PRINCE DWALA succeeded by other qualities than those attributed to him. His wealth raised him to a high tableland, where others also dwelt; it was not his fine palate which raised him higher, nor was it his manners. His manners, in point of fact, were not perfect; his manner perhaps, but not his manners. The finest manners were not to be learnt in the school of Warbeck Wemyss, as he quickly perceived; that was only a preparation, a phase. Captain Howland-Bowser, who believed his own success to be due to that schooling, was mistaken; he underrated himself: his success was greatly due to his fine presence, but still more to the fact that his intelligence stood head and shoulders higher than that of most of those with whom he was thrown into contact; and he had confirmed his pre-eminence by his literary fame.
Prince Dwala’s popularity was chiefly due to the zeal, the zest, the frenzy, with which he threw himself into the distractions and pursuits of the best society. He missed nothing: he was everywhere; wakeful, watchful, interested. He was a dancing man, a dining man, a club man, a racing man, an automobilist, a first-nighter. His dark head, groomed to a millimetre, his big figure, tailored to perfection, formed a necessary feature of every gathering.
Nor did he hold himself aloof from the more serious pursuits of the wealthy: he was at every meeting, big or small, that had to do with missionary work, temperance, philanthropy; he visited the Geographical Society, the Antiquaries, the Christian Scientists, and the lady with the crystal globe in Hanover Square.
He was up early, walking through the slums, or having his correspondence read to him. Tired rings grew round the Huxtable’s eyes; the Prince was as fresh as paint. He was studying ‘the Human Question.’
We will not follow him through all the details of his social life: the limbo of frocks and lights, the lovely people, the unlovely, the endless flickering of vivid talk, the millions of ideas, all different in outline but uniform in impulse, like the ripples on the Atlantic swell. We come at once to the great day when he met Lady Wyse.
Strange that such a meeting should have marked the day for him as great. Not strange that it should be so for you and me: for us it has inner meanings, implications of success; it marks the grandeur of our flight; it has high possibilities. Who knows but we may catch the fancy of the lovely creature, be admitted freely to her familiar fellowship; penetrate thereby to the very innermost arcana of the Social Mystery?
But for him—a monster of the forest, an elemental being—that happiness should date from his first meeting with a woman whom we must call after all frail, the fine flower of all that is most artificial and decadent in England: that was strange. But so it was.
He had studied; he had seen; he knew the human question to the bottom. But what to make of it? Was this all? Discontentment gnawed him. He suffered a deprivation, as once in the forest, when he lacked Man. Now he had had Man, to the full; he was sated. What more?
Lady Wyse understood his want, and helped him to supply it. He must reduce himself, limit his range to the human scale; he must put off his elemental largeness and himself be Man; be less—an Englishman, a Londoner.