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Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
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Chapter 7 |
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_ CHAPTER VII About the middle of February, 1879, I was sitting at work in my lodgings in Newman Street, when I was interrupted by the advent of my landlady, to inform me that there was a gentleman below who wished to see me. I told her to show him up, and she returned in a moment, ushering in, to my extreme surprise, Arthur Hamilton. I confess I hardly knew him at first. He had grown a beard, and looked thinner and graver than he used to do. He had the same slow, almost stately movement, with a slight and not ungraceful suggestion of languor; his manner was somewhat changed, and very much improved; and he had contracted, from living so long with strangers, a delightfully frank and free way of speaking. He never gave me, as he used to, the least feeling of constraint; he always seemed perfectly at his ease. And he had acquired, too, the art of asking unobtrusive questions of a tentative kind, so as to feel out the interests of his companion, and draw him out; not in that professional way which so-called influential people often acquire--the melancholy confidential smile, the intimate manner, and the air of bland inattention with which they receive your remarks, only to be detected in the fixed or wandering eye. He had learnt the art of being interested in other people, and in what they had to say, and of indicating by a subtle tact in speech that he was following them, and intelligently sympathizing with them. He did not then tell me much about himself. He confessed that the most rapturous feeling he had known since he set off on his travels, was the hour or two as he whirled through the flat pasture-lands and the pleasant green of Kent. He gave me no detailed descriptions of adventures, but hinted in a suggestive way that he had seen much, and thought more. "I think I have learnt myself very fairly," was the only remark he made about his own personal experience. "To finish my tour," he said, "I want to see something of my native land. I have been away so long, that I don't know where to begin, and I want you to help me. I want to be introduced to a few Christian households, that I may see the kind of people that our Western friends are." I had an uncle, a Mr. Raymond, who had made a fortune in business, lived in a fine house in Lancaster Gate, and saw a good deal of fairly interesting and cultivated people. I took him to dine there once or twice, and he needed nothing else. He had a real genius for _tete-a-tete_ conversation; that is, he could listen without appearing only to listen. He made people feel at their best with him. My aunt's criticism of him was highly characteristic of the British matron and her choice of friends. "I thoroughly approve, Harry," she said to me, "of your friend, Mr. Hamilton. He is very well-informed and clever, and he doesn't allow it to make him in the least disagreeable." And starting from this, he was asked to dinner by, and invited to visit, a fair selection of pleasant people. Of the events which immediately succeeded his return to England I can not, for two reasons, give a very detailed account. In the first place, dealing as they do with living people, I have thought it better, after consultation with the friends of both, to leave the outlines of the story rather vague; and secondly, there are great gaps and deficiencies in diaries and letters, which, though I believe I can supply, knowing what I do of the circumstances, I hardly like to fill in in a narrative of fact. He took a dose, as I have already said, of the London season. "Those six weeks," he said, "absolutely knocked me up; my friends told me, among other things, that my physiognomy, being of a grave and gloomy cast, was of a kind that was not suitable to a festive occasion; and so I used to come home at night with my jaws positively aching with the effort of a perpetually fatuous grin." The following extract, which I have selected from one of his letters of this period, will give a good picture of his mind: "I think that two of the things that move me most, not to sadness nor indignation, but to those vague tumultuous feelings for which we have, I think, no name, but which were formerly called melancholy, are these: "To come up-stairs after a hot London banquet, where you have been sitting, talking the poorest trash, between two empty, worldly women; and then, perhaps, listening to stories that are dull, or worse, and see dullness personified in every one of the twelve faces that stare at you with such sodden respectability through the cigarette smoke; and then, I say, to come up-stairs, and see moving about among the knowing selfish people a child with hair like gold thread, and something of the regretful innocence of heaven in her eyes and motions. If you can get her to talk to you, so much the better for you; but if you or she are shy, as generally happens, to watch her is something. God knows the insidious process by which she will be transformed, step by step, into one of those godless fine ladies; for it makes me inclined to pray that anything may happen to her first that may hinder that development. "The other thing is, under the same circumstances, to sit down and hear some rippling melody of Bach's, a tender gavotte or a delicate rapid fugue, just as it stole on to the paper in that quaint German garden with the clipped yew-hedges and the tall summer-house in the corner, in the master's pointed handwriting, calling down by his magic wand the spirits of the air to aid him in the perfecting of the exquisite phrase that some Ariel had whispered to him as he walked or sat. "To hear that little rill of Paradise breaking out in the glaring room, not echoed or reflected in the rows of listless faces, gives me a strange turn. It sweeps away for a minute or two, as it goes and comes and returns upon itself until its sweet course is run, all the hard and stifling web of convention and opinion that closes us in; it takes me back for a moment to old-world fancies, till I seem to feel, as I am always longing to feel, that we are separated only by a very little flimsy hedge from the secrets of the beautiful, from the shadow-land which is so real; and that every now and then a breeze breaks and stirs across, with something of the fragrance of the place in its wandering air."
"Do I feel flat?" he used to say--"it isn't the word--bored to death. Why, my dear Chris, if you'd heard the conversation of the lady next me to-night, you'd have thought that the premier said, every morning when his shaving-water was brought him, 'Another day! Whose happiness can I mar? Whose ruin can I effect? What villainy can I execute to-day?'" One night, at dinner, he happened to sit next a young lady in whom the fashionable world were a good deal interested. It is impossible to give a fair sketch of her character; she was what would now be called unconventional, and was then called fast. She openly avowed her preference for men's society as compared to female--women, as a rule, did not like her--she used to receive calls from her own men friends in her own room whenever she liked, and it was considered rather "compromising" to know her. She was perfectly reckless about what she said and did. I questioned Arthur about her conversation, for she was accused of telling improper stories. "I have often," he said, "heard her allude to things and tell stories that would be considered unusual, even indelicate. But I never heard her say a thing in which there could be any conceivable 'taint,' in which the point consisted in the violation of the decent sense. The 'doubtful' element was rare and always incidental." Arthur told me a delightful story about her. Her father was a testy old country gentleman, very irritable and obstinate. It happened that an Eton boy was staying in the house, of the blundering lumpish type; he had had more than his share of luck in breaking windows and articles of furniture. One morning Mr. B----, finding his study window broken, declared in a paroxysm of rage that the next thing he broke the boy should go. That same afternoon, it happened he was playing at small cricket with Maud, and made a sharp cut into the great greenhouse. There was a crash of glass, followed by Maud's ringing laugh. They stopped their game, and went to discuss the position of events. As they stood there, Mr. B----'s garden door, just round the corner, was heard to open and slam, and craunch, craunch, came his stately pace upon the gravel. They stared with a humorous horror at one another. In an instant, Maud caught up a lawn-tennis racquet that was near, and smashed the next pane to atoms. Mr. B---- quickened his pace, hearing the crash, and came round the corner with his most judicial and infuriated air, rather hoping to pack the culprit out of the place, only to be met by his favourite daughter. "Papa, I'm so sorry, I've broken the greenhouse with my racquet. May I send for Smith? I'll pay him out of my own money." The Eton boy adored her from that day forth; and so did other people for similar reasons. I, personally, always rather wondered that Arthur was ever attracted by Miss B----, for he was very fastidious, and the least suggestion of aiming at effect or vulgarity, or hankering after notoriety, would infallibly have disgusted him. But this was the reason. She was never vulgar, never self-conscious. She acted on each occasion on impulse, never calculating effects, never with reference to other people's opinions. A gentleman once said, remonstrating with her for driving alone with a Cambridge undergraduate in his dog-cart down to Richmond after a ball, "People are beginning to talk about you." "What fools they must be!" said Miss B----, and showed not the slightest inclination to hear more of the matter. There is no question, I think, that Arthur's grave and humorous ways attracted her. He, when at his best, was a racy and paradoxical talker--with that natural tinge of veiled melancholy or cynicism half-suspected which is so fascinating, as seeming to imply a "_past_," a history. He ventured to speak to her more than once about her tendency to "drift." He told me of one conversation in particular. "I think you have too many friends," he said to her once, at the conclusion of an evening party at her own house. They were sitting in a balcony looking out on to the square, where the trees were stirring in the light morning wind. "That's curious," she said. "I never feel as if I had enough; I have room enough in my heart for the whole world." And she spread out her hands to the great city with all her lights glaring before them. "God knows I love you all, though I don't know you," she said with a sudden impulse. They were silent for a moment. Then she resumed: "Tell me why you said that," she said. "I like to be told the truth." "_You_ may feel large enough," he said, "but they don't appreciate your capacity; they feel hurt and slighted. Why, only to-night, during the ten minutes I was talking to you, you spoke and dismissed eight people, every one of whom was jealous of me, and thinking 'Who's the new man?' And I began to wonder how I should feel if I came here and found a new man installed by you, and got a handshake and a smile." "Shall I tell you?" she said, looking at him. "I should give you a look which would mean, 'I would give anything to have a quiet talk to you, Mr. Hamilton, but the exigencies of society oblige me to be civil to this person.'" "Yes," he said, "and that's just what I complain of; it gives me, the new man to-night, a feeling of insecurity--that perhaps you are just 'carrying on' with me because it is your whim, and that the instant I bore you, you will throw me away like a broken toy, and with even less regret." "How dare you speak like that to me?" she said, turning upon him almost fiercely. "I never forget people." And she rose and went quickly into the room, and didn't speak to him for the rest of the evening. But just as he was going out he passed her, and hardly looked at her, thinking he had offended her; but she came and put out her hand quickly, and said, almost pathetically-- "You must forgive me for my behaviour to-night, Mr. Hamilton. What you said was not true, but you meant it to be true; you believed it. And please don't stop talking to me openly. I value it very much. I have so few people to tell me the truth." I find this conversation narrated in his diary, almost word for word as I have given it. But there is omitted from it, necessarily perhaps, the most pregnant comment of all. "And yet," he said to me once, as he turned to leave the room after commenting upon their freedom of speech with one another, "I am not in love with her, though I can't think why I am not." The sequel must be soon told. Miss B---- suddenly accepted a gentleman who was in every way a suitable _parti_: heir to a peerage, of fairly high character. But to return to Arthur. I can not do better than quote a few sentences of a letter he wrote to me on the event. It conceals--as he was wont to do--strong feeling under the bantering tone. "As you are in possession of most of my moral and mental diagnoses, I had better communicate to you a new and disturbing element. You remember what I said to you about Miss B----, that I did not care for her. A fancied immunity is often a premonitory symptom of disease: the system is excited into an instantaneous glow by the first contact of the poisonous seed. "I don't know, at present, quite how things are with me. I labour under a great oppression of spirit. I have a strange thirsty longing to see her face and hear her speech. If I could only hear from herself that she had done what her best self--of which we have often spoken--ratifies, I should feel more content. But she trusts her impulses too much; and the habit of loving all she loves with passion, blinds her a little. A woman who loves her sister, her pets, the very sunshine and air with passion, hardly knows what a lover is. I can not help feeling that I might have shown her a little better than J----. Still one must accept facts and interpret them, especially in cases where one has not even been allowed to try and fail; for I never spoke to her a word of love. Ah, well! perhaps I shall be stronger soon." _ |
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