Open country; a comedy with a sting

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Contents

STATISTICS OF A RESPECTABLE FAMILY . . INTRODUCES THE GENTLEMAN GIPSY

OF COMMERCE WITH A DRYAD BY A POOL . BETWEEN BILL HILL AND GORSTON . - GREEK AND ITALIAN ° . : : .

HOW HE WENT HIS WAY. . ° : ° THE RETURN TO GREAT CUMBERLAND PLACE . VOICE FROM THE OPEN IN JUSTIFICATION . VICKY’S CONCLUSIONS, AND THE FACTS . . SENHOUSE ON PAN AND THE NYMPHS . ° FIRST APPEARANCE OF MR. NEVILE INGRAM

Chapter I Statistics Of A Respectable Family

THE name of Thomas Welbore Percival was soundly respected in the city of London. It stood for a turnover of fifteen thousand pounds, and a private income of at least six thousand a year. It centred in the person of a rosy-gilled, full-waistcoated gentleman of middle life—Mr. Percival was five-andfifty and admitted it—to whom a joke was dear, and not less dear because its scope and measurements were accurately known. When Mr. Percival came into Lomax’s Bank, had said ‘‘ Morning, Wilkins— growing weather!” to the grey-whiskered cashier, and handed over his slip of green paper, a glance at the back was the only formula. Then came, “How will you take it, Mr. Percival?” and Wilkins had his bundle of notes out and his finger wet before he so much as looked at the figures. Mr. Percival’s invariable reply was, “‘How I can get it; my boy. Honestly if possible—in these days.” Such old customs die hard. 3

Blount and Percival had been the firm. East India merchants they were, trading in the Poultry for more than two generations of traffic; and so the name stood now before the world of men, engraved on well-rubbed brass. But everybody knew that Tom Percival had married Kitty Blount, old Blount’s only child, and was now Blount and Percival in his own pair of shoes. Snug Tom, they called him, with a fine girl and a plum to himself; but always added that he well deserved his luck. And still he stuck to his desk, for all his whitening whiskers. ‘Ten to five saw him in the Poultry every day; a four-wheeled cab brought him, and sometimes the brougham would come to take him back; and passers-by saw the flash of a white skirt in the doorway, and told each other, “One of old Tom’s pretty daughters come for him.”’ On Saturdays he left at two, and never varied his year for more than a month in August; but what was to happen by and by nobody could tell, for he had daughters, and Mrs. Percival was ambitious, and there were many who doubted whether what had been good enough for Kitty Blount, that strapping girl she had been, would be good enough for Mrs. Percival, high-complexioned, highstepping lady of Great Cumberland Place. There had been no sons of the marriage—five daughters, but no son; and already Philippa, the eldest, was married to a Mr. Tompsett-King, a West End solicitor with clients in the peerage, and accepted membership of the Atheneum. That, said the gossips, had no look of the Poultry about it. And next we hear

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY 5 of Hawise, the second daughter, engaged to a baronet in the country. A baronet in the country—a county family. The Poultry, on a stool at Sweeting’s, shook its head over Kitty Percival, and said, “Hard luck on poor old Tom!”

And yet, if ever a man was happy in his offspring it was this honest East India merchant. He adored them all in various ways, and suited his worship to each with a tact which you had not supposed him to possess. He knew, and never shamed to say, that they were “‘a cut above him,” and often jogged his knees (alone, before his smoking-room fire) in triumph at the thought that, such as they were, he, stout Tom Percival, had begotten them. He knew also that each fair girl of them steered her own separate course, each remote from each, each with a purposeful jut to her sharp chin, each (as it dimly appeared to him) with a definite beacon ahead of her fine bright eyes. His adoration, then, was mingled with respect. He respected Philippa’s incisive scorn, Hawise’s calm, Melusine’s reverie (she was a most graceful girl, and danced beautifully), Vicky’s daring and dash, and, above all things in earth or heaven, little Sanchia’s coaxing. While Sanchia was a romp, her hair all tumbled about her face, I think Mr. Percival’s cup of happiness overbrimmed. She had been a beautiful, healthy child, all roses and roundness, and he had been eight years younger!— still, as he expressed it, in his roaring forties. But now we are in 1894, when Sanchia had had her hair up some three years, and he was five-and-fifty. Sanchia-Josepha—these romantic names!—was a young lady of twenty, and would be out as soon as Hawise was married to her Sir George—Sir George Pinwell, Baronet, between you and me an insufferable blonde person. And Sanchia, from a rosy coax, was turned -intoaslim, thoughtful girl with grey and dreamy eyes and a sad mouth. She was quiet now, and rather mysterious, speaking little and (apparently) thinking much. She went her own ways, having acquired (by not claiming it) much more liberty than any of her sisters had had. She was fond of Art, and used to go to a school of painting; she was fond of reading poetry (wherein she differed from her sister Melusine, who said that she was); and she didn’t get on with her mother. Comfort and terror contended for her father’s soul as he pondered this.

There I have always been with her, I confess. I never could myself get on with Mrs. Percival, who seemed to me to be at once in arms against society and its abject slave. Society, I used to fancy, beat her black and blue; and she kissed the rod. Sir George Pinwell treated her, for example, with such deadly, cold insolence that I defy her not to have known it—and of course no one knew it better; but his name was balm to her lips; she rolled it over her tongue like a salve.. She had pride and to spare, ambition and to spare; but the two worked not together. Her ambition ought to have been to win scope for her pride. It was quite the other way. To help her ambition she humiliated herself extremely—auntil

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY il even her husband, honest man, saw into what sore passes she was getting herself, and tried to rescue her. ‘I should go slow, Mother; I should indeed,” he would say, or, ‘‘Damn the fellow” (this of Sir George!) ; ‘I'll give him a piece of my mind one of these days.” But Mrs. Percival was incorrigible. With a fierce temper of her own and a bitter tongue, she feared nothing but public opinion. The good esteem of her neighbours was absolutely necessary to her; to get it she would school her temper and curb her speech until she must have suffered the tortures of the damned. And she had the knack of turning her sufferings into virtues, as so many women have it. She always got Percival’s pity and had kept his love by these means. As her daughter Vicky said, “Mother gets herself into a hole and then looks like an Early Christian.” Her daughters judged her far more shrewdly and with less ruth than her husband. Philippa was in her confidence, and gave her the most sympathy; but Melusine was her favourite, because she was so lovely and so refined. Philippa spoke her comforts; Melusine looked or sighed them forth. Grace was in every long line and gentle curve of this pensive beauty; her eyes spoke her fair mind, but otherwise she had little conversation. She danced, I have said, exquisitely, and yet she sat out a great deal. She had many admirers, “quite a court,” her fond mother declared.

Hawise, at this time, stood very high in her respect, for Hawise was doing very well for herself. She was exceedingly handsome also, with her mother’s high colouring and large blue eyes; she bade fair, indeed, to emulate her mother’s amplitude of charm in other ways. There were those who called Hawise Percival ‘‘Fatty.” Her neck and bust were superb, but her arms were certainly too big. She was not very tall either. Her temperament was placid; she could always be relied upon for a comfortable opinion, and nearly always agreed with you. By Sir George’s wish she took daily horse-exercise with a groom, and she did her best to please him by assuming an interest in lawn-tennis and golf which she was far from possessing. Naturally, she was inert. Her mother used to warn her against it—a “besetting sin.” Her father could not value her judgment so much as that of Philippa; but Philippa was married and in Bryanston Square, and he found Hawise’s infinitely more comfortable. He had many a cosy talk with her over his cigar before dinner, and used to say of her apple-cheeks that they were as good as a day in the country. |

Victoria, Vicky as she always was, comes up next for estimation, a merry girl, very pretty, not shrewish as yet, though that was her danger. Her eyes, of the family blue, shone black in the dusk, like black diamonds, or sapphires so dark as to be black. Her nose was retroussé and piquant; her lips smiled; she could be saucy. She was not really so. flippant as she seemed, for it was innocence which prompted her to impossible utterances, and gave her hearers many a panging ten minutes. She had a bright, inconsequent way of probing you to the depths which you might

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY 9 find charming, or might not. It depended very much upon who was there also. There was a Fraulein Winkiewicz attached to the household, a grim Hungarian lady of great reminiscences. Never shall I forget what I suffered at a tea-party—a young people’s tea-party, of course—when Vicky asked her what it » felt like to be kissed by a man,—‘‘Not an uncle, you know, or a cousin, or anybody of that kind, but a strange man, who takes you in his arms and says, Darling, you are all the world to me, and kisses you. That sort, you know.” ‘This was terrible. Vicky, it should be added, was always very much interested in such questions and spared neither age nor sex in her pursuit of information. She gathered, I fancy, a great deal of experience one way and another before she finally accepted the hand and heart of Captain Sinclair. That, however, was not yet. That must have been in ’96, and we are now in the early days of ’94.

Sanchia, the youngest of these well-endowed girls, was at this time as nearly without sex as a girl of twenty may be. Her mother had kept her back deliberately, but the child must in any case have ripened slowly. I think her mind developed faster than her body. She—at twenty—saw nothing of love, and thought nothing. It may be that she accepted it, like the budding of the trees, as a fact of life, which came in its season. It interested her not at all; and this made at once her distinction, her charm, and her danger. For she shared to the full the franchise of her remarkable family, and was never ashamed of acting as she felt or saying what she thought. Difficult she found it, always, to speak ; but it was not in self-consciousness that the difficulty lay. If she liked a person, or was touched by something said, she would give up her hand; except that she had no motions that way, it might as well have been her cheek. She was at once confiding and reserved, at once extraordinarily frank and extraordinarily reticent (for so young a girl); but her reservations seemed often absurd and her confidences astounding to bewildered youth of my sex. Bewildered youth, agog for captures, panted after her, baffled, faint, yet pursuing. At one hour blessed beyond his hopes, at another chilled far beyond his assured deserts, the marvel is that she went her even way, untouched and unconscious. But she did— with a devastating friendliness which was to beguile a man in every way worthy of her affections, and tumble her at last into the arms of another of a very different stamp. ‘That is the theme to which I propose to devote these pages, and it ought to be a curious study.

Meantime, we have her now, slim and thoughtful, rather pale, with something still of the childish roundness of face which she had worn when her father, eight years younger, could cuddle her to his comfortable ribs, and call her his saucy Sancie, and his love-apple. Her eyes were very large and extremely lovely—hblue-grey whites, black-ringed iris, large and palpitating pupils, a deep and serious gaze. She developed later—according to me—into the Beauty

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY II of the Family, though she was always pale. Undeniably she was her father’s beloved. He respected Hawise, admired Melusine from afar, and was afraid of sparkling Vicky’s audacious criticism. But to his Sancie he could unfold his simple soul. She alone \bore with his little jokes: his ‘‘A Miss is as good as a mile, hey? And here am I, with five Misses! Quite a long walk for an elderly gentleman.” It was Sanchia also who, to please him, egged him on, on Michaelmas Day, to repeat his famous verse:

Of all fowls in the poultry-yard The goose must be preferred; There’s such a deal of nutriment In that weak-minded bird.

Laugh she could not—she laughed rarely; but it was sweet to him to catch the answering beam from her eyes, and her tender smile that met midway with his and blew a kiss to it.

She used to sit with him in the smoking-room—on his knee or on the arm of his chair—while he took his nightcap of whisky-and-water and his last cigar. She said little; but often he told her of the doings at the office, or what old Bob Etherington said, or what old Jack Burmester. He had more household cares for her ear than ever he had for his wife. In her thin hands, upon her virgin lap, lay the destinies of many a sharp young clerk. His heart glowed to feel her charity, his head bowed to her cool judgment. And when she had kissed his forehead and gone to bed, often and often he would stand upright in the middle of the room, cigar in one hand and toddy in the other, and shut his eyes and pray with all his might, “God bless my Sancie! God bless my girl! And send her happy, for Christ’s sake, Amen.”

In such uncouth ways the good man bared himself before his gods.

It is only necessary to add to this chapter of particulars the following, which will place us squarely at the opening of 1894. It was decided that Hawise was to be married in June of this year, and that Sanchia could accept the invitation of an old Lady Mauleverer to spend some earlier weeks at Gorston, her seat in the Eastern Midlands. Sanchia had been to school, it seems, with Grace Mauleverer, who was her ladyship’s granddaughter, and now Mrs. Percival felt that she was reaping the fruits of a diligent sowing. Lady Pinwell was a good name for one daughter to bear; Lady Mauleverer a good name for the friend of another. The malicious say that she kept a record of titled acquaintances which now contained two baronets, a baronet’s brother, and a baronet’s widow. Vicky’s inference, rather, was that Mamma collected baronets. And not city titles either. Sir George Pinwell was county, and a creation of Charles IJ. Lady Mauleverer’s husband, the late Sir Giles, had been of a still older origin. He claimed James I.; but that had been disputed. There had been a Mauleverer creation by that sovereign, but it expired with the patentee’s son. Charles I. revived it in the person of a brother of the first

A RESPECTABLE FAMILY 13 baronet’s. The other name on her list—that of Sir Carnaby Hodges—was a George III. title. The family seat was in Gloucestershire, and was unfortunately /e-—to a pork-butcher of Cheltenham. Sir Carnaby, meantime, lived in lodgings in Brighton. He had been a client of Septimus Tompsett-King’s for many years. The baronet’s brother was Gerald Scales, and most devoted to Melusine. Nothing could be more chivalrous than his behaviour. His way of looking at her across a room reminded Mrs. Percival of the Marquis of Montrose. I don’t know why.

Let us conceive then this prosperous family in the spring of the year, when lilacs are a-flower in the London squares, and the London skies are washed pure every night by wholesome showers. In April every Londoner takes thought for the morrow— since the morrow is May. Mr. Percival therefore will bethink him of his white hat, which must be cleaned against next month, and Mrs. Percival of drawing-rooms. Philippa Tompsett-King will have plans for an Easter in Rome, Hawise for her trousseau. Melusine and Vicky ride daily in the park with Mr. Gerald Scales and others. About Sanchia’s budding breast the maid now pins breadths of white, that she may be furnished with frocks for Gorston. In Mrs. Percival’s phrase, ““She may meet anybody there.” The child must be presentable. She must look her quality. Meantime in a rock-strewn glen, far from the Marble Arch, the three Women, daughters of Night, sit steadfast at their task.

Chapter II Introduces The Gentleman Gipsy

JoHN MAXWELL SENHOUSE, at the age of thirty, had travelled much of the habitable globe without losing his zest for adventure. He was now in England, with no immediate prospect of leaving it; yet every morning he arose, and fronted the day with heart-beats. That announces a habit of mind so enviable as to be extraordinary; and such indeed the man was. He would be extraordinary to-day, was still more so in 1894, which is the date at which we are here and now; in 1884, when he began to live the life which suited him, he was most extraordinary.

He was the only man I ever knew who was able to behold in the rising of the sun a daily miracle. Literally, I have seen him astounded, spell-bound before that filling up of the sky with almost intolerable brightness, and that slow entrance of the King of Life into the great dome, swept, garnished, and made pure for his habitation. This simplicity of mind in Mr. Senhouse was of a piece with his extreme simplicity of habit. He had the knack of reducing complexity into its elements, of drawing order out of chaos. In his ways and words he betrayed himself—very nearly primitive man; primitive man, let us say, who has learnt the comfort of washing himself, and has got so far into civilisation as to be able to criticise those who don’t wash. He was, as a fact, a keener critic than you would have supposed, and his absorbed eyes, which followed so often his busy hands, took in you and your little tricks and shifts together with a great deal that was vastly more beautiful and curious— and settled for you, off-hand, your place in the scheme of things. He resolved you, in fact, into your elements. Very unpleasant elements, too, they seemed to be when, as might well happen, he exhibited them to you, with a cheerful candour which turned you cold, and seemed to have settled it with the Supreme Arbiter that his analysis was unimpeachable. Mostly you were driven to see that it was.

He had theories about everything in nature and society, and practised more of them than you would have thought possible. There was nothing, he said, in the civilised world—to call it so for the convenience of the moment—which he was not able to go without’; and it is remarkable, really remarkable, how closely he could justify that assertion. A house, a bed, a coat, a shirt, money, tobacco, a dinner, a Bible. He did without most of these habitually, and any one of them at a pinch of a week or so. I have known him since ’82 or thereabouts, and can swear that he has never had a roof of his

1 He preferred, for instance, dry sand to soap.

own over his head. He does not need a bed, never wears a coat if he can help it; and as for money, the outside that it costs him to live is five shillings a week, and the utmost that he cares to make by his many arts is a hundred a year. What is over from the bare cost of living he spends in plants. Gardening is his passion, but he has no garden. His passion is to turn all wild England into a garden. To that he has devoted himself day and _ night. A few years ago he was bribed into Germany to pursue his hobby there. He received—or rather he was promised—a handsome stipend. He did not, as a matter of fact, receive it so, but it was held over for him till the end of the term of years, and -handed to him in a lump. He returned it to the Grand Ducal officer, much to that worthy’s confusion. But that doesn’t come in here at all.

The pages which follow, and the tale which they unfold, are the work of this interesting fellow, and, in a sense, the property of a lady already mentioned. They both live at this hour, and for that reason their names are not warrantable. John Maxwell Senhouse, Sanchia-Josepha Percival—that is as near to their names as I care to go. With this provision, I have the consent of both parties to the publication of letters and this commentary upon them which do them no discredit, and do not reveal an intimacy of which they have any reason to be ashamed. As to the story involved in their relations, and how far it was conditioned by them—that is another affair, to be judged by reader and compiler on the merits. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to add that while the writer has my sympathy, I by no means share all his opinions with him, and that I have taken upon myself the responsibility of selecting what, out of his letters, I would print. The correspondence as a whole is massive; some of it is occasional; some relates to private affairs, and some to the private affairs of other people. There is a good deal of freedom used in dealing with the names and deeds of persons much in the world’s eye. To publish names and comments together might be scandalous; either without the other would be stupid. So also with the tale—such tale as lay in the relations of the eloquent, profuse, and random writer of these letters with Miss Sanchia . Percival—I have no more, I believe, allowed my selection to interfere with its course than I could persuade it to sway its fortunes. It is a good tale, as all true tales are, and may be read independently of any correspondence. The reader who chooses may skip the whole budget, and form his opinion of the persons here treated, as he should, by their actions, not by their words.

By way of introduction, however, to such tale as there is, something must be said before it and the letters within it can be left to speak for themselves. Their writer, when I knew him first (redhot and sizzling with theory), was the most cheerful revolutionary you could conceive of. Anarchism— for he signed himself Anarchist—on his showing, was the best joke in the world. He would have dethroned kings and obliterated their dynasties as Isaac Walton would have had you impale worms on your hooks, with the same tender nicety. “‘My dear old chap,” one might hear him say to a doomed monarch, “‘we’ve had a splendid time; but a game’s a game, and really yours is up. You perish for the good of your so-called people, you know; upon my honour, it’s all right. Now. this bomb is beautifully timed. It'll be over before you can say knife. Just you see.”

That was the sort of impression he made upon one in those early days; he was frightfully reasonable and perfectly ridiculous. He was then at Cambridge, King’s his college, embroiled for ever with the dons—heading his examination papers, “Down with the bourgeois!”’ or, ‘“‘ Death to tyrants!’’? —and yet for ever in their houses. It was the women who would have him there; his manner with women was perfect. He put them on his own level, to begin with, and his level was high. He neither flattered nor bullied, never told fibs, nor paid compliments, nor posed for what he was not; nor, so far as I can learn, did he ever make love. Flirtation and he were contradictories, for, ridiculously as he would put things, and do them, the most ridiculous part of his performance was always that he was perfectly serious. He was all for liberty and equality, and very likely was waiting for the ladies to begin. He would have seen no reason whatever against that; and I can imagine him dis-

*This he used to call “sowing the seed.”

THE GENTLEMAN GIPSY me)

cussing a tender proposal from one of them with the most devastating candour, lying on the hearthrug (his favourite place in the room) with his face between his thin hands, and his black eyes glossy with mystery. He was extraordinarily popular; and when he was sent down for some outrageous act or another—I forget exactly what it was, but fancy it had something flagrant to do with the Athanasian Creed—he spent the time of rustication actually in Cambridge, in the house of a Fellow of his college, as everybody knew perfectly well. They dug a canoe out of a tree-trunk, the queer pair of them, and navigated the Cam from Ashwell to Littleport.

He was a great reader but a fitful, an excellent Grecian, and left the University without attempting his degree. He had come, he said, to consider -the course of study prescribed an absurdity, and the-reward held out to be a foppery unworthy of a serious man’s time. Such a man, with that persuasive, irresistible smile of his, he solemnly proclaimed himself in a letter to the Vice-Chancellor— or with what he fully intended to be solemnity. But his manner of leaving Cambridge was so characteristic that I cannot omit it, though I study to be brief.

It was simplicity itself. On a certain May morning in the year 1885 he rose as usual, dressed as usual in grey flannel trousers, white sweater, and pair of nailed boots; breakfasted as usual upon an egg and some coffee, and walked out of his rooms, out of his college, out of Cambridge, never to return.

This was literally the manner of his going. The only thing he took away with him, except the clothes he stood in, was a holly stick. He never wore a hat, and his bedmaker found all his loose change— gold, silver, and copper—lying at random on his dressing-table, and his cheque-book in a drawer. The rest of his belongings, which were ordinary, neither more necessary nor less various than the common run—clothes, furniture, books, pipes, correspondence, including the morning’s post, which, I am told, had not even been opened—he left everything where it was, dropped it just then and there, and vanished. Nor was anything heard of him in England for two years, after a letter received by his father, which had the postmark ‘‘Cracow” and the date “14th July,” in which he said that he had come to the sudden conviction of waste of time, money, and opportunity, and must be excused from indulging either the parental partiality or his own proneness to luxury any longer. He had chosen to come to Poland, he said, because nobody could tell him anything about it except that it was, on the whole, the most oppressed country in Europe. He. was uncertain of his return, and begged to assure his correspondent that he was well, happy, selfsupporting, and his affectionate Jack.

His adventures in Poland, which led him certainly and expeditiously to Siberia, are no concern of ours just now. He conspired, I believe, in Latin, since he had not the tongue of the country; but, being overheard and more or less understood, to

Siberia he went, and was there lost sight of for a year. How he escaped, whether by intervention from home or his own address, doesn’t now matter. I know that he was in England in 1887, for I met him in the autumn of that year in his father’s house in the Midlands, irredeemably enthusiastic in the cause of absolute liberty, in touch with Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Stepniak, and half the dreamers of Europe; a confirmed wanderer, a sojourner in tents; as much artist, scribbler, desultory scholar as ever, but with a new taste, which he had acquired in his exile from a fellow-conscript, a taste for botany, which became later on the ruling passion of his life. He was more charming and more ridiculous than ever, and, mentally, entirely naked and entirely unashamed. To please his father—with whom he was on the best of terms—he went into the countinghouse at Dingeley for six months; but in the spring of ’88 he was off again, none knew whither, though it was discovered afterwards to have been the Atlas, and after that never settled down in the haunts of civilised man for more than a few weeks at a time.