The Ivory Tower (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917)/The Ivory Tower/Book 3/Chapter 4
IV
Horton Vint, on being admitted that evening at the late Mr. Betterman's, walked about the room to which he had been directed and awaited there the friend of his younger time very much as we have seen that friend himself wait under stress of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of a crisis might have been almost equally sharp; he was alone for some minutes during which he shifted his place and circled, indulged in wide vague movements and vacuous stares at incongruous objects—the place being at once so spacious and so thickly provided—quite after the fashion in which Gray Fielder's nerves and imagination had on the same general scene sought and found relief at the hour of the finest suspense up to that moment possessing him. Haughty too, it would thus have appeared for the furtherance of our interest, had imagination and nerves—had in his way as much to reflect upon as we have allowed ourselves to impute to the dying Mr. Betterman's nephew. No one was dying now, all that was ended, or would be after the funeral, and the nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive, in face of great sequels, including preparations for those obsequies, with an intensity beyond all former experience. This in fact Horton had all the air of recognising under proof as soon as Gray advanced upon him with both hands out; he couldn't not have taken in the highly quickened state of the young black-clad figure so presented, even though soon and unmistakably invited to note that his own visit and his own presence had much to do with the quickening. Gray was in complete mourning, which had the effect of making his face show pale, as compared with old aspects of it remembered by his friend—who was, it may be mentioned, afterwards to describe him to Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these including the air of the big bedimmed palace room, for all the world like a sort of "happy Hamlet". For so happy indeed our young man at once proclaimed himself at sight of his visitor, for so much the most interesting thing that had befallen or been offered him within the week did he take, by his immediate testimony, his reunion with this character and every element of the latter's aspect and tone, that the pitch of his acclamation clearly had, with no small delay, to drop a little under some unavoidable reminder that they met almost in the nearest presence of death. Was the reminder Morton's own, some pull, for decorum, of a longer face, some expression of his having feared to act in undue haste on the message brought him by Davey?—which might have been, we may say, in view of the appearance after a little that it was Horton rather than Gray who began to suggest a shyness, momentary, without doubt, and determined by the very plenitude of his friend's welcome, yet so far incongruous as that it was not his adoption of a manner and betrayal of a cheer that ran the risk of seeming a trifle gross, but quite these indications on the part of the fortunate heir of the old person awaiting interment somewhere above. He could only have seen with the lapse of the moments that Gray was going to be simple—admirably, splendidly simple, one would probably have pronounced it, in estimating and comparing the various possible dangers; but the simplicity of subjects tremendously educated, tremendously "cultivated" and cosmopolitised, as Horton would have called it, especially when such persons were naturally rather extra-refined and ultra-perceptive, was a different affair from the crude candour of the common sort; the consequence of which apprehensions and reflections must have been, in fine, that he presently recognised in the product of "exceptional advantages" now already more and more revealed to him such a pliability of accent as would easily keep judgment, or at least observation, suspended. Gray wasn't going to be at a loss for any shade of decency that didn't depend, to its inconvenience, on some uncertainty about a guest's prejudice; so that once the air was cleared of awkwardness by that perception, exactly, in Horton's ready mind that he and his traditions, his susceptibilities, in fact (of all the queer things!) his own very simplicities and, practically, stupidities were being superfluously allowed for and deferred to, and that this, only this, was the matter, he should have been able to surrender without a reserve to the proposed measure of their common rejoicing. Beautiful might it have been to him to find his friend so considerately glad of him that the spirit of it could consort to the last point with any, with every, other felt weight in the consciousness so attested; in accordance with which we may remark that continued embarrassment for our gallant caller would have implied on his own side, or in other words deep within his own spirit, some obscure source of confusion.
What distinguishably happened was thus that he first took Graham for exuberant and then for repentant, with the reflection accompanying this that he mustn't, to increase of subsequent shame, have been too open an accomplice in mere jubilation. Then the simple sense of his restored comrade's holding at his disposal a general confidence in which they might absolutely breathe together would have superseded everything else hadn't his individual self-consciousness been perhaps a trifle worried by the very pitch of so much openness. Open, not less generously so, was what he could himself have but wanted to be—in proof of which we may conceive him insist to the happy utmost, for promotion of his comfort, on those sides of their relation the working of which would cast no shadow. They had within five minutes got over much ground—all of which, however, must be said to have represented, and only in part, the extent of Gray's requisition of what he called just elementary human help. He was in a situation at which, as he assured his friend, he had found himself able, those several days, but blankly and inanely to stare. He didn't suppose it had been his uncle's definite design to make an idiot of him, but that seemed to threaten as the practical effect of the dear man's extraordinary course. "You see," he explained, bringing it almost pitifully out, "he appears to have left me a most monstrous fortune. I mean"—for under his appeal Haughty had still waited a little—"a really tremendous lot of money."
The effect of the tone of it was to determine in Haughty a peal of laughter quickly repressed—or reduced at least to the intention of decent cheer. "He 'appears', my dear man? Do you mean there's an ambiguity about his will?"
Gray justified his claim of vagueness by having, with his animated eyes on his visitor's, to take an instant or two to grasp so technical an expression. "No—not an ambiguity. Mr. Crick tells me that he has never in all his experience seen such an amount of property disposed of in terms so few and simple and clear. It would seem a kind of masterpiece of a will."
"Then what's the matter with it?" Horton smiled. "Or at least what's the matter with you?—who are so remarkably intelligent and clever?"
"Oh no, I'm not the least little bit clever!" Gray in his earnestness quite excitedly protested. "I haven't a single ray of the intelligence that among you all here clearly passes for rudimentary. But the luxury of you, Haughty," he broke out on a still higher note, "the luxury, the pure luxury of you!"
Something of beauty in the very tone of which, some confounding force in the very clearness, might it have been that made Horton himself gape for a moment even as Gray had just described his own wit as gaping. They had first sat down, for hospitality offered and accepted—though with no production of the smokable or the drinkable to profane the general reference; but the agitation of all that was latent in this itself had presently broken through, and by the end of a few moments we might perhaps scarce have been able to say whether the host had more set the guest or the guest more the host in motion. Horton Vint had everywhere so the air of a prime social element that it took in any case, and above all in any case of the spacious provision or the sumptuous setting, a good deal of practically combative proof to reduce the implications of his presence to the minor right. He might inveterately have been master or, in quantitative terms, owner—so could he have been taken for the most part as offering you the enjoyment of anything fine that surrounded him: this in proportion to the scale of such matters and to any glimpse of that sense of them in you which was what came nearest to putting you on his level. All of which sprang doubtless but from the fact that his relation to things of expensive interest was so much at the mercy of his appearance; representing as it might be said to do a contradiction of the law under which it is mostly to be observed, in our modernest conditions, that the figure least congruous with scenic splendour is the figure awaiting the reference. More references than may here be detailed, at any rate, would Horton have seemed ready to gather up during the turns he had resumed his indulgence in after the original arrest and the measurements of the whole place practically determined for him by Gray's own so suggestive revolutions. It was positively now as if these last had all met, in their imperfect expression, what that young man's emotion was in the act of more sharply attaining to—the plain conveyance that if Horton had in his friendliness, not to say his fidelity, presumed to care to know, this disposition was as naught beside the knowledge apparently about to drench him. They were there, the companions, in their second brief arrest, with everything good in the world that he might have conceived or coveted just taking for him the radiant form of precious knowledges that he must be so obliging as to submit to. Let it be fairly inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness of his perception during these minutes of the possibilities of good involved; the refinement of pleasure in his seeing how the advantage thrust upon him would wear the dignity and grace of his consenting unselfishly to learn—inasmuch as, quite evidently, the more he learnt, and though it should be ostensibly and exclusively about Mr. Betterman's heir, the more vividly it all would stare at him as a marked course of his own. Wonderful thus the little space of his feeling the great wave set in motion by that quiet worthy break upon him out of Gray's face, Gray's voice, Gray's contact of hands laid all appealingly and affirmingly on his shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser light and the uncovered prospect, something like his entire personal future. Something extraordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to recognise it through a deepening consciousness, at the same time, of how he was more than matching the growth of his friend's need of him by growing there at once, and to rankness, under the friend's nose, all the values to which this need supplied a soil.
"Well, I won't pretend I'm not glad you don't adopt me as pure ornament—glad you see, I mean, a few connections in which one may perhaps be able, as well as certainly desirous, to be of service to you. Only one should honestly tell you," Horton went on, "that people wanting to help you will spring up round you like mushrooms, and that you'll be able to pick and choose as even a king on his throne can't. Therefore, my boy," Haughty said, "don't exaggerate my modest worth."
Gray, though releasing him, still looked at him hard—so hard perhaps that, having imagination, he might in an instant more have felt it go down too deep. It hadn't done that, however, when "What I want of you above all is exactly that you shall pick and choose" was merely what at first came of it. And the case was still all of the rightest as Graham at once added: "You see 'people' are exactly my difficulty—I'm so mortally afraid of them, and so equally sure that it's the last thing you are. If I want you for myself I want you still more for others—by which you may judge," said Gray, "that I've cut you out work."
"That you're mortally afraid of people is, I confess," Haughty answered, "news to me. I seem to remember you, on the contrary, as so remarkably and—what was it we used to call it?—so critico-analytically interested in 'em."
"That's just it—I am so beastly interested! Don't you therefore see," Gray asked, "how I may dread the complication?"
"Dread it so that you seek to work it off on another?"—and Haughty looked about as if he would after all have rather relished a cigarette.
Clearly, none the less, this awkwardness was lost on his friend. "I want to work off on you, Vinty, every blest thing that you'll let me; and when you've seen into my case a little further my reasons will so jump at your eyes that I'm convinced you'll have patience with them."
"I'm not then, you think, too beastly interested myself———? I've got such a free mind, you mean, and such a hard heart, and such a record of failure to have been any use at all to myself, that I must be just the person, it strikes you, to save you all the trouble and secure you all the enjoyment?" That inquiry Horton presently made, but with an addition ere Gray could answer. "My difficulty for myself, you see, has always been that I also am by my nature too beastly interested."
"Yes"—Gray promptly met it—"but you like it, take that easily, immensely enjoy it and are not a bit afraid of it. You carry it off and you don't pay for it."
"Don't you make anything," Horton simply went on, "of my being for instance so uncannily interested in yourself?"
Gray's eyes again sounded him. "Are you really and truly? to the extent of its not boring you?" But with all he had even at the worst to take for granted he waited for no reassurance. "You'll be so sorry for me that I shall wring your heart and you'll assist me for common pity."
"Well," Horton returned, a natural gaiety of response not wholly kept under, "how can I absurdly make believe that pitying you, if it conies to that, won't be enough against nature to have some fascination? Endowed with every advantage, personal, physical, material, moral, in other words, brilliantly clever, inordinately rich, strikingly handsome and incredibly good, your state yet insists on being such as to nip in the bud the hardy flower of envy. What's the matter with you to bring that about would seem, I quite agree, well worth one's looking into—even if it proves, by its perversity or its folly, something of a trial to one's practical philosophy. When I pressed you some minutes ago for the reason of your not facing the future with a certain ease you gave as that reason your want of education and wit. But please understand," Horton added, "that I've no time to waste with you on sophistry that isn't so much as plausible." He stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that his considering look might have seemed for the time to descend from a height designed a little to emphasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That young man's own eyes remained the while, none the less, unresentfully raised; to such an effect indeed that, after some duration of this exchange, the bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded into a still finer, and withal frankly kinder, curiosity. Poor Gray, with a strained face and an agitation but half controlled, breathed quick and hard, as from inward pressure, and then, renouncing choice—there were so many things to say—shook his head, slowly and repeatedly, after a fashion that discouraged levity. "My dear boy," said his friend under this sharper impression, "you do take it hard." Which made Graham turn away, move about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big chimney-piece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook, before the box went back to its shelf. Odd again might have been for a protected witness of this scene—which of course is exactly what you are invited to be—the lapse of speech that marked it for the several minutes. Horton, truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of something more important than his imagination, even at its best, could give him, and which, not less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he himself hadn't signs, either actual or possible, for. He waited while they did the place at last the inevitable small violence—this being long enough to make him finally say: "Do you mean, on your honour, that you don't like what has happened to you?"
This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible expression. "Of course I like it—that is of course I try to. I've been trying here, day after day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for anything; and yet I remain, don't you see? a wretched little worm."
"Deary, deary me," stared Horton, "that you should have to bring up your appreciation of it from such depths! You go in for it as you would for the electric light or the telephone, and then find half-way that you can't stand the expense and want the next-door man somehow to combine with you?"
"That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-door man!"—Gray embraced the analogy with glee. "I can't stand the expense, and yet I don't for a moment deny I should immensely enjoy the convenience. I want," he asseverated, "to like my luck. I want to go in for it, as you say, with every inch of any such capacity as I have. And I want to believe in my capacity; I want to work it up and develop it—I assure you on my honour I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling that if I don't I shall be a base creature, a worm of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll help me to develop. To develop my capacity I mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.
Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith; even, the cigarettes helping, to the verge again of hilarity. "Your capacity—I see. Not so much your property itself."
"Well"—Gray considered of it—"what will my property be except my capacity?" He spoke really as for the pleasure of seeing very finely and very far. "It won't if I don't like it, that is if I don't understand it, don't you see? enough to make it count. Yes, yes, don't revile me," he almost feverishly insisted: "I do want it to count for all it's worth, and to get everything out of it, to the very last drop of interest, pleasure, experience, whatever you may call it, that such a possession can yield. And I'm going to keep myself up to it, to the top of the pitch, by every art and prop, by every helpful dodge, that I can put my hand on. You see if I don't. I breathe defiance," he continued, with his rare radiance, "at any suspicion or doubt. But I come back," he had to add, "to my point that it's you that I essentially most depend on."
Horton again looked at him long and frankly; this subject of appeal might indeed for the moment have been as embarrassed between the various requisitions of response as Gray had just before shown himself. But as the tide could surge for one of the pair so it could surge for the other, and the large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared as soon as he had spoken. "The name of your complaint, you poor dear delightful person, or the name at least of your necessity, your predicament and your solution, is marriage to a wife at short order. I mean of course to an amiable one. There, so obviously, is your aid and your prop, there are the sources of success for interest in your fortune, and for the whole experience and enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere. What are you but just 'fixed' to marry, and what is the sense of your remarks but a more or less intelligent clamour for it?"
Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity and ease, was this question, and yet it had filled the air, for its moment, but to drop at once by the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recognition. "Oh of course I've thought of that—but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he been capable of disappointment in his friend he might almost have been showing it now.
Horton had, however, no heat about it. "You mean you absolutely don't want a wife—in connection, so to speak, with your difficulties; or with the idea, that is, of their being resolved into blessings?"
"Well"—Gray was here at least all prompt and clear—"I keep down, in that matter, so much as I can any a priori or mere theoretic want. I see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean—I somehow don't see it at all as a cause. A cause, that is"—he easily worked it out—"of my getting other things right. It may be, in conditions, the greatest rightness of all; but I want to be sure of the conditions."
"The first of which is, I understand then"—for this at least had been too logical for Haughty not to have to match it—"that you should fall so tremendously in love that you won't be able to help yourself."
Graham just debated; he was all intelligence here. "Falling tremendously in love—the way you grands amoureux talk of such things!"
"Where do you find, my boy," Horton asked, "that I'm a grand amoureux?"
Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of their young days together; there was the admission, under pressure, that he might have confused the appearances. "They were at any rate always up and at you—which seems to have left me with the impression that your life is full of them."
"Every man's life is full of them that has a door or a window they can come in by. But the question's of yourself," said Haughty, "and just exactly of the number of such that you'll have to keep open or shut in the immense façade you'll now present."
Our young man might well have struck him as before all else inconsequent. "I shall present an immense façade?"—Gray, from his tone of surprise, to call it nothing more, would have thought of this for the first time.
But Horton just hesitated. "You've great ideas if you see it yourself as a small one."
"I don't see it as any. I decline," Gray remarked, "to have a façade. And if I don't I shan't have the windows and doors."
"You've got 'em already, fifty in a row"—Haughty was remorseless—"and it isn't a question of 'having': you are a façade; stretching a mile right and left. How can you not be when I'm walking up and down in front of you?"
"Oh you walk up and down, you make the things you pass, and you can behave of course if you want like one of the giants in uniform, outside the big shops, who attend the ladies in and out. In fact," Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. I'll be hanged if I consent to take up an inch more than suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated I've at least means to be quiet. Every one among us—I mean among the moneyed—isn't a monster on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded. "I know people myself who aren't."
Horton considered him with amusement, as well apparently as the people that he knew! "Of course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground that ever was dug—spade-work comes high, but you'll have the means—and get down into it and sit at the very bottom. Only your hole will become then the feature of the scene, and we shall crowd a thousand deep all round the edge of it."
Gray stood for a moment looking down, then faced his guest as with a slight effort. "Do you know about Rosanna Gaw?" And then while Horton, for reasons of his own, failed at once to answer: "She has come in for millions———"
"Twenty-two and a fraction," Haughty said at once. "Do you mean that she sits, like Truth, at the bottom of a well?" he asked still more divertedly.
Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't call a façade———!"
"You don't call her one?"—Haughty took it right up. And he added as for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man———!"
"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.
Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this time to a light, wait in silence for his word. "She does more than that"—it was brought quite dryly out. "She loathes every separate dollar she possesses."
Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though it was, could just stare at this extravagance of assent; seeing however, on second thoughts, what there might be in it. "Well then if what I have is a molehill beside her mountain, I can the more easily emulate her in standing back."
"What you have is a molehill?" Horton was concerned to inquire.
Gray showed a shade of guilt, but faced his judge. "Well—so I gather."
The judge at this lost patience. "Am I to understand that you positively cultivate vagueness and water it with your tears?"
"Yes"—the culprit was at least honest—"I should rather say I do. And I want you to let me. Do let me."
"It's apparently more then than Miss Gaw does!"
"Yes"—Gray again considered; "she seems to know more or less what she's worth, and she tells me that I can't even begin to approach it."
"Very crushing of her!" his friend laughed. "You 'make the pair', as they say, and you must help each other much. Her 'loathing' it exactly is—since we know all about it!—that gives her a frontage as wide as the Capitol at Washington. Therefore your comparison proves little—though I confess it would rather help us," Horton pursued, "if you could seem, as you say, to have asked one or two of the questions that I should suppose would have been open to you."
"Asked them of Mr. Crick, you mean?"
"Well, yes—if you've nobody else, and as you appear not to have been able to have cared to look at the will yourself."
Something like a light of hope, at this, kindled in Gray's face. "Would you care to look at it, Vinty?"
The inquiry gave Horton pause. "Look at it now, you mean?"
"Well—whenever you like. I think," said Gray, "it must be in the house."
"You're not sure even of that?" his companion wailed.
"Oh I know there are two"—our young man had coloured. "I don't mean different ones, but copies of the same," he explained; "one of which Mr. Crick must have."
"And the other of which"—Horton pieced it together—"is the one you offer to show me?"
"Unless, unless———!" and Gray, casting about, bethought himself. "Unless that one———!" With his eyes on his friend's he still shamelessly wondered.
"Unless that one has happened to get lost," Horton tenderly suggested, "so that you can't after all produce it?"
"No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs———" Gray continued to turn this over. "I think it is," he then recognised, "where I had perhaps better not just now disturb it."
His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness of Morton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"
"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here." This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.
Morton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off, he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back, "but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time, between these friends—by which I mean of course as from one of them only, the more generally assured, to the other—irony would, to an at all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just distinguishable.