I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert’s courtship and come to the moment when—at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside—he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.
That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spyglass.
“Mr. Banks,” she said, “I will speak frankly.”
“Charge right ahead,” assented Cuthbert.
“Deeply sensible as I am of—”
“I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction—”
“Love is not everything.”
“You’re wrong,” said Cuthbert, earnestly. “You’re right off it. Love—” And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.
“I am a girl of ambition.”
“And very nice, too,” said Cuthbert.
“I am a girl of ambition,” repeated Adeline, “and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself—”
“What!” cried Cuthbert. “You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can’t have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints.”
“Well,” said Adeline, softening a trifle, “I believe I am fairly good-looking—”
“Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb.”
“But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself forever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity.”
“And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?”
“Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely ever to do anything worthwhile?”
Cuthbert hesitated.
“It’s true,” he said, “I didn’t finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was knocked out in the semifinal of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year.”
“The—what?”
“The French Open Championship. Golf, you know.”
“Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I admire a man who is more spiritual, more intellectual.”
A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert’s bosom.
“Like What’s-his-name Devine?” he said, sullenly.
“Mr. Devine,” replied Adeline, blushing faintly, “is going to be a great man. Already he has achieved much. The critics say that he is more Russian than any other young English writer.”
“And is that good?”
“Of course it’s good.”
“I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than any other young English writer.”
“Nonsense! Who wants an English writer to be English? You’ve got to be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success. The mantle of the great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine.”
“From what I’ve heard of Russians, I should hate to have that happen to me.”
“There is no danger of that,” said Adeline scornfully.
“Oh! Well, let me tell you that there is a lot more in me than you think.”
“That might easily be so.”
“You think I’m not spiritual and intellectual,” said Cuthbert, deeply moved. “Very well. Tomorrow I join the Literary Society.”
Even as he spoke the words his leg was itching to kick himself for being such a chump, but the sudden expression of pleasure on Adeline’s face soothed him; and he went home that night with the feeling that he had taken on something rather attractive. It was only in the cold, grey light of the morning that he realized what he had let himself in for.
I do not know if you have had any experience of suburban literary societies, but the one that flourished under the eye of Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst at Wood Hills was rather more so than the average. With my feeble powers of narrative, I cannot hope to make clear to you all that Cuthbert Banks endured in the next few weeks. And, even if I could, I doubt if I should do so. It is all very well to excite pity and terror, as Aristotle recommends, but there are limits. In the ancient Greek tragedies it was an ironclad rule that all the real rough stuff should take place offstage, and I shall follow this admirable principle. It will suffice if I say merely that J. Cuthbert Banks had a thin time. After attending eleven debates and fourteen lectures on vers libre Poetry, the Seventeenth-Century Essayists, the Neo-Scandinavian Movement in Portuguese Literature, and other subjects of a similar nature, he grew so enfeebled that, on the rare occasions when he had time for a visit to the links, he had to take a full iron for his mashie shots.
It was not simply the oppressive nature of the debates and lectures that sapped his vitality. What really got right in amongst him was the torture of seeing Adeline’s adoration of Raymond Parsloe Devine. The man seemed to have made the deepest possible impression upon her plastic emotions. When he spoke, she leaned forward with parted lips and looked at him. When he was not speaking—which was seldom—she leaned back and looked at him. And when he happened to take the next seat to her, she leaned sideways and looked at him. One glance at Mr. Devine would have been more than enough for Cuthbert; but Adeline found him a spectacle that never palled. She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice-cream. All this Cuthbert had to witness while still endeavouring to retain the possession of his faculties sufficiently to enable him to duck and back away if somebody suddenly asked him what he thought of the sombre realism of Vladimir Brusiloff. It is little wonder that he tossed in bed, picking at the coverlet, through sleepless nights, and had to have all his waistcoats taken in three inches to keep them from sagging.
This Vladimir Brusiloff to
