The Island Pharisees

“Oh, Mr. Shelton!” he said, “I wondered if you could tell me what tips I ought to give the servants here; after ten years away I ‘ve forgotten all about that sort of thing.”

Shelton sat down beside him; unconsciously assuming, too, a cross-legged attitude, which caused him much discomfort.

“I was listening,” said his new acquaintance, “to the little chap learning his French. I’ve forgotten mine. One feels a hopeless duffer knowing no, languages.”

“I suppose you speak Arabic?” said Shelton.

“Oh, Arabic, and a dialect or two; they don’t count. That tutor has a curious face.”

“You think so?” said Shelton, interested. “He’s had a curious life.”

The traveller spread his hands, palms downwards, on the grass and looked at Shelton with, a smile.

“I should say he was a rolling stone,” he said. “It ‘s odd, I’ ve seen white men in Central Africa with a good deal of his look about them.

“Your diagnosis is a good one,” answered Shelton.

“I ‘m always sorry for those fellows. There’s generally some good in them. They are their own enemies. A bad business to be unable to take pride in anything one does!” And there was a look of pity on his face.

“That’s exactly it,” said Shelton. “I ‘ve often tried to put it into words. Is it incurable?”

“I think so.”

“Can you tell me why?”

Whyddon pondered.

“I rather think,” he said at last, “it must be because they have too strong a faculty of criticism. You can’t teach a man to be proud of his own work; that lies in his blood “; folding his arms across his breast, he heaved a sigh. Under the dark foliage, his eyes on the sunlight, he was the type of all those Englishmen who keep their spirits bright and wear their bodies out in the dark places of hard work. “You can’t think,” he said, showing his teeth in a smile, “how delightful it is to be at home! You learn to love the old country when you’re away from it.”

Shelton often thought, afterwards; of this diagnosis of the vagabond, for he was always stumbling on instances of that power of subtle criticism which was the young foreigner’s prime claim to be “a most awfully interesting” and perhaps a rather shocking person.

An old school-fellow of Shelton’s and his wife were staying in the house, who offered to the eye the picture of a perfect domesticity. Passionless and smiling, it was impossible to imagine they could ever have a difference. Shelton, whose bedroom was next to theirs, could hear them in the mornings talking in exactly the tones they used at lunch, and laughing the same laughs. Their life seemed to accord them perfect satisfaction; they were supplied with their convictions by Society just as, when at home, they were supplied with all the other necessaries of life by some co-operative stores. Their fairly handsome faces, with the fairly kind expressions, quickly and carefully regulated by a sense of compromise, began to worry him so much that when in the same room he would even read to avoid the need of looking at them. And yet they were kind – that is, fairly kind – and clean and quiet in the house, except when they laughed, which was often, and at things which made him want to howl as a dog howls at music.

“Mr. Shelton,” Ferrand said one day, “I ‘m not an amateur of marriage – never had the chance, as you may well suppose; but, in any case, you have some people in the house who would make me mark time before I went committing it. They seem the ideal young married people – don’t quarrel, have perfect health, agree with everybody, go to church, have children – but I should like to hear what is beautiful in their life,” and he grimaced. “It seems to me so ugly that I can only gasp. I would much rather they ill-treated each other, just to show they had the corner of a soul between them. If that is marriage, ‘Dieu m’en garde!’.rdquo;

But Shelton did not answer; he was thinking deeply.

The saying of John Noble’s, “He’s really a most interesting person,” grew more and more upon his nerves; it seemed to describe the Dennant attitude towards this stranger within their gates. They treated him with a sort of wonder on the “don’t touch” system, like an object in an exhibition. The restoration, however, of, his self-respect proceeded with success. For all the semblance of having grown too big for Shelton’s clothes, for all his vividly burnt face, and the quick but guarded play of cynicism on his lips – he did much credit to his patrons. He had subdued his terror of a razor, and looked well in a suit of Shelton’s flannels. For, after all, he had only been eight years exiled from middle-class gentility, and he had been a waiter half that time. But Shelton wished him at the devil. Not for his manners’ sake – he was never tired of watching how subtly the vagabond adapted his conduct to the conduct of his hosts, while keeping up his critical detachment – but because that critical detachment was a constant spur to his own vision, compelling him to analyse the life into which, he had been born and was about to marry. This process was disturbing; and to find out when it had commenced, he had to go back to his meeting with Ferrand on the journey up from Dover.

There was kindness in a hospitality which opened to so strange a bird; admitting the kindness, Shelton fell to analysing it. To himself, to people of his class, the use of kindness was a luxury, not significant of sacrifice, but productive of a pleasant feeling in the heart, such as massage will setup in the legs. “Everybody’s kind,” he thought; “the question is, What understanding is there, what real sympathy?” This problem gave him food for thought.

The progress, which Mrs. Dennant not unfrequently remarked upon, in Ferrand’s conquest of his strange position, seemed to Shelton but a sign that he was getting what he could out of his sudden visit to green pastures; under the same circumstances, Shelton thought that he himself would do the same. He felt that the young foreigner was making a convenient bow to property, but he had more respect for the sarcastic smile on the lips of Ferrand’s heart.

It was not long before the inevitable change came in the spirit of the situation; more and more was Shelton conscious of a quaint uneasiness in the very breathing of the household.

“Curious fellow you’ve got hold of there, Shelton,” Mr. Dennant said to him during a game of croquet; “he ‘ll never do any good for himself, I’m afraid.”

“In one sense I’m afraid not,” admitted Shelton.

“Do you know his story? I will bet you sixpence” – and Mr. Dennant paused to swing his mallet with a proper accuracy “that he’s been in prison.”

“Prison!” ejaculated Shelton.

“I think,” said Mr. Dennant, with bent knees carefully measuring his next shot, “that you ought to make inquiries – ah! missed it! Awkward these hoops! One must draw the line somewhere.”

“I never could draw,” returned Shelton, nettled and uneasy; “but I understand – I ‘ll give him a hint to go.”

“Don’t,” said Mr. Dennant, moving after his second ball, which Shelton had smitten to the farther end, “be offended, my dear Shelton, and by no means give him a hint; he interests me very much – a very clever, quiet young fellow.”

That this was not his private view Shelton inferred by studying Mr. Dennant’s manner in the presence of the vagabond. Underlying the well-bred banter of the tranquil voice, the guarded quizzicality of his pale brown face, it could be seen that Algernon Cuffe Dennant, Esq., J.P., accustomed to laugh at other people, suspected that he was being laughed at. What more natural than that he should grope about to see how this could be? A vagrant alien was making himself felt by an English Justice of the Peace – no small tribute, this, to Ferrand’s personality. The latter would sit silent through a meal, and yet make his effect. He, the object of their kindness, education, patronage, inspired their fear. There was no longer any doubt; it was not of Ferrand that they were afraid, but of what they did not understand in him; of horrid subtleties meandering in the brain under that straight, wet-looking hair; of something bizarre popping from the curving lips below that thin, lopsided nose.

But to Shelton in this, as in all else, Antonia was what mattered. At first, anxious to show her lover that she trusted him, she seemed never tired of doing things for his young protege, as though she too had set her heart on his salvation; but, watching her eyes when they rested on the vagabond, Shelton was perpetually reminded of her saying on the first day of his visit to Holm Oaks, “I suppose he ‘s really good – I mean all these things you told me about were only…”

Curiosity never left her glance, nor did that story of his four days’ starving leave her mind; a sentimental picturesqueness clung about that incident more valuable by far than this mere human being with whom she had so strangely come in contact. She watched Ferrand, and Shelton watched her. If he had been told that he was watching her, he would have denied it in good faith; but he was bound to watch her, to find out with what eyes she viewed this visitor who embodied all the rebellious under-side of life, all that was absent in herself.

“Dick,” she said to him one day, “you never talk to me of Monsieur Ferrand.”

“Do you want to talk of him?”

“Don’t you think that he’s improved?”

“He’s fatter.”

Antonia looked grave.

“No, but really?”

“I don’t know,” said Shelton; “I can’t judge him.”

Antonia turned her face away, and something in her attitude alarmed him.

“He was once a sort of gentleman,” she said; “why shouldn’t he become one again?”

Sitting on the low wall of the kitchen-garden, her head was framed by golden plums. The sun lay barred behind the foliage of the holm oak, but a little patch filtering through a gap had rested in the plum-tree’s heart. It crowned the girl. Her raiment, the dark leaves, the red wall, the golden plums, were woven by the passing glow to a block of pagan colour. And her face above it, chaste, serene, was like the scentless summer evening. A bird amongst the currant bushes kept a little chant vibrating; and all the plum-tree’s shape and colour seemed alive.

“Perhaps he does n’t want to be a gentleman,” said Shelton.

Antonia swung her foot.

“How can he help wanting to?”

“He may have a different philosophy of life.”

Antonia was slow to answer.

“I know nothing about philosophies of life,” she said at last.

Shelton answered coldly,

“No two people have the same.”

With the falling sun-glow the charm passed off the tree. Chilled and harder, yet less deep, it was no more a block of woven colour, warm and impassive, like a southern goddess; it was now a northern tree, with a grey light through its leaves.

“I don’t understand you in the least,” she said; “everyone wishes to be good.”

“And safe?” asked Shelton gently.

Antonia stared.

“Suppose,” he said – “I don’t pretend to know, I only suppose – what Ferrand really cares for is doing things differently from other people? If you were to load him with a character and give him money on condition that he acted as we all act, do you think he would accept it?”

“Why not?”

“Why are n’t cats dogs; or pagans Christians?”

Antonia slid down from the wall.

“You don’t seem to think there ‘s any use in trying,” she said, and turned away.

Shelton made a movement as if he would go after her, and then stood still, watching her figure slowly pass, her head outlined above the wall, her hands turned back across her narrow hips. She halted at the bend, looked back, then, with an impatient gesture, disappeared.

Antonia was slipping from him!

A moment’s vision from without himself would have shown him that it was he who moved and she who was standing still, like the figure of one watching the passage of a stream with clear, direct, and sullen eyes.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE RIVER

One day towards the end of August Shelton took Antonia on the river – the river that, like soft music, soothes the land; the river of the reeds and poplars, the silver swan-sails, sun and moon, woods, and the white slumbrous clouds; where cuckoos, and the wind, the pigeons, and the weirs are always singing; and in the flash of naked bodies, the play of waterlily leaves, queer goblin stumps, and the twilight faces of the twisted tree-roots, Pan lives once more.

The reach which Shelton chose was innocent of launches, champagne bottles and loud laughter; it was uncivilised, and seldom troubled by these humanising influences. He paddled slowly, silent and absorbed, watching Antonia. An unaccustomed languor clung about her; her eyes had shadows, as though she had not slept; colour glowed softly in her cheeks, her frock seemed all alight with golden radiance. She made Shelton pull into the reeds, and plucked two rounded lilies sailing like ships against slow-moving water.

“Pull into the shade, please,” she said; “it’s too hot out here.”

The brim of her linen hat kept the sun from her face, but her head was drooping like a flower’s head at noon.

Shelton saw that the heat was really harming her, as too hot a day will dim the icy freshness of a northern plant. He dipped his sculls, the ripples started out and swam in grave diminuendo till they touched the banks.

He shot the boat into a cleft, and caught the branches of an overhanging tree. The skiff rested, balancing with mutinous vibration, like a living thing.

“I should hate to live in London,” said Antonia suddenly; “the slums must be so awful. What a pity, when there are places like this! But it’s no good thinking.”

“No,” answered Shelton slowly! “I suppose it is no good.”

“There are some bad cottages at the lower end of Cross Eaton. I went them one day with Miss Truecote. The people won’t help themselves. It’s so discouraging to help people who won’t help themselves.”

She was leaning her elbows on her knees, and, with her chin resting on her hands, gazed up at Shelton. All around them hung a tent of soft, thick leaves, and, below, the water was deep-dyed with green refraction. Willow boughs, swaying above the boat, caressed Antonia’s arms and shoulders; her face and hair alone were free.

“So discouraging,” she said again.

A silence fell… Antonia seemed thinking deeply.

“Doubts don’t help you,” she said suddenly; “how can you get any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.”

“Victories?” said Shelton. “I ‘d rather understand than conquer!”

He had risen to his feet, and grasped stunted branch, canting the boat towards the bank.

“How can you let things slide like that, Dick? It’s like Ferrand.”

“Have you such a bad opinion of him, then?” asked Shelton. He felt on the verge of some, discovery.

She buried her chin deeper in her hands.

“I liked him at first,” she said; “I thought that he was different. I thought he couldn’t really be – ”

“Really be what?”

Antonia did not answer.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I can’t explain. I thought – ”

Shelton still stood, holding to the branch, and the oscillation of the boat freed an infinity of tiny ripples.

“You thought – what?” he said.

He ought to have seen her face grow younger, more childish, even timid. She said in a voice smooth, round, and young:

“You know, Dick, I do think we ought to try. I know I don’t try half hard enough. It does n’t do any good to think; when you think, everything seems so mixed, as if there were nothing to lay hold of. I do so hate to feel like that. It is n’t as if we didn’t know what’s right. Sometimes I think, and think, and it ‘s all no good, only a waste of time, and you feel at the end as if you had been doing wrong.”

Shelton frowned.

“What has n’t been through fire’s no good,” he said; and, letting go the branch, sat down. Freed from restraint, the boat edged out towards the current. “But what about Ferrand?”

“I lay awake last night wondering what makes you like him so. He’s so bitter; he makes me feel unhappy. He never seems content with anything. And he despises” – her face hardened – “I mean, he hates us all!”

“So should I if I were he,” said Shelton.

The boat was drifting on, and gleams of sunlight chased across their faces. Antonia spoke again.

“He seems to be always looking at dark things, or else he seems as if – as if he could – enjoy himself too much. I thought – I thought at first,” she stammered, “that we could do him good.”

“Do him good! Ha, ha!”

A startled rat went swimming for its life against the stream; and Shelton saw that he had done a dreadful thing: he had let Antonia with a jerk into a secret not hitherto admitted even by himself – the secret that her eyes were not his eyes, her way of seeing things not his nor ever would be. He quickly muffled up his laughter. Antonia had dropped her gaze; her face regained its languor, but the bosom of her dress was heaving. Shelton watched her, racking his brains to find excuses for that fatal laugh; none could he find. It was a little piece of truth. He paddled slowly on, close to the bank, in the long silence of the river.

The breeze had died away, not a fish was rising; save for the lost music of the larks no birds were piping; alone, a single pigeon at brief intervals cooed from the neighbouring wood.

They did not stay much longer in the boat.

On the homeward journey in the pony-cart, rounding a corner of the road, they came on Ferrand in his pince-nez, holding a cigarette between his fingers and talking to a tramp, who was squatting on the bank. The young foreigner recognised them, and at once removed his hat.

“There he is,” said Shelton, returning the salute.

Antonia bowed.

“Oh!” she, cried, when they were out of hearing, “I wish he ‘d go. I can’t bear to see him; it’s like looking at the dark.”

CHAPTER XXIX

ON THE WING

That night, having gone up to his room, Shelton filled his pipe for his unpleasant duty. He had resolved to hint to Ferrand that he had better go. He was still debating whether to write or go himself to the young foreigner, when there came a knock and Ferrand himself appeared.

“I should be sorry,” he said, breaking an awkward silence, “if you were to think me ungrateful, but I see no future for me here. It would be better for me to go. I should never be content to pass my life in teaching languages ‘ce n’est guere dans mon caractre’.”

As soon as what he had been cudgelling his brains to find a way of saying had thus been said for him, Shelton experienced a sense of disapproval.

“What do you expect to get that’s better?” he said, avoiding Ferrand’s eyes.

“Thanks to your kindness,” replied the latter, “I find myself restored. I feel that I ought to make some good efforts to dominate my social position.”

“I should think it well over, if I were you!” said Shelton.

“I have, and it seems to me that I’m wasting my time. For a man with any courage languages are no career; and, though I ‘ve many defects, I still have courage.”

Shelton let his pipe go out, so pathetic seemed to him this young man’s faith in his career; it was no pretended faith, but neither was it, he felt, his true motive for departure. “He’s tired,” he thought; “that ‘s it. Tired of one place.” And having the instinctive sense that nothing would keep Ferrand, he redoubled his advice.

“I should have thought,” he said, “that you would have done better to have held on here and saved a little before going off to God knows what.”

“To save,” said Ferrand, “is impossible for me, but, thanks to you and your good friends, I ‘ve enough to make front to first necessities. I’m in correspondence with a friend; it’s of great importance for me to reach Paris before all the world returns. I ‘ve a chance to get, a post in one of the West African companies. One makes fortunes out there – if one survives, and, as you know, I don’t set too much store by life.”

“We have a proverb,” said Shelton, “‘A bird in the hand is worth two birds in the bush!’.rdquo;

“That,” returned Ferrand, “like all proverbs, is just half true. This is an affair of temperament. It ‘s not in my character to dandle one when I see two waiting to be caught; ‘voyager, apprendre, c’est plus fort que moi’.” He paused; then, with a nervous goggle of the eyes and an ironic smile he said: “Besides, ‘mon cher monsieur’, it is better that I go. I have never been one to hug illusions, and I see pretty clearly that my presence is hardly acceptable in this house.”

“What makes you say that?” asked, Shelton, feeling that the murder was now out.”

“My dear sir, all the world has not your understanding and your lack of prejudice, and, though your friends have been extremely kind to me, I am in a false position; I cause them embarrassment, which is not extraordinary when you reflect what I have been, and that they know my history.”

“Not through me,” said Shelton quickly, “for I don’t know it myself.”

“It’s enough,” the vagrant said, “that they feel I’m not a bird of their feather. They cannot change, neither can I. I have never wanted to remain where I ‘m not welcome.”

Shelton turned to the window, and stared into the darkness; he would never quite understand this vagabond, so delicate, so cynical, and he wondered if Ferrand had been swallowing down the words, “Why, even you won’t be sorry to see my back!”

“Well,” he said at last, “if you must go, you must. When do you start?”

“I ‘ve arranged with a man to carry my things to the early train. I think it better not to say good-bye. I ‘ve written a letter instead; here it is. I left it open for you to read if you should wish.”

“Then,” said Shelton, with a curious mingling of relief, regret, good-will, “I sha’n’. see you again?”

Ferrand gave his hand a stealthy rub, and held it out.

“I shall never forget what you have done for me,” he said.

“Mind you write,” said Shelton.

“Yes, yes” – the vagrant’s face was oddly twisted – “you don’t know what a difference it makes to have a correspondent; it gives one courage. I hope to remain a long time in correspondence with you.”

“I dare say you do,” thought Shelton grimly, with a certain queer emotion.

“You will do me the justice to remember that I have never asked you for anything,” said Ferrand. “Thank you a thousand times. Good-bye!”

He again wrung his patron’s hand in his damp grasp, and, going out, left Shelton with an odd sensation in his throat. “You will do me the justice to remember that I have never asked you for anything.” The phrase seemed strange, and his mind flew back over all this queer acquaintanceship. It was a fact: from the beginning to the end the youth had never really asked for anything. Shelton sat down on his bed, and began to read the letter in his hand. It was in French.

DEAR MADAME (it ran),

It will be insupportable to me, after your kindness, if you take me for ungrateful. Unfortunately, a crisis has arrived which plunges me into the necessity of leaving your hospitality. In all lives, as you are well aware, there arise occasions that one cannot govern, and I know that you will pardon me that I enter into no explanation on an event which gives me great chagrin, and, above all, renders me subject to an imputation of ingratitude, which, believe me, dear Madame, by no means lies in my character. I know well enough that it is a breach of politeness to leave you without in person conveying the expression of my profound reconnaissance, but if you consider how hard it is for me to be compelled to abandon all that is so distinguished in domestic life, you will forgive my weakness. People like me, who have gone through existence with their eyes open, have remarked that those who are endowed with riches have a right to look down on such as are not by wealth and breeding fitted to occupy the same position. I shall never dispute a right so natural and salutary, seeing that without this distinction, this superiority, which makes of the well-born and the well-bred a race apart, the rest of the world would have no standard by which to rule their lives, no anchor to throw into the depths of that vast sea of fortune and of misfortune on which we others drive before the wind. It is because of this, dear Madame, that I regard myself so doubly fortunate to have been able for a few minutes in this bitter pilgrimage called life, to sit beneath the tree of safety. To have been able, if only for an hour, to sit and set the pilgrims pass, the pilgrims with the blistered feet and ragged clothes, and who yet, dear Madame, guard within their hearts a certain joy in life, illegal joy, like the desert air which travellers will tell you fills men as with wine to be able thus to sit an hour, and with a smile to watch them pass, lame and blind, in all the rags of their deserved misfortunes, can you not conceive, dear Madame, how that must be for such as I a comfort? Whatever one may say, it is sweet, from a position of security, to watch the sufferings of others; it gives one a good sensation in the heart.