09 Not George Washington

by Unknown

  Norah’s mother wouldn’t let her wait three years, and though fellows have been known to have had a couple of kids at the time of their official marriage, I personally couldn’t stand the wear and tear of that hole-and-corner business. It couldn’t be done.

  (End of Sidney Price’s narrative.)

  Julian Eversleigh’s Narrative

  Chapter 21

  THE TRANSPOSITION OF SENTIMENT

  It is all very, very queer. I do not understand it at all. It makes me sleepy to think about it.

  A month ago I hated Eva. Tomorrow I marry her by special licence.

  Now, what about this?

  My brain is not working properly. I am becoming jerky.

  I tried to work the thing out algebraically. I wrote it down as an equation, thus:—

  HATRED, denoted by x + Eva. REVERSE OF HATRED, ” ” y + Eva ONE MONTH ” ” z.

  From which we get:—

  x + Eva = (y + Eva)z.

  And if anybody can tell me what that means (if it means anything—which I doubt) I shall be grateful. As I said before, my brain is not working properly.

  There is no doubt that my temperament has changed, and in a very short space of time. A month ago I was soured, cynical, I didn’t brush my hair, and I slept too much. I talked a good deal about Life. Now I am blithe and optimistic. I use pomade, part in the middle, and sleep eight hours and no more. I have not made an epigram for days. It is all very queer.

  I took a new attitude towards life at about a quarter to three on the morning after the Gunton-Cresswells’s dance. I had waited for James in his rooms. He had been to the dance.

  Examine me for a moment as I wait there.

  I had been James’ friend for more than two years and a half. I had watched his career from the start. I knew him before he had located exactly the short cut to Fortune. Our friendship embraced the whole period of his sudden, extraordinary success.

  Had not envy by that time been dead in me, it might have been pain to me to watch him accomplish unswervingly with his effortless genius the things I had once dreamt I, too, would laboriously achieve.

  But I grudged him nothing. Rather, I had pleasure in those triumphs of my friend.

  There was no confidence we had withheld from one another.

  When he told me of his relations with Margaret Goodwin he had counted on my sympathy as naturally as he had requested and received my advice.

  To no living soul, save James, would I have confessed my own tragedy—my hopeless love for Eva.

  It is inconceivable that I should have misjudged a man so utterly as I misjudged James.

  That is the latent factor at the root of my problem. The innate rottenness, the cardiac villainy of James Orlebar Cloyster.

  In a measure it was my own hand that laid the train which eventually blew James’ hidden smoulder of fire into the blazing beacon of wickedness, in which my friend’s Satanic soul is visible in all its lurid nakedness.

  I remember well that evening, mild with the prelude of spring, when I evolved for James’ benefit the System. It was a device which was to preserve my friend’s liberty and, at the same time, to preserve my friend’s honour. How perfect in its irony!

  Margaret Goodwin, mark you, was not to know he could afford to marry her, and my system was an instrument to hide from her the truth.

  He employed that system. It gave him the holiday he asked for. He went into Society.

  Among his acquaintances were the Gunton-Cresswells, and at their house he met Eva. Whether his determination to treat Eva as he had treated Margaret came to him instantly, or by degrees I do not know. Inwardly he may have had his scheme matured in embryo, but outwardly he was still the accomplished hypocrite. He was the soul of honour—outwardly. He was the essence of sympathetic tact as far as his specious exterior went. Then came the 27th of May. On that date the first of James Orlebar Cloyster’s masks was removed.

  I had breakfasted earlier than usual, so that by the time I had walked from Rupert Court to Walpole Street it was not yet four o’clock.

  James was out. I thought I would wait for him. I stood at his window. Then I saw Margaret Goodwin. What features! What a complexion! “And James,” I murmured, “is actually giving this the miss in baulk!” I discovered, at that instant, that I did not know James. He was a fool.

  In a few hours I was to discover he was a villain, too.

  She came in and I introduced myself to her. I almost forget what pretext I manufactured, but I remember I persuaded her to go back to Guernsey that very day. I think I said that James was spending Friday till Monday in the country, and had left no address. I was determined that they should not meet. She was far too good for a man who obviously did not appreciate her in the least.

  We had a very pleasant chat. She was charming. At first she was apt to touch on James a shade too frequently, but before long I succeeded in diverting our conversation into less uninteresting topics.

  She talked of Guernsey, I of London. I said I felt I had known her all my life. She said that one had, undeniably, one’s affinities.

  I said, “Might I think of her as ‘Margaret’?”

  She said it was rather unconventional, but that she could not control my thoughts.

  I said, “There you are wrong—Margaret.”

  She said, “Oh, what are you saying, Mr. Eversleigh?”

  I said I was thinking out loud.

  On the doorstep she said, “Well, yes—Julian—you may write to me—sometimes. But I won’t promise to answer.”

  Angel!

  The next thing that awakened me was the coming of James.

  After I had given him a suitable version of Margaret’s visit, he told me he was engaged to Eva. That was an astounding thing; but what was more astounding was that James had somehow got wind of the real spirit of my interview with Margaret.

  I have called James Orlebar Cloyster a fool; I have called him a villain. I will never cease to call him a genius. For by some marvellous capacity for introspection, by some incredible projection of his own mind into other people’s matters, he was able to tax me to my face with an attempt to win his former fiancée’s affections. I tried to choke him off. I used every ounce of bluff I possessed. In vain. I left Walpole Street in a state approaching mental revolution.

  My exact feelings towards James were too intricate to be defined in a single word. Not so my feelings towards Eva. “Hate” supplied the lacuna in her case.

  Thus the month began.

  The next point of importance is my interview with Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell. She had known all along how matters stood in regard to Eva and myself. She had not been hostile to me on that account. She had only pointed out that as I could do nothing towards supporting Eva I had better keep away when my cousin was in London. That was many years ago. Since then we had seldom met. Latterly, not at all. Invitations still arrived from her, but her afternoon parties clashed with my after-breakfast pipe, and as for her evening receptions—well, by the time I had pieced together the various component parts of my dress clothes, I found myself ready for bed. That is to say, more ready for bed than I usually am.

  I went to Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell in a very bitter mood. I was bent on trouble.

  “I’ve come to congratulate Eva,” I said.

  Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell sighed.

  “I was afraid of this,” she said.

  “The announcement was the more pleasant,” I went on, “because James has been a bosom friend of mine.”

  “I’m afraid you are going to be extremely disagreeable about your cousin’s engagement,” she said.

  “I am,” I answered her. “Very disagreeable. I intend to shadow the young couple, to be constantly meeting them, calling attention to them. James will most likely have to try to assault me. That may mean a black eye for dear James. It will certainly mean the police court. Their engagement will be, in short, a succession of hideous contretemps, a series of laughable scenes.”

  “Julian,” said Mrs. Gunton-Cresswel
l, “hitherto you have acted manfully toward Eva. You have been brave. Have you no regard for Eva?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Nor for Mr. Cloyster?”

  “Not a scrap.”

  “But why are you behaving in this appallingly selfish way?”

  This was a facer. I couldn’t quite explain to her how things really were, so I said:

  “Never you mind. Selfish or not, Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell, I’m out for trouble.”

  That night I had a letter from her. She said that in order to avoid all unpleasantness, Eva’s engagement would be of the briefest nature possible. That the marriage was fixed for the twelfth of next month; that the wedding would be a very quiet one; and that until the day of the wedding Eva would not be in London.

  It amused me to find how thoroughly I had terrified Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell. How excellently I must have acted, for, of course, I had not meant a word I had said to that good lady.

  In the days preceding the twelfth of June I confess I rather softened to James. The entente cordiale was established between us. He told me how irresistible Eva had been that night; mentioned how completely she had carried him away. Had she not carried me away in precisely the same manner once upon a time?

  He swore he loved her as dearly as—(I can’t call to mind the simile he employed, though it was masterly and impressive.) I even hinted that the threats I had used in the presence of Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell were not serious. He thanked me, but said I had frightened her to such good purpose that the date would now have to stand. “You will not he surprised to hear,” he added, “that I have called in all my work. I shall want every penny I make. The expenses of an engaged man are hair-raising. I send her a lot of flowers every morning—you’ve no conception how much a few orchids cost. Then, whenever I go to see her I take her some little present—a gold-mounted umbrella, a bicycle lamp, or a patent scent-bottle. I’m indebted to you, Julian, positively indebted to you for cutting short our engagement.”

  I now go on to point two: the morning of the twelfth of June.

  Hurried footsteps on my staircase. A loud tapping at my door. The church clock chiming twelve. The agitated, weeping figure of Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell approaching my hammock. A telegram thrust into my hand. Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell’s hysterical exclamation, “You infamous monster—you—you are at the bottom of this.”

  All very disconcerting. All, fortunately, very unusual.

  My eyes were leaden with slumber, but I forced myself to decipher the following message, which had been telegraphed to West Kensington Lane:

  Wedding must be postponed.—CLOYSTER.

  “I’ve had no hand in this,” I cried; “but,” I added enthusiastically, “it serves Eva jolly well right.”

  CHAPTER 22

  A CHAT WITH JAMES (Julian Eversleigh’s narrative continued)

  Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell seemed somehow to drift away after that. Apparently I went to sleep again, and she didn’t wait.

  When I woke, it was getting on for two o’clock. I breakfasted, with that magnificent telegram propped up against the teapot; had a bath, dressed, and shortly before five was well on my way to Walpole Street.

  The more I thought over the thing, the more it puzzled me. Why had James done this? Why should he wish to treat Eva in this manner? I was delighted that he had done so, but why had he? A very unexpected person, James.

  James was lying back in his shabby old armchair, smoking a pipe. There was tea on the table. The room seemed more dishevelled than ever. It would have been difficult to say which presented the sorrier spectacle, the room or its owner.

  He looked up as I came in, and nodded listlessly. I poured myself out a cup of tea, and took a muffin. Both were cold and clammy. I went to the bell.

  “What are you doing?” asked James.

  “Only going to ring for some more tea,” I said.

  “No, don’t do that. I’ll go down and ask for it. You don’t mind using my cup, do you?”

  He went out of the room, and reappeared with a jug of hot water.

  “You see,” he explained, “if Mrs. Blankley brings in another cup she’ll charge for two teas instead of one.”

  “It didn’t occur to me,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “It sounds mean,” mumbled James.

  “Not at all,” I said. “You’re quite right not to plunge into reckless extravagance.”

  James blushed slightly—a feat of which I was surprised to see that he was capable.

  “The fact is–-” he began.

  I interrupted him.

  “Never mind about that,” I said. “What I want to know is—what’s the meaning of this?” And I shoved the bilious-hued telegraph form under his nose, just as Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell had shoved it under mine.

  “It means that I’m done,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll explain. I have postponed my marriage for the same reason that I refused you a clean cup—because I cannot afford luxuries.”

  “It may be my dulness; but, still, I don’t follow you. What exactly are you driving at?”

  “I’m done for. I’m on the rocks. I’m a pauper.”

  “A what?”

  “A pauper.”

  I laughed. The man was splendid. There was no other word for it.

  “And shall I tell you something else that you are?” I said. “You are a low, sneaking liar. You are playing it low down on Eva.”

  He laughed this time. It irritated me unspeakably.

  “Don’t try to work off the hollow, mirthless laugh dodge on me,” I said, “because it won’t do. You’re a blackguard, and you know it.”

  “I tell you I’m done for. I’ve barely a penny in the world.”

  “Rot!” I said. “Don’t try that on me. You’ve let Eva down plop, and I’m jolly glad; but all the same you’re a skunk. Nothing can alter that. Why don’t you marry the girl?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “It would be too dishonourable.”

  “Dishonourable?”

  “Yes. I haven’t got enough money. I couldn’t ask her to share my poverty with me. I love her too dearly.”

  I was nearly sick. The beast spoke in a sort of hushed, soft-music voice as if he were the self-sacrificing hero in a melodrama. The stained-glass expression on his face made me feel homicidal.

  “Oh, drop it,” I said. “Poverty! Good Lord! Isn’t two thousand a year enough to start on?”

  “But I haven’t got two thousand a year.”

  “Oh, I don’t pretend to give the figures to a shilling.”

  “You don’t understand. All I have to live on is my holiday work at the Orb.”

  “What!”

  “Oh, yes; and I’m doing some lyrics for Briggs for the second edition of The Belle of Wells. That’ll keep me going for a bit, but it’s absolutely out of the question to think of marrying anyone. If I can keep my own head above water till the next vacancy occurs at the Orb I shall be lucky.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “I’m not, though I dare say I shall be soon, if this sort of thing goes on.”

  “I tell you you are mad. Otherwise you’d have called in your work, and saved yourself having to pay those commissions to Hatton and the others. As it is, I believe they’ve somehow done you out of your cheques, and the shock of it has affected your brain.”

  “My dear Julian, it’s a good suggestion, that about calling in my work. But it comes a little late. I called it in weeks ago.”

  My irritation increased.

  “What is the use of lying like that?” I said angrily. “You don’t seem to credit me with any sense at all. Do you think I never read the papers and magazines? You can’t have called in your work. The stuff’s still being printed over the signatures of Sidney Price, Tom Blake, and the Rev. John Hatton.”

  I caught sight of a Strawberry Leaf lying on the floor beside his chair. I picked it up.

  “Here you are,” I said. “Page 324. Short story. ‘Lady Mary’s Mistake,’ b
y Sidney Price. How about that?”

  “That’s it, Julian,” he said dismally; “that’s just it. Those three devils have pinched my job. They’ve learned the trick of the thing through reading my stuff, and now they’re turning it out for themselves. They’ve cut me out. My market’s gone. The editors and publishers won’t look at me. I have had eleven printed rejection forms this week. One editor wrote and said that he did not want John-Hatton-and-water. That’s why I sent the wire.”

  “Let’s see those rejection forms.”

  “You can’t. They’re burnt. They got on my nerves, and I burnt them.”

  “Oh,” I said, “they’re burnt, are they?”

  He got up, and began to pace the room.

  “But I shan’t give up, Julian,” he cried, with a sickening return of the melodrama hero manner; “I shan’t give up. I shall still persevere. The fight will be terrible. Often I shall feel on the point of despair. Yet I shall win through. I feel it, Julian. I have the grit in me to do it. And meanwhile”—he lowered his voice, and seemed surprised that the orchestra did not strike up the slow music—”meanwhile, I shall ask Eva to wait.”

  To wait! The colossal, the Napoleonic impudence of the man! I have known men who seemed literally to exude gall, but never one so overflowing with it as James Orlebar Cloyster. As I looked at him standing there and uttering that great speech, I admired him. I ceased to wonder at his success in life.

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t do it,” I said regretfully. “I simply cannot begin to say what I think of you. The English language isn’t equal to it. I cannot, off-hand, coin a new phraseology to meet the situation. All I can say is that you are unique.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Absolutely unique. Though I had hoped you would have known me better than to believe that I would swallow the ludicrous yarn you’ve prepared. Don’t you ever stop and ask yourself on these occasions if it’s good enough?”

  “You don’t believe me!”

  “My dear James!” I protested. “Believe you!”

  “I swear it’s all true. Every word of it.”