Paul Kelver

“But why submit?” was our natural argument. “Why not say you are going to smoke, and do it?”

“It’s her theory, me boy,” explained the O’Kelly, “that the home should be kept pure – a sort of a temple, ye know. She’s convinced that in time it is bound to exercise an influence upon me. It’s a beautiful idea, when ye come to think of it.”

Meanwhile, in the rooms of half-a-dozen sinful men the O’Kelly kept his own particular pipe, together with his own particular smoking mixture; and one such pipe and one such tobacco jar stood always on our mantelpiece.

In the spring the forces of temptation raged round that feeble but most excellently intentioned citadel, the O’Kelly’s conscience. The Signora had returned to England, was performing then at Ashley’s Theatre. The O’Kelly would remain under long spells of silence, puffing vigorously at his pipe. Or would fortify himself with paeans in praise of Mrs. O’Kelly.

“If anything could ever make a model man of me” – he spoke in the tones of one whose doubts are stronger than his hopes – “it would be the example of that woman.”

It was one Saturday afternoon. I had just returned from the matinee.

“I don’t believe,” continued the O’Kelly, “I don’t really believe she has ever done one single thing she oughtn’t to, or left undone one single thing she ought, in the whole course of her life.”

“Maybe she has, and you don’t know of it,” I suggested, perceiving the idea might comfort him.

“I wish I could think so,” returned the O’Kelly. “I don’t mean anything really wrong,” he corrected himself quickly, “but something just a little wrong. I feel – I really feel I should like her better if she had.”

“Not that I mean I don’t like her as it is, ye understand,” corrected himself the O’Kelly a second time. “I respect that woman – I cannot tell ye, me boy, how much I respect her. Ye don’t know her. There was one morning, about a month ago. That woman – she’s down at six every morning, summer and winter; we have prayers at half-past. I was a trifle late meself: it was never me strong point, as ye know, early rising. Seven o’clock struck; she didn’t appear, and I thought she had overslept herself. I won’t say I didn’t feel pleased for the moment; it was an unworthy sentiment, but I almost wished she had. I ran up to her room. The door was open, the bedclothes folded down as she always leaves them. She came in five minutes later. She had got up at four that morning to welcome a troupe of native missionaries from East Africa on their arrival at Waterloo Station. She’s a saint, that woman; I am not worthy of her.”

“I shouldn’t dwell too much on that phase of the subject,” I suggested.

“I can’t help it, me boy,” replied the O’Kelly. “I feel I am not.”

“I don’t for a moment say you are,” I returned; “but I shouldn’t harp upon the idea. I don’t think it good for you.”

“I never will be,” he persisted gloomily, “never!”

Evidently he was started on a dangerous train of reflection. With the idea of luring him away from it, I led the conversation to the subject of champagne.

“Most people like it dry,” admitted the O’Kelly. “Meself, I have always preferred it with just a suggestion of fruitiness.”

“There was a champagne,” I said, “you used to be rather fond of when we – years ago.”

“I think I know the one ye mean,” said the O’Kelly. “It wasn’t at all bad, considering the price.”

“You don’t happen to remember where you got it?” I asked.

“It was in Bridge Street,” remembered the O’Kelly, “not so very far from the Circus.”

“It is a pleasant evening,” I remarked; “let us take a walk.”

We found the place, half wine-shop, half office.

“Just the same,” commented the O’Kelly as we pushed open the door and entered. “Not altered a bit.”

As in all probability barely twelve months had elapsed since his last visit, the fact in itself was not surprising. Clearly the O’Kelly had been calculating time rather by sensation. I ordered a bottle; and we sat down. Myself, being prejudiced against the brand, I called for a glass of claret. The O’Kelly finished the bottle. I was glad to notice my ruse had been successful. The virtue of that wine had not departed from it. With every glass the O’Kelly became morally more elevated. He left the place, determined that he would be worthy of Mrs. O’Kelly. Walking down the Embankment, he asserted his determination of buying an alarm-clock that very evening. At the corner of Westminster Bridge he became suddenly absorbed in his own thoughts. Looking to discover the cause of his silence, I saw that his eyes were resting on a poster representing a charming lady standing on one leg upon a wire; below her – at some distance – appeared the peaks of mountains; the artist had even caught the likeness. I cursed the luck that had directed our footsteps, but the next moment, lacking experience, was inclined to be reassured.

“Me dear Paul,” said the O’Kelly – he laid a fatherly hand upon my shoulder – “there are fair-faced, laughing women – sweet creatures, that ye want to put yer arm around and dance with.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “There are the sainted women, who lead us up, Paul – up, always up.”

A look, such as the young man with the banner might have borne with him to the fields of snow and ice, suffused the O’Kelly’s handsome face. Without another word he crossed the road and entered an American store, where for six-and-elevenpence he purchased an alarm-clock the man assured us would awake an Egyptian mummy. With this in his hand he waved me a good-bye, and jumped upon a Hampstead ‘bus, and alone I strolled on to the theatre.

Hal returned a little after Christmas and started himself in chambers in the City. It was the nearest he dared venture, so he said, to civilisation.

“I’d be no good in the West End,” he explained. “For a season I might attract as an eccentricity, but your swells would never stand me for longer – no more would any respectable folk, anywhere: we don’t get on together. I commenced at Richmond. It was a fashionable suburb then, and I thought I was going to do wonders. I had everything in my favour, except myself. I do know my work, nobody can deny that of me. My father spent every penny he had, poor gentleman, in buying me an old-established practice: fine house, carriage and pair, white-haired butler – everything correct, except myself. It was of no use. I can hold myself in for a month or two; then I break out, the old original savage that I am under my frock coat. I feel I must run amuck, stabbing, hacking at the prim, smiling Lies mincing round about me. I can fool a silly woman for half-a-dozen visits; bow and rub my hands, purr round her sympathetically. All the while I am longing to tell her the truth:

“‘Go home. Wash your face; don’t block up the pores of your skin with paint. Let out your corsets. You are thirty-three round the abdomen if you are an inch: how can you expect your digestion to do its work when you’re squeezing it into twenty-one? Give up gadding about half your day and most of your night; you are old enough to have done with that sort of thing. Let the children come, and suckle them yourself. You’ll be all the better for them. Don’t loll in bed all the morning. Get up like a decent animal and do something for your living. Use your brain, what there is of it, and your body. At that price you can have health to-morrow, and at no other. I can do nothing for you.’

“And sooner or later I blurt it out.” He laughed his great roar. “Lord! you should see the real face coming out of the simpering mask.

“Pompous old fools, strutting into me like turkey-cocks! By Jove, it was worth it! They would dribble out, looking half their proper size after I had done telling them what was the matter with them.

“‘Do you want to know what you are really suffering from?’ I would shout at them, when I could contain myself no longer. ‘Gluttony, my dear sir; gluttony and drunkenness, and over-indulgence in other vices that shall be nameless. Live like a man; get a little self-respect from somewhere; give up being an ape. Treat your body properly and it will treat you properly. That’s the only prescription that will do you any good.’”

He laughed again. “‘Tell the truth, you shame the Devil.’ But the Devil replies by starving you. It’s a fairly effective retort. I am not the stuff successful family physicians are made of. In the City I may manage to rub along. One doesn’t see so much of one’s patients; they come and go. Clerks and warehousemen my practice will be among chiefly. The poor man does not so much mind being told the truth about himself; it is a blessing to which he is accustomed.”

We spoke but once of Barbara. A photograph of her in her bride’s dress stood upon my desk. Occasionally, first fitting the room for the ceremony, sweeping away all impurity even from under the mats, and dressing myself with care, I would centre it amid flowers, and kneeling, kiss her hand where it rested on the back of the top-heavy looking chair without which no photographic studio is complete.

One day he took it up, and looked at it long and hard.

“The forehead denotes intellectuality; the eyes tenderness and courage. The lower part of the face, on the other hand, suggests a good deal of animalism: the finely cut nostrils show egotism – another word for selfishness; the nose itself, vanity; the lips, sensuousness and love of luxury. I wonder what sort of woman she really is.” He laid the photograph back upon the desk.

“I did not know you were so firm a believer in Lavater,” I said.

“Only when he agrees with what I know,” he answered. “Have I not described her rightly?”

“I do not care to discuss her in that vein,” I replied, feeling the blood mounting to my cheeks.

“Too sacred a subject?” he laughed. “It is the one ingredient of manhood I lack, ideality – an unfortunate deficiency for me. I must probe, analyse, dissect, see the thing as it really is, know it for what it is.”

“Well, she is the Countess Huescar now,” I said. “For God’s sake, leave her alone.”

He turned to me with the snarl of a beast. “How do you know she is the Countess Huescar? Is it a special breed of woman made on purpose? How do you know she isn’t my wife – brain and heart, flesh and blood, mine? If she was, do you think I should give her up because some fool has stuck his label on her?”

I felt the anger burning in my eyes. “Yours, his! She is no man’s property. She is herself,” I cried.

The wrinkles round his nose and mouth smoothed themselves out. “You need not be afraid,” he sneered. “As you say, she is the Countess Huescar. Can you imagine her as Mrs. Doctor Washburn? I can’t.” He took her photograph in his hand again. “The lower part of the face is the true index to the character. It shows the animal, and it is the animal that rules. The soul, the intellect, it comes and goes; the animal remains always. Sensuousness, love of luxury, vanity, those are the strings to which she dances. To be a Countess is of more importance to her than to be a woman. She is his, not mine. Let him keep her.”

“You do not know her,” I answered; “you never have. You listen to what she says. She does not know herself.”

He looked at me queerly. “What do you think her to be?” he asked me. “A true woman, not the shallow thing she seems?”

“A true woman,” I persisted stoutly, “that you have not eyes enough to see.”

“You little fool!” he muttered, with the same queer look – “you little fool. But let us hope you are wrong, Paul. Let us hope, for her sake, you are wrong.”

It was at one of Deleglise’s Sunday suppers that I first met Urban Vane. The position, nor even the character, I fear it must be confessed, of his guests was never enquired into by old Deleglise. A simple-minded, kindly old fellow himself, it was his fate to be occasionally surprised and grieved at the discovery that even the most entertaining of supper companions could fall short of the highest standard of conventional morality.

“Dear, dear me!” he would complain, pacing up and down his studio with puzzled visage. “The last man in the world of whom I should have expected to hear it. So original in all his ideas. Are you quite sure?”