Fraternity

Of all the persons in his grand-daughter’s studio that afternoon, that stray sheep Mr. Purcey would have been, perhaps, the only one whose judgments he would have considered sound. No one had laid up a competence for Mr. Purcey, who had been in business from the age of twenty.

It is uncertain whether the mere fact that he was not in his own fold kept this visitor lingering in the studio when all other guests were gone; or whether it was simply the feeling that the longer he stayed in contact with really artistic people the more distinguished he was becoming. Probably the latter, for the possession of that Harpignies, a good specimen, which he had bought by accident, and subsequently by accident discovered to have a peculiar value, had become a factor in his life, marking him out from all his friends, who went in more for a neat type of Royal Academy landscape, together with reproductions of young ladies in eighteenth-century costumes seated on horseback, or in Scotch gardens. A junior partner in a banking-house of some importance, he lived at Wimbledon, whence he passed up and down daily in his car. To this he owed his acquaintance with the family of Dallison. For one day, after telling his chauffeur to meet him at the Albert Gate, he had set out to stroll down Rotten Row, as he often did on the way home, designing to nod to anybody that he knew. It had turned out a somewhat barren expedition. No one of any consequence had met his eye; and it was with a certain almost fretful longing for distraction that in Kensington Gardens he came on an old man feeding birds out of a paper bag. The birds having flown away on seeing him, he approached the feeder to apologize.

“I’m afraid I frightened your birds, sir,” he began.

This old man, who was dressed in smoke-grey tweeds which exhaled a poignant scent of peat, looked at him without answering.

“I’m afraid your birds saw me coming,” Mr. Purcey said again.

“In those days,” said the aged stranger, “birds were afraid of men.”

Mr. Purcey’s shrewd grey eyes perceived at once that he had a character to deal with.

“Ah, yes!” he said; “I see – you allude to the present time. That’s very nice. Ha, ha!”

The old man answered: “The emotion of fear is inseparably connected with a primitive state of fratricidal rivalry.”

This sentence put Mr. Purcey on his guard.

‘The old chap,’ he thought, ‘is touched. He evidently oughtn’t to be out here by himself.’ He debated, therefore, whether he should hasten away toward his car, or stand by in case his assistance should be needed. Being a kind-hearted man, who believed in his capacity for putting things to rights, and noticing a certain delicacy – a “sort of something rather distinguished,” as he phrased it afterwards – in the old fellow’s face and figure, he decided to see if he could be of any service. They walked along together, Mr. Purcey watching his new friend askance, and directing the march to where he had ordered his chauffeur to await him.

“You are very fond of birds, I suppose,” he said cautiously.

“The birds are our brothers.”

The answer was of a nature to determine Mr. Purcey in his diagnosis of the case.

“I’ve got my car here,” he said. “Let me give you a lift home.”

This new but aged acquaintance did not seem to hear; his lips moved as though he were following out some thought.

“In those days,” Mr. Purcey heard him say, “the congeries of men were known as rookeries. The expression was hardly just towards that handsome bird.”

Mr. Purcey touched him hastily on the arm.

“I’ve got my car here, sir,” he said. “Do let me put you down!”

Telling the story afterwards, he had spoken thus:

“The old chap knew where he lived right enough; but dash me if I believe he noticed that I was taking him there in my car – I had the A.i. Damyer out. That’s how I came to make the acquaintance of these Dallisons. He’s the writer, you know, and she paints – rather the new school – she admires Harpignies. Well, when I got there in the car I found Dallison in the garden. Of course I was careful not to put my foot into it. I told him: ‘I found this old gentleman wandering about. I’ve just brought him back in my car.’ Who should the old chap turn out to be but her father! They were awfully obliged to me. Charmin’ people, but very what d’you call it ‘fin de siecle’ – like all these professors, these artistic pigs – seem to know rather a queer set, advanced people, and all that sort of cuckoo, always talkin’ about the poor, and societies, and new religions, and that kind of thing.”

Though he had since been to see them several times, the Dallisons had never robbed him of the virtuous feeling of that good action – they had never let him know that he had brought home, not, as he imagined, a lunatic, but merely a philosopher.

It had been somewhat of a quiet shock to him to find Mr. Stone close to the doorway when he entered Bianca’s studio that afternoon; for though he had seen him since the encounter in Kensington Gardens, and knew that he was writing a book, he still felt that he was not quite the sort of old man that one ought to meet about. He had at once begun to tell him of the hanging of the Shoreditch murderer, as recorded in the evening papers. Mr. Stone’s reception of that news had still further confirmed his original views. When all the guests were gone – with the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Dallison and Miss Dallison, “that awfully pretty girl,” and the young man “who was always hangin’ about her” – he had approached his hostess for some quiet talk. She stood listening to him, very well bred, with just that habitual spice of mockery in her smile, which to Mr. Purcey’s eyes made her “a very strikin’-lookin’ woman, but rather – ” There he would stop, for it required a greater psychologist than he to describe a secret disharmony which a little marred her beauty. Due to some too violent cross of blood, to an environment too unsuited, to what not – it was branded on her. Those who knew Bianca Dallison better than Mr. Purcey were but too well aware of this fugitive, proud spirit permeating one whose beauty would otherwise have passed unquestioned.

She was a little taller than Cecilia, her figure rather fuller and more graceful, her hair darker, her eyes, too, darker and more deeply set, her cheek-bones higher, her colouring richer. That spirit of the age, Disharmony, must have presided when a child so vivid and dark-coloured was christened Bianca.

Mr. Purcey, however, was not a man who allowed the finest shades of feeling to interfere with his enjoyments. She was a “strikin’-lookin’ woman,” and there was, thanks to Harpignies, a link between them.

“Your father and I, Mrs. Dallison, can’t quite understand each other,” he began. “Our views of life don’t seem to hit it off exactly.”

“Really,” murmured Bianca; “I should have thought that you’d have got on so well.”

“He’s a little bit too – er – scriptural for me, perhaps,” said Mr. Purcey, with some delicacy.

“Did we never tell you,” Bianca answered softly, “that my father was a rather well – known man of science before his illness?”

“Ah!” replied Mr. Purcey, a little puzzled; “that, of course. D’you know, of all your pictures, Mrs. Dallison, I think that one you call ‘The Shadow’ is the most rippin’. There’s a something about it that gets hold of you. That was the original, wasn’t it, at your Christmas party – attractive girl – it’s an awf’ly good likeness.”

Bianca’s face had changed, but Mr. Purcey was not a man to notice a little thing like that.

“If ever you want to part with it,” he said, “I hope you’ll give me a chance. I mean it’d be a pleasure to me to have it. I think it’ll be worth a lot of money some day.”

Bianca did not answer, and Mr. Purcey, feeling suddenly a little awkward, said: “I’ve got my car waiting. I must be off – really.” Shaking hands with all of them, he went away.

When the door had closed behind his back, a universal sigh went up. It was followed by a silence, which Hilary broke.

“We’ll smoke, Stevie, if Cis doesn’t mind.”

Stephen Dallison placed a cigarette between his moustacheless lips, always rather screwed up, and ready to nip with a smile anything that might make him feel ridiculous.

“Phew!” he said. “Our friend Purcey becomes a little tedious. He seems to take the whole of Philistia about with him.”

“He’s a very decent fellow,” murmured Hilary.

“A bit heavy, surely!” Stephen Dallison’s face, though also long and narrow, was not much like his brother’s. His eyes, though not unkind, were far more scrutinising, inquisitive, and practical; his hair darker, smoother.

Letting a puff of smoke escape, he added:

“Now, that’s the sort of man to give you a good sound opinion. You should have asked him, Cis.”

Cecilia answered with a frown:

“Don’t chaff, Stephen; I’m perfectly serious about Mrs. Hughs.”

“Well, I don’t see what I can do for the good woman, my dear. One can’t interfere in these domestic matters.”

“But it seems dreadful that we who employ her should be able to do nothing for her. Don’t you think so, B.?”

“I suppose we could do something for her if we wanted to badly enough.”

Bianca’s voice, which had the self-distrustful ring of modern music, suited her personality.

A glance passed between Stephen and his wife.

“That’s B. all over!” it seemed to say…

“Hound Street, where they live, is a horrid place.”

It was Thyme who spoke, and everybody looked round at her.

“How do you know that?” asked Cecilia.

“I went to see.”

“With whom?”

“Martin.”

The lips of the young man whose name she mentioned curled sarcastically.

Hilary asked gently:

“Well, my dear, what did you see?”

“Most of the doors are open – ”

Bianca murmured: “That doesn’t tell us much.”

“On the contrary,” said Martin suddenly, in a deep bass voice, “it tells you everything. Go on.”

“The Hughs live on the top floor at No. 1. It’s the best house in the street. On the ground-floor are some people called Budgen; he’s a labourer, and she’s lame. They’ve got one son. The Hughs have let off the first-floor front-room to an old man named Creed – ”

“Yes, I know,” Cecilia muttered.

“He makes about one and tenpence a day by selling papers. The back-room on that floor they let, of course, to your little model, Aunt B.”

“She is not my model now.”

There was a silence such as falls when no one knows how far the matter mentioned is safe to, touch on. Thyme proceeded with her report.

“Her room’s much the best in the house; it’s airy, and it looks out over someone’s garden. I suppose she stays there because it’s so cheap. The Hughs’ rooms are – ” She stopped, wrinkling her straight nose.

“So that’s the household,” said Hilary. “Two married couples, one young man, one young girl” – his eyes travelled from one to another of the two married couples, the young man, and the young girl, collected in this room – “and one old man,” he added softly.

“Not quite the sort of place for you to go poking about in, Thyme,” Stephen said ironically. “Do you think so, Martin?”

“Why not?”

Stephen raised his brows, and glanced towards his wife. Her face was dubious, a little scared. There was a silence. Then Bianca spoke:

“Well?” That word, like nearly all her speeches, seemed rather to disconcert her hearers.

“So Hughs ill-treats her?” said Hilary.

“She says so,” replied Cecilia – “at least, that’s what I understood. Of course, I don’t know any details.”

“She had better get rid of him, I should think,” Bianca murmured.

Out of the silence that followed Thyme’s clear voice was heard saying:

“She can’t get a divorce; she could get a separation.”

Cecilia rose uneasily. These words concreted suddenly a wealth of half-acknowledged doubts about her little daughter. This came of letting her hear people talk, and go about with Martin! She might even have been listening to her grandfather – such a thought was most disturbing. And, afraid, on the one hand, of gainsaying the liberty of speech, and, on the other, of seeming to approve her daughter’s knowledge of the world, she looked at her husband.

But Stephen did not speak, feeling, no doubt, that to pursue the subject would be either to court an ethical, even an abstract, disquisition, and this one did not do in anybody’s presence, much less one’s wife’s or daughter’s; or to touch on sordid facts of doubtful character, which was equally distasteful in the circumstances. He, too, however, was uneasy that Thyme should know so much.

The dusk was gathering outside; the fire threw a flickering light, fitfully outlining their figures, making those faces, so familiar to each other, a little mysterious.

At last Stephen broke the silence. “Of course, I’m very sorry for her, but you’d better let it alone – you can’t tell with that sort of people; you never can make out what they want – it’s safer not to meddle. At all events, it’s a matter for a Society to look into first!”

Cecilia answered: “But she’s, on my conscience, Stephen.”

“They’re all on my conscience,” muttered Hilary.

Bianca looked at him for the first time; then, turning to her nephew, said: “What do you say, Martin?”

The young man, whose face was stained by the firelight the colour of pale cheese, made no answer.

But suddenly through the stillness came a voice:

“I have thought of something.”

Everyone turned round. Mr. Stone was seen emerging from behind “The Shadow”; his frail figure, in its grey tweeds, his silvery hair and beard, were outlined sharply against the wall.

“Why, Father,” Cecilia said, “we didn’t know that you were here!”

Mr. Stone looked round bewildered; it seemed as if he, too, had been ignorant of that fact.

“What is it that you’ve thought of?”

The firelight leaped suddenly on to Mr. Stone’s thin yellow hand.

“Each of us,” he said, “has a shadow in those places – in those streets.”

There was a vague rustling, as of people not taking a remark too seriously, and the sound of a closing door.

CHAPTER III

HILARY’S BROWN STUDY

“What do you really think, Uncle Hilary?”

Turning at his writing-table to look at the face of his young niece, Hilary Dallison answered:

“My dear, we have had the same state of affairs since the beginning of the world. There is no chemical process; so far as my knowledge goes, that does not make waste products. What your grandfather calls our ‘shadows’ are the waste products of the social process. That there is a submerged tenth is as certain as that there is an emerged fiftieth like ourselves; exactly who they are and how they come, whether they can ever be improved away, is, I think, as uncertain as anything can be.”

The figure of the girl seated in the big armchair did not stir. Her lips pouted contemptuously, a frown wrinkled her forehead.

“Martin says that a thing is only impossible when we think it so.”

“Faith and the mountain, I’m afraid.”

Thyme’s foot shot forth; it nearly came into contact with Miranda, the little bulldog.

“Oh, duckie!”

But the little moonlight bulldog backed away.

“I hate these slums, uncle; they’re so disgusting!”

Hilary leaned his face on his thin hand; it was his characteristic attitude.

“They are hateful, disgusting, and heartrending. That does not make the problem any the less difficult, does it?”

“I believe we simply make the difficulties ourselves by seeing them.”

Hilary smiled. “Does Martin say that too?”

“Of course he does.”

“Speaking broadly,” murmured Hilary, “I see only one difficulty – human nature.”

Thyme rose. “I think it horrible to have a low opinion of human nature.”

“My dear,” said Hilary, “don’t you think perhaps that people who have what is called a low opinion of human nature are really more tolerant of it, more in love with it, in fact, than those who, looking to what human nature might be, are bound to hate what human nature is.”

The look which Thyme directed at her uncle’s amiable, attractive face, with its pointed beard, high forehead, and special little smile, seemed to alarm Hilary.

“I don’t want you to have an unnecessarily low opinion of me, my dear. I’m not one of those people who tell you that everything’s all right because the rich have their troubles as well as the poor. A certain modicum of decency and comfort is obviously necessary to man before we can begin to do anything but pity him; but that doesn’t make it any easier to know how you’re going to insure him that modicum of decency and comfort, does it?”

“We’ve got to do it,” said Thyme; “it won’t wait any longer.”

“My dear,” said Hilary, “think of Mr. Purcey! What proportion of the upper classes do you imagine is even conscious of that necessity? We, who have got what I call the social conscience, rise from the platform of Mr. Purcey; we’re just a gang of a few thousands to Mr. Purcey’s tens of thousands, and how many even of us are prepared, or, for the matter of that, fitted, to act on our consciousness? In spite of your grandfather’s ideas, I’m afraid we’re all too much divided into classes; man acts, and always has acted, in classes.”

“Oh – classes!” answered Thyme – “that’s the old superstition, uncle.”

“Is it? I thought one’s class, perhaps, was only oneself exaggerated – not to be shaken off. For instance, what are you and I, with our particular prejudices, going to do?”

Thyme gave him the cruel look of youth, which seemed to say: ‘You are my very good uncle, and a dear; but you are more than twice my age. That, I think, is conclusive!’

“Has something been settled about Mrs. Hughs?” she asked abruptly.

“What does your father say this morning?”

Thyme picked up her portfolio of drawings, and moved towards the door.

“Father’s hopeless. He hasn’t an idea beyond referring her to the S.P.B.”

She was gone; and Hilary, with a sigh, took his pen up, but he wrote nothing down …

Hilary and Stephen Dallison were grandsons of that Canon Dallison, well known as friend, and sometime adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist. The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of two volumes of “Socratic Dialogues.” He had bequeathed to his son – a permanent official in the Foreign Office – if not his literary talent, the tradition at all events of culture. This tradition had in turn been handed on to Hilary and Stephen.

Educated at a public school and Cambridge, blessed with competent, though not large, independent incomes, and brought up never to allude to money if it could possibly be helped, the two young men had been turned out of the mint with something of the same outward stamp on them. Both were kindly, both fond of open-air pursuits, and neither of them lazy. Both, too, were very civilised, with that bone-deep decency, that dislike of violence, nowhere so prevalent as in the upper classes of a country whose settled institutions are as old as its roads, or the walls which insulate its parks. But as time went on, the one great quality which heredity and education, environment and means, had bred in both of them – self-consciousness – acted in these two brothers very differently. To Stephen it was preservative, keeping him, as it were, in ice throughout hot-weather seasons, enabling him to know exactly when he was in danger of decomposition, so that he might nip the process in the bud; it was with him a healthy, perhaps slightly chemical, ingredient, binding his component parts, causing them to work together safely, homogeneously. In Hilary the effect seemed to have been otherwise; like some slow and subtle poison, this great quality, self-consciousness, had soaked his system through and through; permeated every cranny of his spirit, so that to think a definite thought, or do a definite deed, was obviously becoming difficult to him. It took in the main the form of a sort of gentle desiccating humour.

“It’s a remarkable thing,” he had one day said to Stephen, “that by the process of assimilating little bits of chopped-up cattle one should be able to form the speculation of how remarkable a thing it is.”

Stephen had paused a second before answering – they were lunching off roast beef in the Law Courts – he had then said:

“You’re surely not going to eschew the higher mammals, like our respected father-in-law?”

“On the contrary,” said Hilary, “to chew them; but it is remarkable, for all that; you missed my point.”

It was clear that a man who could see anything remarkable in such a thing was far gone, and Stephen had murmured:

“My dear old chap, you’re getting too introspective.”

Hilary, having given his brother the special retiring smile, which seemed not only to say; “Don’t let me bore you,” but also, “Well, perhaps you had better wait outside,” the conversation closed.

That smile of Hilary’s, which jibbed away from things, though disconcerting and apt to put an end to intercourse, was natural enough. A sensitive man, who had passed his life amongst cultivated people in the making of books, guarded from real wants by modest, not vulgar, affluence, had not reached the age of forty-two without finding his delicacy sharpened to the point of fastidiousness. Even his dog could see the sort of man he was. She knew that he would take no liberties, either with her ears or with her tail. She knew that he would never hold her mouth ajar, and watch her teeth, as some men do; that when she was lying on her back he would gently rub her chest without giving her the feeling that she was doing wrong, as women will; and if she sat, as she was sitting now, with her eyes fixed on his study fire, he would never, she knew, even from afar, prevent her thinking of the nothing she loved to think on.

In his study, which smelt of a particular mild tobacco warranted to suit the nerves of any literary man, there was a bust of Socrates, which always seemed to have a strange attraction for its owner. He had once described to a fellow-writer the impression produced on him by that plaster face, so capaciously ugly, as though comprehending the whole of human life, sharing all man’s gluttony and lust, his violence and rapacity, but sharing also his strivings toward love and reason and serenity.

“He’s telling us,” said Hilary, “to drink deep, to dive down and live with mermaids, to lie out on the hills under the sun, to sweat with helots, to know all things and all men. No seat, he says, among the Wise, unless we’ve been through it all before we climb! That’s how he strikes me – not too cheering for people of our sort!”

Under the shadow of this bust Hilary rested his forehead on his hand. In front of him were three open books and a pile of manuscript, and pushed to one side a little sheaf of pieces of green-white paper, press-cuttings of his latest book.

The exact position occupied by his work in the life of such a man is not too easy to define. He earned an income by it, but he was not dependent on that income. As poet, critic, writer of essays, he had made himself a certain name – not a great name, but enough to swear by. Whether his fastidiousness could have stood the conditions of literary existence without private means was now and then debated by his friends; it could probably have done so better than was supposed, for he sometimes startled those who set him down as a dilettante by a horny way of retiring into his shell for the finish of a piece of work.

Try as he would that morning to keep his thoughts concentrated on his literary labour, they wandered to his conversation with his niece and to the discussion on Mrs. Hughs; the family seamstress, in his wife’s studio the day before. Stephen had lingered behind Cecilia and Thyme when they went away after dinner, to deliver a last counsel to his brother at the garden gate.

“Never meddle between man and wife – you know what the lower classes are!”

And across the dark garden he had looked back towards the house. One room on the ground-floor alone was lighted. Through its open window the head and shoulders of Mr. Stone could be seen close to a small green reading-lamp. Stephen shook his head, murmuring:

“But, I say, our old friend, eh? ‘In those places – in those streets!’ It’s worse than simple crankiness – the poor old chap is getting almost – ”

And, touching his forehead lightly with two fingers, he had hurried off with the ever-springy step of one whose regularity habitually controls his imagination.