The Streets of Ascalon Part 20

She looked up at him, her little opaque green eyes a trifle softened.

"I am trying to get you the prettiest woman in America," she said. "I'm ready to fight off everybody else--beat 'em to death," she added, her eyes snapping, then suddenly kind again--"because, Sir Charles, I like you. And for no other reason on earth!"

Which was not the exact truth. It was for another man's sake she was kind to him. And the other man had been dead many years.

Sir Charles thanked her, awkwardly, and fell silent again, pulling his moustache.

"Is--Mrs. Leeds--well?" he ventured, at length, reddening again.

"Perfectly. She's a bit wiry just now--thin--leggy, y' know. Some fanciers prefer 'em weedy. But she'll plump up. I know the breed."

He shrank from her loud voice and the vulgarity of her comments, and she was aware of it and didn't care a rap. There were plenty of n.o.ble ladies as vulgar as she, and more so--and anyway it was not this well-built, sober-faced man of forty-five whom she was serving with all the craft and insolence and brutality and generosity that was in her--it was the son of a dead man who had been much to her. How much n.o.body in these days gossiped about any longer, for it was a long time ago, a long, long time ago that she had made her curtsey to a young queen and a prince consort. And Sir Charles's father had died at Majuba Hill.

"There's a wretched little knock-kneed peer on the cards," she observed; "Dankmere. He seems to think she has money or something. If he comes over here, as my sister writes, I'll set him straighter than his own legs. And I've written Foxy to tell him so."

"Dankmere is a very good chap," said Sir Charles, terribly embarra.s.sed.

"But not good enough. His level is the Quartier d'Europe. He'll find it; no fear.... When do you go South?"

"To-morrow," he said, so honestly that she grinned again.

"Then I'll give you a letter to Molly Wycherly. Her husband is Jim Wycherly--one of your sort--eternally lumbering after something to kill.

He has a bungalow on some lagoon where he murders ducks, and no doubt he'll go there. But his wife will be stopping at Palm Beach. I'll send you a letter to her in the morning."

"Many thanks," said Sir Charles, shyly.

CHAPTER IV

Strelsa remained South longer than she had expected to remain, and at the end of the third week Quarren wrote her.

"DEAR MRS. LEEDS:

"Will you accept from me a copy of Karl's new book? And are you ever coming back? You are missing an unusually diverting winter; the opera is exceptional, there are some really interesting plays in town and several new and amusing people--Prince and Princess Sarnoff for example; and the Earl of Dankmere, an anxious, and perplexed little man, sadly hard up, and simple-minded enough to say so; which amuses everybody immensely.

"He's pathetically original; plebeian on his mother's side; very good-natured; nothing at all of a sportsman; and painfully short of both intellect and cash--a funny, harmless, distracted little man who runs about asking everybody the best and quickest methods of ama.s.sing a comfortable fortune in America. And I must say that people have jollied him rather cruelly.

"The Sarnoffs on the other hand are modest and nice people--the Prince is a yellow, dried-up Asiatic who is making a collection of parasites--a shrewd, kindly, and clever little scientist. His wife is a charming girl, intellectual but deliciously feminine. She was Cynthia Challis before her marriage, and always a most attractive and engaging personality. They dined with us at the Legation on Thursday.

"Afterward there was a dance at Mrs. Sprowl's. I led from one end, Lester Caldera from the other. One or two newspapers criticised the decorations and favours as vulgarly expensive; spoke of a 'monkey figure'--purely imaginary--which they said I introduced into the cotillion, and that the favours were marmosets!--who probably were the intellectual peers of anybody present.

"The old lady is in a terrific temper. I'm afraid some poor scribblers are going to catch it. I thought it very funny.

"Speaking of scribblers and temper reminds me that Karl Westguard's new book is stirring up a toy tempest. He has succeeded in offending a dozen people who pretend to recognise themselves or their relatives among the various characters. I don't know whether the novel is really any good, or not. We, who know Karl so intimately, find it hard to realise that perhaps he may be a writer of some importance.

"There appears to be considerable excitement about this new book.

People seem inclined to discuss it at dinners; Karl's publishers are delighted. Karl, on the contrary, is not at all flattered by the kind of a success that menaces him. He is mad all through, but not as mad as his redoubtable aunt, who tells everybody that he's a scribbling lunatic who doesn't know what he's writing, and that she washes her fat and gem-laden hands of him henceforth.

"Poor Karl! He's already thirty-seven; he's written fifteen books, no one of which, he tells me, ever before stirred up anybody's interest. But this newest novel, 'The Real Thing,' has already gone into three editions in two weeks--whatever that actually means--and still the re-orders are pouring in, and his publishers are madly booming it, and several indignant people are threatening Karl with the law of libel, and Karl is partly furious, partly amused, and entirely astonished at the whole affair.

"Because you see, the people who think they recognise portraits of themselves or their friends in several of the unattractive characters in the story--are as usual, in error. Karl's people are always purely and synthetically composite. Besides everybody who knows Karl Westguard ought to know that he's too decent a fellow, and too good a workman to use models stupidly. Anybody can copy; anybody can reproduce the obvious. Even photographers are artists in these days. Good work is a synthesis founded on truth, and carried logically to a conclusion.

"But it's useless to try to convince the Philistines. Once possessed with the idea that they or their friends are 'meant,' as they say, Archimedes's lever could not pry them loose from their agreeably painful obsession.

"Then there are other sorts of humans who are already bothering Karl. This species recognise in every 'hero' or 'heroine' a minute mental and physical a.n.a.lysis of themselves and their own particular, specific, and petty emotions. Proud, happy, flattered, they permit n.o.body to mistake the supposed tribute which they are entirely self-persuaded that the novelist has offered to them.

"And these phases of 'The Real Thing' are fretting and mortifying Karl to the verge of distraction. He awakes to find himself not famous but notorious--not criticised for his workmans.h.i.+p, good or bad, but gabbled about because some ludicrous old Uncle Foozle pretends to discover a similarity between Karl's episodes and characters and certain doings of which Uncle F. is personally cognisant.

"The great resource of stupidity is and has always been the anagram; and as stupidity is almost invariably suspicious, the hunt for hidden meanings preoccupies the majority of mankind.

"Because I have ventured to send you Karl's new book is no reason why I also should have presumed to write you a treatise in several volumes.

"But I miss you, oddly enough--miss everything I never had of you--your opinions on what interests us both; the delightful discussions of things important, which have never taken place between us. It's odd, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds, that I miss, long for, and even remember so much that has never been?

"Molly Wycherly wrote to Mrs. Lannis that you were having a gay time in Florida; that Sir Charles Mallison had joined your party; that you'd had luncheons and dinners given you at the Club, at the Inlet, at the Wiers's place, 'Coquina Castle'; and that Jim and Sir Charles had bravely slain many ducks. Which is certainly glory enough to go round. In a friendly little note to me you were good enough to ask what I am doing, and to emphasise your request for an answer by underlining your request.

"Proud and flattered by your generous interest I hasten to inform you that I am leading the same useful, serious, profitable, purposeful, ambitious, and enn.o.bling life which I was leading when I first met you. Such a laudable existence makes for one's self-respect; and, happy in that consciousness, undisturbed by journalistic accusations concerning marmosets and vulgarity, I concentrate my entire intellectual efforts upon keeping my job, which is to remain deaf, dumb, and blind, and at the same time be ornamental, resourceful, good-tempered, and amusing to those who are not invariably all of these things at the same time.

"Is it too much to expect another note from you?

"Sincerely yours,

"RICHARD STANLEY QUARREN."

She answered him on the fourth week of her absence.

"MY DEAR MR. QUARREN:

"Your letter interested me, but there was all through it an undertone of cynicism which rang false--almost a dissonance to an ear which has heard you strike a truer chord.

"I do not like what you say of yourself, or of your life. I have talked very seriously with Molly, who adores you; and she evidently thinks you capable of achieving anything you care to undertake.

Which is my own opinion--based on twenty-four hours of acquaintance.

"I have read Mr. Westguard's novel. Everybody here is reading it.

I'd like to talk to you about it, some day. Mr. Westguard's intense bitterness confuses me a little, and seems almost to paralyse any critical judgment I may possess. A crusade in fiction has always seemed to me but a sterile effort. To do a thing is fine; to talk about it in fiction a far less admirable performance--like the small boy, safe in the window, who defies his enemy with out-thrust tongue.

"When I was young--a somewhat lonely child, with only a very few books to companion me--I pored over Carlyle's 'French Revolution,'

and hated Philip Egalite. But that youthful hatred was a little modified because Egalite did actually become personally active. If he had only talked, my hatred would have become contempt for a renegade who did not possess the courage of his convictions. But he voted death to his own caste, facing the tribunal. He talked, but he also acted.

"I do not mean this as a parallel between Mr. Westguard and the sanguinary French iconoclast. Mr. Westguard, also, has the courage of his convictions; he lives, I understand, the life which he considers a proper one. It is the life which he preaches in 'The Real Thing'--a somewhat solemn, self-respecting, self-supporting existence, devoted to self-development; a life of upright thinking, and the fulfilment of duty, civil and religious, incident to dignified citizens.h.i.+p. Such a life may be a blameless one; I don't know.