The Lesson of the Master

“You mean Mr. St. George—isn’t he delightful?”

Paul Overt met her eyes, which had a cool morning-light that would have half-broken his heart if he hadn’t been so young.  “Alas I don’t know him.  I only admire him at a distance.”

“Oh you must know him—he wants so to talk to you,” returned Miss Fancourt, who evidently had the habit of saying the things that, by her quick calculation, would give people pleasure.  Paul saw how she would always calculate on everything’s being simple between others.

“I shouldn’t have supposed he knew anything about me,” he professed.

“He does then—everything.  And if he didn’t I should be able to tell him.”

“To tell him everything?” our friend smiled.

“You talk just like the people in your book!” she answered.

“Then they must all talk alike.”

She thought a moment, not a bit disconcerted.  “Well, it must be so difficult.  Mr. St. George tells me it is—terribly.  I’ve tried too—and I find it so.  I’ve tried to write a novel.”

“Mr. St. George oughtn’t to discourage you,” Paul went so far as to say.

“You do much more—when you wear that expression.”

“Well, after all, why try to be an artist?” the young man pursued.  “It’s so poor—so poor!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Miss Fancourt, who looked grave.

“I mean as compared with being a person of action—as living your works.”

“But what’s art but an intense life—if it be real?” she asked.  “I think it’s the only one—everything else is so clumsy!”  Her companion laughed, and she brought out with her charming serenity what next struck her.  “It’s so interesting to meet so many celebrated people.”

“So I should think—but surely it isn’t new to you.”

“Why I’ve never seen any one—any one: living always in Asia.”

The way she talked of Asia somehow enchanted him.  “But doesn’t that continent swarm with great figures?  Haven’t you administered provinces in India and had captive rajahs and tributary princes chained to your car?”

It was as if she didn’t care even should he amuse himself at her cost.  “I was with my father, after I left school to go out there.  It was delightful being with him—we’re alone together in the world, he and I—but there was none of the society I like best.  One never heard of a picture—never of a book, except bad ones.”

“Never of a picture?  Why, wasn’t all life a picture?”

She looked over the delightful place where they sat.  “Nothing to compare to this.  I adore England!” she cried.

It fairly stirred in him the sacred chord.  “Ah of course I don’t deny that we must do something with her, poor old dear, yet.”

“She hasn’t been touched, really,” said the girl.

“Did Mr. St. George say that?”

There was a small and, as he felt, harmless spark of irony in his question; which, however, she answered very simply, not noticing the insinuation.  “Yes, he says England hasn’t been touched—not considering all there is,” she went on eagerly.  “He’s so interesting about our country.  To listen to him makes one want so to do something.”

“It would make me want to,” said Paul Overt, feeling strongly, on the instant, the suggestion of what she said and that of the emotion with which she said it, and well aware of what an incentive, on St. George’s lips, such a speech might be.

“Oh you—as if you hadn’t!  I should like so to hear you talk together,” she added ardently.

“That’s very genial of you; but he’d have it all his own way.  I’m prostrate before him.”

She had an air of earnestness.  “Do you think then he’s so perfect?”

“Far from it.  Some of his later books seem to me of a queerness—!”

“Yes, yes—he knows that.”

Paul Overt stared.  “That they seem to me of a queerness—!”

“Well yes, or at any rate that they’re not what they should be.  He told me he didn’t esteem them.  He has told me such wonderful things—he’s so interesting.”

There was a certain shock for Paul Overt in the knowledge that the fine genius they were talking of had been reduced to so explicit a confession and had made it, in his misery, to the first comer; for though Miss Fancourt was charming what was she after all but an immature girl encountered at a country-house?  Yet precisely this was part of the sentiment he himself had just expressed: he would make way completely for the poor peccable great man not because he didn’t read him clear, but altogether because he did.  His consideration was half composed of tenderness for superficialities which he was sure their perpetrator judged privately, judged more ferociously than any one, and which represented some tragic intellectual secret.  He would have his reasons for his psychology à fleur de peau, and these reasons could only be cruel ones, such as would make him dearer to those who already were fond of him.  “You excite my envy.  I have my reserves, I discriminate—but I love him,” Paul said in a moment.  “And seeing him for the first time this way is a great event for me.”

“How momentous—how magnificent!” cried the girl.  “How delicious to bring you together!”

“Your doing it—that makes it perfect,” our friend returned.

“He’s as eager as you,” she went on.  “But it’s so odd you shouldn’t have met.”

“It’s not really so odd as it strikes you.  I’ve been out of England so much—made repeated absences all these last years.”

She took this in with interest.  “And yet you write of it as well as if you were always here.”

“It’s just the being away perhaps.  At any rate the best bits, I suspect, are those that were done in dreary places abroad.”

“And why were they dreary?”

“Because they were health-resorts—where my poor mother was dying.”

“Your poor mother?”—she was all sweet wonder.

“We went from place to place to help her to get better.  But she never did.  To the deadly Riviera (I hate it!) to the high Alps, to Algiers, and far away—a hideous journey—to Colorado.”

“And she isn’t better?” Miss Fancourt went on.

“She died a year ago.”

“Really?—like mine!  Only that’s years since.  Some day you must tell me about your mother,” she added.

He could at first, on this, only gaze at her.  “What right things you say!  If you say them to St. George I don’t wonder he’s in bondage.”

It pulled her up for a moment.  “I don’t know what you mean.  He doesn’t make speeches and professions at all—he isn’t ridiculous.”

“I’m afraid you consider then that I am.”

“No, I don’t”—she spoke it rather shortly.  And then she added: “He understands—understands everything.”

The young man was on the point of saying jocosely: “And I don’t—is that it?”  But these words, in time, changed themselves to others slightly less trivial: “Do you suppose he understands his wife?”

Miss Fancourt made no direct answer, but after a moment’s hesitation put it: “Isn’t she charming?”

“Not in the least!”

“Here he comes.  Now you must know him,” she went on.  A small group of visitors had gathered at the other end of the gallery and had been there overtaken by Henry St. George, who strolled in from a neighbouring room.  He stood near them a moment, not falling into the talk but taking up an old miniature from a table and vaguely regarding it.  At the end of a minute he became aware of Miss Fancourt and her companion in the distance; whereupon, laying down his miniature, he approached them with the same procrastinating air, his hands in his pockets and his eyes turned, right and left, to the pictures.  The gallery was so long that this transit took some little time, especially as there was a moment when he stopped to admire the fine Gainsborough.  “He says Mrs. St. George has been the making of him,” the girl continued in a voice slightly lowered.

“Ah he’s often obscure!” Paul laughed.

“Obscure?” she repeated as if she heard it for the first time.  Her eyes rested on her other friend, and it wasn’t lost upon Paul that they appeared to send out great shafts of softness.  “He’s going to speak to us!” she fondly breathed.  There was a sort of rapture in her voice, and our friend was startled.  “Bless my soul, does she care for him like that?—is she in love with him?” he mentally enquired.  “Didn’t I tell you he was eager?” she had meanwhile asked of him.

“It’s eagerness dissimulated,” the young man returned as the subject of their observation lingered before his Gainsborough.  “He edges toward us shyly.  Does he mean that she saved him by burning that book?”

“That book? what book did she burn?”  The girl quickly turned her face to him.

“Hasn’t he told you then?”

“Not a word.”

“Then he doesn’t tell you everything!”  Paul had guessed that she pretty much supposed he did.  The great man had now resumed his course and come nearer; in spite of which his more qualified admirer risked a profane observation: “St. George and the Dragon is what the anecdote suggests!”

His companion, however, didn’t hear it; she smiled at the dragon’s adversary.  “He is eager—he is!” she insisted.

“Eager for you—yes.”

But meanwhile she had called out: “I’m sure you want to know Mr. Overt.  You’ll be great friends, and it will always be delightful to me to remember I was here when you first met and that I had something to do with it.”

There was a freshness of intention in the words that carried them off; nevertheless our young man was sorry for Henry St. George, as he was sorry at any time for any person publicly invited to be responsive and delightful.  He would have been so touched to believe that a man he deeply admired should care a straw for him that he wouldn’t play with such a presumption if it were possibly vain.  In a single glance of the eye of the pardonable Master he read—having the sort of divination that belonged to his talent—that this personage had ever a store of friendly patience, which was part of his rich outfit, but was versed in no printed page of a rising scribbler.  There was even a relief, a simplification, in that: liking him so much already for what he had done, how could one have liked him any more for a perception which must at the best have been vague?  Paul Overt got up, trying to show his compassion, but at the same instant he found himself encompassed by St. George’s happy personal art—a manner of which it was the essence to conjure away false positions.  It all took place in a moment.  Paul was conscious that he knew him now, conscious of his handshake and of the very quality of his hand; of his face, seen nearer and consequently seen better, of a general fraternising assurance, and in particular of the circumstance that St. George didn’t dislike him (as yet at least) for being imposed by a charming but too gushing girl, attractive enough without such danglers.  No irritation at any rate was reflected in the voice with which he questioned Miss Fancourt as to some project of a walk—a general walk of the company round the park.  He had soon said something to Paul about a talk—“We must have a tremendous lot of talk; there are so many things, aren’t there?”—but our friend could see this idea wouldn’t in the present case take very immediate effect.  All the same he was extremely happy, even after the matter of the walk had been settled—the three presently passed back to the other part of the gallery, where it was discussed with several members of the party; even when, after they had all gone out together, he found himself for half an hour conjoined with Mrs. St. George.  Her husband had taken the advance with Miss Fancourt, and this pair were quite out of sight.  It was the prettiest of rambles for a summer afternoon—a grassy circuit, of immense extent, skirting the limit of the park within.  The park was completely surrounded by its old mottled but perfect red wall, which, all the way on their left, constituted in itself an object of interest.  Mrs. St. George mentioned to him the surprising number of acres thus enclosed, together with numerous other facts relating to the property and the family, and the family’s other properties: she couldn’t too strongly urge on him the importance of seeing their other houses.  She ran over the names of these and rang the changes on them with the facility of practice, making them appear an almost endless list.  She had received Paul Overt very amiably on his breaking ground with her by the mention of his joy in having just made her husband’s acquaintance, and struck him as so alert and so accommodating a little woman that he was rather ashamed of his mot about her to Miss Fancourt; though he reflected that a hundred other people, on a hundred occasions, would have been sure to make it.  He got on with Ms. St. George, in short, better than he expected; but this didn’t prevent her suddenly becoming aware that she was faint with fatigue and must take her way back to the house by the shortest cut.  She professed that she hadn’t the strength of a kitten and was a miserable wreck; a character he had been too preoccupied to discern in her while he wondered in what sense she could be held to have been the making of her husband.  He had arrived at a glimmering of the answer when she announced that she must leave him, though this perception was of course provisional.  While he was in the very act of placing himself at her disposal for the return the situation underwent a change; Lord Masham had suddenly turned up, coming back to them, overtaking them, emerging from the shrubbery—Overt could scarcely have said how he appeared—and Mrs. St. George had protested that she wanted to be left alone and not to break up the party.  A moment later she was walking off with Lord Masham.  Our friend fell back and joined Lady Watermouth, to whom he presently mentioned that Mrs. St. George had been obliged to renounce the attempt to go further.

“She oughtn’t to have come out at all,” her ladyship rather grumpily remarked.

“Is she so very much of an invalid?”

“Very bad indeed.”  And his hostess added with still greater austerity: “She oughtn’t really to come to one!”  He wondered what was implied by this, and presently gathered that it was not a reflexion on the lady’s conduct or her moral nature: it only represented that her strength was not equal to her aspirations.

III

The smoking-room at Summersoft was on the scale of the rest of the place; high light commodious and decorated with such refined old carvings and mouldings that it seemed rather a bower for ladies who should sit at work at fading crewels than a parliament of gentlemen smoking strong cigars.  The gentlemen mustered there in considerable force on the Sunday evening, collecting mainly at one end, in front of one of the cool fair fireplaces of white marble, the entablature of which was adorned with a delicate little Italian “subject.”  There was another in the wall that faced it, and, thanks to the mild summer night, a fire in neither; but a nucleus for aggregation was furnished on one side by a table in the chimney-corner laden with bottles, decanters and tall tumblers.  Paul Overt was a faithless smoker; he would puff a cigarette for reasons with which tobacco had nothing to do.  This was particularly the case on the occasion of which I speak; his motive was the vision of a little direct talk with Henry St. George.  The “tremendous” communion of which the great man had held out hopes to him earlier in the day had not yet come off, and this saddened him considerably, for the party was to go its several ways immediately after breakfast on the morrow.  He had, however, the disappointment of finding that apparently the author of “Shadowmere” was not disposed to prolong his vigil.  He wasn’t among the gentlemen assembled when Paul entered, nor was he one of those who turned up, in bright habiliments, during the next ten minutes.  The young man waited a little, wondering if he had only gone to put on something extraordinary; this would account for his delay as well as contribute further to Overt’s impression of his tendency to do the approved superficial thing.  But he didn’t arrive—he must have been putting on something more extraordinary than was probable.  Our hero gave him up, feeling a little injured, a little wounded, at this loss of twenty coveted words.  He wasn’t angry, but he puffed his cigarette sighingly, with the sense of something rare possibly missed.  He wandered away with his regret and moved slowly round the room, looking at the old prints on the walls.  In this attitude he presently felt a hand on his shoulder and a friendly voice in his ear “This is good.  I hoped I should find you.  I came down on purpose.”  St. George was there without a change of dress and with a fine face—his graver one—to which our young man all in a flutter responded.  He explained that it was only for the Master—the idea of a little talk—that he had sat up, and that, not finding him, he had been on the point of going to bed.

“Well, you know, I don’t smoke—my wife doesn’t let me,” said St. George, looking for a place to sit down.  “It’s very good for me—very good for me.  Let us take that sofa.”

“Do you mean smoking’s good for you?”

“No no—her not letting me.  It’s a great thing to have a wife who’s so sure of all the things one can do without.  One might never find them out one’s self.  She doesn’t allow me to touch a cigarette.”  They took possession of a sofa at a distance from the group of smokers, and St. George went on: “Have you got one yourself?”

“Do you mean a cigarette?”

“Dear no—a wife.”

“No; and yet I’d give up my cigarette for one.”

“You’d give up a good deal more than that,” St. George returned.  “However, you’d get a great deal in return.  There’s a something to be said for wives,” he added, folding his arms and crossing his outstretched legs.  He declined tobacco altogether and sat there without returning fire.  His companion stopped smoking, touched by his courtesy; and after all they were out of the fumes, their sofa was in a far-away corner.  It would have been a mistake, St. George went on, a great mistake for them to have separated without a little chat; “for I know all about you,” he said, “I know you’re very remarkable.  You’ve written a very distinguished book.”

“And how do you know it?” Paul asked.

“Why, my dear fellow, it’s in the air, it’s in the papers, it’s everywhere.”  St. George spoke with the immediate familiarity of a confrère—a tone that seemed to his neighbour the very rustle of the laurel.  “You’re on all men’s lips and, what’s better, on all women’s.  And I’ve just been reading your book.”

“Just?  You hadn’t read it this afternoon,” said Overt.

“How do you know that?”

“I think you should know how I know it,” the young man laughed.

“I suppose Miss Fancourt told you.”

“No indeed—she led me rather to suppose you had.”

“Yes—that’s much more what she’d do.  Doesn’t she shed a rosy glow over life?  But you didn’t believe her?” asked St. George.

“No, not when you came to us there.”

“Did I pretend? did I pretend badly?”  But without waiting for an answer to this St. George went on: “You ought always to believe such a girl as that—always, always.  Some women are meant to be taken with allowances and reserves; but you must take her just as she is.”

“I like her very much,” said Paul Overt.

Something in his tone appeared to excite on his companion’s part a momentary sense of the absurd; perhaps it was the air of deliberation attending this judgement.  St. George broke into a laugh to reply.  “It’s the best thing you can do with her.  She’s a rare young lady!  In point of fact, however, I confess I hadn’t read you this afternoon.”

“Then you see how right I was in this particular case not to believe Miss Fancourt.”

“How right? how can I agree to that when I lost credit by it?”

“Do you wish to pass exactly for what she represents you?  Certainly you needn’t be afraid,” Paul said.

“Ah, my dear young man, don’t talk about passing—for the likes of me!  I’m passing away—nothing else than that.  She has a better use for her young imagination (isn’t it fine?) than in ‘representing’ in any way such a weary wasted used-up animal!”  The Master spoke with a sudden sadness that produced a protest on Paul’s part; but before the protest could be uttered he went on, reverting to the latter’s striking novel: “I had no idea you were so good—one hears of so many things.  But you’re surprisingly good.”

“I’m going to be surprisingly better,” Overt made bold to reply.

“I see that, and it’s what fetches me.  I don’t see so much else—as one looks about—that’s going to be surprisingly better.  They’re going to be consistently worse—most of the things.  It’s so much easier to be worse—heaven knows I’ve found it so.  I’m not in a great glow, you know, about what’s breaking out all over the place.  But you must be better—you really must keep it up.  I haven’t of course.  It’s very difficult—that’s the devil of the whole thing, keeping it up.  But I see you’ll be able to.  It will be a great disgrace if you don’t.”

“It’s very interesting to hear you speak of yourself; but I don’t know what you mean by your allusions to your having fallen off,” Paul Overt observed with pardonable hypocrisy.  He liked his companion so much now that the fact of any decline of talent or of care had ceased for the moment to be vivid to him.

“Don’t say that—don’t say that,” St. George returned gravely, his head resting on the top of the sofa-back and his eyes on the ceiling.  “You know perfectly what I mean.  I haven’t read twenty pages of your book without seeing that you can’t help it.”

“You make me very miserable,” Paul ecstatically breathed.

“I’m glad of that, for it may serve as a kind of warning.  Shocking enough it must be, especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith—the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour.”  St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion.  His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm.  But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: “Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson.  Let that good come of it at least that you shudder with your pitiful impression, and that this may help to keep you straight in the future.  Don’t become in your old age what I have in mine—the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods!”

“What do you mean by your old age?” the young man asked.

“It has made me old.  But I like your youth.”

Paul answered nothing—they sat for a minute in silence.  They heard the others going on about the governmental majority.  Then “What do you mean by false gods?” he enquired.

His companion had no difficulty whatever in saying, “The idols of the market; money and luxury and ‘the world;’ placing one’s children and dressing one’s wife; everything that drives one to the short and easy way.  Ah the vile things they make one do!”

“But surely one’s right to want to place one’s children.”

“One has no business to have any children,” St. George placidly declared.  “I mean of course if one wants to do anything good.”

“But aren’t they an inspiration—an incentive?”

“An incentive to damnation, artistically speaking.”

“You touch on very deep things—things I should like to discuss with you,” Paul said.  “I should like you to tell me volumes about yourself.  This is a great feast for me!”

“Of course it is, cruel youth.  But to show you I’m still not incapable, degraded as I am, of an act of faith, I’ll tie my vanity to the stake for you and burn it to ashes.  You must come and see me—you must come and see us,” the Master quickly substituted.  “Mrs. St. George is charming; I don’t know whether you’ve had any opportunity to talk with her.  She’ll be delighted to see you; she likes great celebrities, whether incipient or predominant.  You must come and dine—my wife will write to you.  Where are you to be found?”

“This is my little address”—and Overt drew out his pocketbook and extracted a visiting-card.  On second thoughts, however, he kept it back, remarking that he wouldn’t trouble his friend to take charge of it but would come and see him straightway in London and leave it at his door if he should fail to obtain entrance.

“Ah you’ll probably fail; my wife’s always out—or when she isn’t out is knocked up from having been out.  You must come and dine—though that won’t do much good either, for my wife insists on big dinners.”  St. George turned it over further, but then went on: “You must come down and see us in the country, that’s the best way; we’ve plenty of room, and it isn’t bad.”