“So do I,” said her sister. “Tibby only cares for cultured females singing Brahms.” And when they joined him she said rather sharply: “Why didn’t you make that young man welcome, Tibby? You must do the host a little, you know. You ought to have taken his hat and coaxed him into stopping, instead of letting him be swamped by screaming women.”
Tibby sighed, and drew a long strand of hair over his forehead.
“Oh, it’s no good looking superior. I mean what I say.”
“Leave Tibby alone!” said Margaret, who could not bear her brother to be scolded.
“Here’s the house a regular hen-coop!” grumbled Helen.
“Oh, my dear!” protested Mrs. Munt. “How can you say such dreadful things! The number of men you get here has always astonished me. If there is any danger it’s the other way round.”
“Yes, but it’s the wrong sort of men, Helen means.”
“No, I don’t,” corrected Helen. “We get the right sort of man, but the wrong side of him, and I say that’s Tibby’s fault. There ought to be a something about the house—an—I don’t know what.”
“A touch of the W’s, perhaps?”
Helen put out her tongue.
“Who are the W’s?” asked Tibby.
“The W’s are things I and Meg and Aunt Juley know about and you don’t, so there!”
“I suppose that ours is a female house,” said Margaret, “and one must just accept it. No, Aunt Juley, I don’t mean that this house is full of women. I am trying to say something much more clever. I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father’s time. Now I’m sure you understand! Well, I’ll give you another example. It’ll shock you, but I don’t care. Suppose Queen Victoria gave a dinner-party, and that the guests had been Leighton, Millais, Swinburne, Rossetti, Meredith, Fitzgerald, etc. Do you suppose that the atmosphere of that dinner would have been artistic? Heavens, no! The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that. So with our house—it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn’t effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but won’t, sounded irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn’t brutal.”
“That house being the W’s house, I presume,” said Tibby.
“You’re not going to be told about the W’s, my child,” Helen cried, “so don’t you think it. And on the other hand, I don’t the least mind if you find out, so don’t you think you’ve done anything clever, in either case. Give me a cigarette.”
“You do what you can for the house,” said Margaret. “The drawing-room reeks of smoke.”
“If you smoked too, the house might suddenly turn masculine. Atmosphere is probably a question of touch and go. Even at Queen Victoria’s dinner-party—if something had been just a little Different—perhaps if she’d worn a clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin.”
“With an India shawl over her shoulders—”
“Fastened at the bosom with a Cairngorm-pin.”
Bursts of disloyal laughter—you must remember that they are half German—greeted these suggestions, and Margaret said pensively, “How inconceivable it would be if the Royal Family cared about Art.” And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly. Beyond them the thoroughfare roared gently—a tide that could never be quiet, while in the east, invisible behind the smokes of Wapping, the moon was rising.
“That reminds me, Margaret. We might have taken that young man into the dining-room, at all events. Only the majolica plate—and that is so firmly set in the wall. I am really distressed that he had no tea.”
For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.
CHAPTER VI
WE are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.
The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilisations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, “All men are equal—all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slip into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.
As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that he was as good as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride, he tried to wound them in return. They were probably not ladies. Would real ladies have asked him to tea? They were certainly ill-natured and cold. At each step his feeling of superiority increased. Would a real lady have talked about stealing an umbrella? Perhaps they were thieves after all, and if he had gone into the house they would have clapped a chloroformed handkerchief over his face. He walked on complacently as far as the Houses of Parliament. There an empty stomach asserted itself, and told him that he was a fool.
“Evening, Mr. Bast.”
“Evening, Mr. Dealtry.”
“Nice evening.”
“Evening.”
Mr. Dealtry, a fellow clerk, passed on, and Leonard stood wondering whether he would take the tram as far as a penny would take him, or whether he would walk. He decided to walk—it is no good giving in, and he had spent money enough at Queen’s Hall—and he walked over Westminster Bridge, in front of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and through the immense tunnel that passes under the South-Western main line at Vauxhall. In the tunnel he paused and listened to the roar of the trains. A sharp pain darted through his head, and he was conscious of the exact form of his eye sockets. He pushed on for another mile, and did not slacken speed until he stood at the entrance of a road called Camelia Road which was at present his home.
Here he stopped again, and glanced suspiciously to right and left, like a rabbit that is going to bolt into its hole. A block of flats, constructed with extreme cheapness, towered on either hand. Farther down the road two more blocks were being built, and beyond these an old house was being demolished to accommodate another pair. It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality—bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain as the city receives more and more men upon her soil. Camelia Road would soon stand out like a fortress, and command, for a little, an extensive view. Only for a little. Plans were out for the erection of flats in Magnolia Road also. And again a few years, and all the flats in either road might be pulled