The Corner of Harley Street Part 2

Well, it was a great game, and I wish you could have been there to see it. Molly, with the halo of Newnham still upon her, was as enthusiastic as her tradition will allow, while Claire, on a special holiday from her school at Eastbourne, was quite openly broken-hearted for poor Horace's sake. However, he got enough hero-worshipping next day to soothe the most wounded of defeated warriors. The more prosaic problem of how to tackle his future is troubling him now; and I more than half suspect him of designs on Medicine.

Molly, on the other hand, is disturbed by no such uncertainty. She is already on the committee of the W.S.P.U., which being interpreted means the Women's Social and Political Union; and concerns herself vigorously with the vexed questions of adult suffrage and the feminine vote.

Besides this she is a.s.sistant manager of a girls' club in Hoxton, and combines an intense faith in the political future of her s.e.x with an ardent admiration for Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw. Religiously, she is, for the moment (to the acute distress of some of our nearer relatives), inclining to an up-to-date form of polytheism; but hedges with an occasional (rather un.o.btrusive) attendance at a more orthodox early service. Fortunately she is inveterately addicted to the coldest of cold baths, the roughest of towels, and a plentiful breakfast. Moreover another phase of experience is presenting itself modestly, but with a quite unmistakable st.u.r.diness, to her consideration. He is a nice, open-air sort of boy (_entre nous_, Bob Lynn junior. What fogies we are getting, to be sure), untroubled about the const.i.tution of his _ego_, and frankly bored by politics, but with a pa.s.sion for his microscope that must be running, I think, a very neck-and-neck sort of race with his admiration for Miss Molly.

Tom, as you know, is still at Rugby; and about him we are all, that is Esther and I and Jakes, his house-master, a little anxious. For it seems that during the latter part of his Christmas holidays, which he spent with a friend at Scarborough, he fell very deeply under the influence of one of those ardent, but dangerous, people possessed of what they describe as a pa.s.sion for souls. This particular one, a sort of nondescript with private means, was what he called, and what he has tried to make Tom and his friend, an "out and outer."

Obviously shyly, Tom sent us a programme of this man's meetings--he was holding a mission to schoolboys--from which we gathered that his particular spiritual preserves are confined to our larger public schools. He was a little careful to emphasise this. Boys from elsewhere were only permitted to hear him by special introduction. He has not apparently been to a public school himself; but owns, or was once owned by, one of the more recent colleges at Cambridge. I hope that I am not writing this too bitterly, for I am trying to be kind to his motives.

But the results of his efforts upon Tom have been, up to the present, rather devastating. The boy is quite clearly in earnest, has been indeed very profoundly stirred. With one or two others he has started a meeting for prayer in his house, has given up singing his comic songs, and has been systematically tackling his fellows about their souls' health.

Knowing a little bit about the boy, I should scarcely have been able to believe all this, if Jakes hadn't written to me so very fully about the matter. He is acting quite wisely, I think--has given full permission and facilities for their little meetings, with a gentle word or two about the inadvisability of too much publicity. Nevertheless a certain amount of natural, and, as I can't help feeling, healthy hostility has sprung up against the movement--a hostility that we both fear is being interpreted by the boys, and their spiritual adviser, as persecution for their Lord's sake.

I doubt if you'll understand much of this. Your temperament has always been too downright, too untroubled with spiritual questionings, too simply aware of the "things we don't talk about." "Isn't this all rather like cant?" I can imagine you wondering. But it isn't by any means all cant. And that is what makes the whole question so difficult to deal with. For into the warm nest of the boy's soul this holy blunderer has thrust his easy, ignorant fingers, pulling out, as it were, the fledgling spiritual secrets. They were not ready for the air and the light and the winds. They were tucked away, as a wise Nature meant them to be, under the protecting feathers of the natural boy's carelessness.

And now, since they have been plucked out into the open for all the world to see, they must needs flap their premature wings in a sort of pitiful, earnest foolishness. While we, who know so well what has really happened, can only stand by, at whatever cost, to see that the half-sprouted pinions may not beat themselves into some permanent distortion or futility--may become, after all, those strong, supporting structures that they were designed for at their birth.

And all the while there will be the ever-present danger of the natural boy himself discovering suddenly, in a dumb sort of way, that his fledgling has been making (as he will most certainly put it) a little fool of itself. And then how desperately likely will he be to disown it altogether, to his lifelong incompleteness. Self-const.i.tuted missioners to schoolboys should be required to possess a licence. And it should be pretty difficult to obtain.

Claire you will still find, I think, when you come home next autumn, very much of the pure child, for all her fifteen and a half years.

Hockey and Henty bound her physical and mental horizons, and she writes periodical letters to Tom urging the army as the only possible profession for him. And now I must put a stop to what will seem in your bachelor eyes the prosy outpourings of the typical family man. But then your Kashmir precipices are not for all of us, you know; and I have only just been giving you what you asked for.

Yours as ever, PETER HARDING.

P.S.--There will of course be a spare bedroom and a well-stoked fire here against your return next October.

V

_To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _March_ 23, 1910.

MY DEAR HUGH,

Our exchange of letters, since you finally left our fickle climate, has become so regular that I would apologise for not having written to you since the New Year, were it not that by so doing I should be distilling the poison of formality into the pot-luck of our correspondence. So I won't.

I am sorry to hear that the bronchitis has been bothering you again, joining hands with _anno Domini_ to remind you of our human frailty. But your fingers, I see, have lost none of their cunning, and I immensely enjoyed your little exhibition of etchings at Obach's. Two of them I have acquired, I am glad to say, and they are looking at me as I write.

And now I almost think that I shall have to take a third. It has drifted into Obach's window, and for several days past its fascination has been growing upon me. Three or four times in pa.s.sing I have paused to consider it; and on each occasion it has brightened far more than Bond Street for me.

It is the drawing of the little flower-girl who has forgotten her wares to feast her eyes upon the silk gown in the shop-window. And there was a time, I think, when an older, or younger, Pontrex would rather have scorned to descend upon so well-worn a theme--it would have seemed a descent in those days. And at first I thought that even now you had thrown it in among the others as a kind of sop to the easy sentiments of the majority. But I have learned better, I think, and discovered that you have treated what is, after all, the perennially beautiful with all your own scrupulous severity.

I met such a little girl only to-day in Aldgate. She was not selling flowers, and was singularly northern in type--coming home, I should guess, from afternoon school. Moving mechanically through the maze of hurrying pa.s.sengers, she was obviously as deaf to the street-side costers as to the more thunderous traffic of the dock-yard waggons. At the corner of Houndsditch we almost collided, and she looked up for a moment from her book. It was a healthy and piquant little face, if typically town-bred, that she turned towards mine. But the look, if I could have captured it on canvas, would have done more than immortalise us both. For there was reflected in it--just for a moment--the very dazzle itself of that authentic Wonder which some of us call Mysticism, and some Romance; but which is only half named by them both. And I should greatly have liked to ask her what book had wrought the miracle.

But the currents of crossing pedestrians separated us almost instantly, though not so quickly as the look itself had bolted back into hiding, leaving in its stead a very ordinary little schoolgirl extending the tip of a small pink tongue.

"'Ullo, fice," she said.

So I blessed her, and went on my way rejoicing; and was quite ignorant, for at least a quarter of an hour, of the very gorgeous pageant of smoke and sunset that faced me towards Cheapside. For, like yourself, it is always the humanity that these things frame that captures me first and holds me longest. And I believe I would exchange any merely physical panorama in the world for a new vista of the human soul. So greatly indeed is this preference growing in me that, keenly as I love it, I find my English landscape already rearranging itself in my memory. Where it was once punctuated by trees or monuments or natural wonders, it is now becoming mapped out for me by such trivial affairs as some pa.s.sing word of greeting or chance exchange of easy gossip. At this bend of the road I met the decidedly tipsy old rascal who a.s.sured me that he had made his debut with Henry Irving. By that hedge two little girls gave me a spontaneous, and consequently very sweet, small handful of half-ripe blackberries.

So your little flower-seller has gone to my heart; and if Esther will let me--and I think that she will--I shall take her into my house as well. Can I tell you more than this? My opinion on your technique is not worth having, as you know very well. I only know that I am less conscious of it in these latest etchings of yours than in any of the others; and that too ought to count for praise, I think. And in any case I mean it as such. For indeed it is rather refreshing just now to be able, for once in a way, to ignore technique, or at any rate so unconsciously to take it for granted that the message conveyed by it at once, and alone, fills the mind. Because, _entre nous_, I seem lately to have diagnosed in most of our galleries a small epidemic of--shall we say?--hypertechnique. The origin of the malady cannot, I think, be very deep-seated. But its outward and visible signs are rather striking eruptions of a polymorphic type, for the most part somewhat grotesque, and not infrequently even a little nauseous. And they are very modern.

Nothing quite like them has ever been seen before; unless--can it be possible?--every age has known them, but time, in his mercy, has hidden them in due season--a reflection that is not without a certain comfort, since its corollary suggests the same process as being at work to-day--un.o.btrusively, no doubt, but with equal certainty. As Wensley said to me last week, if the authorities could only be induced to put up, for example, Velasquez' Philip IV, or The Laughing Cavalier among the annual exhibits of the New English Art Club, even the most completely self-satisfied of Mr. John's young ladies would call out for a catalogue to cover her nakedness. But, alas, Philip IV remains where he is, and the neo-intellectuals of the art-world still perspire admiration round their master's most recent visions, to drift hence, in due season, that they may do homage to those "obscenities in lavender"

on the one hand, and the Bedlamite echoes of Van Gogh on the other, that emerge annually from Paris to soil our walls in the name of progress.

Poor Wensley, he is still chipping away at his unprofitable marble, spending two years over a group that his conscience forbids him to finish in as many months. Every year there are rumours that the Chantrey trustees are to buy something from his studio. And every year they just fail to do so for varying reasons. Poor Wensley, if ever a genius cut life out of marble (and will never, I'm afraid, cut marble out of life) it is he, hammering his years away in the purlieus of Chelsea. I have seen a good deal of him lately, and once I am fairly inside his studio find it very hard to escape those siren hands of his white-limbed men and maidens under a good two hours. His group for this year's Academy, if he has been able to finish it, will be as good as, if not better than, anything that he has yet done, I think. May the G.o.ds be kind to him, for he needs their pity in more ways than one. He is too good to be allowed to fritter his life away in ill.u.s.trating nursery books and repairing mediocre saints; and there are times when one cannot help feeling that his long knocking at the gates of official appreciation is making him just a little bitter--brief times, for the next moment his eye will be bright again and his smile so boyish as to make his fifty years of struggle seem almost mythical.

Leaving him there, with his beautiful, unwanted works about him, I always encounter a certain wave of spiritual depression. For, look where one will, one's eyes would seem to be confronted only with the grotesque, the degenerate, the pernicious; so much so that it becomes hard to realise them merely as the little unworthy successes of a very pa.s.sing hour. Our newest music would appear fain to wed itself to the obscene imaginings of a decadent poesy, to find its loftiest inspiration in pathological versions of Elektra and Salome. Our latest dances seek to lift into the very publicity that he lives for the erotic beastliness of some such vicious weakling as a Parisian apache. Our most up-to-date novels probe the labyrinths of s.e.xual perversity at a shilling a time under the banner of an emanc.i.p.ated virility, and our Sunday newspapers reap the dung-hills for their headlines.

By this time, if it is on foot, my middle-Victorianism will nearly have reached South Kensington Station, or, if it has been driving, Carter's rosy-gilled countenance will be at the carriage-door wondering why it doesn't get out. And so the wave will pa.s.s over me, and I shall be rocking once again upon a more equable ocean. I shall behold your little flower-girl hungering for her beautiful gown, and beside her nine-tenths at least of her brothers and sisters, hands out for the real beauty, and entirely impervious to the Wildes and the Strausses, the Beardsleys, Johns, and Polaires. After all--let us remember it humbly with thanksgiving--these people do not penetrate our homes. They are doled out to us in public. We scan them in galleries. They are momentary sensations in the circulating libraries. But we don't live with them. At least I don't think we do, and in one way and another I have seen the insides of a good many different homes. For a man may perhaps temporarily subordinate his sense of decency to a well-meaning desire for artistic fairness. He may accord a judicial word of praise to some particularly masterly portrayal of a libertine's blotches or the pimples of a fading courtesan. But he will seldom bear them home in his bosom to set up among his _lares_ and _penates_. And since it is by these that we must judge (for they are the heart-judgment of the race), my billow of pessimism drops behind me and expends itself in foam upon the rocks.

No, it is our Thackerays and Fieldings, our d.i.c.kenses and Shakespeares, that we still escort, hats off, to the true and formative intimacy of our firesides. Our Blyths and Waleses and Victoria Crosses--my cla.s.sification is mainly themic--are for furtive journeys on the underground, and a hasty burying in obscure corners; where a sanitary Providence no doubt arranges for them some useful and inconspicuous destiny.

Well, the hour is late, and I must stop. I can hear footsteps in the hall, and in comes Molly, looking very gay, if a little sleepy, in her newest evening frock. She has just been with some rather dull girls (Ah, Molly, Molly, they are non-Shavians, I admit, but just talk to them about horses!) to see a play. "The--_what_ was the name, my dear?"

"'The Scarlet Pimpernel,'" confesses Molly.

I look surprised--even incredulous--remembering certain sweeping d.a.m.nations of a month or two ago. "But surely," I venture timidly, "isn't that the very--er--acme of provincial melodrama?"

The words have a strangely familiar sound, and Molly appears to recognise them.

"Of course it is," she says. "I was _taken_ there."

The expression suggests ropes and cart-tails, and I commiserate with her appropriately.

"Poor Molly, and of course you--you----"

But my courage fails me, and I dare not finish the question. She tosses her dark head a little.

"W-well," she stammers, and then, being very honest with herself, stops short, and begins to grow a little pink. I gasp, half rising from my chair.

"Surely," I exclaim, "you--you don't mean to say you actually _enjoyed_ it?"

There is a moment's appalled stillness; and then, very rosy, she stoops suddenly to kiss my forehead.

"Daddy," she says, "you're an old _beast_."

Ever yrs., PETER HARDING.

VI

_To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._

91B HARLEY STREET, W., _March_ 31, 1910.

MY DEAR SALLY,