Simon the Jester Part 17

By some extraordinary process of the contortionist's art, she curled herself out of her chair on to the hearthrug and knelt before me, her hands clasped on my knee.

"You're not angry with me, are you?" she asked in her rich contralto.

I took both her hands, rose, and a.s.sisted her to rise. I was not going to be mesmerised again.

"Of course not," I laughed. Indeed my wrath had fallen from me.

Her bosom heaved with a sigh. "I'm so glad," she said. Her breath fanned my cheek. It was aromatic, intoxicating. Her lips are ripe and full.

"You had better find your husband as soon as possible," said I.

"Do you think so?" she asked.

"Yes, I do. And it strikes me I had better go and find him myself."

She started. "You?"

"Yes," I said. "The Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique are probably in Africa, and the doctors have ordered me to winter in a hot climate, and I shall go on writing a million letters a day if I stay here, which will kill me off in no time with brain f.a.g and writer's cramp. Your husband will be what the newspapers call an objective. Good-bye!" said I, "I'll bring him to you dead or alive."

And without knowing it at the time, I made an exit as magnificent as that of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.

CHAPTER VIII

I do not know whether I ought to laugh or rail. Judged by the ordinary canons that regulate the respectable life to which I have been accustomed, I am little short of a lunatic. The question is: Does the recognition of lunacy in oneself tend to amus.e.m.e.nt or anger? I compromise with myself. I am angry at having been forced on an insane adventure, but the prospect of its absurdity gives me a considerable pleasure.

Let me set it down once and for all. I resent Lola Brandt's existence.

When I am out of her company I can contemplate her calmly from my vantage of social and intellectual superiority. I can pooh-pooh her fascinations. I can crack jokes on her shortcomings. I can see perfectly well that I am Simon de Gex, M.P. (I have not yet been appointed to the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds), of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a barrister of the Inner Temple (though a brief would cause me as much dismay as a command to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden), formerly of the Foreign Office, a man of the world, a diner-out, a hardened jester at feminine wiles, a cynical student of philosophy, a man of birth, and, I believe, breeding with a cultivated taste in wine and food and furniture, one also who, but for a little pain inside, would soon become a Member of His Majesty's Government, and eventually drop the "Esquire" at the end of his name and stick "The Right Honourable" in front of it--in fact, a most superior, wise and important person; and I can also see perfectly well that Lola Brandt is an uneducated, lowly bred, vagabond female, with a taste, as I have remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and the sound of her overpower me; I proclaim her rich and remarkable personality; and I bask in her lazy smiles like any silly undergraduate whose knowledge of women has. .h.i.therto been limited to his sisters and the common little girl at the tobacconist's.

I say I resent it. I resent the low notes in her voice. I resent the cajolery of the supple twists of her body. I resent her putting her hands on my shoulders, and, as the twopenny-halfpenny poets say, fanning my cheek with her breath. If it had not been for that I should never have promised to go in search of her impossible husband. At any rate, it is easy to discover his whereabouts. A French bookseller has telegraphed to Paris for the _Annuaire Officiel de l'Armee Francaise_, the French Army List. It locates every officer in the French army, and as the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique generally chase in Africa, it will tell me the station in Algeria or Tunisia which Captain Vauvenarde adorns. I can go straight to him as Madame Brandt's plenipotentiary, and if the unreasonable and fire-eating warrior does not run me through the body for impertinence before he has time to appreciate the delicacy of my mission, I may be able to convince him that a well-to-do wife is worth the respectable consideration of a hard-up captain of Cha.s.seurs. I say I may be able to convince him; but I shrink from the impudence of the encounter. I am to accost a total stranger in a foreign army and tell him to return to his wife. This is the pretty little mission I have undertaken. It sounded glorious and eumoirous and quixotic and deucedly funny, during the n.o.ble moment of inspiration, when Lola's golden eyes were upon me; but now--well, I shall have to persuade myself that it is funny, if I am to carry it out. It is very much like wagering that one will tweak by the nose the first gentleman in gaiters and shovel-hat one meets in Piccadilly. This by some is considered the quintessence of comedy. I foresee a revision of my sense of humour.

This afternoon I met Lady Kynnersley again--at the Ellertons'. I was talking to Maisie, who has grown no happier, when I saw her sailing across to me with questions hoisted in her eyes. Being particularly desirous not to report progress periodically to Lady Kynnersley, I made a desperate move. I went forward and greeted her.

"Lady Kynnersley," said I, "somebody was telling me that you are in urgent need of funds for something. With my usual wooden-headedness I have forgotten what it is--but I know it is a deserving organisation."

The philanthropist, as I hoped, ousted the mother. She exclaimed at once:

"It must have been the Cabmen and Omnibus Drivers' Rheumatic Hospital."

"That was it!" said I, hearing of the inst.i.tution for the first time.

"They are martyrs to rheumatic gout, and of course have no means of obtaining proper treatment; so we have secured a site at Harrogate and are building a comfortable place, half hospital, half hotel, where they can be put up for a shilling a day and have all the benefits of the waters just as if they were staying at the Hotel Majestic. Do you want to become a subscriber?"

"I am eager to," said I.

"Then come over here and I'll tell you all about it."

I sat with her in a corner of the room and listened to her fairy-tale.

She wrung my heart to such a pitch of sympathy that I rose and grasped her by the hand.

"It is indeed a n.o.ble project," I cried. "I love the London cabby as my brother, and I'll post you a cheque for a thousand pounds this evening.

Good-bye!"

I left her in a state of joyous stupefaction and made my escape. If it had not fallen in with my general scheme of good works I should regard it as an expensive method of avoiding unpleasant questions.

Another philanthropist, by the way, of quite a different type from Lady Kynnersley, who has lately benefited by my eleemosynary mania is Rex Campion. I have known him since our University days and have maintained a sincere though desultory friendship with him ever since. He is also a friend of Eleanor Faversham, whom he now and then inveigles into weird doings in the impossible slums of South Lambeth. He has tried on many occasions to lure me into his web, but hitherto I have resisted.

Being the possessor of a large fortune, he has been able to gratify a devouring pa.s.sion for philanthropy, and has squandered most of his money on an inst.i.tution--a kind of club, school, labour-bureau, dispensary, soup-kitchen, all rolled into one--in Lambeth; and there he lives himself, perfectly happy among a hungry, grubby, scarecrow, tatterdemalion crowd. At a loss for a defining name, he has called it "Barbara's Building," after his mother. His conception of the cosmos is that sun, moon and stars revolve round Barbara's Building. How he learned that I was, so to speak, standing at street corners and flinging money into the laps of the poor and needy, I know not. But he came to see me a day or two ago, full of Barbara's Building, and departed in high feather with a cheque for a thousand pounds in his pocket.

I may remark here on the peculiar difficulty there is in playing Monte Cristo with anything like picturesque grace. Any dull dog that owns a pen and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable inst.i.tutions. But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative, adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy matter. You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with the craving unsatisfied. You have really had so few opportunities; and when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties as to baffle all but the most persistent. Have you ever tried to give a beggar a five-pound note? I did this morning.

She was a miserable, shivering, starving woman of fifty selling matches in Sackville Street. She held out a shrivelled hand to me, and eyes that once had been beautiful pleaded hungrily for alms.

"Here," said I to myself, "is an opportunity of bringing unimagined gladness for a month or two into this forlorn creature's life."

I pressed a five-pound note into her hand and pa.s.sed on. She ran after me, terror on her face.

"I daren't take it, sir; they would say I had stolen it, and I should be locked up. No one would believe a gentleman had given it to me."

She trembled, overwhelmed by the colossal fortune that might, and yet might not, be hers. I sympathised, but not having the change in gold, I could do no more than listen to an incoherent tale of misery, which did not aid the solution of the problem. It was manifestly impossible to take back the note; and yet if she retained it she would be subjected to scandalous indignities. What was to be done? I turned my eyes towards Piccadilly and beheld a policeman. A page wearing the name of a milliner's shop on his cap whisked past me. I stopped him and slipped a shilling into his hand.

"Will you ask that policeman to come to me?"

The boy tore down the street and told the policeman and followed him up to me, eager for amus.e.m.e.nt.

"What has the woman been doing, sir?" asked the policeman.

"Nothing," said I. "I have given her a five-pound note."

"What for, sir?" he asked.

"To further my pursuit of the eumoirous," said I, whereat he gaped stolidly; "but, be that as it may, I have given it her as a free gift, and she is afraid to present it anywhere lest she should be charged with theft. Will you kindly accompany her to a shop, where she can change it, and vouch for her honesty?"

The policeman, who seemed to form the lowest opinion of my intellect, said he didn't know a shop on his beat where they could change it. The boy whistled. The woman held the box of matches in one hand, and in the other the note, fluttering in the breeze. Idlers paused and looked on.

The policeman grew authoritative and bade them pa.s.s along. They crowded all the more. My position was becoming embarra.s.sing. At last the boy, remembering the badge of honour on his cap, undertook to change the note at the hatter's at the corner of the street. So, having given the note to the boy and bidden the policeman follow him to see fair play, and encouraged the woman to follow the policeman, I resumed my walk down Sackville Street.

But what a pother about a simple act of charity! In order to repeat it habitually I shall have to rely on the fortuitous attendance of a boy and a policeman, or have a policeman and a boy permanently attached to my person, which would be as agreeable as the continuous escort of a jackdaw and a yak.

Poor Latimer is having a dreadful time. Apparently my ten thousand pounds have vanished like a snowflake on the river of liabilities. How he is to repay me he does not know. He wishes he had not yielded to temptation and had allowed himself to be honestly hammered. Then he could have taken his family to sing in the streets with a quiet conscience.

"My dear fellow," said I through the telephone this morning. "What are ten thousand pounds to me?"

I heard him gasp at the other end.

"But you're not a millionaire!"