Personalities were not altogether to his taste; besides, he was really anxious to finish that letter. He caught sight of a back at the other window.
"I think," said he quietly, "this conversation had better cease."
The owner of the back had moved, a little ostentatiously. He now got up and crossed the room. The back was still towards the group of talkers. Jewdwine followed its pa.s.sage. He was fascinated. He gasped.
He could have sworn to that back anywhere, with its square but slender shoulders, its defiant swing from the straight hips, the head tossed a little backwards as if to correct the student"s tendency to stoop. He looked from the back to Maddox. Maddox could not see what he saw, but his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine"s.
Their voices were inaudible enough now.
"Do you know who it is?"
"I should think I did. It"s the man himself."
"How truly d.a.m.nable," said Rankin. After those words there was a silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his correspondence.
It was Maddox who recovered first. "Call him what you like," said he, in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, "I consider him an uncommonly good sort. A bit of a bounder, but no end of a good sort."
The others were evidently impressed by this bold though desperate policy. Maddox himself was inclined to think that it had saved the situation, but he was anxious to make sure. Edging his chair by slow degrees, he turned discreetly round. With the tail of his eye he could see "the man himself" standing at the far end of the room. He saw too that his own effort, though supreme, had been unavailing. It had deceived no one, least of all S.K.R. "The man himself" stood on the very hearth of the club, with his back to the fireplace. It was the att.i.tude of mastery, a mastery the more superb because unconscious.
His eyes too, were the eyes of a master, twinkling a little as to their light, but steady as to their direction, being fixed on Maddox.
He was smiling.
There was nothing malignant, or bitter, or sardonic about that smile.
No devilry of delight at their confusion. No base abandonment of the whole countenance to mirth, but a curious one-sided smile, implying delicacies, reservations. A slow smile, reminiscent, ruminant, appreciative; it expressed (if so subtle and refined a thing could be said to express anything) a certain exquisite enjoyment of the phrases in which they had defined him.
And seeing it, Maddox said to himself, "He isn"t a gentleman. He"s something more."
In that moment the Celtic soul of Maddox had recognized its master, and had sworn to him unhesitating allegiance.
CHAPTER VI
It was not until Rankin and the others had left the room that Jewdwine had courage to raise his head tentatively. He had only seen that young man"s back, and he still clung to the hope that it might not be Rickman"s, after all.
He looked up as steadily as he dared. Oh, no doubt that it was Rickman"s back; no doubt, too, that it was his, Jewdwine"s, duty to go up and speak to him. The young man had changed his place; he was at his window again, contemplating--as Jewdwine reflected with a pang of sympathy--the shop. So profound, so sacred almost, was his absorption that Jewdwine hesitated in his approach.
"_Is_ it Rickman?" he asked, still tentative.
"Mr. Jewdwine!" Rickman"s soul leapt to Jewdwine"s from the depths; but the "Mister" marked the s.p.a.ce it had had to travel. "When did you come up?"
"Three hours ago." ("He looks innocent," said Jewdwine to himself.)
"Then you weren"t prepared for that?"
Jewdwine followed his fascinated gaze. He smiled faintly.
"You haven"t noticed our new departure? We not only purchase Gentlemen"s Libraries, but we sell the works of persons who may or may not be gentlemen."
Jewdwine felt profoundly uncomfortable. Rickman"s face preserved its inimitable innocence, but he continued to stare fixedly before him.
"Poor fellow," thought Jewdwine, "he must have heard those imbecilities." He felt horribly responsible, responsible to the Club for the behaviour of Rickman and responsible to Rickman for the behaviour of the Club. What could he do to make it up to him? Happy thought--he would ask him to dinner at--yes, at his sister"s, Miss Jewdwine"s, house at Hampstead. That was to say, if his cousin, Lucia Harden, did not happen to be staying there. He was not quite sure how Rickman would strike that most fastidious of young ladies. And Rankin had said he drank.
In the light of Lucia Harden"s and his sister"s possible criticism, he considered him more carefully than he had done before.
The contrast between the two men was certainly rather marked. A gentleman can be neither more nor less than a gentleman, and Rickman, in a sense not altogether intended by Maddox, was decidedly more. His individuality was too exuberant, too irrepressible. He had the restless, emphatic air of a man who has but little leisure and is too obviously anxious to make the most of what he has. He always seemed to be talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly, too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine"s opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight elision of the aspirate observed by some of them. But then, he had a voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into forgetfulness of these enormities.
It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman"s. He looked neither more nor less than he was--an Oxford don, developing into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow.
There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined.
You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out of sight.
Rickman had always looked up to him. For Jewdwine, as Rankin had intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R. He was always discovering him. Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was always losing sight of him in between. These lapses in their intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense), but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City.
He felt responsible for that, too.
Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism. But he mistook its nature and its grounds.
"Don"t suppose," said he, "I"m ashamed of the shop. It isn"t that. I wasn"t ashamed of our other place--that little rat "ole in the City."
Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.
"--But I _am_ ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern. It"s so brutally big. It can"t live, you know, without sucking the life out of the little booksellers. They mayn"t have made a great thing out of it, but they were happy enough before we came here."
"I never thought of it in that light."
"Haven"t you? I have."
It was evident that little Rickman was deeply moved. His sentiments did him credit, and he deserved to be asked to dinner. At Hampstead?
No--no, not at Hampstead; here, at the Club. The Club was the proper thing; a public recognition of him was the _amende honorable_.
Besides, after all, it was the Club, not Jewdwine, that had offended, and it was right that the Club should expiate its offence.
"What are you doing at Easter?" he asked.
Rickman stroked his upper lip and smiled as if cherishing a joy as secret and unborn as his moustache. He recited a selection from the tale of his engagements.
"Can you dine with me here on Sat.u.r.day? You"re free, then, didn"t you say?"
Rickman hesitated. That was not what he had said. He was anything but free, for was he not engaged for that evening to Miss Poppy Grace? He was pulled two ways, a hard pull. He admired Jewdwine with simple, hero-worshipping fervour; but he also admired Miss Poppy Grace. Again, he shrank from mentioning an engagement of that sort to Jewdwine, while, on the other hand concealment was equally painful, being foreign to his nature.
So he flushed a little as he replied, "Thanks awfully, I"m afraid I can"t. I"m booked that night to Poppy Grace."
The flush deepened. Besides his natural sensitiveness on the subject of Miss Poppy Grace, he suffered tortures not wholly sentimental whenever he had occasion to mention her by her name. Poppy Grace--he felt that somehow it did not give you a very high idea of the lady, and that in this it did her an injustice. He could have avoided it by referring to her loftily as Miss Grace; but this course, besides being unfamiliar would have savoured somewhat of subterfuge. So he blurted it all out with an air of defiance, as much as to say that when you had called her Poppy Grace you had said the worst of her.
Jewdwine"s face expressed, as Rickman had antic.i.p.ated, an exquisite disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was incomprehensible to Jewdwine.
"I didn"t know you cultivated that sort of person."
"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too light for _that_.