Robert Hichens

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”