Widdershins Part 27

"Literally."

"You mean to say that you haven't outgrown _that_?"

"I hope not."

Romarin had thrown up his handsome head. "Well, well!" he murmured incredulously.

"Why 'well, well'?" Marsden demanded.... "But, of course, you never did and never will know what I meant."

"By Romance? ... No, I can't say that I did; but as I conceived it, it was something that began in appet.i.te and ended in diabetes."

"Not philosophic, eh?" Marsden inquired, picking up a chicken bone.

"Highly unphilosophic," said Romarin, shaking his head.

"Hm!" grunted Marsden, stripping the bone... "Well, I grant it pays in a different way."

"It does pay, then?" Romarin asked.

"Oh yes, it pays."

The restaurant had filled up. It was one frequented by young artists, musicians, journalists and the clingers to the rather frayed fringes of the Arts. From time to time heads were turned to look at Romarin's portly and handsome figure, which the Press, the Regent Street photographic establishments, and the Academy Supplements had made well known. The plump young Frenchwoman within the glazed cash office near the door, at whom Marsden had several times glanced in a way at which Romarin had frowned, was aware of the honour done the restaurant; and several times the blond-bearded proprietor had advanced and inquired with concern whether the dinner and the service was to the liking of M'sieu.

And the eyes that were turned to Romarin plainly wondered who the scallawag dining with him might be.

Since Romarin had chosen that their conversation should be of the old days, and without picking and choosing, Marsden was quite willing that it should be so. Again he was casting the bullets of bread into his mouth, and again Romarin was conscious of irritation. Marsden, too, noticed it; but in awaiting the _roti_ he still continued to roll and bolt the pellets, was.h.i.+ng them down with gulps of whiskey and soda.

"Oh yes, it paid," he resumed. "Not in that way, of course--" he indicated the head, quickly turned away again, of an aureoled youngster with a large bunch of black satin tie, "--not in admiration of that sort, but in other ways--"

"Tell me about it."

"Certainly, if you want it. But you're my host. Won't you let me hear your side of it all first?"

"But I thought you said you knew that--had followed my career?"

"So I have. It's not your list of honours and degrees; let me see, what are you? R.A., D.C.L., Doctor of Literature, whatever that means, and Professor of this, that, and the other, and not at the end of it yet. I know all that. I don't say you haven't earned it; I admire your painting; but it's not that. I want to know what it _feels_ like to be up there where you are."

It was a childish question, and Romarin felt foolish in trying to answer it. Such things were the things the adoring aureoled youngster a table or two away would have liked to ask. Romarin recognised in Marsden the old craving for sensation; it was part of the theoretical creed Marsden had made for himself, of doing things, not for their own sakes, but in order that he might have done them. Of course, it had appeared to a fellow like that, that Romarin himself had always had a calculated end in view; he had not; Marsden merely measured Romarin's peck out of his own bushel. It had been Marsden who, in self-consciously seeking his own life, had lost it, and Romarin was more than a little inclined to suspect that the vehemence with which he protested that he had not lost it was precisely the measure of the loss.

But he essayed it--essayed to give Marsden a _resume_ of his career. He told him of the stroke of sheer luck that had been the foundation of it all, the falling ill of another painter who had turned over certain commissions to him. He told him of his poor but happy marriage, and of the windfall, not large, but timely, that had come to his wife. He told him of fortunate acquaintances.h.i.+ps happily cultivated, of his first important commission, of the fresco that had procured for him his a.s.sociates.h.i.+p, of his sale to the Chantrey, and of his quietly remunerative Visitors.h.i.+ps and his work on Boards and Committees.

And as he talked, Marsden drew his empty gla.s.s to him, moistened his finger with a little spilt liquid, and began to run the finger round the rim of the gla.s.s. They had done that formerly, a whole roomful of them, producing, when each had found the note of his instrument, a high, thin, intolerable singing. To this singing Romarin strove to tell his tale.

But that thin and bat-like note silenced him. He ended lamely, with some empty generalisation on success.

"Ah, but success in what?" Marsden demanded, interrupting his playing on the gla.s.s for a moment.

"In your aim, whatever it may be."

"Ah!" said Marsden, resuming his performance.

Romarin had sought in his recital to minimise differences in circ.u.mstances; but Marsden seemed bent on aggravating them. He had the miserable advantage of the man who has nothing to lose. And bit by bit, Romarin had begun to realise that he was going considerably more than halfway to meet this old enemy of his, and that amity seemed as far on as ever. In his heart he began to feel the foreknowledge that their meeting could have no conclusion. He hated the man, the look of his face and the sound of his voice, as much as ever.

The proprietor approached with profoundest apology in his att.i.tude.

M'sieu would pardon him, but the noise of the gla.s.s ... it was annoying ... another M'sieu had made complaint....

"Eh?..." cried Marsden. "Oh, that! Certainly! It can be put to a much better purpose."

He refilled the gla.s.s.

The liquor had begun to tell on him. A quarter of the quant.i.ty would have made a clean-living man incapably drunk, but it had only made Marsden's eyes bright. He gave a sarcastic laugh.

"And is that all?" he asked.

Romarin replied shortly that that was all.

"You've missed out the R.A., and the D.C.L."

"Then let me add that I'm a Doctor of Civil Law and a full Member of the Royal Academy," said Romarin, almost at the end of his patience. "And now, since you don't think much of it, may I hear your own account?"

"Oh, by all means. I don't know, however, that--" he broke off to throw a glance at a woman who had just entered the restaurant--a divesting glance that caused Romarin to redden to his crown and drop his eyes. "I was going to say that you may think as little of my history as I do of yours.

Supple woman that; when the rather scraggy blonde does take it into her head to be a devil she's the worst kind there is...."

Without apology Romarin looked at his watch.

"All right," said Marsden, smiling, "for what _I've_ got out of life, then. But I warn you, it's entirely discreditable."

Romarin did not doubt it.

"But it's mine, and I boast of it. I've done--barring receiving honours and degrees--everything--everything! If there's anything I haven't done, tell me and lend me a sovereign, and I'll go and do it."

"You haven't told the story."

"That's so. Here goes then ... Well, you know, unless you've forgotten, how I began...."

Fruit and nutsh.e.l.ls and nutcrackers lay on the table between them, and at the end of it, s.h.i.+elded from draughts by the menu cards, the coffee apparatus simmered over its elusive blue flame. Romarin was taking the rind from a pear with a table-knife, and Marsden had declined port in favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy. Every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other.

Marsden was already well into his tale...

The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romarin. It was as he had said--there was nothing he had not done and did not exult in with a sickening exultation. It had, indeed, ended in diabetes. In the pitiful hunting down of sensation to the last inch he had been fiendishly ingenious and utterly unimaginative. His unholy curiosity had spared nothing, his unnatural appet.i.te had known no truth. It was grinning sin.

The details of it simply cannot be told....

And his vanity in it all was prodigious. Romarin was pale as he listened.

What! In order that _this_ malignant growth in Society's breast should be able to say "I know," had sanct.i.ties been profaned, sweet conventions a.s.sailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bright and of the day been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night had called--yes, stilled called--by the gentle name of Romance? Yes, so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but manhood and womanhood and the clean inst.i.tutions by which alone the creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame. And what was he to look at when it was all done?...

"Romance--Beauty--the Beauty of things as they are!" he croaked.

If faces in the restaurant were now turned to Romarin, it was the horror on Romarin's own face that drew them. He drew out his handkerchief and mopped his brow.