"Which?"
"The girl with the bun, by the potted palm."
"Oh," said the stranger, "that is Lady Mary Aiden Hibbert; she is of a rather buoyant disposition."
"Not to say _Tom_ buoyant," said Gobion, punning lazily; "she seems of an amiable complexion."
"My dear sir, complexion of both kinds is influenced by cosmetics, not by character."
"I perceive you are a cynic."
"Possibly," said the other in a meditative tone; "yet not so much of a cynic as a man in quest of sensations."
"A society journalist?"
"No, merely a man who has become tired of the higher immorality, and wants something else to do."
Gobion laughed and got up. "I"m going to the Palace for an hour or two."
"May I come?" said the stranger; "my name is Jones."
"Please do. I am called Yardly Gobion. I shouldn"t like to be called Jones, it"s not a pretty name."
The other smiled, he was not vexed; Gobion knew his man. They drove swiftly to the Palace through the lighted streets, talking a little on the way. When they went into the stalls the hysterio-comic of the hour was leaping round the stage in frenzied pirouettes between the verses of her song.
The suggestive music of the dance pulsed through the audience, and when the time sank into the rhythm of the verse, they sat back in their seats with expectant eyes, and a little sigh of delight and antic.i.p.ation.
Miss Mace, in her song "It"s a Family Characteristic," was the talk of London. The _risque_ nature of the words, her wonderful art in singing them, her naughty eyes, the twitching of her somewhat large mouth--all the lewd papers of the baser sort yelled over her in ecstasy every Wednesday morning.
"I wonder what they pay her a week," said Mr. Jones.
Gobion hadn"t an idea, but he said "sixty pounds" confidently.
"Really! She certainly is very clever."
"The best thing I find about her is that she is in wonderful sympathy with her audience, especially too when she is drunk--much funnier then."
"Imagine how often the average faddist would invoke the Deity during her turn," said the stranger something sententiously.
"His deity, you mean," answered Gobion. "The average man of the _Echo_-reading type thinks G.o.d is a policeman in the service of the Purity party."
"You coruscate; let us go to the American bar."
"That"s a good idea; the presiding gentleman who makes the drinks is an artist. The mingled science and art with which he compounds whimsical beverages is wonderful. Half of him seems impulse and nervous force as he rattles the pounded ice and flourishes the gla.s.ses, while the other half looks in and puts the finishing touches."
"You talk nonsense very pleasantly," said Mr. Jones. "What will you have?"
"Oh! a sherry cobbler, please, _with_ straws."
"Are you a connoisseur in drinks?"
"Not yet; I hope to be."
"I will take you to a place where you may learn."
"Please do; drinks are more than a cult, they are a science. To a man I knew at Oxford they were a religion." He was thinking of Condamine.
"There are so many religions nowadays."
"Yes; the sham of yesterday takes an alias and calls itself the religion of the future."
"I hate the faddist."
"What _do_ you like?"
"I haven"t many likes left now. I like to be amused as much as possible."
After a time they left the music-hall, and while they were walking through clubland the stranger permitted himself more freedom of expression, talking cynically. He was a middle-aged man, and Gobion amused him immensely.
"How badly brought up you must have been," he said to him.
"Why, what makes you think so?"
"You vibrate so quickly to my views, and I am not considered orthodox."
"Well, I was not so much badly brought up, as left to myself. My father"s pedigree claimed a larger share of his attention than his progeny. I was an accident in the domestic arrangements."
"He must be a strange person."
"He is. I always suspect my predisposition to shady pleasures is hereditary, although he is a parson."
"It"s quite often the case that a repentant rake takes Orders from a mere revulsion to asceticism. And your mother?"
"A nonent.i.ty with most seductive hair."
While talking, they had arrived at the Park, and were turning home to the hotel in the fresh night air. Gobion knew that he had been smart, perhaps smarter than usual, but he did not know what impression he had made. The stranger was a man outside his experience. Accustomed as Gobion was, in the light of Oxford experience, to feel that _he_ was the cynic and man of the world, he was somewhat doubtful of a man who appeared to him to be a realization of what he might himself become.
Cynicism, he thought, is now my plaything; it is this man"s master, and he has lost the savours of life. I wonder if Father Gray was right. He often said that up to thirty a man might be happy with no moral sense; but after----
He saw dimly a foreshortened view of the future. It was on this night that the confidence in his own ability to be happy in evil began to be a little undermined. This chance meeting with a man weary of life, and not interested in death, a man with an aching, futile soul, whom he never saw again, was fraught with tremendous importance to his future career.
On this his first night in London the seeds were sown which led to the final pose in Houndsditch.
A celebrated lady novelist (she is now in Colney Hatch, but very clever) once said to the writer of these memoirs that literature, or rather journalism, is little more than a big game of bluff. Her remark was quite true. The art of the thing consists in getting the keynote of twenty different publics, and writing on those lines for the twenty different papers that represent their views.
This is not the way to make a reputation, but it is certainly one of the ways in which the literary adventurer may make a certain amount of money. Gobion knew this well. The conquest was mean and the reward not far from meagre; but at his age and with his past he could not hope for much more, and there was a bustling excitement in it which seemed to him most desirable.
He could not specialize; he had no fixed opinions. It was impossible for him to take up a decided line in his work.
At Oxford the exigencies of his career had forced him to have no opinions, but simply to adopt the policy of the set he happened to be with. He belonged to no party, and in moral views, though he was apparently in agreement with both, he t.i.tillated the men of a clean and decent life, and amused their opposites, while he borrowed money from both with a cheerful impartiality. As far as he could dispa.s.sionately reckon them up, his mental a.s.sets were a felicity and facility of expression, more or less wide reading, and a power of intuition and knowledge of the public mind that was almost devilish in its infallibility.