CHAPTER XXXII
ROSE-WATER SOCIALISM
Dinah did not turn from him. Nay, although her brain was in a whirl, although her voice was not under command, although her heart was bursting, Dinah’s lips smiled. She was monosyllabic, Lord Rex felt, but monosyllabic with a difference. And eager to improve the scantiest, most meagre encouragement, he began instantly to ransack such memory and imagination as were his for pertinent subject-matter.
Frothy small-talk, personal compliments, local gossip, were little relished, as he had proved, by Dinah Arbuthnot. She did not read newspaper trials, had never opened a society journal, knew nothing about actors or actresses, or novels, or prime ministers, or popular divines. You could not get her even to talk about herself. But then, that face of hers! If one might, quietly, stand gazing at her surpassing fairness as one does at a canvas or a marble, Lord Rex Basire, on this summer night, would have asked nothing more. His duties as a host, however, the sense that others might construe his silence into deficiency of wit, forced upon him articulate speech.
‘Awful hole, Alderney, for an idle man! Now I was stationed there for three months and got through an awful lot of work. No good letting circumstances beat you. I coloured a meerschaum first rate—worked at it, morning, noon, and night. I taught two of my terriers to march on hind legs, while I whistled the “Marseillaise.” Favourite tune of mine, the “Marseillaise.”’
‘So your lordship has told me.’
Dinah thought of their first conversation at the rose-show.
‘I loathe classic music—loathe everything, in art and literature, but what I can understand. Ever seen Maxwell Grimsby’s Alderney sketches, by the bye? Dab of greenish-gray for the sea. Dab of bluish-gray for the clouds—Storms, Sunsets, Whirlwinds, things you may as well frame upside down as straight, if you choose.’
No, Dinah had never seen them.
‘Maxwell Grimsby’s an old friend, isn’t he, of Arbuthnot’s? That accounts for your husband throwing over all us people on board the Princess.’
To this there was no answer. The balls had, certainly, not broken well as regarded Alderney. Clearing his throat twice, after a more redoubtable pause than heretofore, Lord Rex at length sought a wild and sudden refuge in English politics. He had never in his life talked politics to a pretty woman, reserving his views, which were of the rose-water socialistic school, for after-dinner eloquence among his brother subs. So desperately new an experience as Dinah required desperate measures! To talk well above this young person’s head, thought Lord Rex, who held no mean opinion of his own intellect, might awe her into appreciation. And the subject he chose for his experiment was that of class inequality.
The emptiness of all titles, the folly of all social preeminence, were themes on which Lord Rex waxed hot, exceedingly. Perhaps he was sincere. Rose-water socialism, I must admit, did not sit without a certain grace on this sunburnt little dandy, a grace to which his slinged arm, shot through in the forlorn defence of English Empire, gave the added zest of piquancy.
Dinah unthawed at once. She broke into talk. In the matter of class differences, Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife held fixed opinions, and could express them incisively. But her ideas were not Lord Rex Basire’s ideas. Lord Rex had got a vast deal of rabid rhetoric by heart, very picturesque rhetoric in its way, and coming from the lips of a duke’s son; Dinah had sharp, clear knowledge, gained at first hand, through the vicissitudes of her own marriage. To Lord Rex social inequality was a party question—kind of thing, don’t you know, that, vehemently taken up, may sometimes land a man, with a following, in the House! To Dinah it was the hidden enemy, the impalpable barrier that stood between her and her husband’s heart. Lord Rex had learnt pages of showy axioms to demonstrate that social inequality should never exist. Dinah’s life was one long, irrefragable, stubborn proof that it existed.
‘Your remarks have a terribly Conservative flavour, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’ When they had talked for some considerable time he told her this. ‘Impossible you can be a Conservative in reality?’
‘Gaston calls me an old-fashioned Whig. I don’t know the meaning of the word. I only pretend to understand these things in the humblest way, from my own standpoint.’
‘But you are in favour of the nationalisation of the land? You would do away with the laws of primogeniture? You don’t think a few thousand loiterers, slave-drivers, should hold big estates—for their pheasants—because each elder son, let him be fool, knave, or coward, is heir to them?’
‘Without such laws where would our English families be, my lord, our barons, and earls, and great dukes, like your father?’
‘Oh, where they came from,’ said Lord Rex, disposing of the question jauntily. ‘Labour was the original purchase-money paid for all things. You believe that much, at least, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
‘If the succession law was swept away we might lose more than we can afford along with it.’ Dinah had heard ultra-revolutionary notions freely aired at times among Gaston’s friends, and, in her one-sided feminine way, had striven, over her cross-stitch, to think them out. ‘I, for one, should not like to see any church or chapel in England turned into a lecture place for these new unbelievers.’
‘Unbelievers! Oh, that is quite a different story. We began by talking about the folly of class differences.’
Dinah was silent awhile. Then: ‘It would be impossible for you and me to think alike on all this,’ she told her companion, with a grave smile. ‘You have seen so much of the world, Lord Rex, perhaps have heard the debates in the Houses of Parliament!’
Lord Rex confessed that this intellectual advantage had befallen him.
‘And I have just watched the lives, the manners of a few more or less troubled men and women. Class differences, as you call them, may be folly. They are the hardest facts I know, the....’
Dinah saved herself, just in time, from adding, ‘the cruellest.’
‘Beauty is the universal leveller,’ observed Lord Rex, with presence of mind. ‘A perfectly beautiful woman would grace the steps of any throne in Europe.’
‘Leave thrones alone, Lord Rex Basire! If the beautiful woman wanted to make others happy, she would have most chance to do so in her own class of life.’
‘And suppose the beautiful woman wanted to be happy herself, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
‘Happiness comes naturally if you see it on the faces of the people round you.’
Their politics had not taken the turn Lord Rex desired. He harked back, a little abruptly, upon his first premises.
‘Yes, I am for absolute equality, Gardener Adam and his wife, and that style of thing. I would make the shopkeeping capitalist, just as much as the bloated aristocrat, turn over a fresh leaf. If I ever marry,’ said Lord Rex Basire—‘don’t feel at all like marrying at present, but if I ever do—I hope to get for my wife some simple little village barbarian who has never been to a ball, never heard an opera, never seen a racecourse in her life!’
‘A village barbarian—of what station?’ asked Dinah Arbuthnot.
‘Matter of blank indifference. I should marry the girl, not her station.’
‘And afterwards? Would the barbarian be accepted by your family? Or would you accept hers? Or would you, both, give up society?’
‘That would suit me best! Give up society. United to the woman one adored,’ said Lord Rex with fervour, ‘what could one want with artificial pleasures, with the eternal bore of dinners and dances?’
Dinah gave a chill laugh. She remembered the days when Gaston Arbuthnot was wont to use the like phrases, as a preface (so, in her present jealous misery, she thought) to returning to the world and its pleasures, unhampered by a wife.
‘When you marry, my lord,’ she observed, distantly, ‘you will, if you act wisely, choose some duke’s or earl’s daughter for your wife. Give up that notion of the village barbarian. As time wore on, and ... and the truth of things grew clear, the duke’s daughter would, at least, understand you. There could be no discoveries for her to make.’
Lord Rex turned and faced Dinah Arbuthnot, good-humouredly ignoring the coldness of her bearing towards himself.
‘Your opinions are desperately mixed, Mrs. Arbuthnot. You may be Conservative in theory—you would be a staunch Republican in practice! I am afraid, now, that a man with the misfortune—I mean, you know,’ stammered Lord Rex, lowering his voice, ‘that you could never bring yourself to care, ever so little, for a man with any wretched sort of handle to his name.’
‘I beg your pardon, my lord?’
‘A man belonging to the most useless class of all—the class that so many of us who are in it would gladly see done away with! Such a man would never find favour in your sight?’
‘Would have found, do you mean, when I was a girl of seventeen?’ Dinah asked, in tones of ice. ‘I can give no answer to that. Girls’ hearts are moved by such trifles—a title, even, might turn the balance. But I and my sisters lived in a little Devonshire village. We saw nothing whatever of high folks, and——’
‘I am not talking of Devonshire villages!’ exclaimed Lord Rex, interrupting her hastily, but dropping his voice still lower. ‘I am not talking of the time when you were seventeen—I mean now.’
Dinah recoiled from him on the instant. Idle compliments had moved her, at length, to an extent Lord Rex dreamed not of. For she could not forget that this was all part of her lesson, that her companion was making speeches such as better born women, careless mothers, wives of the type of Linda Thorne, might just listen lightly to, parry, and forget. With the thought came a thought of Gaston. A flood of shame tingled in her cheeks.
‘You ask me questions beyond my understanding, Lord Rex.’ So after a strong effort of will she brought herself to speak. ‘My choice was made, happily, long ago. How could any man but Gaston find favour in my sight?’
Now Lord Rex Basire, his tender years notwithstanding, had seen plenty of good feminine acting, of the kind which dispenses with footlights and the critics, the acting required in the large shifting comedy of human life. Although his own delicacy was not extreme, or his perception sensitive, some unspoiled fibre in his heart vibrated, responsive to the honesty of Dinah’s voice. This woman acted not, could never act! Her fealty to her light, neglectful husband was part of herself. Duty and happiness for Dinah were simply exchangeable terms. She could taste of the one only in the fulfilment of the other.
‘That was very charmingly expressed, Mrs. Arbuthnot. I hope, when I marry, my wife will say the same pretty things of me, if I deserve them, which I shall not! Characters like mine don’t reform.’
‘There will be more chance of reformation if you marry than if you don’t—especially if you choose the duke’s daughter,’ added Dinah, stiffly, ‘not the barbarian.’
‘And without any marrying at all! If some woman, as good as she is fair, would hold out her hand to me in friendship, would let me think that I held a place rather lower than a favourite dog or horse would hold in her regard! If—if—ah, Mrs. Arbuthnot! if you——’
But Lord Rex speedily discovered that he was apostrophising the waves and the stars. At the moment when his eloquence waxed warmest, Dinah Arbuthnot, village barbarian that she was, had walked away, without one syllable of excuse, from his lordship’s side.
He watched the outlines of her figure as long as they were discernible through the gloom; then, drawing forth his vesuvians and tobacco pouch, prepared to smoke a lonely pipe of wisdom on the bridge. Lord Rex was in a fever of perplexity. Until the last five days he had never cared for living mortal but himself. His brief fealties to the prettiest face of the hour, Rosie Verschoyle’s among the number, had been so many offerings at the shrine of small personal vanity. All this was over. His surrender to Dinah’s nobler beauty, his recognition of Dinah’s pure and upright nature, had roused him thoroughly out of self, made him look searchingly at the aims, the pleasures of life, and acknowledge that there were human affections, human fidelities, high above the range of his own light and worldly experience. Did happiness thrive in that loftier, chill atmosphere? Was Gaston Arbuthnot to be congratulated, wholly, on his lot?
One thing was certain—so Rex Basire decided, as he betook himself gloomily to the bridge. However this drama of domestic life might end, it would be monstrous, impossible, that he, Rex Basire, should be peremptorily dismissed therefrom, dismissed as one occasionally sees the frustrated stage villain, long before the final falling of the curtain!
‘And even if it is so,’ mused Lord Rex, half aloud, and drawing upon reminiscences of Nap. in his ill-humour, ‘if no choice lies before one but to “accept misery,” misery let it be! The man who goes blue does not invariably find himself in the worst position at the end of the game.’
But the lad’s philosophy was lip-deep only. Lord Rex Basire had never felt less cynically indifferent to loss and gain than in this hour.