South Wind Part 13

CHAPTER IX

"That is the worst of dining with a man. You have to be civil next morning. But surely, Eames, we two need not stand on ceremony? I am particularly anxious for you to come to-night. Can't you really manage it? I want you to meet Malipizzo and say a few nice words to him. You are too aloof with that man. There is nothing like keeping on the right side of the law."

"What do you mean by that?"

"The right side of the judge," said Keith. "It is so easy to be polite to people, and so advisable in some cases. How would you like to spend a week or two in gaol? He will have you there one of these days, unless you have placed him under some kind of obligation. He represents justice here. I know you don't like him. But what would it cost you--just a friendly handshake?"

"He cannot touch me. I have nothing on my conscience."

"Conscience, my dear fellow, is a good servant but a bad master. Your sentiments are English. They will never do in a country where the personal element still counts for something."

"The personal element signifying favouritism and venality?" asked Eames. "A pretty state of affairs!"

"The philosopher can only live under a venal government."

"I disagree with you altogether."

"You always disagree with me," answered Keith. "And you always find yourself in the wrong. You remember how I warned you about that little affair of yours? You remember what an a.s.s you made of yourself?"

"What little affair?" enquired Eames, with a tinge of resignation in his voice.

The other did not reply. Mr. Keith could be tactful, on occasions. He pretended to be absorbed in cutting a cigar.

"What little affair?" insisted the bibliographer, fearful of what was coming next.

It came.

"Oh, that balloon business...."

It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in Richmond Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels--the notorious Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club scandal, that he was the local representative of an international gang of white-slave traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of the world, that he was not a man at all but an old boarding-house keeper who had very good reasons for a.s.suming the male disguise, that he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist minister, a p.a.w.nbroker out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent period in connection with some East-End mission for reforming the boys of Bermondsey and then, after p.a.w.ning his mother's jewelry, writing anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet Ministers and tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he had been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.

All these things, and a good many more, had been said. Eames knew it.

Kind friends had seen to that.

To contrive such stories was a certain lady's method of a.s.serting her personality on the island. She seldom went into society owing to some physical defect in her structure; she could only sit at home, like Penelope, weaving these and other bright tapestries--odds and ends of servants' gossip, patched together by the virulent industry of her own disordered imagination. It consoled Mr. Eames slightly to reflect that he was not the only resident singled out for such aspersions; that the more harmless a man's life, the more fearsome the legends. He suffered, none the less. This was why he seldom entered the premises of the Alpha and Omega Club where, quite apart from his objection to Parker's poison and the loose and rowdy talk of the place, he was liable to encounter the lady's stepbrother. Of course he knew perfectly well what he ought to have done. He ought to have imitated the example of other people who behaved like scoundrels and openly gloried in it. That was the only way to be even with her; it took the wind out of her sails. Keith often put the matter into a nutsh.e.l.l:

"The practical advantages of doing something outrageous must be clear to you. It is the only way of stopping her mouth, unless you like to have her poisoned, which might be rather expensive even down here, though you may be sure I would do my best to smooth things over with Malipizzo. But I am afraid you don't realize the advantages of ruffianism as a mode of art, and a mode of life. Only think: a thousand wrongs to every right! What an opening for a man of talent, especially in a country like this, where frank and independent action still counts its admirers. You have done nothing, of late, worthy to be recorded in the CHRONIQUE SCANDALEUSE of Nepenthe. Twelve years ago, wasn't it, that little affair of yours? Time is slipping by, and here you muddle along with your old Perrelli, in a fog of moral stagnation. It is not fair to the rest of us. We all contribute our mites to the gaiety of nations. Bethink yourself. Bestir yourself. Man! Do something to show us you are alive."

To such speeches Mr. Eames would listen with a smile of amused indignation. He was incapable of living up to the ideals of a man like Keith whose sympathy with every form of wrong-doing would have rendered him positively unfit for decent society but for his flagrant good nature and good luncheons. He suffered in silence.

He had good reason for suffering. That "little affair" of twelve years ago was a ghost which refused to be laid. Every one on the island knew the story; it was handed down from one batch of visitors to the next.

He knew that whenever his name was mentioned this unique indiscretion of his, this toothsome morsel, would likewise be dished up. It would never grow stale, though atoned for by twelve years of exemplary conduct. He felt guilty. There was a skeleton in his cupboard. He realized what people were saying.

"Know Eames? Oh, yes. That quiet man, who writes. One can't swallow half those yarns about him; quite impossible to believe, of course. She overdoes things, the good woman. All the same, there's no smoke without fire. You know what actually did happen, don't you? Well; one really doesn't quite know what to make of a fellow like that, does one?"

What had happened?

The bibliographer had fallen in love, after the fashion of a pure-minded, gallant gentleman. It was his first and only experience of this kind--an all-consuming pa.s.sion which did much credit to his heart but little to his head. So deeply were his feelings involved that during those brief months of infatuation he neglected, he despised, he derided his idol Perrelli. He put on a new character. While the dust was acc.u.mulating on those piles of footnotes, Mr. Eames astonished people by becoming a society man. It was a transfiguration. He appeared in fancy ties and spats, fluttered about at boating parties and picnics, dined at restaurants, perpetrated one or two cla.s.sic jokes about the sirocco. Nepenthe opened its eyes wide till the truth was made manifest. After that, everybody said he might have discovered a worthier object for his affection than the "BALLOON CAPTIF."

She was a native of the mainland to whose credit it must be said that she did not pretend to be anything but what she was--an exuberant, gluttonous dame, with volcanic eyes, heavy golden bracelets, the soupcon of a moustache, and arms as thick as other people's thighs; an altogether impossible person. n.o.body but a man of genuine refinement, scrupulous rect.i.tude, delicate sense of honour and kindly disposition would have risked being seen in the same street with such a horror; n.o.body but a real gentleman could have fallen in love with her. Mr.

Eames ran after her like a dog. He made a perfect a.s.s of himself, heedless of what anybody though or said of him. The men declared he was going mad--breaking up--sickening for an attack of G.P. "Miracles will never cease," charitably observed the d.u.c.h.ess. Alone of all his lady acquaintances, Madame Steynlin liked him all the better for this gaucherie. She was a true woman-friend of all lovers; she knew the human heart and its queer little vagaries. She received the couple with open arms and entertained them royally, after her manner; gave them a kind of social status. Under this friendly treatment Mr. Eames grew thinner from day to day; he was visibly losing flesh. The dame prospered. Piloted by the love-sick bibliographer she gradually waddled her way--it was uphill work, for both of them--into the uppermost strata of local society where, owing to the rarefied atmosphere, her appet.i.te, to say nothing of her person, soon gained notoriety. She was known, in briefest s.p.a.ce of time, as "the cormorant," as "prime streaky," as "Jumbo," as "the phenomenon" and, by those who understood the French language, as the "BALLON CAPTIF."

The "BALLON CAPTIF." ...

How things got about, on Nepenthe! Somehow or other, this odious nickname reached her lover's ears. It embittered his existence to such an extent that, long after the idyll was over, he had serious thoughts of leaving the island and would doubtless have done so, but for his re-kindled enthusiasm for Monsignor Perrelli. So sensitive did he remain on this point that the mere mention of balloons, or even aeroplanes, would make him wince and feel desirous of leaving the room; he always thought that people introduced the subject with malicious purpose, in order to remind him of this unforgettable peccadillo, the "balloon business," his one lapse from perfect propriety. Mr. Keith, who confessed to a vein of coa.r.s.eness in his nature--prided himself upon it and, in fact, cultivated insensitiveness as other people cultivate orchids, p.r.o.nouncing it to be the best method of self-protection in a world infested with fools--Mr. Keith sometimes could not resist the temptation of raking up the ashes surrept.i.tiously, after an elaborate, misleading preamble. He loved to watch his friend's meekly perplexed face on such occasions.

Heaven knows how long the affair might have lasted but for the fact that a husband, or somebody, unexpectedly turned up--a husky little man with a cast in one eye, who looked uxorious to an alarming degree. He carried her off in the nick of time to save Mr. Eames from social ostracism, mental dotage, and financial ruin. Her mere appearance had made him the laughing-stock of the place; her appet.i.te had led him into outlays altogether incompatible with his income, chiefly in the matter of pastries, macaroons, fondants, ices, caramels, chocolates, jam tartlets and, above all, meringues, to which she was fabulously destructive.

It took some living down, that episode. He feared people would talk of it to his dying day; he knew they would! He wished balloons had never been invented. None the less he stuck it out bravely, threw himself with redoubled zeal into Monsignor Perrelli and, incidentally, became more of a recluse than ever.

"It has been a lesson," he reflected. "SEMPER ALIQUID HAEREBIT, I am afraid...."

Ernest Eames was the ideal annotator. He was neither inductive nor deductive; he had no axe to grind. His talent consisted in an ant--like hiving faculty. He was acquisitive of information for a set purpose--to bring the ANTIQUITIES up to date. Whatever failed to fit in with this programme, however novel, however interesting--it was ruthlessly discarded. In this and other matters he was the reverse of Keith, who collected information for its own sake. Keith was a pertinacious and omnivorous student; he sought knowledge not for a set purpose but because nothing was without interest for him. He took all learning to his province. He read for the pleasure of knowing what he did not know before; his mind was unusually receptive because, he said, he respected the laws which governed his body. Facts were his prey. He threw himself into them with a kind of piratical ardour; took them by the throat, wallowed in them, worried them like a terrier, and finally a.s.similated them. They gave him food for what he liked best on earth: "disinterested thought." They "formed a rich loam." He had an encyclopaeic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information. He could tell you how many public baths exited in Geneva in pre-Reformation days, what was the colour of Mehemet Ali's whiskers, why the ma.n.u.script of Virgil's friend Gallius had not been handed down to posterity, and in what year, and what month, the decimal system was introduced into Finland. Such aimless incursions into knowledge were a puzzle to his friends, but not to himself. They helped him to build up a harmonious scheme of life--to round himself off.

He had lately attacked, in Corsair fashion, the Greek philosophers and had disembowelled Plato, Aristotle and the rest of them, to his complete satisfaction, in a couple of months; at present he was up to the ears in psychology, and his talk bristled with phrases about the "function of the real," about reactions, reflexes, adjustments and stimuli. For all his complexity there was something so childlike in his nature that he never realized what an infliction he was, nor how tiresome his conversation could become to people who were not quite so avid of "disinterested thought." Living alone and spending too much time in unprofitable studies, his language was apt to be professionally devoid of humour--a defect he made heroic efforts to remedy by what he called the "Falernian system." It was the fault of his mother, he said; she was a painfully conscientious woman. A man's worst enemies are his parents, he would add.

So far as was known, Mr. Keith had never written a book, a pamphlet, or even a letter to the newspapers. He maintained a good deal of correspondence, however, in different parts of the world, and the wiser of those who were favoured with his epistles preserved them as literary curiosities, under lock and key, by reason of the writer's rare faculty of expressing the most atrocious things in correct and even admirable English. Chaster than snow as a conversationalist, he prost.i.tuted his mother-tongue, in letter-writing, to the vilest of uses. Friends of long standing called him an obscene old man. When taxed with this failing--by Mr. Eames, for instance, who shivered at what he called PRAETEXTATA VERBA--he would hint that he could afford to pay for his little whims, meaning, presumably, that a rich man is not to be judged by common standards of propriety. Such language was particularly galling to Mr. Eames, who held that the possession of wealth entails not only privileges but obligations, and that the rich man should set the example of purity in words and deeds, etc., etc., etc.

They were always disagreeing, anyhow.

"You exalt purity to a bad eminence," Keith would remark. "What did you say about the book I lent you the other day? You said it was morbid and indecent; you said that no clean-minded person would car to read it.

And yet, after an unnecessary amount of arguing, you were forced to admit that the subject was interesting and that the writer dealt with it in an interesting manner. What more can you expect from an author?

Believe me, this hankering after purity, this hypersensitiveness as to what is morbid or immoral, is by no means a good sign. A healthy man refuses to be hampered by preconceived notions of what is wrong or ugly. When he reads a book like that the either yawns or laughs. That is because he is sure of himself. I could give you a long list of celebrated statesmen, princes, philosophers and prelates of the Church who take pleasure, in their moments of relaxation, in what you would call improper conversation, literature or correspondence. They feel the strain of being continually pure; they realize that all strains are pernicious, and that there is no action without its reaction. They unbend. Only inveterate folks do not unbend. They dare not, because they have no backbone. They know that if they once unbent, they could not straighten themselves out again. They make a virtue of their own organic defect. They explain their natural imperfection by calling themselves pure. If you had a little money--"

"You are always harking back to that point. What has money to do with it?"

"Poverty is like rain. It drops down ceaselessly, disintegrating the finer tissues of a man, his recent, delicate adjustments, and leaving nothing but the bleak and gaunt framework. A poor man is a wintry tree--alive, but stripped of its shining splendour. He is always denying himself this or that. One by one, his humane instincts, his elegant desires, are starved away by stress of circ.u.mstances. The charming diversity of life ceases to have any meaning for him. To console himself, he sets up perverse canons of right and wrong. What the rich do, that is wrong. Why? Because he does not do it. Why not? Because he has no money. A poor man is forced into a hypocritical att.i.tude towards life--debarred from being intellectually honest. He cannot pay for the necessary experience."

"There is something in what you say," Eames would a.s.sent. "But I fear you are overstating your case."

"So did Demosthenes and Jesus Christ, and likewise Cicero and Julius Caesar. Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious to do something which he considers useful. I regard it as a real grievance, Eames, not to be allowed to a.s.sist you financially. Having never done a stroke of work in my life, I can talk freely about my money. My grandfather was a pirate and slave-dealer. To my certain knowledge, not a penny of his wealth was honestly come by. That ought to allay your scruples about accepting it. NON OLET, you know. Let me write you out a cheque for five hundred, there's a good fellow. Solely as a means of smoothing over the anfractuosities of life and squeezing all the possible pleasure out of it! What else is money made for? They say you live on milk and salad. Why the h.e.l.l--"

"Thanks! I have all I want; sufficient to pay for the minor pleasures of life."

"Such as?"

"A clean handkerchief now and then. I see no harm in dying poor."

"Where would I be, if my grandfather had seen no harm in it? Don't you really believe that money sweetens all things, as Pepys says?"