The Education of Eric Lane.
by Stephen McKenna.
CHAPTER ONE
AN EXPERIMENT IN EMOTION
". . . A genial . . . bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him. . . ."
OSCAR WILDE: "THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY."
1
Eric Lane, visible only from ear to chin above the water-line, peered through the steam of the bathroom at a travelling-clock on his dressing-table. The bath would have been improved by another half handful of verbena salts; but, even lacking this, the water was still too hot to be lightly dismissed with an aggrieved gurgle down the waste-pipe. It was an added self-indulgence to know that, if he lay gently boiling himself for more than another minute, he would be late for dinner with Lady Poynter; but, if any one had to suffer, let it be Lady Poynter. It was not his fault that the rehearsal of "The Bomb-Sh.e.l.l" had dragged on until after seven; something had to be sacrificed--the letters which his secretary had left for him to sign, or the hot bath, or the cigarette and gla.s.s of sherry as he dressed, or (in the last resort and quite obviously) Lady Poynter. He had already foregone a c.o.c.ktail, which would have made him two minutes later.
As the water began to cool, Eric threw a towel over his shoulders, wiped the steam from the face of the clock and began to dry himself slowly, looking round with ever-fresh delight at the calculated ingenuity of comfort in his new flat. It was his reward for the successful play. For ten years after coming down from Oxford he had lived in the Temple, first with Jack Waring and afterwards by himself; lonely, hard-working years, when he had painfully learned the value of money and time. With one play running indefatigably, another rehearsing and a third in sight of completion, he had decided to construct a frame better suited to his new position. Ten years ago he had dreamed at Oxford of a day when he would burst upon London as a new young Byron; and, when the dream was almost forgotten, he found himself living in its midst. He was courted and quoted, photographed and "paragraphed"; Lady Poynter and the rich, malcontent world which aspired to intelligence humbly invited him to dine, and it did not matter whether she wanted to pay him homage or to exhibit him as her latest celebrity. It was time to leave the Temple and to burst, fully equipped, upon London. A friend in the artillery made over the remainder of his lease, and Eric gave himself a fortnight"s holiday to order the furnishing and decoration of the six tiny rooms.
When he surveyed telephone and dictaphone, switches and presses, files and cases, tables and lights, he felt that the ease and beauty of which he had dreamed were dulled and stunted by the reality.
Over the dressing-table hung a framed poster of his play: "_Regency Theatre_" in a scroll of blue lettering: "_A Divorce Has Been Arranged_"
under it; then his own name; then the cast. Eric looked affectionately at the trophy, as he began to comb his dripping, black hair. He was proud of the play and grateful to it; grateful for money, reputation and the added importance of himself. As he entered the Carlton that day one unknown woman had whispered to another, "Isn"t that Eric Lane? I thought he was older." He was boy enough to be gratified that seventeen people had stopped him that morning between Grosvenor Street and Piccadilly.
Eight months ago no one outside Fleet Street or the Thespian Club had heard of him. Jack Waring and O"Rane, Loring and Deganway always seemed to regard him as a harmless eccentric who wrote unacceptable plays for his own amus.e.m.e.nt. . . .
The hair-brushing completed, he put on a dressing-gown and crossed the hall to his smoking-room for the sherry and cigarette. On the table lay a pile of typewritten letters, awaiting his signature, and another pile not yet opened and secured from the late summer breeze by a gla.s.s paper-weight. It was shaped like a horse-shoe and had been sent him on his first night, to be followed by a telegram: "_Best wishes for all possible success Agnes._" He had kept it for luck and in grat.i.tude to Agnes Waring, who had been a sympathetic, if rather undiscriminating, friend for many years. Until eight months ago he had never earned enough money to think of marrying; and, at thirty-two, he told himself that he was not a marrying man; but more than once in the early hours of triumph he had thought of Agnes and of his own return to Lashmar; they had often talked jestingly of the day when he would come back famous, and behind the jest lay a hint of romance and sentiment which told him that she was waiting for him and believed in his success when he himself doubted it.
Next to the letters lay an alb.u.m in which his secretary had at last finished pasting his press-cuttings. He could not resist the temptation to glance at two or three of his favourite notices before opening the letters. The critics had treated him kindly, for he had been a critic himself and had not scrupled to secure a good press; but mere flattery never kept a bad play running. . . . He decided that he was going to enjoy his dinner with the Poynters, though the chiming of the clock in the hall warned him that he could not hope to be dressed and in Belgrave Square by a quarter past eight. The new Byron would achieve an effect, if he gained the reputation of _always_ being ten minutes late for everything; but the pose offended Eric"s sense of tidiness. Signing his letters, he ripped open half-a-dozen envelopes and glanced at the contents, pushed the news-cutting alb.u.m neatly into its shelf and hurried into his bedroom with a gla.s.s of sherry in his hand.
It was time to order a taxi, and a tall Scotch parlour-maid, of whom he lived in secret dread, came in answer to his ring. He would have preferred a man, but men were unprocurable in war-time. He let fall a word of instruction on the correct way of laying out dress-clothes and was beginning to get ready in earnest, when the telephone-bell rang simultaneously in bedroom, bathroom, dining-room and smoking-room. As he finished his sherry, he tried to remember where he had left the instrument.
"Hul-lo," he cried, exploring to see whether the bathroom chair was dry.
"That you, Ricky? Sybil speaking. I say, are you coming down on Sat.u.r.day? You"ve not been here for months, and we want to see you."
Eric sighed patiently before he remembered that the sigh was unlikely to carry as far as Winchester. The prophet could look for affection in his own country and in his own house; he would not find honour.
"If you feel I"m essential to the family happiness----" he began.
"You"re not. But we"ve got some people dining on Sat.u.r.day--Agnes Waring amongst others. You can bring your work with you. . . . Say you"ll come, like a good boy, and don"t be selfish."
"Well, I might," Eric answered. "Good-bye, Sybil."
"You needn"t be in such a hurry! What are you doing to-night?"
"I"m being--_extraordinarily_--late for dinner with some people I don"t know," he answered.
His sister"s voice in reply was slightly aggrieved.
"I wouldn"t detain you for worlds. I only wanted to know if you"d seen a full-page photograph of yourself----"
"In the "Gallery." Yes, I know the editor and I got him to shove it in.
As my own advertising agent, I take a lot of beating. Good-bye, Sybil."
"Good-bye, selfish pig. You"re being spoilt by success, you know."
Eric made no answer, but, as he s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat and cane, still more as he settled himself in the taxi with his feet on the opposite seat, he reflected with philosophic indulgence how wide of the mark his sister had fired. He was self-satisfied, perhaps, as he had some reason to be; self-sufficient, a.s.suredly, as he had set out to become. After all, he could have entered the Civil Service ten years before, as his father had wished; and there would have been ten years of material comfort, an unchallengeable social position, a wife, a home, spiritual paralysis and soul-destroying domestic worries as his portion. Instead, he had elected to make his own way in a hard and somewhat despised school. A young journalist had no status. People invited him to their houses, because he had been at the same college as their sons, because other people had already taken the plunge; but he had always had enough detachment to recognize where the intimacy was to stop.
Now he was being accepted at his own valuation. As he pa.s.sed the Ritz, two officers and a girl hailed a taxi and told the driver to take them to the Regency. At eleven o"clock they would be saying: "Good show, that." (Had he not loitered in the hall of the theatre, with coat-collar turned up, to hear just that?) In another month they would be going to "The Bomb-Sh.e.l.l," because it was by the fellow who wrote "A Divorce Has Been Arranged." . . . He had money, friends, adulators and the health to do a full day"s work. In speaking to Sybil, he had only hesitated because he was not sure whether he wanted to meet Agnes Waring yet. When they became engaged. . . . _If_ they became engaged, he would lose in interest with the women like Lady Poynter who were always inviting him to be lionized. . . .
As the taxi drew up in Belgrave Square, he looked at his watch.
Twenty-seven minutes past eight. He handed his hat and cane to a footman and followed the butler upstairs with complete self-possession. As he was asked his name at the door of the drawing-room, however, he stammered:
"Mr. Eric L-lane."
It was intolerable that he could not overcome that stammer, so entirely alien to a new young Byron. . . .
2
Lady Poynter had finished dressing and was writing in her diary when her maid entered to ask whether Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley might come in. At luncheon the d.u.c.h.ess of Ross had complained that no one would give her a chance of meeting young Eric Lane; Gerald Deganway had murmured, "One poor martyr without a lion"; and, as Deganway was incapable of originating anything, Lady Poynter felt that she was not infringing any copyright in recording the jest against that day when Eleanor Ross tried to steal any more of her young men the moment she had put a polish on them and made them known. . . .
"Angel Marion!" cried Lady Poynter, throwing down her pen so that it described an inky semi-circle. "The idea of asking!"
She embraced her guest as effusively as she had addressed her. Lady Poynter was forty-eight years of age, daily increasing in bulk, masculine in voice, intellectual through vanity and childless by preference. Her husband was rich, patient, stupid and self-indulgent, bearing with her literary pa.s.sions and in self-defence displaying that care for household comfort which it was Lady Poynter"s pride to neglect.
Why, she asked, were men given brains if they made G.o.ds of their bellies? Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley was the widow of a well-known free-lance journalist, who in his day had brought her into contact with a sufficient number of authors for her to imitate on austerely simple lines the symposia of wit and learning which Lady Poynter a.s.sembled on the strength of her own personality and her husband"s cellar. There was a long-standing gentle compet.i.tion between the two, which they abandoned in common hostility to Lady Maitland, who excelled them both in the ruthlessness and speed of her hunting. At the moment, however, Mrs.
Sh.e.l.ley had eclipsed both her rivals by the chance of having known Eric Lane for ten years; to Lady Maitland he was still "Mr. Eric," to Lady Poynter "Mr. Lane."
"You don"t mind my coming like this, do you?" she asked timidly, disengaging herself from Lady Poynter"s embrace and indicating her commandant"s uniform. "I was at the hospital until eight."
"As if I minded what you wore!" her hostess cried. "In war-time, when we haven"t a moment to turn round . . .! And it isn"t as if this were a party."
Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley walked to a mirror and looked thoughtfully at her una.s.sertive reflection. Her hair was a dusty brown, her eyes an unsoftening grey, and her cheeks, which were careworn with exacting, humble ambition, acted at once as frame and background for a thin nose and unrelaxing mouth.
"You always say that, darling," she protested gently, leaning forward to the mirror and dabbing at herself with a powder-puff. "And it means the _most_ delightful----"
"I"ve got Eric Lane coming," interrupted Lady Poynter, groping for a crumpled half-sheet of paper marked as with the sweeping strokes of a hay-rake in soft mud. "Who else? Sonia O"Rane you know; Max--or did Max say he was dining at his club? It doesn"t matter, because I can"t pretend that Max contributes much, even though he is my husband; then there"s my nephew, Johnnie Gaymer; and Babs Neave----"
"Dear Babs," murmured Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley with conscientious enthusiasm. It was her favourite boast that she sincerely tried to make allowances for all and permitted ill-speaking of none. In the years before the war, when Lady Barbara"s friends were wondering whether they really could continue to know her, Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley remained embarra.s.singly loyal. "I haven"t seen her for months."
"She"s been nursing at Crawleigh all this time, simply wearing herself out. I"ve never seen any one so changed. We met in Bond Street this morning; I hadn"t _meant_ to invite her, but I felt I must do _some_thing. . . ." Lady Poynter projected herself from the sofa and rustled to the door, murmuring: "I _must_ find out whether Max is dining at home to-night."
Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley made her way downstairs to the drawing-room and stood on the balcony outside one of the French windows, looking down through the warm dusk on Belgrave Square. An open taxi drew up at the door, and she watched Mrs. O"Rane descending daintily and smiling at the driver; a second taxi drove from the opposite corner of the square, and Captain Gaymer, in Flying Corps uniform, jumped out and hurried to the door, looking apprehensively at his watch. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley left the balcony and shook hands with Lord Poynter who was dutifully dressed in time to receive any guests who might arrive before his wife appeared.
"Two. Four," he counted timidly. "Babs Neave is sure to be late. That leaves only Lane. Does every one know him?"
An indistinct murmur was drowned by Gaymer, who knitted his brows and repeated:
"Lane? Eric Lane? The dramatist fellow? I saw something about him in one of the picture-papers to-day, when I was having my hair cut. Oh, I know!
He"d left London, and letters weren"t going to be forwarded. Didn"t he tell you?" he asked as his aunt crossed the room in concern.