Simon the Jester Part 52

She blushed a furious red. "Can't you guess? You must be as stupid as she is. And, of course, you're wildly angry with me. Aren't you?"

"I certainly wish you hadn't gone to see her."

"Was it merely to tell me this that you ordered me to come here?" she asked, with a touch of anger in her voice, for however much like G.o.d's good angels young women may be, they generally have a spirit of their own.

I felt I had been wanting in tact; also that I had put myself--through an impetuosity foreign to what I had thought to be my character--in a foolish position. If I replied affirmatively to her question, she would have served me perfectly right by tossing her head in the air and marching indignantly out of the room. I temporised.

"In order to understand the extraordinary consequences of your interview, I should like to have some idea of what took place. I know, my dear Eleanor," I continued as gently as I could, "I know that you went to see her out of the very great kindness of your heart--"

"No, I didn't."

I made a little gesture in lieu of reply. There was a span of silence.

Eleanor played with the silky ears of Agatha's little Yorks.h.i.+re terrier which had somehow strayed into the room and taken possession of her lap.

"Don't you see, Simon?" she said at last, half tearfully, without taking her eyes off the dog, "don't you see that by accusing me in this way you make it almost impossible for me to speak? And I was going to be so loyal to you."

A tear fell down her cheek on to the dog's back, and convicted me of unmitigated brutality.

"What else could you be but loyal?" I murmured. "Your att.i.tude all through has shone it."

She flashed her hand angrily over her eyes, and looked at me. "And I wanted to be loyal to the end. If you had waited and she had waited, you would have seen. As soon as I could have conveyed it to you decently, I should have shown you----Ah!" She broke off, put the Yorks.h.i.+re terrier on the sofa beside her, and rose with an impatient gesture. "You want to know why I called on Lola Brandt? I felt I had to know for myself what kind of woman she was. She was the woman between us--you and me. You don't suppose I ceased to care for you just because what we thought was a fatal illness broke off our engagement! I did care for you. I cared for you--in a way; I say 'in a way'--I'll tell you why later on. When we met here the last time do you think I was not moved? I knew your altered position would not allow you to suggest a renewal of the engagement so I offered you the opportunity. Do you remember? But I could not tell whether you still cared for me or whether you cared for the other woman.

So I had to go and see her. I couldn't bear to think that you might feel in honour bound to take me at my word and be caring all the time for some one else. I went to see her, and then I realised that I didn't count. Don't ask why. Women know these things. And I found that she loved you with a warmth and richness I'm incapable of. I felt I had stepped into something big and splendid, as if I had been a caterpillar walking into the heart of a red rose. I felt prim and small and petty.

Until then I had never known what love meant, and I didn't feel it; I couldn't feel it. I couldn't give you a millionth part of what that woman does. And I knew that having lived in that atmosphere, you couldn't possibly be content with me. If you had waited, I should have found some means of telling you so. That's what I meant by saying I was loyal to you. And I thought I had made it clear to her. It seems I didn't. It isn't my fault."

"My dear," said I, when she had come to the end of this astonis.h.i.+ng avowal, and stood looking at me somewhat defiantly and twisting her fingers nervously in front of her, "I don't know what in the world to say to you."

"You can tell me, at least, that my instinct was right."

"Which one? A woman has so many."

"That you love Lola Brandt."

I lifted my arms in a helpless gesture and let them drop to my sides.

"One is not one's own master in these things."

"Then you do?"

"Yes," said I in a low voice.

Eleanor drew a long breath, turned and sat down again on the sofa.

"And she knows it?"

"I have told her so."

"Then why in the world has she run away?"

"Because you two wonderful and divinely foolish people have been too big for each other. While you were impressed by one quality in her she was equally impressed by another in you. She departed, burning her s.h.i.+ps, so as to go entirely out of my life for the simple reason, as she herself expresses it, that she was not fit to black your boots. So," said I, taking her left hand in mine and patting it gently, "between you two dear, divine angel fools, I fall to the ground."

A while later, just before we parted, she said in her frank way:

"I know many people would say I've behaved with shocking impropriety--immodestly and all that. You don't, do you? I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things. Perhaps I've gone too straight this time--but you'll forgive me?"

I smiled and squeezed her hand. "My dear," said I, "Lola Brandt was right. You are G.o.d's good angel."

I went away in a chastened mood, no longer wrathful, for what could woman do more for mortal man than what Eleanor Faversham had attempted?

She had gone to see whether she should stand against her rival, and with a superb generosity, unprecedented in her s.e.x, she had withdrawn. The magnanimity of it overwhelmed me. I walked along the street exalting her to viewless pinnacles of high-heartedness. And then, suddenly, the Devil whispered in my ear that execrated word "eumoiriety." It poisoned the rest of the day. It confirmed my conviction of the ironical designs of Destiny. Destiny, not content with making me a victim of the accursed principle in my own person, had used these two dear women as its instruments in dealing me fresh humiliation. Where would it end? Where could I turn to escape such an enemy? If I had been alone in green fields instead of Sloane Square, I should have clapped my hands to my head and prayed G.o.d not to drive me crazy. I should have cried wild vows to the winds and shaken my fist at the sky and rolled upon the gra.s.s and made a genteel idiot of myself. Nature would have understood. Men do these things in time of stress, and I was in great stress. I loved a woman for the first time in my life--and I was a man nearly forty. I wanted her with every quivering nerve in me. And she was gone. Lost in the vast expanse of Europe with a parcel of performing cats. Gone out of my life loving me as I loved her, all on account of this h.e.l.l-invented principle. Ye G.o.ds! If the fierce, pure, deep, abiding love of a man for a woman is not a reality, what in this world of shadows is anything but vapour? I grasped it tight, hugged it to my bosom--and now she was gone, and in my ears rang the derisive laughter of the enemy.

Where would it end? What would happen next? Nothing was too outrageously, maniacally impossible. I walked up Sloane Street, a street for which impeccable respectability, security of life and person, comfortable, modern, twentieth-century, prosperous smugness has no superior in all the smug cities of the earth, and I was prepared to encounter with a smile of recognition anything that the whirling brains of Bedlam had ever conceived. Why should not this little lady tripping along with gold chain-bag and anxious, shopping knit of the brow, throw her arms round my neck and salute me as her long-lost brother? Why should not the patient horses in that omnibus suddenly turn into griffins and begin to snort fire from their nostrils? Why should not that policeman, who, on his beat, was approaching me with the heavy, measured tread, suddenly arrest me for complicity in the Pazzi Conspiracy or the Rye House Plot? Why should not the whole of the decorous street suddenly change into the inconsequence of an Empire ballet? Why should not the heavens fall down and universal chaos envelop all?

The only possible reason I can think of now is that the Almighty Powers did not consider it worth while to go to quite so much trouble on my account.

This, however, gives you some idea of my state of mind. But though it lasted for a considerable time, I would not have you believe that I fostered it unduly. Indeed, I repudiated it with some disgust. I took it out, examined it, and finding it preposterous, set to work to modify it into harmony with the circ.u.mstances of my every-day life. Even the most sorely tried of men cannot walk abroad shedding his exasperation around like pestilence. If he does, he is put into a lunatic asylum.

If a man cannot immediately a.s.suage the hunger of his heart, he must meet starvation with a smiling face. In the meantime, he has to eat so as to satisfy the hunger of his body, to clothe himself with a certain discrimination, to attend to polite commerce with his fellow man and to put to some fair use the hours of his day. I did not doubt but that by means of intelligent inquiry which I determined to pursue in every possible direction I should sooner or later obtain news of Lola. A lady with a troupe of performing cats could not for long remain in obscurity.

True, I might have gone in gallant quest of her; but I had had enough of such fool adventures. I bided my time, consulted with Dale, who took up the work of a private detective agency with his usual zeal, writing letters to every crony who languished in the exile of foreign emba.s.sies, and corresponding (unknown to Lady Kynnersley) with the agencies of the International Aid Society, did what I could on my own account, and turned my attention seriously to the regeneration of the Judds.

As the affairs of one drunken tailor's family could not afford me complete occupation for my leisure hours, I began to find myself insensibly drawn by Campion's unreflecting enthusiasm into all kinds of small duties connected with Barbara's Building. Before I could realise that I had consented, I discovered myself in charge of an evening cla.s.s of villainous-looking and uncleanly youths who a.s.sembled in one of the lecture-rooms to listen to my recollections of the history of England.

I was to continue the course begun by a young Oxford man, who, for some reason or other, had migrated from Barbara's Building to Toynbee Hall.

"I've never done any schoolmastering in my life. Suppose," said I, with vivid recollections of my school days, "suppose they rag me?"

"They won't," said Campion, who had come to introduce me to the cla.s.s.

And they did not. I found these five and twenty youthful members of the proletariat the most attentive, respectable, and intelligent audience that ever listened to a lecture. Gradually I came to perceive that they were not as villainous-looking and uncleanly as at first sight I had imagined. A great many of them took notes. When I came to the end of my dissertation on Henry VIII, I went among them, as I discovered the custom to be, and chatted, answering questions, explaining difficulties, and advising as to a course of reading. The atmosphere of trust and friendliness compensated for the lack of material sweetness. Here were young men pathetically eager to learn, grateful for every crumb of information that came from my lips. They reminded me of nothing more than the ragged cla.s.s of scholars around a teacher in a mediaeval university. Some had vague dreams of eventually presenting themselves for examinations, the Science and Art Department, the College of Preceptors, the Matriculation of the University of London. Others longed for education for its own sake, or rather as a means of raising themselves in the social scale. Others, bitten by the crude Socialism of their cla.s.s, had been persuaded to learn something of past movements of mankind so as to obtain some basis for their opinions. All were in deadly earnest. The magnetic attraction between teacher and taught established itself. After one or two lectures, I looked forward to the next with excited interest.

Other things Campion off-handedly put into my charge. I went on tours of inspection round the houses of his competing housewives. I acted as his deputy at the police court when ladies and gentlemen with a good record at Barbara's got into trouble with the constabulary. I investigated cases for the charity of the inst.i.tution. In quite a short time I realised with a gasp that I had become part of the machinery of Barbara's Building, and was remorselessly and helplessly whirled hither and thither with the rest of the force of the driving wheel which was Rex Campion.

The amazing, the astounding, the utterly incredible thing about the whole matter was that I not only liked it, but plunged into it heart and soul as I had never plunged into work before. I discovered sympathies that had hitherto lain undreamed of within me. In my electioneering days I had, it is true, foregathered with the sons of toil. I had shaken the h.o.r.n.y hands of men and the soap-suddy hands of women. I had flattered them and cajoled them and shown myself mighty affable, as a sensible and aspiring Parliamentary candidate should do; but the way to their hearts I had never found, I had never dreamed of seeking. And now it seemed as if the great gift had been bestowed on me--and I examined it with a new and almost tremulous delight.

Also, for the first time in all my life, I had taken pain to be the companion of my soul. All my efforts to find Lola were fruitless. I became acquainted with the heartache, the longing for the unattainable, the agony of spirit. The only anodyne was a forgetfulness of self, the only compensation a glimmer of a hope and the shadow of a smile in the grey and leaden lives around me.

On Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my way home from Waterloo Station, wet through, tired out, disappointed, and looking forward to the dry, soft raiment, the warm, cosy room, the excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat. I--with several others--had been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young hooligans. The weather, which had been perfect on Sat.u.r.day, Sunday, and when we had started, a gay and astonis.h.i.+ng army, at seven o'clock, had broken before ten. It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day long. The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco.

I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill, as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break. As the spectacle of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an exhausted manner on the bench beside him. He continued to sob. At last I said, raising my voice:

"You seem to be pretty miserable. What's wrong?"

He turned bleared, yet honest-looking eyes upon me.

"The whole blasted show!" said he. "There's nothing right in it, s'welp me Gawd."

I gave a modified a.s.sent to the proposition and drew my coat-collar over my eyes. "Being wet through doesn't make it any better," said I.

"Who would ha' thought it would come down as it has to-day? Tell me that. It's enough to make a man cut his throat!"

I was somewhat surprised. "You're not in such a great distress just because it has been a rainy day!"