Gossamer Part 32

She is an American, not a German, and the Americans pay high honour to their humourists. Perhaps she has lived too long with Ascher. Perhaps she has devoted herself too much to art and her steady contemplation of the sublime has killed her sense of the ridiculous. At all events it is dead. She has no humour now.

It is almost impossible to imagine that any woman would have been capable of calling in Gorman and me as advisers and helpers at a critical moment of her life. Yet that is what Mrs. Ascher did.

We obeyed the summons of course, both of us.

Gorman got there first. I found him seated opposite Mrs. Ascher in the large drawing-room of the house in Hampstead. Mrs. Ascher is lacking in humour, but she has a fine sense of dramatic propriety. Great decisions can only be come to fittingly, mighty spiritual tragedies can only be satisfactorily enacted, in s.p.a.cious rooms. And there must be emptiness.

Knicknacks and pretty ornaments kill high emotion. The chamber of a dainty woman, the room which delicate feminity has made its own, will suit a light flirtation, the love-making of a summer afternoon, but deep pa.s.sion is out of place in it.

I walked cautiously across a wide s.p.a.ce of slippery floor in order to shake hands with Mrs. Ascher. I saw that Gorman was sitting in a huge straight-backed chair with heavily carved elbow rests. It was the sort of chair which would have suited a bishop--in the chancel of his cathedral, not in his private room--. and a major excommunication might very suitably have been delivered from it.

"I am in great trouble," said Mrs. Ascher, "and I have asked you two to come to me because you are my friends. I was right to call you, was I not?"

She looked at Gorman and then at me, evidently expecting us to make a confession of friends.h.i.+p for her. Gorman wriggled in a way that made me think the carving of the chair must be sticking into him somewhere. But he did not fail Mrs. Ascher.

"You were right," he said with deep feeling, "altogether right."

I was not going to be outdone by Gorman.

"'A friend,'" I said, "'must bear a friend's infirmities.'"

The quotation was not wholly happy, but Mrs. Ascher seemed to like it.

She smiled gratefully.

"My husband," she said.

I knew it must be her husband's affairs which were troubling her.

"He is in a very difficult position," I said. "I had a long talk with him the other night. It seems to me that he has to choose between----"

Gorman interrupted me.

"He's in an infernally awkward hole," he said. "The English people will lose their tempers to a certainty, not at first perhaps, but as soon as anything goes against them. When they do they'll make things d.a.m.nably unpleasant for any one who's suspected of being German or even remotely connected with Germany. That's the sort of people the English are.

And Ascher is just the man they'll fasten on at once. They'll hunt him down."

Mrs. Ascher looked at Gorman while he spoke. Her face expressed a quiet dignity.

"That is not the difficulty," she said. "What people say or think of us or do to us does not matter. We live our own lives. We can always live them, apart from, above the bitter voices of the crowd."

"All the same," said Gorman, "it will be unpleasant It will be a great deal worse than merely unpleasant. If I were Ascher I should get on the safe side at once. I should give a thumping big subscription--50,000 or something that will attract attention--to some popular fund. I should offer to present the War Office with half a dozen aeroplanes to be called 'The Ascher Flying Fleet'; or a first-rate cannon of the largest size. A good deal can be done to shut people's mouths in that sort of way."

"You do not understand," said Mrs. Ascher.

She turned to me, evidently hoping that I would explain Ascher's real difficulty to Gorman. I hesitated for a moment. It was plain to me that though Gorman did not appreciate the reality of the spiritual crisis, he did understand something which had escaped me and, so far as I knew, had escaped Ascher also. I had a vivid recollection of the unenviable position of men suspected of lukewarm patriotism during the Boer War.

In the struggle we were then entering upon popular pa.s.sion would be far more highly excited. The position of the Aschers in England might become impossible.

Gorman with his highly developed faculty for gauging the force and direction of popular opinion understood at once and thoroughly the difficulties that lay before Ascher. What he did not understand was the peculiar difficulty which Ascher felt. I responded to Mrs. Ascher's glance of appeal and tried to explain things to Gorman.

"Ascher," I said, "is pulled two ways. His country is pulling him.

That's the call of patriotism. You ought to understand that, Gorman.

You're a tremendous patriot yourself. But if he goes back to his country now he absolutely ruins his business. That means a lot more than merely losing his money. It means more even than losing other people's money, the money of the men who trusted him. It means that he must be false to his commercial honour. You see that, don't you, Gorman? And there doesn't seem any way out of the dilemma. He has got to go back on his patriotism or on his honour. There is no other course."

I looked at Mrs. Ascher for approval. I had stated her husband's dilemma clearly, I believed fairly. Gorman could hardly fail to understand. I thought Mrs. Ascher would have been pleased with me. To my amazement she acknowledged my efforts with a burst of indignation.

"Oh," she cried, "you do not understand, either of you. You do not even begin to understand. I suppose you cannot, because you are men and not women. You men! All of you, my husband, too, though he is far above the rest of you--but even he! You concern yourselves about things which are nothing. You argue about phantoms and discuss them as if they were realities. And all the time you miss the things which are. You think"--she spoke directly to Gorman and her voice expressed the utmost scorn--"you think about reputation, the way men babble about each other and will babble about us. Why should we care? Even if we were afraid of what men say there are places in the world to which the voices of Europe cannot reach. There are islands in the sea where the sun s.h.i.+nes and palm trees grow, to which the talk of men who dwell in cities never comes."

I recollected the desire which Mrs. Ascher had once expressed to me of getting "far, far away from everywhere." She evidently hoped to be able to try that experiment.

She turned from Gorman and faced me.

"You talk," she said, "about honour and patriotism. What are they?

Words, just words. It is only you men, slaves of your own conventions, who take them for realities. We women know better. You go about life imagining that your limbs are bound with fetters. They are bound with delusions. We women know. Love and beauty are real. Nothing else is. All your fine words are like the flags under which your dupes go out to die; fluttering rags to us whose eyes are open. You talk--oh, so finely you talk--about the shadows your own imaginings cast, and you end in being afraid of them. You talk--you dare to talk to me of money----"

This was a totally unjust accusation. I had not talked about money. I had more sense than to mention money to a woman in Mrs. Ascher's frame of mind.

"I have money enough of my own," she said. "He and I want very little.

What do we care for except just to love each other and to see beautiful things and to escape from all this nightmare of blood and hate and horror and hideousness?"

I felt helpless. Mrs. Ascher had undoubtedly hit on a new solution of the problem. She proposed that Ascher should impale himself not on one or other, but on both horns of the dilemma, be false to every kind of honour and loyalty. It was, I suppose, possible for Ascher to pack a bag and take to flight, simply to disappear, leaving everything behind him. He and she might go to some valley in the Rocky Mountains, to some unknown creek on the Californian coast, to some island in the South Pacific. If she were right about honour and faithfulness and patriotism, if these are, after all, only idols of the tribe, then she and Ascher might be very happy. They would have all that either of them required.

I looked at Gorman. He shrugged his shoulders, helpless as I was. Mrs.

Ascher began to plead with us in a way that was very strange to listen to.

"Life is so short," she said. "Already most of it is gone from us. We have only a few years more, he and I. Why should we be miserable? There is happiness waiting for us. There is nothing between us and happiness except words, honor, patriotism, right, wrong. These are words, only words. They are gossamer threads which we break as we go, break without feeling them if only we go boldly. Will you not help me? Tell him that what I say is true. He will listen to you because you are men; and you know in your hearts that I speak what is true, that I have hold upon reality."

There was a moment's silence after she stopped speaking. Before either Gorman or I attempted to make any answer Ascher himself came into the room. I certainly did not expect to see him. Mrs. Ascher was, I am sure, as much surprised as I was. It was about twelve o'clock and at that hour Ascher is always in his office. He crossed the room quietly. He greeted Gorman and me without a sign that our presence was unexpected or unwelcome. He went to his wife and took her hand in his. She clung to him, looking up into his face. She knew at once that he had something very important to say to her.

"You have decided?" she said.

Ascher's eyes met hers. His face seemed to me full of tenderness and pity. He held her hand tightly. He bowed his head, a silent "yes" to the question she asked.

"To leave it all and come with me?" she said; "away, away."

Ascher did not speak; but she knew and I knew that his decision was not that.

The scene was very painful. I felt that I had no right whatever to witness it Gorman, I am sure, would have been glad to escape. But it was very difficult for us to get away. Neither Ascher nor his wife seemed, conscious of our presence. We stood helpless a little apart from them.

Gorman, with that unfailing tact of his, did, or tried to do the only thing which could have relieved the intolerable tension. He made an effort to get us all back to the commonplace.

"You're in a devil of an awkward situation, Ascher," he said. "A good deal seems to me to depend on whether you are a naturalised British subject or not. If you have been naturalised you ought to be able to pull through, though it won't be pleasant even then."

"I have not been naturalised," said Ascher. "I never thought of it."

"That's a pity," said Gorman. "Still--in the case of a man in your position I daresay it can be managed even now. I'll use my influence.

I know most of the members of the Cabinet pretty well. I can put it to them that, from an English point of view, considering the tremendous importance of your business, considering the financial collapse which would follow--oh, we'll be able to manage."

"Thank you," said Ascher, "but that purely legal aspect of the matter does not at the moment strike me as the most important or the most pressing. No doubt it is important and your kindness will be helpful.

But just now I cannot speak about that There is, you see, my country and the loyalty I owe to it. I do not seem to escape from that obligation by a process of law. I may legalise, but do I really justify, treachery to the claim of patriotism?"

I have always felt,--felt rather than known,--that there is a queer strain of mysticism in Gorman. His arid common sense, his politics, his rhetoric, his tricky money-making, are the outside, visible things about him. Behind them, deep down, seldom seen, is a strange, emotional love for his country. When Ascher spoke as he did about the claim of patriotism Gorman understood. The innermost part of the man was reached.

Without hesitating for an instant, without consideration or debate, Gorman leaped to a solution of the problem.