Produced by David Widger






THE FOLLY OF EUSTACE.

By R. S. Hichens

1896




I.

Some men deliberately don a character in early youth as others don a
mask before going to an opera ball. They select it not without some
care, being guided in their choice by the opinion they have formed
of the world’s mind and manner of proceeding. In the privacy of the
dressing-room, the candles being lighted and the mirror adjusted at the
best angle for a view of self, they assume their character, and peacock
to their reflection, meditating: Does it become me? Will it be generally
liked? Will it advance me towards my heart’s desire? Then they catch up
their cloak, twist the mirror back to its usual position, puff out the
candles, and steal forth into their career, shutting the door gently
behind them. And, perhaps till they are laid out in the grave, the
last four walls enclosing them, only the dressing-room could tell their
secret. And it has no voice to speak. For, if they are wise, they do not
keep a valet.

At the age of sixteen Eustace Lane chose his mask, lit the candles,
tried it on, and resolved to wear it at the great masquerade. He was
an Eton boy at the time. One fourth of June he was out in the
playing-fields, paying polite attentions to another fellow’s sister,
when he overheard a fragment of a conversation that was taking place
between his mother and one of the masters. His mother was a kind
Englishwoman, who was very short-sighted, and always did her duty.
The master was a fool, but as he was tall, handsome, and extremely
good-natured, Eustace Lane and most people considered him to be highly
intelligent. Eustace caught the sound of his name pronounced. The fond
mother, in the course of discreet conversation, had proceeded from the
state of the weather to the state of her boy’s soul, taking, with
the ease of the mediocre, the one step between the sublime and the
ridiculous. She had told the master the state of the weather--which, for
once, was sublime; she wanted him, in return, to tell her the state of
her boy’s soul--which was ridiculous.

Eustace forgot the other fellow’s sister, her limpid eyes, her
open-worked stockings, her panoply of chiffons and of charms. He
had heard his own name. Bang went the door on the rest of the world,
shutting out even feminine humanity. Self-consciousness held him
listening. His mother said:

“Dear Eustace! What do you think of him, Mr. Bembridge? Is he _really_
clever? His father and I consider him unusually intelligent for his
age--so advanced in mind. He judges for himself, you know. He always
did, even as a baby. I remember when he was quite a tiny mite I could
always trust to his perceptions. In my choice of nurses I was invariably
guided by him. If he screamed at them I felt that there was something
wrong, and dismissed them--of course with a character. If he smiled at
them, I knew I could have confidence in their virtue. How strange these
things are! What is it in us that screams at evil and smiles at good?”

“Ah! what, indeed?” replied the master, accepting her conclusion as an
established and very beautiful fact. “There is more in the human heart
than you and I can fathom, Mrs. Lane.”

“Yes, indeed! But tell me about Eustace. You have observed him?”

“Carefully. He is a strange boy.”

“Strange?”

“Whimsical, I mean. How clever he may be I am unable to say. He is so
young, and, of course, undeveloped. But he is an original. Even if he
never displays great talents the world will talk about him.”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Lane in some alarm.

To be talked about was, she considered, to be the prey of
scandalmongers. She did not wish to give her darling to the lions.

“I mean that Eustace has a strain of quaint fun in him--a sort of
passion for the burlesque of life. You do not often find this in boys.
It is new to my experience. He sees the peculiar side of everything with
a curious acuteness. Life presents itself to him in caricature. I------
Well hit! Well hit indeed!”

Someone had scored a four.

The other fellow’s sister insisted on moving to a place whence they
could see the cricket better, and Eustace had to yield to her. But from
that moment he took no more interest in her artless remarks and her
artful open-worked stockings. In the combat between self and her she
went to the wall. He stood up before the mirror looking steadfastly at
his own image.

And, finding it not quite so interestingly curious as the fool of a
master had declared it to be, he lit some more candies, selected a mask,
and put it on.

He chose the mask of a buffoon.

*****

From that day Eustace strove consistently to live up to the reputation
given to him by a fool, who had been talking at random to please an avid
mother. Mr. Bembridge knew that the boy was no good at work, wanted
to say something nice about him, and had once noticed him playing
some absurd but very ordinary boyish prank. On this supposed hint of
character the master spoke. Mrs. Lane listened. Eustace acted. A sudden
ambition stirred within him. To be known, talked about, considered,
perhaps even wondered at--was not that a glory? Such a glory came to the
greatly talented--to the mightily industrious. Men earned it by labour,
by intensity, insensibility to fatigue, the “roughing it” of the mind.
He did not want to rough it. Nor was he greatly talented. But he was
just sharp enough to see, as he believed, a short and perhaps easy way
to a thing that his conceit desired and that his egoism felt it could
love. Being only a boy, he had never, till this time, deliberately
looked on life as anything. Now he set himself, in his, at first,
youthful way, to look on it as burlesque--to see it in caricature.
How to do that? He studied the cartoons in _Vanity Fair_, the wondrous
noses, the astounding trousers, that delight the cynical world. Were men
indeed like these? Did they assume such postures, stare with such eyes,
revel in such complexions? These were the celebrities of the time.
They all looked with one accord preposterous. Eustace jumped to the
conclusion that they were what they looked, and, going a step farther,
that they were celebrated because they were preposterous. Gifted with
a certain amount of imagination, this idea of the interest, almost the
beauty of the preposterous, took a firm hold of his mind. One day he,
too, would be in _Vanity Fair_, displaying terrific boots, amazing thin
legs, a fatuous or a frenetic countenance to the great world of the
unknown. He would stand out from the multitude if only by virtue of an
unusual eyeglass, a particular glove, the fashion of his tie or of his
temper. He would balance on the ball of peculiarity, and toe his way
up the spiral of fame, while the music-hall audience applauded and the
managers consulted as to the increase of his salary. Mr. Bembridge had
shown him a weapon with which he might fight his way quickly to the
front. He picked it up and resolved to use it. Soon he began to slash
out right and left. His blade chanced to encounter the outraged body of
an elderly and sardonic master. Eustace was advised that he had better
leave Eton. His father came down by train and took him away.

As they journeyed up to town, Mr. Lane lectured and exhorted, and
Eustace looked out of the window. Already he felt himself near to being
a celebrity. He had astonished Eton. That was a good beginning. Papa
might prose, knowing, of course, nothing of the poetry of caricature,
of the wild joys and the laurels that crown the whimsical. So while Mr.
Lane hunted adjectives, and ran sad-sounding and damnatory substantives
to earth, Eustace hugged himself, and secretly chuckled over his
pilgrim’s progress towards the pages of _Vanity Fair_.

“Eustace! Eustace! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, father.”

“Then what have you to say? What explanation have you to offer for your
conduct? You have behaved like a buffoon, sir--d’you hear me?--like a
buffoon!”

“Yes, father.”

“What the deuce do you mean by ‘yes,’ sir?”

Eustace considered, while Mr. Lane puffed in the approved paternal
fashion What did he mean? A sudden thought struck him. He became
confidential. With an earnest gaze, he said:

“I couldn’t help doing what I did. I want to be like the other fellows,
but somehow I can’t. Something inside of me won’t let me just go on as
they do. I don’t know why it is, but I feel as if I must do original
things--things other people never do; it--it seems in me.”

Mr. Lane regarded him suspiciously, but Eustace had clear eyes, and
knew, at least, how to look innocent.

“We shall have to knock it out of you,” blustered the father.

“I wish you could, father,” the boy said. “I know I hate it.”

Mr. Lane began to be really puzzled. There was something pathetic in the
words, and especially in the way they were spoken. He stared at Eustace
meditatively.

“So you hate it, do you?” he said rather limply at last. “Well, that’s a
step in the right direction, at any rate. Perhaps things might have been
worse.”

Eustace did not assent.

“They were bad enough,” he said, with a simulation of shame. “I know
I’ve been a fool.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Lane said, whirling, as paternal weathercocks will,
to another point of the compass, “never mind, my boy. Cheer up! You see
your fault--that’s the main thing. What’s done can’t be undone.”

“No, thank heaven!” thought the boy, feeling almost great.

How delicious is the irrevocable past--sometimes!

“Be more careful in future. Don’t let your boyish desire for follies
carry you away.”

“I shall,” was his son’s mental rejoinder.

“And I dare say you’ll do good work in the world yet.”

The train ran into Paddington Station on this sublime climax of
fatherhood, and the further words of wisdom were jerked out of Mr. Lane
during their passage to Carlton House Terrace in a four-wheeled cab.

*****

“What an extraordinary person Mr. Eustace Lane is!” said Winifred Ames
to her particular friend and happy foil, Jane Fraser. “All London is
beginning to talk about him. I suppose he must be clever?”

“Oh, of course, darling, very clever; otherwise, how could he possibly
gain so much notice? Just think--why, there are millions of people in
London, and I’m sure only about a thousand of them, at most, attract any
real attention. I think Mr. Eustace Lane is a genius.”

“Do you really, Jenny?”

“I do indeed.”

Winifred mused for a moment. Then she said:

“It must be very interesting to marry a genius, I suppose?”

“Oh, enthralling, simply. And, then, so few people can do it.”

“Yes.”

“And it must be grand to do what hardly anybody can do.”

“In the way of marrying, Jenny?”

“In any way,” responded Miss Fraser, who was an enthusiast, and
habitually sentimental. “What would I give to do even one unique thing,
or to marry even one unique person!”

“You couldn’t marry two at the same time--in England.”

“England limits itself so terribly; but there is a broader time coming.
Those who see it, and act upon what they see, are pioneers; Mr. Lane is
a pioneer.”

“But don’t you think him rather extravagant?”

“Oh yes. That is so splendid. I love the extravagance of genius, the
barbaric lavishness of moral and intellectual supremacy.”

“I wonder whether the supremacy of Eustace Lane is moral, or
intellectual, or--neither?” said Winifred. “There are so many different
supremacies, aren’t there? I suppose a man might be supreme merely as
a--as a--well, an absurdity, you know.”

Jenny smiled the watery smile of the sentimentalist; a glass of still
lemonade washed with limelight might resemble it.

“Eustace Lane likes you, Winnie,” she remarked.

“I know; that is why I am wondering about him. One does wonder, you see,
about the man one may possibly be going to marry.”

There had never been such a man for Jane Fraser, so she said nothing,
but succeeded in looking confidential.

Presently Winifred allowed her happy foil to lace her up. She was going
to a ball given by the Lanes in Carlton House Terrace.

“Perhaps he will propose to you to-night,” whispered Jane in a gush of
excitement as the two girls walked down the stairs to the carriage. “If
he does, what will you say?”.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, darling, but surely----”

“Eustace is so odd. I can’t make him out.”

“That is because he is a genius.”

“He is certainly remarkable--in a way. Good-night, dear.”

The carriage drove off, and the happy foil joined her maid, who was
waiting to conduct her home. On the way they gossipped, and the maid
expressed a belief that Mr. Lane was a fine young gentleman, but full of
his goings-on.

Jane knew what she meant. Eustace had once kissed her publicly in Jane’s
presence, which deed the latter considered a stroke of genius, and the
act of a true and courageous pioneer.

Eustace was now just twenty-two, and he had already partially succeeded
in his ambition. His mask had deceived his world, and Mr. Bembridge’s
prophecy about him was beginning to be fulfilled. He had done nothing
specially intellectual or athletic, was not particularly active either
with limbs or brain; but people had begun to notice and to talk about
him, to discuss him with a certain interest, even with a certain
wonder. The newspapers occasionally mentioned him as a dandy, a fop,
a whimsical, irresponsible creature, yet one whose vagaries were not
entirely without interest. He had performed some extravagant antic in a
cotillon, or worn some extraordinary coat. He had invented a new way
of walking one season, and during another season, although in perfect
health, he had never left the house, declaring that movement of any kind
was ungentlemanly and ridiculous, and that an imitation of harem life
was the uttermost bliss obtainable in London. His windows in Carlton
House Terrace had been latticed, and when his friends came there to see
him they found him lying, supported by cushions, on a prayer-carpet,
eating Eastern sweetmeats from a silver box.

But he soon began to tire of this deliberate imprisonment, and to reduce
buffoonery to a modern science. His father was a rich man, and he was an
only child. Therefore he was able to gratify the supposed whims, which
were no whims at all. He could get up surprise parties, which really
bored him, carry out elaborate practical jokes, give extraordinary
entertainments at will. For his parents acquiesced in his absurdities,
were even rather proud of them, thinking that he followed his
Will-o’-the-wisp of a fancy because he was not less, but more, than
other young men. In fact, they supposed he must be a genius because he
was erratic. Many people are of the same opinion, and declare that a
goose standing on its head must be a swan. By degrees Eustace Lane’s
practical jokes became a common topic of conversation in London, and
smart circles were in a perpetual state of mild excitement as to what
he would do next. It was said that he had put the latchkey of a Duchess
down the back of a Commander-in-Chief; that he had once, in a country
house, prepared an apple-pie bed for an Heir-apparent, and that he had
declared he would journey to Rome next Easter in order to present a
collection of penny toys to the Pope. Society loves folly if it is
sufficiently blatant. The folly of Eustace was just blatant enough to
be more than tolerated--enjoyed. He had by practice acquired a knack
of being silly in unexpected ways, and so a great many people honestly
considered him one of the cleverest young men in town.

But, you know, it is the proper thing, if you wear a mask, to have a sad
face behind it. Eustace sometimes felt sad, and sometimes fatigued. He
had worked a little to make his reputation, but it was often hard labour
to live up to it. His profession of a buffoon sometimes exhausted him,
but he could no longer dare to be like others. The self-conscious live
to gratify the changing expectations of their world, and Eustace had
educated himself into a self-consciousness that was almost a disease.

And, then, there was his place in the pages of _Vanity Fair_ to be won.
He put that in front of him as his aim in life, and became daily more
and more whimsical.

Nevertheless, he did one prosaic thing. He fell in love with Winifred
Ames, and could not help showing it. As the malady increased upon him
his reputation began to suffer eclipse, for he relapsed into sentiment,
and even allowed his eyes to grow large and lover-like. He ceased to
worry people, and so began to bore them--a much more dangerous thing.
For a moment he even ran the fearful risk of becoming wholly natural,
dropping his mask, and showing himself as he really was, a rather dull,
quite normal young man, with the usual notions about the usual things,
the usual bias towards the usual vices, the usual disinclination to do
the usual duties of life.

He ran a risk, but Winifred saved him, and restored him to his fantasies
this evening of the ball in Carlton House Terrace.

It was an ordinary ball, and therefore Eustace appeared to receive his
guests in fancy dress, wearing a powdered wig and a George IV. Court
costume. This absurdity was a mechanical attempt to retrieve his
buffoon’s reputation, for he was really very much in love, and very
serious in his desire to be married in quite the ordinary way. With a
rather lack-lustre eye he noticed the amusement of his friends at his
last vagary; but when Winifred Ames entered the ballroom a nervous
vivacity shook him, as it has shaken ploughmen under similar conditions,
and for just a moment he felt ill at ease in the lonely lunacy of his
flowered waistcoat and olive-green knee-breeches. He danced with her,
then took her to a scarlet nook, apparently devised to hold only one
person, but into which they gently squeezed, not without difficulty.

She gazed at him with her big brown eyes, that were at the same time
honest and fanciful. Then she said:

“You have taken an unfair advantage of us all to-night, Mr. Lane.”

“Havel? How?”

“By retreating into the picturesque clothes of another age. All the men
here must hate you.”

“No; they only laugh at me.”

She was silent a moment. Then she said:

“What is it in you that makes you enjoy that which the rest of us are
afraid of?”

“And that is----”

“Being laughed at. Laughter, you know, is the great world’s
cat-o’-nine-tails. We fear it as little boys fear the birch on a
winter’s morning at school.”

Eustace smiled uneasily.

“Do you laugh at me?” he asked.

“I have. You surely don’t mind.”

“No,” he said, with an effort. Then: “Are you laughing to-night?”

“No. You have done an absurd thing, of course, but it happens to be
becoming. You look--well, pretty--yes, that’s the word--in your wig.
Many men are ugly in their own hair. And, after all, what would life be
without its absurdities? Probably you are right to enjoy being laughed
at.”

Eustace, who had seriously meditated putting off his mask forever that
night, began to change his mind. The sentence, “Many men are ugly in
their own hair,” dwelt with him, and he felt fortified in his powdered
wig. What if he took it off, and henceforth Winifred found him ugly?
Does not the safety of many of us lie merely in dressing up? Do we not
buy our fate at the costumier’s?

“Just tell me one thing,” Winifred went on. “Are you natural?”

“Natural?” he hesitated.

“Yes; I think you must be. You’ve got a whimsical nature.”

“I suppose so.” He thought of his journey with his father years ago,
and added: “I wish I hadn’t.”

“Why? There is a charm in the fantastic, although comparatively few
people see it. Life must be a sort of Arabian Nights Entertainment to
you.”

“Sometimes. To-night it is different. It seems a sort of Longfellow
life.”

“What’s that?”

“Real and earnest.”

And then he proposed to her, with a laugh, to shoot an arrow at the dead
poet and his own secret psalm.

And Winifred accepted him, partly because she thought him really
strange, partly because he seemed so pretty in his wig, which she chose
to believe his own hair.

They were married, and on the wedding-day the bridegroom astonished his
guests by making a burlesque speech at the reception.

In anyone else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst
taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun
to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after
the pantomime at the church--for what is a modern smart wedding but a
second-rate pantomime?--put them into a good humour, and made them feel
that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the
happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that
Bluebeard’s Chamber, the honeymoon.




II.

Winifred anticipated this honeymoon with calmness, but Eustace was too
much in love to be calm. He was, on the contrary, in a high state of
excitement, and of emotion, and the effort of making his ridiculous
speech had nearly sent him into hysterics. But he had now fully resolved
to continue in his whimsical course, and to play for ever the part of a
highly erratic genius, driven hither and thither by the weird impulses
of the moment. That he never had any impulses but such as were common to
most ordinary young men was a sad fact which he meant to most carefully
conceal from Winifred. He had made up his mind that she believed his
mask to be his face. She had, therefore, married the mask. To divorce
her violently from it might be fatal to their happiness. If he showed
the countenance God had given him, she might cry: “I don’t know you.
You are a stranger. You are like all the other men I didn’t choose to
marry.” His blood ran cold at the thought. No, he must keep it up. She
loved his fantasies because she believed them natural to him. She must
never suspect that they were not natural. So, as they travelled, he
planned the campaign of married life, as doubtless others, strange in
their new bondage, have planned. He gazed at Winifred, and thought,
“What is her notion of the ideal husband, I wonder?” She gazed at him,
and mused on his affection and his whimsicality, and what the two would
lead to in connection with her fate. And the old, scarlet-faced guard
smiled fatuously at them both through the window on which glared a
prominent “Engaged” as he had smiled on many another pair of fools--so
he silently dubbed them. Then they entered Bluebeard’s Chamber and
closed the door behind them.

Brighton was their destination. They meant to lose themselves in a
marine crowd.

They stayed there for a fortnight, and then returned to town, Eustace
more in love than ever.

But Winifred?

One afternoon she sat in the drawing-room of the pretty little house
they had taken in Deanery Street, Park Lane. She was thinking, very
definitely. The silent processes of even an ordinary woman’s mind--what
great male writer would not give two years of his life to sit with them
and watch them, as the poet watches the flight of a swallow, or the
astronomer the processions of the sky? A curious gale was raging through
the town, touzling its thatch of chimney-pots, doing violence to
the demureness of its respectable streets. Night was falling, and in
Piccadilly those strange, gay hats that greet the darkness were coming
out like eager, vulgar comets in a dim and muttering firmament. It was
just the moment when the outside mood of the huge city begins to undergo
a change, to glide from its comparative simplicity of afternoon into
its leering complexity of evening. Each twenty-four hours London has its
moment of emancipation, its moment in which the wicked begin to breathe
and the good to wonder, when “How?” and “Why?” are on the lips of the
opposing factions, and only the philosophers who know--or think they
know--their human nature hold themselves still, and feel that man is at
the least ceaselessly interesting.

Winifred sat by the fire and held a council. She called her thoughts
together and gave audience to her suspicions, and her brown eyes were
wide and rather mournful as her counsellors uttered each a word of hope
or of warning.

Eustace was out. He had gone to a concert, and had not returned.

She was holding a council to decide something in reference to him.

The honeymoon weeks had brought her just as far as the question, “Do I
know my husband at all, or is he, so far, a total stranger?”

Some people seem to draw near to you as you look at them steadily,
others to recede until they reach the verge of invisibility. Which was
Eustace doing? Did his outline become clearer or more blurred? Was he
daily more definite or more phantasmal? And the members of her council
drew near and whispered their opinions in Winifred’s attentive ears.
They were not all in accord at the first. Pros fought with cons, elbowed
them, were hustled in return. Sometimes there was almost a row, and she
had to stretch forth her hands and hush the tumult. For she desired a
calm conclave, although she was a woman.

And the final decision--if, indeed, it could be arrived at that
evening--was important. Love seemed to hang upon it, and all the sweets
of life; and the little wings of Love fluttered anxiously, as the little
wings of a bird flutter when you hold it in the cage of your hands,
prisoning it from its wayward career through the blue shadows of the
summer.

For love is not always and for ever instinctive--not even the finest
love. While many women love because they must, whether the thing to be
loved or not loved be carrion or crystal, a child of the gods or an imp
of the devil, others love decisively because they see--perhaps can even
analyze--a beauty that is there in the thing before them. One woman
loves a man simply because he kisses her. Another loves him because he
has won the Victoria Cross.

Winifred was not of the women who love because they are kissed.

She had accepted Eustace rather impulsively, but she had not married him
quite uncritically. There was something new, different from other
men, about him which attracted her, as well as his good looks--that
prettiness which had peeped out from the white wig in the scarlet nook
at the ball. His oddities at that time she had grown thoroughly to
believe in, and, believing in them, she felt she liked them. She
supposed them to spring, rather like amazing spotted orchids, from
the earth of a quaint nature. Now, after a honeymoon spent among the
orchids, she held this council while the wind blew London into a mood of
evening irritation.

What was Eustace?

How the wind sang over Park Lane! Yet the stars were coming out.

What was he? A genius or a clown? A creature to spread a buttered slide
or a man to climb to heaven? A fine, free child of Nature, who did,
freshly, what he would, regardless of the strained discretion
of others, or a futile, scheming hypocrite, screaming after forced
puerilities, without even a finger on the skirts of originality?

It was a problem for lonely woman’s debate. Winifred strove to weigh it
well. In Bluebeard’s Chamber Eustace had cut many capers. This activity
she had expected--had even wished for. And at first she had been amused
and entertained by the antics, as one assisting at a good burlesque,
through which, moreover, a piquant love theme runs. But by degrees she
began to feel a certain stiffness in the capers, a self-consciousness in
the antics, or fancied she began to feel it, and instead of being always
amused she became often thoughtful.

Whimsicality she loved. Buffoonery she possibly, even probably, could
learn to hate.

Of Eustace’s love for her she had no doubt. She was certain of his
affection. But was it worth having? That depended, surely, on the nature
of the man in whom it sprang, from whom it flowed. She wanted to be sure
of that nature; but she acknowledged to herself, as she sat by the fire,
that she was perplexed. Perhaps even that perplexity was merciful. Yet
she wished to sweep it away. She knit her brows moodily, and longed for
a secret divining-rod that would twist to reveal truth in another.
For truth, she thought, is better than hidden water-springs, and a
sincerity--even of stupidity--more lovely than the fountain that gives
flowers to the desert, wild red roses to the weary gold of sands.

The wind roared again, howling to poor, shuddering Mayfair, and there
came a step outside. Eustace sprang in upon Winifred’s council, looking
like a gay schoolboy, his cheeks flushed, his lips open to speak.

“Dreaming?” he said.

She smiled.

“Perhaps.”

“That concert paralyzed me. Too much Beethoven. I wanted Wagner.
Beethoven insists on exalting you, but Wagner lets you revel and feel
naughty. Winnie, d’you hear the wind?”

“Could I help it?” she asked.

“Does it suggest something to you?”

He looked at her, and made his expression mischievous, or meant to make
it. She looked up at him, too.

“Yes, many things,” she said--“many, many things.”

“To me it suggests kites.”

“Kites?”

“Yes. I’m going to fly one now in the Park. The stars are out. Put on
your hat and come with me.”

He seemed all impulse, sparkling to the novelty of the idea.

“Well, but------” She hesitated.

“I’ve got one--a beauty, a monster! I noticed the wind was getting up
yesterday. Come!”

He pulled at her hand; she obeyed him, not quickly. She put on her hat,
a plain straw, a thick jacket, gloves. Kite-flying in London seemed an
odd notion. Was it lively and entertaining, or merely silly? Which ought
it to be?

Eustace shouted to her from the tiny hall.

“Hurry!” he cried.

The wind yelled beyond the door, and Winifred ran down, beginning to
feel a childish thrill of excitement. Eustace held the kite. It was,
indeed, a white monster, gaily decorated with fluttering scarlet and
blue ribbons.

“We shall be mobbed,” she said.

“There’s no one about,” he answered. “The gale frightens people.”

He opened the door, and they were out in the crying tempest. The great
clouds flew along the sky like an army in retreat. Some, to Winifred,
seemed soldiers, others baggage-waggons, horses, gun-carriages, rushing
pell-mell for safety. One drooping, tattered cloud she deemed the
colours of a regiment streaming under the stars that peeped out here
and there--watching sentinel eyes, obdurate, till some magic password
softened them.

As they crossed the road she spoke of her cloud army to Eustace.

“This kite’s like a live thing,” was his reply. “It tugs as a fish tugs
a line.”

He did not care for the tumult of a far-off world.

They entered the Park. It seemed, indeed, strangely deserted. A
swaggering soldier passed them by, going towards the Marble Arch. His
spurs clinked; his long cloak gleamed like a huge pink carnation in
the dingy dimness of the startled night. How he stared with his
unintelligent, though bold, eyes as he saw the kite bounding to be free.

Eustace seemed delighted.

“That man thinks us mad!” he said.

“Are we mad?” Winifred asked, surprised at her own strange enjoyment of
the adventure.

“Who knows?” said Eustace, looking at her narrowly. “You like this
escapade?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“My mask!” he thought, secretly longing to be quietly by the fire
sipping tea and reading _Punch_. “She loves that.”

They were through the trees now, across the broad path, out on the open
lawns.

“Now for it!” he shouted, as the wind roared in their faces.

He paid out the coils of the thin cord. The white monster skimmed,
struggled near the ground, returned, darted again upward and outward,
felt for the wind’s hands, caught them and sprang, with a mad courage,
star-wards, its gay ribbons flying like coloured birds to mark its
course. But soon they were lost to sight, and only a diminished,
ghost-like shadow leaping against the black showed where the kite beat
on to liberty.

Eustace ran with the wind, and Winifred followed him. The motion sent
an exultation dancing through her veins, and stirred her blood into a
ferment. The noises in the trees, the galloping music of the airs on
their headlong courses, rang in her ears like clashing bells. She called
as she ran, but never knew what words. She leaped, as if over glorious
obstacles. Her feet danced on the short grass. She had a sudden notion:
“I am living now!” and Eustace had never seemed so near to her. He had
an art to find why children are happy, she thought, because they do
little strange things, coupling mechanical movements, obvious actions
that may seem absurd, with soft flights of the imagination, that wrap
their prancings and their leaps in golden robes, and give to the dull
world a glory. The hoop is their demon enemy, whom they drive before
them to destruction. The kite is a great white bird, whom they hold
back for a time from heaven. Suddenly Winifred longed to feel the bird’s
efforts to be free.

“Let me have it!” she cried to Eustace, holding out her hands eagerly.
“Do let me!”

He was glad to pass the cord to her, being utterly tired of a prank
which he thought idiotic, and he could not understand the light that
sprang into her eyes as she grasped it, and felt the life of the
lifeless thing that soared towards the clouds.

For the moment it was more to her--this tugging, scarce visible, white
thing--than all the world of souls. It gave to her the excitement of
battle, the joy of strife. She felt herself a Napoleon with empires in
her hand; a Diana holding eternities, instead of hounds, in leash. She
had quite the children’s idea of kites, the sense of being in touch with
the infinite that enters into baby pleasures, and makes the remembrance
of them live in us when we are old, and have forgotten wild passions,
strange fruitions, that have followed them and faded away for ever.

How the creature tore at her! She fancied she felt the pulsings of its
fly-away heart, beating with energy and great hopes of freedom. And
suddenly, with a call, she opened her hands. Her captive was lost in the
night.

In a moment she felt sad, such a foolish sorrow, as a gaoler may feel
sad who has grown to love his prisoner, and sees him smile when the
gaping door gives him again to crime.

“It’s gone,” she said to Eustace; “I think it’s glad to go.”

“Glad--a kite!” he said.

And it struck her that he would have thought it equally sensible if she
had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the
Homeric passions of wooden dolls.

Then, why had he been prompted by the wind to play the boy if he had
none of the boy’s ardent imagination?

They reached Deanery Street, and passed in from the night and the
elements. Eustace shut the door with a sigh of relief. Winifred’s
echoing sigh was of regret.

It seemed a listless world--the world inside a lighted London house,
dominated by a pale butler with black side-whiskers and endless
discretion. But Eustace did not feel it so. Winifred knew that beyond
hope of doubt as she stole a glance at his face. He had put off the
child--the buffoon--and looked for the moment a grave, dull young man,
naturally at ease with all the conventions. She could not help saying
to herself, as she went to her room to live with hairpins and her
lady’s-maid: “I believe he hated it all!”

From that night of kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her
husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even
in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she
was not afraid of--could even love, being a searcher after the new
and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck
eccentricity--Brummagem originalities--gave to her views of the poverty
of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with
contempt.

And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous
as he began to note the lassitude which gradually crept into her
intercourse with him. London rang with them. At one time he pretended to
a strange passion for death; prayed to a skull which grinned in a shrine
raised for it in his dressing-room; lay down each day in a coffin, and
asked Winifred to close it and scatter earth upon the lid, that he might
realize the end towards which we journey. He talked of silence, long
and loudly--an irony which Winifred duly noted--sneered at the fleeting
phantoms in the show of existence, called the sobbing of women, the
laughter of men, sounds as arid as the whizz of a cracker let off by a
child on the fifth of November.

“We should kill our feelings,” he said. “They make us absurd. Life
should be a breathing calm, as death is a breathless calm.”

The calm descending upon Winifred was of the benumbing order.

Later he recoiled from this coquetting with the destroyer.

“After all,” he said, “which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt
from the penalty of the race? You don’t believe that you will ever die,
Winifred?”

“I know it,” she said.

“Yes, but you don’t believe it.”

“You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at
least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be
like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and
supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers,
and touched the hand of one’s hostess, and swung round in a final
gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all--one wants to go home.”

“Does one?” Eustace said. “Home you call it!”

He shuddered.

“I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor
and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us,
at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is.”

“You have strange fancies,” he said.

“I! Not so strange as yours.”

She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look
meant. It seemed to him a menace.

“I must keep it up--I must keep it up,” he murmured to himself as he
left the room. “Winifred loves fancies--loves me for what she thinks
mine.”

He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages
on the ordinary.

His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original
figure of London. The papers quoted him--his doings, not his sayings.
People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the
Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the
observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.

At least, so a wag declared.

And Winifred bore it, but with an increasing impatience.

At this time, too, a strange need of protection crept over her, the
yearning for man’s beautiful, dog-like sympathy that watches woman in
her grand dark hour before she blooms into motherhood. When she knew the
truth, she resolved to tell Eustace, and she came into his room softly,
with shining eyes. He was sitting reading the Financial News in a nimbus
of cigarette smoke, secretly glorying in his momentary immunity from the
prison rules of the fantastic. Winifred’s entry was as that of a warder.
He sprang up laughing.

“Winnie,” he said, “I think I am going to South Africa.”

“You!” she said in surprise.

“Yes; to give acrobatic performances in the street, and so pave the way
to a position as a millionaire. Who ever heard of a man rising from a
respectable competence to a fortune? According to the papers, you must
start with nothing; that is the first rule of the game. We have ten
thousand a year, so we can never hope to be rich. Fortune only favours
the pauper. I am mad about money to-day. I can think of nothing else.”

And he began showing her conjuring tricks with sovereigns which he drew
from his pockets.

She did not tell him that day. And when she told him, it was without
apparent emotion. She seemed merely stating coldly a physical fact,
not breathing out a beautiful secret of her soul and his, a consecrated
wonder to shake them both, and bind them together as two flowers are
bound in the centre of a bouquet, the envy of the other flowers.

“Eustace,” she said, and her eyes were clear and her hands were still,
“I think I ought to tell you--we shall have a child.”

Her voice was unwavering as a doctor’s which pronounces, “You have the
influenza.” She stood there before him.

“Winifred!” he cried, looking up. His impulse was to say, “Wife! My
Winifred!” to take her in his arms as any clerk might take his little
middle-class spouse, to kiss her lips, and, in doing it, fancy he drew
near to the prison in which every soul eternally dwells on earth. Finely
human he felt, as the dullest, the most unknown, the plainest, the
most despised, may feel, thank God! “Winifred!” he cried. And then he
stopped, with the shooting thought, “Even now I must be what she thinks
me, what she perhaps loves me for.”

She stood there silently waiting.

“Toys!” he exclaimed. “Toys have always been my besetting sin. Now I
will make a grand collection, not for the Pope, as people pretend, but
for our family. You will have two children to laugh at, Winnie. Your
husband is one, you know.” He sprang up. “I’ll go into the Strand,” he
said. “There’s a man near the Temple who has always got some delightful
novelty displaying its paces on the pavement. What fun!”

And off he went, leaving Winifred alone with the mystery of her woman’s
world, the mystic mystery of birth that may dawn out of hate as out of
love, out of drunken dissipation as out of purity’s sweet climax.

Next day a paragraph in the papers told how Mr. Eustace Lane had bought
up all the penny toys of the Strand. Mention was again made of his
supposed mission to the Vatican, and a picture drawn of the bewilderment
of the Holy Father, roused from contemplation of the eternal to
contemplation of jumping pasteboard, and the frigid gestures of people
from the world of _papier-mache_.

Eustace showed the paragraph to Winifred.

“Why will they chronicle all I do?” he said, with a sigh.

“Would you rather they did not?”

“Oh, if it amuses them,” he answered. “To amuse the world is to be its
benefactor.”

“No, to comfort the world,” was Winifred’s silent thought. .

To her the world often seemed a weary invalid, playing cards on the
coverlet of the bed from which it longed in vain to move, peeping with
heavy eyes at the shrouded windows of its chamber, and listening for
faint sounds from without--soft songs, soft murmurings, the breath of
winds, the sigh of showers; then turning with a smothered groan to its
cards again, its lengthy game of “Patience.” Clubs, spades, hearts,
diamonds--there they all lay on the coverlet ready to the hands of the
invalid. But she wanted to take them away, and give to the sufferer a
prayer and a hope.

At this period she was often full of a vague, chaotic tenderness,
far-reaching, yet indefinite. She could rather have kissed the race than
a person.

And so the days went by, Winifred in a dream of wonder, Eustace in the
toy-shops.

Until the birthday dawned and faded.

All through that day Eustace was in agony. He did not care so much for
the child, but he loved the mother. Her danger tore at his heart. Her
pain smote him, till he seemed to feel it actually and physically. That
she was giving him something was naught to him; that she might be taken
away in the giving was everything. And when he learnt that all was well,
he cried and prayed, and thought to himself afterwards, “If Winifred
could know what I am like, what I have done to-day, how would it strike
her?”

She did not know; for when at length Eustace was admitted to her room,
he trained himself to murmur, “A girl, that’s lucky because of all the
dolls. The Pope sha’n’t have even one now.”

Winifred lay back white on her pillow, and a little frown travelled
across her face. If Eustace had just kissed her, and she had felt a tear
of his on her face, and he had said nothing, she could have loved him
then as a father, perhaps, more than as a husband. His allusion to the
supposed Papal absurdity disgusted her at such a time, only faintly,
because of her weakness, but distinctly, and in a way to be remembered.

She recovered; but just as the child was beginning to smile, and to
express an approbation of life by murmurous gurglings, an infantile
disease gripped it, held it, would not release it. And Winifred knelt
beside it, dead, and thought, with a new and vital horror, of the
invalid world playing cards upon the drawn coverlet of its bed. Baby was
outside that chamber now, beyond the curtained windows, outside in sun
or shower that she could not see, could only dream of, while the game of
“Patience” went on and on.




III.

The death of the child meant more to Winifred than she would at first
acknowledge even to herself. Almost unconsciously she had looked forward
to its birth as to a release from bondage. There are moments when a duet
is gaol, a trio comparative liberty. The child, the tiny intruder into
youthful married life, may come in the guise of an imp or of a good
fairy: one to cloud the perfect and complete joy of two, or one to give
sunlight to their nascent weariness and dissatisfaction. Or, again, it
may be looked for with longing by one of two lovers, with apprehension
by the other. Only when it lay dead did Winifred understand that Eustace
was to her a stranger, and that she was lonely alone with him. The “Au
revoir” of two bodies may be sweet, but the “Au revoir” of two minds is
generally but a hypocritical or sarcastic rendering of the tragic word
“Adieu.” Winifred’s mind cried “Au revoir” to the mind of Eustace, to
his nature, to his love, but deep in her soul trembled the minor music,
the shuddering discord, of “Adieu.” Adieu to the body of child; adieu
more complete, more eternal, to the soul of husband. Which good bye was
the stranger? She stood as at cross-roads, and watched, with hand-shaded
eyes, the tiny, wayward babe dwindling on its journey to heaven; the man
she had married dwindling on his journey--whither? And the one she had a
full hope of meeting again, but the other----

After the funeral the Lanes took up once more the old dual life which
had been momentarily interrupted. Had it not been for the interruption,
Winifred fancied that she might not have awakened to the full knowledge
of her own feelings towards Eustace until a much later period. But the
baby’s birth, existence, passing away, were a blow upon the gate of life
from the vague without. She had opened the gate, caught a glimpse of the
shadowy land of the possible. And to do that is often to realize in a
flash the impossibility of one’s individual fate. So many of us manage
to live ignorantly all our days and to call ourselves happy. Winifred
could never live quite ignorantly again.

To Eustace the interruption meant much less. So long as he had Winifred
he could not feel that any of his dreams hung altogether in tatters.
Sometimes, it is true, he contemplated the penny toys, and had a moment
of quaint, not unpleasant regret, half forming the thought, Why do we
ever trouble ourselves to prepare happiness for others, when happiness
is a word of a thousand meanings? As often as not, to do so is to set
a dinner of many courses and many wines before an unknown guest, who
proves to be vegetarian and teetotaler, after all.

“What shall I do with the toys?” he asked Winifred one day.

“The toys? Oh, give them to a children’s hospital,” she said, and her
voice had a harsh note in it.

“No,” he answered, after a moment’s reflection; “I’ll keep them and play
with them myself; you know I love toys.”

And on the following Sunday, when many callers came to Deanery Street,
they found him in the drawing-room, playing with a Noah’s ark. Red,
green, violet, and azure elephants, antelopes, zebras, and pigs
processed along the carpet, guided by an orange-coloured Noah in a
purple top-hat, and a perfect parterre of sons and wives. The fixed
anxiety of their painted faces suggested that they were in apprehension
of the flood, but their rigid attitudes implied trust in the Unseen.

Winifred’s face that day seemed changed to those who knew her best.
To one man, a soldier who had admired her greatly before her marriage,
and\who had seen no reason to change his opinion of her since, she was
more cordial than usual, and he went away curiously meditating on the
mystery of women.

“What has happened to Mrs. Lane?” he thought to himself as he walked
down Park Lane. “That last look of hers at me, when I was by the door,
going, was--yes, I’ll swear it--Regent Street. And yet Winnie Lane is
the purest--I’m hanged if I can make out women! Anyhow, I’ll go there
again. People say she and that fantastic ass she’s married are devoted.
H’m!” He went to Pall Mall, and sat staring at nothing in his Club till
seven, deep in the mystery of the female sex.

And he went again to Deanery Street to see whether the vision of Regent
Street was deceptive, and came away wondering and hoping. From this time
the vagaries of Eustace Lane became more incessant, more flamboyant,
than ever, and Mrs. Lane was perpetually in society. If it would not
have been true to say, conventionally, that no party was complete
without her, yet it certainly seemed, from this time, that she was
incomplete without a party. She was the starving wolf after the sledge
in which sat the gay world. If the sledge escaped her, she was left to
face darkness, snow, wintry winds, loneliness. In London do we not often
hear the dismal howling of the wolves, suggesting steppes of the heart
frigid as Siberia?

Eustace grew uneasy, for Winifred seemed eluding him in this maze of
entertainments. He could not impress the personality of his mask upon
her vitally when she moved perpetually in the pantomime processions of
society, surrounded by grotesques, mimes, dancers, and deformities.

“We are scarcely ever alone, Winnie,” he said to her one day.

“You must learn to love me in a crowd,” she answered. “Human nature can
love even God in isolation, but the man who can love God in the world is
the true Christian.”

“I can love you anywhere,” he said. “But you------” And then he stopped
and quickly readjusted his mask which was slipping off.

From that day he monotonously accentuated his absurdities. All London
rang with them. He was the Court Fool of Mayfair, the buffoon of the
inner circles of the Metropolis, and, by degrees, his painted fame,
jangling the bells in its cap, spun about England in a dervish dance,
till Peckham whispered of him, and even the remotest suburbs crowned
him with parsley and hung upon his doings. All the blooming flowers of
notoriety were his, to hug in his arms as he stood upon his platform
bowing to the general applause. His shrine in _Vanity Fair_ was surely
being prepared. But he scarcely thought of this, being that ordinary,
ridiculous, middle-class thing, an immoderately loving husband, insane
enough to worship romantically the woman to whom he was unromantically
tied by the law of his country. With each new fantasy he hoped to win
back that which he had lost. Each joke was the throw of a desperate
gamester, each tricky invention a stake placed on the number that would
never turn up. That wild time of his career was humorous to the world,
how tragic to himself we can only wonder. He spread wings like a bird,
flew hither and thither as if a vagrant for pure joy and the pleasure
of movement, darted and poised, circled and sailed, but all the time
his heart cried aloud for a nest and Winifred. Yet he wooed her only
silently by his follies, and set her each day farther and farther from
him.

And she--how she hated his notoriety, and was sick with weariness when
voices told her of his escapades, modulating themselves to wondering
praise. Long ago she had known that Eustace sinned against his own
nature, but she had never loved him quite enough to discover what that
nature really was. And now she had no desire to find out. He was only
her husband and the least of all men to her.

The Lanes sat at breakfast one morning and took up their letters.
Winifred sipped her tea, and opened one or two carelessly. They were
invitations. Then she tore, the envelope of a third, and, as she read
it, forgot to sip her tea. Presently she laid it down slowly. Eustace
was looking at her.

“Winifred,” he said, “I have got a letter from the editor of _Vanity
Fair_.”

“Oh!”

“He wishes me to permit a caricature of myself to appear in his pages.”

Winifred’s fingers closed sharply on the letter she had just been
reading. A decision of hers in regard to the writer of it was hanging in
the balance, though Eustace did not know it.

“Well?” said Eustace, inquiring of her silence.

“What are you going to reply?” she asked.

“I am wondering.”

She chipped an eggshell and took a bit of dry toast.

“All those who appear in _Vanity Fair_ are celebrated, aren’t they?” she
said.

“I suppose so,” Eustace said.

“For many different things.”

“Of course.”

“Can you refuse the editor’s request?”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“Exactly. Tell me when you have written to him, and what you have
written, Eustace.”

“Yes, Winnie, I will.”

Later on in the day he came up to her boudoir, and said to her:

“I have told him I am quite willing to have my caricature in his paper.”

“Your portrait,” she said. “All right. Leave me now, Eustace; I have
some writing to do.”

As soon as he had gone she sat down and wrote a short letter, which she
posted herself.

A month later Eustace came bounding up the stairs to find her.

“Winnie, Winnie!” he called. “Where are you? I’ve something to show
you.”

He held a newspaper in his hand. Winifred was not in the room. Eustace
rang the bell.

“Where is Mrs. Lane?” he asked of the footman who answered it.

“Gone out, sir,” the man answered.

“And not back yet? It’s very late,” said Eustace, looking at his watch.

The time was a quarter to eight. They were dining at half-past.

“I wonder where she is,” he thought.

Then he sat down and gazed at a cartoon which represented a thin man
with a preternaturally pale face, legs like sticks, and drooping hands
full of toys--himself. Beneath it was written, “His aim is to amuse.”

He turned a page, and read, for the third or fourth time, the following:

“Mr. Eustace Lane.

“Mr. Eustace Bernhard Lane, only son of Mr. Merton Lane, of Carlton
House Terrace, was born in London twenty-eight years ago. He is married
to one of the belles of the day, and is probably the most envied husband
in town.

“Although he is such a noted figure in society, Mr. Eustace Lane has
never done any conspicuously good or bad deed. He has neither invented
a bicycle nor written a novel, neither lost a seat in Parliament, nor
found a mine in South Africa. Careless of elevating the world, he has
been content to entertain it, to make it laugh, or to make it wonder.
His aim is to amuse, and his whole-souled endeavour to succeed in this
ambition has gained him the entire respect of the frivolous. What more
could man desire?”

As he finished there came a ring at the hall-door bell.

“Winifred!” he exclaimed, and jumped up with the paper in his hand.

In a moment the footman entered with a note.

“A boy messenger has just brought this, sir,” he said.

Eustace took it, and, as the man went out and shut the door, opened it,
and read:

     “Victoria Station.

     “This is to say good-bye. By the time it reaches you I
     shall have left London. Not alone. I have seen the cartoon.
     It is very like you.
     Winifred.”

Eustace sank down in a chair.

On the table at his elbow lay _Vanity Fair_. Mechanically he looked at
it, and read once more the words beneath his picture, “His aim is to
amuse.”






End of Project Gutenberg’s The Folly Of Eustace, by Robert S. Hichens