The Patricians
OCTOBER, 1910
BY JOHN GALSWORTHY
I
IN the great glass house adjoining the hall at Ravensham House, Lady Casterley stood in front of some Japanese lilies. She was a slender, short old woman, with an ivory-colored face, a thin nose, and keen eyes half-veiled by delicate wrinkled lids. Very still, in her gray dress, and with gray hair, she gave the impression of a little figure carved out of fine, worn steel. Her firm, spidery, small hand held a letter written in a free and somewhat sprawling style: —
MONKLAND COURT, DEVON
June 9th.
MY DEAR MOTHER,
Valleys is motoring up to-morrow, He’ll look in on you on the way if he can. This new war scare has taken him to Town. I shan’t be at Valleys House myself till Milton’s election is over. The fact is, I dare n’t leave him down here alone. He sees his ‘Anonyma’ every day. A Mr. Courtier, who wrote that book against war, though they say he’s been a soldier of fortune, is staying at the inn. He knows her, too — one can only hope, for Milton’s sake, too well: — an attractive person, with red moustaches, rather nice and mad. He’s working for the Radical. Bertie will be down to-morrow, and I must get him to have a talk with Milton. ‘ Anonyma’ is really a very sweetlooking woman; but one knows nothing of her except that she’s divorced her husband. How does one find out about people without being odious ? Of course Milton’s being so extraordinarily straitlaced makes it all the more awkward. The earnestness of this rising generation is quite remarkable. I don’t recollect being so serious in my youth.
Lady Casterley lowered that coroneted sheet of paper. The ghost of a grimace haunted her face — she had not forgotten her daughter’s youth. Raising the letter again, she read on:
I’m sure Valleys and I feel years younger than either Milton or Agatha, though we did produce them. One does n’t feel it with Bertie or Babs, luckily. The war scare is having an excellent effect on Milton’s candidature. Claud Harbinger is with us, too, working for Milton; but, as a matter of fact, I think he’s after Babs. It’s rather melancholy, — Babs is only twenty,— still, what can one expect, with her looks; and Claud is rather a fine specimen. They talk of him a lot now, as the most promising of the young Tories.
Lady Casterley again lowered the letter, and stood listening. A prolonged, muffled sound as of distant cheering and groans had penetrated the great conservatory, vibrating among the pale petals of the lily flowers, and setting free their scent in short waves of perfume. She passed into the hall; there stood an old man with sallow face and long white whiskers.
‘What was that noise, Clifton?’
’A posse of Socialists, my lady, on their way to Putney to hold a demonstration; the people are hooting them. They’ve got blocked just outside the gates.’
‘Are they making speeches?’
‘They are talking some kind of rant, my lady.’
‘ I ’ll go and hear them. Give me my black stick.’
Above the velvet-dark, flat-boughed cedar-trees, which rose like black pagodas on either side of the drive, the sky hung lowering in one great purple cloud, endowed with sinister life by a single white beam striking up into it from the horizon. Beneath this canopy of cloud a small phalanx of dusty, disheveled-looking men and women was drawn up in the road, guarding, and encouraging with cheers, a tall, blackcoated orator. Before and behind this phalanx, a mob of men and boys kept up an accompaniment of groans and jeering.
Lady Casterley and her ‘majordomo’ stood six paces from the scrolled iron gates, and watched. The slight steel-colored figure with steel-colored hair was more arresting in its immobility than all the vociferations and gestures of the mob. Her eyes alone moved under their half-drooped lids; her right hand clutched tightly the handle of her stick. The speaker’s voice rose in shrill protest against the exploitation of ‘the people’; it sank in ironical comment on Christianity; it demanded passionately to be free from the continuous burden of this militarist taxation; it threatened that the people would take things into their own hands.
Lady Casterley turned her head.
‘He is talking nonsense, Clifton. It is going to rain. I shall go in.’
In the white stone porch she paused. The purple cloud had broken; a blind fury of rain was deluging the fast-scattering crowd. A faint smile came on Lady Casterley’s lips.
‘It will do them good to have their ardor damped a little. You will get wet, Clifton — hurry! I expect Lord Valleys to dinner. Have a room got ready. He’s motoring from Monkland.’
II
Ravensham House, on the borders of Richmond Park, had served as suburban seat to the Casterley family since the time when it became usual to have a country residence within easy driving distance of Westminster. In one of its bedrooms the Earl of Valleys was dressing for dinner. His firm, tanned, good-natured face, with grizzled fair moustache, was well-shaped, and lighted by a pair of steady, levelglancing gray eyes. He was brushing his wet hair vigorously with silverbacked brushes. Blue silk braces, delineating his comely chest, supported the coverings of two legs which ‘stood over’ a very little at the knee, as if while accustomed to do his own riding, he was used to have his standing done for him. He tied his tie without looking at the glass. He seemed to be thinking of anything but dressing. Then suddenly, as though remembering what he was doing, he looked round the room; catching sight of his coat, he put it on, and went downstairs.
In an enormously high, white-paneled room, with very little furniture, he found Lady Casterley awaiting him. Greeting his mother-in-law respectfully, he said,—
‘Motored up in seven hours, ma’am, — not bad going.’
‘I am glad you came. When is Milton’s election?’
‘On the twenty-ninth.’
‘Pity! He should be away from Monkland, with that — anonymous woman living there.’
Lord Valleys murmured,—
‘Oh! you’ve heard of her?’
A slight frown contracted his brows above the straight glance of a man who drives a team of horses, and knows exactly what he has to look out for in the road.
Lady Casterley said sharply, —
‘You’re too easy-going, Geoffrey.’
Lord Valleys smiled.
‘These war scares,’ he said, ‘are getting a bore. Can’t quite make out what the feeling of the country is about them.’
Lady Casterley rose.
‘It has none. When war comes, the feeling will be all right. It always is. Give me your arm. Are you hungry?’
When Lord Valleys spoke of war, he spoke as one who, since he arrived at years of discretion, had lived within the circle of those who direct the destinies of states. It was for him, as for the lilies in the great glass house, impossible to see with the eyes, or feel with the feelings, of a flower of the garden outside. Soaked in the best prejudices and manners of his class, he lived a life no more shut off from the general life than was to be expected. Indeed, in some sort, as a man of facts and common sense, he was in touch with the opinion of the average man. A good and liberal landlord, well-disposed toward the arts until those arts revealed that which he had not before perceived; neither narrow nor puritanical, so long as the shell of ‘good form’ was preserved intact; never ridiculously in earnest; efficient, but not strenuous, or desirous of pushing ideas to logical conclusions; endowed with light hands, steady eyes, and no nerves to speak of — he had been born in the saddle of the state with the trick, transmitted through very many generations, of sticking there. As a husband, easy-going; as a father, indulgent; as a politician, careful and straightforward; as a man, moderately sensuous, addicted to pleasure, to work, to fresh air; and endowed with those excellent manners that have no mannerisms. He was the typical workaday aristocrat, embodying the real strength of his order, since he possessed none of the spiritual implacability which distinguishes the ‘aristocrat pure,’ that rare flower found in every rank of life. He admired, and was fond of, his wife, and had never regretted his marriage. He had never regretted anything, unless it were that he had not yet won the Derby, or quite succeeded in perfecting a variation of the pointer dog, whose body, all but its eyebrows, should be permanently white. His mother-inlaw he respected, as one might respect a principle.
There was indeed in the personality of that little old lady the tremendous force of accumulated decision — the inherited assurance of one whose prestige had never been questioned; who from long immunity, and a certain clear-cut practicality bred by the habit of command, had indeed lost the power of perceiving that her prestige ever could be questioned. Her knowledge of her own mind was no ordinary piece of learning, had not, in fact, been learned at all, but sprang full-forged from an active, dominating temperament. Fortified by the habit, common to her class, of knowing thoroughly the more patent side of public affairs; armored by the tradition of a culture demanded by leadership; inspired by ideas, but always the same ideas; owning no master, but in servitude to her own habit of leading, she had a mind formidable as the two-edged swords wielded by her ancestors, the FitzHarolds, at Agincourt or Poitiers — a mind which had ever instinctively rejected that inner knowledge of herself or of the selves of others, produced by habits of introspection, contemplation, and understanding, so deleterious to authority. If Lord Valleys was the body of the aristocratic machine, Lady Casterley was the steel spring inside it. All her life studiously unaffected and simple in attire; of plain and frugal habit; an early riser; working at something or other from morning till night, and as little worn out at seventy-eight as most women at fifty, she had only one weak spot, — and that was her strength, — blindness as to the nature and size of her place in the scheme of things. She was a type, a force.
‘What will you drink, my lord?’
‘Whiskey and soda, Clifton.’
‘Very good, my lord.’
There was about the room where they were dining — unlike the rooms of the newly-rich, or of artistic people — nothing to describe. It was like the daisy in the old song, ‘smell-less, and most quaint’; or like the head of an old and well-bred dog who lies on a mat with his eyes moving quietly from side to side to follow the flight of swallows across a lawn. That room rested. Its day was done. It was there for all time, high, unornate; having nothing to strive for. In the very centre of its stillness, five lilies stood in an old silver chalice; and a portrait of the late Lord Casterley hung on one gray-white wall.
Lady Casterley spoke.
‘ I hope Milton is taking his own line.’
‘That’s the trouble. He suffers from swollen principles—only wash he could keep ’em out of his speeches.’ ‘Let him be; and get him away from that woman as soon as his election’s over. How long has she been there?’
‘About a year, I think.’
‘And you don’t know anything about her ? ’
Lord Valleys raised his shoulders.
‘Ah!’ said Lady Casterley, ‘exactly! You’re letting the thing drift. I shall go down myself. I suppose Gertrude can have me. What has that man Courtier to do with this woman?’
Lord Valleys smiled. In this smile was the whole of his polite and easygoing philosophy. ‘I am no meddler, no uncharitable bourgeois,’ it seemed to say.
At sight of that smile Lady Casterley tightened her lips. ‘He is a firebrand,’ she said. ‘I read that book of his against war — most inflammatory. Have you seen it?’
Lord Valleys shook his head.
‘Aimed at Grant — and Rosenstern, chiefly. I have just seen one of the results, outside my own gates. A mob of anti-war agitators.’
Lord Valleys yawned.
‘Really? I’d no idea Courtier had any influence. Motoring’s made me very sleepy.’
‘Courtier is a dangerous man. Most idealists are negligible; but he’s a man of action as well, — half-mad, of course;
— his book was quite clever.’
‘I wish to goodness we could see the last of these scares, they only make both countries look foolish,’ muttered Lord Valleys.
Lady Casterley raised her glass, full of a blood-red wine. ‘The war would save us,’ she said.
‘ War is no joke.’
‘It would be the beginning of a better state of things.’
‘You think so?’
‘We should get the lead again as a nation, and socialism would be put back fifty years.’
Lord Valleys made three little heaps of salt, and paused to count them; the slight lifting of his eyebrows and shoulders betrayed as much uneasiness as he ever suffered to escape him.
‘I should be glad to feel certain of that,’he said.
’I notice that you are never certain of anything till it has happened, Geoffrey.’
Lord Valleys smiled. ‘What is it, Clifton?’
‘Your chauffeur would like to know, my lord, what time you will have the car.’
’Directly after dinner.'
Twenty minutes later, he was turning through the scrolled iron gates into the road for London. It was falling dark; and in the tremulous sky clouds were piled up, and drifted here and there with a sort of endless lack of purpose. No direction seemed to have been decreed unto their wings. They had met together in the firmament like a flock of giant magpies crossing and recrossing each others’ flight. The smell of rain was in the air. The car raised no dust, but bored swiftly on, searching out the road with its lamps. On Putney Bridge its march was stayed by a string of wagons.
Lord Valleys looked to right and left. The river reflected the thousand lights of buildings piled along her sides, the lamps of the embankments, the lanterns of moored barges. The sinuous pallid body of this great creature, forever gliding down to the sea, roused in his lordship’s mind no symbolic image. He had had to do with her years back at the Board of Trade, and knew her for what she was, extremely dirty, and getting abominably thin just where he would have liked her plump. Yet as he leaned back and lighted a cigar, there came to him a queer feeling, —as if he were in the presence of a woman he was fond of. ‘I hope to God,’ he thought, ‘nothing’ll come of these scares!’
The car glided on into the long road, swarming with traffic, toward the fashionable heart of London. Outside stationers’ shops the posters of evening papers were of no reassuring order.
‘THE PLOT THICKENS.’
‘ MORE REVELATIONS.’
‘ GRAVE SITUATION THREATENED! ’
And before each poster could be seen a little eddy in the stream of the passers-by, formed by persons glancing at the news, and disengaging themselves, to press on again. Lord Valleys caught himself wondering what they thought of it! What was passing behind those pallid rounds of flesh turned toward the posters?
Did they think at all, these men and women in the street? What was their attitude toward this vaguely-threatened cataclysm? Face after face, stolid and apathetic, expressed no thought, no active desire, certainly no enthusiasm, hardly any dread. Poor devils! The thing was no more within their control than it was within the power of ants to stop the ruination of their antheap by some passing boy. It was quite true — what they said — that the people had never had much voice in the making of war. And the words of an article in the Radical weekly, which he always forced himself to read, recurred to him. ‘Ignorant of the facts, hypnotized by the words “Country” and “Patriotism”; in the grip of mob-instinct and inborn prejudice against the foreigner; helpless by reason of his patience, stoicism, good faith, and confidence in those above him; helpless by reason of his snobbery, mutual distrust, carelessness for the morrow, and lack of public spirit, — in the face of war how impotent and to be pitied is the man in the street!’ That paper was always a little hi-falutin’!
How would this affect Milton’s chances? It was doubtful whether he himself would get to Ascot this year. Thence his mind flew for a moment to his promising two-year-old Casetta; then dashed almost violently, as though in shame, to the Admiralty, and the doubt whether they were fully alive to possibilities. He himself now occupied a softer spot of government, one of those almost nominal offices necessary to qualify into the Cabinet certain tried minds, for whom no more strenuous post can for the moment be found. From the Admiralty again his thoughts leaped to his mother-in-law. Wonderful old woman! What a statesman she would have made! Rather reactionary! Deuce of a straight line she had taken about Mrs. Noel! A twinge of pleasure shot through Lord Valleys. Mysterious or not, that woman was attractive! Very delicate face, with the dark hair waved back from the middle over either temple — very charming figure, no lumber of any sort! Bouquet about her! Some story or other, no doubt — no affair of his! Always sorry for that sort of woman!
A regiment of Territorials returning from a march stayed the progress of his car. Lord Valleys leaned forward, watching them with the contained, shrewd, critical look he would have bent on a pack of hounds. All the mistiness and speculation in his mind was gone. ‘Good stamp of man,’ he thought; ‘give a capital account of themselves!’ Their faces, flushed by a day in the open, were masked with passivity, or with a half-aggressive, half-jocular selfconsciousness; they were clearly not troubled by abstract speculations, or any visions of the horrors of war. Something in the look of those faces again awakened the streak of philosophy in Lord Valleys. To these fellows, war — as to the street-folk — was just a word, a notion. If it came, it would be necessary, no doubt. The papers said so— all except those which no one ever read. The country’s honor! What!
Some one in the crowd raised a cheer ‘ for the “Terriers.” ’ Lord Valleys saw round him a little sea of hats, rising and falling, and heard a sound, rather shrill and tentative, swell into hoarse, high clamor, and suddenly die out.
‘Seem keen enough!’ he thought. ‘Very little does it ! Plenty of fighting spirit in the country.’ And a thrill of pleasure shot through him.
The band struck up a march. Then, as the last soldier passed, his car slowly forged its way through the straggling crowd pressing on behind the regiment; men of all ages, youths, a few women, young girls.
And caught, in the midst of these dismal, disenchanted forms, feverishly pursuing glory, he thought: ‘Dreadful lot of wasters; nothing to be made of them ! ’
III
At that same hour, in the little whitewashed ‘withdrawing-room ’ of a thatched, whitewashed cottage, down in Devonshire, two men were arguing, one on either side of the hearth; and while they talked, the dark eyes of a woman, who sat between them, watched the way they moved their hands, crossed their legs, got up, and again sat down.
The figure on the left was that of a man of forty, rather over middle height, active, and straight, whose blue eyes and sanguine face glowed on small provocation; who had very bright, almost red hair, and moustaches which descended to the level of his clean-shorn chin, and, like Don Quixote’s, seemed always bristling and charging in front of him.
The man on the right was not yet thirty, with a certain beauty in his face; tall, wiry, stooping very slightly; cleanshaven; having deep-set, very living eyes, tanned, parchmenty skin, and a little, crucified smile haunting his lips.
Though it was already June, a fire was burning; and logs, dropping now and then, turned up their glowing under-sides, and very soon became gray ash. The lamplight seemed to have soaked the white walls till a wan warmth exuded; and silvery dun moths, fluttering in from the dark garden, kept vibrating like spun shillings above a jade-green bowl of crimson roses; there was a scent, as always in that old thatched cottage, of wood-smoke and sweetbrier.
‘No, Lord Milton,’ the man with the auburn hair was saying, ‘the microbe of war — like the microbe of sour milk — is kept alive in a culture. I could give you the component parts of that culture, but I should bore Mrs. Noel.'
‘Go on, Mr. Courtier, please.’
‘It’s in my book. War culture — ingredients: four types. Military man proper — whole life and business to dream of war. Stubborn honest journalist — bee in bonnet. Man of affairs—word “big” scrawled over head and heart — cf. Bismarck, Napoleon. Aristocrat pure, calls war “ purgative of national soul.” Blessed microbe kept alive in that culture, now and then gets into milk and sours whole caboodle.’
‘You started by saying it was the ruling classes who were responsible for war.’
‘Well, if you come to think of it, the said culture is rather closely identified with the ruling classes, and it’s certainly by means of the press of the ruling classes that, it gets into the milk. International war is a creature of Authority.’
‘Those who are responsible for the conduct of national affairs must expect to bear the odium which attaches to the administration of purgatives, but they are sometimes as necessary as thunderstorms.’
’You come back there to the question whether war is necessary, which I entirely deny. There would be no European wars in these days but for the cock-and-bull ideas that get into the heads of the ruling classes, and the press which represents them.’
‘That is merely a plea for democracy, which, by the way, is not a form of government at all, but just a word, signifying an idea which can never be put into practice.’
‘I am a democrat, Lord Milton, only so far as the word implies the greatest latitude of sane machinery that shall enable people to do things of their own accord instead of being forced.’
‘I have called you no names, Mr. Courtier.’
‘Seriously, I’ve been in five wars, and I tell you that, if the ruling classes had the grace to put themselves in the position of “the people,” there never would be another European war. You have only to look at the latter history of France.’
‘A charge of want of sympathy and understanding! ’
‘Exactly. If you could understand the wants and feelings of the people you wish to govern, you would never stand there and take the line you’re taking. I appeal to Mrs. Noel.’
‘Perhaps if Lord Milton quite understood and sympathized, it would unfit him for governing.’
‘Is that so, Lord Milton?’
Milton smiled; but something in his smile seemed to excite his opponent, who said abruptly,—
‘Oh! you believers in authority!’
The retort came quickly: —
‘Oh! you believers in liberty!’
Mrs. Noel, rising from her chair, went over to the window, and stood looking out into her garden.
‘I’m a fighting man by nature,’ Courtier began again, ‘ but I ’ve seen too much of war; and I ask you, what earthly purpose docs it ever serve?’
‘The purpose of all suffering.’
‘Vicarious suffering!’
‘Mr. Courtier!’
‘Lord Milton, I hate the attitude of one who arrogates to himself the right to inflict suffering on others, which in the nature of things he can never feel, himself.’
‘Do you accuse the upper classes of this country of cowardice?’
‘By no manner of means; I merely accuse them of not having the nous to see that the suffering that comes to themselves through war is not a tenth part of that which comes to those who are not, as they are, fortified against nature by money, position, health, every physical advantage; and fortified too by the fact that they’re fighting in their own quarrel, not in a scrimmage that they’ve been pitchforked into, willy-nilly, for all the world like blind puppies.’
‘You are unjust. In a war there are always more, in proportion, of the ruling classes engaged than of the ruled; always a larger proportion of officers killed; always most lost by those who have most to lose.’
Courtier was silent for a moment, then said, —
‘One to you; but I have a deeper point. In my belief, the ruling classes, not consciously, but instinctively, keep alive the idea of war, because that idea fosters the national, as against the international ideal; and the national ideal is their bulwark and safety. The ship of Aristocracy is built in watertight compartments; run them into one, and down it goes.’
To hear this speech the younger man had risen; and his thin face glowed as though his spirit, leaving the recesses of his body, were clinging round his lips, gleaming from his deep eyes.
Mrs. Noel called from the window,
‘Mr. Courtier! Look at my dear toad!’ On a flagstone of the veranda, in the centre of a stream of lamplight , sat a little golden toad.
‘It comes here every evening; is n’t it a darling?’
The toad waddled quickly to one side, and disappeared.
‘It never does that when I’m alone!’
Courtier laughed a low, infectious, chuckling laugh. ‘It’s evidently time we went ’; and calling out ‘Good-night! ’ he passed into the darkness.
Mrs. Noel turned to the young man, who was still standing by the hearth.
‘It seems a little queer to talk about war on a night like this.’
‘It seems a little queer to talk about war in your presence.’
Mrs. Noel raised her eyes, but they failed just before they reached his face.
‘Good-night!’ he said, and touched her fingers with his lips.
Left alone at the window, Mrs. Noel put the hand he had kissed to her heart.
Truly peace brooded over her garden. The night seemed listening to the quiet breathing of the land, now that all lights were out, and the millions of hearts at rest. It watched, with a little white star for every tree, and roof, and slumbering tired flower, as a mother watches her child, fallen asleep, leaning above him and counting, as it were, with her love, every hair of his head, and all his tiny tremors.
Rumors of wars seemed child’s babble indeed under the ironic smile of Night. And the face of the woman, gazing out into her dark garden, was a little like the face of this warm, sweet night. It was sensitive and so harmonious; and its harmony was not, as in some faces, cold, but seemed to tremble and glow and flutter as though it were a spirit which had found a resting-place. Nor was it content to inhabit the face alone, but pervaded softly the whole body, making her breathe more delicately than other people.
In her garden, all velvety gray, with black shadows beneath its yew-trees, the white flowers alone seemed to be awake, and to look at her wistfully. The trees stood dark and still. Not even the night birds stirred. Alone, the little stream down in the bottom raised its voice, privileged when day voices were hushed.
It was not in Anonyma to deny herself to any spirit that was abroad. To repel was an art she did not practice. But this night, though the Spirit of Peace hovered near, she did not seem to know it. Her hands trembled, her cheeks were burning; her breast heaved, and sighs fluttered from her parted lips.
IV
Eustace Caradoc, Viscount Milton, had lived a very lonely life, since he first began to understand the peculiarities of existence. With the exception of Clifton, his grandmother’s ‘majordomo,’ he made, as a small child, no intimate friend. His nurses, governesses, tutors, by their own confession, did not understand him, finding that he took himself with unnecessary seriousness; a little afraid, too, of one whom they discovered to be capable of pushing things to the point of enduring pain in silence. Much of that early time was passed at Ravensham, for he had always been his grandmother’s favorite. She recognized in him the purposeful austerity which had somehow been left out of the composition of her daughter. But only to Clifton, then a man of fifty with a great gravity and long black whiskers, did Eustace relieve his soul. ‘I tell you this, Clifton,’ he would say, sitting on the sideboard, or the arm of the big chair in Clifton’s room, or wandering amongst the raspberries, ‘because you are my friend.’
And Clifton, with his head a little on one side, and a sort of wise concern at his ’friend’s’ confidences, which were sometimes of too intimate a nature, would answer, ’Of course, my lord’; but sometimes, ‘Of course, my dear.’
There was in this friendship something fine and suitable, neither of these ‘friends’ taking or suffering liberties, and both being interested in pigeons, which they would stand watching with a remarkable attention.
In course of time, following the tradition of his family, Eustace went to Harrow. He was there five years — always one of those boys a little out at wrists and ankles, who may be seen slouching, solitary, along the pavement to their own haunts, rather dusty, and with one shoulder slightly raised above the other, from the habit of carrying something beneath one arm. Saved from being thought a ‘smug ’ by his title, his lack of any conspicuous scholastic ability, his obvious independence of what was thought of him, and a certain mordancy of tongue, which no one was eager to encounter, he remained the ugly duckling who refused to paddle properly in the green ponds of public-school tradition. He played games so badly that, in sheer self-defense his fellows permitted him to play without them. Of ‘fives’ they made an exception, for in this he attained much proficiency, owing to a certain windmill-like quality of limb. He was noted too for daring chemical experiments, of which he usually had one or two brewing, surreptitiously at first, and afterwards by special permission of his house-master, on the principle that if a room must smell, it had better smell openly. He made few friendships, but these were lasting. His Latin verse was so poor, and his Greek verse so vile, that all had been surprised when toward the finish of his career he showed a very considerable power of writing and speaking his own language. He left school without a pang. But when in the train he saw the old Hill and the old spire on the top of it fading away from him, a great lump rose in his throat, he swallowed violently two or three times, and, thrusting himself far back into the carriage corner, appeared to sleep.
At Oxford he was happier, but still comparatively lonely; remaining, so long as custom permitted, in lodgings outside his college, and clinging thereafter to remote, paneled rooms high up, overlooking the gardens and a portion of the city wall. It was at Oxford that he first developed that passion for self-discipline which afterwards distinguished him. He took up rowing; and, though thoroughly unsuited by nature to this pastime, secured himself a place in his college ‘torpid.’ At the end of a race he was usually supported from his stretcher in a state of extreme extenuation, due to having pulled the last quarter of the course entirely with his spirit. The same craving for self-discipline guided him in the choice of schools; he went out in ‘Greats,’ for which, owing to his indifferent mastery of Greek and Latin, he was the least fitted. With enormous labor he took a very good degree. He carried off, besides, the highest distinctions of the University for English Essays.
The ordinary circles of college life knew nothing of him. Not once in the whole course of his university career was he the better for wine. He did not hunt; he never talked of women, and none talked of women in his presence. But now and then he was visited by those gusts which come to the ascetic, when all life seemed suddenly caught up and devoured by a flame burning night and day, and going out mercifully, he knew not why, like a blown candle. However unsocial in the proper sense of the word, he by no means lacked company in these Oxford days. He knew many, both dons and undergraduates. His long stride, and determined absence of direction, had severely tried all those who could stomach so slow a pastime as walking for the sake of talking. The country knew him — though he never knew the country — from Abingdon to Bablock Hythe. His name stood high, too, at the Union. He made his mark there in his first term in a debate on a ‘Censorship of Literature,’ which he advocated with gloom, pertinacity, and a certain youthful brilliance which might have carried the day, had not an Irishman got up and pointed out the danger that would be incurred by the Old Testament. To that he had retorted, ‘Better, sir, it should run a risk than have no risk to run.’ From that moment he was notable.
He stayed up four years, and went down with a sense of bewilderment and loss. The matured verdict of Oxford on this child of hers, was: ‘Eustace Milton! Ah! queer character! Will make his mark!’
He had about this time an interview with his father which confirmed the impression each had formed of the other. It took place in the library at Monkland Court, on a late November afternoon.
That room (in the main, or Elizabethan, portion of the building) was lighted only by four candles in thin silver candlesticks on either side of the carved stone hearth. Their gentle, mellow radiance penetrated but a little way into the great dark space lined with books, paneled and floored with black oak, where the acrid fragrance of leather and dried rose leaves seemed to drench the very soul with the aroma of the past. Above the huge fireplace, with light falling on one side of his shaven face, hung a portrait — painter unknown — of that Cardinal Caradoc who suffered for his faith in the sixteenth century. Ascetic, crucified, with a little smile clinging to the lips and deep-set eyes, he presided, above the bluish flames of a log fire.
The father and son found much difficulty in beginning their conversation.
Truly, each of those two felt as though he were in the presence of some one else’s very near relation. They had, in fact, seen extremely little of each other, and had not seen that little long.
Lord Valleys uttered the first remark.
‘Well, my dear fellow, what are you going to do now? I think we can make certain of this seat for you if you like to stand.’
Milton answered: ‘ Thanks very much; I don’t think I’m fit at present.'
Through the thin fume of his cigar Lord Valleys watched that long figure sunk deep in the chair opposite.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You can’t begin too soon; unless you think you ought to go round the world.’
‘I’d rather study at present.’
Lord Valleys gave one of his pleasant laughs.
‘There’s nothing you can’t pick up as you go along,’ he said. ‘ How old are you ? ’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘You look older.’ A faint line, as of contemplation, rose between his eyes. Was it fancy that a little smile was hovering about Milton’s mouth?
‘I’ve always held,’ came from those lips, ‘that a man who’s going to lead must know the conditions first. I want to give five years to that.’
Lord Valleys raised his eyebrows. ‘ Waste of time,’ he said. ‘ You ’d know more at the end of it, if you went into the House at once. You take this matter too seriously, I think.’
‘Is that possible, father?’
For fully a minute Lord Valleys made no answer; he felt almost ruffled. Waiting till the sensation had passed, he said, ‘Well, my dear fellow, as you please.’
Milton’s apprenticeship in the profession of leadership was served in a slum settlement; on his father’s estates; in Chambers at the Temple; in expeditions to Germany, America, and the British Colonies; in work at elections; and in a forlorn hope to capture a constituency which could be trusted not to change its principles. He read much, slowly, but with conscientious tenacity; he read poetry, history, and works on philosophy, religion, and social matters. Fiction, and especially foreign fiction, he did not care for. With the utmost desire to be wide and impartial, he sucked in what ministered to the wants of his nature, rejecting unconsciously all that by its unsuitability endangered the flame of his private spirit. What he read, in fact, served only to strengthen those profounder convictions which arose from his temperament.
With contempt of the vulgar gewgaws of wealth and rank, he combined a humble but intense and growing conviction of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual superiority to those whom he desired to benefit. There was no trace of the common Pharisee in Milton, he was too simple and direct; but the look of his eyes, his gestures, the whole man, proclaimed the presence of some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well, into which no disturbing glimmers penetrated. He was not devoid of wit, but he was devoid of that kind of wit which turns its eyes inward, and sees something of the fun that lies in being what you are. Milton saw the world and all the things thereof shaped like spires — even when they were circles. He seemed to have no sense that the universe was equally compounded of those two symbols, whose point of reconciliation had not yet been discovered.
Such was he, when the member for his native division was made a peer.
He had reached the age of twentyeight without ever having been in love, leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown. Women were afraid of him. And he was perhaps a little afraid of woman. She was in theory too lovely and desirable — the half-moon in a summer sky; in practice too cloying, or too harsh. He had an affection for Barbara, his younger sister; but to his mother, his grandmother, or his elder sister, Agatha, he had never felt close. It was indeed amusing to see Lady Valleys with her eldest son. Her fine figure, the blown roses of her face, her gray-blue eyes which had a slight tendency to roll, as though amusement just touched with naughtiness bubbled behind them, were reduced to a queer, satirical decorum in Milton’s presence. Thoughts and sayings verging on the risky were characteristic of her robust physique, her soul which could afford to express almost all that occurred to it. Milton had never, not even as a child, given her his confidence. She bore him no resentment, being of that large, generous build in body and mind, which is rarely, and never in her class, associated with the capacity for feeling aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its own. He was, and always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of it! Nothing had perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his behavior, or want of behavior, in regard to women. She felt it abnormal, just as she felt that Valleys, and her other son, Bertie, were normal. It was this feeling which made her realize almost more vividly than she had time for, in the whirl of politics and fashion, the danger of his friendship with the unknown and divorced ‘ Anonyma.’
Pure chance had been responsible for the inception and growth of that friendship. Going one December afternoon to the farmhouse of a tenant just killed by a fall from his horse, Milton had found the widow, in a state of bewildered grief, thinly veiled by the manner of one who had almost lost the power to express her feelings, and quite lost it in the presence of ‘the gentry.’ Having assured the poor soul that she need have no fear about her tenancy, he was coming away, when he met, in the stone-flagged entrance, a lady in fur cap and jacket carrying in her arms a little boy, who was bleeding from a cut on the forehead, and crying bitterly. Milton took him from her, and, placing him on a table in the parlor, looked at the lady. She was extremely grave, and soft, and charming. And he said, —
‘Ought the mother to be told?’
She shook her head.
‘Poor thing, no; let’s wash it, and bind it up first.’
Together they washed and bound up the cut. Having finished, she looked at Milton, as much as to say, ‘Now we might tell the mother, but you would do it so much better than I.’
Deferring to that look, he was rewarded by a little smile. He carried away from that meeting the knowledge of her name— Audrey Noel — and the remembrance of a strangely sensitive and sympathetic face, whose beauty, under the cap of squirrel’s fur, haunted him. A few days later he chanced on her again, entering her garden gate at the foot of the village green. On this occasion he asked her whether she would like her cottage re-thatched; an inspection of the roof had followed; he had stayed talking a long time. Accustomed to women over whom, for all their graceand lack of affectation, highcaste life has wrapped a cloak, there was peculiar charm for Milton in one who seemed to live quite out of the world, yet had so poignant, so shy, a flavor; who looked with such dark, soft eyes; whose voice was ironic, yet sympathetic. So from a chance seed had blossomed swiftly one of those rare friendships between lonely people, that can in short time fill great spaces of two lives.
One day she had asked him shyly, ‘You know about me, I suppose?’
Milton had made a motion of his head, signifying that he did. His informant had been the vicar.
‘Yes, I am told, her story is a sad one — a divorce.’
‘Do you mean that she has been divorced, or —’
The vicar hesitated for the fraction of a second.
‘Oh! no — no. Sinned against, I am sure. A nice woman, so far as I have seen; though I ’m afraid not one of my congregation.’
With this, Milton, in whom she had already awakened the shy emotion, chivalry, was content. When she asked if he knew her story, he would not for the world have had her rake up what was painful. Whatever that story, she could not have been to blame; for she had begun already to be shaped by his own spirit; had become not a thing as it was, but an expression of his aspiration.
On the third evening after the argument with Courtier he was again at the little white cottage sheltered by high garden walls. Smothered in roses, and with a black-brown thatch overhanging the old-fashioned leaded panes of the upper windows, it had an air of hiding from the world. Behind, as though on guard, two pine trees spread their dark boughs over the out-houses; in any southwest wind their voices could be heard speaking gravely about the weather. Tall lilac bushes flanked the garden, and a huge lime tree in the adjoining field sighed and rustled, or on still days let forth the drowsy hum of the countless small dusky bees who frequented that green hostelry.
He found her altering a dress, sitting over it in her delicate way: inanimate objects, dresses, and flowers, books and music, required from her the same sympathy as if they had been animate.
He was tired by electioneering; it was soothing to be ministered to; and stretched out in a long chair by the window he listened to her playing.
Over the hill a Pierrot moon was slowly moving up in a sky the color of gray irises. A spirit, cross-legged, in that burned-out star, seemed thrumming an ode of disenchantment on his mandolin.
And Milton stared as in a trance. Across the moor a sea of shallow mist was rolling; the trees in the valley, like browsing cattle, stood knee-deep in whiteness; and all the air above was wan with an innumerable rain as of moon-dust, falling into that white sea. And the lime tree, dark shade over the moon’s lamp, hung blue-black, balloon-like, tethered to the ground.
Then, jarring and shivering the music, there came a sound of hooting. It swelled, died away, and swelled again.
Milton rose.
‘That has spoiled my vision. Mrs. Noel, I have something to say.'
She had left her piano, and was close to him, trembling and flushing. And her face was so sweet that he was silent.
A voice from the door said,—
‘Oh, ma’am — oh, my lord! They’re deviling a gentleman on the green! ’
V
When the immortal Don set out to ring all the bells of merriment, he was followed by one clown. Charles Courtier on the other hand had always been accompanied by thousands, who really could not understand the conduct of a man with no commercial sense. Though he puzzled his contemporaries, they did not exactly laugh at him, because they knew that he had really killed some men and loved some women. The combination was irresistible, when coupled with an appearance both vigorous and gallant. The son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and mounted on a lost cause, he had been riding through the world ever since he was eighteen, without once getting out of the saddle. The secret of this endurance lay perhaps in his unconsciousness that he was in the saddle at all. It was as much his natural seat as office-stools to other men. He made no capital out of errantry, his temperament being far too like his red-gold hair, which people compared to flames, consuming all before them. His vices were patent: too quick a temper, too incurable an optimism, and an admiration for beauty such as had sometimes caused him to forget which woman he was most in love with. He was thin-skinned, hothearted, a hater of humbug, habitually forgetful of his personal interests. He was, too, unmarried; with many friends, and many enemies; his body always thin and hard, like a swordblade, and his soul always at white heat.
That one who admitted to having taken part in five wars should be assisting Milton’s political opponent in the cause of peace, was not so inconsistent as might be supposed; for Courtier had always fought on the losing side, and there had seemed to him at the moment no side so losing as that of peace. He was no orator, not even a glib talker; but a certain quiet mordancy of tongue, and the white-hot look in his eyes, never failed to make an impression of some kind on an audience. There was hardly perhaps a corner of England where orations on behalf of peace had a poorer chance than the Bucklandbury division. To say that he had made himself unpopular with that matter-of-fact, independent, stolid, yet quick-tempered population, would be inadequate. He had outraged their beliefs, and roused the most profound suspicions. They could not, for the life of them, make out what he was at. They had never heard of him, though by his adventures and his book, Peace — a Lost Cause, he was, in London, a sufficiently conspicuous figure. His appearance in these parts was an almost ludicrous example of the endless encounter of spirit with matter, of the pure idea with the plain fact. The idea that nations ought to, and could, live in peace was so very pure; and the fact that they never had, so very plain!
At Monkland, which was all Court estate, Mr. Humphrey Chilcox, Milton’s opponent, had necessarily but few supporters; and Courtier met with a reception which passed from curiosity to derision, from derision to menace. Moved to his very soul by the attachment of his audience to their own point of view, he was saved from rough handling only by the influential interposition of the vicar.
Yet when he began to address them he had felt so irresistibly attracted. They looked such capital, independent fellows. Waiting for his turn to speak, he had marked them down as men after his own heart. For though Courtier knew that against, an unpopular idea there must always be a majority, it never occurred to him to think so ill of any one as to suppose that he could actually be one of ‘ those beggars, those dogs, those logs!’
Surely these fine, independent fellows were not to be hoodwinked by the Jingos! It had been one more disillusion. He had not taken it lying down; neither had ‘those beggars, those dogs, those logs.’ They dispersed without forgiving; they came together again without having forgotten.
The village inn was a little white building, whose small windows were overgrown with creepers. It had a single guest’s bedroom on the upper floor, and a little sitting-room where Courtier took his meals. The rest of the house was but a stone-floored bar with a long wooden bench against the back wall, whence nightly a stream of talk would issue, all harsh a’s, and sudden soft u’s; whence too a figure, a little unsteady, would now and again emerge, to a chorus of ‘gude-naights,’ stand black in the shadow of the ash trees to light his pipe, then move slowly home.
But on that evening, when the trees, like cattle, stood knee-deep in the moon-dust, those who came from the bar-room did not go away; they hung about under the ash trees, and were joined by other figures creeping furtively through the bright moonlight from behind the inn. Rustles of stealthy laughter yielded to silence. More figures moved up from the lanes and churchyard path, till thirty or more were huddled in the shadows, and an endless murmur of talk, carefully subdued, distilled a rare savor of illicit joy. There was unholy hilarity about those figures lurking in deep tree-shadow before the wan silent inn, whence, from a single lighted window, came forth the half-chanting sound of a man reading. Here were the mocking spirits of Silence listening to the spirit of Voice. Passing those lurking figures one could hear whispered comments: ’He’m a-practicin’ of his spaches.’ ‘Smoke the cunnin’ old vox out.’ ‘ Red pepper, ’t is praaper stuff! You watch him bolt!’
Then a face showed at the lighted window; and a ripple of harsh laughter rose in the shadow of the trees.
He at the window was seen struggling violently to wrench away a bar. The laughter swelled to hooting. The figure had forced its way through, dropped to the ground, rose, staggered, and fell.
A voice broke the silence.
‘What’s this?’
Out of sounds of scuffling and scattering, came the whisper, ‘His lordship!’
The shade under the ash trees was deserted, save by the tall dark figure of a man, and a woman’s white shape.
‘Is that you, Mr. Courtier? Are you hurt?’
A chuckling sound came from the recumbent figure.
‘Only my knee. The beggars! They precious near choked me, though.’
VI
Bertie Caradoc, leaving the smokingroom at Monkland Court that night, on his way to bed, went to the Georgian corridor, where his pet barometer was hanging. To look at the glass had become the nightly habit of one who gave all the time he could spare from his profession, to hunting in the winter, and racing in the summer.
The Hon. Hubert Caradoc — an apprentice to the calling of diplomacy — more completely than any living Caradoc embodied the characteristic strength and weaknesses of that family. He was of fair height, and wiry build. His weathered face, under sleek dark hair, had regular, rather small features, and wore an expression of alert resolution, masked by impassivity. Over his inquiring, hazel-gray eyes the lids were almost religiously kept half drawn. He had been born reticent, and great indeed was the emotion under which he suffered when the whole of his eyes were visible. His nose was finely chiseled, and had little flesh. His lips, covered by a small dark moustache, scarcely opened to emit his speeches, which were uttered in a voice singularly muffled, yet unexpectedly quick. The whole personality was of a man practical, spirited, guarded, resourceful, with great power of self-control, who looked at life as if she were a horse under him, to whom he must give way just so far as was necessary to keep mastery of her. A man to whom ideas were of no value except when wedded to immediate action; essentially neat; demanding to be ‘done well,’ but capable of stoicism if necessary; urbane, but always in readiness to thrust; able to condone certain failings and to compassionate certain classes of distress which his own experience had taught him to understand. Such was Milton’s younger brother at the age of twentyfour.
Having noted that the glass was steady, he was about to seek the stairway, when he saw at the farther end of the entrance hall three figures advancing arm-in-arm. Habitually curious, he waited to examine them, till, within the radius of a lamp, he saw them to be those of Milton and a footman, supporting between them a lame man. He at once hastened up to them, and said,
‘Have you put your knee out, sir? Hold on a minute! Get a chair, Charles.’
Having seated the stranger in the chair, Bertie rolled up the trouser, and passed his fingers round the knee. There was a sort of loving-kindness about that movement, as of a hand that had in its time felt the joints and sinews of innumerable horses.
‘ H’m! ’ he said. ‘ Can you stand a bit of a jerk, sir? Catch hold of him behind, Eustace. Sit down on the floor, Charles, and hold the legs of the chair. Now then!’ And taking up the foot, he pulled. There was a click, a little noise of teeth ground together; and Bertie said, ‘Good man — shan’t have to have the vet. to you.’ When they had conducted Courtier to a room in the Georgian corridor, hastily converted to a bedroom, the two brothers left him to the attentions of the footman.
‘Well, old man,’ said Bertie, as they sought their rooms, ‘ this has put paid to his name; he won’t do any more harm to your election! He’s no poltroon, though.’
The report that Milton’s new enemy was harbored beneath their roof went the round of the family before breakfast. It awakened in the great house a variety of feelings, and the paramount necessity for being studiously kind.
Lady Valleys ordered the picture chamber, that gave on the terrace, to be prepared for him to sit in. Apart from the simple feeling of hospitality to an injured man, she was vexed that the injury should have been inflicted by tenants of the Monkland Court estate, and curious as to Courtier himself, whose reputation for adventure was well established. Of strong political views and zealous for her son’s success, she contemplated with but moderate equanimity the presence of this enemy, in spite of Milton’s explanation that nothing else could have been done with him — the inn stairs being too narrow to carry the poor fellow up. It was some comfort to her to hear of Bertie’s prompt action; the knee would be all right, it seemed, in a few days. Any achievement of her favorite, Bertie, always delighted her.
It was past noon when Courtier, leaning on a stick, passed through the picture chamber on to the terrace.
The great house slumbered in the haze of a summer noon. Before it three sunlit peacocks were moving slowly across a lawn, toward a statue of Diana.
Past those lawns and certain noble trees, over the wooded foot-hills of the moorland, and a promised land of pinkish fields, pasture, and orchards, the prospect stretched to the far sea. The heat clothed this view with a kind of opalescence, a fairy garment, transmuting all values. The four-square walls and tall chimneys of the pottery works a few miles down seemed to Courtier like a vision of some old fortified Italian town. He turned back into the picture chamber, and slowly, smiling a little, passed from one to another of the effigies on its walls. All the faces of these old Caradocs gave him the same feeling: they seemed ‘armored,’ not with the mere fleshy mask of the average citizen, but with a spirit more steely and enduring. A curious, darting ghost hovered about those painted faces, as though heritage of power and shelter had freed their owners for more give-and-take of judgment and speculation than their humbler neighbors. And yet these faces seemed all insisting that nature will never be denied its balance; their expansion and elasticity had certainly been paid for by constriction. So curiously ‘armored’ they seemed to Courtier.
The Monkland Court family, he had found in the course of his campaign, was well spoken of throughout the neighborhood. They administered their lands well; nor was there any lack of kindly feeling between them and their people. Those olden-age æsthetic ties, which the newly-arrived have had as a rule neither the time nor the tact to establish, appeared still to be maintained. There was said to be no griping destitution nor ill-housing on their estate. The inhabitants of that kingdom were not so much encouraged to improve themselves, as maintained at a certain level, by steady and not ungenerous supervision. When a roof required thatching, it was thatched; when a man became too old to work, he was not suffered to lapse into the workhouse. In bad years for wool or beasts, the farmers received a graduated remission of their rents. The pottery works were run on a liberal if autocratic basis. All this was said to be traditional from the old Caradocs whom Courtier was examining.
He was still studying them when he saw a lady approaching. She was perhaps a little more than fifty years of age, tall, and of full figure, with hair still brown. Her complexion and a slight prominence of her gray-blue eyes betrayed a growing ripeness. Her manner had a certain dignified curiosity.
But Courtier was one of those who, by virtue of their warm-bloodedness, are ever ready to catch the moment as it flies. He had the large manner that never varied — as polite and cordial to a beggar as to a lord. His urbanity had not to fight with the timidities and irritations of a nervous temperament. And only when a sentiment or action appeared mean to him did people become conscious of something at variance with his cheery courtesy; as though a war horse, hard-held, were fretting and fuming within his chest. His shell of stoicism, however, was never quite melted by this internal heat, so that a very peculiar expression was the result, a sort of calm, sardonic, desperate, jolly look. And, since he not infrequently found himself confronted by actions and sentiments of dubious character, he was often visited by this look.
Lady Valleys spoke.
’I most heartily apologize to you, Mr. Courtier; disgraceful of those people. I want to tell you how much I admire your book; though of course I disagree with it. What we want preached in these days are the warlike, not the peaceful virtues — especially by a warrior.’
Courtier laughed. ‘Must I be accused of preaching, Lady Valleys?’
‘Oh! well, you’ll soon come to it. It’s part of the writing disease. But your ideas really are impracticable.’
‘Though they say that the ideas of to-day are the facts of to-morrow.’
‘Now do you really believe that? You tell us in your book that the ruling classes are deficient in ideas.’
‘According to the law that every creature suits itself to its environment, the probabilities seem to lie in that direction.’
‘Ah!’ said Lady Valleys, a little sharply, ‘you must prove that, please.’
‘What is the motive power of ideas? Imagination! What is the motive power of imagination? Sympathy. What is the motive power of sympathy? Understanding. What is the motive power of understanding? Suffering and experience. Q. E. D.’
‘I dispute that entirely,’ said Lady Valleys. ‘People are born sympathetic, or they are not.’
‘As individuals, yes; as classes, no.’
' At all events, we bear a better name for sympathy than the middle classes.’
‘Certainly,’ said Courtier. ‘There arc only two classes that beat you — the very poor — ’
‘No! I don’t agree. Their understanding, and certainly their sympathies, are very narrow. They have never had ideas.’ ‘Yes. I should have said there’s only one class that beats you.’
‘And that?’
‘The men of ideas themselves.’
‘That is surely a platitude.’
‘Ah! but the point is, does your class produce them?’
‘How about your Fielding, Byron, Shelley? In proportion to numbers —'
‘Well, Lady Valleys,’ Courtier answered, ‘it’s my experience that if you give a man power, he’s done for — from the point of view of understanding. It would be odd if he were n’t. You can hardly be fixing the lines within which other people shall act — and be keeping your mind open, and your feelers going at the same time!’
Lady Valleys answered with a certain irritation, as though not accustomed to be so long withstood. ‘We are n’t all officials and public men. There are plenty of us to do other work.’
‘Forgive me, it is not so much what you do, but the attitude of mind in which you are brought up.’
Lady Valleys looked at him shrewd-
ly.
‘ What’s much more interesting,’ she said, ‘is — why you came down here! I’m sure you don’t care a rap for politics! ’
But as she spoke a young girl entered.
(To be continued.)