Tales of Space and Time
threw Elizabeth's budding womanhood in his way. It was one of Bindon's
most cherished secrets that he had a considerable capacity for a pure
and simple life of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted a
sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive and quite inconsequent and
unmeaning excesses, which he was pleased to regard as dashing
wickedness, and which a number of good people also were so unwise as to
treat in that desirable manner. As a consequence of these excesses, and
perhaps by reason also of an inherited tendency to early decay, his
liver became seriously affected, and he suffered increasing
inconvenience when travelling by aeroplane. It was during his
convalescence from a protracted bilious attack that it occurred to him
that in spite of all the terrible fascinations of Vice, if he found a
beautiful, gentle, good young woman of a not too violently intellectual
type to devote her life to him, he might yet be saved to Goodness, and
even rear a spirited family in his likeness to solace his declining
years. But like so many experienced men of the world, he doubted if
there were any good women. Of such as he had heard tell he was outwardly
sceptical and privately much afraid.
When the aspiring Mwres effected his introduction to Elizabeth, it
seemed to him that his good fortune was complete. He fell in love with
her at once. Of course, he had always been falling in love since he was
sixteen, in accordance with the extremely varied recipes to be found in
the accumulated literature of many centuries. But this was different.
This was real love. It seemed to him to call forth all the lurking
goodness in his nature. He felt that for her sake he could give up a way
of life that had already produced the gravest lesions on his liver and
nervous system. His imagination presented him with idyllic pictures of
the life of the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental with her,
or silly; but always a little cynical and bitter, as became the past.
Yet he was sure she would have an intuition of his real greatness and
goodness. And in due course he would confess things to her, pour his
version of what he regarded as his wickedness--showing what a complex of
Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini, and Shelley, and all those other chaps he
really was--into her shocked, very beautiful, and no doubt sympathetic
ear. And preparatory to these things he wooed her with infinite subtlety
and respect. And the reserve with which Elizabeth treated him seemed
nothing more nor less than an exquisite modesty touched and enhanced by
an equally exquisite lack of ideas.
Bindon knew nothing of her wandering affections, nor of the attempt made
by Mwres to utilise hypnotism as a corrective to this digression of her
heart; he conceived he was on the best of terms with Elizabeth, and had
made her quite successfully various significant presents of jewellery
and the more virtuous cosmetics, when her elopement with Denton threw
the world out of gear for him. His first aspect of the matter was rage
begotten of wounded vanity, and as Mwres was the most convenient person,
he vented the first brunt of it upon him.
He went immediately and insulted the desolate father grossly, and then
spent an active and determined day going to and fro about the city and
interviewing people in a consistent and partly-successful attempt to
ruin that matrimonial speculator. The effectual nature of these
activities gave him a temporary exhilaration, and he went to the
dining-place he had frequented in his wicked days in a devil-may-care
frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply and cheerfully with two
other golden youths in their early forties. He threw up the game; no
woman was worth being good for, and he astonished even himself by the
strain of witty cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate
blades, warmed with wine, made a facetious allusion to his
disappointment, but at the time this did not seem unpleasant.
The next morning found his liver and temper inflamed. He kicked his
phonographic-news machine to pieces, dismissed his valet, and resolved
that he would perpetrate a terrible revenge upon Elizabeth. Or Denton.
Or somebody. But anyhow, it was to be a terrible revenge; and the friend
who had made fun at him should no longer see him in the light of a
foolish girl's victim. He knew something of the little property that was
due to her, and that this would be the only support of the young couple
until Mwres should relent. If Mwres did not relent, and if unpropitious
things should happen to the affair in which Elizabeth's expectations
lay, they would come upon evil times and be sufficiently amenable to
temptation of a sinister sort. Bindon's imagination, abandoning its
beautiful idealism altogether, expanded the idea of temptation of a
sinister sort. He figured himself as the implacable, the intricate and
powerful man of wealth pursuing this maiden who had scorned him. And
suddenly her image came upon his mind vivid and dominant, and for the
first time in his life Bindon realised something of the real power of
passion.
His imagination stood aside like a respectful footman who has done his
work in ushering in the emotion.
"My God!" cried Bindon: "I will have her! If I have to kill myself to
get her! And that other fellow--!"
After an interview with his medical man and a penance for his overnight
excesses in the form of bitter drugs, a mitigated but absolutely
resolute Bindon sought out Mwres. Mwres he found properly smashed, and
impoverished and humble, in a mood of frantic self-preservation, ready
to sell himself body and soul, much more any interest in a disobedient
daughter, to recover his lost position in the world. In the reasonable
discussion that followed, it was agreed that these misguided young
people should be left to sink into distress, or possibly even assisted
towards that improving discipline by Bindon's financial influence.
"And then?" said Mwres.
"They will come to the Labour Company," said Bindon. "They will wear the
blue canvas."
"And then?"
"She will divorce him," he said, and sat for a moment intent upon that
prospect. For in those days the austere limitations of divorce of
Victorian times were extraordinarily relaxed, and a couple might
separate on a hundred different scores.
Then suddenly Bindon astonished himself and Mwres by jumping to his
feet. "She _shall_ divorce him!" he cried. "I will have it so--I will
work it so. By God! it shall be so. He shall be disgraced, so that she
must. He shall be smashed and pulverised."
The idea of smashing and pulverising inflamed him further. He began a
Jovian pacing up and down the little office. "I will have her," he
cried. "I _will_ have her! Heaven and Hell shall not save her from me!"
His passion evaporated in its expression, and left him at the end
simply histrionic. He struck an attitude and ignored with heroic
determination a sharp twinge of pain about the diaphragm. And Mwres sat
with his pneumatic cap deflated and himself very visibly impressed.
And so, with a fair persistency, Bindon sat himself to the work of being
Elizabeth's malignant providence, using with ingenious dexterity every
particle of advantage wealth in those days gave a man over his
fellow-creatures. A resort to the consolations of religion hindered
these operations not at all. He would go and talk with an interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father of the Huysmanite sect of the Isis
cult, about all the irrational little proceedings he was pleased to
regard as his heaven-dismaying wickedness, and the interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father representing Heaven dismayed, would
with a pleasing affectation of horror, suggest simple and easy penances,
and recommend a monastic foundation that was airy, cool, hygienic, and
not vulgarised, for viscerally disordered penitent sinners of the
refined and wealthy type. And after these excursions, Bindon would come
back to London quite active and passionate again. He would machinate
with really considerable energy, and repair to a certain gallery high
above the street of moving ways, from which he could view the entrance
to the barrack of the Labour Company in the ward which sheltered Denton
and Elizabeth. And at last one day he saw Elizabeth go in, and thereby
his passion was renewed.
So in the fullness of time the complicated devices of Bindon ripened,
and he could go to Mwres and tell him that the young people were near
despair.
"It's time for you," he said, "to let your parental affections have
play. She's been in blue canvas some months, and they've been cooped
together in one of those Labour dens, and the little girl is dead. She
knows now what his manhood is worth to her, by way of protection, poor
girl. She'll see things now in a clearer light. You go to her--I don't
want to appear in this affair yet--and point out to her how necessary it
is that she should get a divorce from him...."
"She's obstinate," said Mwres doubtfully.
"Spirit!" said Bindon. "She's a wonderful girl--a wonderful girl!"
"She'll refuse."
"Of course she will. But leave it open to her. Leave it open to her. And
some day--in that stuffy den, in that irksome, toilsome life they can't
help it--_they'll have a quarrel_. And then--"
Mwres meditated over the matter, and did as he was told.
Then Bindon, as he had arranged with his spiritual adviser, went into
retreat. The retreat of the Huysmanite sect was a beautiful place, with
the sweetest air in London, lit by natural sunlight, and with restful
quadrangles of real grass open to the sky, where at the same time the
penitent man of pleasure might enjoy all the pleasures of loafing and
all the satisfaction of distinguished austerity. And, save for
participation in the simple and wholesome dietary of the place and in
certain magnificent chants, Bindon spent all his time in meditation upon
the theme of Elizabeth, and the extreme purification his soul had
undergone since he first saw her, and whether he would be able to get a
dispensation to marry her from the experienced and sympathetic Father in
spite of the approaching "sin" of her divorce; and then ... Bindon would
lean against a pillar of the quadrangle and lapse into reveries on the
superiority of virtuous love to any other form of indulgence. A curious
feeling in his back and chest that was trying to attract his attention,
a disposition to be hot or shiver, a general sense of ill-health and
cutaneous discomfort he did his best to ignore. All that of course
belonged to the old life that he was shaking off.
When he came out of retreat he went at once to Mwres to ask for news of
Elizabeth. Mwres was clearly under the impression that he was an
exemplary father, profoundly touched about the heart by his child's
unhappiness. "She was pale," he said, greatly moved; "She was pale. When
I asked her to come away and leave him--and be happy--she put her head
down upon the table"--Mwres sniffed--"and cried."
His agitation was so great that he could say no more.
"Ah!" said Bindon, respecting this manly grief. "Oh!" said Bindon quite
suddenly, with his hand to his side.
Mwres looked up sharply out of the pit of his sorrows, startled. "What's
the matter?" he asked, visibly concerned.
"A most violent pain. Excuse me! You were telling me about Elizabeth."
And Mwres, after a decent solicitude for Bindon's pain, proceeded with
his report. It was even unexpectedly hopeful. Elizabeth, in her first
emotion at discovering that her father had not absolutely deserted her,
had been frank with him about her sorrows and disgusts.
"Yes," said Bindon, magnificently, "I shall have her yet." And then that
novel pain twitched him for the second time.
For these lower pains the priest was comparatively ineffectual,