THAT was one of Mr. Cato’s chief preoccupations. What was the Prince’s social station in England? How much deference might be demanded of the world? Who were the people to whose company he had a natural right? One must neither prejudice his future by assuming too low a value for him, nor expose him to any rebuff by claiming too much.
The question was one beyond Mr. Cato’s own competence. His thoughts turned to his nephew Pendred. Not a country nephew this, with any implication of humbleness. Quite the contrary; Pendred Lillico, ex-Lieutenant of the Grenadiers, son of Mr. Cato’s half-sister, who had married a hitherto obscure baronet in the days of her beauty. Pendred was a dancing man, a well-known man, a pattern of manners, an arbiter of fashions. They rarely met: Mr. Cato was secretly afraid of his nephew; Pendred seldom had occasion to boast of his uncle.
He arrived on his motor-car—small, fair, translucent, admirable. The occasion suited him. Appreciation was his métier—appreciation of frocks, laces, china, women, men. He knew hallmarks, pottery-marks, marks of breeding, marks of coming success. Mr. Cato passed the morning before his arrival in a restless state; he was nervous as to the verdict.
‘How much a year, do you say?’ asked Pendred, in his touching little glass voice.
‘Two thousand.’
‘H’m ... Borneo.... Can I see him?’
‘But that makes no difference, does it?’
‘It’s everything.’
‘But, surely dukes and millionaires aren’t estimated on their personal value?’
‘Oh, once you get into big figures!’
‘But a man’s social value....’
‘Social value, my dear uncle, is human value.’
‘Well, I’m delighted to hear it.’
‘On two thousand a year, that is.... Well, let’s see your man. I think I shall be able to give you an opinion.’
Prince Dwala was seated in an armchair in the library—nursing the fire, remote, abstracted. So abstracted that he took no notice of their entrance. Pendred put his head on one side and tried to sketch a rough estimate; he was puzzled. He put his head on the other side and attempted a new valuation. Mr. Cato touched the Prince on the shoulder.
‘I’ve brought you my nephew to make your acquaintance.’
Dwala gave a long sigh and looked up.
‘Nephew ... what’s a nephew?’
‘This is my nephew,’ said Mr. Cato, presenting Pendred, who stepped delicately forward, smiling, with hand extended.
The Prince drew him towards himself. Then suddenly, without any warning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he took him up in his arms and carried him to the light to make a better examination. Mr. Cato stood petrified. Pendred lay perfectly still, looking up with frightened blue eyes. Dwala seated himself on the edge of the table by the window, and put Pendred on his knee. It was the first finished product of civilisation that he had seen, perfect at every point. He smelt him; he stroked his hair and ears; he felt the fineness of his clothes; and growled a deep guttural growl of delight.
‘I should like to have a nephew, too.’
‘Put him down, put him down,’ cried Mr. Cato, finding voice: ‘you mustn’t treat Pendred like that!’
Dwala glided obediently off the table, set Pendred on a chair, and crouched at his feet looking up.
‘Does it talk?’ he asked.
‘That’s right. Of course he does. Pendred’s a terrible chatterbox. He’ll talk your head off.’
‘Please make it talk.’
‘How can he talk when you frighten him to death like that?’
‘Don’t be absurd, Uncle Wyndham,’ said Pendred plaintively: ‘I’m not at all frightened, thank you.’ He pulled out his case of gold-tipped cigarettes, and lighted one, at which Dwala growled again and clapped his hands.
‘Did you have a jolly voyage? I hear you were quite a lion on board. Terrible long journey. Awful bore travellin’. What do you think of England?’
‘Pretty voice! pretty voice!’ said the Prince, stroking one of his little boots. ‘Will it eat? He pulled a biscuit out of his pocket and put it up to Pendred’s lips. Pendred slipped his legs away and jumped up.
‘No, thanks awfully. I must be gettin’ home. People to tea. Awful bore.’ And with this he bolted straight out of the door and through the house to his motor-car, which was snorting and jumping up and down outside, in charge of a man in shiny black surrounded by a crowd of ragamuffins. He was half-way down the road when Mr. Cato emerged in pursuit.
The Prince sat by the fire, nodding his head in high spirits, and ejaculating: ‘Awful bore! Awful bore!’
‘How dare you?’ said Mr. Cato, coming in a moment later, and shutting the door behind him.
‘Dare what?’
‘How dare you treat my nephew like that? Pendred! A gentleman! A future baronet! Here am I, working my fingers to the bone to get justice done to you—at it night and day, spending my substance, sacrificing everything—and then, when I invite my nephew out here, who might have helped you in your London career, you treat him like that! You drive him out of the house—he even forgot his gloves.’
‘I liked him. I wanted to keep him.’
‘You treat him like a child, like a plaything, a doll. You forget that he is a man.’
‘Is he a man?’
‘He was twenty-eight in June. Of course he’s a man.’
‘I didn’t know. He has no eye.’
‘No eye? What do you mean?’
‘Nothing here.’ The Prince moved his hand over his eyes. ‘Nothing behind.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. Eye or no eye, I’ll beg you for the future to be respectful to everybody, mind you—everybody, high or low. Social position makes no difference. Now you’ve spoilt everything. Pendred’s offended. He won’t come back. How can you get on if you behave like that?’
Mr. Cato had heard of a man ‘having a leg,’ but never of a man having ‘no eye.’ It conveyed nothing to him. But the idea was clear and even elementary to Dwala. Being a beast, endowed with no reason, having only instinct and that μονὴ αἰσθήματος, or persistence of impressions, which takes the place of reason in the lower animals, he was incapable of the rational classification of natural things which characterises the human outlook. His criteria of species were distinct but illogical; his categories did not tally with human categories; they fell short of them and they overlapped them. Species was defined for him, not by the grouping of attributes, but by an abstract something—a spiritual essence inherent in the attributes. He was guided, to put it in philosophical terms, not by ‘phenomena,’ but by ‘noumena.’ For instance, he knew a horse from a donkey, not by its size, its ears, or its coat, not on consideration, but abruptly, instinctively, round the corner, by an effluence of individuality; in short, by its ‘equinity.’ So too, in the forest, he had always known a venomous cobra from a harmless grass-snake at any distance, not by considerations of form or colour—considerations which might often have led to too late a conclusion—but merely by its ‘cobrinity.’ But this attitude is liable to error; and Prince Dwala had been led astray by it. His notion of the essence of humanity was formed from the men he had first met; it was limited and imperfect. It included an element not essential to humanity, this ‘eye’ of which he spoke: a thing difficult to define; something revealed in the bodily eye; not exactly strength of will or power to command; not entirely dignity or courage; some reflection rather of the spirit of the universe, a self-completeness and responsibility, a consciousness of individual independence. This he had known and felt in the American, in the Soochings, in Mr. Cato, in the housemaid—it was the basis of his respect and obedience; but it was wanting in Pendred Lillico.
It was fortunate that he was disabused of error so early in his career. He could afford to laugh at his foolishness later—he saw what mistakes of behaviour it would have led him into; for when he came to know London better, he found that the mass of people, both in drawing-rooms and slums, indubitably men, altogether lacked the ‘eye’ which he had thought essential.