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.”

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