The complete gentleman

Contents

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Book One: s. d ii

Book Two: Carried Forward 323 t I

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BOOK ONE: £. s. d. THE

COMPLETE GENTLEMAN

Chapter I

T T ENRY WEDLAW stopped outside the tobacconist’s and took a paper from his waistcoat pocket. On this was his list of errands, through which he deliberately went. Yes; everything had been crossed out — wine, captain’s biscuits, pot of caviare — everything but cigarettes. He had met with a good deal of difficulty in trying to get the particular sort he wanted. It would be terrible if Oliver couldn’t have the cigarettes he used to like so much, and if Wedlaw could manage to get them, Oliver would greatly appreciate his thoughtfulness and praise his memory.

He went into the shop, and without visible surprise or expressed pleasure, he found what he wanted. It was a great extravagance — but then it was for Oliver.

Before leaving he solemnly drew a straight line through the last item on his list, holding the paper against the glass door. He then tore it into three equal pieces and dropped them into the gutter outside. His conscience was free. All the time he had himself been smoking a cigarette, because he desired tobacco. He did not like II cigarettes. The salutary discipline of Great Cumberland Place, through which he had lately passed, claimed its ready but inconvenienced victim.

After a minute or two he turned into a peaceful little byway, and stopped before an early Georgian house — narrow, gracious, prim. The beautiful red tiles caught the sun as they rose for a few feet from behind the coping and slanted obtusely back to their inconspicuous apex. The front of the house was flat, its bricks mellowed, its level window frames gleaming with white paint. And of the houses in that row, kempt as they all were, spruce and trim, this was the masterpiece of nicety. The small, square panes were pools of ink, revealing darkness; and here and there they glittered in the light. The straight, cream-coloured folds of the curtains peeped prudently from within.

A momentary hesitation before the doorstep was enough to recall to Wedlaw all the usual emotions proper to the place and circumstances.

It would be too much to say that he was envious of Faucet as owner of this delectable abode : yet he recalled with a pang of regret that but for the perdition of the family fortune, this house might have been his. It had been sold by his grandfather to the Faucets in the early ’forties for a good price. But Henry Wedlaw was one of those who must ever irk and gall himself and growl — 'This would be mine — ^but for contingencies.”

Gerald Faucet was an amateur priest, and he had just returned from a retreat. It was said that he gave this name to a holiday during which he allowed no letters to follow him. They had not met since Wedlaw’s engagement. It would be interesting to hear what Gerald would say.

“Money?’’

For a man who cherished a reputation for shyness, Gerald had an unexpectedly disconcerting way of looking up from whatsoever task engaged his attention, and asking leading questions. He was a young man gone bald, with bumpy, irregular features, and something of a dandy. He wore a short jacket of black velvet, its buttons made of old silver coins.

Wedlaw was startled into annoyance. He even flushed a little.

Faucet screwed himself round in his chair again and took up a fragment of porcelain which with steady fingers he insinuated into its cemented niche in a broken plate. The table at which he was working was big and long with bulbous legs, black with age, rugged and unshakable. It was in a muddle of newspapers and books, quill pens and the other munitions of writing. At one end there was a tray with tools and small pieces of brass and hard wood for the mending of ancient pistols.

“An exceedingly ill-bred question, wasn’t it?” Faucet said before the other could answer. “But you always said you’d marry money, you know.”

“One says these things ”

One does. Wedlaw had reiterated his calm intention on many occasions. “For my part, if ever I marry. I’ll marry money. That’s the only inducement for me.” And so it was. But now he got up impatiently and fidgeted with the key of his watch, twisting it backwards and forwards until it was fully wound and he could only twist it backwards.

“One says these things ”

“And then nature proves too strong, ’’suggested Faucet, going on with his mending, “and love steps in — so” — and he added another atom to the shattered plate — ^“and earthy resolutions die — ^there’s a little triangle here that's going to be the very devil — and the human pawn bows to the sweet inevitable, and ”

Henry Wedlaw looked up to the high mantel where there stood Persian bowls and Syrian. They were of an exquisite colour, but he was unable to determine whether it was blue or green.

^‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense," he said casually.

‘T am. Lucre is trampled under love. Ambitions are reconstructed. Gross desires for material comfort are wiped out ; the heart is filled with noble resolves and the belly with its dinner of herbs; the soul aspires to a vague but loftier bourne, and self is lost in another and more precious self. Nevertheless," and Gerald, having finished the mending of the plate, turned round with the mien of detennination upon his victim, “nevertheless, Henry, I repeat — has she any money?"

Wedlaw gave in with what grace he could summon. After all, though mad, Gerald was an old friend.

“It's Dolly Lowe," he said, in the tone of a boy who admits to anxious parents that he has made a hundred runs.

Faucet's lean, enthusiastic face lit up.

“My dear Henry, how very nice. Dolly too : so bright and accessible to ideas. How few girls are. And she’s well off, of course, since her uncle died."

“And he incidentally inherited all my namesake’s money, who, since he was distantly connected with both of us, might just as well have left it to me. In fact I had hopes. He was one of those people who are always chopping and changing. He never could make up his mind about some things."

Faucet restrained a smile.

never knew Joe Wedlaw,” he said. ‘‘Sugar, wasn’t it? Sugar and spice and all that is nice.”

“Yes, he was about the only planter in the West Indies who ever really made money since the old slave days.”

“I’m glad you’re going to marry Dolly. She’s not stupid and, as we were just saying ”

“Look here, I’m devilish fond of her,” said Wedlaw decisively.

Gerald thought the introduction of sentiment peculiarly needless. Nevertheless he fell in with his companion’s mood.

“Really, my dear fellow, you should have said so at first. I humbly apologise for being amusing about it. By Jove, Henry, you ought to look much more pleased than that.”

Wedlaw had been standing against a bookcase, looking slightly foolish. Now he grinned.

“Oh, I am pleased. I’m very pleased. I’ve — not got used to it yet.”

“Ah, you must never, never do that. Now I simply must tackle another plate. You tell me all about it. Wonderful cement this — hardens at once.”

He scooped up a little from a tin, poured it into an envelope and gave it to Wedlaw.

“My invention,” he added. “Come in useful some time. Keep it in a dry place.”

“Why on earth don’t you patent it? You’d make a heap of money.”

“Money,” repeated Gerald in an even voice;

“Yes. It’s very well for you to sneer. You can afford to.”

“I’m not. I’m only rather glad to keep the thing to myself. I like to think I’ve got something which might be turned into thousands of pounds but which isn’t going to be. It tickles me very much. You talk now.”

Henry didn’t want to talk. He wanted to collect his thoughts and to make certain whether Gerald was laughing at him or not. He felt uneasy, and as soon as he had said it, he knew what a fool he had been for confessing his old hopes of Wedlaw’s money. Having achieved what for some years past he had been coolly determined upon he for the time being tried to hoodwink himself into believing that there was in his marriage an element quite foreign to his previous intentions. Gerald, he decided, was a cynical person, much too prone to laugh.

Now he looked about him. He had not been in the house for some time, and, in view of repairing his own and settling down, he was beginning to take an interest in domestic arrangements and conditions. The room was pleasantly low and plainly panelled, the even-grained oak being of that exquisite colour which comes only from years of hard polishing with beeswax. It was an untidy place; there was a pile of books upon the floor, evidently being used to press out something flat. Old firearms were strewn about, and pipes were everywhere, dark shining briar, meerschaum exotically carved.

Certainly such surroundings would not have contented Henry Wedlaw. The room, in one sense, was too severe ‘ for him. He would have preferred big leather arm- 1 chairs and photographs of his friends. But it was im- j possible to avoid being struck by the place and its contents. Wedlaw was a man who liked to remember now and again that he had taste. But he had no idea what he really liked. He did not know, for instance, how much he appreciated the brick-red cushions on the dark chairs in conjunction with the deep blue hearthrug. He was

i6 quite convinced that things should be quiet and subdued, cheerful without being vulgar; always and ever useful.

Here there was little strictly of use. It could hardly be said that Faucet’s chattels were for show: he could never be accused of that. But they were for the most part things to be looked at, not to be handled, save in the sheer joy of possession.

There was no denying that Faucet really was artistic, as Wedlaw would put it to himself — his old furniture, his china, his collection of weapons showed that. But then also he was rich.

Leaving costly art out of the question, Wedlaw had never been able to surround himself with any of the things he liked.

He wondered for the hundredth time what the lord of all this transcendence did with his money. He was extravagant only within the walls of his house. Beyond that there was nothing to show that he was well off. Gerald was rather a mystery. Perhaps the word retreat was a euphemism: perhaps Gerald was an arrant humbug — ^^sly old bird. But no: Wedlaw knew that this commonplace explanation would not do.

Chapter II

O view of his proposed conduct save the material ^ had ever presented itself to Henry. He just wanted money. He wanted to be comfortable. He wanted to be able to do what he liked, to sit where he liked, to eat what he liked and choose the amusements which appealed to him. He was generous — in the accepted meaning of that word — and he wished to give his generosity free play. Easy in the satisfaction of his own requirements he would like the easy gratitude for money given. To poor relations and laborious friends he would be perpetually a Santa Claus, a deiis ex machina. . . .

For there had scarcely been a period in his life when he had not allowed himself to be hampered by lack of money. He had rarely been content. Ever had he needed the imagination by means of which poor folk make merry, the childish faculty of make-believe. He knew of jolly vagabonds who played the fool and did outrageous things, which were the things that are not done. But these were the outcasts of society. Though they enjoyed mad pranks, and made the best of what the gods had given them, they cut themselves adrift from kith and kin and kind. Henry Wedlaw, on the other hand, put out his eyes to spite his head, and thus it was that his idea of pleasure was pleasure bought. He refused to have a good-time-for-nothing, for that meant i8 silliness : the English of it being that he regarded happiness as an external condition. *

“My dear,” his mother said, “happiness has nothing to do with money. It is there — inside you. You can take it or leave it, but no amount of money and no poverty that you’re likely to face will alter it.”

“That sounds very nice, mother,” he replied, “but it’s a bit too lofty and high falutin for me.”

“You work hard, my boy,” said his father, “and you’ll find time go fast enough” — which is the same thing said differently.

“Eh, Master Henry. I rec’lect as if ’twas yesterday,” said his old nurse, though she did not say it all at once, “I rec’lect the way you’d be a Hindian one day and a sailor the next. You won’t be remembering that, I expect? Quiet, good little boy, you was. You’d come to me to help you put the nursery table topsy turvey on the floor; and all the afternoon you’d be a rigging of it — your ship you called it. And the legs was masts, with an old dust sheet for sails, and you’d sit under there and tie them up with bits of string. Same with your Hindian tent, which you called your wig — wigwam — that was it. That’d be the curtain which you propped out from the wall with a couple of walking-sticks. You never played no games with them. All the afternoon you’d be a getting ready for the game till you was tired out. And it struck me then, and, thinking of it, it’s struck me since, that getting your boat ready and making it and all was your game” — which again is the same thing, only said very much better.

But in spite of this natural law Henry Wedlaw continued steadfastly to grumble. Even at school, where the snobbery of wealth is perhaps least active, he had been handicapped and thwarted. The 3tudy orgy on

Saturday nights had been for him a travesty. Fives-balls were expensive. . . . His was the curse of the yoimger son.

To pig it in some tuppeny regiment — no. He took comfort in knowing there was something to be said for the point of view. He despised the idea of playing Chanticleer on an inferior dunghill — ^which part he regarded as non-conformity in essence. He would be content to take his place along with his fellows, if he could. But he could not. It must be all, or nothing. He could not go into the Army.

As a boy just fledged he had a pretty taste in horseflesh. He could ride fairly well. He liked racing. He had the unbefitting gift of making friends with rich young men from whom he was too proud to cadge. He( could be with them for a while, tasting in an agony of apprehension their money joys, too little of a fool to live in paradise.

From one such set as this he often recalled his dismissal. It was just before he went abroad on his first serious job in South America. Behind him lay the days of drudgery in the School of Mines. He was staying with his mother in London. He had fallen in with friends. A glorious evening had been proposed — dinner here, a box at the Empire, supper there. Ordinary enough, only you had to remember in whose company the night was to be spent. And Wedlaw always remembered. He had learnt never to act without thinking first, always to look before he leapt, so that if the leap came off at all there was no exhilaration in it. He was damnably cautious. He had got into the habit of looking twice at a shilling before spending it, he had become disgustedly accustomed to the miserable economy of wearing his clothes according to the people he was to 20 meet — old clothes for friends, new clothes when strangers might be useful. So now he had the foresight to guess the sort of figure this jolly riot would stand him in.

He had grown courageous. With no shamed face he owned that he was sorry he couldn’t run to it.

‘Tity it is you have no money,” said a young Jew who knew him well.

That was the end of it. It was a pity, but there was no more to be said. At first he had been outraged at the indelicacy of the remark. It was blatantly vulgar — exactly the sort of thing a little nouveau riche, a scion of Whitechapel properly would say. Wedlaw felt bitterly cheapened. He had been friends with this man and the others. He had tried in the past to keep up with them, at any rate now and again to play with the toys that were the commonplaces of their every day. And he knew it was no use. He could dabble with their pleasures on rare occasions, on occasions rarer still they would dally with affected simplicity. But poor men’s pleasures bored them even more than they bored him. And when he had time to think he recognised the wisdom of the Jew. There was flattery in what he said, and the flattery was sincere. He was not a snob. Wedlaw might have gone about with them in rags, if only he could have afforded to do in other respects as they did. They were not in the least degree mean|, but they knew that he was too good a man to buy, too good a friend. It was just — a pity. They would get on without him. He must get on without them. But — ^ —

'^One day I’ll marry a girl with money, and then ”

Gerald Faucet was the only man of his own age whose money had never diminished intimacy: but that was owing to dissimilarity of tastes.

Henry was a man of expensive ideas but he had stifled them and never given them rein. Unlike many a better man before him, he had never allowed his affairs to get out of hand: he was never for long in debt. He liked to think that a peculiar code of honour belonging to his family excluded even this: he liked to think of the inviolable Wedlaw ideal. It never occurred to him that this was colouring the picture rather too highly. The Wedlaw Honour sounded rather feudal and impressive, having a common root idea with the Hyphen Jewels and the Curse of the Asterisks : it seemed to suggest one hand upon the heart and t’other on a sword-hilt. Whereas the Wedlaws had no continuous stream of family history. They had not been immemorially connected with one house or one part of the country. Some times they had lived in a house of their own for a generation or two, and then it had been sold or stolen from them. At the moment there were two houses in the family, one for each son. Michael’s had been bought by his father : from his mother Henry had inherited his. Certainly it was an old family in a narrower sense than that in which all families are old, but it was not particularly distinguished.

For the most part, up to Henry’s time, they had followed the old rule of Navy, Army, Church and Law. And if from time to time one member of the family contrived to distinguish himself, the effort strained the resources of the rest. Henry’s father, for instance, had retired as a major who had seen but little service, and had* never been able to recover from the fact either that his grandfather had written a standard work on Jurisprudence, or that his uncle would once have preached at St. Paul’s but for twisting his ankle as he mounted the steps to the pulpit.

Still, the Wedlaws were an honest race, had been and proposed to be; and if the late major had swaggered a little about this wholesome tradition and had tried to regard it as an heirloom, no harm could result save the derision of those who had heirlooms but no traditions.

With a little rough shooting, an occasional day’s hunting, though never contented, Henry put up. Judging clubs on the same principle as the Army, he had, until recently, belonged to none.

When staying in some country house he would wonder, without any quickening sense of humour, what the man would think who took his keys, unpacked his battered box and saw the signs of beggary within: less that he might give a tip the servant earned than to avoid the stare of insolence and sneering thanks, he would endure a minor martyrdom of self-denial.

For a year or two, hard work in a strange land, novelty, a measure of good luck, brought him some sort of content. He developed quickly along orthodox lines. He was thrown much on his own resources. He read, he even rioted a little. And from everything he did and read he learned the lesson that the world is governed by money, that with money you can do anything, without it nothing, that happiness can be bought. This lesson, so far as Wedlaw was concerned, had been learnt before it had been begun.

The republicans of Indian blood and Spanish name to whom the abominable expenditure of gains ill-gotten was the summit of usual ambition he detested as only a healthy white man can : but their more immediate goal was also his — money, money.

He found that Britons were respected in Montevideo. A government shrewd enough to realise the little weaknesses of the people it represented was ready to pay (if such a course was unavoidable) for unimpeachable integrity. So Britons found work. And as mining engineers simply must be honest, Wedlaw was one of them. He did his work, he drew his pay. He lived as much as possible with his own countrymen. Whenever possible he played English games and eschewed native drinks. He was perfectly content with his own view of things, which remained quite unaltered all the time he was abroad. He resolutely refused access to fresh impressions. Great Heavens, if he did that he might become cosmopolitan, which is about the same as being a cursed foreigner. He behaved very much as though Uruguay were a British colony. And when lonely evenings found him in the camp, he would dream of all the things he could remember in the Stores catalogue.

But at however high a value that shrewd government might be disposed to count his services, the irresponsible native was wily in exacting toll, and pay must be high indeed to stand the strain and leave any of itself over to be saved. And Henry Wedlaw had not got it in him to save. Discontented as he was with his comparative poverty he liked to be munificent to his mother who herself was of a like kind — ^poor but with fine ideas. There was Evelyn too, his elder sister. It was nice to do something for her when he could. No, a mere job was no good. True, it might be if you stayed long enough. You might be rich in the days when you were too old to enjoy it. But now was the time. All youth knows that the old cannot enjoy their wealth. It is of no real consequence to them that they travel first class from London to York, sit in luxurious clubs, be well waited on. Rare flowering shrubs don’t look as though they were expensive, an old woman’s dress cannot cost so much as a young one’s. . . . They don’t 24 want to be gadding about and spending money. Not a bit of it. Get money young and enjoy it whilst you may. Now was the time that he wanted capital. Time and time again he had seen a chance if only he had been able to take it. A new country, unexploited hitherto — that was how fortunes were made, and new countries were getting scarce. But what could he do with his miserable salary?

There were ways if only he knew them. Other men were always telling him so and taking advantage of them too. But these were men with ‘'sound commercial educations.” Bitterly he cursed the snobbery which had forbidden him this. Certainly he had been taught a trade ; thus far was he in better plight than poor wretches who came unequipped for anything from the Universities. But of Business he knew nothing. Business was the thing. Business with a perfectly enormous B ruled the world, also the waves. Business was twin to Britannia. And he, Henry Wedlaw, had been denied any knowledge of it because the Wedlcm/s didn't do it. There is this to be said — it wasn’t merely that it wasn’t done; what mattered was that the Wedlaw’s ipsissimi didn’t do it. To be sure, engineering “wasn’t much,” but then some concession must be made to the trend of the times and, moreover, the Carlyans — even the Alketts — ^to choose two very notable families — had each contributed younger sons to this profession; and however lofty your outlook, however inviolate your self-esteem, a little precedent is very comforting at times.

From Uruguay he moved to Colombia, where he and his kind were just as indispensable, and where robbery was as rife. He journeyed very extensively, and because he had to, he hated it. He greatly admired the scenery, passing through which he played picquet as much as possible, and wrote home to say so. What really impressed him was the size of the mountains. He was intensely proud to know that his mine was at whatever preposterous height above the sea level it happened to be. He felt that it was nice to see a strange country, but that it would be much nicer if he was a leisured traveller. It was no pleasure to him to be part of the show the tripper gazes at, to sell where most Englishmen buy. On the contrary it was rather infra dig. When he married the golden girl he would see things properly. And in the meantime a certain wholesome abhorrence kept him from the easy marriage market of Latin America. Big-eyed, whopping, wobbling Juanitas and their greasy papas were very fain to capture an Englishman; and Wedlaw’s entirely English conscience revolted against an arrangement which would be so matter-of-fact, so blunt, so artless. It would not be sporting. Also, it would not be nice.

So time went on. Hard work abroad, home for a spell, and away again. He was thoroughly capable, absolutely conscientious. When he was given a job he did his job to the ultimate best of his capacity. At work he must have been happy — his face showed no permanent signs of discontent. Nevertheless in between whiles he never lost an opportunity of complaining. ‘There’s no money in engineering,” he would say. The Grouser, he began to be called wherever Englishmen gathered together behind his back. When Joe Wedlaw, a very remote cousin, died rich in the West Indies, he had gnashed his teeth, silently and with well-bred restraint. His hopes had not been very big, but the man was childless and alone: and as a boy Henry had seen a good deal of him; occasionally the elder man had been generous. That would have been such a splendid way out 26 of the difficulty. To get the money without the trouble and bother of being married for it was, he saw afterwards, much too good to be true.

Then his mother died and he inherited enough to live on. His sister Evelyn had been married for some time to a private schoolmaster with a heavy sense of responsibility, but apparently an income to match it. She was satisfactorily accounted for. Engineering, in which there was no money, was promptly given up for idling, in which there was less. But at least he was now free to pursue the course he had mapped out.

Naturally, during short respites at home there had been an affair or two: and once he had been caught napping in a sentimental mood. Actually, he had imagined himself in love with a face — a face which was its owner’s sole fortune. His mother, unwise for her generation, had applauded him; his elder brother Michael, the soldier, of whom he saw very little, sneered. Between them he woke up and realised what he was doing and hurriedly withdrew before any damage was done.

And now, thirty years of age, straight and trustworthy to look at, Henry had successfully finished his long campaign. Though he had never known her — ^it is to be doubted indeed whether he had ever heard of her — ^before his last return home, Dolly Lowe was a distant connection of his, the connection of a connection, rather. He had met her at the house of her aunt. Of her money he had heard beforehand. Old Joe should be done yet. The mountain was coming to Mahomet. If he couldn’t have bread and butter, he should have butter and bread. It was almost the same in the end.