“She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she’s as good as said as much to Marchant”—Marchant had been Tietjens’ old nurse.
Suddenly—and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his head—Macmaster remarked:
“You can’t say the man wasn’t a poet!”
The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens’ forelock and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish often go speckled with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap off to bowl.
But Macmaster’s mind, taking appalled change, had felt assured that Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife’s letter: in four hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in Macmaster had been quite subconscious. He would not, advisedly, have introduced the painter-poet as a topic.
Tietjens said:
“I haven’t said anything at all that I can remember.”
The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:
“ ‘Since,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘when we stand side by side
“ ‘Only hands may meet,
Better half this weary world
Lay between us, sweet!
Better far tho’ hearts may break
Bid farewell for aye!
Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine,
Tempt my soul away!’
“You can’t,” he continued, “say that that isn’t poetry! Great poetry.”
“I can’t say,” Tietjens answered contemptuously. “I don’t read poetry except Byron. But it’s a filthy picture. …”
Macmaster said uncertainly:
“I don’t know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?”
“It isn’t painted!” Tietjens said. “But it’s there!”
He continued with sudden fury:
“Damn it. What’s the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? England’s mad about it. Well, you’ve got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! Or leave me out at least. I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.”
Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling:
“You daren’t … you daren’t talk like that,” he stuttered.
“I dare!” Tietjens answered; “but I oughtn’t to … to you! I admit that. But you oughtn’t, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, either. It’s an insult to my intelligence.”
“Certainly,” Macmaster said stiffly, “the moment was not opportune.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Tietjens answered. “The moment can never be opportune. Let’s agree that making a career is a dirty business—for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.”
“You’re getting esoteric,” Macmaster said faintly.
“I’ll underline,” Tietjens went on. “I quite understand that the favour of Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear of that old don Ingleby.”
Macmaster said:
“Damn!”
“I quite agree,” Tietjens continued, “I quite approve. It’s the game as it has always been played. It’s the tradition, so it’s right. It’s been sanctioned since the days of the Précieuses Ridicules.”
“You’ve a way of putting things,” Macmaster said.
“I haven’t,” Tietjens answered. “It’s just because I haven’t that what I do say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I stand for monogamy.”
Macmaster uttered a “You!” of amazement.
Tietjens answered with a negligent “I!” He continued:
“I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course, if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda. …”
“You call that monogamy and chastity!” Macmaster interjected.
“I do,” Tietjens answered. “And it probably is, at any rate it’s clean. What is loathesome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That’s all right if you can get your club to change its rules.”
“You’re out of my depth,” Macmaster said. “And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don’t like it.”
“I’m probably being disagreeable,” Tietjens said. “Jeremiahs usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years’ close time for discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca—and Dante’s—went, very properly, to Hell, and no bones about it. You don’t get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven.”
“He doesn’t,” Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity:
“Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop boys …”
“I’ll admit,” Macmaster coincided, “that Briggs is going too far. I told him only last Thursday at Mrs. Limoux’s. …”
“I’m not talking of anyone in particular,” Tietjens said. “I don’t read novels. I’m supposing a case. And it’s a cleaner case than that of your pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don’t read novels, but I follow tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it’s relatively respectable. It would be better just to boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. But …”
“You carry joking too far sometimes,” Macmaster said. “I’ve warned you about it.”
“I’m as solemn as an owl!” Tietjens rejoined. “The lower classes are becoming vocal. Why shouldn’t they? They’re the only people in
