Chapter X: The Irreproachable Conduct of a Gentleman Who Once Refused a

KNIGHTHOOD

I

Said Mr. Fall to Lord Tarlyon on the telephone, one day in July:

“Pleased if you’d dine with me to-night.”

“Sorry,” said Lord Tarlyon; and he was sorry, for he liked Mr. Fall very well. “Promised to dine with a man.”

“Pleased if you’d bring him along,” said Mr. Fall.

Mr. Fall lived in Lord Brazie’s house in Grosvenor Square. (Lord Brazie, of course, lived somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have been able to live at all if Mr. Fall had not taken his house.) As George Tarlyon and I walked thither through the quietening streets and the dainty noises of the Town in the evening, we spoke of Cyrus Fall; and then a silence fell upon us, for we were meditating on millionaires of the Canadian sort. In the last decade of the last century millionaires were always American: in the first decade of this century an Australian mode set in, and many a young lady of birth was married to a fruit-farm, and many a chorus-girl decorated the bush: but fashion, as _The Tatler_ has brilliantly put it, is proverbially fickle, and with the war all millionaires who were not Canadian fell into great discredit, so that many women exchanged theirs for the Canadian model on the first opportunity. Now of these, the greatest was Cyrus Fall....

The history of Mr. Fall and his millions is simple. Like all Canadian millionaires he was born near Limerick and emigrated, with his parents, to Canada at the age of three. For a time he was dancing-master and chucker-out in a _cabaret_ in Toronto; but, deciding that that was a discreditable profession, bought some newspapers and edited them in such an original way that he very soon became a Force. Throughout this time he never failed to consult his mother at every turn, and though in doing so he sometimes made mistakes, he never missed an opportunity of saying that a man’s best friend is his mother; and when, at the age of thirty, having been a Force in Canada for some years, he came to England, he wrote to his mother, who of course lived in Winnipeg, every day, saying that a man should be grateful to the woman who gave him birth. In England Mr. Fall went on being a millionaire until the war broke out, when he at once became a multi-millionaire. He was offered a knighthood for his services on the field of finance, but humbly refused the honour in a letter which, his newspapers said, was that of a simple, sincere and great-hearted man and should be a historic model for all letters refusing knighthoods. Later on he refused a baronetcy in the same simple and sincere way, excusing himself to his friends on the grounds that his mother wouldn’t like him making a guy of himself; and when some one said that Canadians can’t be choosers Mr. Fall biffed him one. About the time when George Tarlyon and I were going to dine with him he was said to be about to accept a barony, excusing himself on the ground that he was getting too old for letter-writing. Mr. Fall had not married.

II

I had never actually met Mr. Fall, but when we did meet he said he was pleased to know me, so that was all right.

“You will, of course, have a cocktail,” he said.

“Of course,” we said.

“My own particular make,” Mr. Fall told us. “Instead of shaking them I stir them with a shagreen shoe-horn steeped in Chartreuse.”

“Perfect it is,” I assured him.

With the cocktails were caviare sandwiches.

“They go together very well,” said George Tarlyon. When they had gone, we dined.

Somewhere near us, but not in the room, sang a _ukelele_: near enough to be enjoyed, far enough not to distract, a gentle noise, a mezzotint noise, unrecognisable and remote.

And then in the fulness of time, the table was cleared, and there was coffee.

“You will like the brandy,” said Mr. Fall, as Tarlyon hesitated on the butler’s question. We liked the brandy very much.

“Leave it,” said Mr. Fall; and the butler left us.

“It’s like this,” he began; and he put both elbows on the table, and in one hand he waved a cigar and with the other he caressed his chin. Seriously he glanced from one to the other of us; he was a man with a courteous eye.

“It’s like this,” Mr. Fall addressed Tarlyon. “I asked you to dinner, Lord Tarlyon, not only because of the very real pleasure I take in your company, but because I want your advice--your advice,” said Mr. Fall, “as an Englishman of honour. And for yours, too, Mr. Trevor, I shall be very much obliged. Have some brandy.”

“You see,” said Mr. Fall, “I am not a gentleman. I am not even quite a gentleman. My birth and upbringing, though they have fitted me for very much, have not fitted me to decide on certain matters with that clearness of vision and decision which I find so admirable in men of breeding....”

Tarlyon made a faint noise which sounded like “Ah....”

“To men like you,” Mr. Fall continued, “there are not two ways of doing a thing: there is only a right way; and that, with you, is the instinctive way. Whereas for me there is also the right way, but there are other ways as well, and sometimes I find myself wandering up these other ways and wondering if they are not quite as right as the right way, even though they are more convenient. In matters of policy there are two sides to every question; and I sometimes wonder if, in matters of honour, there are not also two sides to every question....”

“There are,” said George Tarlyon. “But one of them is a precipice....”

“Exactly, Lord Tarlyon. And that is why I am about to put before you the case of myself and a lady, as discreetly as possible of course, so that you can advise me what to do--as a man of honour. Or rather, so that you can support me in going on doing what I am already doing, or encourage me to change my course towards what, I frankly admit, will be a happy fulfilment for me. Have some brandy.”

Mr. Fall, in the interests of his country at war, had frequently had occasion to voyage on board a cruiser of His Majesty’s Fleet, and had thus acquired that finished courtesy which presumes a man has drunk nothing before the glass you are offering him.

“I may say,” Mr. Fall continued, “that at the age of fifty-two I know as little about ladies as I did when I was twenty, when I didn’t know any. Perhaps it is because I have always been a very busy man, perhaps it is because I do not attract them enough----”

“Or perhaps it’s because you attract them too much,” Tarlyon suggested.

“Of course,” Mr. Fall admitted, “one is agreeable financially; and a knowledge of that fact has sometimes, I am afraid, caused me to reconsider an invitation to dinner which the night before had seemed full of friendship, and, perhaps, possibilities of a kind which I am not too old to think romantic. However....”

III

“A little over a year ago,” said Mr. Fall, “I met the lady who is bound up in the situation on which I need your advice. I met her in an ordinary way, at a ball; and saw nothing unusual in the meeting until the evening of the following day, when I found to my surprise that throughout the day she had been inhabiting that part of a man’s mental economy which is called the ‘back-of-his-mind.’ On bringing her to the front I discovered that I was in love with her; and on ringing her up was delighted to hear that she was agreeably disposed to seeing me at her flat, at about five o’clock any afternoon. That was a year ago, and that is as far as I have got.”

“You mean, she has so far refused to marry you?” I asked.

“I have not asked her, Mr. Trevor. That is the point--I cannot ask her. With such as she, as you can understand, the words love and marriage are synonymous--and both, to her in particular, are offensive. I am her friend. I do not want to be, but I am.

“She is a lady of birth, of deep principles and affections, which, I believe, it is the custom of the day to find wanting in women of fashion; and I find that, at the end of a year, I respect the dignity of her mind as much as I admire that of her carriage, her principles as much as her features, which are of the kind known as classical, though indeed I find in them every quality of romance. We were speaking, a moment ago, of ladies to whom a rich man is, if in no other way, financially agreeable. With this lady, that would suffice me: I would think myself well-rewarded to be allowed to marry her on any terms; but I would dare to offer her anything but the most trifling bric-à-brac--for not she to accept expensive presents--as little as I would dare to offer her my hand. I cannot even mention marriage to her, because of the damn silly thing which stands between us. Have some brandy.

“Her husband had died some twelve months before I met this lady, in Rome, where he was on political business, of a sudden chill. At that time I was also in Rome; and though I had never met his wife, or even knew he was married, I had had a fairly long acquaintance with him, which had begun in the early days of the war in Paris, where he was stationed as a military officer of some consequence. I remember while I was there he won the D.S.O. for service at the front--telephone service, I gathered.

“He died of his chill within twenty-four hours, and my business took me from Rome before his wife could arrive. I leave you to imagine the tragedy of her arrival in a city where, only a few years before, she had spent the happiest weeks of her life, her honeymoon, to look upon the still face of one who had left her two weeks before in the full vigour of youth and health. She has described it to me, not as a whole but in those disjointed pieces with which a sensitive mind can make a figure of tragedy vivid to a sympathetic listener, and I can see the thing so clearly that I feel it as a personal loss....”

“And so,” Mr. Fall added grimly, “it is. It seems that, on the night I met her at the ball, she had discovered my acquaintance with her dead husband; and it was that fact which had made her so agreeably disposed to allowing me to call on her, for hers was that kind of breeding--rare, I am given to understand, in these days--which is not usually approachable by a slight acquaintance on the telephone. I am quite assured, in spite of her very courteous assertions to the contrary, that we would never have become friends but for my having known her husband; and I, of course, was at first only too pleased to have chanced on a link which gave her a certain degree of pleasure in my person and company--for both, I have since discovered, were at first devoid of any other interest for her. Very early in our friendship I found that she had loved her husband as few men are fortunate enough to be loved; and in this love had been contained a respect which I can only describe as religious. It was not the qualities of his mind, which were gentlemanly but scarcely above the commonplace, but those of his heart, which had held such a high place in her love; and which, now that he was dead, reigned in her mind to the exclusion--I speak literally, Lord Tarlyon--of every other interest and affection. She had not loved him enough, she said. She ought, she insisted, to have recognised more deeply his regard for and constancy to her; and she ought certainly to have insisted on accompanying him to Rome when, perhaps, under her care, he might not have caught that fatal chill. She persuaded herself that she had neglected one whose every thought, whose whole life, was bound up in hers, a great gentleman whose fidelity to her, one of four daughters of an impoverished house, had merited the most utter devotion; and whose memory she couldn’t but hold in the highest esteem, to the exclusion of every petty circumstance which might invade the life of a woman who was still young and, perhaps, not unattractive. Have some brandy.

“I need scarcely tell you, who are men of the world, that a lady so devoted, so consistent, is rare, and must undoubtedly possess qualities of mind and heart deserving a man’s highest respect. Perhaps, however, I carried this respect business too far when, at that beginning, and in the natural flow of conversation about some one whose memory was so admirably dear to her, I helped to feed her illusion about her husband; but I was aware only of the present moment, and wished--and who, being human, would not?--to make myself agreeable enough for her to wish to see me again. For my success in that little intrigue I am now being sufficiently punished. In me, Mr. Trevor, and you, Lord Tarlyon, you may see at the present moment a man undergoing heavy punishment for the pettiest of all crimes, the crime of thoughtless kindness. I am now suffering for my lies, for I told more lies about that dead husband than you could believe possible in a man whose imagination has hitherto been considered financial rather than fanciful. I had, you understand, been so deeply impressed by her belief in the love and fidelity of her dead husband, had been so moved by the naïve illusions of a lady who, passing her life among a generation avid for the details of other people’s infidelities, prized constancy above all things, that I had let myself go. It seemed, don’t you see, the decent thing to do; and I, not being well versed in the rules concerning these matters, did it very thoroughly. Anyway, I could at best only have kept my mouth shut, for one breath of a hint adverse to that treasured memory would have snapped the slender cord of our friendship. But I need not, in trying to anchor her interest in me, have gone so far as I did: I need not, just for the pleasure of seeing the tender light in her eyes, have rashly struck out on my own and invented magnificent Parisian situations in which her husband’s constancy to her had been as a shining light among the crude passions let loose by war among even the most decent of temporarily celibate men. I need not have depicted him as a man whose purity and asceticism were such as to astonish his friends--myself, who was but human, among them--and as one whom the fascinations of the most lovely women left untouched, except for a sad smile which I had frequently seen to come on his face, as at the thought of some one inexpressibly dear to him. Have some brandy.

“The man is dead; and I wouldn’t have you think me so wanting in decency as to speak harshly of a dead man. But the fact remains that that man must have been one of the world’s biggest liars, a liar of inconceivable genius and magnitude, a liar beside whom Ananias would have been a saint, Cagliostro a child, and Barry Lyndon a novice. As for Casanova, I simply hate to think how small he would have felt beside that dear, dead, faithful husband. I have told you how, throughout the time I knew him, I was not even aware that he was married; but there was not only nothing in his conversation, but there was less than nothing in his behaviour, to indicate that he had a wife in England for whose company he was passionately longing. I may say that I have never yet met a man who gave the appearance of passionately longing for his own wife less. I had nothing against him, mind you; he was a charming bachelor, a gay companion, and, if you will permit a small vulgarity, could resist a pretty woman about as much as a mouse can resist a cheese. He was certainly a shining light among the crude passions let loose by war; in fact, he shone magnificently; and a patriotic element in me was, in a dim kind of way, only too pleased to see him at it, for Frenchmen are nowadays so uppish about their talents at _le Sport_, what with one thing and another, that it was pleasant to see an Englishman teaching them a thing or two about the one which, with boxing, they are most cocksure about. By the way, Lord Tarlyon, I wonder if you will agree with me when I suggest that this modern fashion among Englishwomen of decrying Englishmen as lovers in comparison to foreigners is not only getting very tedious but is, so I heard in a discussion on the matter with a student of my acquaintance, entirely without foundation in fact?”

“Our friend Trevor,” said Tarlyon, with a sombre nod, “has been actively engaged in propaganda to that effect for some time: and with, I am told, no small measure of success.”

“I am sincerely glad to hear that, Mr. Trevor; for it is by the accumulation of such small cancerous growths, perhaps scarcely significant in themselves but considerable in their rolling together, that the heart of an Empire is affected and its body grows rotten. The Dominion of Canada looks to you gentlemen of England to combat such insidious errors, which may seem harmless enough as part of the merry prattle of young ladies, but are, I am persuaded, detrimental to our particular civilisation. However....” Mr. Fall waved aside our particular civilisation for the time being, and lit another cigar. He continued:

“The fever which proved fatal to this amorous gentleman in Rome was caused by exposure to the treacherous chill of that city in the early hours of the morning when, I am told, even a strong man’s vitality is at its lowest; and the contrast between a warm place and the cold streets towards a hotel is sometimes more than the human constitution will bear. It has been my part to have had to sit and listen to his praises by the hour, and at his name I have had to endure seeing tears spring to the eyes of a noble and beautiful lady. With her I have stood by his grave, and on it I have emptied the contents of Solomon’s windows. I have sat close beside her, and longed to touch her hand, to kiss her hair, to express even the surface of my passion--I have known that, perhaps, in happier circumstances, she might not have pushed away my hand nor denied my kiss--and I have also known that she would not allow herself for one second to deviate from the path she had set herself, the path of self-sacrifice to the memory of a man who, I knew, had never spent a moment of his life in thinking about her. Have some brandy.

“It may seem strange to you, Lord Tarlyon, and to you, Mr. Trevor, that I should confide in you with so little restraint. But, as I told you in throwing myself upon your kind attention, I lack the breeding which could alone give me an instinctive direction in such a matter. I need guidance, Lord Tarlyon. I am in a damnable case; and in the last few weeks I have been seeking refuge from a position which becomes more insupportable every moment--and the more so, you understand, because I can see I am not altogether distasteful to the lady--in wondering whether, in some recess in the code of honour, there is no decent way out of this damnable lie. That in particular is why, Lord Tarlyon, I was so anxious to see you, and to put the matter before you. Is there, for a man of honour, no way out of a mess like this? Is it utterly impossible for me to shatter her illusions about her late--her extremely late, in his nightly habits--husband? Is there nothing I can do but look sulky every time the man’s name is mentioned? But I have tried that, and I am afraid she takes it as the expression of a sympathy too deep for words. What can I do, Lord Tarlyon? Or perhaps you, Mr. Trevor, can suggest some way out? Have some brandy.”

A silence fell on us a while. At last I said:

“I’m afraid, Mr. Fall, as you have honoured me by asking for my advice, that there seems to be nothing you _can_ do but what you have already done--to wait. Maybe sometime ... she ... well, you know what I mean.” I hope he did, for I was by no means sure....

“And you, Lord Tarlyon?”

“Well,” said George, very thoughtfully, with his eyes somewhere on the table, “as you ask me, I must say that your behaviour throughout seems to me to have been irreproachable, and I respect you enormously for it. I can’t say fairer than that. But,” and he looked across at Mr. Fall; and he smiled at him a grave smile, “neither can I for the life of me see how you can break away from the position you are in. It seems beastly--but, since you’ve asked my advice, I can only suggest that you must just wait. You can’t, as you have said, shatter the illusion--you can’t, as a man of honour. A cad, of course, would long ago have stepped into the breach and away with the body--I mean, booty. Your brandy is marvellous, Mr. Fall. But, as I was saying, I can’t for the life of me see that you can do anything but just wait and look sulky whenever you get the chance....”

“You will forgive my boring you?” Mr. Fall put to us sincerely.

“It would be too cold-blooded of us to say we have been entertained,” I began----

“But,” said Tarlyon, “we have certainly not been bored. And I only wish we could have been of some use----”

“I just wanted cor-rob-or-ation,” Mr. Fall murmured softly, sadly. “Have some brandy.”

IV

It was past one o’clock when George Tarlyon and I set foot again in Grosvenor Square; we walked up South Audley Street, and I stopped at my door.

“Good-night, George,” I said. But Tarlyon held my arm.

“You are coming home with me,” says he.

“Nonsense!” said I; and though I was friendly, I was firm. “There was once a woman in a play by Shaw who amazed five continents by the magic words, ‘Not bloody likely.’ At this moment I am that woman, and it is thus that I refuse your solicitations. I have drunk brandy, and I would sleep. Good-night, George Almeric St. George.”

But he is a very tall man, and he dragged me by the arm down South Audley Street, the while crying mighty cries after the manner of one who wants a taxi immediately; and into one he threw me, and the taxi hurled itself towards Belgrave Square, where George Tarlyon lives in a house which, together with much money, was left to him by his wife, who died before she could make a will.

I was very angry, and insisted that he should make a note of it.

“There, there,” he soothed me. “All I want you to do, Ralph, is to leer in the offing while I ring up a lady. I do so hate to do that kind of thing alone.”

I pointed out that she couldn’t be much of a lady if he could ring her up at that unearthly hour; he warned me to leave his friends alone; I said I wouldn’t touch them at the end of a barge-pole, and then I composed myself to sleep. The taxi hurled itself across Hyde Park Corner, and dreamily I heard Tarlyon’s voice:

“I am not only going to telephone a lady, but I am going to insult a lady intolerably. And in case my invention should run low, I want you, Ralph, to stand by and suggest some more intolerable insults....”

And dreamily I heard Tarlyon’s voice:

“She keeps her telephone beside her bed, and so she must answer; and lo! I will insult her intolerably.”

The taxi stopped, and very soon the receiver was to his ear, while I leered at him from the depths of an arm-chair.

“Have some brandy,” said Tarlyon, but I sneered at him.

But what he said down the telephone, I cannot repeat. These things should only be spoken of privately, as between man and man. All I can do is to give a brief outline of his speech and a summary of the conclusions at which he arrived. He spoke at length of her character, of which he seemed to take an unfavourable view; he took grave exception to the manner of her life; and he begged her to hold him excused, in future, from any closer relationship than that of a distant acquaintance. She must have said he was drunk, for he denied any undue excess, while reserving to himself the right to think she was probably a secret drinker.

He began, I thought, rather subtly: on a matter which has been discussed between ladies and gentlemen ever since Solomon took a fancy to the Queen of Sheba and put off all dinner engagements for a week. In the gentlest way Tarlyon begged to be excused from dining with her on the following night. No, it was not that he had discovered a previous engagement; no, he couldn’t say that. The truth was, he said, that he had found something better to do; he hadn’t, he added, had to look very hard. He then proceeded to give his reasons for never wishing to see her again, and these he deduced (_a_) from flaws in her character, (_b_) from fissures in her temperament, and (_c_) from structural errors in her personal appearance. He pointed out that he was putting himself to this trouble only for her good, and in memory of his long friendship with her late husband, whom he had known ever since they were at Oxford and Cambridge together. I can only put down the fact that she did not ring off before she did to some fatal fascination in his voice, which was throughout smooth and reasonable in tone.

“That woman,” he explained, “is a very clever woman. She has the kind of brains that don’t generally go with beauty; and if I had any political ambitions, or any indoor ambitions of any kind, I would marry her like a shot. She has been thinking this last year that I might marry her, but I’ve just managed to keep the conversation off that. For, though one doesn’t deserve an angel, one needn’t marry a devil. Meanwhile, however, I’ve grown fond of her, and I’ve taken no trouble to hide from her that I admire her enormously; and so she has kept me dangling for a year, doing neither one thing or the other--indeed, why should she?--on the off-chance that I might marry her; for though Viscounts are not what they were, Ralph, a wealthy Viscount was to her mind just preferable to a wealthy Canadian of a certain age. And so she has kept poor old Cyrus Fall, who adores her, as I’ve known for the last ten months or so, hanging on as her second string, palming off that ghastly lie on him about a husband she never cared a damn about--she’s just kept him hanging on, while she waited to see whether I’d toe the line or not; and if not.... But I’m rather sorry about it all, Ralph, for she is a clever and amusing woman, and I shall miss begging her to put off Mr. Fall to dine with me.”

“Poor old Cyrus Fall!” I murmured. “But then--why poor? He adores the woman--no matter how cunning she is, he adores her. And so on....”

“Exactly,” said Tarlyon. “There are men, Ralph, who would warn Mr. Fall against that woman, whereas we are throwing her into his arms. For we, Ralph, know that no matter how thoroughly he finds her out, as he surely will, he will not cease to adore her; for it is not virtue that men and women love in each other----”

“Quite,” said I, “Good-night.”

V

A week later, there was announced in the _Morning Post_, which somehow always seems to know about these things, the engagement of Mr. Cyrus Fall to Mrs. Leycester-Craven, widow of Major Leycester-Craven of the ----. The same morning Mr. Fall rang up Lord Tarlyon.

“Pleased if you’d take luncheon with me to-day,” said Mr. Fall.

“Sorry,” said Tarlyon. “Already luncheoning.”

“Cocktail?”

“Well, why not?”

“Ritz, one o’clock?”

“Right,” said Tarlyon.

* * * * *

Tarlyon grasped the outstretched hand, and wrung it.

“Congratulations,” he murmured.

“Thank _you_,” said Mr. Fall.

Tarlyon raised his eyebrows.

“But is the man mad?” he asked. “What on earth for?”

“For your advice to the lady, Lord Tarlyon,” said Mr. Fall gently.

Tarlyon jumped in his chair, and he stared at Cyrus Fall.

“You don’t mean to tell me that she told you!” he gasped.

“Oh, no!” Mr. Fall assured him. “Oh, no! She has never mentioned your name, and I haven’t the faintest idea of what you said to her. But I knew that you would say something, Lord Tarlyon--as a man of honour. That is why I told you of my dilemma that night--after which, as a man of honour, you could do but one thing, since my intentions were serious and yours were not. A cocktail?”

“I’ll have some brandy,” whispered Tarlyon.