Lying by Implication

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

WHEN Flavian wishes to benefit his fellow creatures, to make them perfectly happy by the quarter hour, he has a cheap and comely way of attaining his end. He goes into a state of incognito, of suspended animation, the moment he sees, for instance, the story of the grouse in the gunroom hovering upon the lips of his latest acquaintance. Everybody says of Flavian : “ So intelligent ! ” “ So sympathetic ! ” He has to love you dear before he will tell you to hold your tongue. Among the tautologous and the trite he passes for the best of fellows, and all because he knows how to deceive, how to endure. Like Mr. Barrie’s early hero, he would much rather die than explain. He has the misfortune to have read, heard, thought, almost everything. He is one of those few scholarly unfortunates left with us who are forever running up against the over-and-done-with in the persons of their contemporaries, like the one clever schoolboy hampered by the heavy and tardy progress of his class. To Flavian,

To talk to him is almost invariably to bore him; to improve his moral being, that is, by wounding him physically and intellectually. For he is the most accomplished boree in the world. You never can tell, unless you have the bent key of his soul, whether he is listening or merely ceasing from all cognition, — hovering around you, as it were, upon a sleeping wing, like a cravatted albatross, until you shall have become fit again for his platitude-hating society. Meanwhile, his smile is one of apparently delighted interest, seraphic as Shelley’s. He might put salt upon the tails of all the birds he knows ; he has been from his youth a repository of things said, — potentially more dangerous than any eavesdropper. But he goes deaf and blind. He stands, so to speak, by his lying. He is much too lazy, much too proud, to beg off. He will never say, “ I have seen it played,” or “ I knew her twenty years ago,” or “ Yes, I have been there ; ” but he will sit through a long monologue which delights its own performer, and so does good to Flavian’s ironic heart. More: he has been known to join domestic excursions, when it was taken for granted that all was new and fair to him, without a hint that he was himself the best local antiquary within a hundred miles, and had had the real Numa-Egeria relations with the spirit of the place. And he went, not to impart or supplement information, but to look on, “bright, placid, and dumb,” and to seem the most surprised and enchanted of uninstructed visitors, because it would have disappointed two enthusiasts if he had either stayed at home or betrayed his slightly exhausted interest in the scene. He does these deeds through no least benevolence of feeling, but merely to save talk and maintain his own ease. Flavian is a monster, a casuist, an underground serpent ; a knave past finding out, whom the gypsies would call a jinney-mengro. But one sees his eyelids flicker when the Georgies get misquoted ; and some fine day or other, in the middle of an exposition on the Casket Letters or the battle of San Juan Hill, an unoffending stranger will be murdered by the martyr of patience and politeness, that silent man of Rowanwood. Until then Flavian will lie like a sepulchral mediæval effigy.