The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 3
III
She was later on more open about it, sundry other things, not wholly alien, having meanwhile happened. One of these had been that her friend had waited with her to the end of the Finnish performance and that it had then, in the lobby, as they went out, not been possible for her not to make him acquainted with Mr. Mortimer Marshal. This gentleman had clearly waylaid her and had also clearly divined that her companion was of the Papers—papery all through; which doubtless had something to do with his having handsomely proposed to them to accompany him somewhere to tea. They hadn't seen why they shouldn't, it being an adventure, all in their line, like another; and he had carried them, in a four-wheeler, to a small and refined club in a region which was as the fringe of the Piccadilly region, where even their own presence scarce availed to contradict the implication of the exclusive. The whole occasion, they were further to feel, was essentially a tribute to their professional connection, especially that side of it which flushed and quavered, which panted and pined in their host's personal nervousness. Maud Blandy now saw it vain to contend with his delusion that she, underfed and imprinted, who had never been so conscious as during these bribed moments of her non-conducting quality, was papery to any purpose—a delusion that exceeded, by her measure, every other form of pathos. The decoration of the tea-room was a pale, æsthetic green, the liquid in the delicate cups a copious potent amber; the bread and butter was thin and golden, the muffins a revelation to her that she was barbarously hungry. There were ladies at other tables with other gentlemen—ladies with long feather boas and hats not of the sailor pattern, and gentlemen whose straight collars were doubled up much higher than Howard Bight's and their hair parted far more at the side. The talk was so low, with pauses somehow so not of embarrassment that it could only have been earnest, and the air, an air of privilege and privacy to our young woman's sense, seemed charged with fine things taken for granted. If it hadn't been for Bight's company she would have grown almost frightened, so much seemed to be offered her for something she couldn't do. That word of Bight's about smashing a window-pane had lingered with her; it had made her afterwards wonder, while they sat in their stalls, if there weren't some brittle surface in range of her own elbow. She had to fall back on the consciousness of how her elbow, in spite of her type, lacked practical point, and that was just why the terms in which she saw her services now, as she believed, bid for, had the effect of scaring her. They came out most, for that matter, in Mr. Mortimer Marshal's dumbly-insistent eyes, which seemed to be perpetually saying: "You know what I mean when I'm too refined—like everything here, don't you see?—to say it out. You know there ought to be something about me somewhere, and that really, with the opportunities, the facilities you enjoy, it wouldn't be so much out of your way just to—well, reward this little attention."
The fact that he was probably every day, in just the same anxious flurry and with just the same superlative delicacy, paying little attentions with an eye to little rewards, this fact by itself but scantily eased her, convinced as she was that no luck but her own was as hopeless as his. He squared the clever young wherever he could get at them, but it was the clever young, taking them generally, who fed from his hand and then forgot him. She didn't forget him; she pitied him too much, pitied herself, and was more and more, as she found, now pitying everyone; only she didn't know how to say to him that she could do, after all, nothing for him. She oughtn't to have come, in the first place, and wouldn't if it hadn't been for her companion. Her companion was increasingly sardonic—which was the way in which, at best, she now increasingly saw him; he was shameless in acceptance, since, as she knew, as she felt at his side, he had come only, at bottom, to mislead and to mystify. He was, as she wasn't, on the Papers and of them, and their baffled entertainer knew it without either a hint on the subject from herself or a need, on the young man's own lips, of the least vulgar allusion. Nothing was so much as named, the whole connection was sunk; they talked about clubs, muffins, afternoon performances, the effect of the Finnish soul upon the appetite, quite as if they had met in society. Nothing could have been less like society—she innocently supposed at least—than the real spirit of their meeting; yet Bight did nothing that he might do to keep the affair within bounds. When looked at by their friend so hard and so hintingly, he only looked back, just as dumbly, but just as intensely and, as might be said, portentously; ever so impenetrably, in fine, and ever so wickedly. He didn't smile—as if to cheer—the least little bit; which he might be abstaining from on purpose to make his promises solemn: so, as he tried to smile—she couldn't, it was all too dreadful—she wouldn't meet her friend's eyes, but kept looking, heartlessly, at the "notes" of the place, the hats of the ladies, the tints of the rugs, the intenser Chippendale, here and there, of the chairs and tables, of the very guests, of the very waitresses. It had come to her early: "I've done him, poor man, at home, and the obvious thing now will be to do him at his club." But this inspiration plumped against her fate even as an imprisoned insect against the window-glass. She couldn't do him at his club without decently asking leave; whereby he would know of her feeble feeler, feeble because she was so sure of refusals. She would rather tell him, desperately, what she thought of him than expose him to see again that she was herself nowhere, herself nothing. Her one comfort was that, for the half-hour—it had made the situation quite possible—he seemed fairly hypnotised by her colleague; so that when they took leave he as good as thanked her for what she had this time done for him. It was one of the signs of his infatuated state that he clearly viewed Bight as a mass of helpful cleverness, though the cruel creature, uttering scarce a sound, had only fixed him in a manner that might have been taken for the fascination of deference. He might perfectly have been an idiot for all the poor gentleman knew. But the poor gentleman saw a possible "leg up" in every bush; and nothing but impertinence would have convinced him that she hadn't brought him, compunctiously as to the past, a master of the proper art. Now, more than ever, how he would listen for the postman!
The whole occasion had broken so, for busy Bight, into matters to be attended to before Fleet Street warmed to its work, that the pair were obliged, outside, to part company on the spot, and it was only on the morrow, a Saturday, that they could taste again of that comparison of notes which made for each the main savour, albeit slightly acrid, of their current consciousness. The air was full, as from afar, of the grand indifference of spring, of which the breath could be felt so much before the face could be seen, and they had bicycled side by side out to Richmond Park as with the impulse to meet it on its way. They kept a Saturday, when possible, sacred to the Suburbs as distinguished from the Papers—when possible being largely when Maud could achieve the use of the somewhat fatigued family machine. Many sisters contended for it, under whose flushed pressure it might have been seen spinning in many different directions. Superficially, at Richmond, our young couple rested—found a quiet corner to lounge deep in the Park, with their machines propped by one side of a great tree and their associated backs sustained by another. But agitation, finer than the finest scorching, was in the air for them; it was made sharp, rather abruptly, by a vivid outbreak from Maud. It was very well, she observed, for her friend to be clever at the expense of the general "greed"; he saw it in the light of his own jolly luck, and what she saw, as it happened, was nothing but the general art of letting you starve, yourself, in your hole. At the end of five minutes her companion had turned quite pale with having to face the large extent of her confession. It was a confession for the reason that in the first place it evidently cost her an effort that pride had again and again successfully prevented, and because in the second she had thus the air of having lived overmuch on swagger. She could scarce have said at this moment what, for a good while, she had really lived on, and she didn't let him know now to complain either of her privation or of her disappointments. She did it to show why she couldn't go with him when he was so awfully sweeping. There were at any rate apparently, all over, two wholly different sets of people. If everyone rose to his bait no creature had ever risen to hers; and that was the grim truth of her position, which proved at the least that there were two quite different kinds of luck. They told two different stories of human vanity; they couldn't be reconciled. And the poor girl put it in a nutshell. "There's but one person I've ever written to who has so much as noticed my letter."
He wondered, painfully affected—it rather overwhelmed him; he took hold of it at the easiest point. "One person———?"
"The misguided man we had tea with. He alone—he rose."
"Well then, you see that when they do rise they are misguided. In other words they're donkeys."
"What I see is that I don't strike the right ones and that I haven't therefore your ferocity; that is my ferocity, if I have any, rests on a different ground. You'll say that I go for the wrong people; but I don't, God knows—witness Mortimer Marshal—fly too high. I picked him out, after prayer and fasting, as just the likeliest of the likely—not anybody a bit grand and yet not quite a nobody; and by an extraordinary chance I was justified. Then I pick out others who seem just as good, I pray and fast, and no sound comes back. But I work through my ferocity too," she stiffly continued, "though at first it was great, feeling as I did that when my bread and butter was in it people had no right not to oblige me. It was their duty—what they were prominent for—to be interviewed, so as to keep me going; and I did as much for them any day as they would be doing for me."
Bight heard her, but for a moment said nothing. "Did you tell them that? I mean say to them it was your little all."
"Not vulgarly—I know how. There are ways of saying it's 'important'; and I hint it just enough to see that the importance fetches them no more than anything else. It isn't important to them. And I, in their place," Maud went on, "wouldn't answer either; I'll be hanged if ever I would. That's what it comes to, that there are two distinct lots, and that my luck, being born so, is always to try the snubbers. You were born to know by instinct the others. But it makes me more tolerant."
"More tolerant of what?" her friend asked.
"Well, of what you described to me. Of what you rail at."
"Thank you for me!" Bight laughed.
"Why not? Don't you live on it?"
"Not in such luxury—you surely must see for yourself—as the distinction you make seems to imply. It isn't luxury to be nine-tenths of the time sick of everything. People moreover are worth to me but tuppence apiece; there are too many, confound them—so many that I don't see really how any can be left over for your superior lot. It is a chance," he pursued—"I've had refusals too—though I confess they've sometimes been of the funniest. Besides, I'm getting out of it," the young man wound up. "God knows I want to. My advice to you," he added in the same breath, "is to sit tight. There are as good fish in the sea———!"
She waited a moment. "You're sick of everything and you're getting out of it; it's not good enough for you, in other words, but it's still good enough for me. Why am I to sit tight when you sit so loose?"
"Because what you want will come—can't help coming. Then, in time, you'll also get out of it. But then you'll have had it, as I have, and the good of it."
"But what, really, if it breeds nothing but disgust," she asked, "do you call the good of it?"
"Well, two things. First the bread and butter, and then the fun. I repeat it—sit tight."
"Where's the fun," she asked again, "of learning to despise people?"
"You'll see when it comes. It will all be upon you, it will change for you any day. Sit tight, sit tight."
He expressed such confidence that she might for a minute have been weighing it. "If you get out of it, what will you do?"
"Well, imaginative work. This job has made me at least see. It has given me the loveliest tips."
She had still another pause. "It has given me—my experience has—a lovely tip too."
"And what's that?"
"I've told you before—the tip of pity. I'm so much sorrier for them all—panting and gasping for it like fish out of water—than I am anything else."
He wondered. "But I thought that was what just isn't your experience."
"Oh, I mean then," she said impatiently, "that my tip is from yours. It's only a different tip. I want to save them."
"Well," the young man replied, and as if the idea had had a meaning for him, "saving them may perhaps work out as a branch. The question is can you be paid for it?"
"Beadel-Muffet would pay me," Maud suddenly suggested.
"Why, that's just what I'm expecting," her companion laughed, "that he will, after to-morrow—directly or indirectly—do me."
"Will you take it from him then only to get him in deeper, as that's what you perfectly know you'll do? You won't save him; you'll lose him."
"What then would you, in the case," Bight asked, "do for your money?"
Well, the girl thought. "I'd get him to see me—I should have first, I recognise, to catch my hare—and then I'd work up my stuff. Which would be boldly, quite by a master-stroke, a statement of his fix—of the fix, I mean, of his wanting, his supplicating to be dropped. I'd give out that it would really oblige. Then I'd send my copy about, and the rest of the matter would take care of itself. I don't say you could do it that way—you'd have a different effect. But I should be able to trust the thing, being mine, not to be looked at, or, if looked at, chucked straight into the basket. I should so have, to that extent, handled the matter, and I should so, by merely touching it, have broken the spell. That's my one line—I stop things off by touching them. There'd never be a word about him more."
Her friend, with his legs out and his hands locked at the back of his neck, had listened with indulgence. "Then hadn't I better arrange it for you that Beadel-Muffet shall see you?"
"Oh, not after you've damned him!"
"You want to see him first?"
"It will be the only way—to be of any use to him. You ought to wire him in fact not to open his mouth till he has seen me."
"Well, I will," said Bight at last. "But, you know, we shall lose something very handsome—his struggle, all in vain, with his fate. Noble sport, the sight of it all." He turned a little, to rest on his elbow, and, cycling suburban young man as he was, he might have been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy Jacques looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted Maud, in—for elegance—a new cotton blouse and a long-limbed angular attitude, might have prosefully suggested the mannish Rosalind. He raised his face in appeal to her. "Do you really ask me to sacrifice it?"
"Rather than sacrifice him? Of course I do."
He said for a while nothing more; only, propped on his elbow, lost himself again in the Park. After which he turned back to her. "Will you have me?" he suddenly asked.
"'Have you?'"
"Be my bonny bride. For better, for worse. I hadn't, upon my honour," he explained with obvious sincerity, "understood you were so down."
"Well, it isn't so bad as that," said Maud Blandy.
"So bad as taking up with me?"
"It isn't as bad as having let you know—when I didn't want you to."
He sank back again with his head dropped, putting himself more at his ease. "You're too proud—that's what's the matter with you. And I'm too stupid."
"No, you're not," said Maud grimly. "Not stupid."
"Only cruel, cunning, treacherous, cold-blooded, vile?" He drawled the words out softly, as if they sounded fair.
"And I'm not stupid either," Maud Blandy went on. "We just, poor creatures—well, we just know."
"Of course we do. So why do you want us to drug ourselves with rot? to go on as if we didn't know?"
She made no answer for a moment; then she said: "There's good to be known too."
"Of course, again. There are all sorts of things, and some much better than others. That's why," the young man added, "I just put that question to you."
"Oh no, it isn't. You put it to me because you think I feel I'm no good."
"How so, since I keep assuring you that you've only to wait? How so, since I keep assuring you that if you do wait it will all come with a rush? But say I am sorry for you," Bight lucidly pursued; "how does that prove either that my motive is base or that I do you a wrong?"
The girl waived this question, but she presently tried another. "Is it your idea that we should live on all the people———?"
"The people we catch? Yes, old man, till we can do better."
"My conviction is," she soon returned, "that if I were to marry you I should dish you. I should spoil the business. It would fall off; and, as I can do nothing myself, then where should we be?"
"Well," said Bight, "we mightn't be quite so high up in the scale of the morbid."
"It's you that are morbid," she answered. "You've, in your way—like everyone else, for that matter, all over the place—'sport' on the brain."
"Well," he demanded, "what is sport but success? What is success but sport?"
"Bring that out somewhere. If it be true," she said, "I'm glad I'm a failure."
After which, for a longish space, they sat together in silence, a silence finally broken by a word from the young man. "But about Mortimer Marshal—how do you propose to save him?"
It was a change of subject that might, by its so easy introduction of matter irrelevant, have seemed intended to dissipate whatever was left of his proposal of marriage. That proposal, however, had been somehow both too much in the tone of familiarity to linger and too little in that of vulgarity to drop. It had had no form, but the mild air kept perhaps thereby the better the taste of it. This was sensibly moreover in what the girl found to reply. "I think, you know, that he'd be no such bad friend. I mean that, with his appetite, there would be something to be done. He doesn't half hate me."
"Ah, my dear," her friend ejaculated, "don't, for God's sake, be low."
But she kept it up. "He clings to me. You saw. It's hideous, the way he's able to 'do' himself."
Bight lay quiet, then spoke as with a recall of the Chippendale Club. "Yes, I couldn't 'do' you as he could. But if you don't bring it off———?"
"Why, then, does he cling? Oh, because, all the same, I'm potentially the Papers still. I'm at any rate the nearest he has got to them. And then I'm other things."
"I see."
"I'm so awfully attractive," said Maud Blandy. She got up with this and, shaking out her frock, looked at her resting bicycle, looked at the distances possibly still to be gained. Her companion paused, but at last also rose, and by that time she was awaiting him, a little gaunt and still not quite cool, as an illustration of her last remark. He stood there watching her, and she followed this remark up. "I do, you know, really pity him."
It had almost a feminine fineness, and their eyes continued to meet. "Oh, you'll work it!" And the young man went to his machine.