第29章

Armour was alone and smoking, but I had come prepared against the contingency of one of his cigars.They were the cigars of the man who doesn't know what he eats.With sociable promptness I lighted one of my own.The little enclosed veranda testified to a wave of fresh activity.The north light streamed in upon two or three fresh canvases, the place seemed full of enthusiasm, and you could see its source, at present quiescent under the influence of tobacco, in Armour's face.

'You have taken a new line,' I said, pointing to a file of camels, still half obscured by the dust of the day, coming along a mountain road under a dim moon.They might have been walking through time and through history.It was a queer, simple thing, with a world of early Aryanism in it.

'Does that say anything? I'm glad.It was to me articulate, but Ididn't know.Oh, things have been going well with me lately.Those two studies over there simply did themselves.That camp scene on the left is almost a picture.I think I'll put a little more work on it and give it a chance in Paris.I got in once, you know.

Champ de Mars.With some horses.'

'Did you, indeed?' I said.'Capital.' I asked him if he didn't atrociously miss the life of the Quarter, and he surprised me by saying that he never had lived it.He had been en pension instead with a dear old professor of chemistry and his family at Puteaux, and used to go in and out.A smile came into his eyes at the rememberance, and he told me one after the other idyllic little stories of the old professor and madame.Madame and the omelet--madame and the melon--M.Vibois and the maire; I sat charmed.So long as we remained in France his humour was like this, delicate and expansive, but an accidental allusion led us across the Channel when he changed.He had no little stories of the time he spent in England.Instead he let himself go in generalizations, aimed, for they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and character, particularly as these appear in English society.I could not believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had the flavour of Radical Sunday papers.The only original element was the feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation instantly clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and how far the result of painful contact.He himself, he said, though later of the Western States, had been born under the British flag of British parents--though his mother was an Irishwoman she came from loyal Ulster--and he repeated the statement as if it in some way justified his attitude towards his fellow countrymen and excused his truculence in the ear of a servant of the empire which he had the humour to abuse.I heard him, I confess, with impatience, it was all so shabby and shallow, but I heard him out, and I was rewarded;he came for an illustration in the end to Simla.'Look,' he said, 'at what they call their "Government House list"; and look at Strobo, Signor Strobo.Isn't Strobo a man of intelligence, isn't he a man of benevolence? He gave ten thousand rupees last week to the famine fund.Is Strobo on Government House list? Is he ever invited to dine with the Viceroy? No, because Strobo keeps a hotel!

Look at Rosario--where does Rosario come in? Nowhere, because Rosario is a clerk, and a subordinate.Yet Rosario is a man of wide reading and a very accomplished fellow!'

It became more or less necessary to argue then, and the commonplaces with which I opposed him called forth a wealth of detail bearing most picturesquely upon his stay among us.I began to think he had never hated English rigidity and English snobbery until he came to Simla, and that he and Strobo and Rosario had mingled their experiences in one bitter cup.I gathered this by inference only, he was curiously watchful and reticent as to anything that had happened to him personally; indeed, he was careful to aver preferences for the society of 'sincere' people like Strobo and Rosario, that seemed to declare him more than indifferent to circles in which he would not meet them.In the end our argument left me ridiculously irritated--it was simply distressing to see the platform from which he obtained so wide and exquisite a view of the world upheld by such flimsy pillars--and my nerves were not soothed by his proposal to walk with me to the Club.I could hardly refuse it, however, and he came along in excellent spirits, having effected the demolition of British social ideals, root and branch.His mongrel dog accompanied, keeping offensively near our heels.It was not even an honest pi, but a dog of tawdry pretensions with a banner-like tail dishonestly got from a spaniel.On one occasion Ivery nearly kicked the dog.