sentimentalist--people matter to you; you're concerned in their individual good or bad luck. Now none of that is worth anything to me. I observe from the outside--always. What I want to see is less muddle, more brain, less waste of time, more progress. I believe the loosing of the Tiger is going to bring that about. That's why I welcome it--I don't care one little d.a.m.n about your individual--let him be sacrificed every time for the general wisdom.

Your d.u.c.h.ess, she was good for her age. Now she is against progress. She vanishes. That crowd of to-night has swept her away.... There'll be a chaos here for a time--people like the Ruddards will mix things up; a woman like Mrs. Strode will destroy as many good people as she can. But the time will come; out of that crowd that we got into to-night a world, ruled by brain, by common sense, by understanding, not by sentiment and confusion, will arise.... May I not be with the good G.o.d!"

"'Sentiment and confusion,'" said Christopher, smiling. "That's me, I suppose."

"Well, you _are_ sentimental," said Brun. "You're stuffed with it."

"Do you yourself ..." asked Christopher, "is there no one--no one in the world--who matters to you?"

"n.o.body," said Brun. "No one in the world. I think I like you better than anybody; you're the honestest man I know and yet one of the most wrong-headed. Yes, I like you very much; but it would not be true to say that it would leave any great blank in my life if you were to die.

Women! Yes, there have been women! But--thank the good G.o.d! for the moment only. The Heart--no--The Brain--yes----"

"Well, then," said Christopher, "that's all clear enough. It isn't very wonderful that we differ. People are to me everything. Love the only power in the world to make change, to work miracles; I don't mean only sensual love, or even s.e.xual love, but simply the love of one human being for another, the love that leads to thinking more of your neighbour than yourself--self-denial.

"Self-denial; the only curb for your Tiger, Brun. I've been watching it in a piece of private history, all this last year and a half. There might have been the most horrible mess; self-denial saved it all the time. You'll say that all this is so vague and loose that it's worth nothing."

"Not at all," said Brun politely. "Go ahead."

"Well, then, the reason why I, old-fas.h.i.+oned and Philistine as I am, hail the pa.s.sing of the Grand Duke with joy--and I cared for the old woman, mind you--is just this. I see some chance at last for the plain man--not the clever man, or the especially spiritual man or the wealthy man--but simply the ordinary man. When I say Brotherhood I don't mean anything to do with a.s.sociations or meetings or rules--Simply that I believe in an age when a man's neighbour will matter to a man more than himself, when it won't be priggish or weak to help someone in worse plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing ... when, above all, there'll be no jealousy, no getting in a man's way because he does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the world--this world and the next--differently. That's my Individualism, my Rising City, and if you had watched the lives of a few friends of mine during the last year or two as I've watched them you'd know that 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is the fire that's going to burn all the Grand-Ducal woods in the world in time."

Brun laughed. "You'll be taken in horribly one of these days, Christopher."

"You speak as though I were a chicken," Christopher broke out indignantly. "Man alive, haven't I lived all these years? Haven't I seen the poorest and rottenest and feeblest side of human nature time and time again? But this I know: That it's losing the thing you prize most that pays, it's the pursuit, the self-denial, the forgetting of self that scores in the material, practical world as well as the spiritual, heavenly one. That's where the Millennium's coming from. Brains as well perhaps, but souls first."

"We'll see," said Brun. "A bit of both, I dare say. Anyhow, it's the next generation that's going to be interesting. All kinds of people free who've never been free before, all sorts of creeds and doctrines smashed that seemed like Eternity. The old woods flaming already. _Apres la d.u.c.h.esse!..._ But as for your Love, your Brotherhood, Christopher, I've a shrewd suspicion that human nature will change very little.

Unselfishness? Very fine to talk about--but who's going to practise it?

Every man for his own hand, now as ever."

"We'll see," answered Christopher. "I'm not clever at putting things into words. If I were to go along to the man in the street and say, 'Look here, I've made a discovery--I've got something that's going to make everything straight in the world,' and he were to say, 'What's that?' and then I were to answer, 'Self-denial. Unselfishness--Love of your neighbour,' he would, of course, instantly remind me that Someone greater than myself had made the same remark a few thousand years ago.

He'd be right.... There's nothing new in it. But it's coming new to the world just because the laws and conventions that covered it are breaking. The Tiger in Every Man and Self-denial to curb it ... That's my prophecy, Brun."

Brun gave himself a whisky-and-soda. "No idea you were such a talker, Christopher.... But I'm right all the same."

He held up his gla.s.s.

"Here's to the Tiger in the next generation." He drank, then held it up again. "And here," he cried, "to the memory of the last Great lady in England!"

III

When Brim had gone it seemed that he had left that last toast of his in the air behind him.

Christopher was haunted by the thought of the d.u.c.h.ess, he felt her with him in the room; she stirred him to restlessness so that at last, desperately, he took his hat and went out.

His steps took him, round the corner, to Portland Place; here all was very quiet, a few cabs in the middle of the street, a few lights in the windows, the silver field of stars, in the distance the sky golden, fired now and again into life as a rocket rose s.h.i.+elding beneath its glow all that stirring mult.i.tude. Sounds rose--a cry, a shout, singing--then died down again.

He was outside No. 104. He thought that he would ring and see whether Mrs. Newton were in; perhaps she had gone to bed, it was after eleven, but, if she were there, he would take one last look at the Portrait before it was packed up and sent down to Beaminster.

Mrs. Newton unbolted the door and smiled when she saw him--"I was just going to bed--There's only myself and Louisa here--and the watchman."

"I won't keep you, Mrs. Newton," he said. "The fancy just took me to look at some of the pictures once more before they're packed up. Lady Seddon told me that a good many of them were to be packed up to-morrow; they won't look quite the same at Beaminster."

"No, that they won't, sir," said Mrs. Newton. "I shall miss the old house. Just to think of the years; and now, all of us scattered!"

She lit a lamp for him and he went up the stone staircase, found the long drawing-room, and there, on the farther wall, the Portrait.

The furniture, shrouded in brown holland, waited like ghostly watchers on every side of him. The huge house, always a place of strange silences and vast disturbances, multiplied now in its long mirrors and its air of cold suspense as though it were waiting for something to happen, showed its recognition of death and death's consequences.

But the Portrait was alive! As he held the lamp up to it the face leapt into agitation, the eyes were bent once again sharply upon him, the mouth curved to speak, the black silk rustled against the chair.

A host of memories crowded the room, he was filled with a regret more poignant than anything that he had felt since her death.

"She _was_ fine! I miss her more than I had any notion that I would! She stirred one up, she made one alive!"

He put the lamp upon the floor and sat down for a minute amongst the shrouded furniture.

His mind pa.s.sed from Brun's generalizations to the little bundle of people whom he knew--Rachel, Francis, Roddy, Lizzie Rand. To all of them the Tiger's moment had come; and out of it all, out of the stress and suffering and struggle, Rachel's child was to be born--instead of the d.u.c.h.ess the new generation. Instead of this old house, the hooded furniture, the anger at all freedom of thought, the jealousy of all enterprise, the slander and the malice, an age of a universal Brotherhood, of unselfishness, restraint, charity, tolerance ...

Perhaps after all, he _was_ an old, sentimental fool. There had always been those at every birth and every death who had had their dreams of new human nature, new worlds, new virtues and moralities....

He looked his last at the Portrait--

"I'm nearly as old as you. I shall go soon. But I miss you ... you'd be yourself surprised if you knew how much!"

He took up the lamp and left her.... He said good night to Mrs. Newton and closed the door behind him.

Standing on the steps of the house he looked about him. Portland Place was like a broad river running silently into the dark trees at the end of it. There was a great rest and quiet here.

Southwards the sky flamed, the noise of a great mult.i.tude of people came m.u.f.fled across s.p.a.ce with the rhythm in it of a beating song. Rockets slashed the sky, broke into golden stars; the bells from all the churches in the town clashed and, from some great distance, guns solemnly booming rolled through the air.

Christopher, standing there, smiled as he thought of Brun's little picture.

Brun springing up, of course, at the right moment, to point his moral.

Brun, who appeared, like some Jack-in-the-box, in city after city, with his conclusion, his prophecy, neat and prepared.

"And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's Wood..."

There was the Wood, there the mob, there the Grand Duke, dead and buried--