sincerely congratulate you,” said she. “There is no gift so enviable as that of liking.”
Mrs. Allbutt, as Hugh noticed for the second time and more emphatically than before, had a voice of singular charm, and to him, to whom the ear was the main organ of communication between his soul and that of things external to him, it seemed a voice of wonderful temperament. It was very level in tone, and pitched on rather a low note for woman, but the quality of it was fine, clear but a little veiled, as if it came from really inside her brain, not from her throat merely. Her utterance, too, had great distinction; there was nothing slurred or clipped about it, the words stood up like flowers in a field, and her personality gave them its significance; what she said was no echo of other voices; it was genuine, personal, as much hers as her face or her cool long-fingered hands. Even had she talked mere gibberish her voice would have been a thing to listen to for the melody of it; as it was, its music was but the accompaniment to her thought so delightfully made audible. At the moment, however, while these very simple and sincere sounds still dwelt on his ear like song, Peggy, gorgeously though so hastily attired, came in with a rush, snapping a bracelet on to her wrist.
“Ah, but if only the Government would bring in an eight-hour day for the upper classes,” she cried, “how I would work for them—Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, whatever they were! I have been on the warpaths of charity since nine this morning, which makes ten hours already, and if you think I have done yet—why, you’re mistaken. I have been mistaken too, because I find that my ladyship is at home at eleven, and I quite forgot. So you’ll come back with us, Hugh, won’t you, after the theatre? Can’t you? How tiresome of you! There’s going to be no dancing, but we are going to talk to each other for an hour. And at twelve a glass slipper of rather large size is coming for me, and I’m going to a ball. I wish I was dead!”
“No, dear, you don’t,” said Edith.
“Anyhow, why?” asked Hugh.
“Because I shan’t want to go out again, and I must. But one knows quite well that one enjoys everything when one is doing it. I even enjoyed my dentist yesterday, because he is a Christian Scientist and told me I had no nerves in my teeth, and even if I had they wouldn’t hurt, because mortal mind, as far as I understood him, did not really exist.”
“Then there should have been no teeth either,” remarked Hugh.
“I thought of that too, but my mouth was full of syringes and syphons and pads of cotton-wool so that I couldn’t talk. Oh, yes, doing things is always pleasant, whatever they are! Now you, Hugh, won’t do things.”
Hugh nodded at her.
“No; that is the other point of view. The one you don’t see.”
“Have you written to Reuss?”
“Not actually, because he refused to take any answer for a fortnight. But practically.”
“And what is the other point of view,” she demanded—“the one I don’t see?”
Hugh looked from one to the other; it seemed as if Mrs. Allbutt also was waiting to hear about the other point of view.
“Merely that to be effective, to do things, however excellently, isn’t necessarily the only thing in the world worth living for. As you say, you like doing things; you would be bored and discontented if you were not flying about like—like——”
“Well?” said Peggy.
“Well, if you don’t mind, like a bee against a glass window,” said Hugh. “You go banging about in all directions, and stopping really in pretty much the same place.”
“You serpent!” said Peggy. “Pray go on!”
“I think I will, because I’ve been thinking about it, and I probably shall forget unless I say it soon. Oh, I think I was wrong about the bee and the glass window! At least, it only partly applies to you, for you do get through things, although, like the bee, you only charge wildly at them. But you like working sixteen hours a day and having no time for lunch; it pleases you. Add to that that you have a nice nature, and it follows that you work sixteen hours a day for the sake of other people. But——”
Hugh pointed an almost threatening finger at her.
“But if you had to work sixteen hours a day for yourself you wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do. You can improve the condition of other people to any extent, but you haven’t got any idea as to how to improve your own. The time would hang very heavy for you if you had to use it all in improving your mind. Consequently you tend to think that people who do try to improve their minds are lazy. You haven’t got any real sympathy with art or music or literature, and you mainly want me to go and squall at the opera because you feel that I shall then be doing something definite.”
Peggy put both her elbows on the table.
“Go on about me,” she said. “It’s deeply interesting. Coil and wriggle and sting, you dear serpent!”
“Very well. You are hopelessly conventional.”
Peggy gasped.
“Conventional?” she asked.
“Yes. You have often urged me, for instance, to go into Parliament, merely because it was the obvious thing to do. You yourself do all the conventional things with almost fanatical enthusiasm—bazaars, and Fridays in Lent, and garden parties to congenital idiots. It is all so stereotyped; there is nothing original about it, except when you induce your friends to buy dinner-services that melt and dissolve when the soup touches them, and then expect them to buy more. You can’t——”
Hugh paused a moment.
“Ah, I have it!” he said. “You can’t think of anything. And you don’t want to.”
Peggy looked at him in a sort of comic despair.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.
“Because you never thought of it before,” said he. “Oh, I know what I mean quite well! Do say it for me, Mrs. Allbutt,” he said, turning to her.
She smiled at him.
“Do you know the thing called the Æolian harp?” she said. “It is a matter of a few strings, and you put it up in a tree, and whatever happens, whether it blows a gale or whether the sun shines or whether it is frosty, the Æolian harp, as I imagine it, always responds and makes music of some kind.”
“Oh, but the Æolian harp—” began Peggy.
“Dear, this is a peculiar sort of Æolian harp. The ordinary one only makes sound when the wind blows, but I imagine one which turns everything into song. It is the romanticist, the dreamer. It is neither moral nor immoral; it is only exquisitely sensitive, not only in matters of the heart, in sympathy, in kindness, but in intellectual things.”
Hugh laughed.
“Oh, how nice it sounds!” he cried. “Do let us all go and be Æolian harps!”
Then, with one of his quick eager movements, he turned to Peggy.
“That’s the other ideal,” he said. “To catch all there is and turn it into song.”
But Peggy was grave.
“But there are so many things that can’t be turned into song,” she said, “and since I very wisely recognise that, I try to turn them into shillings. There is no romance about a wretched family dying of lead-poisoning and there is no song about it except funeral hymns. Besides, I gather that Hugh wants to be an Æolian harp. Well, that’s just what I want him to be. The whole point of the argument has been that he should turn things into song at Covent Garden.”
She got up.
“We must go,” she said, “because we have to be there at the rise of the curtain. Will you follow us in a hansom, Æolian harp?”