Chapter III

"Mr Melville, Mr Melville," cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on the following day, "the absinthe has arrived!"

Claude came out languidly into the hall.

"Has it?" he said dreamily.

"Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books--I mean the yellow books, and" (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) "yes, here are two novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes. Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea, or what?"

Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion was lulled to rest.

"We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe about an hour or so before dinner."

"Very well. Tea, James, and muffins."

The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming, "What's to be done now?"

The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct it.

"Please try to be a little--a--"

"Yes?"

"A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it should never be crude. All extremes are crude."

"What--even extremes of wickedness?"

He hesitated.

"Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me. Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street--really."

Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.

"Perhaps you are right," she said. "I daresay happiness is unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?"

Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides, Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.

"I do it because I feel so Turkish," he explained. "Otherwise, it would be an assumption, and not naive. People make a great mistake in fancying the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry would have been much more read in England than it has been. Yes, please, I will have another muffin."

"But I think I feel Turkish too," Miss Haddon said calmly. "Yes, I am sure I do. I ought not to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be flying in the face of your beautiful theories." And she squatted down on the floor at his elbow.

Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute irritation, during which he felt strangely natural. Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery manner until he began to be rather ill, but her face never lost its expression of grave sadness, a strange, inexplicable melancholy that was not in the least Bank Holiday. The contrast between her expression and her voice worried Claude, as an intelligent pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that something was wrong. Either face or voice required alteration. And then questions are like death--extremely irksome. Besides, he found it difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define precisely the position of the decadent, his intentions and his aims. It was no use to tell Miss Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or the other. Always with the same definitely sad face, the same definitely cheerful voice, she declined to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion, and his Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously disturbed.

The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess, and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.

"It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt," she said after a while.

Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.

"When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead rabbit at the end of it," she explained.

"My dear lady," he protested plaintively. "Really, you do not grasp the inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will not care what happens, or what--"

"But must I drink it all before I feel detached?" she asked. "It's really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think so."

"I drink it for its after-effect."

"Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?"

"I don't know," the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a good act seemed to him quite intolerable.

He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing gong sounded in the hall.

Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.

"I rather admire you for drinking this stuff," she said. "I am sure you do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most invigorating to the mind."

As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never wished to touch absinthe again. The glitter of its personality was dulled for him now that it was looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to be indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like wearing a hair shirt, or rejecting meat on Fridays. He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company. To feel Turkish alone was graceful and quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old lady feeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to emphasise the sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring imbecility very near. Claude dressed with unusual agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie.

All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically about her prospects as a successful decadent, much as if she were discussing her future on the Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She calculated that at her present rate of progress she ought to be almost on a level with her guest by the end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to take any interest in the ordinary facts of life, of learning a proper contempt for all healthy-minded humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection in literature, in art, and, above all, in movement and in appearance. Her bright eyes flashed upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair, as she talked, and the big room rang with her jovial voice.

The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph. Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural cricket match and of the supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the drawing-room.

"Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets."

"Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that, or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any games."

"Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?"

She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:

"Please--please teach me Halma."

That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.

Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.