Читать книгу The Gateless Barrier - Lucas Malet - Страница 9

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The conversation that evening did not move very smoothly. Laurence brought all the good temper and practical philosophy at his command into play. But the elder man was captious. His blank scepticism, his keen, unsparing statements jarred on his companion. An inclination towards revolt arose in Laurence.

"I am half afraid, sir," he permitted himself to say at last, while his eyes rested on the gleaming breasts of the ebony sphinxes—"that we have made a radical mistake and put the cart before the horse. To understand the average man, and his relation to things in general, must not you begin with the study of the average woman? Is not cherchez la femme, after all, the keynote of our inquiry?"

Mr. Rivers raised his thin hand almost as in warning, and the heavy finger-rings chinked as he let it fall again on the arm of his chair.

"The subject of sex in connection with human beings is distasteful to me," he said.

Laurence glanced at the speaker and then back at the carven sphinx again. His eyes were a little merry—he could not help it.

"Oh! no doubt," he said; "there are times when it is distasteful to many of us, and most infernally inconvenient into the bargain. Only you see, unluckily, it is the pivot on which the whole history of the race turns."

"A most objectionable pivot! An insult to the intellect, a degradation."

"That may be so," Laurence answered. "Still the thing is there—always has been, always will be, modern science notwithstanding, unless humanity agrees to voluntary and universal suicide, a consummation which does not seem immediately probable in any case.—'Male and female created He them.' An error perhaps of judgment, but one the Creator has never shown much sign of wishing to correct as yet. The most venerable religious systems recognise this. I need not remind you that it lies at the heart of their mysteries. Christianity too—Catholic Christianity—the only form, that is, of Christianity worth considering seriously—acknowledges the profound significance of it in the worship of the divine motherhood and the perpetually renewed miracle of the Incarnation."

"You interest me," Mr. Rivers said slowly.

"I am glad of that," Laurence answered. He had warmed up unexpectedly to his subject. "I am glad of that, for I can't help seeing—"

Mr. Rivers interrupted him.

"Pardon me," he said. "I would not have you labour even temporarily under a misapprehension. It is less your exposition that interests me than yourself. I note indications of thought and feeling for which I was not wholly prepared. Taking you as a fair example of the type, I perceive that the mind of the average member of society is of an even lower order than I had supposed. I had, in my ignorance, imagined that, even in the class to which you belong, modern, scientific ideas had taken sufficient root to oust such effete superstitions as those to which you have alluded. A more or less stupid Agnosticism, an utter indifference, would not have surprised me. From such a condition development is still possible. But here I recognise traces of a return to fetich worship, to savage standards—this indeed is hopeless, a degeneration from which revival is impossible. I admit, of course, the necessity of the existence of woman, since the perpetuation of the race appears at present desirable. It would be childish to argue the matter. She must be kept and cared for by qualified persons, as are the other higher, domestic animals, but—"

"But, but," Laurence said, laughing, "I must protest. Perhaps his type of mind is too low for yours to be able to stoop to it; but, upon my word, sir, even with so thorough-paced a specimen as myself before you, you have not grasped the characteristics of the average man one bit. I don't say we are conspicuously noble, or virtuous, or godly creatures, and I don't say that the side of our lives which has to do with our ambitions, with public affairs, our profession, or our art—the side, in fact, in which woman counts least—may not give scope to that which is best in us. I have no end of belief in the life a man lives among men. I grant a good deal on your side of the question, you see. Only I know it will be a precious bad day when we keep our women merely for breeding purposes. We shall have degeneration in uncommonly full swing then. There is an immense lot in the relation between man and woman beside the physical one; and—and—I'm not ashamed to thank whatever gods there be for that."

"Your wife—" began Mr. Rivers. Laurence looked hard at him, while the good temper, the geniality, died out of his face.

"My wife does not enter into our contract, sir," he said shortly.

The coldly brilliant eyes fastened on him with a certain voracity of observation. Then the elder man bowed slightly, courteously, contemptuously.

"You interest me extremely," he said. "I am obliged to you. But I must not presume upon your complaisance. You have supplied me with sufficient subjects of meditation for to-night. I will not detain you further. I thank you, my dear Laurence. Good-night."

"I was a fool to let myself go, and a still bigger one to lose my temper," the young man said to himself as he closed the door and passed out on to the corridor.

Save for a ticking of clocks, silence prevailed throughout the house. The electric light, clear and steady, revealed every object in its completeness. The temperature was some degrees higher than during the day, and airless in proportion to its increased warmth. Half-way down the shining oak staircase, Laurence was saluted by the musky odour of the orchids. Clinging, enfolding, it seemed to meet him more as a presence than a scent. The dining-room door stood wide open. The under-butler came forth and went noiselessly towards the offices. There followed a muffled sound of baize doors swinging to. Then simultaneously, sharply, from all quarters, clocks struck the half hour.

"Only half-past ten!" Laurence exclaimed. "How villainously early! I wish to goodness I had not lost my temper though. It was slightly imbecile. If the poor, old gentleman enjoys being offensive, why shouldn't he be so? He has none too many opportunities of amusement."

He paused, looking down the bright, vacant, silent corridor, past the open doors of all the bright, vacant, silent rooms.

"If it comes to that, nor have I," he added, "when I come to think of it. There's a notable paucity of excitement in this existence, and this beastly hot air makes one too muzzy to read." He yawned.—"What a mercy Virginia didn't come! She would have been most extensively and articulately bored."

He sauntered aimlessly along the passage, past the fine, copper-plate engravings, and the impassive, Roman emperors, and drew up before the great, tapestry curtain. Again he looked curiously at the figures worked so skilfully upon it. The light took the silken surface, bringing the warm flesh-tints into high relief, against the dim, grey-green background of shadowy hill and grove.

"No wonder my uncle blasphemes if that represents his only idea of the relation of the sexes."

He sighed involuntarily.

"Yes, but, thank God, there is more in it all than merely that," he said. Then he repeated:—"It is a mercy Virginia did not come. It would not have suited her from any point of view. She'd have been hideously bored, and she would have been offended and a good deal shocked. It is queer the way the Puritanic element survives over there, notwithstanding their modernity."

Laurence smiled to himself, becoming aware of the slight inconsistency of his own attitude—his late heated championship of the claims of the Eternal Feminine, his self-congratulation at the fact that his own particular investment in the matter of womanhood was, at present, safely away on the other side of the Atlantic.

Then, taken by a sudden impulse—born in part of a desire of escape from the suffocating atmosphere around him—he pulled the edge of the heavy curtain outwards, passed round it, letting it drop into place behind him. He stood a moment in a contracted, blind space. The place seemed possessed of singular influences. Again he grew faint as he groped for the door handle; while a conviction grew upon him that he had stood just here, and so groped an innumerable number of times already, and that he should so stand and grope—either in fact or in imagination, just as long, indeed, as consciousness remained to him—an innumerable number of times again.

At last the handle was found and yielded. Breathing rather quickly, Laurence entered the lofty, fair-coloured room. It too was bright with electric light, but the air of it was sensibly purer than that of the corridor; while, standing before the painted satin-wood escritoire, at the further side of the fireplace, was a slender woman. Her back was towards him. She wore a high-waisted, clinging, rose-pink, silken gown. Her dark hair was gathered up in soft, yet elaborate, bows and curls high on her small head, after the fashion prevalent in the early years of the century. A cape of transparent muslin and lace veiled her bare shoulders.