The two young men dined at the Café Royal. “It’s as good a kitchen as there is in London, and in the matter of people it isn’t such a tiresome repetition of those one meets everywhere else as Willis’s or the Prince’s. To see the same shoulders and the same necks, night after night—a fellow gets tired of it.”
To this explanation by Dicky of his choice, as they rolled forward in their hansom, Christian made no direct response. After a little he said: “Very soon now, I am going to do something that seems to have been in my mind for months. Perhaps I have only thought of it since this afternoon: I cannot be sure. But I am going to do it—I am going to know for myself what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses and feathers in their hair—all thinking and talking about themselves and their own little affairs—that does not mean London. And a few large houses in the country, where these same people spend a few months riding after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with idle, sleepy talk—that does not represent England.”
“Doesn’t it!” cried Westland. “I should say that’s just what it did, worse luck!”
“No, no!” protested Christian. “I don’t want to be told that it does—for then I should want to go away altogether. No—there is the other thing, and I am going to find it out, and see it and know it. When all those years of my boyhood and youth I was so proud of being an Englishman, it was not this empty, valueless life of the West End, or the chase of foxes and birds in the country, that I longed for, and nourished pride in.”
“Oh, but they do other things, you know,” laughed Dicky. “They are in Parliament, some of them, or they are at the bar, or in the Services, or they manage estates or are directors in companies, and that sort of thing. And some of them go in a lot for charities, and work on committees and organize things, you know. You’d hardly believe how much of that most of the women let themselves in for.”
“That is not what I mean,” said the other, rather abruptly. “To me all that is not worth the snap of a finger,” and he emphasized his words by a gestured with the hand which rested on the door of the hansom.
At an advanced stage of the dinner, the young men came to the subject again. In reply to a random inquiry Christian said that his grandfather, the duke, as far as he knew, was neither worse nor better in health than he had been all winter. “I have not been to Caermere since my first visit,” he went on. “I am really living upon a programme arranged for me, I should think, by a committee of my relations. Lord Lingfield is my active bear-leader. He conducts me, or sends me, wherever it has been decided that I shall go. It was not deemed important that I should go to Caermere again—and so I have not gone. Voilà tout! If I had been free to myself, I think I should have gone.”
“It must be an awfully jolly place, from the pictures I’ve seen of it,” said Westland.
“Jolly!” cried Christian. “My dear creature, it is a grave, a mausoleum, a place of skulls and dead men’s bones! You have never seen such a family vault in all your days. When I even begin to think of undertaking the task of brightening it into life again, I grow dizzy. The immensity of the work unnerves me. And now I do not know if I shall ever put my hand to it. The country-gentleman idea—which you make so much of in England—it does not appeal to me. It is too idle—too purposeless. Of course my cousin Emanuel, he makes a terrible toil of it—and does some wonderful things, beyond doubt. But after all, what does it come to? He helps people to be extremely fine who without him would only be tolerably fine. But I have the feeling that one should help those who are not fine at all—who have never had the chance to be fine, who do not know what it means. Emanuel’s wife—oh, a very lovely character—she said to me that they disliked coming up to town, the sight of the London poor distressed them so much. Well, that is the point—if I am to help anybody at all, it is the London poor that I should try to help. Emanuel’s plan is to give extra bones, and teach new tricks, to dogs already very comfortable. My heart warms to the dogs without collars, the homeless and hungry devils who look for bones in the gutters.”
“Oh, you’re going in for settlements and that sort of thing,” commented Dicky. “I hear that is rather disappointing work. If you don’t take the sporting papers at the reading-room they say the men won’t come at all. Slingsby Chetwynd was awfully keen on the thing. He went down to stop a whole week—at Shoreditch or Houndsditch or the Isle of Dogs, or somewhere like that—and a woman smashed his hat in, and he fell into a cellar—and he was jolly glad to get back again the same night.”
Christian was pursuing thoughts of his own. The wine was admirable—as indeed it should have been considering the pains Dicky had been at, with pursed lips and lifted eyebrows, in the selection of it—and Christian had found an unaccustomed pleasure in its aromatic, sub-acid taste. He had drunk rather freely of it, and was satisfied with himself for having done so. He leaned back in his chair now, and watching the golden fountain of bubbles forever streaming upward in his glass, mused upon welcome new impulses within him toward the life of a free man.
“None the less,” he remarked, indifferent to the irrelevancy of his theme, “I should have liked to go to Caermere during the winter. I am annoyed with myself now that I did not go—whether it was arranged for me or not. There is a lady there for whom I felt great sympathy. I had expected to be of service to her long before this—but I am of service to no one. She is a cousin—no doubt you know her—Lady Cressage.”
“But she is in London,” put in Westland. “I only know her a little, but Lady Selton used to be by way of seeing a good deal of her. She told me last week that she was in town—taken a little flat somewhere—Victoria Street way, I think. She doesn’t go in for being very smart, you know. Why—yes—of course she’s your cousin by marriage. Awfully pretty woman she was. Gad! how well I remember her season! All the fellows went quite off their heads. How funny—that she should be your cousin!”
Christian took no note of his companion’s closing words, or of the tone in which they had been uttered. He scowled at the playful bubbles in his glass, as he reflected that the news of her arrival in London ought not to have come to him in this roundabout, accidental way. Why did none of his own people tell him? Or still more to the point, why had not she herself told him? He really had given her only an occasional and sporadic thought, during these past four or five months. Now, as he frowned at his wine, it seemed to him that his whole winter had been burdened with solicitude for her. Or no, “burdened” was an ungracious word, and false to boot. He would say “mellowed” or “enriched” instead.
“You must find out for me”—he began, and then, upon a second thought born of pique, checked himself. “Or do not mind—it is of no consequence. I shall hear as a matter of course.” He called for the bill with a decision in his voice which seemed full of warning that the topic was exhausted.
Westland could not help observing the fat roll of crackling white notes which the other drew from his pocket. If they were all of the smallest denomination, they must still represent something like his whole year’s allowance. The general understanding that Christian’s unfamiliarity with English ways excused, and even invited, wise admonition from his friends, prompted him to speak.
“That’s rather a lot to carry about with you, old man,” he said, in gentle expostulation.
“Oh, I like it!” Christian declared, with shining eyes. He snapped the elastic band about the roll, with an air of boyish delight in the sound, as he returned it to his pocket. “If you knew the years in which I counted my sous!”.
It was nearly ten o’clock when they left. Beginning with the Pavilion, they went to four or five music halls, only to find that there were no seats to be had. “Why, of course it’s the boat-race,” exclaimed Dicky at last. “Stupid of me to have forgotten it. I say, I ought to have come for you this morning, and taken you up the river to see it. It’s worth seeing—for once. I wonder Lingfield did not arrange it for you.”
“Oh, several people asked me to join their parties,” Christian replied. “But it did not attract me. The athletics here—they rather annoy me. It is as if people thought of nothing else. And to have students at the universities consumed with the idea—that is specially unpleasant to my mind. You must remember—I am a teacher by profession.”
“We’ll go back to the Empire,” Westland decided. “Ever been there? Well, it’s worth seeing, too—perhaps more than once. The Johnnies’ll be out in extraordinary force, I’m afraid, but then you ought to see them too, I suppose. It takes all sorts to make a world—and the world is what you’ve come out to look at. Let me get the tickets—or, well, if you insist—ask for the promenade.” It was indeed a novel spectacle, which smote and confused his eyes, rather than revealed itself to them, when Christian found himself inside. The broad, low, rounded promenade was so crowded with people that at first sight walking about seemed wholly impracticable, but Dicky stepped confidently into the jumbled throng and began moving through it, apparently with ease, and the other followed him. They made their way to the end, where a man in uniform guarded a staircase; then, turning, they elbowed along back to the opposite end of the half-circle. This gained, there was nothing in Dicky’s thoughts, seemingly, but to repeat the performance indefinitely. Their progress was of a necessity slow. On the inner side a dense wall of backs and high hats rendered hopeless any notion of seeing the stage below. Christian, struggling after his guide, wondered what else there was to see.
After a time it became obvious to him that the women who formed so large an element of the lazily shifting crowd were also the occasion of its ............