IV

SO tall that he looked over most men’s heads, so strong that his movements must be for ever circumscribed and timid, Dudley Leicester had never in his life done anything—he had not even been in the Guards. Least of all did he ever realize personal attitudes in those around him. The minute jealousies, the very deep hatreds, and the strong passions that swelled in his particular world of deep idleness, of high feeling, and of want of occupation—in this world where, since no man had any need of anything to do, there were so many things to feel—Dudley Leicester perceived absolutely nothing, no complexities, no mixed relationships. To him a man was a man, a woman a woman; the leader in a newspaper was a series of convincing facts, of satisfying views, and of final ideals. Belonging as he did to the governing classes, Dudley Leicester had not even the one outlet for passion that is open to these highly groomed and stall-fed creatures. The tradition of the public service was in his blood. He owned a slice of his kingdom that was more than microscopic on the map. But though he had come into his great possessions at the age of twenty-seven, he made no effort whatever to put things straight, since he had more than enough to satisfy his simple needs,—to provide him with a glass bath and silver taps, to pay his subscription at his club, to give him his three cigars a day, his box at a music-hall once a week, his month on the Riviera—and to leave him a thousand or two over every year, which was the fact most worrying to his existence.

It was Robert Grimshaw who set his estates in order; who found him a young, hard steward with modern methods; who saw to it that he built additions to several Church schools, and who directed the steward to cut down the rent on overburdened farms, to raise other rents, to provide allotments, to plant heavy land with trees, and to let the shootings to real advantage. It was, indeed, Robert Grimshaw who raised Dudley Leicester’s income to figures that in other circumstances Leicester would have found intolerable. But, on the other hand, it was Robert Grimshaw who put all the surplus back into the estates, who had all the gates rehung, all the hedges replanted, all the roofs of the barns ripped and retiled, and all the cottages rebuilt. And it was Robert Grimshaw who provided him with his Pauline.

So that at thirty-two, with a wife whom already people regarded as likely to be the making of him, a model landlord, perfectly sure of a seat in the House, without a characteristic of any kind or an enemy in the world, there, gentle and exquisitely groomed, Dudley Leicester was a morning or so after his return to town. Standing in front of his mantelshelf in a not too large dining-room of Curzon Street, he surveyed his breakfast-table with an air of immense indifference, of immense solitude, and of immense want of occupation. His shoulder-blades rubbed the glass front of the clock, his hand from time to time lightly pulled his moustache, his face was empty, but with an emptiness of depression. He had nothing in the world to do. Nothing whatever!

So that turning round to take a note from the frame of the mirror behind him was with him positively an action of immense importance. He hadn’t a visit to pay to his tailor; there wouldn’t be at his club or in the Park anyone that he wanted to be talked to by. The one bright spot in his day was the P—— exercise that he would take just before lunch in his bath-room before the open window. This interested him. This really engrossed him. It engrossed him because of his docility, his instructor having told him that, unless he paid an exact attention to each motion of his hands and wrists the exercises would cause him no benefit whatever. He longed immensely for physical benefit, for he suffered from constant panics and ideas of ill-health. He remembered that he had an aunt who had been a consumptive; therefore he dreaded tuberculosis. He had read in some paper that the constant string of vehicles passing us in the streets of London so acted on the optic nerves that general paralysis was often induced. Therefore sometimes he walked along the streets with his eyes shut; he instructed his chauffeur to drive him from place to place only by way of back streets and secluded squares, and he abandoned the habit of standing in the window of his club, which overlooked Piccadilly. Because Pauline, by diverting his thoughts, diverted also these melancholy forebodings, he imagined that marriage had done him a great deal of good. The letter that he took from the mantelshelf contained an invitation from the Phyllis Trevors to dine that night at the Equator Club, and to go afterwards to the Esmeralda, the front row of whose stalls Phyllis Trevors had engaged. That matter was one for deep and earnest consideration, since Dudley Leicester had passed his last three evenings at the place of entertainment in question, and was beginning to feel himself surfeited with its particular attractions. Moreover, the Phyllis Trevors informed him that Etta Stackpole—now Lady Hudson—was to be one of the party. But, on the other hand, if he didn’t go to the Phyllis Trevors, where in the world was he to spend his evening?

Promptly upon his return to town, he had despatched letters to the various more stately houses where he and Pauline were to have dined—letters excusing himself and his wife on account of the extreme indisposition of his wife’s mother. He dreaded, in fact, to go to a dinner alone; he was always afraid of being taken ill between the soup and the fish; he suffered from an unutterable shyness; he was intolerably afraid of “making an ass of himself.” He felt safe, however, as long as Pauline had her eyes on him. But the Phyllis Trevors’ dinners were much more like what he called “a rag.” If he felt an uncontrollable impulse to do something absurd—to balance, for instance, a full glass on the top of his head or to flip drops of wine at his neighbour’s bare shoulders—nobody would be seriously perturbed. It was not necessary to do either of these things, but you might if you wanted to; and all the Phyllis Trevors’ women could be trusted either to put up the conversation for you, or—which was quite as good—to flirt prodigiously with their neighbours on the other side. The turning-point of his deliberations, which lasted exactly three-quarters of an hour, the actual impulse which sent him out of the room to the telephone in the hall, came from the remembrance that Pauline had made him promise not to be an irrational idiot.

He had promised to go out to some dinners, and it was only dinners of the Phyllis Trevors’ sort that he could bring himself to face. So that, having telephoned his acceptance to Mrs. Trevor, who called him the Great Chief Long-in-the-fork, and wanted to know why his voice sounded like an undertaker’s mute, a comparative tranquillity reigned in Dudley Leicester’s soul. This tranquillity was only ended when at the dinner-table he had at his side red-lipped, deep-voiced, black-haired, large, warm, scented, and utterly uncontrollable Etta Stackpole. She had three dark red roses in her hair.