for Reformatories, mayhap.’
‘They would hardly be a cure.’
‘You ‘re in search of a cure?’
‘It would be a blessed discovery.’
‘But what’s to become of Society?’
‘It’s a puzzle to the cleverest.’
‘All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.
‘Establishments must have their sacrifices. Beware of interfering: eh?’
‘By degrees, we may hope. …’
‘Society prudently shuns the topic; and so ‘ll we. For we might tell of one another, in a fit of distraction, that t’ other one talked of it, and we should be banished for an offence against propriety. You should read my friend Durance’s Essay on Society. Lawyers are a buttress of Society. But, come: I wager they don’t know what they support until they read that Essay.’
Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to him.
He said: ‘Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?’
‘Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years. I was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!’
‘Followed by a second, not less … ?’
‘In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to make it so!’
‘The Law must be vindicated.’
‘The law is a clumsy bludgeon.’
‘We think it the highest effort of human reason—the practical instrument.’
‘You may compare it to a rustic’s finger on a fiddlestring, for the murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.
‘I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.’
‘You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.—Here’s a peep of Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows. I like these old streets!’
‘Hum,’ Carling hesitated. ‘I can remember when the dirt at the windows was appalling.’
‘Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster’s green-scum eye: it was. And there your Law did good work.—You’re for Bordeaux. What is your word on Burgundy?’
‘Our Falernian!’
‘Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom. But he will have the best of everything. A Romanee! A Musigny! Sip, my friend, you embrace the Goddess of your choice above. You are up beside her at a sniff of that wine.—And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a bit by our feelings of our first love, who hadn’t the cleanest of faces or nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.’
Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share. He said urgently: ‘Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor’s abilities. He is one of our foremost men … proud of him. Mr. Radnor has genius; I have watched him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the memorable men of our times. I can admire him, independent of—well, misfortune of that kind … a mistaken early step. Misfortune, it is to be named. Between ourselves—we are men of the world—if one could see the way! She occasionally … as I have told you. I have ventured suggestions. As I have mentioned, I have received an impression …’
‘But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn’t release him and will keep his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.’
‘Can you trace them?’
‘Undisguised!’
‘Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout. I should not exactly say revengeful. We have to discriminate. I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty, directed at the—I quote—state of sin. We are mixed, you know.’
The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap. ‘But, fifty thousand times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she calls it, if it pleased her.’
‘She might try. Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions. And there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble. She has had to combat that scruple.’
‘Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!—well. But put a by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin. Where, do you imagine, she would lay it? You’ll say, that Nature and Law never agreed. They ought.’
‘The latter deferring to the former?’
‘Moulding itself on her swelling proportions. My dear dear sir, the state of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of, in violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.’
‘He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.’
‘He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley sugar in her pockets;—and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar for awful combinations in druggery! Gilt widows are equal to decrees of Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law that sanctions, they’re the criminals. Victor Radnor is the noblest of fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell you: he saved me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen—which means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that! Yes, Mr. Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen; and it is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual man again before I blacken paper. Owing to him, I have a tenderness for mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help it. He is an Olympian—who thinks of them below. The lady also is an admirable woman at all points. The pair are a mated couple, such as you won’t find in ten households over Christendom. Are you aware of the story?’
Carling replied: ‘A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very distinct versions.’
‘Hear mine.—And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all right. But a crazy cab it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury. Except that it’s sheer riff-raff here to knock over.’
‘Hulloa?—come!’ quoth the wary lawyer.
‘There’s the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me! One may be sure that the man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal practices; a dear good spherical fellow! Some day, we’ll hope, you will be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor’s Romance Conti aged thirty-one: a wine, you’ll say at the second glass, High Priest for the celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of man.’
‘You hit me rightly,’ said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited by the bouquet of Victor Radnor’s hospitality and companionship, which added flavour to Fenellan’s compliments. These came home to him through his desire to be
