Evelyn Sharp

“ To be able to laugh at ourselves is the great thing," murmured Lady Joan.
"There is nothing so depressing," continued the musician, without heeding the interruption, "as the spectacle of a man who will not face his own wickedness—or even his own goodness. It is a sign of the age, this wretched spirit of compromise; we don't live in town because it is unhealthy, and the fogs are so bad—"
"My dear, that was not the reason," Lady Raleigh murmured—also unheeded. ”

“ But Lady Joan did all the while that she sat by Norah Bisley on the horse-hair sofa, downstairs in the oak-panelled parlor.
The child stirred in his sleep.
"Happy Sonny," murmured the musician, sentimentally, "your turn has yet to come. Why can't children always remain children? Norah ought never to have grown up; she was meant for eternal childhood. It was a mistake to make Lady Joan a child at all, she ought to have been born a full-grown woman. I ought never to have been born at all, of course. ”

“ The musician was thinking that he knew now which one he wanted to marry, and that it did not matter if his love affairs went wrong so long as there was music to be made.
Lady Joan went on with her shawl, and reflected that if she lived to be a hundred she should never understand musical people or their ways.
Norah lay with her brown eyes full of tears, and she was thinking that love was the strongest thing in the world, for it could outlive its ideals. ”

“ Digby would never have thought of looking out for a wife at all if it had not been for my persuasions; he was far too fond of Ibsen, and Schopenhauer, and Bernard Shaw, and all those tiresome people. At all events, I never allowed a week to pass without asking him to dinner, and the picture of my domestic happiness must have done something for him. Ah, well, my work is done now; and thank God my ideal of friendship is too high to stand in the way of his marrying, though I have felt towards him like a sister, and it is hard at first to give up my place to another. ”

“ Tell me you are not angry with me, Digby,—and—when may I have my kiss, please?"
He took her mechanically into his arms and kissed the mouth that was held up to him, and he experienced dully the sort of shock that an unconventional man feels when a woman he has always considered the type of purity does something which a woman of the world would know better than to risk her reputation by doing. Upstairs, in the room overhead, he could hear Lady Joan singing his child to sleep. ”

“ The musician walked back to the inn and tried to persuade himself that he was a disappointed man.
"My engagements never do seem to go right," he thought dejectedly, as he leaned out of the parlor window and looked vaguely among the fruit-trees. The door was pushed open from without, and a rush of red sunshine and childish footsteps came into the room.
"Here I are, daddy! Where is you, daddy? I've been a naughty boy, welly naughty Nanny says, 'cos I didn't say grace at tea-time. Why don't you never say grace, my daddy? When I are a big man I aren't never going to say grace no more! ”

“ How can you argue at breakfast time? And I think you might keep your horrid atheistical notions to yourself before the children," cried Helen, crossly. She had not recovered from her passage of arms with the Squire.
Digby plodded on with his breakfast and his theory.
"We are all the same, as a family. Take the father: he would lay down his life for the working-man, or he thinks so; and yet he is afraid to go in for Socialism, which offers the only solution to the labor question. It is an age of compromise; we are all cowards." ”

“ Besides, I can't tell him myself; how do they know?"
"They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all."
Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct.
"All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. ”

“ Jack had caught him by the coat in a sudden paroxysm of nervous fury, and Digby found himself half throttled and pinned against the stone wall of the portico, while a loud peal from the door-bell resounded through the house.
"You brute—you! Why do you want to keep me from her? If you were any one else standing between her and me I would wipe the floor with you. There—clear out, can't you? Oh, hang it, I've been half crazed to meet her all day, and now—that devilish suggestion of yours—ah! can't you go, you?" ”

“ Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cushion, and the pale green glass pot with a lid, and the shining porcelain shepherdess with a chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever composed, to some words by George Meredith.
"Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much. ”

“ Why can't I make myself heard in my own house? Is it—can it—oh, tell me who it is!"
A moment's breathless silence was followed by a shout of laughter as the unmistakable corduroys of the handy man came into view.
"George, George, come here," exclaimed Lady Raleigh; "you must not leave this spot all day long, as Master Jack may be here at any minute. Do you understand? So go into the field at once and get the pony in, and you had better have him harnessed, all ready to go to the station. And will you go now to the post-office and see if there is a telegram? ”

“ For besides being an interesting musician with a studio in the West End, he had views on metaphysics and Socialism as well, and although his warm discussions of these and other modern subjects conveyed little but confused notions to the minds of his feminine hearers, yet his enthusiasm only lent him a more potent charm in their eyes.
"Not yet, Mrs. Routh, no, no, not yet," he exclaimed earnestly, "we are not ready, not fit for it yet. Socialism has to come first; the people must be taught the meaning of life and humanity before they can be made ready for music. ”

“ He was thinking that the courtship was not going as smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not live without her for his wife.
"Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?" ”

“ I wish there were a piano here; it would do us both so much good, wouldn't it, dear?"
Digby looked at his wife's gentle face as she bent it over her needlework, and he counted the regular folds of her soft gray gown and the coils of brown hair round her head, and he made a few mental reflections on the marvellous nature of woman.
"I cannot conceive what it must be to live without the love of music," she went on unconsciously in her low tuneful voice. "Music is like religion in that way, I think; we may try to do without it when we are happy, but we want it terribly when the trials come. ”

“ How helpless men are! Take baby a minute, will you? There, you have set her off again, just when I had quieted her. She has taken cold in the night, that's what it is. Hush, hush! There then, it sha'n't, that it sha'n't!"
"After all," began the musician in a momentary lull, "I do think Plato—"
"Will you give Digby something to eat, Joan, dear?" interposed Norah gently; and peace presently pervaded the breakfast-table.
"The lambs is fat, isn't they, daddy?" asked Sonny, from the window-seat. "How does the lambs know, daddy, which sheep is their right mother?" ”

“ And finally she thought about nothing at all as she yielded to the drowsiness of the hot spring morning, and rested her cheek against a background of green creepers and became conscious of nothing but a confused medley of well-known sounds,—the loud ticking of the clock in the way trifles assert their importance after an event, the tuneless humming of the child on the floor, the warning bell of the postman's bicycle as he came round the corner of the street, and the splash of the ducks he frightened into the pond as he came. ”

“ He has no theories about things, and he does not want to upset creation, and he doesn't take life so desperately seriously. It is such a blessing to meet some one who is content with the age as it is—bah! what a smell of tobacco smoke!"
And she rose, shut the window with a bang, and went to bed, where she slept soundly till the morning.
"It is curious," murmured the musician, lighting another cigarette, "how Fate seems to have propelled her towards me at every crisis of my life; just after Mary died, for instance, and again before I met Norah!—poor little Norah! ”

“ I dislike all kinds of sentimental effusion, and society lions, especially when they are musical ones, are singularly unpleasing to me. There can be no flattery where true genius exists, and if we were to reserve our praise for real hidden talent," she paused as the musician came within hearing and repeated her last words in a louder tone, "real hidden talent, music would at last find her rightful place of honor among us. Do you not think so, Mr. Digby?" ”

“ Lady Joan went up to her town house at the end of the summer, but her philanthropic campaign was not a success. The field of philanthropy was overcrowded just then with people like herself, who had too little wealth and too much energy to be of any practical use to the great organizers of charity, who never wanted anything from their devotees but subscriptions and obedience; a reformer does not want to be interfered with by a penniless nobody who has independent views concerning his method of reform. ”

“ The musician laughed heartily.
"What a fuss ladies make about trifles. If you had a man to manage your affairs—"
"But I haven't," she said quickly, and looked him full in the face; "I thought of getting one, but—it has fallen through."
The musician did not laugh any more, and Norah's big eyes began to shine again. Lady Joan felt she had fully deserved that little bit of revenge. But it was not amusing enough to carry any further, and she was beginning to weary of the protracted love-making of the day, especially now that she was no longer a principal actor in the play. ”

“ It is the spirit of altruism that has to be diffused among us, and when we have once realized that the 'will to live' as Schopenhauer puts it, is the one to be controlled, and that the finest of all things is to die,—that is, of course, to live,—to live for the good of the Commonwealth, then shall we be prepared for the enjoyment of perfect art, and then shall the musician,—that is, of course, the art of the musician,—be allowed to exist without such sordid considerations as bread and butter and a roof. ”

“ Among a mass of other inconsistencies, which almost likened him to a schoolboy who is having a romp through life instead of playing the game seriously, the Squire, while considering his children in the light of impedimenta, yet cherished a passionate affection for the least worthy of them all, for the one to whom nature had decreed that he should bequeath, with a liberality he had shown his children in no other respect, the largest share of his own failings. ”

“ She wants to know you after your marriage, my dear. That is where you will feel your inexperience, when these designing clever women come and play upon your ignorance in order to get at your husband. You will feel the want of some nice sensible married woman, not too old, who has been through it all, and can help you to see through them. I've no patience with these women who won't have husbands of their own, but must needs go running after other people's. Ah-h, Mr. Digby, is it really true that we are to hear the last movement of the trio this afternoon? ”

“ Another man, a less easily impressed one, might have been killed by the suddenness of Jack's death; but Sir Marcus, although his infatuation for his scapegrace son had been the deepest attachment he had ever felt for any one, had been really more affected by the tragedy of his end than by his actual death; and so it came about that he was considerably aged by the shock, and yet was able to return again to his books and his hobbies.
"Philanthropy in town is all a mistake, my dear," he answered her, hotly; "it's nothing but a trumped-up job among the swells, that's what it is, of course. ”

“ That is why he has gone wrong."
"Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was broken.
"He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home; and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his friendship for me was love. ”

“ You can't get over facts with any amount of Socialism; give me facts, that's what I always say," concluded Sir Marcus, happily innocent that all his life his one aim had been to avoid facts and the unpleasant truths they had forced upon him.
"I can hear wheels," said Lady Raleigh, suddenly. As she had made the same remark at intervals during the day, no one paid her any particular attention except Helen, who put out a protecting hand to the tea-table, as if she anticipated a rush. This time, however, there was undoubtedly a carriage coming up the drive ”

“ Helen, you must write at once, and, dear me! we must watch for every footstep all day; and there are the sheets too,—where is Nurse? Dear Lady Joan, you must forgive the emotions of a foolish old mother ”