“Well,” said Mr. Lane-Gwithers, “it’s something in the nature of a public disavowal. Do you see the London Daily?”
“Generally I do,” I said.
“If you look up the London Daily for last Wednesday, you will find in it the statement that at a certain ball in Belgrave Square a number of dancing men were present, including Mr. Ambrose Lane-Gwithers. That’s me. Those were their exact words. ‘A number of dancing men,’ et cetera. Well,” said Mr. Lane-Gwithers, slapping his knee in a desultory, accustomed manner with his gloved hand, “what was I to do?”
“And weren’t you there?” I asked breathlessly.
“What was I to do?” repeated Mr. Lane-Gwithers. “It was a serious matter for me, you see, bein’ published like that as a dancing man. These editor-fellows, in their anxiety to fill up their papers, don’t stop to realise what they’re doing half the time. I don’t particularly blame them—I daresay it isn’t so easy—but what was I to do? I’ll tell you what I did do. I wrote to the paper—a regular letter to the editor, you know.”
“Did you tell him what you thought of him?”
“Not I! He wouldn’t have put it in—and that was my object, you see, to get it in. I began by quoting his statement in full, just as I have to you. Then I said: ‘Now, sir, I can prove to your satisfaction that there is only one Ambrose Lane-Gwithers in London society; and I will ask you to accept my personal statement that I have never been to a ball in Belgrave Square in my life. Further,’ I said, ‘I am afraid I cannot claim to be a dancing man, being of the opinion that the spectacle of a bright and shining pate circulating round in the gay and giddy waltz is simply ridiculous. Apologising,’ I said, ‘for trespassing at such length on your valuable space, I am, yours, &c., A. Lane-Gwithers.’”
“And did he put it in?”
“Rather! The very next day. I daresay he saw the humour of it.”
“I wonder if he did?” I said pensively.
“Of course I’ve been roasted over it ever since, but I expected that. And I consider I’ve saved my reputation.”
“Taking into account the number of people who read the London Daily, I should think you had made it,” I replied.
It was so interesting that I quite regretted, after that, any invitation which was not to sit out. I wanted so much to discover the precise point at which each of them would have felt compelled to explain about himself in the papers. Which of them, for instance, being reported by a journal to have appeared in the Park with a red tie, would have assured the public that he never wore a red tie in his life, at all events since he had chosen his own ties, that red was peculiarly obnoxious to him and particularly impossible, he being of opinion that the spectacle of this colour combined with a fair complexion and a yellow moustache was an outrage upon society. I did not elicit as much as that; but I made careful explorations and was very well rewarded. Profound, profound it was; one hesitated at the brink of such a sense of personal importance. Graham, when I told him about it, said that probably none of them had ever earned a penny in their lives, and that nothing so contributed to swelled head as a false relation to the economic basis of society. But I am sure it needs more than that to explain the solemn phenomena of those young men. There must be climatic, moral, philosophical reasons to account for them, probably something very creditable. It is impossible that they could come to such perfection anywhere but in the captial of the most serious country in the world.
Lord Doleford asked me for Number Seven, and whether I cared about it. I said not particularly. I thought he looked disappointed, and was immediately sorry, suddenly remembering that he was just back from India and perhaps would have liked to. So I said as awkwardly as possible: “I’ll dance if you like.”
“Suppose we take just one turn,” he said; and we went round two or three times.
“But,” I said, as we paused, “you seem to like it!”
“Of course I like it,” he replied; “that’s not surprising, is it? Did you think I was too infirm?”
“Not at all,” I said, “but the others don’t, do they?” It seems a bald and foolish reply, and that was what I felt it to be.
“The others?” he said, and looked at a knot of them, standing near. “Oh, those fellows! They don’t know what’s good for them. They’ve been allowed to stay too long in England. I’d like to see every one of them planted out for three or four years in Dera Ismail Khan. When they came back they would dance, and be uncommon pleased to get the chance.”
“Would you like to go on?” I said.
“Not if you’re tired. No? Then—it’s awfully good of you!”
We finished it so vigorously that for a moment or two, when it was over and we found chairs, we simply panted in unison. I was more or less glad I had to pant, for I now saw clearly that I would never be able to talk at all intelligently to Lord Doleford. I don’t wish to say that I found him antipathetic—not in the least. I am afraid I can’t account for it by anything in him, unless I might have suspected him of being somewhat critical of people from our side of the Atlantic—had he not been rather severe upon Evelyn? Now that I come to think of it, that had, I daresay, a good deal to do with it. There must be some way of explaining it when a person properly brought up, and quite well, is as nervous as I was whenever a pause in the conversation seemed to suggest that I should go on with it. I had positively to remember that I had been properly brought up, and that I wasn’t likely to make any mistakes that mattered, even in this conventional England, where, I had already noticed, one may say a hundred things that are not at all correct so long as they are of the kind that it is correct to say incorrectly. I felt very angry with my paralysed tongue. To confess all my silly fears, I was afraid the Earl of Doleford might think—how little I knew him!—that I was stupidly impressed with his exalted rank and his so beautifully matching it in appearance; which, of course, I was in a way, but not in that way. I was not, as a rule, awkward and silent with people; and their being earls, when they were earls, had made no difference so far. Having been brought up with Graham helped, I suppose, to account for it; it wasn’t as if I had nothing to fall back on.
Fortunately, Lord Doleford had himself a good deal to say, and seemed extraordinarily interested, too, in saying it—extraordinarily, that is, for a young man in London. He was like a person who has had his conversation dammed up for a long time, and he poured it out delightfully, not noticing, or not seeming to notice in the least, that I was falling from abyss to abyss of sheer imbecility. What will be thought of me when I say that he was finally obliged to ask my opinion of English weather?
“I like it,” I said; “it’s always clearing up.”
“So it is,” he agreed. “Always improving—or getting worse. Like life. There’s variety in our old English weather. I like it too. You can’t count on the infernal sun, day in an’ day out. I imagine there’s variety in the Canadian weather, too, isn’t there? Pretty violent variety.”
“I know,” I said, “you think we’re constantly either having our noses frozen or getting the skin burned off them. But it isn’t like that always, or even for much of the time.”
“I daresay we get hold of wrong notions,” he said. “The old tales, you know, of the Elizabethan explorers—they stick in our heads. You might make your climate over again before we realised there had been any change in it. It must be a good country—Canada. I’d like to see it.”
“Why didn’t you go there, instead of to India?” I asked.
“One can’t always choose,” said he. (Mightn’t I have known that?) “My people have generally found their job in India, somehow. Besides, they run their own show out there. They wouldn’t have any use for a chap like me.”
“We do run our own show,” I told him. “But there are lots of other things to do, you know, besides running the show.”
“I know. I suspect it’s the mistake we make, we English, that we must always be in the management, wherever we go. The Colonies teach us better, but we’re slow at seei
ng things. And there’s always India to keep up the idea. I thought once of ranching—I’m not such a duffer at horses—but that takes capital, doesn’t it?”
“Graham could tell you,” I assured him.
“I’m afraid it’s too late in the day!” he laughed. “And I don’t regret India, you know. It’s a fine thing, India—and great luck for us, that we’ve got it to do. Either for soldiering or civil work—I’ve had a little of both—there’s a day’s work to be found in India that asks a fellow for all he’s got. And it’s a country a man can stretch himself in, you know—not like this.”
“England isn’t quite big enough to be a country, is it? In the geographical sense, I mean. But it’s a heavenly place,” I said—“especially London. Don’t you think so?”
“I grant you this,” said Lord Doleford—“it’s a good place to come back to. And when you’re in harness anywhere in the open it’s out-and-out good to know it’s always there. But it’s a bad place to find work in, if you want anything better than a secretaryship to a charitable organisation. You suffer so from the competition of cleverer chaps. It’s full of infernally clever chaps. Unless you’re one of them I don’t think it’s much of a place to spend a lifetime in. And the air’s thick with money. To me it would be a kind of penal servitude,” he said gloomily, and as if it were an argument he often had occasion to use.
“Have you got to face it?”
“Oh, well! sooner or later it will have to be considered, I suppose. Personally, I should like to get into the permanent civil line in India—enter the Foreign Office, you know, and work up. If you’re any good they may give you a little kingdom to run before you’ve done. There are lots of them going.”
“Little kingdoms?”
“Yes; belonging to Maharajahs, you know. You take the Maharajah on as well, of course. But my mother is dead against it, and my uncle, and everyone belonging to me.”
Lord Doleford stared into space with real dejection, and I felt very sorry for him. I looked all round my mind for some way of saying so, but there was nothing to be found, so I could only try to make my silence as sympathetic as possible. His case seemed another illustration, amazing and a little absurd, of that curious authority by which the simple social structure and scheme of things in England could interfere with a person born in it, at all events if he happened to be born at all importantly.
“I call it great luck to belong to a place like Canada,” he said; “no bother in seeing your way, out there. No impedimenta.”
“I was just thinking so,” I said.
“Look at your brother. There’s a fellow to be envied. See what he can do, and help to bring about, in a country like that.”
“I know,” I said; “and he’s going to.” There was something very exhilarating in hearing Graham envied by Lord Doleford.
“They offer me politics, too, you know,” he went on; “or what they call politics. A seat nobody can take away from me, and the opportunity of making speeches nobody is interested enough to interrupt. Bah—birth’s a rotten borough!”
“My father is a member of our Upper House,” I said, “and he was appointed, not elected, and it’s for life; and they don’t interrupt him a great deal; but he doesn’t feel like that about it.”
“If he was appointed it was because he jolly well deserved it, I imagine. It’s a very different thing, making your own place and finding it ready-made.”
I had, at the time, a confused feeling that this was unreasonable, and the argument of a person on his defence against doing something that he didn’t want to do; and afterwards in the night, I saw quite clearly that Lord Doleford’s real place couldn’t be made for him by anybody but himself, and that it didn’t really matter much whether his starting-point was in the Lords or the Commons, or just in the street. But at the moment none of these useful ideas came.
“Yes, it would be nicer!” I said out of my vacuity. It seemed to me we were in desperate regions for discussion, and that I must drag myself out of them somehow if I was to look back upon a single intelligent remark on my part in the humiliating course of the evening. We were sitting near a half-opened window, and a sharp sound struck through the street. I grasped at it desperately.
“There!” I said. “That’s the only thing I don’t like in London.”
“The hansoms?”
“No, the whistles for them. The poor nervous horses trying to catch a passenger, and getting lashed and tearing up, knocking their poor hoofs against the cobble-stones, and not knowing why in the world, but just blindly competing in the dark under the whip. I get horrid thrills of sympathy for the horse, especially for the disappointed horse.”
I saw by Lord Doleford’s smile that he understood exactly.
“There is no disappointment this time,” he said. “Is there? Only one came up. Poor brutes, yes. One sees it in their eyes sometimes, that single frightened spark that says ‘I’ve got to get there, whatever happens.’ You like them, then—horses?”
“I adore them!” I said, and presently we were both, metaphorically, mounted. I do not wonder that horses played such an important part in ancient mythology—they will save any situation. As a subject they appeal so, in their simple, serious, noble way, that there is not room left in the mind for a shred of self-consciousness or any of the meaner things. Anybody who can claim acquaintance with a horse is on masonic terms with anybody else who can; and after that, thanks to the fact that I could tell him from personal experience something about bronchos, I was pleased to feel that Lord Doleford did not consider my conversation quite negligible.
“I hope you will come in for some hunting,” he said.
“I don’t hunt,” I told him, “but I hope to see it done.”
“‘See it done!’” he repeated, as if it amused him. “Well, at this time of year there ought to be no difficulty about that. Which Hunt are you going to honour by inspecting it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we are to stay with the Lippingtons in the country in January, and Lady Lippington mentioned that there would be a Meet while we were there. It was the very thing I most longed for.”
“Oh, but that’s the Famine!” exclaimed Lord Doleford. “The South Crosshires. Capital! We must find you a mount.”
The music had begun again some moments before, and he suddenly consulted his programme.
“Can that be Number Ten? The dev—I mean I’m afraid I must leave you, Miss Trent. Or can I take you anywhere?”
“Please don’t mind,” I said. “Here is Mr. Milliken, and I think it’s his dance.”
Billy Milliken thought, however, that an interval should be allowed for refreshments. There was rather a jam near the supper-room; and while we waited our chance to penetrate, I glanced back and saw Lord Doleford once more engaging Evelyn Dicey in the waltz.
CHAPTER XI
BY this time it had grown quite clear to me that Graham was seriously in love. Not with any lady—with England. It might be thought from what I put down earlier that it was always he who supplied the critical note in our experiences, and I who blindly admired and gratefully seized. But that had regard only to things of the surface, little matters of taste and custom, and especially to the national attitude toward other Anglo-Saxons. Wherever we penetrated deeper it was Graham who really cared most; and I think his sensitiveness to the little things was exactly because he did care so much about the big ones. I was always amused in London; Graham was always occupied; where I found spectacle, he found drama and the matter of life. I was in love with England, too, but not seriously; mine was an attachment I could take home and talk about. I wanted to take other things, too—clothes and ideas and old china, anything portable. I had distinctly, now that I come to analyse it, a plundering feeling toward the mother country. One couldn’t remove St. Martin’s-le-Grand, or a blue distance out of Hyde Park, or a wet omnibus with the sun on it, or the Cockney character, but I thanked Heaven that there was a good deal that one could remove, and I wanted to fly back with it, lik
e a bird of prey, and enjoy it with my family in Minnebiac. Graham, on the contrary, seemed hardly to have a rapacious thought. What he seemed rather to bemoan was the impossibility of contributing anything.
“Look at that!” he would say of Westminster Abbey, or the hall in the Temple where Shakespeare played to Elizabeth. “Confound them, they’ve finished it! Where do we come in?”
That was his trouble always, that everything fine and supreme was finished, consummated, left standing, and that the Further Briton, however eager his heart, could only “come in” like a wave of the Atlantic, and break upon the shore. One or two little things he did find to do, concerned with a certain sacred folio and a small Jacobite collection, for which the local authorities were outbid by gentlemen from New York and Chicago. Graham saw it in the paper and was just in time in each case—it was only a matter of a few hundred pounds, from Heaven or anywhere, according to the Times. They were very nice to him about it, the local authorities; he said when he came back that he had been given the moral freedom of Oxford, and that the old gentleman in charge of the folio very nearly wept upon his shoulder. He took a high line that evening about the treasures of the race that had been carried off by the Americans, and talked of a crusade from the Imperial North at some future day, to rescue and restore them. I think he saw himself, with satisfaction, riding over the border in some time of inter-American war, at the head of a chosen predatory band, or navigating some majestic ship as far as possible up the Thames, laden with spoils recaptured for the National Gallery.
Graham was so desperately serious about everything that I could not help thinking of his growing attachment to England with a little anxiety lest something should come of it. I could see exactly how it was affecting him. It was with a kind of passion to realise his right of identification with the people, their ideas and their standards and their history, their ways of doing things and the things they had done. He wanted his moral birthright, in some kind of recognisable way.
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