In spite of their best efforts, however,the dinner was a languishing affair.Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room.
The Vicar, after a glass of port,was obliged to hurry away to a meeting,and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid,was packed off to bed.But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Rivière, who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Rivière added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.
It seemed impossible, Archer thought,that he should be long without one,so varied were his interests and so many his gifts.He was a man of about thirty,with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.
His father, who had died young,had filled a small diplomatic post,and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career;but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful),and at length--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt _grenier_, been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Mérimée in his mother's house.He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.
"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it,to keep one's intellectual liberty,not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,one's critical independence?It was because of that that I abandoned journalism,and took to so much duller work:tutoring and private secretaryship.There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;but one preserves one's moral freedom,what we call in French one's _quant à soi_.And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "_Voyez-vous_, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret;and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in New York?"
Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York,for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert,and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living!He continued to stare at M. Rivière perplexedly,wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.
"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered, utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity.
A sudden flush rose under M. Rivière's sallow skin."I--I thought it your metropolis:is not the intellectual life more active there?" he rejoined; then,as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of having asked a favour,he went on hastily:"One throws out random suggestions--more to one's self than to others.In reality, I see no immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added,without a trace of constraint: "But Mrs.Carfry will think that I ought to be taking you upstairs. "
During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.His hour with M. Rivière had put new air into his lungs,and his first impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day;but he was beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses.
"That young tutor is an interesting fellow:we had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in the hansom.
May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them.
"The little Frenchman?Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned coldly;and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French tutor. The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. If May's parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster.
But Archer was on edge, and took her up.
"Common--common _where_?" he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness:"Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room.Those people are always awkward in society. But then," she added disarmingly,"I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."
Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.
"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May echoed, bewildered:"Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"
"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys,if you prefer I shouldn't.But I did rather want another talk with him.He's looking for a job in New York."
Her surprise increased with her indifference:he almost fancied that she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness. "
"A job in New York?What sort of a job?People don't have French tutors:what does he want to do?"
"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband retorted perversely;and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "Oh, Newland, how funny!Isn't that _French_?"