The mis-rule of three

The Diggings were in a street somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, in a tall, old-fashioned, roomy house which had seen its best days, but which still made a valiant attempt to hold its own in the respectable class in a neighbourhood where respectability is not exactly rampant.

For dingy foreigners of the undesirable class abound exceedingly in those parts, and undesirables of home growth are not unknown there. Indeed, individuals of both these types did get in, now and then, within the hospitable shelter of No. 46 itself, in spite of the anxiety of Mrs Inkersole, the landlady, to preserve the high tone of the house.

But whoever might occupy the ground floor and the first floor of No. 46, whoever might enjoy the solid mahogany and second-hand chenille curtains of the former, or bask in the luxury of alleged Sheraton upholstered in vivid plush and brocade in the latter, the historical Diggings on the second floor remained for month after month in the possession of the famous Three, who were known among the landlady’s family and servants as “The gentlemen.”

Not only did “the gentlemen” occupy the two rooms which constituted the second floor, but they overflowed upwards into two of the small apartments of the rabbit warren which is always to be found on the upper floors of the typical London lodging-house. One of these small upper rooms belonged to Bartlett Bayre, a tall, thin, dark-skinned, black-haired young man, who was a clerk at Somerset House in the first place, and a struggling writer of loftiest ambition but as yet very indifferent success in the second. His room was remarkable for great outward neatness, though the internal condition of the wardrobe and chest of drawers left much to be desired in the way of order.

The little room next to Bayre’s was occupied by Ted Southerley, a big, broad, stolid, red-faced Northerner, who was “on” two or three papers of no world-wide circulation and with no very certain prospects, and on one which actually paid its way and afforded a modest pittance to its most energetic if, perhaps, slightly commonplace contributor.

The third member of the confraternity was a painter, to whom neither the Academy nor the New Gallery had as yet opened its doors. As the happy possessor of a small allowance from home, which enabled him to enjoy the luxury of being idle and the further luxury of pretending to be very busy at the same time, Jan Repton occupied the place of honour among the three friends: that is to say, he had the back room on the second floor all to himself as combined studio and bedroom. This apartment, therefore, offered a picturesque combination; an easel being placed near the window for the benefit of the north light, while a small bedstead stood in one corner, and a platform for a model occupied the place of honour in the middle of the room. The bedstead was used by day for books, newspapers and parcels of various kinds. The dressing-table made a convenient hat and coat stand; while the washstand was rendered picturesque with a display of palettes, canvases, paint-brushes, and all the paraphernalia of the artist’s profession.

On occasions of state, when friends or cousins from the country were to be entertained, such choice bits of this outfit as seemed adapted to the purposes of the picturesque were transferred to the sitting-room in the front, together with the easel containing the picture upon which Repton was engaged, the model platform and a few bits of cheap brocade, remnants bought at drapers’ sales, to be thrown at random across the well-worn and springless sofa and over the backs of the lodging-house chairs. Also, on these occasions, the solid square table, which would then have been particularly useful, was thrust into the bedroom at the back, so that the visitors might have their tea uncomfortably in corners, on their own laps, in what was felt to be the orthodox studio fashion.

Bayre grumbled on these occasions, objecting to this “faking up” of an unreal atmosphere of artistic luxury to which they were unaccustomed. Ted Southerley growled more openly at the unnecessary discomfort the plan entailed. But Jan Repton was inexorable. Art was superior to all things else: and the artistic atmosphere, according to him, “gave a tone,” which he was not going to sacrifice for any utilitarian whims of “you two fellows.”

It may be mentioned that “Jan” was an assumed name and not Repton’s real baptismal prænomen. He had, in fact, been christened plain “John”; but finding the appellation unsatisfying, he replaced it by the three simple letters which gave him at once a distinction in his small circle, which the circle did not hesitate to inform him was the only one he would ever possess.

It was after an entertainment which had not been altogether satisfactory, Repton having tried to sing and Bayre to play the banjo, both with more exuberant applause than real success, that they were rearranging the furniture in its everyday position one November evening when a certain discontent which had of late been growing in Bayre’s breast reached a momentous crisis.

“I tell you what it is, Repton,” said he, as he managed, after fearful struggles, to get the fourth and last leg of the table through the door into the sitting-room, “all this beastly turn-out and turning everything upside down whenever your friends and relations put in an appearance here is perfectly sickening. Have friends by all means if you like, though Southerley and I can do without denuding half the country parishes in England of their inhabitants at regular intervals to fill our room and eat our bread-and-butter.”

“Bother your bread-and-butter!” said Repton, cheerfully, as he tilted the table over into its place in the middle of the room, and dragged on the dark green tapestry tablecloth with which it was a point of honour to cover the much-dented sham mahogany top. “You could have your own relations here if you liked, or if you’ve got any. I’m not going to let myself grow into a moping misanthrope for you, or for Southerley either, and so I tell you.”

“Nobody wants you to grow into a moping misanthrope, or into anything else you don’t like,” boomed out burly Ted Southerley from the cosy if slightly battered armchair by the fire into which he had dropped with his pipe when the ladies went away. “But I do think, Repton, for all our sakes, you might exercise the principle of judicious selection among your acquaintances, and especially you might introduce a little more variety among the ladies. Your female cousins are thoroughly charming, I admit, but they do run a little to the same type now, don’t they?”

“You have to take your cousins as you can get them,” replied Repton, cheerfully. “Some of us would be glad enough to have cousins at all; and if they were such beauties that they were run after by half London, why, you couldn’t expect them to come up to take tea with us on a second floor now, could you?”

“I shouldn’t expect it,” snapped Bayre. “And more than that, if I have to expect it now it’s not because I like it. To have to sit for two hours listening to a sandy-haired girl who can talk about nothing but the theatres and the opera, and who is trying all the time to impress you with the idea that she belongs to a circle in society where she certainly never set foot herself, and about which you yourself know little and care less, is no end of a bore.”

“She moves in a circle a precious sight better than yours!” retorted Repton, nettled. “And as for talking, she was only trying to find something to say because you were too surly to open your own mouth. And as for her being sandy--”

“I thought you didn’t like women to be intellectual, Bayre,” put in Southerley, anxious to prevent a quarrel. “I can’t make out what it is you want.”

Bayre, thus challenged, sat on the edge of the table, put his hand in his pocket, swung his leg, and laid down the law upon the subject of the Eternal Feminine thus:--

“I like a woman,” said he, “who exhales femininity at every pore. That is to say, one who is above all things modest and even somewhat shy; one who says little, does not trouble her head about the arts or sciences, or about intellectual pursuits, when compared with the interests of the home. There I imagine her supreme; calm, serene, orderly, diffusing a spirit of comfort, an atmosphere of peace, wherever she appears. She has no thought of “Society” in the modern slang sense, because for her Society is concentrated in her home, in the little circle of human beings who depend upon her, as they would upon an all-wise, all-providing, all-healing fairy, for help and sympathy and sunny kindness.”

“What you want is a housekeeper who will darn your socks, cook your mutton chop, and give her whole mind, what she has of it, to making you comfortable,” said Repton, scoffingly.

“Not altogether that, though socks are more comfortable when darned than when in holes, as we occasionally wear them at present, and chops are undoubtedly better cooked than raw,” replied Bayre, suavely.

“What do you think of his precious feminine ideal, Southerley?” asked Repton, with a superb raising of his light eyebrows.

“I think it’s all jolly rot,” said Ted, promptly. “I don’t mean I disapprove of a woman’s being domestic in her tastes--somebody must look after the house, and see to the dinner and all that sort of thing, I suppose; and certainly none of those things would get done very well if they were left to me--but a woman who had her hands always in dough or in dusters, whose mind was divided between her saucepan and her cotton reels, would drive me mad.”

“Do you want small talk and Society slip-slop, then, as accomplishments?” sneered Bayre.

“No,” said Southerley. “What I admire in a woman is spirit and fire, life and animation. My ideal is a girl who can ride like the wind, whose feet dance as she walks, whose eyes are all aglow with life and vitality, and there--I shouldn’t mind if she were a bit of a genius into the bargain!”

“A genius!” roared Repton, derisively. “What should a female genius want with you, Southerley?”

“Well, he’s welcome to her!” put in Bayre with contempt. “It’s the first time I ever heard a sane man say he admired that sort of thing in a woman! And I should think it would be the last! Intellect in a woman--intellect out of the common, I mean: of course I don’t mean that I admire a born fool--is an evil fungus, hideous and useless if not actually noxious in itself, and fatal, too, to the object upon which it has made its home.”

“Very poetical, but very absurd,” remarked Southerley. “The female genius you sneer at so loftily would be much more likely even to manage the house well than the sheep-woman you think so much of. And if she didn’t, at any rate she wouldn’t bore you to death as the other would.”

“Why don’t you get hold of some of your sheep and bring ’em here and let’s see if we can worship ’em too?” suggested Repton, derisively. “They’re common enough; surely you must have a few sisters and cousins and aunts who answer to the description!”