A Servant of the Public

"He needn't go on drifting away unless you like."

"It isn't very likely that I should make any efforts to call him back," said Alice, with a faint smile.

"Why not?" asked Irene crossly.

"Well, do women do that sort of thing?"

"Why, of course they do, my dear."

Alice's smile expressed a very clear opinion of such conduct, supposing it to exist. Irene grew red for an instant and pushed her chair back from the table. Anger makes delicate methods of remarking on important facts seem unnecessary.

"You know Ora Pinsent's off to America?" she asked.

"No, I know nothing of Miss Pinsent's movements," said Alice haughtily. "I don't read theatrical gossip."

Irene looked at her, rose, and came near. She stood looking down at Alice. Alice looked up with a smile; the irritation in both seemed to vanish.

"Oh, my dear girl, why must you be so proud?" asked Irene, with a nervous little laugh. "You cared for him, Alice."

"Yes; all the world knew that. I didn't realise, though, quite how well they knew it."

"And now you don't?"

Alice's eyes did not leave her friend's face as she paused in consideration.

"I don't suppose I shall ever be so happy as I used to think I should be with Ashley Mead," she said at last. "But I couldn't now. I should always be thinking of – of what's been happening lately. Irene, I loathe that sort of thing, don't you?"

"Oh, with men it's just – " Irene began.

"With some sort of men, I suppose so," Alice interrupted. "I tried to think it didn't matter, but – Could you care for a man if you knew he had done what Ashley has?"

In ninety hours out of a hundred, in ninety moods out of a hundred, Irene would have been ready with the "No" that Alice expected so confidently from her; with that denial she would instinctively have shielded herself from a breath of suspicion. But now, looking into the grave eyes upturned to hers, she answered with a break in her voice,

"Yes, dear; we must take what we can get, you know." Then she turned away and walked back to her tea-table; her own face was in shadow there, and thence she watched Alice's, which seemed to rise very firm and very white out of the high black collar of her mourning gown. She loved Alice, but, as she watched, she knew why Ashley Mead had left her and given himself over to Ora Pinsent; she had not often seen so nearly in the way men saw. Then she thought of what Bertie Jewett was; he could not love as this girl deserved to be loved. "And we don't always get what we deserve," she added, forcing another nervous laugh. "Most women have to put up with something like what you mean, only they're sensible and don't think about it."

"I'm considered sensible," said Alice, smiling.

"Sensible people are only silly in different ways from silly people," Irene declared, with a touch of fresh irritation in her voice. "Well then, it's no use?" she asked.

"It's no use trying to undo what's done." Alice got up and came and kissed her friend. "It was like you to try, though," she said.

"And I suppose it's to be – ?"

"It's not to be anybody," Alice interrupted. "Fancy talking about it now!"

"Oh, that's conventional. You needn't mind that with me."

"Really I'm not thinking about it." But even as she spoke her face grew thoughtful. "Our life's arranged for us, really," she said. "We haven't much to do with it. Look how I was born to the business!"

"And you'll go on in the business?"

"Yes. I used to think I should like to get away from it. Perhaps I should like still; but I never shall. There are terribly few things one gets a choice about."

"Marriage is one," Irene persisted, almost imploringly.

"Do you think it is, as a rule?" asked Alice doubtfully.

Their talk had drawn them closer together and renewed the bonds of sympathy, but herein lay its only comfort for Irene Bowdon. The disposition that Alice shewed seemed clearly to presage Bertie Jewett's success and to prove how far he had already progressed. She wondered to find so much done and to see how Ashley had lost his place in the girl's conception of what her life must be. "I should have fought more," Irene reflected, and went on to ask whether that were not because she also felt more than her friend, or at least differently; did not the temperament which occasioned defeat also soften it? Yet the girl was not happy; she was rather making the best of an apparently necessary lack of happiness; life was a niggard of joy, but by good management the small supply might be so disposed as to make a good show and so spread out as to cover a handsome space. Against the acceptance of such a view Irene's soul protested. It was dressing the shop-window finely when there was no stock inside.

"I shouldn't mind what a man had thought," she said, "if I could make him think as I wanted him to now."

"No, but you'd know him too well to imagine that you ever could," said Alice.

A little inhuman, wasn't it? The old question rose again in Irene's mind, even while she was feeling full of sympathy and of love. It was all too cold, too clear-sighted, too ruthless; if you were very fond of people, you did not let yourself know too well what you did not wish to think about them; you ought to be able to forget, to select, to idealise; else how could two people ever love one another? There must be a partiality of view; love must pretend. She could fancy Ashley's humorously alarmed look at the idea of living in company with perfect clear-sightedness. As for Ora – but surely the objection here would come even sooner and more clamorously from clear-sightedness itself?

"I daresay you're right, dear, but it doesn't sound very encouraging," she said. "I declare it's a good thing I'm married already, or I should never have dared after this!"

"If it is like that, we may just as well admit it," said Alice, with a smile and a sigh. "I must go back," she added. "Mr. Jewett's coming to dinner to talk over some business with me."

Business and Mr. Jewett! That indeed seemed now the way of it. Irene kissed her friend with rueful emphasis.

At this time Lady Muddock, while conceiving herself prostrate and crushed under the blow which had fallen on her, was in reality very placid and rather happy. As a dog loves his master she had loved her husband; the dog whines at the master's loss, but after a time will perceive that there is nobody to prevent him from having a hunt in the coverts. A repressive force was removed, and Lady Muddock enjoyed the novel feeling of being a free agent. And everything went very well according to her ideas. Minna Soames, whose father had been a clergyman, and who had sung only at concerts, would become her daughter-in-law, and Bertie Jewett her son-in-law; Minna would cease to sing, and Bertie would carry on the business; Bob would be perfectly happy, and Alice would act with true wisdom and presently find her reward. She had a sense of being at home in all things, of there being nothing that puzzled or shocked or upset her. She disliked the unfamiliar; she had therefore disliked Ora Pinsent, even while she was flattered by knowing her; but it was just as flattering and at the same time more comfortable to have known and voluntarily to have ceased to know her. As for Ashley Mead, he had never let her feel quite at ease with him; and the society which he had been the means of bringing to the house was not the sort which suited her. She made preparations for taking a handsome villa at Wimbledon; to that she would retire when Bob brought his bride to Kensington Palace Gardens. In a word, the world seemed to be fitting itself to her size most admirably.

Bowdon had been paying a visit of condolence to her while Alice was with his wife – so Irene had contrived to distribute the quartette – and discovered her state of mind with an amusement largely infected with envy. His own life was of course laid on broader lines than hers; there was a wider social side to it and a public side; but he also had come to a time of life and a state of things when he must fit himself to his world and his world to him, much in Lady Muddock's fashion – when things became definite, vistas shortened, and the actual became the only possible. The return of his thousand pounds typified this change to him; it closed an incident which had once seemed likely to prevent or retard the process of settling down to which he was now adapting and resigning himself; he admitted with a sigh that he had put it off as long as most men, and that, now it was come, it had more alleviations for him than for most. Well, the ground had to be cleared for the next generation; theirs would be the open playing-fields; it was time for him to go into the house and sit down by the fire. What was there to quarrel with in that? Did not placens uxor sit on the other side of the hearth? And though tempests were well enough in youth, in advanced years they were neither pleasant nor becoming. But he wished that it was all as grateful to him as it was to Lady Muddock.

Alice came in before he left and took him to walk with her in the garden. The burden of her talk chimed in with his mood; again she dwelt on the view that one's place was somewhere in the world, that by most people at all events it had only to be found, not made, but that sorrow and a fiasco waited on any mistake about it. She spoke only for herself, but she seemed to speak for him also, expressing by her subdued acquiescence in giving up what was not hers, and her resolute facing of what was, the temper which he must breed in himself if he were to travel the rest of the way contentedly.

"But it's a bit of a bore, isn't it?" he asked, suddenly standing still and looking at her with a smile.

"Yes, I suppose it's a bit of a bore," said she. Then she went on rather abruptly, "Have you seen Ashley since you came back?"

"Only once, for a moment at the club."

"Is he getting on well? Will he do well?"

"If he likes," said Bowdon, shrugging his shoulders. "But he's a queer fellow."

"I don't think he quite agrees with us in what we've been saying."

"I don't know about that. At any rate I fancy he won't act on it."

"There's no use talking about it," she said with an impatience only half suppressed. "He's so different from what he used to be."

"Not so very, a little perhaps. Then you're a little different from what you used to be, aren't you?"

She looked at him with interest.

"Yes?" she said questioningly.

"Add the two little differences together and they make a big one."

"A big difference between us?"

"That's what I mean. I feel the same thing about him myself. He's not for settling down, Miss Muddock."

"Oh, I suppose we both know why that is," she said. "We needn't mention names, but – "

"Well, we know how it is even if we don't know why it is; but it isn't all Miss Pinsent, or – " He paused an instant and ended with a question. "Or why doesn't he settle down there?"

She seemed to consider his question, but shook her head as though she found no answer. To adduce the obvious objection, the Fenning objection, seemed inconsistent with the sincerity into which their talk had drifted.

"I tell you what," said Bowdon, "I'm beginning to think that it doesn't much matter what sort a man is, but he ought to be one sort or the other. Don't you know what I mean?"

She walked by his side in silence again for a few minutes, then she turned to him.

"Are we contemptuous, or are we envious, or what are we, we people of one sort?" she asked.

"On my honour I don't know," answered Bowdon, shaking his head and laughing a little.

"I think I'm contemptuous," she said, and looked in his face to find an equal candour. But he did not give his decision; he would not admit that he inclined still a little towards the mood of envy. "Anyhow it must be strange to be like that," she said; she had thought the same thing before when she sat in the theatre, watching Ora Pinsent act. Then she had watched with an outside disinterested curiosity in the study of a being from another world who could not, as it had seemed, make any difference to her world or to her; but Ora had made differences for her, or at least had brought differences to light. So the various lines of life run in and out, now meeting and now parting, each following its own curve, lead where it may.

"I must run away," said Bowdon, "or I shall keep my wife waiting for dinner."

"And I must go and dress, or I shall keep Mr. Jewett waiting for dinner."

They parted with no more exchange of confidence than lay in the hint of a half-bitter smile. Lord Bowdon walked home to Queen's Gate, meditating on the Developments and Manifestations of the Modern Spirit. He yielded to fashion so far as to shape his phrase in this way and to affix mental capital letters to the dignified words. But in truth he was conscious that the affair was a very old one, that there had been always a Modern Spirit. In the state of innocency Adam fell, and in the days of villainy poor Jack Falstaff; the case would seem to be much the same with the Modern Spirit. Still there is good in a label, to comfort the consciences of sinners and to ornament the eloquence of saints.

The eloquence of saints was on the lips of his wife that evening when they dined together, and Bowdon listened to it with complete intellectual assent. He could not deny the force of her strictures on Ashley Mead nor the justness of her analysis of Ora Pinsent. But he did not love her in this mood; we do not always love people best when they convince us most. Ashley was terribly foolish, Ora seemed utterly devoid of the instinct of morality, intimated Irene.

"No," said Bowdon, with a sudden undeliberated decisiveness, "that's just what she's got. She hasn't anything else, but she has that."

The flow of Irene's talk was stemmed; she looked across at him with a vexed enquiring air.

"You've not seen anything like so much of her as I have," she objected. "Really I don't see what you can know about it, Frank. Besides men never understand women as women do."

"Sometimes better, and I'm quite right here," he persisted. "Why did she send for her husband?"

"I don't think there was ever any real question of his coming." This remark was not quite sincere.

"Oh, yes, there was," said Bowdon with a smile. The smile hinted knowledge and thereby caused annoyance to his wife. How did he come to know, or to think he knew, so much of Ora? But it was no great thing that had inspired his protest; it was only the memory of how she once said, "Don't."

"I'm going to see her," Irene announced in resolute tones. "I used to have some influence over her, and I'm going to try and use it. I may do some good."

"In what direction, dear?" There was a touch of scepticism in Bowdon's voice.

"About Ashley Mead. I do believe everything could be made happy again. Frank, I'm not reconciled to Bertie Jewett yet."

Bowdon shook his head; he was reconciled to Bertie Jewett and to the tendency of events which involved the success of Bertie Jewett.

"And she ought to go back to her husband," Irene pursued.

The Modern Spirit had not, it must be presumed, left Lord Bowdon entirely untouched, else he could not have dissented from this dictum; or was it only that a very vivid remembrance of Mr. Fenning rose in his mind?

"I'm hanged if she ought," he said emphatically. "And if you only knew what the fellow's like – " He came to a sharp stop; his wife's surprised eyes were set on his face.

"You don't know what he's like, you've never seen him; you told me so, long ago, when I first got to know her." Lord Bowdon appeared embarrassed. "Wasn't it true?" asked Irene severely.

"Yes, it was true," he answered, and truly, for, at the time he said it, it had been true.

"Then how do you know what he's like?" she persisted. The servants had left them to their coffee. Irene came round and sat down close to her husband. "You know something, something you didn't mean me to know. What is it, Frank?"

Bowdon looked at her steadily. He had meant to tell nothing; but he had already told too much. A sudden gleam of understanding came into her eyes; her quick intuition discerned a connection between this thing and the other incident which had puzzled her.

"I believe it's something to do with that cheque Ashley Mead sent you," she said. She would not move her eyes from his face.

"I'm not at liberty to tell you anything about it. Of course I'm not going to deny that there's a secret. But I can't tell you about it, Irene."

"You would be quite safe in telling me." She rose and stood looking down on him. "You ought to tell me," she said. "You ought to tell me anything that concerns both you and Ora Pinsent."

She was amazed to say this, and he to hear it. The one point of silence, of careful silence, the one thing which neither had dared to speak of to the other, the one hidden spring which had moved the conduct of both, suddenly became a matter of speech on her lips to him. Suddenly she faced the question and demanded that he also should face it. She admitted and she claimed that what touched him and Ora Pinsent must touch her also. And he did not contest the claim.

"I must know, if – if we're to go on, Frank," she said.

"There's much less than you think," said he. "But I'll tell you. I tell you in confidence, you know. Fenning came. That's all."

Irene made no comment. That was not all; the cheque from Ashley Mead was not explained. Bowdon proceeded with his story. He told what he had to tell in short sharp sentences. "The fellow was impossible." "It was impossible to let her see him." "He was a rascal." "He drank." Pauses of silence were interspersed. "It would have killed her." "He only wanted money of her." "The idea of his going near her was intolerable." "She had forgotten what he was, or he had gone down-hill terribly."

"And the money?" asked Irene, in a low whisper. She had seated herself again, and was looking before her into the fireplace.

"He came for money; he had to have it if he was to go. Ashley asked me for it. I gave it him."

"As a loan? He sent it back."

"I didn't mean it as a loan. But, as you say, he's sent it back."

"Why?"

"Because he didn't want her to be indebted to me for it." His bitterness cropped out in his tone; he had desired a share in the work which Ashley would not give him. He must have forgotten his wife for the moment, or he would have kept that bitterness out of his voice; indeed for the moment he seemed to have forgotten her, as he leant his head on his hand and stared gloomily at the floor.

"So we gave him the money, and he went away again." She was silent. "You wouldn't wonder so much if you'd seen him."

"I don't wonder," she said. "I haven't seen him, but I don't wonder. And you never told her?"

"No, I never told her."

"Nor Ashley Mead?"

"No, he's never told her, either. And you mustn't." For an instant his tone was rigidly imperative.

In spite of the tone she seemed to pay no heed to the last words.

"You kept it all from her?" she asked again.

"Yes," he said. "Does that seem very wrong to you?"

"Oh, I don't know," she groaned.

"Or very strange?" he asked, turning his head and looking towards her.

She rose to her feet suddenly, walked to the mantel-piece, and stood there with her back towards him.

"No," she said, "not very strange. It's only what I knew before. It's not strange." She turned round and faced him; she was rather pale, but she smiled a little.

"I knew all the time that you were in love with her too," she said. "Of course you wouldn't let the man go near her!"

Bowdon raised his eyes to his wife's face. She turned away again.

"I knew it when I made you propose to me," she said.

CHAPTER XX

THE WAYS DIVIDE

It may safely be said that, had Bowdon's wife been such as Ora Pinsent, or Bowdon himself of the clay of which Ora was made, the foregoing conversation would not have stopped where it did, nor with the finality which in fact marked its close. It would have been lengthened, resumed, and elaborated; its dramatic possibilities in the way of tragedy and comedy (it was deficient in neither line) would have been developed; properly and artistically handled, it must have led to something. But ordinary folk, especially perhaps ordinary English folk, make of their lives one grand waste of dramatic possibilities, and as things fell out the talk seemed to lead to nothing. When Irene had made her remark about knowing that her husband was in love with Ora even when she induced him to propose to herself, she stood a moment longer by the mantel-piece and then went upstairs, as her custom was; he held the door open for her, as his custom was; sat down again, drank a small glass of cognac, and smoked a cigar, all as his custom was; in about half an hour he joined her in the drawing-room and they talked about the house they were going to take in Scotland for the autumn. Neither then nor in the days that followed was any reference made to this after-dinner conversation, nor to the startling way in which the hidden had become open, the veil been for a moment lifted, and the thing which was between them declared and recognised. The dramatic possibilities were, in fact, absolutely neglected and thrown away; to all appearance the conversation might never have taken place, so little effect did it seem to have, so absolutely devoid of result it seemed to be. It was merely that for ever there it was, never to be forgotten, always to form part of their consciousness, to define permanently the origin of their relations to one another, to make it quite plain how it was that they came to be passing their lives together. That it did all these not unimportant things and yet never led to another acute situation or striking scene shews how completely the dramatic possibilities were thrown away.

It did not even alter Irene's resolve of going to see Ora Pinsent. To acquiesce in existing facts appeared the only thing left to do so far as she herself was concerned: but the facts might still be modified for others; this was what she told herself. Besides this feeling, she was impelled by an increased curiosity, a new desire to see again and to study the woman who had been the occasion of this conversation, who had united her husband and her friend in a plot and made them both sacrifice more than money because they would not have Jack Fenning come near her. We are curious when we are jealous; where lies the power, what is the secret of the strength which conquers us?

The scene in the little house at Chelsea was very much the same as Alice Muddock had once chanced on there. Sidney Hazlewood and Babba Flint were with Ora; after a swift embrace Ora resumed her talk with them. The talk was of tours, triumphs, and thousands; the masterpiece was finished; it bulged nobly in Babba's pocket, type-written, in brown covers, with pink ribbons to set off its virgin beauty. On the table lay a large foolscap sheet, fairly written; this was an agreement, ready for Ora's signature; when it had received that, it would be, as Hazlewood was reminding Ora, an agreement. Ora was struck anew with the unexpectedness of this result of merely writing one's name, and shewed a disinclination to take the decisive step. She preferred to consider tour, triumphs, and thousands as hypothetical delights; she got nearly as much enjoyment out of them and was bound to nothing. Babba smoked cigarettes with restless frequency and nervous haste; a horse and cart could almost have been driven along the wrinkle on Mr. Hazlewood's brow. He looked sixty, if he looked a day, that afternoon. Irene sat unnoticed, undisturbed, with the expression in her eyes which a woman wears when she is saying, "Yes, I suppose it would be so; I suppose men would. I don't feel it myself, but I understand how it would be." The expression is neither of liking nor of dislike; it is of unwilling acquiescence in a fact recognised but imperfectly comprehended. The presence of the power is admitted, the source but half discovered; the analysis of a drug need not be complete before we are able to discern its action.

"I won't sign to-day," said Ora. "I might change my mind."

"Good Lord, don't!" cried Babba, seizing another cigarette.

"That's just why we want you to sign to-day," said Hazlewood, passing his hand over his forehead in a vain effort to obliterate the wrinkle.

"Then you'd bring an action against me!" exclaimed Ora indignantly.