Chapter 6 No.6

On the way to luncheon Mr. Woods came upon Adèle Haggage and Hugh Van

Orden, both of whom he knew, very much engrossed in one another, in a

nook under the stairway. To Billy it seemed just now quite proper that

every one should be in love; wasn't it--after all--the most pleasant

condition in the world? So he greeted them with a semi-paternal smile

that caused Adèle to flush a little.

For she was--let us say, interested--in Mr. Van Orden. That was

tolerably well known. In fact, Margaret--prompted by Mrs. Haggage,

it must be confessed--had invited him to Selwoode for the especial

purpose of entertaining Miss Adèle Haggage; for he was a good match,

and Mrs. Haggage, as an experienced chaperon, knew the value of

country houses. Very unexpectedly, however, the boy had developed a

disconcerting tendency to fall in love with Margaret, who snubbed him

promptly and unmercifully. He had accordingly fallen back on Adèle,

and Mrs. Haggage had regained both her trust in Providence and her

temper.

In the breakfast-room, where luncheon was laid out, the Colonel

greeted Mr. Woods with the enthusiasm a sailor shipwrecked on a desert

island might conceivably display toward the boat-crew come to rescue

him. The Colonel liked Billy; and furthermore, the poor Colonel's

position at Selwoode just now was not utterly unlike that of the

suppositious mariner; were I minded to venture into metaphor, I should

picture him as clinging desperately to the rock of an old fogeyism

and surrounded by weltering seas of advanced thought. Colonel Hugonin

himself was not advanced in his ideas. Also, he had forceful opinions

as to the ultimate destination of those who were.

Then Billy was presented to the men of the party--Mr. Felix Kennaston

and Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury. Mrs. Haggage he knew slightly; and

Kathleen Saumarez he had known very well indeed, some six years

previously, before she had ever heard of Miguel Saumarez, and when

Billy was still an undergraduate. She was a widow now, and not

well-to-do; and Mr. Woods's first thought on seeing her was that a man

was a fool to write verses, and that she looked like just the sort of

woman to preserve them.

His second was that he had verged on imbecility when he fancied he

admired that slender, dark-haired type. A woman's hair ought to be an

enormous coronal of sunlight; a woman ought to have very large, candid

eyes of a colour between that of sapphires and that of the spring

heavens, only infinitely more beautiful than either; and all

petticoated persons differing from this description were manifestly

quite unworthy of any serious consideration.

So his eyes turned to Margaret, who had no eyes for him. She had

forgotten his existence, with an utterness that verged on ostentation;

and if it had been any one else Billy would have surmised she was in a

temper. But that angel in a temper!--nonsense! And, oh, what eyes she

had! and what lashes! and what hair!--and altogether, how adorable she

was, and what a wonder the admiring gods hadn't snatched her up to

Olympus long ago!

Thus far Mr. Woods.

But if Miss Hugonin was somewhat taciturn, her counsellors in divers

schemes for benefiting the universe were in opulent vein. Billy heard

them silently.

"I have spent the entire morning by the lake," Mr. Kennaston informed

the party at large, "in company with a mocking-bird who was practising

a new aria. It was a wonderful place; the trees were lisping verses to

themselves, and the sky overhead was like a robin's egg in colour,

and a faint wind was making tucks and ruches and pleats all over

the water, quite as if the breezes had set up in business as

mantua-makers. I fancy they thought they were working on a great sheet

of blue silk, for it was very like that. And every once in a while a

fish would leap and leave a splurge of bubble and foam behind that you

would have sworn was an inserted lace medallion."

Mr. Kennaston, as you are doubtless aware, is the author of "The

King's Quest" and other volumes of verse. He is a full-bodied young

man, with hair of no particular shade; and if his green eyes are a

little aged, his manner is very youthful. His voice in speaking is

wonderfully pleasing, and he has a habit of cocking his head on one

side, in a bird-like fashion.

"Indeed," Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury observed, "it is very true that God

made the country and man made the town. A little more wine, please."

Mr. Jukesbury is a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy

and temperance. He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is

president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the

Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the

Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of divers

similar honours.

"I am never really happy in the country," Mrs. Saumarez dissented; "it

reminds me so constantly of our rural drama. I am always afraid the

quartette may come on and sing something."

Kathleen Eppes Saumarez, as I hope you do not need to be told, is

the well-known lecturer before women's clubs, and the author of many

sympathetic stories of Nature and animal life of the kind that have

had such a vogue of late. There was always an indefinable air of

pathos about her; as Hunston Wyke put it, one felt, somehow, that her

mother had been of a domineering disposition, and that she took after

her father.

"Ah, dear lady," Mr. Kennaston cried, playfully, "you, like many of

us, have become an alien to Nature in your quest of a mere Earthly

Paradox. Epigrams are all very well, but I fancy there is more

happiness to be derived from a single impulse from a vernal wood than

from a whole problem-play of smart sayings. So few of us are

natural," Mr. Kennaston complained, with a dulcet sigh; "we are too

sophisticated. Our very speech lacks the tang of outdoor life.

Why should we not love Nature--the great mother, who is, I grant you,

the necessity of various useful inventions, in her angry moods, but

who, in her kindly moments--" He paused, with a wry face. "I beg your

pardon," said he, "but I believe I've caught rheumatism lying by that

confounded pond."

Mrs. Saumarez rallied the poet, with a pale smile. "That comes of

communing with Nature," she reminded him; "and it serves you rightly,

for natural communications corrupt good epigrams. I prefer Nature

with wide margins and uncut leaves," she spoke, in her best platform

manner. "Art should be an expurgated edition of Nature, with all

the unpleasant parts left out. And I am sure," Mrs. Saumarez added,

handsomely, and clinching her argument, "that Mr. Kennaston gives us

much better sunsets in his poems than I have ever seen in the west."

He acknowledged this with a bow.

"Not sherry--claret, if you please," said Mr. Jukesbury. "Art should

be an expurgated edition of Nature," he repeated, with a suave

chuckle. "Do you know, I consider that admirably put, Mrs.

Saumarez--admirably, upon my word. Ah, if our latter-day writers would

only take that saying to heart! We do not need to be told of the vice

and corruption prevalent, I am sorry to say, among the very best

people; what we really need is continually to be reminded of the fact

that pure hearts and homes and happy faces are to be found to-day

alike in the palatial residences of the wealthy and in the humbler

homes of those less abundantly favoured by Fortune, and yet dwelling

together in harmony and Christian resignation and--er--comparatively

moderate circumstances."

"Surely," Mrs. Saumarez protested, "art has nothing to do with

morality. Art is a process. You see a thing in a certain way; you make

your reader see it in the same way--or try to. If you succeed, the

result is art. If you fail, it may be the book of the year."

"Enduring immortality and--ah--the patronage of the reading public,"

Mr. Jukesbury placidly insisted, "will be awarded, in the end, only

to those who dwell upon the true, the beautiful, and the--er

--respectable. Art must cheer; it must be optimistic and

edifying and--ah--suitable for young persons; it must have an uplift,

a leaven of righteousness, a--er--a sort of moral baking-powder. It

must utterly eschew the--ah--unpleasant and repugnant details of life.

It is, if I may so express myself, not at home in the ménage à trois

or--er--the representation of the nude. Yes, another glass of claret,

if you please."

"I quite agree with you," said Mrs. Haggage, in her deep voice. Sarah

Ellen Haggage is, of course, the well-known author of "Child-Labour in

the South," and "The Down-Trodden Afro-American," and other notable

contributions to literature. She is, also, the "Madame President" both

of the Society for the Betterment of Civic Government and Sewerage,

and of the Ladies' League for the Edification of the Impecunious.

"And I am glad to see," Mrs. Haggage presently went on, "that the

literature of the day is so largely beginning to chronicle the sayings

and doings of the labouring classes. The virtues of the humble must be

admitted in spite of their dissolute and unhygienic tendencies. Yes,"

Mrs. Haggage added, meditatively, "our literature is undoubtedly

acquiring a more elevated tone; at last we are shaking off the

scintillant and unwholesome influence of the French."

"Ah, the French!" sighed Mr. Kennaston; "a people who think depravity

the soul of wit! Their art is mere artfulness. They care nothing for

Nature."

"No," Mrs. Haggage assented; "they prefer nastiness. All French

books are immoral. I ran across one the other day that was simply

hideously indecent--unfit for a modest woman to read. And I can assure

you that none of its author's other books are any better. I purchased

the entire set at once and read them carefully, in order to make sure

that I was perfectly justified in warning my working-girls' classes

against them. I wish to misjudge no man--not even a member of a nation

notoriously devoted to absinthe and illicit relations."

She breathed heavily, and looked at Mr. Woods as if, somehow, he

was responsible. Then she gave the name of the book to Petheridge

Jukesbury. He wished to have it placed on the Index Expurgatorius of

the Brotherhood of Benevolence, he said.

"Dear, dear," Felix Kennaston sighed, as Mr. Jukesbury made a note of

it; "you are all so practical. You perceive an evil and proceed at

once, in your common-sense way, to crush it, to stamp it out. Now,

I can merely lament certain unfortunate tendencies of the age; I am

quite unable to contend against them. Do you know," Mr. Kenneston

continued gaily, as he trifled with a bunch of grapes, "I feel

horribly out-of-place among you? Here is Mrs. Saumarez creating an

epidemic of useful and improving knowledge throughout the country, by

means of her charming lectures. Here is Mrs. Haggage, the mainspring,

if I may say so, of any number of educational and philanthropic

alarm clocks which will some day rouse the sleeping public from its

lethargy. And here is my friend Jukesbury, whose eloquent pleas for a

higher life have turned so many workmen from gin and improvidence, and

which in a printed form are disseminated even in such remote regions

as Africa, where I am told they have produced the most satisfactory

results upon the unsophisticated but polygamous monarchs of that

continent. And here, above all, is Miss Hugonin, utilising the vast

power of money--which I am credibly informed is a very good thing to

have, though I cannot pretend to speak from experience--and casting

whole bakeryfuls of bread upon the waters of charity. And here am

I, the idle singer of an empty day--a mere drone in this hive of

philanthropic bees! Dear, dear," said Mr. Kennaston, enviously, "what

a thing it is to be practical!" And he laughed toward Margaret, in his

whimsical way.

Miss Hugonin had been strangely silent; but she returned Mr.

Kennaston's smile, and began to take part in the conversation.

"You're only an ignorant child," she rebuked him, "and a very naughty

child, too, to make fun of us in this fashion."

"Yes," Mr. Kennaston assented, "I am wilfully ignorant. The world

adores ignorance; and where ignorance is kissed it is folly to be

wise. To-morrow I shall read you a chapter from my 'Defense of

Ignorance,' which my confiding publisher is going to bring out in the

autumn."

So the table-talk went on, and now Margaret bore a part therein.

* * * * *

However, I do not think we need record it further.

Mr. Woods listened in a sort of a daze. Adèle Haggage and Hugh Van

Orden were conversing in low tones at one end of the table; the

Colonel was eating his luncheon, silently and with a certain air of

resignation; and so Billy Woods was left alone to attend and marvel.

The ideas they advanced seemed to him, for the most part, sensible.

What puzzled him was the uniform gravity which they accorded

equally--as it appeared to him--to the discussion of the most pompous

platitudes and of the most arrant nonsense. They were always serious;

and the general tone of infallibility, Billy thought, could be

warranted only by a vast fund of inexperience.

But, in the main, they advocated theories he had always

held--excellent theories, he considered. And he was seized with an

unreasonable desire to repudiate every one of them.

For it seemed to him that every one of them was aimed at Margaret's

approval. It did not matter to whom a remark was ostensibly

addressed--always at its conclusion the speaker glanced more or

less openly toward Miss Hugonin. She was the audience to which they

zealously played, thought Billy; and he wondered.

I think I have said that, owing to the smallness of the house-party,

luncheon was served in the breakfast-room. The dining-room at Selwoode

is very rarely used, because Margaret declares its size makes a meal

there equivalent to eating out-of-doors.

And I must confess that the breakfast-room is far cosier. The room, in

the first place, is of reasonable dimensions; it is hung with Flemish

tapestries from designs by Van Eyck representing the Four Seasons, but

the walls and ceiling are panelled in oak, and over the mantel carved

in bas-relief the inevitable Eagle is displayed.

The mantel stood behind Margaret's chair; and over her golden head,

half-protectingly, half-threateningly, with his wings outstretched to

the uttermost, the Eagle brooded as he had once brooded over Frederick

R. Woods. The old man sat contentedly beneath that symbol of what

he had achieved in life. He had started (as the phrase runs) from

nothing; he had made himself a power. To him, the Eagle meant that

crude, incalculable power of wealth he gloried in. And to Billy Woods,

the Eagle meant identically the same thing, and--I am sorry to say--he

began to suspect that the Eagle was really the audience to whom Miss

Hugonin's friends so zealously played.

Perhaps the misanthropy of Mr. Woods was not wholly unconnected with

the fact that Margaret never looked at him. She'd show him!--the

fortune-hunter!

So her eyes never strayed toward him; and her attention never left

him. At the end of luncheon she could have enumerated for you every

morsel he had eaten, every glare he had directed toward Kennaston,

every beseeching look he had turned to her. Of course, he had taken

sherry--dry sherry. Hadn't he told her four years ago--it was the

first day she had ever worn the white organdie dotted with purple

sprigs, and they sat by the lake so late that afternoon that Frederick

R. Woods finally sent for them to come to dinner--hadn't he told her

then that only women and children cared for sweet wines? Of course he

had--the villain!

[Illustration: "Billy Woods"]

Billy, too, had his emotions. To hear that paragon, that queen among

women, descant of work done in the slums and of the mysteries of

sweat-shops; to hear her state off-hand that there were seventeen

hundred and fifty thousand children between the ages of ten and

fifteen years employed in the mines and factories of the United

States; to hear her discourse of foreign missions as glibly as though

she had been born and nurtured in Zambesi Land: all these things

filled him with an odd sense of alienation. He wasn't worthy of her,

and that was a fact. He was only a dumb idiot, and half the words that

were falling thick and fast from philanthropic lips about him might as

well have been hailstones, for all the benefit he was deriving from

them. He couldn't understand half she said.

In consequence, he very cordially detested the people who

could--especially that grimacing ass, Kennaston.

Altogether, neither Mr. Woods nor Miss Hugonin got much comfort from

their luncheon.