“The last things I saw in England,” I told Mrs. Wylton, “were The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and A Woman of No Importance.”
Dramatic history has developed apace since those days. I recollect we thought Pinero the most daring dramatist since Ibsen; we talked sagely of a revolution in the English theatre. There must have been many revolutions since then! Even the wit of Wilde has grown a little out-moded since ’93. As we drove down to the Cornmarket I was given to understand that the dramatic firmament had been many times disturbed in twenty years; Shaw had followed a meteoric path, Barker burned with fitful brilliance, while aloft in splendid isolation shone the inexorable cold light of Galsworthy.…
“Who’s the new man you’re taking us to see?” Joyce asked the Seraph.
“Gordon Tremayne,” he answered.
“The man who wrote ‘The Child of Misery’? I didn’t know he wrote plays.”
“I believe this is his first. Do you know his books?”
“Forward and backward and upside down,” I answered. “He’s one of the coming men.”
I am not a great novel reader, and have no idea how I came across Tremayne’s first book, “The Marriage of Gretchen,” but when once I had read it, I watched the publisher’s announcements for other books from the same pen. The second one belonged still to the experimental stage: then the whole literary world was convulsed by the first volume of his “Child of Misery.”
I suppose by now it is as well-known as that other strange masterpiece of self-revelation—“Jean Christophe”—which in many ways it so closely resembles. In one respect it shared the same immortality, and “Jean Christophe’s” future was not more eagerly watched in France than “Rupert Chevasse’s” in England. The hero—for want of a better name—was torn from the pages of the book and invested by his readers with flesh and blood reality. We all wanted to know how the theme would develop, and none of us could guess. The first volume gave you the childhood and upbringing of Rupert—and incidentally revealed to my unimaginative mind what a hell life must be for an over-sensitive boy at an English public school. The second opened with his marriage to Kathleen, went on to her death and ended with the appalling mental prostration of Rupert. I suppose every one had a different theory how the third volume would shape.…
“What sort of a fellow is this Tremayne?” I asked the Seraph.
“I’ve never met him,” he answered, and closured my next question by jumping up and helping Mrs. Wylton out of the taxi.
From our box we had an admirable view of both stage and house. One or two critics and a sprinkling of confirmed first-nighters had survived from the audiences I knew twenty years before, but the newcomers were in the ascendant. It was a good house, and I recognised more than one quondam acquaintance. Mrs. Rawnsley, the Prime Minister’s wife, was pointed out to me by Joyce: she was there with her daughter, and for a moment I thought I ought to go and speak. When I recollected that we had not met since her marriage, and thought of the voluminous explanations that would be necessitated, I decided to sit on in the box and talk to Joyce. Indeed, I only mention the fact of my seeing mother and daughter there, because it sometimes strikes me as curious that so large a part should have been played in my life by a girl of nineteen with sandy hair and over-freckled face whom I saw on that occasion for the first, last and only time.
The Heir-at-Law went with a fine swing. There were calls at the end of each act, and the lights were kept low after the final curtain while the whole house rang from pit to gallery with a chorus of “Author! Author!” The Seraph began looking for his coat as soon as the curtain fell, but I wanted to see the great Gordon Tremayne.
“He won’t appear,” I was told when I refused to move.
“How do you know?”
Aintree hesitated, and then pointed to the stage, where the manager had advanced to the footlights and was explaining that the author was not in the house.
We struggled out into the passage and made our way into the hall.
“Where does one sup these times?” I asked the Seraph.
He suggested the Carlton and I handed on the suggestion to Mrs. Wylton, not in any way as a reflection on his admirable dinner, but as a precautionary measure against hunger in the night. Mrs. Wylton in turn consulted her sister, who appeared by common consent to be credited with the dominant mind of the party.
“I should love.…” Joyce was beginning when something made her stop short. I followed the direction of her eyes, and caught sight of a wretched newspaper boy approaching with the last edition of an evening paper. Against his legs flapped a flimsy newsbill, and on the bill were four gigantic words:
DEFEAT OF SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT.
Joyce met my eyes with a determined little smile.
“Not tonight, thanks,” she said. “I’ve a lot of work to do before I go to bed.”
“When shall I see you again?” I asked.
She held out a small gloved hand.
“You won’t. It’s good-bye.”
“But why?”
“It’s war à outrance.”
“That’s no concern of mine.”
“Exactly. Those that are not with me are against me.”
I offered a bribe in the form of matches and a cigarette.
“Don’t you have an armistice even for tea?” I asked.
She shook her head provokingly.
“Joyce,” I said, “when you were five, I had every reason, justification and opportunity for slapping you. I refrained. Now when I think of my wasted chances.…”
“You can come to tea any time. Seraph’ll give you the address.”
“That’s a better frame of mind,” I said, as I hailed a taxi and put the two women inside it.
“It won’t be an armistice,” she called back over her shoulder.
“It’ll have to be. I bring peace wherever I go.”
“I shall convert you.”
“If there’s any conversion.…”
“When are you coming?” she interrupted.
“Not for a day or two,” I answered regretfully. “I’m spending Whitsun with the Rodens.”
Joyce shook my hand in silence through the window of the taxi, and then abruptly congratulated me.
“What on?” I asked.
“Your week-end party. How perfectly glorious!”
“Why?”
“You’re going to be in at the death,” she answered, as the taxi jerked itself epileptically away from the kerb.
CHAPTER II
Supper with a Mystic
“I can look into your soul. D’you know what I see…? … I see your soul.”
—John Masefield
“The Tragedy of Nan.”
I stood absent-mindedly staring at the back of the taxi till it disappeared down Pall Mall and the Seraph brought me to earth with an invitation to supper.
“…if it won’t be too much of an anti-climax to have supper with me alone,” I heard him murmuring.
At that moment I wanted to stride away to the Park, tramp up and down by myself, and think—think calmly, think savagely, try every fashion of thinking.
“To be quite candid,” I said, as I linked arms and turned in the direction of the Club, “if you nailed me down like a Strasburg goose, I don’t believe you could fill me fuller than you’ve already done at dinner.”
“Let me bear you company, then. It’ll keep you from thinking. Wait a minute; I want to have this prescription made up.”
I followed him into a chemist’s shop and waited patiently while a powerful soporific was compounded. I have myself subsisted too many years on heroic remedies to retain the average Englishman’s horror of what he calls “drugs.” At the same time I do not like to see boys of six and twenty playing with toys as dangerous as the Seraph’s little grey-white powders; nor do I like to see them so much as feeling the nee
d.
“Under advice?” I asked, as we came out into the street.
“Originally. I don’t need it often, but I’m rather unsettled tonight.”
He had been restless throughout the play, and the hand that paid for the powders had trembled more than was necessary.
“You were all right at dinner,” I said.
“That was some time ago,” he answered.
“Everything went off admirably; there’s been nothing to worry you.”
“Reaction,” he muttered abruptly, as we mounted the steps of the Club.
Supper was a gloomy meal, as we ate in silence and had the whole huge dining-room to ourselves. I ought not to complain or be surprised, as silence was the Seraph’s normal state, and my mind was far too full of other things to discuss the ordinary banalities of the day. With the arrival of the cigars, however, I began to feel unsociable, and told him to talk to me.
“What about?” he asked.
“Anything.”
“There’s only one thing you’re thinking about at the moment.”
“Oh?”
“You’re thinking of the past three months generally, and the past three hours in particular.”
“That doesn’t carry me very far,” I said.
He switched off the table lights and lay back in his chair with legs crossed.
“Don’t you think it strange and—unsettling? Three months ago life was rounded and complete; you were all-sufficient to yourself. One day was just like another, till the morning when you woke up and felt lonely—lonely and wasted, gradually growing old. Till three, four hours ago you tried to define your new hunger.… Now you’ve forgotten it, now you’re wondering why you can’t drive out of your mind the vision of a girl you’ve not seen for twenty years. Shall I go on? You’ve just had a new thought; you were thinking I was impertinent, that I oughtn’t to talk like this, that you ought to be angry.… Then you decided you couldn’t be, because I was right.” He paused, and then exclaimed quickly, “Now, now there’s another new thought! You’re not going to be angry, you know it’s true, you’re interested, you want to find out how I know it’s true, but you want to seem sceptical so as to save your face.” He hesitated a second time, and added quietly, “Now you’ve made up your mind, you’re going to say nothing, you think that’s non-committal, you’re going to wait in the hope that I shall tell you how I know.”
I made no answer, and he sat silent for a while, tracing his initials with the end of a match in the little mound of cigar ash on his plate.
“I can’t tell you how I know,” he said at last. “But it was true, wasn’t it?”
“Suppose it was?”
His shoulders gave a slight shrug.
“Oh, I don’t know. I just wanted to see if I was right.”
I turned up the table lamp again so that I could see his face.
“Just as a matter of personal interest,” I said, “do you suggest that I always show the world what I’m thinking about?”
“Not the world.”
“You?”
“As a rule. Not more than other people.”
“Can you tell what everybody’s thinking of?”
“I can with a good many men.”
“Not women?”
He shook his head.
“They often don’t know themselves. They think in fits and starts—jerkily; it’s hard to follow them.”
“How do you do it?”
“I don’t know. You must watch people’s eyes; then you’ll find the expression is always changing, never the same for two minutes in succession—you just see.”
“I’m hanged if I do.”
“Your eyes must be quick. Look here, you’re walking along in evening dress, and I throw a lump of mud on to your shirt front. In a fraction of a second you hit me over the head with your cane. That’s all, isn’t it? But you know it isn’t all; there are a dozen mental processes between the mud-throwing and the head-hitting. You’re horror-stricken at the mess I’ve made of your shirt, you wonder if you’ll have time to go back and change into a clean one, and if so, how late you’ll be. You’re annoyed that any one should throw mud at you, you’re flabbergasted that I should be the person. You’re impotently angry. Gradually a desire for revenge overcomes every other feeling; you’re going to hurt me. A little thought springs up, and you wonder whether I shall summon you for assault; you decide to risk it Another little thought—will you hit me on the body or the head? You decide the head because it’ll hurt more. Still another thought—how hard to hit? You don’t want to kill me and you don’t want to make me blind. You decide to be on the safe side and hit rather gently. Then—then at last you’re ready with the cane. Is that right?”
I thought it over very carefully.
“I suppose so. But no one can see those thoughts succeeding each other. There isn’t time.”
The Seraph shook his head in polite contradiction.
“The same sort of thing was said when instantaneous photography was introduced. You got pictures of horses galloping, and people solemnly assured you it was physically impossible for horses’ legs to get into such attitudes.”
“How do you account for it?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Eyes different from other people’s, I suppose.”
I could see he preferred to discuss the power in the abstract rather than in relation to himself, but my curiosity was piqued.
“Anything else?” I asked.
He listened for a moment; the Club was sunk in profound silence. Then I heard him imitating a familiar deep voice: “Oh—er—porter, taxi, please.”
“Why d’you do that?” I asked, not quite certain of his meaning.
“Don’t you know whose voice that was supposed to be?”
“It was Arthur Roden’s,” I said.
He nodded. “Just leaving the Club.”
I jumped up and ran into the hall.
“Is Sir Arthur Roden in the Club?” I asked the porter.
“Just left this moment, sir,” he answered.
I came back and sat down opposite the Seraph.
“I want to hear more about this,” I said. “I’m beginning to get interested.”
He shook his head.
“Why not?” I persisted.
“I don’t like talking about it. I don’t understand it, there’s a lot more that I haven’t told you about. I only—”
“Well?”
“I only told you this much because you didn’t like to see me taking drugs. I wanted to show you my nerves were rather—abnormal.”
“As if I didn’t know that! Why don’t you do something for them?”
“Such as?”
“Occupy your mind more.”
“My mind’s about as fully occupied as it will stand,” he answered as we left the dining-room and went in search of our coats.
As I was staying at the Savoy and he was living in Adelphi Terrace, our homeward roads were the same. We started in silence, and before we had gone five yards I knew the grey-white powder would be called in aid that night. He was in a state of acute nervous excitement; the arm that linked itself in mine trembled appreciably through two thicknesses of coat, and I could feel him pressing against my side like a frightened woman. Once he begged me not to repeat our recent conversation.
As we entered the Strand, the sight of the theatres gave me a fresh train of thought.
“You ought to write a book, Seraph,” I said with the easy abruptness one employs in advancing these general propositions.
“What about?”
“Anything. Novel, play, psychological study. Look here, my young friend, psychology in literature is the power of knowing what’s going on in people’s minds, and being able to communicate that knowledge to paper. How many writers possess the power? If you look at the rot that
gets published, the rot that gets produced at the theatres, my question answers itself. At the present day there aren’t six psychologists above the mediocre in all England; barring Henry James there’s been no great psychologist since Dostoievski. And this power that other people attain by years of heart-breaking labour and observation, comes to you—by some freak of nature—ready made. You could write a good book, Seraph; why don’t you?”
“I might try.”
“I know what that means.”
“I don’t think you do,” he answered. “I pay a lot of attention to your advice.”
“Thank you,” I said with an ironical bow.
“I do. Five years ago, in Morocco, you gave me the same advice.”
“I’m still waiting to see the result.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me to write a book, I wrote it. You’ve read it.”
“In my sleep?”
“I hope not.”
“Name, please? I’ve never so much as seen the outside of it.”
“I didn’t write in my own name.”
“Name of book and pseudonym?” I persisted.
His lips opened, and then shut in silence.
“I shan’t tell you,” he murmured after a pause.
“It won’t go any further,” I promised.
“I don’t want even you to know.”
“Seraph, we’ve got no secrets. At least I hope not.”
We had come alongside the entrance to the Savoy, but neither of us thought of turning in.
“Name, please?” I repeated after we had walked in silence to the Wellington Street crossing and were waiting for a stream of traffic to pass on towards Waterloo Bridge.
“‘The Marriage of Gretchen,’” he answered.
“‘The History of David Copperfield,’” I suggested.
“You see, you won’t believe me,” he complained.
“Try something a little less well—known: get hold of a book that’s been published anonymously.”
“‘Gretchen’ was published over a nom de plume.”
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