The Island Pharisees

“Have you ever been in Baghdad?” he feebly asked.

The fat man did not answer; he had begun an anecdote, and in his broad expanse of face his tiny mouth writhed like a caterpillar. The anecdote was humorous.

With the exception of Antonia, Shelton saw but little of the ladies, for, following the well-known custom of the country house, men and women avoided each other as much as might be. They met at meals, and occasionally joined in tennis and in croquet; otherwise it seemed – almost Orientally – agreed that they were better kept apart.

Chancing one day to enter the withdrawing room, while searching for Antonia, he found that he had lighted on a feminine discussion; he would have beaten a retreat, of course, but it seemed too obvious that he was merely looking for his fiancee, so, sitting down, he listened.

The Honourable Charlotte Penguin, still knitting a silk tie – the sixth since that she had been knitting at Hyeres – sat on the low window-seat close to a hydrangea, the petals of whose round flowers almost kissed her sanguine cheek. Her eyes were fixed with languid aspiration on the lady who was speaking. This was a square woman of medium height, with grey hair brushed from her low forehead, the expression of whose face was brisk and rather cross. She was standing with a book, as if delivering a sermon. Had she been a man she might have been described as a bright young man of business; for, though grey, she never could be old, nor ever lose the power of forming quick decisions. Her features and her eyes were prompt and slightly hard, tinged with faith fanatical in the justice of her judgments, and she had that fussy simpleness of dress which indicates the right to meddle. Not red, not white, neither yellow nor quite blue, her complexion was suffused with a certain mixture of these colours, adapted to the climate; and her smile had a strange sour sweetness, like nothing but the flavour of an apple on the turn.

“I don’t care what they tell you,” she was saying – not offensively, though her voice seemed to imply that she had no time to waste in pleasing – “in all my dealings with them I’ve found it best to treat them quite like children.”

A lady, behind the Times, smiled; her mouth – indeed, her whole hard, handsome face – was reminiscent of dappled rocking-horses found in the Soho Bazaar. She crossed her feet, and some rich and silk stuff rustled. Her whole personality seemed to creak as, without looking, she answered in harsh tones:

“I find the poor are most delightful persons.”

Sybil Dennant, seated on the sofa, with a feathery laugh shot a barking terrier dog at Shelton.

“Here’s Dick,” she said. “Well, Dick, what’s your opinion?”

Shelton looked around him, scared. The elder ladies who had spoken had fixed their eyes on him, and in their gaze he read his utter insignificance.

“Oh, that young man!” they seemed to say. “Expect a practical remark from him? Now, come!”

“Opinion,” he stammered, “of the poor? I haven’t any.”

The person on her feet, whose name was Mrs. Mattock, directing her peculiar sweet-sour smile at the distinguished lady with the Times, said:

“Perhaps you ‘ve not had experience of them in London, Lady Bonington?”

Lady Bonington, in answer, rustled.

“Oh, do tell us about the slums, Mrs. Mattock!” cried Sybil.

“Slumming must be splendid! It’s so deadly here – nothing but flannel petticoats.”

“The poor, my dear,” began Mrs. Mattock, “are not the least bit what you think them – ”

“Oh, d’ you know, I think they’re rather nice!” broke in Aunt Charlotte close to the hydrangea.

“You think so?” said Mrs. Mattock sharply. “I find they do nothing but grumble.”

“They don’t grumble at me: they are delightful persons”, and Lady Bonington gave Shelton a grim smile.

He could not help thinking that to grumble in the presence of that rich, despotic personality would require a superhuman courage.

“They’re the most ungrateful people in the world,” said Mrs. Mattock.

“Why, then,” thought Shelton, “do you go amongst them?”

She continued, “One must do them good, one, must do one’s duty, but as to getting thanks – ”

Lady Bonington sardonically said,

“Poor things! they have a lot to bear.”

“The little children!” murmured Aunt Charlotte, with a flushing cheek and shining eyes; “it ‘s rather pathetic.”

“Children indeed!” said Mrs. Mattock. “It puts me out of all patience to see the way that they neglect them. People are so sentimental about the poor.”

Lady Bonington creaked again. Her splendid shoulders were wedged into her chair; her fine dark hair, gleaming with silver, sprang back upon her brow; a ruby bracelet glowed on the powerful wrist that held the journal; she rocked her copper-slippered foot. She did not appear to be too sentimental.

“I know they often have a very easy time,” said Mrs. Mattock, as if some one had injured her severely. And Shelton saw, not without pity, that Fate had scored her kind and squashed-up face with wrinkles, whose tiny furrows were eloquent of good intentions frustrated by the unpractical and discontented poor. “Do what you will, they are never satisfied; they only resent one’s help, or else they take the help and never thank you for it!”

“Oh!” murmured Aunt Charlotte, “that’s rather hard.”

Shelton had been growing, more uneasy. He said abruptly:

“I should do the same if I were they.”

Mrs. Mattock’s brown eyes flew at him; Lady Bonington spoke to the Times; her ruby bracelet and a bangle jingled.

“We ought to put ourselves in their places.”

Shelton could not help a smile; Lady Bonington in the places of the poor!

“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Mattock, “I put myself entirely in their place. I quite understand their feelings. But ingratitude is a repulsive quality.”

“They seem unable to put themselves in your place,” murmured Shelton; and in a fit of courage he took the room in with a sweeping glance.

Yes, that room was wonderfully consistent, with its air of perfect second-handedness, as if each picture, and each piece of furniture, each book, each lady present, had been made from patterns. They were all widely different, yet all (like works of art seen in some exhibitions) had the look of being after the designs of some original spirit. The whole room was chaste, restrained, derived, practical, and comfortable; neither in virtue nor in work, neither in manner, speech, appearance, nor in theory, could it give itself away.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE STAINED-GLASS MAN

Still looking for Antonia, Shelton went up to the morning-room. Thea Dennant and another girl were seated in the window, talking. From the look they gave him he saw that he had better never have been born; he hastily withdrew. Descending to the hall, he came on Mr. Dennant crossing to his study, with a handful of official-looking papers.

“Ah, Shelton!” said he, “you look a little lost. Is the shrine invisible?”

Shelton grinned, said “Yes,” and went on looking. He was not fortunate. In the dining-room sat Mrs. Dennant, making up her list of books.

“Do give me your opinion, Dick,” she said. “Everybody ‘s readin’ this thing of Katherine Asterick’s; I believe it’s simply because she’s got a title.”

“One must read a book for some reason or other,” answered Shelton.

“Well,” returned Mrs. Dennant, “I hate doin’ things just because other people do them, and I sha’n’. get it.”

“Good!”

Mrs. Dennant marked the catalogue.

“Here ‘s Linseed’s last, of course; though I must say I don’t care for him, but I suppose we ought to have it in the house. And there’s Quality’s ‘The Splendid Diatribes’. that ‘s sure to be good, he’s always so refined. But what am I to do about this of Arthur Baal’s? They say that he’s a charlatan, but everybody reads him, don’t you know”; and over the catalogue Shelton caught the gleam of hare-like eyes.

Decision had vanished from her face, with its arched nose and slightly sloping chin, as though some one had suddenly appealed to her to trust her instincts. It was quite pathetic. Still, there was always the book’s circulation to form her judgment by.

“I think I ‘d better mark it,” she said, “don’t you? Were you lookin’ for Antonia? If you come across Bunyan in the garden, Dick, do say I want to see him; he’s gettin’ to be a perfect nuisance. I can understand his feelin’s, but really he ‘s carryin’ it too far.”

Primed with his message to the under-gardener, Shelton went. He took a despairing look into the billiard-room. Antonia was not there. Instead, a tall and fat-cheeked gentleman with a neat moustache, called Mabbey, was practising the spot-stroke. He paused as Shelton entered, and, pouting like a baby, asked in a sleepy voice,

“Play me a hundred up?”

Shelton shook his head, stammered out his sorrow, and was about to go.

The gentleman called Mabbey, plaintively feeling the places where his moustaches joined his pink and glossy cheeks, asked with an air of some surprise,

“What’s your general game, then?”

“I really don’t know,” said Shelton.

The gentleman called Mabbey chalked his cue, and, moving his round, knock-kneed legs in their tight trousers, took up his position for the stroke.

“What price that?” he said, as he regained the perpendicular; and his well-fed eyes followed Shelton with sleepy inquisition. “Curious dark horse, Shelton,” they seemed to say.

Shelton hurried out, and was about to run down the lower lawn, when he was accosted by another person walking in the sunshine – a slight-built man in a turned-down collar, with a thin and fair moustache, and a faint bluish tint on one side of his high forehead, caused by a network of thin veins. His face had something of the youthful, optimistic, stained-glass look peculiar to the refined English type. He walked elastically, yet with trim precision, as if he had a pleasant taste in furniture and churches, and held the Spectator in his hand.

“Ah, Shelton!” he said in high-tuned tones, halting his legs in such an easy attitude that it was impossible to interrupt it: “come to take the air?”

Shelton’s own brown face, nondescript nose, and his amiable but dogged chin contrasted strangely with the clear-cut features of the stained-glass man.

“I hear from Halidome that you’re going to stand for Parliament,” the latter said.

Shelton, recalling Halidome’s autocratic manner of settling other people’s business, smiled.

“Do I look like it?” he asked.

The eyebrows quivered on the stained-glass man. It had never occurred to him, perhaps, that to stand for Parliament a man must look like it; he examined Shelton with some curiosity.

“Ah, well,” he said, “now you mention it, perhaps not.” His eyes, so carefully ironical, although they differed from the eyes of Mabbey, also seemed to ask of Shelton what sort of a dark horse he was.

“You ‘re still in the Domestic Office, then?” asked Shelton.

The stained-glass man stooped to sniff a rosebush. “Yes,” he said; “it suits me very well. I get lots of time for my art work.”

“That must be very interesting,” said Shelton, whose glance was roving for Antonia; “I never managed to begin a hobby.”

“Never had a hobby!” said the stained-glass man, brushing back his hair (he was walking with no hat); “why, what the deuce d’ you do?”

Shelton could not answer; the idea had never troubled him.

“I really don’t know,” he said, embarrassed; “there’s always something going on, as far as I can see.”

The stained-glass man placed his hands within his pockets, and his bright glance swept over his companion.

“A fellow must have a hobby to give him an interest in life,” he said.

“An interest in life?” repeated Shelton grimly; “life itself is good enough for me.”

“Oh!” replied the stained-glass man, as though he disapproved of regarding life itself as interesting.

“That’s all very well, but you want something more than that. Why don’t you take up woodcarving?”

“Wood-carving?”

“The moment I get fagged with office papers and that sort of thing I take up my wood-carving; good as a game of hockey.”

“I have n’t the enthusiasm.”

The eyebrows of the stained-glass man twitched; he twisted his moustache.

“You ‘ll find not having a hobby does n’t pay,” he said; “you ‘ll get old, then where ‘ll you be?”

It came as a surprise that he should use the words “it does n’t pay,” for he had a kind of partially enamelled look, like that modern jewellery which really seems unconscious of its market value.

“You’ve given up the Bar? Don’t you get awfully bored having nothing to do?” pursued the stained-glass man, stopping before an ancient sundial.

Shelton felt a delicacy, as a man naturally would, in explaining that being in love was in itself enough to do. To do nothing is unworthy of a man! But he had never felt as yet the want of any occupation. His silence in no way disconcerted his acquaintance.

“That’s a nice old article of virtue,” he said, pointing with his chin; and, walking round the sundial, he made its acquaintance from the other side. Its grey profile cast a thin and shortening shadow on the turf; tongues of moss were licking at its sides; the daisies clustered thick around its base; it had acquired a look of growing from the soil. “I should like to get hold of that,” the stained-glass man remarked; “I don’t know when I ‘ve seen a better specimen,” and he walked round it once again.

His eyebrows were still ironically arched, but below them his eyes were almost calculating, and below them, again, his mouth had opened just a little. A person with a keener eye would have said his face looked greedy, and even Shelton was surprised, as though he had read in the Spectator a confession of commercialism.

“You could n’t uproot a thing like that,” he said; “it would lose all its charm.”

His companion turned impatiently, and his countenance looked wonderfully genuine.

“Couldn’t I?” he said. “By Jove! I thought so. 1690! The best period.” He ran his forger round the sundial’s edge. “Splendid line-clean as the day they made it. You don’t seem to care much about that sort of thing”; and once again, as though accustomed to the indifference of Vandals, his face regained its mask.

They strolled on towards the kitchen gardens, Shelton still busy searching every patch of shade. He wanted to say “Can’t stop,” and hurry off; but there was about the stained-glass man a something that, while stinging Shelton’s feelings, made the showing of them quite impossible. “Feelings!” that person seemed to say; “all very well, but you want more than that. Why not take up wood-carving?.. Feelings! I was born in England, and have been at Cambridge.”

“Are you staying long?” he asked Shelton. “I go on to Halidome’s to-morrow; suppose I sha’n’. see you there? Good, chap, old Halidome! Collection of etchings very fine!”

“No; I ‘m staying on,” said Shelton.

“Ah!” said the stained-glass man, “charming people, the Dennants!”

Shelton, reddening slowly, turned his head away; he picked a gooseberry, and muttered, “Yes.”

“The eldest girl especially; no nonsense about her. I thought she was a particularly nice girl.”

Shelton heard this praise of Antonia with an odd sensation; it gave him the reverse of pleasure, as though the words had cast new light upon her. He grunted hastily,

“I suppose you know that we ‘re engaged?”

“Really!” said the stained-glass man, and again his bright, clear, iron-committal glance swept over Shelton – “really! I didn’t know. Congratulate you!”

It was as if he said: “You’re a man of taste; I should say she would go well in almost any drawing-room!”

“Thanks,” said Shelton; “there she’ is. If you’ll excuse me, I want to speak to her.”

CHAPTER XXIV

PARADISE

Antonia, in a sunny angle of the old brick wall, amid the pinks and poppies and cornflowers, was humming to herself. Shelton saw the stained-glass man pass out of sight, then, unobserved, he watched her smelling at the flowers, caressing her face with each in turn, casting away spoiled blossoms, and all the time humming that soft tune.

In two months, or three, all barriers between himself and this inscrutable young Eve would break; she would be a part of him, and he a part of her; he would know all her thoughts, and she all his; together they would be as one, and all would think of them, and talk of them, as one; and this would come about by standing half an hour together in a church, by the passing of a ring, and the signing of their names.

The sun was burnishing her hair – she wore no hat flushing her cheeks, sweetening and making sensuous her limbs; it had warmed her through and through, so that, like the flowers and bees, the sunlight and the air, she was all motion, light, and colour.

She turned and saw Shelton standing there.

“Oh, Dick!” she said: “Lend me your hand-kerchief to put these flowers in, there ‘s a good boy!”

Her candid eyes, blue as the flowers in her hands, were clear and cool as ice, but in her smile was all the warm profusion of that corner; the sweetness had soaked into her, and was welling forth again. The sight of those sun-warmed cheeks, and fingers twining round the flower-stalks, her pearly teeth, and hair all fragrant, stole the reason out of Shelton. He stood before her, weak about the knees.

“Found you at last!” he said.

Curving back her neck, she cried out, “Catch!” and with a sweep of both her hands flung the flowers into Shelton’s arms.

Under the rain of flowers, all warm and odorous, he dropped down on his knees, and put them one by one together, smelling at the pinks, to hide the violence of his feelings. Antonia went on picking flowers, and every time her hand was full she dropped them on his hat, his shoulder, or his arms, and went on plucking more; she smiled, and on her lips a little devil danced, that seemed to know what he was suffering. And Shelton felt that she did know.

“Are you tired?” she asked; “there are heaps more wanted. These are the bedroom-flowers – fourteen lots. I can’t think how people can live without flowers, can you?” and close above his head she buried her face in pinks.

He kept his eyes on the plucked flowers before him on the grass, and forced himself to answer,

“I think I can hold out.”

“Poor old Dick!” She had stepped back. The sun lit the clear-cut profile of her cheek, and poured its gold over the bosom of her blouse. “Poor old Dick! Awfully hard luck, is n’t it?” Burdened with mignonette, she came so close again that now she touched his shoulder, but Shelton did not look; breathless, with wildly beating heart, he went on sorting out the flowers. The seeds of mignonette rained on his neck, and as she let the blossoms fall, their perfume fanned his face. “You need n’t sort them out!” she said.

Was she enticing him? He stole a look; but she was gone again, swaying and sniffing at the flowers.

“I suppose I’m only hindering you,” he growled; “I ‘d better go.”

She laughed.

“I like to see you on your knees, you look so funny!” and as she spoke she flung a clove carnation at him. “Does n’t it smell good?”

“Too good Oh, Antonia! why are you doing this?”

“Why am I doing what?”

“Don’t you know what you are doing?”

“Why, picking flowers!” and once more she was back, bending and sniffing at the blossoms.

“That’s enough.”

“Oh no,” she called; “it’s not not nearly.

“Keep on putting them together, if you love me.”

“You know I love you,” answered Shelton, in a smothered voice.

Antonia gazed at him across her shoulder; puzzled and inquiring was her face.

“I’m not a bit like you,” she said. “What will you have for your room?”

“Choose!”

“Cornflowers and clove pinks. Poppies are too frivolous, and pinks too – ”

“White,” said Shelton.

“And mignonette too hard and – ”

“Sweet. Why cornflowers?”

Antonia stood before him with her hands against her sides; her figure was so slim and young, her face uncertain and so grave.

“Because they’re dark and deep.”

“And why clove pinks?”

Antonia did not answer.

“And why clove pinks?”

“Because,” she said, and, flushing, touched a bee that had settled on her skirt, “because of something in you I don’t understand.”

“Ah! And what flowers shall t give YOU?”

She put her hands behind her.

“There are all the other flowers for me.”

Shelton snatched from the mass in front of him an Iceland poppy with straight stem and a curved neck, white pinks, and sprigs of hard, sweet mignonette, and held it out to her.

“There,” he said, “that’s you.” But Antonia did not move.

“Oh no, it is n’t!” and behind her back her fingers slowly crushed the petals of a blood-red poppy. She shook her head, smiling a brilliant smile. The blossoms fell, he flung his arms around her, and kissed her on the lips.

But his hands dropped; not fear exactly, nor exactly shame, had come to him. She had not resisted, but he had kissed the smile away; had kissed a strange, cold, frightened look, into her eyes.

“She did n’t mean to tempt me, then,” he thought, in surprise and anger. “What did she mean?” and, like a scolded dog, he kept his troubled watch upon her face.

CHAPTER XXV

THE RIDE

“Where now?” Antonia asked, wheeling her chestnut mare, as they turned up High Street, Oxford City. “I won’t go back the same way, Dick!”

“We could have a gallop on Port Meadow, cross the Upper River twice, and get home that way; but you ‘ll be tired.”

Antonia shook her head. Aslant her cheek the brim of a straw hat threw a curve of shade, her ear glowed transparent in the sun.

A difference had come in their relations since that kiss; outwardly she was the same good comrade, cool and quick. But as before a change one feels the subtle difference in the temper of the wind, so Shelton was affected by the inner change in her. He had made a blot upon her candour; he had tried to rub it out again, but there was left a mark, and it was ineffaceable. Antonia belonged to the most civilised division of the race most civilised in all the world, whose creed is “Let us love and hate, let us work and marry, but let us never give ourselves away; to give ourselves away is to leave a mark, and that is past forgive ness. Let our lives be like our faces, free from every kind of wrinkle, even those of laughter; in this way alone can we be really civilised.”

He felt that she was ruffled by a vague discomfort. That he should give himself away was natural, perhaps, and only made her wonder, but that he should give her the feeling that she had given herself away was a very different thing.

“Do you mind if I just ask at the Bishop’s Head for letters?” he said, as they passed the old hotel.

A dirty and thin envelope was brought to him, addressed “Mr. Richard Shelton, Esq.,” in handwriting that was passionately clear, as though the writer had put his soul into securing delivery of the letter. It was dated three days back, and, as they rode away, Shelton read as follows:

IMPERIAL PEACOCK HOTEL, FOLKESTONE. MON CHER MONSIEUR SHELTON,

This is already the third time I have taken up pen to write to you, but, having nothing but misfortune to recount, I hesitated, awaiting better days. Indeed, I have been so profoundly discouraged that if I had not thought it my duty to let you know of my fortunes I know not even now if I should have found the necessary spirit. ‘Les choses vont de mal en mal’. From what I hear there has never been so bad a season here. Nothing going on. All the same, I am tormented by a mob of little matters which bring me not sufficient to support my life. I know not what to do; one thing is certain, in no case shall I return here another year. The patron of this hotel, my good employer, is one of those innumerable specimens who do not forge or steal because they have no need, and if they had would lack the courage; who observe the marriage laws because they have been brought up to believe in them, and know that breaking them brings risk and loss of reputation; who do not gamble because they dare not; do not drink because it disagrees with them; go to church because their neighbours go, and to procure an appetite for the mid-day meal; commit no murder because, not transgressing in any other fashion, they are not obliged. What is there to respect in persons of this sort? Yet they are highly esteemed, and form three quarters of Society. The rule with these good gentlemen is to shut their eyes, never use their thinking powers, and close the door on all the dogs of life for fear they should get bitten.