The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy


The curtain came down upon the act, and he looked at the lady next him.
She was shrugging her shoulders at her husband, whose face was healthy
and offended.

"I do dislike these unhealthy women," he was saying, but catching
Shelton's eye he turned square in his seat and sniffed ironically.

The face of Shelton's friend beyond, composed, satirical as ever, was
clothed with a mask of scornful curiosity, as if he had been listening to
something that had displeased him not a little. The goggle-eyed man was
yawning. Shelton turned to Halidome:

"Can you stand this sort of thing?" said he.

"No; I call that scene a bit too hot," replied his friend.

Shelton wriggled; he had meant to say it was not hot enough.

"I'll bet you anything," he said, "I know what's going to happen now.
You'll have that old ass--what's his name?--lunching off cutlets and
champagne to fortify himself--for a lecture to the wife. He'll show her
how unhealthy her feelings are--I know him--and he'll take her hand and
say, 'Dear lady, is there anything in this poor world but the good
opinion of Society?' and he'll pretend to laugh at himself for saying it;
but you'll see perfectly well that the old woman means it. And then
he'll put her into a set of circumstances that are n't her own but his
version of them, and show her the only way of salvation is to kiss her
husband"; and Shelton grinned. "Anyway, I'll bet you anything he takes
her hand and says, 'Dear lady.'"

Halidome turned on him the disapproval of his eyes, and again he said,

"I think Pirbright 's ripping!"

But as Shelton had predicted, so it turned out, amidst great applause.




CHAPTER V

THE GOOD CITIZEN

Leaving the theatre, they paused a moment in the hall to don their coats;
a stream of people with spotless bosoms eddied round the doors, as if in
momentary dread of leaving this hothouse of false morals and emotions for
the wet, gusty streets, where human plants thrive and die, human weeds
flourish and fade under the fresh, impartial skies. The lights revealed
innumerable solemn faces, gleamed innumerably on jewels, on the silk of
hats, then passed to whiten a pavement wet with newly-fallen rain, to
flare on horses, on the visages of cabmen, and stray, queer objects that
do not bear the light.

"Shall we walk?" asked Halidome.

"Has it ever struck you," answered Shelton, "that in a play nowadays
there's always a 'Chorus of Scandalmongers' which seems to have acquired
the attitude of God?"

Halidome cleared his throat, and there was something portentous in the
sound.

"You're so d---d fastidious," was his answer.

"I've a prejudice for keeping the two things separate," went on Shelton.
"That ending makes me sick."

"Why?" replied Halidome. "What other end is possible? You don't want a
play to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth."

"But this does."

Halidome increased his stride, already much too long; for in his walk, as
in all other phases of his life, he found it necessary to be in front.

"How do you mean?" he asked urbanely; "it's better than the woman making
a fool of herself."

"I'm thinking of the man."

"What man?"

"The husband."

"What 's the matter with him? He was a bit of a bounder, certainly."

"I can't understand any man wanting to live with a woman who doesn't want
him."

Some note of battle in Shelton's voice, rather than the sentiment itself,
caused his friend to reply with dignity:

"There's a lot of nonsense talked about that sort of thing. Women don't
really care; it's only what's put into their heads."

"That's much the same as saying to a starving man: 'You don't really want
anything; it's only what's put into your head!' You are begging the
question, my friend."

But nothing was more calculated to annoy Halidome than to tell him he was
"begging the question," for he prided himself on being strong in logic.

"That be d---d," he said.

"Not at all, old chap. Here is a case where a woman wants her freedom,
and you merely answer that she dogs n't want it."

"Women like that are impossible; better leave them out of court."

Shelton pondered this and smiled; he had recollected an acquaintance of
his own, who, when his wife had left him, invented the theory that she
was mad, and this struck him now as funny. But then he thought: "Poor
devil! he was bound to call her mad! If he didn't, it would be
confessing himself distasteful; however true, you can't expect a man to
consider himself that." But a glance at his friend's eye warned him that
he, too, might think his wife mad in such a case.

"Surely," he said, "even if she's his wife, a man's bound to behave like
a gentleman."

"Depends on whether she behaves like a lady."

"Does it? I don't see the connection."

Halidome paused in the act of turning the latch-key in his door; there
was a rather angry smile in his fine eyes.

"My dear chap," he said, "you're too sentimental altogether."

The word "sentimental" nettled Shelton. "A gentleman either is a
gentleman or he is n't; what has it to do with the way other people
behave?"

Halidome turned the key in the lock and opened the door into his hall,
where the firelight fell on the decanters and huge chairs drawn towards
the blaze.

"No, Bird," he said, resuming his urbanity, and gathering his coat-tails
in his hands; "it's all very well to talk, but wait until you're married.
A man must be master, and show it, too."

An idea occurred to Shelton.

"Look here, Hal," he said: "what should you do if your wife got tired of
you?"

The expression on Halidome's face was a mixture of amusement and
contempt.

"I don't mean anything personal, of course, but apply the situation to
yourself."

Halidome took out a toothpick, used it brusquely, and responded:

"I shouldn't stand any humbug--take her travelling; shake her mind up.
She'd soon come round."

"But suppose she really loathed you?"

Halidome cleared his throat; the idea was so obviously indecent. How
could anybody loathe him? With great composure, however, regarding
Shelton as if he were a forward but amusing child, he answered:

"There are a great many things to be taken into consideration."

"It appears to me," said Shelton, "to be a question of common pride. How
can you, ask anything of a woman who doesn't want to give it."

His friend's voice became judicial.

"A man ought not to suffer," he said, poring over his whisky, "because a
woman gets hysteria. You have to think of Society, your children, house,
money arrangements, a thousand things. It's all very well to talk. How
do you like this whisky?"

"The part of the good citizen, in fact," said Shelton,
"self-preservation!"

"Common-sense," returned his friend; "I believe in justice before
sentiment." He drank, and callously blew smoke at Shelton. "Besides,
there are many people with religious views about it."

"It's always seemed to me," said Shelton, "to be quaint that people
should assert that marriage gives them the right to 'an eye for an eye,'
and call themselves Christians. Did you ever know anybody stand on their
rights except out of wounded pride or for the sake of their own comfort?
Let them call their reasons what they like, you know as well as I do that
it's cant."

"I don't know about that," said Halidome, more and more superior as
Shelton grew more warm; "when you stand on your rights, you do it for the
sake of Society as well as for your own. If you want to do away with
marriage, why don't you say so?"

"But I don't," said Shelton, "is it likely? Why, I'm going--" He
stopped without adding the words "to be married myself," for it suddenly
occurred to him that the reason was not the most lofty and philosophic in
the world. "All I can say is," he went on soberly, "that you can't make
a horse drink by driving him. Generosity is the surest way of tightening
the knot with people who've any sense of decency; as to the rest, the
chief thing is to prevent their breeding."

Halidome smiled.

"You're a rum chap," he said.

Shelton jerked his cigarette into the fire.

"I tell you what"--for late at night a certain power of vision came to
him--"it's humbug to talk of doing things for the sake of Society; it's
nothing but the instinct to keep our own heads above the water."

But Halidome remained unruffled.

"All right," he said, "call it that. I don't see why I should go to the
wall; it wouldn't do any good."

"You admit, then," said Shelton, "that our morality is the sum total of
everybody's private instinct of self-preservation?"

Halidome stretched his splendid frame and yawned.

"I don't know," he began, "that I should quite call it that--"

But the compelling complacency of his fine eyes, the dignified posture of
his healthy body, the lofty slope of his narrow forehead, the perfectly
humane look of his cultivated brutality, struck Shelton as ridiculous.

"Hang it, Hall" he cried, jumping from his chair, "what an old fraud you
are! I'll be off."

"No, look here!" said Halidome; the faintest shade of doubt had appeared
upon his face; he took Shelton by a lapel: "You're quite wrong--"

"Very likely; good-night, old chap!"

Shelton walked home, letting the spring wind into him. It was Saturday,
and he passed many silent couples. In every little patch of shadow he
could see two forms standing or sitting close together, and in their
presence Words the Impostors seemed to hold their tongues. The wind
rustled the buds; the stars, one moment bright as diamonds, vanished the
next. In the lower streets a large part of the world was under the
influence of drink, but by this Shelton was far from being troubled. It
seemed better than Drama, than dressing-bagged men, unruffled women, and
padded points of view, better than the immaculate solidity of his
friend's possessions.

"So," he reflected, "it's right for every reason, social, religious, and
convenient, to inflict one's society where it's not desired. There are
obviously advantages about the married state; charming to feel
respectable while you're acting in a way that in any other walk of life
would bring on you contempt. If old Halidome showed that he was tired of
me, and I continued to visit him, he'd think me a bit of a cad; but if
his wife were to tell him she couldn't stand him, he'd still consider
himself a perfect gentleman if he persisted in giving her the burden of
his society; and he has the cheek to bring religion into it--a religion
that says, 'Do unto others!'"

But in this he was unjust to Halidome, forgetting how impossible it was
for him to believe that a woman could not stand him. He reached his
rooms, and, the more freely to enjoy the clear lamplight, the soft, gusty
breeze, and waning turmoil of the streets, waited a moment before
entering.

"I wonder," thought he, "if I shall turn out a cad when I marry, like
that chap in the play. It's natural. We all want our money's worth, our
pound of flesh! Pity we use such fine words--'Society, Religion,
Morality.' Humbug!"

He went in, and, throwing his window open, remained there a long time,
his figure outlined against the lighted room for the benefit of the dark
square below, his hands in his pockets, his head down, a reflective frown
about his eyes. A half-intoxicated old ruffian, a policeman, and a man
in a straw hat had stopped below, and were holding a palaver.

"Yus," the old ruffian said, "I'm a rackety old blank; but what I say is,
if we wus all alike, this would n't be a world!"

They went their way, and before the listener's eyes there rose Antonia's
face, with its unruffled brow; Halidome's, all health and dignity; the
forehead of the goggle-eyed man, with its line of hair parted in the
centre, and brushed across. A light seemed to illumine the plane of
their existence, as the electric lamp with the green shade had illumined
the pages of the Matthew Arnold; serene before Shelton's vision lay that
Elysium, untouched by passion or extremes of any kind, autocratic;
complacent, possessive, and well-kept as any Midland landscape. Healthy,
wealthy, wise! No room but for perfection, self-preservation, the
survival of the fittest! "The part of the good citizen," he thought:
"no, if we were all alike, this would n't be a world!"




CHAPTER VI

MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT

"My dear Richard" (wrote Shelton's uncle the next day), "I shall be glad
to see you at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon upon the question of your
marriage settlement...." At that hour accordingly Shelton made his way
to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where in fat black letters the names "Paramor
and Herring (Commissioners for Oaths)" were written on the wall of a
stone entrance. He ascended the solid steps with nervousness, and by a
small red-haired boy was introduced to a back room on the first floor.
Here, seated at a table in the very centre, as if he thereby better
controlled his universe, a pug-featured gentleman, without a beard, was
writing. He paused. "Ow, Mr. Richard!" he said; "glad to see you, sir.
Take a chair. Your uncle will be disengaged in 'arf a minute"; and in the
tone of his allusion to his employer was the satirical approval that
comes with long and faithful service. "He will do everything himself,"
he went on, screwing up his sly, greenish, honest eyes, "and he 's not a
young man."

Shelton never saw his uncle's clerk without marvelling at the prosperity
deepening upon his face. In place of the look of harassment which on
most faces begins to grow after the age of fifty, his old friend's
countenance, as though in sympathy with the nation, had expanded--a
little greasily, a little genially, a little coarsely--every time he met
it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was
spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that
its owner could never be in the wrong.

"I hope you're well, sir," he resumed: "most important for you to have
your health now you're going-to"--and, feeling for the delicate way to
put it, he involuntarily winked--"to become a family man. We saw it in
the paper. My wife said to me the other morning at breakfast: 'Bob,
here's a Mr. Richard Paramor Shelton goin' to be married. Is that any
relative of your Mr. Shelton?' 'My dear,' I said to her, 'it's the very
man!'"

It disquieted Shelton to perceive that his old friend did not pass the
whole of his life at that table writing in the centre of the room, but
that somewhere (vistas of little grey houses rose before his eyes) he
actually lived another life where someone called him "Bob." Bob! And
this, too, was a revelation. Bob! Why, of course, it was the only name
for him! A bell rang.

"That's your uncle"; and again the head clerk's voice sounded ironical.
"Good-bye, sir."

He seemed to clip off intercourse as one clips off electric light.
Shelton left him writing, and preceded the red-haired boy to an enormous
room in the front where his uncle waited.

Edmund Paramor was a medium-sized and upright man of seventy, whose brown
face was perfectly clean-shaven. His grey, silky hair was brushed in a
cock's comb from his fine forehead, bald on the left side. He stood
before the hearth facing the room, and his figure had the springy
abruptness of men who cannot fatten. There was a certain youthfulness,
too, in his eyes, yet they had a look as though he had been through fire;
and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles. The room was
like the man--morally large, void of red-tape and almost void of
furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers littered
up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of the law
reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose in a
glass of water. It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity, who
went to the heart of things, despised haggling, and before whose smiles
the more immediate kinds of humbug faded.

"Well, Dick," said he, "how's your mother?"

Shelton replied that his mother was all right.

"Tell her that I'm going to sell her Easterns after all, and put into
this Brass thing. You can say it's safe, from me."

Shelton made a face.

"Mother," said he, "always believes things are safe."

His uncle looked through him with his keen, half-suffering glance, and up
went the corners of his mouth.

"She's splendid," he said.

"Yes," said Shelton, "splendid."

The transaction, however, did not interest him; his uncle's judgment in
such matters had a breezy soundness he would never dream of questioning.

"Well, about your settlement"; and, touching a bell three times, Mr.
Paramor walked up and down the room. "Bring me the draft of Mr.
Richard's marriage settlement."

The stalwart commissionaire reappearing with a document--"Now then,
Dick," said Mr. Paramor. "She 's not bringing anything into settlement,
I understand; how 's that?"

"I did n't want it," replied Shelton, unaccountably ashamed.

Mr. Paramor's lips quivered; he drew the draft closer, took up a blue
pencil, and, squeezing Shelton's arm, began to read. The latter,
following his uncle's rapid exposition of the clauses, was relieved when
he paused suddenly.

"If you die and she marries again," said Mr. Paramor, "she forfeits her
life interest--see?"

"Oh!" said Shelton; "wait a minute, Uncle Ted."

Mr. Paramor waited, biting his pencil; a smile flickered on his mouth,
and was decorously subdued. It was Shelton's turn to walk about.

"If she marries again," he repeated to himself.

Mr. Paramor was a keen fisherman; he watched his nephew as he might have
watched a fish he had just landed.

"It's very usual," he remarked.

Shelton took another turn.

"She forfeits," thought he; "exactly."

When he was dead, he would have no other way of seeing that she continued
to belong to him. Exactly!

Mr. Paramor's haunting eyes were fastened on his nephew's face.

"Well, my dear," they seemed to say, "what 's the matter?"

Exactly! Why should she have his money if she married again? She would
forfeit it. There was comfort in the thought. Shelton came back and
carefully reread the clause, to put the thing on a purely business basis,
and disguise the real significance of what was passing in his mind.

"If I die and she marries again," he repeated aloud, "she forfeits."

What wiser provision for a man passionately in love could possibly have
been devised? His uncle's eye travelled beyond him, humanely turning
from the last despairing wriggles of his fish.

"I don't want to tie her," said Shelton suddenly.

The corners of Mr. Paramour's mouth flew up.

"You want the forfeiture out?" he asked.

The blood rushed into Shelton's face; he felt he had been detected in a
piece of sentiment.

"Ye-es," he stammered.

"Sure?"

"Quite!" The answer was a little sulky.

Her uncle's pencil descended on the clause, and he resumed the reading of
the draft, but Shelton could not follow it; he was too much occupied in
considering exactly why Mr. Paramor had been amused, and to do this he
was obliged to keep his eyes upon him. Those features, just pleasantly
rugged; the springy poise of the figure; the hair neither straight nor
curly, neither short nor long; the haunting look of his eyes and the
humorous look of his mouth; his clothes neither shabby nor dandified; his
serviceable, fine hands; above all, the equability of the hovering blue
pencil, conveyed the impression of a perfect balance between heart and
head, sensibility and reason, theory and its opposite.

"'During coverture,'" quoted Mr. Paramor, pausing again, "you understand,
of course, if you don't get on, and separate, she goes on taking?"

If they didn't get on! Shelton smiled. Mr. Paramor did not smile, and
again Shelton had the sense of having knocked up against something poised
but firm. He remarked irritably:

"If we 're not living together, all the more reason for her having it."

This time his uncle smiled. It was difficult for Shelton to feel angry
at that ironic merriment, with its sudden ending; it was too impersonal
to irritate: it was too concerned with human nature.

"If--hum--it came to the other thing," said Mr. Paramor, "the
settlement's at an end as far as she 's concerned. We 're bound to look
at every case, you know, old boy."

The memory of the play and his conversation with Halidome was still
strong in Shelton. He was not one of those who could not face the notion
of transferred affections--at a safe distance.

"All right, Uncle Ted," said he. For one mad moment he was attacked by
the desire to "throw in" the case of divorce. Would it not be common
chivalry to make her independent, able to change her affections if she
wished, unhampered by monetary troubles? You only needed to take out the
words "during coverture."

Almost anxiously he looked into his uncle's face. There was no meanness
there, but neither was there encouragement in that comprehensive brow
with its wide sweep of hair. "Quixotism," it seemed to say, "has merits,
but--" The room, too, with its wide horizon and tall windows, looking as
if it dealt habitually in common-sense, discouraged him. Innumerable men
of breeding and the soundest principles must have bought their wives in
here. It was perfumed with the atmosphere of wisdom and law-calf. The
aroma of Precedent was strong; Shelton swerved his lance, and once more
settled down to complete the purchase of his wife.

"I can't conceive what you're--in such a hurry for; you 're not going to
be married till the autumn," said Mr. Paramor, finishing at last.

Replacing the blue pencil in the rack, he took the red rose from the
glass, and sniffed at it. "Will you come with me as far as Pall Mall? I
'm going to take an afternoon off; too cold for Lord's, I suppose?"

They walked into the Strand.

"Have you seen this new play of Borogrove's?" asked Shelton, as they
passed the theatre to which he had been with Halidome.

"I never go to modern plays," replied Mr. Paramor; "too d---d gloomy."

Shelton glanced at him; he wore his hat rather far back on his head, his
eyes haunted the street in front; he had shouldered his umbrella.

"Psychology 's not in your line, Uncle Ted?"

"Is that what they call putting into words things that can't be put in
words?"

"The French succeed in doing it," replied Shelton, "and the Russians; why
should n't we?"

Mr. Paramor stopped to look in at a fishmonger's.

"What's right for the French and Russians, Dick," he said "is wrong for
us. When we begin to be real, we only really begin to be false. I should
like to have had the catching of that fellow; let's send him to your
mother." He went in and bought a salmon:

"Now, my dear," he continued, as they went on, "do you tell me that it's
decent for men and women on the stage to writhe about like eels? Is n't
life bad enough already?"

It suddenly struck Shelton that, for all his smile, his uncle's face had
a look of crucifixion. It was, perhaps, only the stronger sunlight in
the open spaces of Trafalgar Square.

"I don't know," he said; "I think I prefer the truth."

"Bad endings and the rest," said Mr. Paramor, pausing under one of
Nelson's lions and taking Shelton by a button. "Truth 's the very
devil!"

He stood there, very straight, his eyes haunting his nephew's face; there
seemed to Shelton a touching muddle in his optimism--a muddle of
tenderness and of intolerance, of truth and second-handedness. Like the
lion above him, he seemed to be defying Life to make him look at her.

"No, my dear," he said, handing sixpence to a sweeper; "feelings are
snakes! only fit to be kept in bottles with tight corks. You won't come
to my club? Well, good-bye, old boy; my love to your mother when you see
her"; and turning up the Square, he left Shelton to go on to his own
club, feeling that he had parted, not from his uncle, but from the nation
of which they were both members by birth and blood and education.




CHAPTER VII

THE CLUB

He went into the library of his club, and took up Burke's Peerage. The
words his uncle had said to him on hearing his engagement had been these:
"Dennant! Are those the Holm Oaks Dennants? She was a Penguin."

No one who knew Mr. Paramor connected him with snobbery, but there had
been an "Ah! that 's right; this is due to us" tone about the saying.

Shelton hunted for the name of Baltimore: "Charles Penguin, fifth Baron
Baltimore. Issue: Alice, b. 184-, m. 186-Algernon Dennant, Esq., of
Holm Oaks, Cross Eaton, Oxfordshire." He put down the Peerage and took
up the 'Landed Gentry': "Dennant, Algernon Cuffe, eldest son of the late
Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq., J. P., and Irene, 2nd daur. of the Honble.
Philip and Lady Lillian March Mallow; ed. Eton and Ch. Ch., Oxford, J. P.
for Oxfordshire. Residence, Holm Oaks," etc., etc. Dropping the 'Landed
Gentry', he took up a volume of the 'Arabian Nights', which some member
had left reposing on the book-rest of his chair, but instead of reading
he kept looking round the room. In almost every seat, reading or
snoozing, were gentlemen who, in their own estimation, might have married
Penguins. For the first time it struck him with what majestic
leisureliness they turned the pages of their books, trifled with their
teacups, or lightly snored. Yet no two were alike--a tall man-with dark
moustache, thick hair, and red, smooth cheeks; another, bald, with
stooping shoulders; a tremendous old buck, with a grey, pointed beard and
large white waistcoat; a clean-shaven dapper man past middle age, whose
face was like a bird's; a long, sallow, misanthrope; and a sanguine
creature fast asleep. Asleep or awake, reading or snoring, fat or thin,
hairy or bald, the insulation of their red or pale faces was complete.
They were all the creatures of good form. Staring at them or reading the
Arabian Nights Shelton spent the time before dinner. He had not been
long seated in the dining-room when a distant connection strolled up and
took the next table.