The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

by Израэль Зангвилл

  He smiled maliciously. "And I, too; I follow you no farther."

  "Oh, you are just too cute," she said with a laugh of vexation and pleasure. "You make me go on just to make you follow; but it is really you that make me lead. That's what you mean by Bismarckism, isn't it?"

  "You put it beautifully."

  She swung round to face him. "Is there nothing you admire but Force?"

  "Not Force-Power!"

  "What's the difference?"

  "Force is blind."

  "So is love," she said. "Do you scorn that?" And her smile was daring and dazzling.

  Ere he could reply Nature outdid her in dazzlement, and superadded a crash of thunder.

  "Yes," he said, as though there had been no interruption. "I scorn all that is blind-even this storm that may strike you and me. Ah! the rain," as the great drops began to fall. "Poor Lady Chelmer-without an umbrella."

  "We can shelter by these shrubs." In an instant she was crouching amid the ferns on a carpet of autumn leaves, making space for him beside her.

  "Thank you-I will stand," he said coldly. "But I don't know if you're aware these are oak-shrubs."

  "What of it?"

  "I was only thinking of the Swiss proverb about lightning, 'Vor den Eichen sollst du weichen.' We ought to make for the beeches."

  "I'm not going to leave my umbrella. I am sorry you won't accept a bit of it." And she bent the tall ferns invitingly towards him.

  "I don't like cowering even before the rain," he laughed. "How it brings out the beautiful earthy smell."

  "One enjoys the beautiful earthy smell the better for being nearer to the earth."

  He did not reply.

  "Oh, you dear fool," she thought. Hadn't she had heaps of Power from childhood-over her stern old father, over her weakling mother, over her governesses, and later over the whole tribe of "the boys," and now in Europe over Marquises and Honourables-and could it all compare in intensity to this delicious, poignant sense of being caught up into a masterful personality! No, not Power but Powerlessness was life's central reality; not to turn with iron hand the great wheels of Fate, but to faint at a dear touch, to be sucked up as a moth in the flame. And for him, too, it were surely as sweet to leave this strenuous quest for dominance, or to be content with dominating her alone. Oh, she would bring him to clear vision, to live for nothing but her, even as she asked for nothing but him.

  The harsh scream of a bluejay struck a discord through her reverie. She remembered that he had yet to be won.

  "But didn't you tell me people can't get power without money?" she said, forgetting the hiatus in the conversation.

  "Nor with it generally," he replied, without surprise. "Money is but a lever. You cannot move the earth unless you have force and fulcrum, too."

  "But I guess a man like you must get real mad to see so many levers lying about idle."

  "Oh, I shall get on without a lever, like primitive man. I have muscles."

  "But it seems too bad not to be able to afford machinery."

  "I shall be hand-made."

  "Yes, and by your own hand. But won't it be slow?"

  "It will be sure."

  Every one of his speeches rang like the stroke of a hammer. Yes, indeed he had muscles.

  "But how much surer with money! You ought to turn your career into a company. Surely it would pay a dividend to its promoters."

  "The directors would interfere."

  "You could be chairman-with a veto."

  He shook his head. "The rain is dripping through your umbrella. Don't you think we might run to the house?"

  "It's only an old hat." It was fresh from Paris, broad-brimmed, beautiful, and bewitching. "Why don't you find"-she smiled nervously-"a millionaire of means?"

  "And what would be his reward?"

  "Just Virtue's. Won't you be a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces.

  "Millionaires' minds don't run that way."

  "Not male millionaires, perhaps," she said, turning her face from him so jerkily that she shook the oak-shrub and it became a shower-bath.

  He looked at her, slightly startled. It was the first emotion she had ever provoked in him, and her heart beat faster.

  "I really do think it is giving over now," he said, gazing at her sopping hat.

  'Twas as if he had shaken the shrub again and drenched her with cold water. He was mocking her, her and her dollars and her love.

  "It is quite over," she said savagely, springing up, and growing even angrier when she found the rain had really stopped, so that her indignation sounded only like acquiescence. She strode ahead of him, silent, through the wet bracken, her frock growing a limp rag as it brushed aside the glistening ferns.

  As she struck the broader path to the house, the cackling laugh of a goat chained to a roadside log followed her cynically. Where had she heard this bleat before? Ah, yes, from the Marquis of Woodham.

  III. BALANCEZ

  Walter Bassett had spoken truly. He did not admire love-that blind force. Women seemed to him delightfully aesthetic objects-to be kept at a distance, however closely one embraced them. They were unreasoning beings at the best, even when unbiassed by that supreme prejudice-love.

  It was not his conception of the strong man that he must needs become as water at some woman's touch and go dancing and babbling like a sylvan brook. Women were the light of life-he was willing enough to admit it, but one must be able to switch the light on and off at will. All these were reasons for not falling in love-they were not reasons for not marrying. And so, Amber being determined to marry him, there was really less difficulty than if it had been necessary for him to fall in love with her.

  It took, however, many letters and interviews, full of the subtlest comedy, infinite advancing and retiring, and recrossing and bowing, and courtesying and facing and half-turning, before this leap-year dance could end in the solemn Wedding March.

  "You know," she said once, "how I should love the fun of seeing you plough your way through all the mediocrities."

  "That is the means, not the end," he reminded her, rebukingly. "One only wants the world to swallow one's pills for the world's sake."

  "I don't believe you," she said frankly. "Else you'd move mountains to get the money for the pills, not turn up your nose at the mountain when it comes to you."

  He laughed heartily. "What a delightful confusion of metaphors! I'm sure you've got Irish blood somewhere."

  "Of course I have. Did I never tell you I am descended from the kings of Ireland?"

  He took off his hat mockingly. "I salute Miss Brian Boru."

  "You're an awfully good fellow," he told her on a later occasion. "I almost believe I'd take your money if you were not a woman." "If I were not a woman I should not offer it to you-I should want a career of my own."

  "And my career would content you?" he asked, touched.

  "Absolutely," she lied. "The interest I should take in it-wouldn't that be sufficient interest on the loan?"

  "There is one thing you have taught me," he said slowly-"how conventional I am! But every prejudice in me shrinks from your proposition, much as I admire your manliness."

  "Perhaps it could be put on more conventional lines-superficially," she suggested in a letter that harked back to this conversation. "One might go through conventional forms. That adorable Disraeli-I have just been reading his letters. How right he was not to marry for love!"

  The penultimate stage of the pre-nuptial comedy was reached in the lobby of the Opera, while Society was squeezing to its carriage. It was after the Rheingold, and poor Lady Chelmer could hardly keep her eyes open, and actually dozed off as she leaned against a wall, in patient martyrdom. Walter Bassett had been specially irritating, for he had not come up to the box once, and everybody knows (as the Hon. Tolshunt had said, with unwonted brilliance) the Rheingold is in heavy bars.

  "I didn't know you admired Wagner so much," Amber said sc
athingly, as Walter pushed through the grooms. "Such a rapt devotee!"

  "Wagner is the greatest man of the century. He alone has been able to change London's dinner-hour."

  Amber could not help smiling. "Poor Lady Chelmer!" she said, nodding towards the drowsing dowager. "Since half-past six!"

  "Is that our carriage?" said the "Prisoner of Pleasure," opening her eyes.

  "No, dear-I guess we are some fifty behind. Tolly and the Marquis are watching from the pavement."

  The poor lady sighed and went to sleep again.

  "Behold the compensations of poverty," observed Walter Bassett. "The gallery-folk have to wait and squeeze before the opera; the carriage-folk after the opera."

  "You forget the places they occupy during the opera. Poor Wagner! What a fight! I wish I could have helped his career." And Amber set a wistful smile in the becoming frame of her white hood.

  "The form of the career appears to be indifferent to you," he said, with a little laugh.

  "As indifferent as the man," she replied, meeting his eyes calmly.

  The faint scent of her hair mingled with his pleasurable sense of her frank originality. For the first time the bargain really appealed to him. He could not but see that she was easily the fairest of that crush of fair women, and to have her prostrated at the foot of his career was more subtly delicious than to have her surrender to his person. The ball was at his foot in surely the most tempting form that a ball could take. And the fact that he must leave her hurriedly to write the musical criticism that was the price of his stall, was not calculated to diminish his appreciation of all the kingdoms of the world which his temptress was showing him from her high mountain.

  "Alas! I must go and write a notice," he sighed.

  "Satan's Secretary?" she queried mischievously.

  He started. Had he not been just thinking of her as a Satan in skirts?

  "En attendant that I become Satan's master," he replied ambiguously, as he raised his hat.

  "Oh, to drive off with him into the peace and solitude of Love-away from the grinding paths of ambition," thought Amber, when the horses pranced up.

  IV. CROISE

  "Women, not measures," said the reigning wit anent the administration which Amber's Salon held together, and in which her husband occupied a position quite disproportionate to his nominal office, and still more so to the almost unparalleled brevity of his career as a private member.

  Few, indeed, were the recalcitrants who could resist Amber's smiles, or her still more seductive sulkiness. Walter Bassett's many enemies declared that the young Cabinet Minister owed his career entirely to his wife. His admirers indignantly pointed out that he had represented Highmead for two sessions before he met Miss Roan. The germ of truth in this was that he had stipulated to himself that he would not accept the contract unless Amber, too, must admit "Value received," and in contributing a career already self-launched, and a good old Huntingdon name, his pride was satisfied. This, however, had wasted a year or so, while the Government was getting itself turned out, and it never entered his brain that his crushing victory at the General Election could owe anything to a corner in votes-at five dollars a head-secretly made by a fair American financier.

  It was in the thick of the season, and Amber had just said good-bye to the Bishop, the last of her dinner-guests. "I always say grace when the church goes," she laughed, as she turned to her budget of unread correspondence and shuffled the letters, as in the old days, when she hoped to draw a letter of Walter's. But her method had become more scientific. Recognising the writers by their crests or mottoes, she would arrange the letters in order of precedence, alleging it was to keep her hand in, otherwise she would always be making the most horrible mistakes in "your Mediaeval British etiquette."

  "Who goes first to-night?" said her husband, watching her movements from a voluptuous arm-chair.

  "Only Lady Chelmer," Amber yawned, as she broke the seal.

  "Didn't I see the scrawl of the Honourable Tolly?"

  "Yes, poor dear. I do so want to know if he is happy in British Honduras. But he must take his turn."

  "If he had taken his turn," Walter laughed, "he never would have got the appointment there."

  "No, poor dear; it was very good of you."

  "Of me?" Walter's tone was even more amused. His eyes roved round the vast drawing-room, as if with the thought that he had as little to do with its dignified grandeur. Then his gaze rested once more on his wife; she seemed a delicious harmony of silks and flowers and creamy flesh-tones.

  "Mrs. Bassett," he said softly, lingering on the proprietorial term.

  "Yes, Walter," she said, not looking up from her letter.

  "Do you realise this is the first time we have been alone together this month?"

  "No? Really?" She glanced up absently.

  "Never mind that muddle-headed old Chelmer. I dare say she only wants another hundred or two." He came over, took the letter and her hand with it. "I have a great secret to tell you."

  Now he had captured her attention as well as her hand. Her eyes sparkled. "A Cabinet Secret?" she said.

  "Yes. At this moment every newspaper office is in a fever-to-morrow all England will be ringing with the news. It is a thunderbolt."

  She started up, snatching her hand away, every nerve a-quiver with excitement. "And you kept this from me all through dinner?"

  "I hadn't a chance, darling-I came straight from the scrimmage."

  "You won't gloss it over by calling me novel names. I hate stale thunderbolts. You might have breathed a word in my ear."

  "I shall make amends by beginning with the part that is only for your ear. Do you know what next Monday is?"

  "The day you address your constituents, of course. Oh, I see, this thunderbolt is going to change your speech."

  "Is going to change my speech altogether. Next Monday is the seventh anniversary of our wedding."

  "Is it? But what has that to do with your speech at Highmead?"

  "Everything." He smiled mysteriously, then went on softly, "Amber, do you remember our honeymoon?"

  She smiled faintly. "Oh, I haven't quite forgotten."

  "If you had quite forgotten the misery of it, I should be glad."

  "I have quite forgotten."

  "You are kinder than I deserve. But I was so startled to find my career was less to you than a kiss that I was more churlish than I need have been. I even wished that you might have a child, so that you might be taken up with it instead of with me."

  She blushed. "Yes, I dare say I showed my hand clumsily as soon as it held all the aces."

  "Ah, Amber, you were an angel and I was a beast. How gallantly you swallowed your disappointment in your bargain, how loyally you worked heart and soul that I might gain my one ideal-Power!"

  "It was a labour of love," she said deprecatingly.

  "My noble Amber. But did you think, selfishly engrossed though I have been with the Fight for Power, that this love-labour of yours was lost on me? No, 'terrible ambitious' as I was, I could still see I got the blackberries and you little more than the scratches, and the less you began to press your claim upon my heart, the more my heart was opening out with an answering passion. I began to watch the play of your eyes, the shimmer of light across your cheek, the roguish pout of your lips, the lock that strayed across your temple-as it is straying now."

  She pushed it back impatiently. "But what has all this to do with the Cabinet Secret?"

  "Patience, darling! How much nicer to listen to you than to the Opposition."

  "I shall be in the Opposition unless you get along faster."

  "That is what I want-your face opposite me always, instead of bald-headed babblers. Ah, if you knew how often, of late, it has floated before me in the House, reducing historic wrangles to the rocking of children's boats in stormy ponds, accentuating the ponderous futility." He took her hand again, and a great joy filled him as he felt its gentle responsive pressure.

  "Ponderous, perhaps," she sa
id, smiling faintly; "but not futile, Walter."

  "Futile, so far as I am concerned, dearest. Ah, you are right. Love is the only reality-everything else a game played with counters. What are our winnings? A few cheers drowned in the roar that greets the winning jockey, a few leading articles, stale as yesterday's newspaper."

  "But the good to the masses-" she reminded him.

  "Don't mock me with my own phrases, darling. The masses have done me more good than I can ever do them. Next Monday, dear Amber Roan, we'll try our honeymoon over again." And his lips sought hers.

  She drew back. "Yes, yes, after the Speech. But now-the Secret!"

  "There will be no speech-that is the secret."

  She drew away from him altogether. "No speech!" she gasped.

  "None save to your adorable ear-and the moonlit waters. Woodham has lent us his yacht-"

  "In the middle of a Cabinet Crisis?"

  "Which concerns me less than anybody." And he beamed happily.

  "Less than anybody?" she repeated.

  "Yes-since it is my resignation that makes the crisis."

  She fell back into a chair, white and trembling. "You have resigned!"

  "For ever. And now, hey for the great round, wonderful world! Don't you hear our keel cutting the shimmering waters?"

  "No," she said savagely. "I hear only Woodham's mocking laughter!... And it sounds like a goat bleating."

  "Darling!" he cried in amaze.

  "I told you not to 'darling' me. How dared you change our lives without a word of consultation?"

  "Amber!" His voice was pained now. "I prepared a surprise for the anniversary of our wedding. One can't consult about surprises."

  "Keep your quibbles for the House! But perhaps there is no House, either."

  "Naturally. I have done with it all. I have written for the Chiltern Hundreds."

  "You are mad, Walter. You must take it all back."

  "I can't, Amber. I have quarrelled hopelessly with the Party. The Prime Minister will never forgive what I said at the Council to-day. The luxury of speaking one's mind is expensive. I ought never to have joined any Party. I am only fit to be Independent."