CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH TWO MODERN LOVERS LAY THEIR CASES BEFORE ME AND I DO NOTHING FOR EITHER

I have had two lovers to see me: such different ones too. The first was Dollie Heathcote, very nervous--for him; which means that his eyeglass dropped ten times in a quarter of an hour instead of only five times. If he would wear a cord this would not matter; but as he has an objection to do so, a great deal of his time is spent on the floor, which, in one so thoughtful of the knees of his trousers, is a curious anomaly.

"Look here, Mr. Falconer," said Dollie, "you know the world and you're married. What do you advise me to do? Do you think I'm really a marrying man?"

"Not impetuously," I replied.

"Oh," he said, "no rotting. You see, it's like this. I'm awfully keen on Ann and she's keen on me, I believe, but I've had a bit of a facer lately. There's my brother Dick, for example, a much better sort than I am--much steadier and domesticated and all that--well, he's just left his wife for no other reason than because he's tired of her. Whether there's anyone else, I don't know; fellows at the Club tell me there always is. But Dick swears there isn't. Anyway, he's gone. That's one thing. Another thing is that I had a fearful jaw the other day from an old aunt of mine who says it's the cruellest and wickedest thing there is to be engaged to a girl for a long time and not marry her; because the girl's losing the best years of her life. That set me thinking, because don't you see there's always the possibility that Ann, although she doesn't mind knocking about with me, might, if she were free, meet some other Johnnie whom she would want to marry at once."

"How would you like to see her doing that?" I asked.

"Oh, I couldn't stand it," said Dollie.

"Then why don't you marry now?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "for one thing, Ann doesn't seem to want to, and for another, I don't much want to myself."

"But you're so keen on her, you say," I remarked.

"Yes, of course I am. But the word husband's so stuffy."

I groaned for the younger generation.

"Yes," he went on, "I'm glad you agree with me. And there's something so ghastly in the thought of settling down, don't you know."

"Well, that's what so many people like--the settlement of it. But look at your friend Farrar, he's not exactly a home-bird, yet he and his wife seem very happy, and they lead, married, very much the same life that you do, unmarried."

"That's true," said Dollie. "But he's Farrar, and I'm not. I'm another Johnnie altogether--the sort that's ever so much happier engaged than he will be when he's married; and so's Ann, I believe; but the silly thing about it is that we're only so happy now because the idea is we're going to be married--otherwise she wouldn't be allowed to go about with me at all. Isn't that what you call a bally paradox? But anyhow, what do you advise?"

"Suppose I were to say," I replied, "that my advice to you was to marry at once."

He started nervously. "Oh, I say," he said. "Not really. But that would be awfully risky, you know. Look at poor old Dick--suppose I got tired like that too? And it's not impossible, you know. Why, I was awfully fond of Naomi once, and then you remember Miss Verity. I was fearfully gone there for a while. Do you really think I ought to make the plunge?"

"Then suppose," I said, "that my advice was, go to Ann and say that you have realized that you don't love her enough"--he started nervously again--"and wish to break off your engagement."

"Oh, but," he said, "I don't. I should be miserable without her. And so would she."

"Well," I said, "since no practical advice would meet your views, as I suspected, the only thing I can give is a sermon, or address, on the dangers of the new cult of diversion which deprives the character of any intensity, and leave you to draw the right moral. But I'm not going to do that. You are both obviously very weak in what the phrenologists call philo-progenitiveness. If you could only develope that bump the problem would solve itself. That, however, is a counsel of perfection. My advice, then, is this: in the words of an illustrious statesman, cultivate an attitude of expectant hesitancy."

Dollie looked very blank.

"Put in another way," I said, "wait and see."

"Oh, I say," he said, "no chaff!"

"But I really mean it," I said.

"Honour bright?" he asked.

"Absolutely," I said.

"Thanks awfully," he replied, shaking my hand. "Tophole. That's a great load off my mind."

I was glad to see him go.

The bore about the people who ask for advice is that they never tell everything; and it is just the reservations that make the case complex.

The second lover was poor Spanton.

"How's Nancy?" I asked.

His face fell. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I wanted to see you about Nancy. She has broken off our engagement. I had her letter this morning, and of course I went down at once to put the matter right. You see, she has been away on a visit and must have come under some foolish influence. She's a very impressionable girl. I couldn't get her to admit this, but I'm sure it's the case. Nothing that I said was any good. For the moment she is out of her mind, I think. She simply refused to discuss it, merely saying that she had discovered that she did not feel for me as deeply as she ought to if we were to marry. So absurd to talk like that at her age and with her inexperience, when, as I told her, I had deliberately chosen her--picked her out from all the other girls I knew."

Luckily he sprang up at this moment and began to pace about, or he would have seen my face.

"I went on to remind her," he continued, "of the campaign we had planned for ourselves--my great social amelioration programme--and showed her how she was breaking faith not only with me, but with the country, the race. Useless. She merely repeated her original phrase like a parrot. I left her and appealed to Mr. Freeland, but he said he should not interfere. Nancy was old enough to know. Don't worry her now, he said: give her another week's holiday. I saw Mrs. Freeland, who is, of course, as you must have noticed, desperately out of date; and she, too, declined to fight for me. She was very sorry, she said, and hoped that Nancy knew her own mind; but how much better to discover a mistake early rather than late! You know how people always say this, and when it is a mistake I agree with them; but this is not a mistake, but the simulacrum of a mistake. How can Nancy know her own mind when she has not got one? She is a dear, sweet girl, and I was devoted to her--am devoted to her--but she has no mind. It was I who was to give her that."

What was I to say to him? Was I to say--what was of course evident to anyone but himself--that she had found some simple fellow on her own level whom she liked better? Was I to say, "You silly young ass, you deserve to lose her for not taking her as she was and loving that, instead of playing the dictator and unsexing her? For the best thing in the world is a pretty, affectionate girl true to her nature, and the silliest thing is a pretty, affectionate girl pretending to be something she is not."

Either of these speeches I might have made, but instead I sympathized with him and advised him to wait a little longer before confessing complete failure.

"No," he said; "her attitude was final. I don't feel as if I could reopen the matter. All those laughing sisters, too."

(I liked to hear that human note.)

"No, I shall go abroad for a while and then gather up the fragments and begin again. But of course I shan't marry now. That's the end of women for me."

And with these words, which the ironical gods must be so tired of hearing, he strode away.

It was, I must admit, a little to my relief. It is difficult to take these perplexities of other persons seriously. One somehow has the feeling that one's own wedding should be the last.

Spanton does not admit that he has been in any way to blame about Nancy. He is still the same ardent futurist, unshaken in anything but woman's stability (in which, however, of course; he never had much belief); yet, none the less, when we were on a motor bus the other day, bowling down the Hampstead Road like an avalanche, I saw a wistful expression come into his face as he watched two lovers on the seat in front of us. They were quite common, from the superior point of view, he a shop assistant or clerk and she a clerk or shop assistant, and her engagement ring was only a pearl surrounded by five little turquoises; but they were as near as possible to each other, and one happiness did for both, and the only words I caught were his, in a lull in the racket made by our terrible vehicle, when he finished a sentence by saying, "And of course I shall _have_ to obey you _then_." A sickening sentiment for Spanton to hear, yet none the less, although a spasm crossed his face, it did not kill the wistful look.

What I am now wondering is whether he has learnt anything from what has happened. Because, of course, many of us learn so badly, and Spanton is so lacking in humility, which is the seed-of-learning's most fruitful soil. That Nancy has made no mistake, I feel convinced; nor will any bitterness be hers. There she is fortunate. One of the hardest things in life, and for women, is that it is only by failing to make one woman happy that many a man acquires the experience which is to serve him in succeeding with another.