The Cruise of the Make-Believes. Gallon Tom
Street that had been spoken of, and she leaned eagerly towards Gilbert, demanding to know what he had been doing, and if it was really true that he had lived among people who were a sort of savages – and what he had had to eat, and how he had managed to live at all.
"There's nothing remarkable about it at all," said Mr. Tant savagely. "Anyone would think that he had been exploring some wild region where the foot of man had never trod; instead of which, he's simply been living in a very thickly populated part of London, within a cab fare of his own home – and all for a whim! Besides, slumming's out of date."
"It wasn't exactly slumming – and besides, he really went to study the people – didn't you, Gilbert?" asked Enid, in her high voice. She was a tall, handsome girl, with a good carriage, and an abundance of good health and spirits; this evening she was particularly glad to see her old friend back again in his place among men.
"What I never can understand," said Mrs. Ewart-Crane, adjusting a bracelet on a very well-formed arm, "is why we need study men at all – or women, for the matter of that. I grant you that in your own sphere you are naturally interested in the people about you; but beyond that I decline to go."
"Exactly, my dear Mrs. Ewart-Crane," broke in Tant. "Just what I always say: let us remember always the dividing line, and stick to it. We should get jumbled up in the most horrible way if we didn't remember the dividing line always, and above all, if we didn't remember that the people who live in the Arcadia Streets of the world are very right and proper in their own places, and very wrong and improper elsewhere. The people of position in this world are those who have come by right to the top; it's fellows like Byfield that put wrong notions into their heads, by mixing with 'em, and coming down, in a sense, to their level. I assure you that when I discovered him he was living in a perfectly shocking place."
Mrs. Ewart-Crane closed her eyes, and shivered. "Then I'm very glad to think that he's left it," she said. "For my part, I wish to hear no more about it; let us regard it as something happily done with and forgotten."
"But I want to hear about it, mamma," persisted Enid, laughing good-humouredly. "I'm quite sure there was an attraction down there – wasn't there?" She turned to Gilbert with a smile.
"Many attractions," he replied evasively. "All sorts of poor people, toiling cheerfully, and having rather a good time in their own way, in spite of poverty."
"Don't let him put you off, Miss Enid," said Tant, a little maliciously. "There was an attraction – I saw her, and I heard about her. And I don't mind saying that she was very pretty."
"Gilbert!" The girl was looking at him quizzically. "I want to hear all about this. What was she like? Big and rather brazen – quite a child of nature, with what they call a heart of gold – eh? I know the sort."
"I beg again, Enid, that the subject may be dropped," said Mrs. Ewart-Crane icily. But no one took the least notice of her.
"I'm afraid you don't know the sort," said Gilbert. He was annoyed at the turn the conversation had taken – annoyed, too, at Jordan Tant for his breach of faith. He hated the thought of discussing the girl with these people; he knew that the more he tried to explain his feeling about the matter, the less they would be able to understand. But the rather haughty eyes of Enid were upon him, and he had to go on, against his will. "The girl Tant is talking about is a little hard-working thing, who lived in the next house to that in which I stayed; and she keeps a drunken father and a reprobate brother by the simple process of letting lodgings. Now you know all about it."
"How touching – and how romantic!" exclaimed the girl. "And the great man from the great world took a deep interest in her, and stayed perhaps a little longer in his slum on her account – eh?"
"For my part," said Mrs. Ewart-Crane stiffly, "since the subject must be discussed, I have never been able to understand what people let lodgings for. If they've got a house, why not live in it, and not give over bits of it to other people?"
Gilbert Byfield glanced at his watch. "We shall be late for the first act," he said.
"Which of course puts an end to the discussion," Enid said, as she rose from the table. "Of course, if you'd like me to send her anything that would be useful, I should be only too pleased. Mother likes me to be charitable."
The play proved to be dull (at least to Gilbert Byfield), and the evening seemed to stretch on interminably. For the man was haunted by the miserable feeling that this child, in her common back-yard – this girl he had understood, as he thought, so perfectly – could never by any chance be understood by those who had not intimately touched her life. He was puzzled to think what he could do to carry out that brave determination of his to help her – to lift her out of her surroundings. If he remained where he was, among his own people, and in his own sphere, he deserted the child; if he went back to her, he deserted them, and took up his life in surroundings uncongenial, except so far as she was concerned. And he saw that it was utterly impossible to go half-way about one matter or the other; Arcadia Street was not to be brought into the West End and dumped down there.
It happened that between the acts he went out to smoke a cigarette, and found himself, with a dozen other men, near the open doors of the theatre. A few people were strolling listlessly outside in the street – pausing now and then to stare in at the well-dressed men, and to whisper. And once a girl went past – a thin shabby girl in black; and he was reminded so forcibly of Bessie Meggison that, without knowing what he did, he hurried out of the place, and went after her. Fifty yards down the street she stopped to look in at a shop window; and it was not Bessie at all, but someone quite different. Yet the thought assailed him, as he went back to the theatre, that just in that fashion the girl might be wandering alone in this horrible London – poorly clad, and not too well fed. He hated the thought of his own prosperity; quite unnecessarily called himself a brute, because he had had a good dinner, and was supposed to be out in search of enjoyment.
Never for a moment, of course, did it occur to him that his point of view was wrong; never for a moment did he understand that properly his life could not touch the girl's, and could have nothing in common with it. He accused himself unnecessarily, when the only mistake that had been made in the whole matter was in going to Arcadia Street at all, and above all going there under false colours. That point of view he did not regard in the least.
But he walked home that night, after leaving his friends, feeling miserably that it would have been better if he had buried himself for ever in Arcadia Street; if in some impossible way, he could have forgotten this selfish purposeless life he had always lived, and could have flung himself into some real work that would have brought him nearer in thought and feeling to the girl. Not for the first time he cried out against artificiality; metaphorically speaking, he wanted to put on rough clothing and thick boots, and plunge into the real fierce work of the world.
Some sense of the injustice of the world in meting out such different lots to such different women urged him, after a lapse of days during which he had been at the beck and call of Enid, to go back to Arcadia Street. He told himself that it would be merely an experimental visit; he meant to see if something could not be done to shake old Meggison into an understanding of his responsibilities, and perhaps even to urge the derelict brother into an attempt to earn a living. That was what he told himself; in the end, of course, it amounted to his going with the prospect of seeing the girl, and of doing something, in a wholly indefinite way, for her personally.
He was a little shy about meeting her; so many ridiculous suggestions had been thrown to him by Jordan Tant, and by Enid and her mother, concerning this girl, that the old freedom between them, so far at least as he was concerned, seemed a thing of the past. Even when that summer evening arrived when, leaning over the wall, he saw her seated in her garden, and called to her, it was with a new constraint.
"I've come back, you see," he said.
She was genuinely very glad to see him; he found himself wondering if the eyes of Enid could by any chance ever light up at his coming as did the eyes of this child. Things were different in Arcadia Street, he knew; almost he wished that they were not – almost he wished that this happy familiarity might obtain in other places with which he was more naturally in touch.
"I thought – thought you were not coming back," said the girl. "And yet I hoped – "
"Hoped