femme if ever there was one, and the loyalest soul in the world, the only one of Judith’s early women friends who has totally ignored the fact of the Sacred Cap of Good Repute having been thrown over the windmills (indeed who knows whether dear, golden-hearted Delphine herself could conscientiously write the magic initials S.C.G.R. after her name?); but Delphine has never struck me as a person in whose dwelling one could find conventual seclusion. Judith, however, explained.
“Delphine will be painting all day, and dissipating all night. I can’t possibly disturb her in her studio, for she has to work tremendously hard—and I’m decidedly not going to dissipate with her. So I shall have my days and nights to my sequestered and meditative self.”
I said nothing: but all the same I am tolerably certain that Judith, being Judith, will enjoy prodigious merrymaking in Paris. She is absolutely sincere in her intentions—the earth holds no sincerer woman—but she is a self-deceiver. Her about-to-be-sequestered and meditative self was at that moment sitting on the arm of a chair and smoking a cigarette, with undisguised relish of the good things of this life. The blue smoke wreathing itself amid her fair hair resembled, so I told her in the relaxed intellectual frame of mind of the contented man, incense mounting through the nimbus of a saint. She affected solicitude lest the life-blood of my intelligence should be pouring out through my cut finger. No, I am convinced that the recueillement (that beautiful French word for which we have no English equivalent, meaning the gathering of the soul together within itself) of the rue Boissy d’Anglais is the very happiest delusion wherewith Judith has hitherto deluded herself. I am glad, exceedingly glad. Her temperament—I have got reconciled to her affliction—craves the gaiety which London denies her.
“And when are you going?” I asked.
“To-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“Why not? I wired Delphine this morning. I had to go out to get something for lunch (my conviction, it appears, was right), and I thought I might as well take an omnibus to Charing Cross and send a telegram.”
“But when are you going to pack?”
“I did that last night. I didn’t get to bed till four this morning. I only made up my mind after you had gone,” she added, in anticipation of a possible question.
It is better that we are not married. These sudden resolutions would throw my existence out of gear. My moral upheaval would be that of a hen in front of a motor-car. When I go abroad, I like at least a fortnight to think of it. One has to attune one’s mind to new conditions, to map out the pleasant scheme of days, to savour in anticipation the delights that stand there, awaiting one’s tasting, either in the mystery of the unknown or in the welcoming light of familiarity. I love the transition that can be so subtly gradated by the spirit between one scene and another. The man who awakens one fine morning in his London residence, scratches his head, and says, “What shall I do to-day? By Jove! I’ll start for Timbuctoo!” is to me an incomprehensible, incomplete being. He lacks an aesthetic sense.
I did not dare tell Judith she lacked an aesthetic sense. I might just as well have accused her of stealing silver spoons. I said I should miss her (which I certainly shall), and promised to write to her once a week.
“And you,” said I, “will have heaps of time to write me the History of a Sequestered and Meditative Self—meanwhile, let us go out somewhere and dine.”
When I got home, I found a card on my hall-table. “Mr. Sebastian Pasquale.”
I am sorry I missed Pasquale. I haven’t seen him for two or three years. He is a fascinating youth, a study in reversion. I will ask him to dinner here some day soon. It will be quieter than at the club.
CHAPTER III
May 24th.
Something has happened. Something fantastic, inconceivable. I am in a condition to be surprised at nothing. If a witch on a broomstick rode in through my open window and lectured me on quaternions, I should accept her visit as a normal occurrence.
I have spent hours walking up and down this book-lined room, wondering whether the universe or I were mad. Sometimes I laughed, for the thing is sheerly ridiculous. Sometimes I cursed at the impertinence of the thing in happening at all. Once I stumbled over a volume of Muratori lying on the floor, and I kicked it across the room. Then I took it up, and wept over the loosened binding.
The question is: What on earth am I to do? Why has Judith chosen this particular time to shut up her flat and sequester herself in Paris? Why did my lawyers appoint this particular morning for me to sign their silly documents? Why did I turn up three hours late? Why did I walk down the Thames Embankment? And why, oh, why, did I seat myself on a bench in the gardens below the terrace of the National Liberal Club?
Yesterday was one of the most peaceful and happy days of my existence. I worked contentedly at my history; I gossiped with Antoinette who came to demand permission to keep a cat.
“What kind of a cat?” I asked.
“Perhaps Monsieur does not like cats?” she inquired, anxiously.
“The cat was worshipped as a god by the ancient Egyptians,” I remarked.
“But this one, Monsieur,” she said in breathless reassurance, “has only one eye.”
I would sooner talk to Antoinette than the tutorial staff of Girton. If she woke up one morning and found she had a mind she would think it a disease.
In the afternoon I strolled into Regent’s Park and meeting the McMurray’s nine-year-old son in charge of the housemaid, around whom seemed to be hovering a sheepish individual in a bowler hat, I took him off to the Zoological Gardens. On the way he told me, with great glee, that his German governess was in bed with an awful sore throat; that he wasn’t doing any lessons; that the sheepish hoverer was Milly’s young man, and that the silly way they went on was enough to make one sick. When he had fed everything feedable and ridden everything ridable, I drove him to the Wellington Road and deposited him with his parents. I love a couple of hours with a child when it is thoroughly happy and on its best behaviour. And the enjoyment is enhanced by the feeling of utter thankfulness that he is not my child, but somebody else’s.
In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot. The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I who lived through them. I had not a care in the world, not a want that I could not gratify. I thought of Judith. I thought of Sebastian Pasquale. I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance type of which he must be the reincarnation. I fixed upon young Olgiati, one of the assassins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Of the many hundreds of British youths who passed before my eyes during my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his manhood. And strange to say we had only a few months together, during my first year’s apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than I. He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most unpopular boy in the school. The staff, to whom the conventional must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him. I alone took to the creature. I think now that my quaint passion for the cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my attraction. In externals he is as English as I am, having been brought up in England by an English mother, but there are thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he. The McMurrays
