‘Why,’ said Merton, ‘by a scientific and thoroughly organised system of disengaging or disentangling. We enlist a lot of girls and fellows like ourselves, beautiful, attractive, young, or not so young, well connected, intellectual, athletic, and of all sorts of types, but all broke, all without visible means of subsistence. They are people welcome in country houses, but travelling third class, and devilishly perplexed about how to tip the servants, how to pay if they lose at bridge, and so forth. We enlist them, we send them out on demand, carefully selecting our agents to meet the circumstances in each case. They go down and disentangle the amorous by—well, by entangling them. The lovers are off with the old love, the love which causes all the worry, without being on with the new love—our agent. The thing quietly fizzles out.’
‘Quietly!’ Logan snorted. ‘I like “quietly.” They would be on with the new love. Don’t you see, you born gomeral, that the person, man or woman, who deserts the inconvenient A.—I put an A. B. case—falls in love with your agent B., and your B. is, by the nature of the thing, more ineligible than A.—too poor. A babe could see that. You disappoint me, Merton.’
‘You state,’ said Merton, ‘one of the practical difficulties which I foresaw. Not that it does not suit us very well. Our comrade and friend, man or woman, gets a chance of a good marriage, and, Logan, there is no better thing. But parents and guardians would not stand much of that: of people marrying our agents.’
‘Of course they wouldn’t. Your idea is crazy.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Merton. ‘The resources of science are not yet exhausted. You have heard of the epoch-making discovery of Jenner, and its beneficent results in checking the ravages of smallpox, that scourge of the human race?’
‘Oh don’t talk like a printed book,’ Logan remonstrated. ‘Everybody has heard of vaccination.’
‘And you are aware that similar prophylactic measures have been adopted, with more or less of success, in the case of other diseases?’
‘I am aware,’ said Logan, ‘that you are in danger of personal suffering at my hands, as I already warned you.’
‘What is love but a disease?’ Merton asked dreamily. ‘A French savant, Monsieur Janet, says that nobody ever falls in love except when he is a little bit off colour: I forget the French equivalent.’
‘I am coming for you,’ Logan arose in wrath.
‘Sit down. Well, your objection (which it did not need the eyes of an Argus to discover) is that the patients, the lovers young, whose loves are disapproved of by the family, will fall in love with our agents, insist on marrying them, and so the last state of these afflicted parents—or children—will be worse than the first. Is that your objection?’
‘Of course it is; and crushing at that,’ Logan replied.
‘Then science suggests prophylactic measures: something akin to vaccination,’ Merton explained. ‘The agents must be warranted “immune.” Nice new word!’
‘How?’
‘The object,’ Merton answered, ‘is to make it impossible, or highly improbable, that our agents, after disentangling the affections of the patients, curing them of one attack, will accept their addresses, offered in a second fit of the fever. In brief, the agents must not marry the patients, or not often.’
‘But how can you prevent them if they want to do it?’
‘By a process akin, in the emotional region of our strangely blended nature, to inoculation.’
‘Hanged if I understand you. You keep on repeating yourself. You dodder!’
‘Our agents must have got the disease already, the pretty fever; and be safe against infection. There must be on the side of the agent a prior attachment. Now, don’t interrupt, there always is a prior attachment. You are in love, I am in love, he, she, and they, all of the broken brigade, are in love; all the more because they have not a chance. “Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth.” So, you see, our agents will be quite safe not to crown the flame of the patients, not to accept them, if they do propose, or expect a proposal. “Every security from infection guaranteed.” There is the felt want. Here is the remedy; not warranted absolutely painless, but salutary, and tending to the amelioration of the species. So we have only to enlist the agents, and send a few advertisements to the papers. My first editions must go. Farewell Shelley, Tennyson, Keats, uncut Waverleys, Byron, The Waltz, early Kiplings (at a vast reduction on account of the overflooded state of the market). Farewell Kilmarnock edition of Burns, and Colonel Lovelace, his Lucasta, and Tamerlane by Mr. Poe, and the rest. The money must be raised.’ Merton looked resigned.
‘I have nothing to sell,’ said Logan, ‘but an entire set of clubs by Philp. Guaranteed unique, and in exquisite condition.’
‘You must part with them,’ said Merton. ‘We are like Palissy the potter, feeding his furnace with the drawing-room furniture.’
‘But how about the recruiting?’ Logan asked. ‘It’s like one of these novels where you begin by collecting desperados from all quarters, and then the shooting commences.’
‘Well, we need not ransack the Colonies,’ Merton replied. ‘Patronise British industries. We know some fellows already and some young women.’
‘I say,’ Logan interrupted, ‘what a dab at disentangling Lumley would have been if he had not got that Professorship of Toxicology at Edinburgh, and been able to marry Miss Wingan at last!’
‘Yes, and Miss Wingan would have been useful. What a lively girl, ready for everything,’ Merton replied.
‘But these we can still get at,’ Logan asked: ‘how are you to be sure that they are—vaccinated?’
‘The inquiry is delicate,’ Merton admitted, ‘but the fact may be almost taken for granted. We must give a dinner (a preliminary expense) to promising collaborators, and champagne is a great promoter of success in delicate inquiries. In vino veritas.’
‘I don’t know if there is money in it, but there is a kind of larkiness,’ Logan admitted.
‘Yes, I think there will be larks.’
‘About the dinner? We are not to have Johnnies disguised as hansom cabbies driving about, and picking up men and women that look the right sort, in the streets, and compelling them to come in?’
‘Oh no, that expense we can cut. It would not do with the women, obviously: heavens, what queer fishes that net would catch! The flag of the Disentanglers shall never be stained by—anything. You know some likely agents: I know some likely agents. They will suggest others, as our field of usefulness widens. Of course there is the oath of secrecy: we shall administer that after dinner to each guest apart.’
‘Jolly difficult for those that are mixed up with the press to keep an oath of secrecy!’ Logan spoke as a press man.
‘We shall only have to do with gentlemen and ladies. The oath is not going to sanction itself with religious terrors. Good form—we shall appeal to a “sense of form”—now so widely diffused by University Extension Lectures on the Beautiful, the Fitting, the—’
‘Oh shut up!’ cried Logan. ‘You always haver after midnight. For, look here, here is an objection; this precious plan of yours, parents and others could work it for themselves. I dare say they do. When they see the affections of a son, or a daughter, or a bereaved father beginning to stray towards A., they probably invite B. to come and stay and act as a lightning conductor. They don’t need us.’
‘Oh, don’t they? They seldom have an eligible and satisfactory lightning conductor at hand, somebody to whom they can trust their dear one. Or, if they have, the dear one has already been bored with the intended lightning conductor (who is old,