At the end of the rubber Dick flung himself back in his chair irritably.
‘I can’t make it out,’ he cried. ‘I play much better than you, and I hold better hands, and yet you get the tricks.’
Dick was known to be an excellent player, and his annoyance was excusable.
‘We didn’t make a single mistake,’ he assured his partner, ‘and we actually had the odd in our hands, but not one of our finesses came off, and all his did.’ He turned to Alec. ‘How the dickens did you guess I had those two queens?’
‘Because I’ve known you for twenty years,’ answered Alec, smiling. ‘I know that, though you’re impulsive and emotional, you’re not without shrewdness; I know that your brain acts very quickly and sees all kinds of remote contingencies; then you’re so pleased at having noticed them that you act as if they were certain to occur. Given these data, I can tell pretty well what cards you have, after they’ve gone round two or three times.’
‘The knowledge you have of your opponents’ cards is too uncanny,’ said Mrs. Crowley.
‘I can tell a good deal from people’s faces. You see, in Africa I have had a lot of experience; it’s apparently so much easier for the native to lie than to tell the truth that you get into the habit of paying no attention to what he says, and a great deal to the way he looks.’
While Mrs. Crowley made herself comfortable in the chair, which she had already chosen as her favourite, Dick went over to the fire and stood in front of it in such a way as effectually to prevent the others from getting any of its heat.
‘What made you first take to exploration?’ asked Mrs. Crowley suddenly.
Alec gave her that slow, scrutinising look of his, and answered, with a smile:
‘I don’t know. I had nothing to do and plenty of money.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ interrupted Dick. ‘A lunatic wanted to find out about some district that people had never been to, and it wouldn’t have been any use to them if they had, because, if the natives didn’t kill you, the climate made no bones about it. He came back crippled with fever, having failed in his attempt, and, after asserting that no one could get into the heart of Rofa’s country and return alive, promptly gave up the ghost. So Alec immediately packed up his traps and made for the place.’
‘I proved the man was wrong,’ said Alec quietly. ‘I became great friends with Rofa, and he wanted to marry my sister, only I hadn’t one.’
‘And if anyone said it was impossible to hop through Asia on one foot, you’d go and do it just to show it could be done,’ retorted Dick ‘You have a passion for doing things because they’re difficult or dangerous, and, if they’re downright impossible, you chortle with joy.’
‘You make me really too melodramatic,’ smiled Alec.
‘But that’s just what you are. You’re the most transpontine person I ever saw in my life.’ Dick turned to Lucy and Mrs. Crowley with a wave of the hand. ‘I call you to witness. When he was at Oxford, Alec was a regular dab at classics; he had a gift for writing verses in languages that no one except dons wanted to read, and everyone thought that he was going to be the most brilliant scholar of his day.’
‘This is one of Dick’s favourite stories,’ said Alec. ‘It would be quite amusing if there were any truth in it.’
But Dick would not allow himself to be interrupted.
‘At mathematics, on the other hand, he was a perfect ass. You know, some people seem to have that part of their brains wanting that deals with figures, and Alec couldn’t add two and two together without making a hexameter out of it. One day his tutor got in a passion with him and said he’d rather teach arithmetic to a brick wall. I happened to be present, and he was certainly very rude. He was a man who had a precious gift for making people feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Alec didn’t say anything, but he looked at him; and, when he flies into a temper, he doesn’t get red and throw things about like a pleasant, normal person — he merely becomes a little paler and stares at you.’
‘I beg you not to believe a single word he says,’ remonstrated Alec.
‘Well, Alec threw over his classics. Everyone concerned reasoned with him; they appealed to his common sense; they were appealing to the most obstinate fool in Christendom. Alec had made up his mind to be a mathematician. For more than two years he worked ten hours a day at a subject he loathed; he threw his whole might into it and forced out of nature the gifts she had denied him, with the result that he got a first class. And much good it’s done him.’
Alec shrugged his shoulders.
‘It wasn’t that I cared for mathematics, but it taught me to conquer the one inconvenient word in the English language.’
‘And what the deuce is that?’
‘I’m afraid it sounds very priggish,’ laughed Alec. ‘The word impossible.’
Dick gave a little snort of comic rage.
‘And it also gave you a ghastly pleasure in doing things that hurt you. Oh, if you’d only been born in the Middle Ages, what a fiendish joy you would have taken in mortifying your flesh, and in denying yourself everything that makes life so good to live! You’re never thoroughly happy unless you’re making yourself thoroughly miserable.’
‘Each time I come back to England I find that you talk more and greater nonsense, Dick,’ returned Alec drily.
‘I’m one of the few persons now alive who can talk nonsense,’ answered his friend, laughing. ‘That’s why I’m so charming. Everyone else is so deadly earnest.’
He settled himself down to make a deliberate speech.
‘I deplore the strenuousness of the world in general. There is an idea abroad that it is praiseworthy to do things, and what they are is of no consequence so long as you do them. I hate the mad hurry of the present day to occupy itself. I wish I could persuade people of the excellence of leisure.’
‘One could scarcely accuse you of cultivating it yourself,’ said Lucy, smiling.
Dick looked at her for a moment thoughtfully.
‘Do you know that I’m hard upon forty?’
‘With the light behind, you might still pass for thirty-two,’ interrupted Mrs. Crowley.
He turned to her seriously.
‘I haven’t a grey hair on my head.’
‘I suppose your servant plucks them out every morning?’
‘Oh, no, very rarely; one a month at the outside.’
‘I think I see one just beside the left temple.’
He turned quickly to the glass.
‘Dear me, how careless of Charles! I shall have to give him a piece of my mind.’
‘Come here, and let me take it out,’ said Mrs. Crowley.
‘I will let you do nothing of the sort I should consider it most familiar.’
‘You were giving us the gratuitous piece of information that you were nearly forty,’ said Alec.
‘The thought came to me the other day with something of a shock, and I set about a scrutiny of the life I was leading. I’ve worked at the bar pretty hard for fifteen years now, and I’ve been in the House since the general election. I’ve been earning two thousand a year, I’ve got nearly four thousand of my own, and I’ve never spent much more than half my income. I wondered if it was worth while to spend eight hours a day settling the sordid quarrels of foolish people, and another eight hours in the farce of governing the nation.’
‘Why do you call it that?’
Dick Lomas shrugged his shoulders scornfully.
‘Because it is. A few big-wigs rule the roost, and the rest of us are only there to delude the British people into the idea that they’re a self-governing community.’
‘What is wrong with you is that you have no absorbing aim in politics,’ said Alec gravely.
‘Pardon me, I am a suffragist of the most vehement type,’ answered Dick, with a thin smile.
‘That’s the last thing I should have expected you to be,’ said Mrs. Crowley, who dressed with admirable taste. ‘Why on earth have you taken to that?’
Dick shrugged his shoulde
rs.
‘No one can have been through a parliamentary election without discovering how unworthy, sordid, and narrow are the reasons for which men vote. There are very few who are alive to the responsibilities that have been thrust upon them. They are indifferent to the importance of the stakes at issue, but make their vote a matter of ignoble barter. The parliamentary candidate is at the mercy of faddists and cranks. Now, I think that women, when they have votes, will be a trifle more narrow, and they will give them for motives that are a little more sordid and a little more unworthy. It will reduce universal suffrage to the absurd, and then it may be possible to try something else.’
Dick had spoken with a vehemence that was unusual to him. Alec watched him with a certain interest.
‘And what conclusions have you come to?’
For a moment he did not answer, then he gave a deprecating smile.
‘I feel that the step I want to take is momentous for me, though I am conscious that it can matter to nobody else whatever. There will be a general election in a few months, and I have made up my mind to inform the whips that I shall not stand again. I shall give up my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, put up the shutters, so to speak, and Mr. Richard Lomas will retire from active life.’
‘You wouldn’t really do that?’ cried Mrs. Crowley.
‘Why not?’
‘In a month complete idleness will simply bore you to death.’
‘I doubt it. Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they’re obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture of Christian times is the sanctification of labour. You see, the early Christians were slaves, and it was necessary to show them that their obligatory toil was noble and virtuous. But when all is said and done, a man works to earn his bread and to keep his wife and children; it is a painful necessity, but there is nothing heroic in it. If people choose to put a higher value on the means than on the end, I can only pass with a shrug of the shoulders, and regret the paucity of their intelligence.’
‘It’s really unfair to talk so much all at once,’ said Mrs. Crowley, throwing up her pretty hands.
But Dick would not be stopped.
‘For my part I have neither wife nor child, and I have an income that is more than adequate. Why should I take the bread out of somebody else’s mouth? And it’s not on my own merit that I get briefs — men seldom do — I only get them because I happen to have at the back of me a very large firm of solicitors. And I can find nothing worthy in attending to these foolish disputes. In most cases it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, and each side is very unjust and pig-headed. No, the bar is a fair way of earning your living like another, but it’s no more than that; and, if you can exist without, I see no reason why Quixotic motives of the dignity of human toil should keep you to it. I’ve already told you why I mean to give up my seat in Parliament.’
‘Have you realised that you are throwing over a career that may be very brilliant? You should get an under-secretaryship in the next government.’
‘That would only mean licking the boots of a few more men whom I despise.’
‘It’s a very dangerous experiment that you’re making.’
Dick looked straight into Alec MacKenzie’s eyes.
‘And is it you who counsel me not to make it on that account?’ he said, smiling. ‘Surely experiments are only amusing if they’re dangerous.’
‘And to what is it precisely that you mean to devote your time?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.
‘I should like to make idleness a fine art,’ he laughed. ‘People, now-a-days, turn up their noses at the dilettante. Well, I mean to be a dilettante. I want to devote myself to the graces of life. I’m forty, and for all I know I haven’t so very many years before me: in the time that remains, I want to become acquainted with the world and all the graceful, charming things it contains.’
Alec, fallen into deep thought, stared into the fire. Presently he took a long breath, rose from his chair, and drew himself to his full height.
‘I suppose it’s a life like another, and there is no one to say which is better and which is worse. But, for my part, I would rather go on till I dropped. There are ten thousand things I want to do. If I had ten lives I couldn’t get through a tithe of what, to my mind, so urgently needs doing.’
‘And what do you suppose will be the end of it?’ asked Dick.
‘For me?’
Dick nodded, but did not otherwise reply. Alec smiled faintly.
‘Well, I suppose the end of it will be death in some swamp, obscurely, worn out with disease and exposure; and my bearers will make off with my guns and my stores, and the jackals will do the rest.’
‘I think it’s horrible,’ said Mrs. Crowley, with a shudder.
‘I’m a fatalist. I’ve lived too long among people with whom it is the deepest rooted article of their faith, to be anything else. When my time comes, I cannot escape it.’ He smiled whimsically. ‘But I believe in quinine, too, and I think that the daily use of that admirable drug will make the thread harder to cut.’
To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.
‘And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred years,’ said Dick. ‘We shall both be forgotten long before then, you with your strenuousness, and I with my folly.’
‘And what conclusion do you draw from that?’ asked Mrs. Crowley.
‘Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda.’
IV
There was some rough shooting on the estate which Mrs. Crowley had rented, and next day Dick went out to see what he could find. Alec refused to accompany him.
‘I think shooting in England bores me a little,’ he said. ‘I have a prejudice against killing things unless I want to eat them, and these English birds are so tame that it seems to me rather like shooting chickens.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Dick, as he set out. ‘The fact is that you can’t hit anything smaller than a hippopotamus, and you know that there is nothing here to suit you except Mrs. Crowley’s cows.’
After luncheon Alec MacKenzie asked Lucy if she would take a stroll with him. She was much pleased.
‘Where would you like to go?’ she asked.
‘Let us walk by the sea.’
She took him along a road called Joy Lane, which ran from the fishing town of Blackstable to a village called Waveney. The sea there had a peculiar vastness, and the salt smell of the breeze was pleasant to the senses. The flatness of the marsh seemed to increase the distances that surrounded them, and unconsciously Alec fell into a more rapid swing. It did not look as if he walked fast, but he covered the ground with the steady method of a man who has been used to long journeys, and it was good for Lucy that she was accustomed to much walking. At first they spoke of trivial things, but presently silence fell upon them. Lucy saw that he was immersed in thought, and she did not interrupt him. It amused her that, after asking her to walk with him, this odd man should take no pains to entertain her. Now and then he threw back his head with a strange, proud motion, and looked out to sea. The gulls, with their melancholy flight, were skimming upon the surface of the water. The desolation of that scene — it was the same which, a few days before, had rent poor Lucy’s heart — appeared to enter his soul; but, strangely enough, it uplifted him, filling him with exulting thoughts. He quickened his pace, and Lucy, without a word, kept step with him. He seemed not to notice where they
walked, and presently she led him away from the sea. They tramped along a winding road, between trim hedges and fertile fields; and the country had all the sweet air of Kent, with its easy grace and its comfortable beauty. They passed a caravan, with a shaggy horse browsing at the wayside, and a family of dinglers sitting around a fire of sticks. The sight curiously affected Lucy. The wandering life of those people, with no ties but to the ramshackle carriage which was their only home, their familiarity with the fields and with strange hidden places, filled her with a wild desire for freedom and for vast horizons. At last they came to the massive gates of Court Leys. An avenue of elms led to the house.
‘Here we are,’ said Lucy, breaking the long silence.
‘Already?’ He seemed to shake himself. ‘I have to thank you for a pleasant stroll, and we’ve had a good talk, haven’t we?’
‘Have we?’ she laughed. She saw his look of surprise. ‘For two hours you’ve not vouchsafed to make an observation.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, reddening under his tan. ‘How rude you must have thought me! I’ve been alone so much that I’ve got out of the way of behaving properly.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ she smiled. ‘You must talk to me another time.’
She was subtly flattered. She felt that, for him, it was a queer kind-of compliment that he had paid her. Their silent walk, she did not know why, seemed to have created a bond between them; and it appeared that he felt it, too, for afterwards he treated her with a certain intimacy. He seemed to look upon her no longer as an acquaintance, but as a friend.
A day or two later, Mrs. Crowley having suggested that they should drive into Tercanbury to see the cathedral, MacKenzie asked her if she would allow him to walk.
He turned to Lucy.
‘I hardly dare to ask if you will come with me,’ he said.
‘It would please me immensely.’
‘I will try to behave better than last time.’
‘You need not,’ she smiled.
Dick, who had an objection to walking when it was possible to drive, set out with Mrs. Crowley in a trap. Alec waited for Lucy. She went round to the stable to fetch a dog to accompany them, and, as she came towards him, he looked at her. Alec was a man to whom most of his fellows were abstractions. He saw them and talked to them, noting their peculiarities, but they were seldom living persons to him. They were shadows, as it were, that had to be reckoned with, but they never became part of himself. And it came upon him now with a certain shock of surprise to notice Lucy. He felt suddenly a new interest in her. He seemed to see her for the first time, and her rare beauty strangely moved him. In her serge dress and her gauntlets, with a motor cap and a flowing veil, a stick in her hand, she seemed on a sudden to express the country through which for the last two or three days he had wandered. He felt an unexpected pleasure in her slim erectness and in her buoyant step. There was something very charming in her blue eyes.
Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated) Page 114