The Moon and Sixpence
beginning to doubt it.”
Strickland gave the polite little laugh with which people acknowledge a
facetiousness in which they see nothing funny, but did not speak. New
arrivals claimed my host’s attention, and I was left to myself. When at
last we were all assembled, waiting for dinner to be announced, I
reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to “take
in,” that civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on
tedious exercises the brief span of his life. It was the kind of party
which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests,
and why the guests have troubled to come. There were ten people. They
met with indifference, and would part with relief. It was, of course, a
purely social function. The Stricklands “owed” dinners to a number of
persons, whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them; these
persons had accepted. Why? To avoid the tedium of dining _tête-à-tête_,
to give their servants a rest, because there was no reason to refuse,
because they were “owed” a dinner.
The dining-room was inconveniently crowded. There was a K.C. and his
wife, a Government official and his wife, Mrs. Strickland’s sister and
her husband, Colonel MacAndrew, and the wife of a Member of Parliament.
It was because the Member of Parliament found that he could not leave
the House that I had been invited. The respectability of the party was
portentous. The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of
their position to be amusing. The men were solid. There was about all
of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.
Everyone talked a little louder than natural in an instinctive desire
to make the party go, and there was a great deal of noise in the room.
But there was no general conversation. Each one talked to his
neighbour; to his neighbour on the right during the soup, fish, and
entree; to his neighbour on the left during the roast, sweet, and
savoury. They talked of the political situation and of golf, of their
children and the latest play, of the pictures at the Royal Academy, of
the weather and their plans for the holidays. There was never a pause,
and the noise grew louder. Mrs. Strickland might congratulate herself
that her party was a success. Her husband played his part with decorum.
Perhaps he did not talk very much, and I fancied there was towards the
end a look of fatigue in the faces of the women on either side of him.
They were finding him heavy. Once or twice Mrs. Strickland’s eyes
rested on him somewhat anxiously.
At last she rose and shepherded the ladies out of one room. Strickland
shut the door behind her, and, moving to the other end of the table,
took his place between the K.C. and the Government official. He passed
round the port again and handed us cigars. The K.C. remarked on the
excellence of the wine, and Strickland told us where he got it. We
began to chat about vintages and tobacco. The K.C. told us of a case he
was engaged in, and the Colonel talked about polo. I had nothing to say
and so sat silent, trying politely to show interest in the
conversation; and because I thought no one was in the least concerned
with me, examined Strickland at my ease. He was bigger than I expected:
I do not know why I had imagined him slender and of insignificant
appearance; in point of fact he was broad and heavy, with large hands
and feet, and he wore his evening clothes clumsily. He gave you
somewhat the idea of a coachman dressed up for the occasion. He was a
man of forty, not good-looking, and yet not ugly, for his features were
rather good; but they were all a little larger than life-size, and the
effect was ungainly. He was clean shaven, and his large face looked
uncomfortably naked. His hair was reddish, cut very short, and his eyes
were small, blue or grey. He looked commonplace. I no longer wondered
that Mrs. Strickland felt a certain embarrassment about him; he was
scarcely a credit to a woman who wanted to make herself a position in
the world of art and letters. It was obvious that he had no social
gifts, but these a man can do without; he had no eccentricity even, to
take him out of the common run; he was just a good, dull, honest, plain
man. One would admire his excellent qualities, but avoid his company.
He was null. He was probably a worthy member of society, a good husband
and father, an honest broker; but there was no reason to waste one’s
time over him.
Chapter VII
The season was drawing to its dusty end, and everyone I knew was
arranging to go away. Mrs. Strickland was taking her family to the
coast of Norfolk, so that the children might have the sea and her
husband golf. We said good-bye to one another, and arranged to meet in
the autumn. But on my last day in town, coming out of the Stores, I met
her with her son and daughter; like myself, she had been making her
final purchases before leaving London, and we were both hot and tired.
I proposed that we should all go and eat ices in the park.
I think Mrs. Strickland was glad to show me her children, and she
accepted my invitation with alacrity. They were even more attractive
than their photographs had suggested, and she was right to be proud of
them. I was young enough for them not to feel shy, and they chattered
merrily about one thing and another. They were extraordinarily nice,
healthy young children. It was very agreeable under the trees.
When in an hour they crowded into a cab to go home, I strolled idly to
my club. I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was with a touch of envy
that I thought of the pleasant family life of which I had had a
glimpse. They seemed devoted to one another. They had little private
jokes of their own which, unintelligible to the outsider, amused them
enormously. Perhaps Charles Strickland was dull judged by a standard
that demanded above all things verbal scintillation; but his
intelligence was adequate to his surroundings, and that is a passport,
not only to reasonable success, but still more to happiness. Mrs.
Strickland was a charming woman, and she loved him. I pictured their
lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by
reason of those two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously
destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station,
not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would
see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due
course—the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the
other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last,
prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants,
after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they
would sink into the grave.
That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life
it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet,
meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant
trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so
calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a
vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in
me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of
the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values, I
saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder
course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In
my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared
for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have
change—change and the excitement of the unforeseen.
Chapter VIII
On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am conscious
that they must seem shadowy. I have been able to invest them with none
of those characteristics which make the persons of a book exist with a
real life of their own; and, wondering if the fault is mine, I rack my
brains to remember idiosyncrasies which might lend them vividness. I
feel that by dwelling on some trick of speech or some queer habit I
should be able to give them a significance peculiar to themselves. As
they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry; they do not
separate themselves from the background, and at a distance seem to lose
their pattern, so that you have little but a pleasing piece of colour.
My only excuse is that the impression they made on me was no other.
There was just that shadowiness about them which you find in people
whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it
and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so
long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole. The
Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant,
hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary
society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in
which a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking, healthy
children. Nothing could be more ordinary. I do not know that there was
anything about them to excite the attention of the curious.
When I reflect on all that happened later, I ask myself if I was
thick-witted not to see that there was in Charles Strickland at least
something out of the common. Perhaps. I think that I have gathered in
the years that intervene between then and now a fair knowledge of
mankind, but even if when I first met the Stricklands I had the
experience which I have now, I do not believe that I should have judged
them differently. But because I have learnt that man is incalculable, I
should not at this time of day be so surprised by the news that reached
me when in the early autumn I returned to London.
I had not been back twenty-four hours before I ran across Rose
Waterford in Jermyn Street.
“You look very gay and sprightly,” I said. “What’s the matter with
you?”
She smiled, and her eyes shone with a malice I knew already. It meant
that she had heard some scandal about one of her friends, and the
instinct of the literary woman was all alert.
“You did meet Charles Strickland, didn’t you?”
Not only her face, but her whole body, gave a sense of alacrity. I
nodded. I wondered if the poor devil had been hammered on the Stock
Exchange or run over by an omnibus.
“Isn’t it dreadful? He’s run away from his wife.”
Miss Waterford certainly felt that she could not do her subject justice
on the curb of Jermyn Street, and so, like an artist, flung the bare
fact at me and declared that she knew no details. I could not do her
the injustice of supposing that so trifling a circumstance would have
prevented her from giving them, but she was obstinate.
“I tell you I know nothing,” she said, in reply to my agitated
questions, and then, with an airy shrug of the shoulders: “I believe
that a young person in a city tea-shop has left her situation.”
She flashed a smile at me, and, protesting an engagement with her
dentist, jauntily walked on. I was more interested than distressed. In
those days my experience of life at first hand was small, and it
excited me to come upon an incident among people I knew of the same
sort as I had read in books. I confess that time has now accustomed me
to incidents of this character among my acquaintance. But I was a
little shocked. Strickland was certainly forty, and I thought it
disgusting that a man of his age should concern himself with affairs of
the heart. With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put
thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love
without making a fool of himself. And this news was slightly
disconcerting to me personally, because I had written from the country
to Mrs. Strickland, announcing my return, and had added that unless I
heard from her to the contrary, I would come on a certain day to drink