Tales of two people

“Of course you know all about it? Jane has told you? And of course you’re dying to tell me I’m a fool – as all the rest of them do! At any rate, they let me see they think it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk of anything else. I’ve got no right – ”

“I give you the right. You’re interested?”

“Oh, I can’t deny that. I’m human.”

She was looking very attractive to-day; her perplexity and worry seemed to soften her; an unwonted air of appeal mitigated her assurance of manner; she was pleasanter when she was not so confident of herself.

“Well, I should rather like to put the case to a sensible man – and we’ll suppose you to be one for the moment.” She laughed more gently as I bowed my thanks. “On the one side is what’s expected of me – ”

“Jane’s phrase!” I thought to myself.

“What all the world thinks, what I’ve thought for a long while myself, what he thinks – in fact, everything. And, I tell you, it’s a good deal. It is even with men, isn’t it?”

“What’s expected of us? Yes. Only unusual men can disregard that.”

“It’s worse with women – the weight of it is much heavier with women. And am I to consider myself unusual? Besides, I do like him enormously.”

“I was wondering when you would touch on that point. It seems to me important.”

“Enormously. Who wouldn’t? Everybody must. Not for his looks or his charm only. He’s a real good sort too, Mr Wynne. A woman could trust her heart with him.”

“I’ve always believed he was a good sort – and, of course, very brilliant – a great career before him – and all that.” She said nothing for a moment, and I repeated thoughtfully: “Astonishingly brilliant, to be sure, isn’t he?”

She nodded at me, smiling. “Yes, that’s the word – brilliant.” She was looking at me very intently. “What more have you to say?” she asked.

“A good heart – a great position – a brilliant intellect – well, what more is there to say? Unless you permit me to say that ladies are sometimes – as they have a perfect right to be – hard to please.”

“Yes, I’m hard to please.” Her smile came again, this time thoughtful, reminiscent, amused, almost, I could fancy, tender. “I’ve been spoilt lately,” she said. Then she stole a quick glance at me, flushing a little.

I grew more interested in her; I think I may say more worthily interested. I knew what she meant – whom she was thinking of. I passed the narrow yet significant line that divides gossip about people from an interest in one’s friends or a curiosity about the human mind. Or so I liked to put it to myself.

“I must talk,” she said. “Is it very strange of me to talk?”

“Talk away. I hear, or I don’t hear, just as you wish. Anyhow, I don’t repeat.”

“That is your point, you men! Well, if it were between a great man and a nobody?”

“The great man I know – we all do. But the nobody? I don’t know him.”

“Don’t you? I think you do; or perhaps you know neither? If the world and I meant just the opposite?”

She was standing now, very erect, proud, excited.

“It’s a bad thing to mean just the opposite from what the world means,” I said.

“Bad? Or only hard?” she asked. “God knows it’s hard enough.”

“There’s the consolation of the – spoiling,” I suggested. “Who spoils you, the great man or the nobody?”

She paid no visible heed to my question. Indeed she seemed for the moment unconscious of me. It was October; a small bright fire burned on the hearth. She turned to it, stretching out her hands to the warmth. She spoke, and I listened. “It would be a fine thing,” she said, “to be the first to believe – the first to give evidence of belief – perhaps the finest thing to be the first and last – to be the only one to give everything one had in evidence.” She faced round on me suddenly. “Everything – if one dared!”

“If you were very sure – ” I began.

“No!” she interrupted. “Say, if I had courage – courage to defy, courage for a great venture!”

“Yes, it’s better put like that.”

“But people don’t realise – indeed they don’t – how much it needs.”

“I think I realise it a little better.” She made no comment on that, and I held out my hand. “I should like to help, you know,” I said, “but I expect you’ve got to fight it out alone.”

She pressed my hand in a very friendly way, saying, “Any single human being’s sympathy helps.”

That was not, perhaps, a very flattering remark, but it seemed to me pathetic, coming from the proud, the rich, the beautiful Miss Constantine. To this she was reduced in her struggle against her mighty foe. Any ally, however humble, was precious in her fight against what was expected of her.

V

MISS CONSTANTINE’S suppression of names, and her studious use of the hypothetical mood in putting her case, forbade me saying she had told me that in her opinion Valentine Hare was a nobody and Oliver Kirby a great man, although the world might be pleased to hold just the opposite view. Still less had she told me that, in consequence of this opinion of hers, she would let the nobody go and cling to the great man; she had merely discerned and pictured that course of action as being a very splendid and a very brave thing – more splendid and brave, just in proportion to the world’s lack of understanding. Whether she would do it remained exceedingly doubtful; there was that heavy weight of what was expected of her. But what she had done, by the revelation of her feelings, was to render the problem of whether she would embrace her great venture or forgo it one of much interest to me. The question of her moral courage remained open; but there was now no question as to her intellectual courage. Her brain could see and dared to see – whether or not she would dare to be guided by its eyes. Her achievement was really considerable – to look so plainly, so clearly and straight, through all externals; to pierce behind incomparable Val’s shop-window accomplishments, his North Africa, his linguistic accomplishments, Duc de Reichstadt, French plays, literary essays, even his supremely plausible and persuasive “Religion of Primitive Man” (which did look so solid on a first consideration) – to go right by all these, and ask what was the real value of the stock in the recesses of the shop! And, conversely, to pick up bullet-headed Kirby from the roadside, so to speak, to find in him greatness, to be “spoilt” (she, the rich, courted beauty) by being allowed to hear the thuds of his sledge-hammer mind, to dream of giving “everything” to his plain form and face because of the mind they clothed, to think that thing the great thing to do, if she dared – yes, she herself stood revealed as a somewhat uncommon young woman.

Her appraisement of Val I was not inclined to dispute; it coincided with certain suspicions which I myself had shamefacedly entertained, but had never found courage to express openly. But was she right about Kirby? Had we here the rare “great man”? Concede to her that we had, her case was still a hard one. Kirby had no start; he was in a rut, if I may say so with unfeigned respect to the distinguished service to which he belonged – an honourable useful rut, but, so far as personal glory or the prospects of it went, a rut, all the same. Unless some rare chance came – they do come now and then, but it was ill to gamble on one here – his main function would be to do the work, to supply the knowledge secretly, perhaps to shape a policy some day in the future; but tulit alter honores. Not to him would the public raise their cheers, and posterity a statue. Her worship of him must be, in all likelihood, solitary, despised, and without reward. Would it be appreciated as it ought to be by her hero himself? But here, perhaps, I could not get thoroughly into the skin of the devotee; the god is not expected to be overwhelmed by his altars and his sacrifices – his divinityship is merely satisfied.

“Mr Hare is behaving splendidly,” Jane reported to me. She had a constant – apparently a daily – report of him from Lady Lexington, his unremitting champion. Indeed the women were all on his side, and it was surprising how many of them seemed to know his position; I cannot help thinking that Val, in his turn, had succumbed to the temptations of sympathy. They spoke of him as of a man patient under wrong, amiable and forgiving through it all, puzzled, bewildered, inevitably hurt, yet with his love unimpaired and his forgiveness ready.

“Do you suppose,” I asked Jane, “that he’s got any theory why she hesitates?”

“Theory! Who wants a theory? We all know why.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” My “exclusive information” seemed a good deal cheapened. “Has she told you, may I ask?”

“Not she; but she goes every afternoon, just after lunch, to Mrs Something Simpson’s – that’s the man’s aunt. She lives in a flat in Westminster, and he goes from his office to lunch at his aunt’s every day, now.”

While I had been musing, Jane had been getting at the facts.

“Val knows that?”

“Of course Lady Lexington told him. Let’s have fair play, anyhow!” said Jane rather hotly.

“What does he say about it?”

“He’s perfectly kind and sweet; but he can’t, of course, quite conceal that he’s” – Jane paused, seeking a word. She flung her hands out in an expressive gesture, and let me have it – “Stupefied!” A moment later she added, “So are we all, if it comes to that.”

“If one dared!” Katharine Constantine’s words came back. They were all stupefied at the idea. Would she dare to pile stupefaction on stupefaction by confronting them with the fact?

In the course of the next few days the Powers That Be in the land took a hand – doubtless an entirely unconscious one – in the game. A peer died; his son, going up to the House of Lords, vacated the post of Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Amid a chorus of applause and of flattering prophecies Valentine Hare was appointed in his place. I met, at one of my clubs, a young friend who had recently entered the Colonial Office, and he told me that the new member of Administration’s secretary would in all probability be Oliver Kirby. “And it’ll give him a bit of a chance to show what’s he’s made of,” said my young friend, with the kindly patronage of youth.

But, under present circumstances, it might create a slight awkwardness, say, about lunch-time, mightn’t it? I doubted whether that appointment would be made.