Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness for the man. It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford. The church young men he had found distasteful to him. They were good young men for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes; but they had no mental horizons. They were also inclined to be a little shy of him, as a rich man"s son with a superior education; a little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that intercourse with them had not been easy. But here was a man who spoke another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once a.s.serts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.
Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in conversation. Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses--a trick which lent emphasis to what he said. It was as though he fumbled for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch.
Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not p.r.o.nounce a word in the way common among educated men. The variation was slight; it could scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency of early training. Perhaps the boy"s face betrayed his surprise too ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:
"I envy you. It was my dream to go to Oxford. I didn"t dream true in that case."
"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur generously.
"No, I have never cherished that--delusion. Deprivations in middle life don"t matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made up." He paused a moment, and then added. "I was a gardener before I became an author."
Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.
"Oh! I a.s.sure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams. Mine, as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires, within sound of her bells. I believed I could become a scholar; indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish. I spent all my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were obsolete, got to know the cla.s.sics in a crude fashion, and went on imagining that some day I might enter the University. Of course it was all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that. My first real discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth. That led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which was that the great ma.s.s of mankind are born disinherited, and that I was one of them. It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long run it was the making of me. It set me studying life as it is, not as it once was in ancient times. And the more I studied it, the more I came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I belonged to them. It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong; no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."
"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted. "You are a writer."
"Oh! I have some apt.i.tudes that are not common, no doubt; I am immodest enough to think that. But if I am a writer, I write of common people. It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices, trials, heroisms, debas.e.m.e.nts, and n.o.bilities of plain people. But I did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive. What you say deeply interests me. My father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a good deal, and you make me recall it. By the way, do you know my father?"
"Yes, I know him."
He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pa.s.s unnoticed.
"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.
"No, I don"t say that. I know him merely as a type. But what did he say?"
"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt; that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and bridle."
"An excellent definition. Life is strong and cruel and hard. Men who really live soon discover that."
"Have you found it so?"
"Yes. And I"ve seen the big strong beast tread thousands down--the people who haven"t got the whip and bridle."
He spoke the words with remarkable intensity. They were flashed from him rather than spoken. Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling, he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening is coming on. I must be going."
They went out of the inn together. The long gray road with its groups of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened, the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky.
"That"s where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars. "You can hear his mighty hooves at work." And, as he spoke, from that great caldron of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road, there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.
But he did not recur to the theme. The talk became trivial, commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant, and what man was meant to do in it.
It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne Gardens. Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many, in a long gravelled street. The houses were all alike; each had its strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with gla.s.s panels, its aspect of decent mediocrity. There was still enough light to see that though the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had overtaken them. The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders. The dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.
"This is where I live," said Vickars.
"I don"t think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur. "It must have been built while I was at Oxford."
"It was," said Vickars. "Your father built it."
They said good-night and parted.
IV
MRS. BUNDY
A few days after Arthur"s memorable conversation with his father, Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom. He went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till long past midnight. The causes of his silence were, as usual, inscrutable. Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding, wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence never came. Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won. But in Masterman"s nature there was a curious element of perversity, which often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest.
It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions could be predicated from any precedent experience.
Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever. I"ll tell you when I want you," and the boy said no more. His sister had gone away to spend some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.
It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to the society of such friends as were available. Among these was Hilary Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking. He walked with him occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the house. Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly, cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman. She was a person of extraordinary slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that she cheerfully shouldered other people"s burdens as a kind of right.
Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and optimistic friend. Over such youths she exercised a directorship as complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.
"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious land-ladies. Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours. But to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.
Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy"s view of life was not unlike theirs. Her whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o"-the-wisp of sudden fortune. He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned in wrong directions. At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal, nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment"s notice to wander off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil which he soon contrived to lose again. Most women would have tired of these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy"s faith in her husband never faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not disconcert her. When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it lasted. When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy. He always came back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his return was sometimes dramatic--as, for instance, when he appeared at midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid in her pocket a county-court summons for a year"s milk bills which she could not pay.
"Come in wi" you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a d.u.c.h.ess introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the Bundy star was in eclipse. And then she would sit down and tell him wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes he had had of being a multimillionaire. Just now, it appeared, he was engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as England. And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter, which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her with a clouded brow.
"It"s small good staying in England these days, if you want to prosper," she would remark. "What wi" all the ships upon the sea and all the new lands that lie beyond, it"s a shame for a youth to sit at home. You don"t get any fun out of life that way."
Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her lot that he never said it. On the contrary, there was sown in his mind a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.
She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of palmistry, and ended by saying, "You"ll have your adventures before long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot through his veins at the prophecy.
"You"ve got a hand like Bundy"s," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.
"Bundy"s had his bad times," she retorted, "but he"s had his good times too. But if you asked him, I don"t think he"d regret anything, and he"d live the same life again if he had the choice. And so would I, for that matter."
And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as something to be greatly envied.
He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he learned to love her. She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.
One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father"s plans for him.
"He wants me to enter the business," he said.
"And why not, laddie?"
"Frankly, I don"t like it."
"That"s neither here nor there. You"ve got to live, and as long as a business is honest, one business is as good as another."
"But is it honest?"