The Hypocrite

The suggestive music of the dance pulsed through the audience, and when the time sank into the rhythm of the verse, they sat back in their seats with expectant eyes, and a little sigh of delight and anticipation.

Miss Mace, in her song "It's a Family Characteristic," was the talk of London. The risquè nature of the words, her wonderful art in singing them, her naughty eyes, the twitching of her somewhat large mouth – all the lewd papers of the baser sort yelled over her in ecstasy every Wednesday morning.

"I wonder what they pay her a week," said Mr. Jones.

Gobion hadn't an idea, but he said "sixty pounds" confidently.

"Really! She certainly is very clever."

"The best thing I find about her is that she is in wonderful sympathy with her audience, especially too when she is drunk – much funnier then."

"Imagine how often the average faddist would invoke the Deity during her turn," said the stranger something sententiously.

"His deity, you mean," answered Gobion. "The average man of the Echo-reading type thinks God is a policeman in the service of the Purity party."

"You coruscate; let us go to the American bar."

"That's a good idea; the presiding gentleman who makes the drinks is an artist. The mingled science and art with which he compounds whimsical beverages is wonderful. Half of him seems impulse and nervous force as he rattles the pounded ice and flourishes the glasses, while the other half looks in and puts the finishing touches."

"You talk nonsense very pleasantly," said Mr. Jones. "What will you have?"

"Oh! a sherry cobbler, please, with straws."

"Are you a connoisseur in drinks?"

"Not yet; I hope to be."

"I will take you to a place where you may learn."

"Please do; drinks are more than a cult, they are a science. To a man I knew at Oxford they were a religion." He was thinking of Condamine.

"There are so many religions nowadays."

"Yes; the sham of yesterday takes an alias and calls itself the religion of the future."

"I hate the faddist."

"What do you like?"

"I haven't many likes left now. I like to be amused as much as possible."

After a time they left the music-hall, and while they were walking through clubland the stranger permitted himself more freedom of expression, talking cynically. He was a middle-aged man, and Gobion amused him immensely.

"How badly brought up you must have been," he said to him.

"Why, what makes you think so?"

"You vibrate so quickly to my views, and I am not considered orthodox."

"Well, I was not so much badly brought up, as left to myself. My father's pedigree claimed a larger share of his attention than his progeny. I was an accident in the domestic arrangements."

"He must be a strange person."

"He is. I always suspect my predisposition to shady pleasures is hereditary, although he is a parson."

"It's quite often the case that a repentant rake takes Orders from a mere revulsion to asceticism. And your mother?"

"A nonentity with most seductive hair."

While talking, they had arrived at the Park, and were turning home to the hotel in the fresh night air. Gobion knew that he had been smart, perhaps smarter than usual, but he did not know what impression he had made. The stranger was a man outside his experience. Accustomed as Gobion was, in the light of Oxford experience, to feel that he was the cynic and man of the world, he was somewhat doubtful of a man who appeared to him to be a realization of what he might himself become. Cynicism, he thought, is now my plaything; it is this man's master, and he has lost the savours of life. I wonder if Father Gray was right. He often said that up to thirty a man might be happy with no moral sense; but after —

He saw dimly a foreshortened view of the future. It was on this night that the confidence in his own ability to be happy in evil began to be a little undermined. This chance meeting with a man weary of life, and not interested in death, a man with an aching, futile soul, whom he never saw again, was fraught with tremendous importance to his future career. On this his first night in London the seeds were sown which led to the final pose in Houndsditch.

A celebrated lady novelist (she is now in Colney Hatch, but very clever) once said to the writer of these memoirs that literature, or rather journalism, is little more than a big game of bluff. Her remark was quite true. The art of the thing consists in getting the keynote of twenty different publics, and writing on those lines for the twenty different papers that represent their views.

This is not the way to make a reputation, but it is certainly one of the ways in which the literary adventurer may make a certain amount of money. Gobion knew this well. The conquest was mean and the reward not far from meagre; but at his age and with his past he could not hope for much more, and there was a bustling excitement in it which seemed to him most desirable.

He could not specialize; he had no fixed opinions. It was impossible for him to take up a decided line in his work.

At Oxford the exigencies of his career had forced him to have no opinions, but simply to adopt the policy of the set he happened to be with. He belonged to no party, and in moral views, though he was apparently in agreement with both, he titillated the men of a clean and decent life, and amused their opposites, while he borrowed money from both with a cheerful impartiality. As far as he could dispassionately reckon them up, his mental assets were a felicity and facility of expression, more or less wide reading, and a power of intuition and knowledge of the public mind that was almost devilish in its infallibility.

After breakfast next morning, that meal so dear (in more senses than one) to the undergraduate, obviously the first thing to be done was to secure a place to dwell in. It was not wise to stay on at the hotel a moment longer than was necessary; the expense was too great. He thought at once of the Temple. It was a good address, and near most things. He knew enough of London to understand that Bloomsbury was clerk-land, and though cheap, quite impossible. Westminster was better, but not quite central enough. Finally, after some trouble, he took two first-floor rooms in one of the quiet streets running from the Fleet Street end of the Strand to the Embankment. They were well-furnished bachelor rooms, with a low window-seat from which a glimpse could be caught of red-sailed barges with yellow masts of pitch-pine floating slowly down the tide, while on late wintry afternoons the sunsets stained the brown water with a grim and sullen glory.

Gobion had a lurking hope that he might meet the comic landlady that Mr. Farjeon writes about so nicely in the flesh. He was doomed to disappointment. The person, called Mrs. Daily, who owned the house had no peculiarities, and nothing to suggest the type he was in search of save rotundity of form. He was loth to think the comic landlady was a fabulous monster, or an extinct one – the lady who says, "Which Mister Jones come tight last blessed hevening has hever was, and which I 'ad to bump 'is 'edd on the stairs to keep 'im quiet while the girl and I 'elped 'im up to the third floor back." Was she really fabulous? It was a sorrowful reflection.

The same day that he took the rooms he moved from the West and took possession. He had dined at the hotel before he left, and when he had unpacked his portmanteaux he sat before the fire feeling horribly dull and uneasy.

He was not inclined to go out to a theatre or bar, and the men he knew in town, mostly journalists, were all hard at work now in Fleet Street.

The sensation of ennui was new to him, and at first quite overbearing. Gobion was in personal matters strong-willed, and after a time this trained faculty of will helped him, and, with an effort almost heroic in its strength, he sat down at the table and began to review a book for The Pilgrim. It was a collection of essays by a well-known priest on some doctrinal aspects of church teaching that he had before him, and it was sent to him partly because he was known to have had some connection with the High Church party, and the editor assumed that he would have enough superficial knowledge of the subject to write a clever and flippant review.

The Pilgrim had been bought at a low ebb in its fortunes by its present editor, James Heath, for a thousand pounds, lock, stock, and barrel. Before it came into his hands it was an unsavoury little print, which published little else but impressionist criticisms of the music-halls and fulsome reviews of evil books, under the direction of a man who was a personified animal passion roughly clothed in flesh.

Now it was all changed. The tone of The Pilgrim was immoral as before, and the column headed "The Pilgrim's Scrip" as grossly personal as ever, but the personalities were more artistic, the immorality the immorality of culture.

The paper was never low. The sale was good, for all the young men and women who considered themselves clever, and who, under the comprehensive shield of "soul," sucked poison from strange flowers, bought it and quoted it.

Heath was smart and cynical in his conduct of the paper, though in private life he lived at Putney, collected stamps, and read Miss Braddon's novels to his wife after dinner. He knew quite well that realism was mechanism, and he never welcomed photography as art, but as the people who bought his literary wares did not understand these things he never enlightened them, which was natural.

The book that Gobion was reviewing he had entrusted to him willingly. He was an Oxford man himself, and still kept up some communication with his friends there, and he had heard indirectly that Gobion had received various benefits from the High Church party. His knowledge of Gobion taught him that he would do a delightfully clever and malicious review.

The clergyman who had written the book was a rather noisy Anglican divine, who preached the gospel of unity in art and religion at the top of his voice. He deprecated and eloquently denounced the new literature of the day. As The Pilgrim was the outward and visible head of what Canon Emeric denounced as very little short of devilish, Heath was naturally anxious that the review should, in journalistic phrase, "crab" the sale of the book among his readers.

Now this Canon Emeric had met Gobion at a garden party, and found him well informed in the history of his campaign against art for art's sake. Finding that Gobion agreed with his views, he had asked him as a special favour to call on his son, who had just come up to Christchurch from Marlborough. Gobion did call, and asked the youth to meet Sturtevant, and the poor boy, dazzled by being in the society of men of whom he heard everyone talking, made a fool of himself and came to utter grief, much to the pecuniary benefit of Condamine, Sturtevant, and Gobion. It was a disgraceful affair, and though some rather acrimonious correspondence had passed between the Canon and Gobion, the matter had been hushed up.

When Gobion got well into his work the ennui passed away and he worked hard, turning out a very clever and caustic review. To the pleasure of creation, always a keen one with him, was added the delight of writing something which, if he saw it, would pain his adversary grievously. And Gobion meant to take very good care that he did see it.

He ended the column by saying: —