65 Short Stories (135 page)

‘I’ll tell you what I gave them in exchange for their money. Romance. Look at this place.’ He made a wide, circular gesture that embraced the sea and the horizon. ‘There are a hundred places in England like this. Look at that sea and that sky; look at these lodging-houses; look at that pier and the front. Doesn’t it make your heart sink? It’s dead as mutton. It’s all very well for you who come down here for a week or two because you’re run down. But think of all those women who live here from one year’s end to another. They haven’t a chance. They hardly know anyone. They’ve just got enough money to live on and that’s all. I wonder if you know how terrible their lives are. Their lives are just like the front, a long, straight, cemented walk that goes on and on from one seaside resort to another. Even in the season there’s nothing for them. They’re out of it. They might as well be dead. And then I come along. Mind you, I never made advances to a woman who wouldn’t have gladly acknowledged to thirty-five. And I give them love. Why, many of them had never known what it was to have a man do them up behind. Many of them had never known what it was to sit on a bench in the dark with a man’s arm round their waist. I bring them change and excitement. I give them a new pride in themselves. They were on the shelf and I come along quite quietly and I deliberately take them down. A little ray of sunshine in those drab lives, that’s what I was. No wonder they jumped at me, no wonder they wanted me to go back to them. The only one who gave me away was the milliner; she said she was a widow, my private opinion is that she’d never been married at all. You say I did the dirty on them; why, I brought happiness and glamour into eleven lives that never thought they had even a dog’s chance of it again. You say I’m a villain and a scoundrel, you’re wrong. I’m a philanthropist. Five years, they gave me; they should have given me the medal of the Royal Humane Society.’

He took out his empty packet of Gold Flake and looked at it with a melancholy shake of the head. When I handed him my cigarette case he helped himself without a word. I watched the spectacle of a good man struggling with his emotion.

‘And what did I get out of it, I ask you?’ he continued presently. ‘Board and lodging and enough to buy cigarettes. But I never was able to save, and the proof is that now, when I’m not so young as I was, I haven’t got half a crown in my pocket.’ He gave me a sidelong glance. ‘It’s a great come-down for me to find myself in this position. I’ve always paid my way and I’ve never asked a friend for a loan in all my life. I was wondering, sir, if you could oblige me with a trifle. It’s humiliating to me to have to suggest it, but the fact is, if you could oblige me with a pound it would mean a great deal to me.’

Well, I had certainly had a pound’s worth of entertainment out of the bigamist and I dived for my pocket-book.

‘I shall be very glad,’ I said.

He looked at the notes I took out.

‘I suppose you couldn’t make it two, sir?’

‘I think I could.’

I handed him a couple of pound notes and he gave a little sigh as he took them.

‘You don’t know what it means to a man who’s used to the comforts of home life not to know where to turn for a night’s lodging.’

‘But there is one thing I should like you to tell me,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t like you to think me cynical, but I had a notion that women on the whole take the maxim, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” as applicable exclusively to our sex. How did you persuade these respectable, and no doubt thrifty, women to entrust you so confidently with all their savings?’

An amused smile spread over his undistinguished features.

Well, sir, you know what Shakespeare said about ambition o’erleaping itself That’s the explanation. Tell a woman you’ll double her capital in six months if she’ll give it you to handle and she won’t be able to give you the money quick enough. Greed, that’s what it is. Just greed.’

It was a sharp sensation, stimulating to the appetite (like hot sauce with ice cream), to go from this diverting ruffian to the respectability, all lavender bags and crinolines, of the St Clairs and Miss Porchester. I spent every evening with them now No sooner had the ladies left him than Mr St Clair sent his compliments to my table and asked me to drink a glass of port with him. When we had finished it we went into the lounge and drank coffee. Mr St Clair enjoyed his glass of old brandy. The hour I thus spent with them was so exquisitely boring that it had for me a singular fascination. They were told by the manageress that I had written plays.

‘We used often to go to the theatre when Sir Henry Irving was at the Lyceum,’ said Mr St Clair. ‘I once had the pleasure of meeting him. I was taken to supper at the Garrick Club by Sir Everard Millais and I was introduced to Mr Irving, as he then was.’

‘Tell him what he said to you, Edwin,’ said Mrs St Clair.

Mr St Clair struck a dramatic attitude and gave not at all a bad imitation of Henry Irving.

“‘You have the actor’s face, Mr St Clair,” he said to me. “If you ever think of going on the stage, come to me and I will give you a part.’ Mr St Clair resumed his natural manner. ‘It was enough to turn a young man’s head.’

‘But it didn’t turn yours,’ I said.

‘I will not deny that if I had been otherwise situated I might have allowed myself to be tempted. But I had my family to think of It would have broken my father’s heart if I had not gone into the business.’

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘I am a tea merchant, sir. My firm is the oldest in the City of London. I have spent forty years of my life in combating to the best of my ability the desire of my fellow-countrymen to drink Ceylon tea instead of the China tea which was universally drunk in my youth.’

I thought it charmingly characteristic of him to spend a lifetime in persuading the public to buy something they didn’t want rather than something they did.

‘But in his younger days my husband did a lot of amateur acting and he was thought very clever,’ said Mrs St Clair.

‘Shakespeare, you know, and sometimes 
The School for Scandal 
I would never consent to act trash. But that is a thing of the past. I had a gift, perhaps it was a pity to waste it, but it’s too late now When we have a dinner-party I sometimes let the ladies persuade me to recite the great soliloquies of Hamlet. But that is all I do.’

Oh! Oh! Oh! I thought with shuddering fascination of those dinner-parties and wondered whether I should ever be asked to one of them. Mrs St Clair gave me a little smile, half shocked, half prim.

‘My husband was very Bohemian as a young man,’ she said.

‘I sowed my wild oats. I knew quite a lot of painters and writers, Wilkie Collins, for instance, and even men who wrote for the papers. Watts painted a portrait of my wife, and I bought a picture of Millais. I knew a number of the Pre-Raphaelites.’

‘Have you a Rossetti?’ I asked.

‘No. I admired Rossetti’s talent, but I could not approve of his private life. I would never buy a picture by an artist whom I should not care to ask to dinner at my house.’

My brain was reeling when Miss Porchester, looking at her watch, said: ‘Are you not going to read to us tonight, Uncle Edwin?’

I withdrew

It was while I was drinking a glass of port with Mr St Clair one evening that he told me the sad story of Miss Porchester. She was engaged to be married to a nephew of Mrs St Clair, a barrister, when it was discovered that he had had an intrigue with the daughter of his laundress.

‘It was a terrible thing,’ said Mr St Clair. ‘A terrible thing. But of course my niece took the only possible course. She returned him his ring, his letters, and his photograph, and said that she could never marry him. She implored him to marry the young person he had wronged and said she would be a sister to her. It broke her heart. She has never cared for anyone since.’

‘And did he marry the young person?’

Mr St Clair shook his head and sighed.

‘No, we were greatly mistaken in him. It has been a sore grief to my dear wife to think that a nephew of hers should behave in such a dishonourable manner. Some time later we heard that he was engaged to a young lady in a very good position with ten thousand pounds of her own. I considered it my duty to write to her father and put the facts before him. He answered my letter in a most insolent fashion. He said he would much rather his son-in-law had a mistress before marriage than after.’

‘What happened then?’

‘They were married and now my wife’s nephew is one of His Majesty’s Judges of the High Court, and his wife is My Lady. But we’ve never consented to receive them. When my wife’s nephew was knighted Eleanor suggested that we should ask them to dinner, but my wife said that he should never darken our doors and I upheld her.’

‘And the laundress’s daughter?’

‘She married in her own class of life and has a public-house at Canterbury. My niece, who has a little money of her own, did everything for her and is godmother to her eldest child.’

Poor Miss Porchester. She had sacrificed herself on the altar of Victorian morality and I am afraid the consciousness that she had behaved beautifully was the only benefit she had got from it

‘Miss Porchester is a woman of striking appearance,’ I said. ‘When she was younger she must have been perfectly lovely. I wonder she never married somebody else.’

‘Miss Porchester was considered a great beauty. Alma-Tadema admired her so much that he asked her to sit as a model for one of his pictures, but of course we couldn’t very well allow that.’ Mr St Clair’s tone conveyed that the suggestion had deeply outraged his sense of decency. ‘No, Miss Porchester never cared for anyone but her cousin. She never speaks of him and it is now thirty years since they parted, but I am convinced that she loves him still. She is a true woman, my dear sir, one life, one love, and though perhaps I regret that she has been deprived of the joys of marriage and motherhood I am bound to admire her fidelity.’

But the heart of woman is incalculable and rash is the man who thinks she will remain in one stay. Rash, Uncle Edwin. You have known Eleanor for many years, for when, her mother having fallen into a decline and died, you brought the orphan to your comfortable and even luxurious house in Leinster Square, she was but a child; but what, when it comes down to brass tacks, Uncle Edwin, do you really know of Eleanor?

It was but two days after Mr St Clair had confided to me the touching story which explained why Miss Porchester had remained a spinster that, coming back to the hotel in the afternoon after a round of golf, the manageress came up to me in an agitated manner.

‘Mr St Clair’s compliments and will you go up to number twenty-seven the moment you come in.’

‘Certainly. But why?’

‘Oh, there’s a rare upset. They’ll tell you.’

I knocked at the door. I heard a ‘Come in, come in,’ which reminded me that Mr St Clair had played Shakespearean parts in probably the most refined amateur dramatic company in London. I entered and found Mrs St Clair lying on the sofa with a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne on her brow and a bottle of smelling-salts in her hand. Mr St Clair was standing in front of the fire in such a manner as to prevent anyone else in the room from obtaining any benefit from it.

‘I must apologize for asking you to come up in this unceremonious fashion, but we are in great distress, and we thought you might be able to throw some light on what has happened.’

His perturbation was obvious.

‘What 
has 
happened?’

‘Our niece, Miss Porchester, has eloped. This morning she sent in a message to my wife that she had one of her sick headaches. When she has one of her sick headaches she likes to be left absolutely alone and it wasn’t till this afternoon that my wife went to see if there was anything she could do for her. The room was empty. Her trunk was packed. Her dressing-case with silver fittings was gone. And on the pillow was a letter telling us of her rash act.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know exactly what I can do.’

‘We were under the impression that you were the only gentleman at Elsom with whom she had any acquaintance.’

His meaning flashed across me.

‘I haven’t eloped with her,’ I said. ‘I happen to be a married man.’

‘I see you haven’t eloped with her. At the first moment we thought perhaps ... but if it isn’t you, who is it?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know’

‘Show him the letter, Edwin,’ said Mrs St Clair from the sofa.

‘Don’t move, Gertrude. It will bring on your lumbago.’

Miss Porchester had ler’ sick headaches and Mrs St Clair had ler’ lumbago. What had Mr St Clair? I was willing to bet a fiver that Mr St Clair had ‘his’ gout. He gave me the letter and I read it with an air of decent commiseration.

Dearest Uncle Edwin and Aunt Gertrude

When you receive this I shall be far away. I am going to be married this morning to a gentleman who is very dear to me. I know I am doing wrong in running away like this, but I was afraid you would endeavour to set obstacles in the way of my marriage and since nothing would induce me to change my mind I thought it would save us all much unhappiness if I did it without telling you anything about it. My fiance is a very retiring man, owing to his long residence in tropical countries not in the best of health, and he thought it much better that we should be married quite privately. When you know how radiantly happy I am I hope you will forgive me. Please send my box to the luggage office at Victoria Station.