"I think I see one just beside the left temple."
He turned quickly to the gla.s.s.
"Dear me, how careless of Charles! I shall have to give him a piece of my mind."
"Come here, and let me take it out," said Mrs. Crowley.
"I will let you do nothing of the sort I should consider it most familiar."
"You were giving us the gratuitous piece of information that you were nearly forty," said Alec.
"The thought came to me the other day with something of a shock, and I set about a scrutiny of the life I was leading. I"ve worked at the bar pretty hard for fifteen years now, and I"ve been in the House since the general election. I"ve been earning two thousand a year, I"ve got nearly four thousand of my own, and I"ve never spent much more than half my income. I wondered if it was worth while to spend eight hours a day settling the sordid quarrels of foolish people, and another eight hours in the farce of governing the nation."
"Why do you call it that?"
d.i.c.k Lomas shrugged his shoulders scornfully.
"Because it is. A few big-wigs rule the roost, and the rest of us are only there to delude the British people into the idea that they"re a self-governing community."
"What is wrong with you is that you have no absorbing aim in politics,"
said Alec gravely.
"Pardon me, I am a suffragist of the most vehement type," answered d.i.c.k, with a thin smile.
"That"s the last thing I should have expected you to be," said Mrs.
Crowley, who dressed with admirable taste. "Why on earth have you taken to that?"
d.i.c.k shrugged his shoulders.
"No one can have been through a parliamentary election without discovering how unworthy, sordid, and narrow are the reasons for which men vote. There are very few who are alive to the responsibilities that have been thrust upon them. They are indifferent to the importance of the stakes at issue, but make their vote a matter of ign.o.ble barter. The parliamentary candidate is at the mercy of faddists and cranks. Now, I think that women, when they have votes, will be a trifle more narrow, and they will give them for motives that are a little more sordid and a little more unworthy. It will reduce universal suffrage to the absurd, and then it may be possible to try something else."
d.i.c.k had spoken with a vehemence that was unusual to him. Alec watched him with a certain interest.
"And what conclusions have you come to?"
For a moment he did not answer, then he gave a deprecating smile.
"I feel that the step I want to take is momentous for me, though I am conscious that it can matter to n.o.body else whatever. There will be a general election in a few months, and I have made up my mind to inform the whips that I shall not stand again. I shall give up my chambers in Lincoln"s Inn, put up the shutters, so to speak, and Mr. Richard Lomas will retire from active life."
"You wouldn"t really do that?" cried Mrs. Crowley.
"Why not?"
"In a month complete idleness will simply bore you to death."
"I doubt it. Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they"re obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture of Christian times is the sanctification of labour. You see, the early Christians were slaves, and it was necessary to show them that their obligatory toil was n.o.ble and virtuous. But when all is said and done, a man works to earn his bread and to keep his wife and children; it is a painful necessity, but there is nothing heroic in it. If people choose to put a higher value on the means than on the end, I can only pa.s.s with a shrug of the shoulders, and regret the paucity of their intelligence."
"It"s really unfair to talk so much all at once," said Mrs. Crowley, throwing up her pretty hands.
But d.i.c.k would not be stopped.
"For my part I have neither wife nor child, and I have an income that is more than adequate. Why should I take the bread out of somebody else"s mouth? And it"s not on my own merit that I get briefs--men seldom do--I only get them because I happen to have at the back of me a very large firm of solicitors. And I can find nothing worthy in attending to these foolish disputes. In most cases it"s six of one and half a dozen of the other, and each side is very unjust and pig-headed. No, the bar is a fair way of earning your living like another, but it"s no more than that; and, if you can exist without, I see no reason why Quixotic motives of the dignity of human toil should keep you to it. I"ve already told you why I mean to give up my seat in Parliament."
"Have you realised that you are throwing over a career that may be very brilliant? You should get an under-secretaryship in the next government."
"That would only mean licking the boots of a few more men whom I despise."
"It"s a very dangerous experiment that you"re making."
d.i.c.k looked straight into Alec MacKenzie"s eyes.
"And is it you who counsel me not to make it on that account?" he said, smiling. "Surely experiments are only amusing if they"re dangerous."
"And to what is it precisely that you mean to devote your time?" asked Mrs. Crowley.
"I should like to make idleness a fine art," he laughed. "People, now-a-days, turn up their noses at the dilettante. Well, I mean to be a dilettante. I want to devote myself to the graces of life. I"m forty, and for all I know I haven"t so very many years before me: in the time that remains, I want to become acquainted with the world and all the graceful, charming things it contains."
Alec, fallen into deep thought, stared into the fire. Presently he took a long breath, rose from his chair, and drew himself to his full height.
"I suppose it"s a life like another, and there is no one to say which is better and which is worse. But, for my part, I would rather go on till I dropped. There are ten thousand things I want to do. If I had ten lives I couldn"t get through a t.i.the of what, to my mind, so urgently needs doing."
"And what do you suppose will be the end of it?" asked d.i.c.k.
"For me?"
d.i.c.k nodded, but did not otherwise reply. Alec smiled faintly.
"Well, I suppose the end of it will be death in some swamp, obscurely, worn out with disease and exposure; and my bearers will make off with my guns and my stores, and the jackals will do the rest."
"I think it"s horrible," said Mrs. Crowley, with a shudder.
"I"m a fatalist. I"ve lived too long among people with whom it is the deepest rooted article of their faith, to be anything else. When my time comes, I cannot escape it." He smiled whimsically. "But I believe in quinine, too, and I think that the daily use of that admirable drug will make the thread harder to cut."
To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.
"And the worst of it is that it will all be the same in a hundred years," said d.i.c.k. "We shall both be forgotten long before then, you with your strenuousness, and I with my folly."
"And what conclusion do you draw from that?" asked Mrs. Crowley.
"Only that the psychological moment has arrived for a whisky and soda."
IV
There was some rough shooting on the estate which Mrs. Crowley had rented, and next day d.i.c.k went out to see what he could find. Alec refused to accompany him.